Last night, I ate salad.

This is the third time in my career as some sort of fuckedup herbivore that I have had salad. I'm not sure that salad will ever be completely enjoyable to me, but at least I'm learning. I have had the punishment of salad leveled on me on a few other times, and I have never enjoyed it. Usually I eat it to be polite--my uncle used to serve salad as a meal, and salad alone; I ate it. I picked the chicken and cheese out of it and ate them first with tiny bits of lettace garnishing the top, but I ate it.

So I ate salad last night. Surprisingly, I did not recieve the usually system shut down information from my twisted, lurching stomach. I didn't really enjoy it, either, but I didn't seize into stomach arrest, either.

Grocery shopping again. Sometimes I think I buy things to have things. I'm not hungry, but when the cabinets get empty looking, I go to the store and I buy things to fill the cabinets. Four kinds of pasta. Three boxes of macaroni and cheese. Six cans of soup. So repetative, so repetative. I feel like some throwback to the Great Depression: what if I run out? What if I need more than just one box of macaroni? What if we're forced to stay in our deathtrap house, and I eat all my food? What if all I needed was just the one box more. And so on and so forth, ecetera ad nauseum. So at the grocery store--as if to conteract the night's unsettlingly pleasent salad experience--I bought the makings for pierogies. I suppose you could make pierogies vegetable friendly, but I made sure to make them into this little cheese and potato loaded timebombs, just waiting for me to eat them.


In other news: it's snowed and frozen and resnowed and refrozen so much that tires are freezing to pavements. We poured hot water on the car door to unstick it. It is not a pleasent time to try and eke out a life in, vegetables aside.

We can't stop here!

It begins with my tongue. Every tongue looks the same—pink. Round, with some kind of tip to it. Lumpy. A little bumpy, like wet sandpaper. I once saw a tongue without a mouth. It looked crippled and funny, like a semi truck without the bed in the back. It was a cow’s tongue, so it was different, I guess; but all tongues are basically the same, just sometimes varying in size. This one looked almost like a thumb, or some soft stretched-out worthless piece of Silly Putty, if you remember that shit. There were deep blue and red roots sticking out of the broader end of the lopped off thing, the roots of some soft pliable organic plant; or thick hippie dreadlocks; or snakes shooting out of this malleable Medusa’s pink head.

It 's been this long running joke among everyone I know that I am allergic to vegetables. This is not necessarily true. There are four vegetables that I do like: potatoes, carrots (uncooked), corn, and yams. And I can stand onions (as long as they’re cooked into things), and mushrooms (as long as they’re in a casserole or fried), and zucchini or pumpkin (in pie or bread alone), and peas (snow peas with teriyaki beef, and maybe in fried rice), and even green beans (but only encased in a carbohydrate shell of a meat pie, snuggled up cozy beside succulent chunks of roast beef). And the red sauce of pasta or pizza runs thick in my bloodstream. But those picky, mundane exceptions to the rule are where the extent of my vegetable adventures end.

I’m not sure when I began to hate vegetables. I used to have a love affair with beets. (More on that later.) I didn’t have a neglectful mother; she did her best. One sister loves green things. My brother downs raw lettuce like a human/rabbit hybrid, the physic of a man and the taste of a bunny. Even my father eats salad, with a lot of garlic dressing; but salad is salad. Most of my friends are vegetarians, which can get weird. None of them are militant vegetarians, or even vegans, and some of them eat chicken wings at Buffalo Wild Wings. I don’t understand this, but I’m not a vegetarian. And I admire vegetarians, because it’s a discipline I couldn’t keep up. Not to mention that it would be a discipline that would spell my death, since without meat or animal products, I would be floating in a sea of starvation, with nothing but bread, corn, and potatoes for company. And it’s not being dramatic, it’s just telling the simple truth, when I say that putting a piece of lettuce in my mouth turns my stomach. My face crumples, my eyes squeeze shut; I can feel the gag reflex setting in, my throat contracting and closing up; I grab spasmodically at tables and place settings, groping blindly to try and find a glass of milk or a chicken wing to clear the green, fresh, disgusting taste from my mouth. I can’t help it. I can’t do it.

I would like to like vegetables. They’re healthy and good for you; they’re full of all these useful vitamins and nutrients (or so I’ve been told). Plates of vegetables look so bright and colorful and fresh. Everyone who eats vegetables always look so happy and pleased with themselves, caught up in this secret joy of vegetables. I would love to be in that club, the vegetable club, in love with greens and yellows and reds; shoots and roots and leaves, stuffing my face with all those colors. I can’t do it.

There are plenty of things that I can’t do. Math is for sure at the top of the list. I’ve never been able to do a cartwheel, not for lack of trying. Every time I try and make an exact scientific measurement, my hands start to shake, so I’m terrible at science, too. I can’t draw a straight line without a ruler, I can’t bring myself to really like farm animals, I can’t make New Year’s resolutions, and I can’t climb ladders without feeling my stomach end up somewhere at the bottom of my pelvis, and I can’t eat vegetables. I’ve tried to do all of these things, but I always screw them up.

So that leads me to the vegetable resolution. When the ball dropped on the last hour of New Year’s Eve, I sure as hell wasn’t thinking about resolutions. I know that they’re something I can’t do. I don’t have some bullshit poetic reason for not making them, something deep and stoic and existential; I don’t even have a good reason. I just have a bad memory, which means if I ever did make a resolution, I’d forget it right away. So I wasn’t thinking about resolutions. The resolution didn’t come until weeks later. It wasn’t even an official resolution, really, it was just this thing that sort of happened.

Senior year of college. I’m not living on the main campus, just in this great old junky house a couple of blocks away. I have a room all to myself on the second floor, and it’s bigger than any room I’ve ever had before. It’s a communal house, almost a weird sorority; it’s me and these two great girls and a little puppy called Tito who pees on the couch when he gets overexcited. He gets overexcited like once a day, so our couch is in this perpetual semi-washed, semi-peed-on state. It’s everything I wanted and more, and now we’re in the second semester. The first day of classes. We drive ten minute to the grocery store, start the monthly stock up—and I find myself standing in this vegetable jungle, surrounded by green leaves and red shiny bodies—and my housemates have wandered off to fill their carts with bananas and green beans—and I start thinking. I wish I liked vegetables. I really do wish I liked vegetables. I really wish I liked vegetables.

And then I’m walking away from my cart. I’m peeling a plastic bag off the roll, picking it open with careful fingernails. I’m reaching down and picking out a modest head of romaine lettuce. I’m shaking off the water, putting it in the plastic bag, and tucking the thing down into my cart—my cart, the bed of which vegetables have never graced by my hand—right beside the pork chops and mozzarella cheese and Fruit-By-The-Foot—and I let go, and I’m going to buy lettuce. This green, foreign object, staring up at me, with ruffles and ridges like this deep-sea creature, lying there like an abandoned child. I’m going to buy lettuce.

In some weird vegetable heat, I put a pound of snow peas in a flimsy bag and jam those beside the lettuce. Maybe I’m hoping they’ll keep the lettuce company, or act as an ambassador between the two of us—me, the lettuce, and then the snow peas, who are acquainted with both of us and will maybe speak some common language. And I’m staring at these green vegetables and I’m thinking, “This is it. This is the end of some age. I don’t know what age it is or why this feel so monumental, but it does. The End of an Age.” I don’t normally wax stupid poetic like that, but it was the first phrase that leapt to my mind. And I think it fits.

When my housemates finally made their way back to me, I proclaimed proudly the presence of my vegetables. They didn’t react with the same amazement that I found, but tolerated my pleasure. I found some potatoes to keep the vegetables company. I made sure they were not smashed, but safe and comfortable beside yogurt containers and boxes of corn cereal. When I finally weighed the produce at the check-out, I felt like some alarm should go off. “WARNING. THIS GIRL HAS NEVER BOUGHT LETTUCE IN HER LIFE.” Or maybe balloons and confetti should tumble down from the ceiling, and triumphant music would begin blaring from the speakers: Congratulations on your first head of lettuce! But the scanner just burped dully, and demanded my credit card.

I’m not sure when I will eat the lettuce. I will eat it—I hate food going to waste. I feel like this is the start of something, but I don’t really know what.