A mutuals post just reminded me of the first time i encountered a rice cooker in person.
So, I love rice. Literally part of at least 40% of my meals and would be more but I cook for more than just me. I make it many ways, I like to think I am p decent w it. My friends I have fed are well aware, which makes the next bit amusing.
I am at a friend's place, they're gonna make dinner, and I ask if there's anything I can do to help. They point at this crock-pot looking thing and ask me to start the rice.
Look. I admit it, I'm stubborn and a bit prideful. I have to at least examine this machine and see if I can deduce it's function before admitting I don't know what they're talking about.
"Oh, it's just these steps in order – wait. Kat, do you not know how to use a rice cooker?"
"Oh, is that what this is?!"
My friend looked at me, then in my thirties, with stunned confusion. "Hon, how have you never – how do you make rice?!"
"In a pot, how else do you know when it's done?!"
"The machine does it for you what do you mean???"
So we discovered that apparently I'm a fucking luddite and also my method of "look, tilt, smell, listen" for know how done the rice is is apparently low-grade kitchen witchcraft. 🤷♀️
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I don't like when I start to lose weight when I poorly manage my diabetes. It makes me feel like shit.
Putting on weight makes me feel so much better.
I think it's because I spent most of my childhood underweight until my diagnosis.
Like I put on so much fucking weight post-diagnosis I was so elated.
I feel much more comfortable in my own skin now that I have some weight on me.
I was so tired of seeing my ribs bro :(
And like the worst part of my diagnosis was when the dietician had the audacity to ask me if I wanted to remain skinny (while I was strapped up to five different IV lines and the skinniest I had ever been in my fucking life).
Like no bitch I like food???
The worst part of DKA was not being hungry. Like my body forcing me to throw up the food I wanted to eat.
I get scared of throwing up food now. Like, I cannot go back to my pre-diagnosis days, when I couldn't stomach anything.
I read so many stories of diabetics not taking their insulin, so they lose weight. Like it's so fucking sad to me. I see gaining weight as an achievement.
Not to mention not taking your insulin makes you feel ill, and you can't function at full brain capacity (plus you gotta piss all the damn time).
Yeah, I get sick of having to stab myself with needles every now and then, but I know I have to do it to live and that I am so much better now that I have treatment.
Anyway I just needed to type this out because I've been thinking about this for a while.
I've got a Slipknot crop top that makes me feel good because it shows off the weight I've put on.
H'okay. So. I would like to tell you about my mother, but the problem with being related to awesome people Of Note™ is that you have to be carefully vague so you don't fuckin doxx yourself. So forgive me if some of the following is imprecise.
I adore my mother. She is absolutely a legend and a role model for me. When her school was desegregated (yes, I'm a bit old but also that wasn't very long ago), she made it her mission that day to make friends with the only black girl who came to her school and sit with her at lunch. When the school called my grams to "warn" her, grams threatened them over the phone and told them they had best not bother her daughter or her friends ever again, so help her God.
My mother went into the Air Force when women were still expected to stick to clerical duties and keep their heads down. She did not fucking do that. She earned her rank through hard work, brilliance, and being too damn stubborn and too damn good for them to ignore her.
She has a master's in mathematics and is an expert in radar. I have watched this woman do literal orbital trajectory calculations in her head, like it was nothing. At 70-ish, she still leg presses 200lbs. For fun.
She had a very high level of security clearance. She was a vital part of America's Missile Defense Program. She is possibly the smartest person I know and was a national strategic asset both as an airwoman and as a private contractor. I'm pretty sure our landline was bugged several times when I was a child.
She overcame sexism, fought racism, and did what she believed served her country and her fellow human beings best. While we disagree on a lot of politics, I have never questioned the absolute truth of her soul or the power of her mind.
I tell you all this so you will understand how much I love her when I say: my mom may be one of the dumbest people I know at times. Mostly about Basic Common Sense.
Like, you know those Christmas sugar cookies with the little Christmas tree in them? The Alice and bake ones? She got those for us one year and baked them. They smelled great, so I came to the kitchen to see if I could steal one while they were still fresh.
Instead, I found my mom puzzling over the tray.
"Hey, what's up?"
"The tree didn't come out. That's so strange!"
I looked at the tray, and sure enough, instead of trees, there were just green swirls.
"Did... Did you knead the dough?"
My mother nodded, still confused. "Of course I did!" she replied, as if she would ever forget such a vital step in baking!
"... Mom."
And she did love to bake, and she was good at it! More or less. But at one point she was on a cheesecake kick. She started experimenting with flavored cream cheeses like strawberry and the like. Then Kraft released cheesecake flavored cream cheese. Naturally, she had to make that into a cheesecake! Of course!
And so I wandered into the kitchen to see my mom staring in dismay at the freshly baked cheesecake, toothpick in hand (which she had just used to poke the cheesecake for doneness and then taste).
"Is something wrong?"
"It's just the cheesecake..."
"What about it?"
"... It just tastes like cheesecake!"
"... Mom, what- what were you expecting?"
Several seconds pass as I watch this, I reiterate, genius woman consider the past few hours of her life. "Y'know, I guess it makes sense..."
In two decades, she still can't work the universal remote but she's been working with computers and programming since punch cards. She sent her first text message ever in 2021. She has likely forgotten more things about missile and radar systems than I will know about everything in my whole life, and yet coined the quote, "It's too dirty to throw in the garbage!"
I love her. She's so cool. But I really question how she spent her XP sometimes 🤣
The first time I tried knitting, I had no idea what I was doing. BUT! I'd seen a gif on how to start a chain and link it to the previous chain.
So, full of next to no knowledge but on an ADHD fueled desire to do this thing, I got started. I had gotten about a foot long chain done when I realized, I have no idea how to turn around. But, overflowing with determination, boredom, and a desire to keep going without looking anything else up, I came up with a "brilliant" idea - I'd just connect the end to the beginning and make it a tube. Now I didn't have to turn around! I could just keep going in a really slow spiral! Obviously, I'm a genius.
I also don't understand the idea of stopping once I get the hang of something so I just kept going. When the skin ran out, I tied the end of another on and kept knitting.
A day later and two more skeins, and I ran out of interest. I put it away and forgot about it.
My then wife found it about a week later. She, however, knew how to knit.
"Kittie?"
"Yeah?"
"... What is this?"
I turned from my computer and shrugged. "I tried knitting."
"... Why did you knit a giant tube???"
"I didn't know how to turn around at the end so I just looped it."
She stared at me for a moment and started laughing. "You didn't think to just ask me?"
There was a moment where my mind went blank. "... No?"
She taught me how to start a new row (which I've since forgotten, I never tried knitting again) and kept the "scarf" as a memento.
I remember back when I was training as an EMT we did an exercise where we wrote down the signs and symptoms of a drug and brought them in, broke into groups, and tried to guess each other's drug based exclusively on what we wrote down.
I started my group:
"Arrhythmia, anxiety, panic attacks, bone loss, insomnia, gastric reflux, muscular pain and breakdown, digestive distress, addiction, hypertension, tachycardia, fatigue, over active bladder, imbalance, shakiness, dehydration, skin flush, disorientation, hallucinations, psychosis, seizures, ischemia, and rhabdomyolysis."
The rest of my group stared.
"What the fuck causes all that?"
"Caffeine. Doses over 400 mg."
"Just 400 mg?"
"Yup."
The group pondered this a moment. Most of us, myself included, had a thermos of coffee with them. We shifted uncomfortably.
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Me: It's important to not overly attach yourself to objects. It is healthy to value items for what they bring into your life and be willing to let them go when they no longer serve that purpose.
Also me: Okay but this dime was given to me as a joke by a friend two decades ago and it stays in this special box forever.
Fun fact about me: my eyes see in slightly different hues.
Not a lot.
I never even noticed it until a college art class where I was examining some Pantone swatches which, because I'm near sighted and weird, I was doing with one eye at a time. I was making notes for a project and looked at one swatch for a moment, then made a note, then looked again, but this time with the other eye.
Huh, I thought, wasn't that orange warmer a second ago? Of course, colors do not shift their hues without a change to chemistry or lighting, and neither has occurred. So I looked again. And I was right, it had been warmer!
Maybe I'm just tired, I considered, as I had a bad habit back when of pulling a few too many all-nighters in a row furiously typing out prose (much to my roommates chagrin). But I am scientifically minded, and I checked again.
Different. What?
I puzzled over this for a moment before the proverbial lightbulb went off. I tried each eye independently in succession and sure enough, each eye produced a different response.
I didn't know what to do with this information. Here I sat, two conflicting impressions of the "objective” reality in front of me, each undeniably what I was witnessing first hand, but incongruent.
I pondered what to do for a while. How did this affect my notes? My intentions? My goals with my art? Did other people have this ... "condition"? Did other people see in hues differently from me? From each other?
I had no answer. I could never confirm what other people saw, they only had their own frame of reference and I mine. We would each experience a supposedly objective reality, but differently.
Years later, this experience would teach me that "objectivity" is a fairy tale. Life is what we experience as we experience it. Of course, finding some common frame of reference was good and helpful, of course, but no two objects occupy the same space at the same time and so no two points of view, no matter how close, will ever be exactly the same.
It is a thought that has never fully crystalized for me. It is an amorphous sense of grace and acceptance, rather, that I experience because of this. While I don't cede ground to extremists who spout hate, I do, when possible, try to remember that the other persons eyes are not my eyes, and even my own eyes do not always agree on everything.
If you're wondering, I decided to examine my swatches with both eyes, and just accept that maybe, just maybe, accepting both as valid and helpful at the same time is the best path forward.
So, one of the light switches in my house died, one of two on a panel. No biggie, easy fix. Bought the replacement, took off the cover, and went downstairs to the basement and opened up the breaker box.
Huh, I thought, none of these say "dining room." So I pondered this for a few seconds and figured, Well, obviously since the dining area is basically an extension of the kitchen, it'll be one of these two. So I flick them both off and come upstairs.
Just to be safe, I turn the working switch on to check the power is off. The lights come on.
Huh.
Well, okay, that wasn't it. No biggie. I go back downstairs and turn the kitchen breakers back on. There are two switches labeled "Stove". The stove is on the same wall as the light switch. Probably those. I turn those off. Back up the stairs and I try the switch again.
The lights turn on.
Hmm.
Okay, so those weren't it either.
I head back down, wander through the basement, and turn the "Stove" breakers back on. I ponder, none of the remaining breakers have labels for the dining room or kitchen at all.
Okay...
I figure the main bathroom shares a wall with the switch in question. Makes sense. I turn that off, and haul myself back up the stairs yet again.
The lights turn on yet again.
Becoming annoyed, I go back downstairs and meander to the breaker box again.
I ponder. Okay, this breaker is for the South hall. That could be it. It's on the corner by that hall. I cut that line and begin the arduous task of getting back up the stairs and flip the switch.
The lights come on.
Hmmm.
I ask my partner to stand in the kitchen and stay on the phone with me so I can just try breakers until I find the right one, being well done with the stairs.
I drag myself down the stairs and back to the dreaded breaker box. I stare. There are no other breakers I can imagine being connected to this switch anymore. Okay. Okay. I toss reason out the door and decide to rely on instinct. I say often that while a "gut feeling" may not always be right, the subconscious can pick up on things the conscious mind misses. I let my eyes scan the breakers.
"Family room, outdoor lights."
Those aren't even physically close to the Damned switch, but I try it anyway.
"That was it," I hear from my phone.
"Oh thank fuck," I reply, and head back upstairs.
Replacing the switch took minutes. I went back downstairs, flip the breaker, label the bastard, and walk back up the stairs for the final time that night.
