Taking you on a Tuesday

Just a nice day!

I rarely work on Tuesdays. They are my free day. My Saturday. A day I get to shape and mold from scratch. I’ve been itching to share something more immediate lately and have decided to take you on a Tuesday. I say immediate, but actually this was last Tuesday, not yesterday, so I still waited a week and edited and all that. Still, we’re zooming in on the everyday.

Something light, wouldn’t that be a nice change. As I like to tell Adam when things are going well, don’t worry, I’m still traumatized! He’s not worrying. Sounds like no one is worrying. Great. Thanks for not worrying, and I hope you have a Tuesday this week, whether it was yesterday or in the days to come.

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8:30am

Stayed in bed with Baby Bo and Ray. I hadn’t thought to do this yet, so I didn’t take a picture, but here’s one from a couple days later to get an idea. Also, I usually wake up later than this. I don’t want to imply I’m an ordinary citizen who wakes up at or before 8:30am, because I’m not. I have the privilege to rise late and sleep lots, and so I do.

9:30am

I try on my new delivery clothes from queer-friendly clothier Bg Bud Press, planning to wear a tank top out of the house today, but they are too small, so I must exchange them for a larger size. The cropped cami, however, fits, though I usually save camis for home use only due to shame over my wretched body. Keep in mind it “feels like” 95 degrees outside, and I’ll be walking a fair bit.

In a triumph for fat women everywhere, I go with this look for my errands. I sunscreen my exposed tummy. I think about us western fat women and our internal monologues, and I think about mass death in Palestine and other parts of the world. In comparison, our body struggle is obviously so unimportant, but we still get paid less and trusted less and dehumanized more. For those reasons, it can feel necessary to peep up and say “being fat is okay, too.” At the same time, it feels silly and even a little shameful to advocate at this level, because it doesn’t matter!

Consider one of my favorite drag queens, Mistress Isabelle Brooks, a mischievous “big girl” in the process of manifesting her dreams. She had a Q&A on her YouTube channel recently where many (perhaps also mischievous) viewers asked how much she weighs. She did a big lead up with all this coyness and modesty and finally “confessed” that she weighs 147 pounds.

This number is such a funny choice, because to the crowd who works hard to maintain 120, this would be horrifying, potentially life-ruining. To Mistress, it’s a fucking joke. She weighs comically more than 147 pounds, and performs around the damn world for thousands of people. She smiles when she talks, which makes me smile. See? It truly does not matter. I wear my cropped tank to errands!

10:00am

I arrive at my first errand where I get a bag of coffee beans ground and am delighted to have forgotten that they have their cold brew slushie this time of year. What an off-the-charts wonderful surprise. I now recall seeing an Instagram post about it, but my subconscious choice to fill my brain with other information instead has worked out in my favor.

The slushie is fantastic. Everything I hoped it would be. Creamy. Touch of sweet. I decide to act on the lingering idea of writing a daily diary post. The Grub Street Diet does a good job with these, as does my friend Julie in her newsletter Girl, Uninterrupted. She doesn’t use this exact format but does a similar accounting of the days that will have you saying, “What’s going to happen next in this person’s real life?” Good stuff!

11:00am

We hit the farmers market. My old (pre-DID-awareness) therapist would love to bring up farmers markets as sort of a happy place for me, which they are. We were treating more typical millennial white woman problems at that point. Disaffection. Dissatisfaction. Depression, of course, but it seemed so random in origin. In trauma therapy we’ve no time for such follies! My current therapist barely has enough paper to write down all the people who have abused me!

I buy raspberries, blackberries, apples, tomatoes, eggs, milk bread, ground pork, kale and prepared Mexican food for dinner tonight. And that’s the full list. The season is booming, and I’m lucky to consume such a bounty of high quality local goods. I overhear that peaches are coming soon!

I give $5 to the guy wearing a One Step Away vest, an organization that helps homeless people that is a shell of its former self as of five to ten years ago. Their most recent Instagram post is from 2020. You used to always see people out selling the newspapers, which contain stories pertaining to homelessness and written by the homeless community. It was cool! Now you barely see them, and there aren’t really newspapers anymore. However, this one guy is still going today, and I wish him well.

11:45am

People always see interesting things on the street. I almost walked by this until I realized I had seen something interesting on the street. Hole. Hole is a funny word to us. It can mean something dirty, and that’s super compelling. I appreciated the explanation, as if the person who made it thought others may be confused as to why the board is there. It shows empathy.

This second one is a bit more somber because it depicts a child whose soul is consumed by this single message: “I’m sory [sic.] mommy.” Look at that fill, it must have taken ages. “I’m sorry, mommy” is a very sad thing. I obviously have a lot of childhood despair kept fresh in Tupperware by my alters, so to see it spilled on the sidewalk affected me. Anyway, I’m sure this kid was back to their goofy self in like five minutes. Unless it represents a core memory that will come back in 20 years. We can’t know. Life is happening all around us.

12:30pm

I slice and salt a tomato for my upcoming lunch before completing 10 minutes of yoga. Then it is time for my weekly hair-washing. Hair washing can be a hot topic in a world where we’ve been fed false information about our own bodies since the dawn of advertising. I wash my hair once a week. I shower the rest of my body most days. And this is the formula for remaining clean that I’ve found just plain works.

1:15pm

I enjoy the quintessential summer sandwich of the food world, the tomato and mayo sandwich on white bread with the ingredients I just purchased. It’s delicious as it is every year, and as with every delicious meal, I’ve paired it with Baba’s brand kombucha, a seasonal raspberry lime flavor! You’re only allowed to eat this sandwich when tomatoes are in season according to food snobs like me, though I don’t think anyone outside of food-media-readers is clamoring for a tomato and mayo sandwich in the first place.

For the general public, I’d crown the BLT the sandwich of the summer. Still using that summer produce, but with the mass appeal of crispy, crunchy bacon. I will conquer this sandwich in the coming weeks, I’m sure.

2:00pm

Make cookies and listen to the Better Oblivion Community Center (Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes and Phoebe Bridgers) album from five years ago. I typically only have emotional real estate for one album at a time, so my queue gets quite backed up, and I’ve only just gotten to it. Great set of songs. Will definitely check out Phoebe Bridgers solo stuff and/or boygenius at some point in the five years.

I make this cookie recipe every 10 days or so, and this time I forget the eggs and vanilla before adding the flour. What is going on in that head? Something else, I guess. I remembered right after I dumped the flour in, so I just added the eggs and vanilla and mixed them all at once. The dough looks ever so slightly different, so we’ll see what the result of such an error will be, if any.

3:00pm

I decide to watch a Jim Jarmusch movie because they are so goddamn chill. At first I wasn’t that impressed with his work, but it just hadn’t sunken in yet how very chill it was. We’re all just out here. Floating. You’ve got to make meaning however you can, and connecting with the people around you is a good place to start. This one is Mystery Train. I’m bummed it doesn’t feature the Italian actor he works with a lot, Roberto Benigni, because he really is a hoot. It does happen to costar his wife, Nicoletta Braschi, though. Classic power couple.

4:30pm

Seasonal snack of berries to finish out the flick. Another winner from Jarmusch. Just a bunch of weirdos doing nothing, hanging out. I got what I came for. Four stars.

5:30pm

It’s almost evening, let’s have more food. Three freezer dumplings to be exact. And then… a little sampler of milk bread and butter and chips and guacamole. An encore of lunch and preview of dinner. It just makes sense!

6:30pm

Finish booking an upcoming overnight in Lancaster. We’re going to take the train and a couple backpacks! How freeing. It reminds me of the Japanese tourist characters in the movie I just watched. In another country for an extended amount of time with just a suitcase, train ticket and the technology of 1989. And you only partially speak the language. Just kidding, it’s much different, but the spirit of travel is the same. Exhilarating.

7:30pm

Dinner of the aforementioned Mexican food (Tinga with rice, chips and guac) and cookies to follow. They taste almost indistinguishable with only a slight textural variation from normal, but I will continue to follow the recipe as written 10 days from now. We watch TV from now ‘til bedtime, and this is the exciting conclusion of Tuesday. See you next time!