Most Delicious Food

I have had a lot of delicious food. My favorite would have to be international food, with a special weakness for Thai and Indian. I’m going to limit this to meals that were so good that I can remember them to this day.

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A friend of mine once made me a stew of curried chicken with coconut milk and young coconut meat from an Indonesian recipe. I do not have the recipe for it, for which I am heartbroken, but I think it was a kind of soto ayam. It was mildly spicy and very comforting.

At a Persian restaurant in Chicago, I had roast chicken with a pomegranate barbecue sauce. I do not know the name of the dish either, but I can remember this meal even though it was over thirty years ago. The sweet/tart glaze of pomegranate works very well with grilling. The restaurant has long since disappeared.

Curried beef brisket at Waldo Thai in Kansas City falls on this list. Anything from Waldo Thai falls on this list, to be honest, especially their curries. Perfectly balanced with plenty of aromatics from lime leaf and basil.

Banana bread and an aged sherry from a winery in upstate New York whose name I don’t remember. I had gotten there early and was sampling the sherry, which tasted of violets and leather and all sorts of flavors I had never encountered in sherry before. The banana bread was part of the man’s lunch because I got tipsy on the sip of sherry. The whole incident was almost like an enchantment.

There are good meals and then there are culinary experiences. The items on this list are definitely culinary experiences.

Casual Day

The question is “If you were forced to wear one outfit over and over, which one would you choose?” I have to admit that it would be a pair of jeans and my shirt of a cat drinking coffee. Something relaxed but still a little dressy. Casual but a little upscale. It’s a definite mood.

Just Sunday

It’s just Sunday, and it’s promising to be a hot one. Time for a leisurely breakfast and some coffee. We have plants to go in in the morning. We scaled down our vegetable garden to tomatoes because of the lack of sun in our yard, but we have a full herb garden that needs a couple more herbs. Lots of basil to go in with the tomatoes.

Once the tomatoes are in, we may be waiting for rain. I would like a good thunderstorm to come through. We might go and write for a while; I don’t know. Not an exciting day, but a good one.

Have a good day!

Self-Care

I ask my students in internships what they do for self-care. It’s a very important practice for people in helping professions, because of the stress levels they experience. Self-care can stave off burnout as well as help people reclaim their free time.

When I assessed my own self-care activities, I found that I was somewhat lacking in them. Writing is a flow activity for me, and flow fits into self-care, but I have not been doing as much of that lately. I’ve started walking again, but right now I can only walk for short periods of time, which makes it not as much of a self-care activity. I don’t meditate as often as I could. I am definitely lacking self-care activities.

What can I do about this? Obviously put some of these practices back into place. Walking will come back a little at a time because of my current fitness level. Meditating can start today. Writing is a struggle given my current motivation level. But it’s important to have my self-care routines together, especially for when the school year starts and I’m back to more pressure in my life.

Getting Sucked Into the Internet

My biggest time waster is getting sucked into the Internet. I could be writing and need to look something up on the Internet, and then presto — twenty minutes have passed and I find myself in the middle of reading Facebook. I take a detour into Quora and find I’ve been reading it for a half-hour.

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I don’t know what makes the Internet so addictive. I suspect it’s the amount of information in it. I crave learning, and the Internet gives me a treasure trove of information. The only trouble with the information is that much of it is trivial. Should I care what Clint Eastwood’s first movie was? (I’ve already forgotten). What was John Wayne’s real name? (Marion Morrison).

In other words, the same reason I love the Internet (information at my fingertips) is the reason I hate it. And so often, I go traveling down the information highway with no destination in mind, just driving.

Nostalgia Food

Daily writing prompt

Which food, when you eat it, instantly transports you to childhood?

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Grilled cheese with Campbell’s tomato soup. This is the food that brings me back to childhood. I eat it seldom, but when I do, I remember being young.

Grilled cheese and tomato soup is known as a comfort food, one that evokes warmth and care. This is a popular lunch food for children in the US. It’s also easy to make, which might explain why it’s so ubiquitous.

Nowadays, I don’t eat grilled cheese and tomato soup much. I’ve lost my taste for tomato soup, finding it too acidic these days. But it is still nostalgia food.

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Progress, Sort Of.

I am writing, although my output on this book seems to be more like 600-1000 words a day. I don’t think the book is as unsalvageable as I did before, but I’m still not feeling it.

I think the drop in writing progress is because I don’t have my identity wrapped up in being a writer these days. Most writers, it turns out, sell few or no books, and that means little or no recognition. I became a writer for the wrong reasons, it seems; I wanted people to read my stuff and tell me it was good.

In the midst of that, I found out that I really liked writing. I loved writing in my little world, and I got to know my characters pretty well. I became a writer, in other words.

I don’t know what the remedy is for not feeling like a writer. Is there one?

My First Crush

I have had a number of crushes, a large number of crushes. Some of these were really intense and lasted years, others were fleeting. My first crush was one of the fleeting ones, seeing that it was in kindergarten.

His name was Randy. He lived around the block from me, by the railroad tracks in an asphalt-shingled house. He had a round face and shaggy blond hair and blue eyes. I don’t understand why I got a crush on him; it was part of that inexplicable kindergarten thinking. But I talked about him constantly.

My mom and I went over to his house to visit, and afterward my mother told me she ‘wasn’t comfortable’ with me going over to Randy’s house. I knew it was because of the house and that he didn’t have a father at home. I don’t know how I knew this unless my mother told me, and it didn’t make sense because my mother told me to be nice to everyone. The crush disappeared as soon as it was formed, because I didn’t want to disappoint my mother. Thus I internalized my first lesson on social class and bias.

I went on to have many crushes, some intense and some fleeting. I learned the most from my crush on Randy, things I look back on and wish I hadn’t learned.

A Good Day

It’s definitely a Monday morning. I woke up from annoying nightmares a few minutes early, and it was too late to go back to bed. I don’t really have words right now, just a lingering need to go back to sleep. Which I will not because of the danger of sleeping through that 11 o’clock appointment.

I now have my coffee. At the moment, it’s not accomplishing much. But the austere white house across the street has a rosy glow to it, and the day promises to be productive.

I will let it be a good day.

My Favorite Thing About Myself

Daily writing prompt

What’s your favorite thing about yourself?

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I feel like you could ask me on different days my favorite thing about myself, and I would have different answers. Some days it’s my sense of humor; other days my intelligence. Occasionally it’s my courage. Today, my favorite thing about myself is my sense of joy. I am, overall, a joyous person.

Joyous is not quite the same thing as happy. Happiness is a state, fleeting, full of excitement or pleasure. For example, when you visit someone. Joy, on the other hand, is a longer-lasting state of being, full of contentment and well-being. (Embark Behavioral Health, 2025).

Joy, to me, is the flow of a stream through my life, one which occasionally bubbles up. I feel the bubbles in my soul, and they sometimes come out in laughter. Laughing for no reason startles people sometimes. I can’t help it; it’s the bubbles.

I feel joy even when I’m depressed, which doesn’t make sense to most people. But joy is my love for the universe, which I feel even when I don’t feel any love back. That’s what depression feels like, like something has put a transparent wall between me and love. But joy is still there, beneath the despair.

Joy is a subversive quality. It does not depend on external factors. It is not a response to good things happening externally. It cannot be taken away, only pushed aside temporarily by things like disaster and depression. It is the thing I like most about myself, at least today.