Ravings of a Textual Deviant

If Doug could come up with stats for these things, I’d put them into my games in a heartbeat.

I got this from someone who will remain anonymous. Names have been changed to protect the guilty.

Gotta love the faith our directors show in us. It is now 2:30 Friday afternoon.

Damn… let’s get naked & barbecue.

Or better yet…

A few years ago, I went to Venice with my brother and our grandmother. Grandma loves to travel, but she was in her eighties at the time and tired out rather more quickly than she used to. By the time we Ari and I were ready for dinner, it was naptime for Grandma. Ari and I went out for dinner, and planned to bring some takeout back for her. The first part of the plan went well; we had genuine Italian pizza (and a lot of red table wine) at a restaurant where we were the only Americans. It was when we went to get something for our grandmother that we ran into trouble.

Thirty minutes later, we discovered that many of the neighborhood family restaurants in Venice don’t do takeout. In fact, in one or two places where we tried, we had to explain the concept. (I should say, Ari tried to explain the concept. He’s fluent in Spanish, which is sufficiently mutually intelligible with Italian to get by, unless you want fettucine alfredo to go. I just stood there looking anxious.) Finally, we hit the desperation point. We were not going back without something for our grandmother to eat, and we were running out of restaurants.

After getting thoroughly lost, we found a tiny place near (I think) the Saint-Stae vaporetto stop. Ari started in with his now-standard explanation in Spanish. I did my best to look concerned and dutiful. The people behind the counter conferred, and said something to Ari. He looked at me and said “They’ll do take-out if we provide the dish.”

It took me a moment to be certain I’d heard correctly. “Where are we supposed to get a dish?”

Ari shrugged.

“Can you convince them to wrap it in foil or something? Tell them it’s for our grandmother.”

Ari plunged back into the fray. He started getting very animated. Gestures grew large and forceful on both sides. I had absolutely no idea what was going on, except he kept repeating “Es por Nonna” at increasingly frequent intervals. I followed his cues and tried to look increasingly concerned and dutiful. Ari was giving it his all; he could’ve won an Oscar for Best Performance in a Foreign Restaurant, and I was going for Best Supporting Actress. I was about to see if I could start crying, when finally, our victims caved in. They brought us a generous portion of spaghetti marinara in the sort of takeout container one routinely sees in the U.S. One of my eyebrows crept up skeptically.

“Do you think you could convince them to give us a plastic fork?”

I don’t remember what happened next. I think the trauma has wiped it from my mind.

I think I’ve acquired a new workout pal, one of the nice ladies who goes to the same water aerobics classes that I do. We were talking after class yesterday, and I noticed that when she was describing her eating and workout habits, she consistently referred to herself as either “being good” or “being bad.” I couldn’t help but think that assigning moral qualities to this kind of behavior probably does not help, and may very well end up hurting. Linking food and exercise habits to my worth as a person made it far too difficult to adopt a rational, moderate attitude. I found that it was much easier to develop healthy eating and exercise habits once I divorced them from any kind of value judgment. Which is not to say that I’m objective, by any stretch of the imagination.

Personally, I love food. I love cooking, for myself and for others; I enjoy a good meal. I even enjoy reading cookbooks and culinary history books (Reay Tannahill’s Food in History is fabulous.) I’ve subscribed to Bon Appetit and Cook’s Illustrated. (As an aside, I find that I much prefer Cook’s Illustrated; Bon Appetit is mostly food porn. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) In my own way, I’m a fussy eater.

I don’t feel bad about the fact that I enjoy food and spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about it. I try to eat reasonably-sized portions of nutritious food most of the time—not because it’s “good” or “right,” but because that is what you do if you want to be healthy. Conversely, eating chocolate does not make me a bad person. (Some people would argue that it makes me easier to deal with, I’m sure.) Eating a big pile of chocolate (or anything else) is, at this point, too much of a good thing for me. Not because it’s “bad” or “wrong,” but because it’s uncomfortable. It’s a big change in the way we’re taught to think about food, and one that goes against the grain. On the other hand, if I cared about what other people think, you’d have to start checking me for signs of pod-personness.

My Supers question got such a fabulous response that I was inspired to make it a regular feature and throw it open to the Reading Public. So, tell me what you think about this:

What is your favorite historical period for RPGs, and why?

Spam me once, shame on you. Spam me twice, shame on me.

Thanks for the spam-killer, D.!

November 11th: Bought Christmas presents for niece and nephews (no batteries required).

November 12th: Mother-in-law’s birthday.

November 13th: First assault by Christmas music in a retail situation.

November 14th: Christmas movie trailers. Ugh.

I wouldn’t print this recipe even if I had it. If the gods are kind, it is lost forever.

So, a couple of years ago, my mom was visiting my grandmother in upstate New York, leaving my dad free to experiment in the kitchen. My dad likes to cook…and more often than not, his experiments turn out fairly well. He’d been on a banana bread kick, and made a few different versions with bits of dried papaya, mango, pineapple, and coconut. I should have known that things were too good to last.

A few days into my mom’s absence, he called me up and said he had something for me to try. I picked up the items in question on my way to work, and they looked like perfectly innocent banana-bread muffins. Throwing caution to the wind, I hadn’t bothered with a backup plan for breakfast. When I got to work, I was ready for a fruit-filled treat.

What I got was one of the absolute worst things I’ve ever tasted. I couldn’t even identify what was wrong. A closer inspection revealed pale-green flecks in the muffin. They couldn’t possibly have gone bad, I thought. He made them last night. Unable to contain my morbid curiousity, I called my dad and asked him what he’d put in the muffins.

“Cabbage. What did you think?” he asked.
“I think that if I weren’t over thirty, they’d constitute child abuse.”
“Not all experiments are successful,” he offered by way of explanation. Then, he told me that he had intent to freeze the remainder of the batch. I contemplated asking him “To what nefarious end?” but decided I’d already been sufficiently tactless.

However, being the dutiful daughter that I am, I felt compelled to warn my mom. I called her at my grandmother’s house that night. “When you get home, if you see something in the freezer that looks like banana bread muffins, whatever you do, don’t eat them. Throw them out,” I suggested.
“What are they?”
“Cabbage muffins.”
Pause.
“Did you say cabbage muffins?”
“Cabbage muffins,” I confirmed.
“What was he thinking?” Mom wondered.
Personally, I’d been wondering the same thing. Then, I decided that I did not want to know what could possibly have made cabbage muffins sound like a good idea. Mom allowed as how perhaps ignorance was indeed bliss in this case.

Dad never did explain his motivation…but he hasn’t attempted cabbage muffins again, either.

One of the few down sides to having lost weight is that I’ve also lost insulation. Ever since the weather turned, I’ve felt like I’ll never be warm again. Usually, I love cold weather. This year, not so much. I’m told one gets used to it, which is probably true. But that is not going to be a fun process.

I’ve been massively spammed! I’m going to diasble comments, but, I hope, only as a stopgap solution.

Update: Sh*t! Over 10,000 comment spams (conservative estimate)! It’s the electronic version of taking wallpaper off unprimed drywall.