on singleness and chocolate

A vegan chocolate cake recipe that is surprisingly good:

1 1/2 cups of flour

3/4 cups of sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon of baking soda

3 Tablespoons of cocoa

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/3 cup vegetable oil

1 Tablespoon vinegar

1 cup water

Mix them all together and bake at 350 for 30 minutes.

(I bring this up because the odds are good that you have all these ingredients at home, sitting there waiting for you. And you don't need any of the fancy ones, like butter, eggs, milk, pudding, etc. I'm just saying that, in a pinch, this satisfies one's need for chocolate.)

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I would like men to come with manuals. (Ha! MAN-uals!) They think we're confusing, but if we're confusing, it's only because they're bewildering.

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Names I never want to scream in passion in the heat of the moment:

Harold

Howard

Norman

Walter

Horace

Herman

Mohammed

Luigi

Jesus

Big Papa

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One problem with being single and living alone is that if you buy a bag of chocolate chips, accidentally open them, and then proceed to eat the entire bag, you have no one else to blame but yourself. Nobody came along and ate "just a handful." Sure, you may have dropped one or two, but not three hundred calories' worth.

Nope, you (and you alone) ate that whole bag. (It's amazing, though, how they can cram such a small bag full of 1400 chips -- knowing that each one only has one calorie...)

less content, more fluff!

I was on a date a while ago and the guy I was with said something deep and profound and prefaced it by saying something like "Well, you know what de Tocqueville says... [insert deep and profound thing here.]"

I looked at him, smiled nerdishly and said, "You've been waiting all day to quote de Tocqueville, haven't you?"

He looked at me, smiled nerdishly and said, "I paraphrased him, I didn't quote him."

Touche, date, touche.

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Overheard at work recently:

"Don't let the door hit you where the good lord split you."

"Nut up or shut up"

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The heat came on in my apartment recently. For a whole day, my home smelled like hot dust.

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So there's a great DIY arts and crafts organization called Etsy. (I think it's short for something, but I don't know what.) They have a whole website where you can buy and sell homemade stuff. And this, of course, has spawned another fabulous website... have you seen regretsy?

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Fernando got two enormous boxes of something delivered to the office recently. So of course, I had to climb into one of them and pop out and shout "SURPRISE!" when he came back into the office. Yes, he knew I was in there. Yes, he laughed anyway. (I love this guy.)

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"I will continue to microwave halibut in the company lunch room every single day until such time as you sign all of my expense reports." (Awesomeness.)

on chickens and eggs (but mostly eggs)

I've been a vegetarian for over a year now, so if there's one thing I know how eat, it's eggs. A major source of protein in my diet, these small ovules are delicious, nutritious, and constantly available in refrigerators near you. (And, of course, when I say "you," I mean "me.")

So when a suitor sent me a link on how to cook the perfect boiled egg (telling me, strangely, that the article made him think of me), I figured it had to be funny or particularly well written (since the topic was less than scintillating). Because it's really not hard to boil eggs. To quote a GEENYUS, "it's not rocket surgery."

Sadly, the article did not rock my world. (No offense J. Kenji Lopez-Alt.) I thought it would suggest hard boiling eggs with rocket fuel or in the microwave or something new-fangled and exciting. Instead, it merely proposed not bringing the water to a boil when hard boiling eggs, providing lots of attractive scientific method to prove the goodness of this idea. So, even though it seemed painfully counter intuitive, I was willing to try J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's method. (Because, realistically, I liked the suitor and thought it would give us something to talk about.)

I have had the worst week of hard boiled eggs in my life.

The method of hard boiling the eggs proposed by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt did not get my eggs cooked all the way through. So while the yolk is less dry and more appealing, THE WHITES ARE GOOPY.

Nobody likes goopy whites. Nobody. Homeless people scoff at goopy whites, and even Sally Struthers' starving children are skeptical. Chickens will drown themselves in a rainstorm before claiming to have produced a goopy-whited egg. So needless to say, I've been miserable.

The other problem is that the shells stick to the whites. And to a hungry girl in the middle of the afternoon, there is little more frustrating than taking an item of food that is a mere two cubic inches and trying to peel away a fraction of a millimeter of that food, only to have about a cubic inch of food stuck to the peelings.

I am not pleased, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. Not pleased at all.

(And things didn't work out with the suitor, either.)

collected thoughts on jury duty

I served my time today. I showed up for jury duty.

Here are some observations:

8:30-11:00 The Jury Room

Remember the teacher's voice in Charlie Brown? Imagine hearing that give you step by step directions on how to fill in the equivalent of a credit card application.

Also, there was a fabulous movie on the history of jury trials. All I could think about was how psyched the actors were who landed those roles. "Dude! I'm going to be in a jury duty film that they'll show in Brooklyn court rooms for decades! Sweet!"

11:00-1:00 The Empaneling Room

The empaneling room was all of 10'x20' and there were 23 of us in there. It was painted in an exciting shade of Doldrums Gray and the temperature in there was a brisk 98.6 degrees. Perfect attention paying weather!

Three different attorneys explained judicial procedures to us. I fought to stay awake.

"Ms. Neal, do you think you could be impartial in this case? Give both sides a fair shake? Let the chips fall where they will? The case is a blank blackboard and we'll fill it up with evidence. Do you think you could make a decision based on that evidence, and not on anything else? Are you a fair person?"

"Yes."

"Great! Mr. MacDuffy, do you think you could be impartial in this case? Give both sides a fair shake? Let the chips fall where they will? The case is a blank blackboard and we'll fill it up with evidence. Do you think you could make a decision based on that evidence, and not on anything else? Are you a fair person?"

"Yes."

"Great! Ms. Surgeon, do you think you could be impartial in this case? Give both sides a fair shake? Let the chips fall where they will? The case is a blank blackboard and we'll fill it up with evidence. Do you think you could make a decision based on that evidence, and not on anything else? Are you a fair person?"

"I'm sorry, what? I didn't hear you the first seventeen times you said that."

Actually, there was one woman who, when asked if she could serve fairly on the jury, said, "I could, but I don't want to." And then I overheard her muttering something about having to answer to Jesus and what if she didn't agree with the laws?

1:00-2:00 Lunch

I was the obnoxious white vegetarian at Subway over lunch. I ordered a veggie patty sandwich and they were much faster than I thought they'd be, so the patty was in the microwave before I saw them do it. So they kept fixing the sandwich without the patty. And I kept reminding them that this was a veggie patty sandwich, not just a veggie sandwich. I must have said "veggie patty" fourteen times. (And it's not a pretty thing to say.) In hindsight, I was kind of a bitch. I didn't mean to be, but I was.

(I'm sorry, Subway!)

2:00-4:30 Jury Room

They didn't like me enough to empanel me on that personal injury case -- even though the law firm I work with doesn't do personal injury work. (I thought about telling them that the defendants' attorney looked like an exboyfriend of mine, but he wasn't cute enough to sway my feelings one way or the other, so I let it slide). Maybe it was because I explained to them what a technical trainer does -- "I teach lawyers how to use their computers."

So I wasn't unhappy being sent back to the jury room. I checked my email, read my book, and actually watched a movie (since I brought my computer with me).

It was, however, kind of cool at the end of the day, when they read the names of jurors who were being dismissed. It's a long list before you get to "Surgeon," so I got to hear the melting pot of names called, one after another. Caitlin MacBride was right next to Jeanine Moskovitz, who were just behind a series of different Lees and Lis.

Would I do it again? Not for eight years. Was I happy to do it? You bet. I'm so civic it hurts.

I have a new chiropractor...

I'm in love.

Again.

With a back-crackin' fool.

(Will I never learn?)

I'd been seeing my regular chiropractor for quite some time, and the pain in my shoulder subsided enough to be bearable, but the pain in my lower back was increasing to Grandma-ish levels, so I went to the health fair.

And there he was. Right next to the skeleton.

Our eyes locked, and it was as if the sky opened up and angels started singing.

"Would you like to make an appointment?" he whispered into my half-opened mouth.

"Yes, YES, YES!!" I screamed with ecstasy, tossing my hair from side to side, and ripping my blouse from my shoulders.

His assistant (who is way prettier on a regular day than I was at prom -- and younger, too) handed me a card and a smile and sent me on my way.

All I had to do now was wait three days. (And wipe the drool from my chin.)

I felt bad cheating on my old chiropractor, but, truth be told, he wasn't really helping me all that much and I was just going back because it was free. The new chiropractor, though... yeah, he's free, too. (And he offers massage!)

"Dr. Jack," as Cutesy McGee at the front desk calls him, is probably all of 30, if even that. He looks dapper in his black scrubs, and has the harried look of a guy who is trying to do seventy five things at once. (Probably because he is.)

He took x-rays of my back and it turns out that my right hip is (to use a technical term) "all cocked up." And my lumbar spine is crooked. And my neck is curved the wrong way. And I'm single.

Oh, wait, that just slipped out.

To fix my hip, Dr. Jack will actually slam his body into my bent knee. I'll admit it, it's hot. I try to simply exhale, but, well, it comes out as more of a gasp. And (this is the sad part) I want him to think I'm awesome, so I relax my neck as much as humanly possible before he cracks it -- and I want you to know, not everyone can do this. I developed it through years of trust-building exercises in acting class. I doubt he even notices.

Tommy, the massage therapist, is an enormous muscle with hands that turn my back into pre-cooked meatloaf. Sweet as hell, but if you didn't know it, you'd be scared. Especially if he was taking his fist, jamming it into your hip socket, and swiveling your leg around. (He's good at what he does -- and likes Sinead O'Connor!)

It's the highlight of my day, going to the doctor. Which, now that I've written it down, makes me kind of sad.