The Megastore recommends: snap out of it edition.

I am having my classic post-semester let down: feeling generally exhausted, judging my own character harshly, eating Pop-Tarts. (That last item may be just this current post-semester.)

Did I once do two-a-days, while I was working my ass off and keeping my schedule humming like a top? Well, this now seems absurd and stupid, and also my shoulders hurt. Did I once hop out of bed at the crack of dawn, ready to meet the day? Don't be ridiculous. Of course not. Still, I have a few recommendations. For myself, I guess, but sometimes I need to give myself advice, don't you?

1. Wear the shoes you bought awhile ago. I can't be the only person who shops ahead--thinking about spring when there's still snow on the ground, for instance, or even thinking about summer when it's still raining like mad. Cold rain, too, not a gentle 'give the flowers a drink' rain--raining like a mad dog.

But when the rain stops, or pauses, it's good to put on the sandals you bought back in, like, March. Admire the fact that they are red, and that they fit your feet, and--hey!--that they're comfortable. Past you was so freaking smart. Past you foresaw the need for comfortable red sandals that fit, and present you is reaping the benefits. Maybe present you isn't so bad after all? Well, at least present you has cute feet.

2. Smell the roses. No, literally: the literal roses are starting to bloom. How bad can things really be, if there are roses, roses in bud, the first blooms, and many more roses to come (just spitballing here, from previous nature data)?

3. Pick up a book you bought a year ago. Just a week or so ago, I was chatting with my Scotland daughter, who recommended a crime/detective series set in Aberdeenshire in the early Reformation period. (I know! right up my alley!) I was all, Ima go read that. So I looked to see if it was downloadable as a Kindle book, but no. So then I thought, FINE I'll buy it. But Amazon remarked to me that lo, I had purchased this book a year before. For a few seconds, I had a giant question mark hovering over my head, and then I thought WAIT and went to my living room, where the first book in the series sat on my coffee table, where it has been sitting for a whole year. I bought it a year ago because my daughter recommended it to me then, also. This time I am humming along in it and it is grand. Good times!

4. Listen to the same album over and over. And over and over. It can be Junk of the Heart by the Kooks, recommended to you by your son. Or it can be Lemonade, recommended to you by the universe because it is just that good. Either way, you aren't going to go wrong whatsoever. Pro tip: both albums can be worked out to nicely.

5. Second wake up. I know, not everyone can do this, and those of you who can't are going to gnash your teeth at me. But if you are so lucky that you can, the way it works is this: you get up at around 7. You go get the paper. You sit on your couch in your nightie and robe and read it for awhile. You mope around the kitchen, check your Instagram, think dire thoughts, consider a cup of tea. Eat a half banana. Then you grab your reformation crime/detective series novel set in Aberdeenshire and get back under the covers. You read three pages and then curl back into sleep. If you've timed things right, the sheets are probably still warm. Sleep till whenever.

Will you have wasted a precious hour or so in this fashion? I submit to you that this is the wrong way to look at it. The way to look at it is you will be well-rested for the rest of your day, and what could be wrong with that? Nothing, America. Nothing whatsoever.

The Megastore recommends: the Take Your Own Advice Edition.

1. More sleep.  You know it, I know it: I don't get enough sleep. Maybe you don't, either. I need more of it. Preferably in this configuration:

a. Go to bed whenever I want to. You know, 1 a.m. or whatnot.
b. Get up when I wake up. Like, you know, 8 a.m. Or 8:30. Or let's splurge on 9 a.m., shall we?
c. Do this and that until 11. Try to speak to no one.
d. Get to work in my super productive style.
e. At an appropriate juncture--after lunch? sure!--take a little nap. Just 30 minutes. Okay,  45 minutes. I've earned it.
f. Work some more. Then:

REPEAT.

The working world was not made for people like me. Last night the historian pointed out that science has proven, via its science-y ways, that exercising in the morning before you've eaten is actually better than all the other timetables for exercising, like when people who follow the schedule above exercise, which is on their way home from work.

Well no thank you, science, for this awful insight into how even biology is apparently in on the conspiracy against me and my kind.

Even so: from this moment forward, I am going to try always to go to bed by midnight, instead of 1 a.m. And then maybe I will roll it back to the bedtime of farmers and country folk, 11:30 p.m. That's probably about as much as I can do. Take that, biology.

In conclusion:

The Megastore Recommends: Back-to-School Edition.

Serious Professor. From A Serious Man.

 

1. Start slow. Let me ask you, Professor So Serious: why are you in such a hurry? Are you afraid the kids won't think you're serious if you don't scare the bejesus out of them the very first day by having a rigorous, killer discussion and also throwing your professorial weight around, already? Hey, Professor: leave them kids alone, and while you're at it, cut yourself a break too. Is it not August? Is it not, therefore, still summer, if only the last remainder? So go in there, meet the kids, point them in the direction of a syllabus, do a couple of magic tricks, crack a joke, and hightail it outta there. They'll be all, my professor is chill. And you are: you are chill. You're chillin' with a couple of minutes to spare, because you took my advice. You started slow.

[parenthetical note: does the above recommendation make my ass look lazy?]

The Answer.

2. Sandwich. Is the answer to pretty much all the questions on the first day of class. For instance:

On the first day of class, what should I have for lunch? Why, a sandwich.

When will class be over? Just in time to go grab a sandwich.

Where shall I eat my sandwich? On the patio. Near the cafeteria. Where they make the sandwiches.
Do I need to buy the textbook--are you really going to use it? or can I just scam off the class discussions? I don't like your attitude, but I'll feel better after I eat a sandwich.

3. Keep an outfit in reserve. "What shall I wear for the first day?" I asked the historian last night. "Comfortable shoes," he said, sensibly, although not entirely helpfully. (see #4 below for more on this point.) Shoes are important, but what about the clothes? Like every college professor in the land--okay, community college professor in the land--I have been stocking up on teaching outfits since before the weather got hot, so there is truly no shortage of possibilities. But it's August, am I

Or I could just wear this.

right? And thus it is still summer, if only the last remainder, so that means sweaters are for suckers. Ditto boots. Ditto anything that touches the body, basically. So the possibilities are not actually all that robust. As I considered the question, I recognized how I had been wearing, literally, the same four things all summer long, and my outfit assembling skills were thus a little rusty.

I'm sure you know what that means: black. Yes, I took the coward's way out and wore a black skirt, a black shirt, and black shoes. I tried to make up for it with badass accessories, but I'm not sure that the message came across--I might have been too busy contemplating the sandwich I was soon to eat when class was over to convey any simmering badassery.

Anyway, the point is this: even if my outfit today was a little predictable, I still have outfits in reserve. I have backup outfits. Today, I was perfectly presentable and pulled together, and I still have outfits yet untold. Outfits yet to be imagined! It's a good feeling, the people, a good feeling indeed.

The Lord help us if it comes to this.

4. Comfortable shoes, or shoes that live in the neighborhood of comfort. Recently, I have declared to many, many people that I will wear no more uncomfortable shoes forever. This is nonsense, of course, because I have so many, many shoes that are not comfortable. I am parting with them, one two three pairs at a time. (Pro tip: if you're in the "getting rid of uncomfortable shoes" game, I suggest wearing the shoes first, since the actual sense memory of how your feet feel just after you've worn them is a direct motivator.)

Anyway: on the first day of classes, you've got your walk in from the parking lot, schlepping your stuff. You've got your walk up the stairs. You've got your walk to class, you've got your walk back to your office, you've got your walk across the quad to get your sandwich. Your walk back, your walk to the car, etc. That's a lot of walking, Professor Fancy Shoes. So get real, and pack a pair of super comfortable shoes in your bag. You can put them on once you're done with the part of your day that calls for Fancy. That's what I did, and I call it genius.

The Megastore recommends.

ate roasted squash today, and liked it!

1. A little story about the baby. Today, my daughter called me to say that she had made a delicious soup with roasted vegetables, and when she offered a little tiny bit to her little tiny daughter, just four months old, the baby loved it. Loved it! I myself was making dinner when this conversation occurred. I was trimming brussels sprouts and baby artichokes. How lovely, to hear this little anecdote. How lovely to think of the baby tasting maybe her first solid food, and it was butternut squash pureed, and it was so good, she wanted more.

look at their cute long stems!

2. Baby artichokes. In their favor: they are adorable. I bought them in a container of robust size, on a day when I clearly imagined myself in full vegetable trimming mode. Because, on the minus side, baby artichokes are a lot of work. "Baby artichokes are a lot of work," I said to the historian, as I chopped most of the thorny part off with my big knife, then pared away everything but the heart with my little knife, for the kajillionth time. "Maybe big ones aren't as much work. Maybe they're more worth it," he said, which I considered. But the thing about the big ones is, they aren't as adorable. The little ones are cute. And when you roast them with cherry tomatoes, lemon juice, olive oil, and thyme, they are delicious, and that's a fact.

--but with chicken.

3. Making shepherd's pie for someone who will love it. You can insert the dish of your choice into the previous phrase, the dish you would make for one of your beloveds because sometimes, it's just nice to make something delicious for someone else, even when it's a thing you won't be eating yourself. In this case, I made it for my son, and it was really only shepherd's pie-esque, because it was chicken and not beef. I happened to have some chicken in the freezer which I had previously roasted, so assembling the pie was as easy as sauteing some carrots and green onions, mashing a few potatoes, heating some leftover broccoli, layering everything in a pie plate, and baking it. I know, it sounds like more steps than "was as easy as" suggests. But it was easy, and my son loved it, and therefore so did I.

count these, because it's time for sleeping.

4. The end of the day. Whatever else, at the end, it's the end, and it's time for bed. Time for bed is something we highly recommend, here at the Megastore.

The Megastore Recommends.

This was good.

1. Validation. For instance, when your daughter checks in with you about how to roast little red potatoes, and later you find out she roasted some green beans alongside, which happens to be a dish you often have made yourself. Or you see your messy perennial garden in full hullaballoo. Or when your Publication Boot Camp goes, if not smashingly, at least swimmingly. Validation is good.

Devastation lies ahead.

2. Watching catch-up episodes of your shows. I hear I have a devastating episode of Mad Men to watch, the one from this past Sunday. But before I can watch that episode, I have to watch the prior two that we also missed while we were in Scotland. One of which we did, tonight. Very satisfying. Also, last night I watched the double episode of Glee, the one where they go to Nationals; and this afternoon after the Publication Boot Camp, I came home and watched the final episode of the season (spoiler alert: they graduate!) and cried my DayQuil eyes out.

King of Clutch.

3. Watching a little Conference Championship basketball. It's not like you have any skin in the game. Might as well enjoy watching several terrific teams, all with terrific players, get into it. I am particularly enjoying the clutchy mc-clutchness of Dwyane Wade at the moment, although I cannot and will not root for the Heat. It's, like, against the laws of nature.



4. The flowers OMG.

Actual flowers.

The Megastore recommends.

an internet reenactment
of my breakfast.

1. Eggs for breakfast. Eggs and I had a parting of the ways, early in life. I had been a happy scrambled eggs girl, then one day I looked at my plate and the eggs upon it and thought, never again will your scrambles cross my lips, you curdled thing. And they did not, lo, not for many many years. Custard, yes. Quiche yes. Souffle, even--yes. But frittata, tortilla, omelet: no. Until one day I saw a plate of frittata pass me by at a restaurant, and I thought, okay. And from then on, eggs and I were friends again after forty years. I can't explain it, but this morning, after yet another long week, I dallied around in the morning with some juice and crackers--why crackers? because they were left over from a big event, and they were sitting on the table. But the moment came when actual breakfast had to materialize or the day would be compromised. There were green chiles in the refrigerator and cheese--leftover from the same event as the crackers--and a tortilla. Eggs, chiles, cheese scrambled up, the tortilla placed on the warm pan. That is a good breakfast, my friends. A breakfast like that will stand you in good stead all the day long.

lettuce. for a salad.

2. The contemplation of salad. Over the last month, I made and/or ate fattoush several times. It was so delicious. The first time I ate fattoush was at a lady-style luncheon at the Nieman Marcus on Union Square in San Francisco. It was as perfect as you might imagine a salad that Nieman Marcus would make, and so easy--a lemony dressing, lots of lettuce, this and that and feta and pita and olives and so on. Mint, cilantro, parsley.

Well, I happened to have a fair amount of leftover fattoush on two separate occasions, leftovers which I took to work and ate with relish. So today, when I was at the store, I thought about that fact, and bought lettuce and this and that and feta and pita and olives and so on. Mint, cilantro, parsley. Contemplating this future salad, which I will take to school and eat with relish, is highly satisfactory.

Talmudic scholar dad.

3. A very good movie. Tonight we saw Footnote,  an Israeli movie that hinges on a national award for Talmudic Studies, and a father and a son who are both Talmud scholars. This movie was mordant, funny, and sharp, and also startlingly sad. It was fully of great characters and two very fine performances. There's a scene, set in a very small conference room full of Talmudic scholars and a billowing argument, that is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. It also has a startlingly ambiguous and unsettled ending that the historian and I talked about all the way home. That's how good the movie was.

snippet of my freewrite.

4. Finding a weird freewrite that might, just might, become the basis of a poem. The actual writing of poems during this academic year has been so very sporadic it could make one weep. But here and there, a little writing got done, and tonight, the night before my writing group, stumbling upon this one freewrite I did back in the fall may prove to be the stumble that nets me a draft. Or not. The freewrite hinges on a story I heard on NPR about how bats and horses share some small piece of DNA. Morning will tell if it can be turned into something other than a piquant mess.

The interesting bits.

I'm reading a novel, Moon Tiger, by Penelope Lively, a writer I've been only dimly aware of. I picked it up because Maureen Corrigan talked about Lively briefly on one of those end-of-the-year discussions of the best books of the year, on Fresh Air. This isn't the book Corrigan mentioned--this one won the Booker Prize in the late 80s. Anyway, I'm not crazy about the book so far--the main character, the narrator, seems to be smug and rich, condescending, and (worst of all!) a self-confessed terrible mother! (Yes, my feminist readers, this speaks volumes about me, I realize.)

However: I'm forging on because of these two passages which really spoke my language:

"We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. More than that we speak volumes -- our language is the language of everything we have not read. Shakespeare and the Authorized Version surface in supermakets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive."

and this:

"Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood -- we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time capsule."