I love broccoli. It tastes good; it’s good for you, and it’s just an all-around good thing. It should never, ever, be put on pizza, though. Not that it is, but just in case you had any doubts.
I like getting drunk, too. Not too often, and not too drunk, but just the sort of blurry that drowns out the suffering in the world, like Covid and its resultant pain. Pain like seeing my Mom just two times in the first year of Covid, then three times in the second year, one of which was her 80th birthday. Pain like seeing my baby niece just four times in two years, that sort of pain. (My brother lives closer, so in Covid Year 1 we got to have one more visit than we did to Mom’s. Mom is also immune compromised; I don’t see her because, frankly, I don’t want to kill her). You do know you can still spread Covid even if you’ve been vaccinated, right? Contrary to human desire, Covid is NOT over. Yes, it sucks. Still.
Baby B was just one year old when Covid started. She’ll turn three in November. Life is unfair; we’ve all missed too much. The entire world has.
As for getting drunk, I don’t like getting drunk-drunk, just blurry, softened enough that the pain of not seeing my family doesn’t seem as horrible as it actually is in the clear, sober light of day. Or the drunken night, as the case may be. Thank God for Facetime, right? Not that I Facetime when I’m drunk. (I don’t do that and you probably shouldn’t, either.)
The funny thing I just realized, or remembered, is that I can’t really eat broccoli anymore–or at least not much of it. I have digestive stuff that suddenly emerged its ugly head in 2015, the year I started to lose weight. I remember eating some pizza once (it didn’t have broccoli on it) and suddenly it seemed too cheesy, too greasy. Something was wrong. What was wrong was that I was becoming very, very sick. I couldn’t eat this; I couldn’t eat that. I was fat and unhealthy to begin with, but then I lost sixty pounds for no known reason. My weight loss was way too fast. Scary fast. By the time I could buy new clothes to fit my melting frame, sometimes I would be at the next size already. I skipped size 12 altogether. When people said, “You look great! You must feel great!” I just shook my head. I didn’t; I felt like shit. It was then that I learned, deeply, how messed up American culture is. In the two years I was dropping weight like a rock, people mostly praised my new figure. My sick body. Only a good friend, a genuine one, told me that I looked like hell. We live far away from each other, so I usually only see him twice a year, some random time and then on his birthday. When he saw me at the random time, he was concerned. When he saw me the second time, on his birthday, he was even more concerned. One year later, after I had gotten medical help and treatment, and regained twenty pounds that put me at a healthy weight, he told me he was really glad I had gotten healthier. So was I. (I’d had a diagnosis and treatment. I’m much better now, thanks).
Around the same time that I became a scarecrow, I had basically become allergic to food (cheese pizza, and dairy at large, sadly). I had to stop cooking with onions and garlic. I also had to stop eating “cruciferous vegetables.” That’s not the worst thing, because I don’t really like cauliflower that much, but broccoli? Really? I had to quit eating a lot of things, unfortunately. I had to learn a lot about nutrition, too. It was a matter of survival, in order to live without being doubled over in pain. Do you know how hard it is to eat healthily when there are so many vegetables you just can’t eat: Brussel sprouts (one of my favorites along with broccoli), bok choy, cabbage, eggplant, etc.? The answer is that it’s really hard. It’s nearly impossible to eat well when your list of foods is so limited, and not just vegetables, either. My poor husband. He tries to eat healthy food, too, but he ended up as tired of green beans as I did.
Fortunately, I went to a nutritionist who helped me get on board with a FODMAPS diet, (FODMAPS is just tons of food things you can’t eat–there is no advertisement here!). Eventually I could re-integrate a lot of stuff without ending up in the emergency room, which had actually happened. Slowly, very slowly. Now, I can even eat a small amount of cheese again, thank goodness, but I have to really limit my gluten. I can even eat pizza once in a great while. Hallelujah! As I like to say, “I save my gluten and my dairy for cheese pizza.” Sadly, I don’t eat real ice cream anymore, and I still can’t eat more than just a couple of bites of broccoli. I guess it could be worse. At least I can still get drunk.
