All I was doing yesterday

All I was doing yesterday day was waiting for yesterday night so that I could cozy up on the couch and veg out with ANTM and Lost. I don’t know if I was getting punished for canceling plans with my real life friends so that I might do this, but things started going swiftly downhill as soon as I left work. It was drizzling a bit, but I made a mad dash for the subway anyway, thinking if it got worse I could always have J come meet me in Brooklyn with an umbrella. This would have worked fine if the rain hadn’t decided to change from “light spray” to “ocean” halfway from the subway stop to our apartment. To make matters worse I was in my winter wool coat and clutching my work bag under my arm to make sure the digital camera I happened to have with me wouldn’t get soaked. This is not a fun way to proceed home. The only thing that kept me from freaking out entirely was the small part of me that was pretending I was running through a jungle trying to escape a robot monster.

It turns out J also got caught in the downpour, so the apartment quickly became filled with draped clothing and coats and we were already feeling a little grumpy. Not to be deterred, I got to work on dinner. The dish was grilled polenta with gorgonzola sauce and garlicky greens, which looked delicious in the cookbook and seemed relatively easy to pull together quickly. Unfortunately for everyone involved, there was a lot of little steps and things kept going wrong: J lost a metal shard in the beans, the sauce boiled up, the polenta wouldn’t brown. This meant that an hour later, we were just finishing up and ANTM was already starting.

I should have known things wouldn’t go well when J leaned over the sauce and said ominously, “I think they used a lot of this type of cheese in the cheese factory where I worked.” Which may as well have been translated to, “Your dinner makes me want to throw up.” Ha ha, I jest. But really, J hated dinner. Logically, I knew that he was simply saying this particular food in this particular makeup was not appealing to him, independently of the preparation or presentation of the food. Emotionally, I had just nearly drowned on the way home, immediately started cooking a semi-complicated dinner, worked hard for an hour, presented fancy nourishment to my husband, and utterly failed. Then it was only a matter of time before I started crying. The kind of crying where you know you are frustrated and tired and wish you weren’t crying and know that you’re just upsetting the person next to you who thinks you’re furious at them when really you’re just hungry and exhausted and sad that something that was supposed to be nice turned out not nice. Especially when what you really want to be doing is watching a wannabe model pee in a diaper on national television because she is feeling a bit jealous.

J didn’t even get to see the peeing in a diaper because he thought I was angry at him and needed some space, which made me cry more and I made him come out and watch the finale where Tyra pulled a reverse Apprentice move and fired—er—dismissed NO people. Luckily, things were pretty much smoothed over for Lost and we ate delicious peanut butter cookies and milk to wash away dinner thoughts.

Phew! My lesson learned is: if you really want to make a night of lounging on the couch and hope to fully enjoy seeing models peeing on themselves, you should just order pizza.

Don't forget to check out Warm Glow for those in the know about Lost.

--------