- Sugar-free popsicles make a perfectly reasonable and delicious breakfast, lunch, or even dinner----just not all three in one day! I eat one real meal to keep the old blood sugar balanced. (This diet plan not approved by physicians. Don't try this at home; don't tell my doctor.)
- I can water my lawn all night long, moving the sprinkler every couple of hours, to justify my out-of-school sleep habits of staying up until 3 or 4 a.m. and sleeping until 10. Let me tell you, it's hard to make that schedule make sense to most people, but it is just what my internal body clock wants to run on.
- Though I mocked them above, I ADORE the smell of chlorine in a swimming pool---I even love the faint trace of the smell left on my skin after a couple of hours spent submerged in the water like a crocodile, up to my very eyeballs. If I could afford it, adding a pool would certainly be my one big-ticket addition to my home, thus avoiding the Petri dish problems mentioned previously. Ahem.
- Summer has good sunrises, but positively glorious sunsets. There's not much that can compete with the beauty of the amber haze suffusing an August sunset in Oklahoma.
- I'm not much of a vegetable fan, but man! I love my sweet corn, and fresh green beans, and homemade sweet pickles from my grandma's recipe, all courtesy of summer's bounty in local gardens. I am a terrible gardener, but the smells and sounds take me back more than 45 years, to when I toddled barefoot through my grandparents' and great-grandma's enormous gardens. I loved picking strawberries and eating them right off the plant.
- And speaking of smells of summer, what can compete with the smell of hay, whether it's prairie hay or alfalfa, just cut and raked one turn?
- In fact, this season is as abundant with gifts as with the heat. QT cheap drinks, Sonic ice, homemade lemonade quench our thirst; we get practically delirious over the smell of rain and roses blooming by the porch; fireworks spark our hearts and our consciences, reminding us to live in gratitude; the whirr of locusts in the evening lulls us into moving a little slower, taking more pleasure in the simplest of things---which of course turn out quite often to be the most important things.
- Summer is busy for everyone else in my agribusiness family, but it's the only time I don't constantly have work waiting for me to do right away. It's not the ideal situation for spending quality time together, but it has allowed me to spend extended time with all my nieces and nephews. And what better excuse to do all the fun things that most parents get a little tired of: movies and water parks and Incredible Pizza, sleepovers and fireworks and projects....ah, now that's the best of summer right there!
Saturday, July 28, 2012
Keep Cool!
It's hot. HOT. Not just faint-sweat-on-your-upper-lip hot---it's heat that obliterates your brain waves, leaving you incapable of any cohesive thought beyond, "Please, God, make it go away" pleas to the Almighty, or dreaming of ice baths, snowstorms, Alpine mountain passes, crisp fall winds.....or even relenting and submersing yourself in that local Petri dish of pee, the public pool. In fact, even the previous very bloated sentence is an offense to the senses in this kind of heat. It can get to the point where one loses hope in Mother Nature, if not all humanity. But we find our ways to slog through it. What gets YOU through? I bet you have some of these same reminders of the goodness of summer:
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Viva la Evolucion!
I've just come from a delicious enchilada dinner at Los Cabos, which I'd been craving for weeks. I finally gave in and stopped off after running errands late this evening. I had a book, Drood, with me---a fictionalized account of Charles Dickens working on his last novel---and it was late enough that I could read undisturbed. Most people would dread eating out alone, but this is one of my greatest pleasures, and probably my worst habit. The novel was engrossing, mysterious and sensationalized, but I couldn't help thinking between chapters about a conversation I had with my sister and brother-in-law last weekend about Mexican food and the changing understanding that we Americans have had of it. I'm probably a pretty average case study in the evolution of "Mexican food" for most midwestern folks.
When I was still a kid in the mid-70's, around my late grade school years, Dad diversified some of his business and was gone at times for a week or two at a time. This brought no change in the discipline of the house (Mom was totally in charge!), but we did have one thing we got to do when Dad was gone: eat frozen TV dinners. Oh, joy!---and there's not a drop of sarcasm in that. We were a farm and ranch family, so we had beef at pretty much every meal, so a change from that was such a treat. Mom didn't mind the break from cooking, I'm sure, and she was always a bargain shopper and would only buy these little slabs of aluminum wonderment when they were on sale, so it wasn't wasteful. My favorite, as I recall, my ONLY desire each time was for a Patio Mexican dinner. It came in the standard 4-block tray, the front one used for enchiladas in the shape of a trapezoid, two angled upper corners for bean and Spanish rice, and the middle spot for what I seem to remember as little mini-tacos. I'm ashamed to tell you here, reader, that I craved those things---they would make my mouth water as I waited to get them home and hovered around the oven as they were defrosting; but I've come to understand that there was probably just some chemical deficiency in my body that was driving me to ingest cumin and chili powder and oregano and mass quantities of salt that I didn't know where to get anywhere else. That's what I tell myself when I look back on that time and cringe deep in my soul. But it opened the door to a culinary world that was more than the great old southern cooking that I was raised on, delicious but often repetitive.
My next exposure to the delight of Mexican food came, if I recall correctly, in my high school home ec classes. (For you young people, this was back in a time when we almost never ate out, so forget fast food.) I have to give credit to Mrs. Delcie Barrett, the greatest home ec teacher ever, for making sure we tried all kinds of things, especially dishes that were influenced by or came from other cultures. It seems completely inconsequential now, but it made a big difference in developing our spirit of adventure when it came to cuisine. In home ec, we tried taco salad for the first time; I still make it the same way we did then, 35 years ago. There was a Mexican chicken casserole that I still have the recipe for, too, using that greatest of all casserole ingredients: Velveeta! I can still eat that stuff in chunks, so I just don't keep it in the house. But I do get a craving for that dish every four or five years, and I make it and can only eat a little. Our food was so much richer back in those days---and THEN we'd add Velveeta to make it go down extra-smooth! The real kicker from home ec was....wait for it...........NACHOS! When my late best friend found I had a RECIPE written on an actual RECIPE CARD for nachos, she just busted a gut. Hey, we had to do the cards for a grade! And the layers had to be done right or they just wouldn't taste good!! And honestly, it was completely revolutionary to me, and to others, I expect.
After that, college: I'm sure this is where Taco Bell entered the scene, though I don't remember going to them back then. What I DO remember is that by the time I was doing my graduate work, our usual restaurant hangout was a Tahlequah institution called Bandido's. They had cheap food, and my boss and eventual best friend loved anything with cheese and didn't eat meat, so Bandido's gave her several options. But the REAL draw was that they didn't bring salsa with your chips unless you requested it. They brought what everyone elegantly referred to at "white sauce." This was some cold dip of indeterminate origin. It wasn't ranch, though it had that texture; it wasn't quite dill or bleu cheese, either, but there was something about it that was more addictive than heroin. I know other restaurants in the area tried to duplicate it, but last I knew, nobody had any idea what it was or how to make it. Now about the enchiladas, burritos, et al: I thought they were pretty good, although I wasn't terribly interested in trying a lot of things. I stuck with my standard enchiladas---and those damned chips and white sauce---for many years. And then..........I moved to Austin.
Ahhhh-stin! There was a stellar Mexican restaurant everywhere you turned. The young professionals I worked with at UT would meet often for lunch, dinner, or drinks all over town; I can't remember the names, but I can picture at least four of them that served Mexican. The first one I went to, Baby A's, was a revelation! What taste----what simplicity---what lack of drenching red enchilada sauce covering everything, and even a minimum of cheese! To say I was hooked would be laughably oversimplifying. I became an enchilada connoisseur, trying them out everywhere. Austin is also where I first tasted that stuccoed drive-through atrocity, Taco Cabana, but fast food doesn't count. What I was meeting, of course, was Tex-Mex. I didn't, couldn't, develop a taste for the hot foods; they burned my tongue, lips, skin, throat, but I loved any of it that didn't set me on fire.
Then, after a year, I beat it home from Texas. Couldn't stand the weather, as Stevie Ray would say, nor the attitude of the UT students. I was so glad to be back....except that suddenly, the Mexican food I had grown up on here was soooo bad. It's a shame I have to tell you this, but I became a total Mexican snob. Nothing satisfied me. So God got me back: I developed gallstones and gall bladder attacks, and for 10 long years (very long) I couldn't eat Mexican food without suffering a brutal attack that started about 35 minutes after I would eat and would continue until the next day. In those 10 years, a beautiful thing happened, though: the authentic Mexican trend. When the gall bladder came out in April of 2001, the first meal I wanted when I was cleared was (you know it!) an enchilada/taco combo platter.
And the options have grown exponentially. I love Los Cabos, Abuelo's is also excellent, and there are any number of authentic Mexican places to choose from in the city. I rarely make my own enchiladas any more---I haven't figured out how to do it without it tasting packaged. I HAVE learned about brining chicken to tenderize and flavor it, and my family members bring back some of the most fabulous hand-made tortillas from Texas. I just have to figure out how to escape that oily, joyously greasy Velveeta for a lighter, easier hand with some queso blanco and green chilies, and my culinary evolution from TV dinner to Tex-Mex-pert will be complete.
When I was still a kid in the mid-70's, around my late grade school years, Dad diversified some of his business and was gone at times for a week or two at a time. This brought no change in the discipline of the house (Mom was totally in charge!), but we did have one thing we got to do when Dad was gone: eat frozen TV dinners. Oh, joy!---and there's not a drop of sarcasm in that. We were a farm and ranch family, so we had beef at pretty much every meal, so a change from that was such a treat. Mom didn't mind the break from cooking, I'm sure, and she was always a bargain shopper and would only buy these little slabs of aluminum wonderment when they were on sale, so it wasn't wasteful. My favorite, as I recall, my ONLY desire each time was for a Patio Mexican dinner. It came in the standard 4-block tray, the front one used for enchiladas in the shape of a trapezoid, two angled upper corners for bean and Spanish rice, and the middle spot for what I seem to remember as little mini-tacos. I'm ashamed to tell you here, reader, that I craved those things---they would make my mouth water as I waited to get them home and hovered around the oven as they were defrosting; but I've come to understand that there was probably just some chemical deficiency in my body that was driving me to ingest cumin and chili powder and oregano and mass quantities of salt that I didn't know where to get anywhere else. That's what I tell myself when I look back on that time and cringe deep in my soul. But it opened the door to a culinary world that was more than the great old southern cooking that I was raised on, delicious but often repetitive.
My next exposure to the delight of Mexican food came, if I recall correctly, in my high school home ec classes. (For you young people, this was back in a time when we almost never ate out, so forget fast food.) I have to give credit to Mrs. Delcie Barrett, the greatest home ec teacher ever, for making sure we tried all kinds of things, especially dishes that were influenced by or came from other cultures. It seems completely inconsequential now, but it made a big difference in developing our spirit of adventure when it came to cuisine. In home ec, we tried taco salad for the first time; I still make it the same way we did then, 35 years ago. There was a Mexican chicken casserole that I still have the recipe for, too, using that greatest of all casserole ingredients: Velveeta! I can still eat that stuff in chunks, so I just don't keep it in the house. But I do get a craving for that dish every four or five years, and I make it and can only eat a little. Our food was so much richer back in those days---and THEN we'd add Velveeta to make it go down extra-smooth! The real kicker from home ec was....wait for it...........NACHOS! When my late best friend found I had a RECIPE written on an actual RECIPE CARD for nachos, she just busted a gut. Hey, we had to do the cards for a grade! And the layers had to be done right or they just wouldn't taste good!! And honestly, it was completely revolutionary to me, and to others, I expect.
After that, college: I'm sure this is where Taco Bell entered the scene, though I don't remember going to them back then. What I DO remember is that by the time I was doing my graduate work, our usual restaurant hangout was a Tahlequah institution called Bandido's. They had cheap food, and my boss and eventual best friend loved anything with cheese and didn't eat meat, so Bandido's gave her several options. But the REAL draw was that they didn't bring salsa with your chips unless you requested it. They brought what everyone elegantly referred to at "white sauce." This was some cold dip of indeterminate origin. It wasn't ranch, though it had that texture; it wasn't quite dill or bleu cheese, either, but there was something about it that was more addictive than heroin. I know other restaurants in the area tried to duplicate it, but last I knew, nobody had any idea what it was or how to make it. Now about the enchiladas, burritos, et al: I thought they were pretty good, although I wasn't terribly interested in trying a lot of things. I stuck with my standard enchiladas---and those damned chips and white sauce---for many years. And then..........I moved to Austin.
Ahhhh-stin! There was a stellar Mexican restaurant everywhere you turned. The young professionals I worked with at UT would meet often for lunch, dinner, or drinks all over town; I can't remember the names, but I can picture at least four of them that served Mexican. The first one I went to, Baby A's, was a revelation! What taste----what simplicity---what lack of drenching red enchilada sauce covering everything, and even a minimum of cheese! To say I was hooked would be laughably oversimplifying. I became an enchilada connoisseur, trying them out everywhere. Austin is also where I first tasted that stuccoed drive-through atrocity, Taco Cabana, but fast food doesn't count. What I was meeting, of course, was Tex-Mex. I didn't, couldn't, develop a taste for the hot foods; they burned my tongue, lips, skin, throat, but I loved any of it that didn't set me on fire.
Then, after a year, I beat it home from Texas. Couldn't stand the weather, as Stevie Ray would say, nor the attitude of the UT students. I was so glad to be back....except that suddenly, the Mexican food I had grown up on here was soooo bad. It's a shame I have to tell you this, but I became a total Mexican snob. Nothing satisfied me. So God got me back: I developed gallstones and gall bladder attacks, and for 10 long years (very long) I couldn't eat Mexican food without suffering a brutal attack that started about 35 minutes after I would eat and would continue until the next day. In those 10 years, a beautiful thing happened, though: the authentic Mexican trend. When the gall bladder came out in April of 2001, the first meal I wanted when I was cleared was (you know it!) an enchilada/taco combo platter.
And the options have grown exponentially. I love Los Cabos, Abuelo's is also excellent, and there are any number of authentic Mexican places to choose from in the city. I rarely make my own enchiladas any more---I haven't figured out how to do it without it tasting packaged. I HAVE learned about brining chicken to tenderize and flavor it, and my family members bring back some of the most fabulous hand-made tortillas from Texas. I just have to figure out how to escape that oily, joyously greasy Velveeta for a lighter, easier hand with some queso blanco and green chilies, and my culinary evolution from TV dinner to Tex-Mex-pert will be complete.
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Photo Finish
My sister Sheri and I have been chasing the sun this evening, trying to get the perfect new profile picture for this blog. There are a number of reasons why the whole endeavor was, simply put, illogical claptrap.
1) The sky, which in my imagination of this shot would be a delicious combination of vivid orange and creamy pink, was just not feeling it tonight. Watery crap yellow was about the best we got. Now, before you suggest Photoshop, I have to say that I'm a purist about a lot of things, down-right old-fashioned, some would say. I wanted the real sky behind the real me.
2) "Perfect" profile photo?! So....wait.....HAHAHAAA....yeah, how many THOUSANDS of profile pics (you know, the long-arm shot, or the phone-in-the-mirror cheat-sheet pic), cluttering how many 16 gig SD cards, have we all done, trying to get a "perfect" shot? If you claim to have gotten one, I could have you declared clinically insane tomorrow, so be careful what you answer. Then add to that issue the next item.
3) I am of, shall we say,advancing years middle age a certain chronological distance from optimum physical prowess. As a sad result, I cut both less and more (a whole lot more) than the perfect figure. And, in my silly, silly mind, this pic would be styled......wait for it.............as a profile against the sun-----a FULL BODY profile. MY profile. Now, Sheri is good with a lens, but, well, even Richard Avedon wouldn't be up to this. At least the BEST pic made us both laugh: the colors were wonderful, the shading fabulous, all the right parts looking in the right proportion.....except for my right shoulder, which made me look more Quasimodo than Goddess of English. I hear you snickering, but don't forget that chances are you've got your own snapped-two-milliseconds-too-late pics out there, and we've all probably seen at least one.
4) In all seriousness, I don't REALLY want to change my photo. After all, two years ago I wrote and won a $5,000 grant to travel to New England and visit the homes of many authors just to get that pic. It's taken at the mailbox of Robert Frost at his cabin in the Green Mountains of Franconia, New Hampshire. The setting was as lush and damp as any jungle, giving every blade of grass and the riotously-blooming lilies their lustrous colors. The mailbox is rustic perfection, original to Frost's time and still receiving mail for the small museum and poet in residence there. The photography, a quick picture by one of the docents at the museum, is nicely framed and shot. So what's the glitch, why replace? Yes, of course, it's me, in a loudly-patterned and unflattering shirt, with no makeup, grimacing apologetically to everyone who would ever see said photo. And I have a similar pic of me on the front steps of Emily Dickinson's home, looking as grim as though I'd just had all my nose hairs plucked out, one by one, instead of spending two days worshiping at the court of my literary queen. With those kinds of things to choose from, taking an entirely new picture was really the only option.
The one bright spot in all this is that I at least learned recently (thanks to the wonders of some daytime talk show) how to take a great face photo every time, and the photos I've tried it with since have worked much better than my usual plasticized smile and too-wide eyes, making me look like the most spastic family member of those "Awkward Family Photo" posts. Here's the trick: duck your chin down, then point the apple of one cheek at the camera. It might be a bit too fey for some of you fellows, but I'd like to see everyone's results. In fact, try it, and post the pic as or with a comment. In the meantime, I'll keep snapping away, waiting for the perfect mix of mystery and art to represent me without making either of us laugh so hard that we snort soda out of our noses.
1) The sky, which in my imagination of this shot would be a delicious combination of vivid orange and creamy pink, was just not feeling it tonight. Watery crap yellow was about the best we got. Now, before you suggest Photoshop, I have to say that I'm a purist about a lot of things, down-right old-fashioned, some would say. I wanted the real sky behind the real me.
2) "Perfect" profile photo?! So....wait.....HAHAHAAA....yeah, how many THOUSANDS of profile pics (you know, the long-arm shot, or the phone-in-the-mirror cheat-sheet pic), cluttering how many 16 gig SD cards, have we all done, trying to get a "perfect" shot? If you claim to have gotten one, I could have you declared clinically insane tomorrow, so be careful what you answer. Then add to that issue the next item.
3) I am of, shall we say,
4) In all seriousness, I don't REALLY want to change my photo. After all, two years ago I wrote and won a $5,000 grant to travel to New England and visit the homes of many authors just to get that pic. It's taken at the mailbox of Robert Frost at his cabin in the Green Mountains of Franconia, New Hampshire. The setting was as lush and damp as any jungle, giving every blade of grass and the riotously-blooming lilies their lustrous colors. The mailbox is rustic perfection, original to Frost's time and still receiving mail for the small museum and poet in residence there. The photography, a quick picture by one of the docents at the museum, is nicely framed and shot. So what's the glitch, why replace? Yes, of course, it's me, in a loudly-patterned and unflattering shirt, with no makeup, grimacing apologetically to everyone who would ever see said photo. And I have a similar pic of me on the front steps of Emily Dickinson's home, looking as grim as though I'd just had all my nose hairs plucked out, one by one, instead of spending two days worshiping at the court of my literary queen. With those kinds of things to choose from, taking an entirely new picture was really the only option.
The one bright spot in all this is that I at least learned recently (thanks to the wonders of some daytime talk show) how to take a great face photo every time, and the photos I've tried it with since have worked much better than my usual plasticized smile and too-wide eyes, making me look like the most spastic family member of those "Awkward Family Photo" posts. Here's the trick: duck your chin down, then point the apple of one cheek at the camera. It might be a bit too fey for some of you fellows, but I'd like to see everyone's results. In fact, try it, and post the pic as or with a comment. In the meantime, I'll keep snapping away, waiting for the perfect mix of mystery and art to represent me without making either of us laugh so hard that we snort soda out of our noses.
Saturday, July 7, 2012
It's Never too Early to be Neurotic
I was a spooky girl---by which I mean, I was afraid of even the merest suggestion of anything scary. All things supernatural or unnatural filled me with terror, but the devil was my special torment. I can easily recount a number of experiences that made me insist on the validity of ghosts in various forms; one case in point, a third grade slumber party at Lisha Shoe's ancient house on Black Bear Creek in Pawnee, a crowd of screaming 9-year-olds insisting there was someone walking in the attic above us, and my sudden anguished proclamation that "It feels like someone is going to open the door and the room is going to turn upside down!" eliciting all new squealing and horrified glances from my classmates. I've sometimes wondered what psychological damage I might have done with that dramatic little number.
Much more often, the devil was on my tail. One must keep in mind that we attended a Methodist church, not at all inclined to fire and brimstone, and my poor, long-suffering mama didn't let me near anything suggestive of scary stuff, because I tormented both of us enough with what I only imagined. There was NO reason at all for me to even be aware of Satan. Nevertheless, there he was. I was afraid if I looked down the hallway to the bedrooms in the opposite direction of my room, I'd see him, so I had to jump from the living room door to my bedroom door to escape him (probably not a distance of more than two feet, so what difference was that going to make? You can't demand logic of a two-year-old.). When we moved into our new house, we didn't have doors on the closets yet. I remember my 8-year-old self waking in the middle of the night and "seeing" the devil's face in the garments hanging there. I've never slept with a closet door open since! In that same new house, I had a gripping conviction that the floor vents in the basement were a direct conduit to Satan. It probably goes without saying that it took a roaring command from Mom or Dad to get me to go down there after dark on my own. And to tell the truth, I don't know whether that suspicion came before or after a dream I had about a luxurious purple satin bedroom, the devil, and Hershey's Syrup---but that story will have to wait. I lived in fear (for much longer than I care to admit) of suddenly coming across a pair of devil-red eyes peering at me from the darkness of a window or unfamiliar room or even my own quiet mind. Did I sleep? Not much---nor did Mom, who probably couldn't understand why in the world two of the most practical people in the world had this nervous child who imagined such crazy stuff. And I'm not even going into my obsession that the world was going to end or we were all going to die in a nuclear blast. If you don't know my family, I can't stress enough how remotely opposite this was of their logical, calm, non-neurotic ways.
All this and more amounted to the fact that I was notoriously easy to scare---and who can resist that temptation? All the way through college, if I watched scary movies with a group of friends, SOMEone would have to sneak up and scare me, just to hear my bloodcurdling scream. (Remember the "Is it live or is it Memorex?" commercials, where the recording of the soprano's voice shattered the wine glass? I could do that from three towns over.) Even now, I don't watch things involving devils or demonic activity after dark. I have a DVR to save me from myself. That was what I used to calm Mom a couple of years ago, when she discovered my short-lived but intense interest in Ghost Hunters; she was horrified that I would even think about watching such a thing, knowing how nervous I used to be. That's when I knew for sure that my childhood had probably scarred her as much as it did me!
Blessedly, though, I find that much of my admittedly humorous torment has subsided. I've been watching The Walking Dead and Trueblood after dark for a few years now. Zombies and vampires---pshh! Is it all so stylish now, done with tremendous attention to detail but in context with modern life that makes it more interesting than terrifying? Or is it, as I suspect, less frightening in comparison to the difficult vagaries of everyday life that makes the fiction entertaining now? I can't say for sure yet. In the meantime, I have a Walking Dead marathon paused that I have to get back to before bed. Hope you caught it, too. And don't forget to check your closet and shut the door before you go to sleep tonight!
Much more often, the devil was on my tail. One must keep in mind that we attended a Methodist church, not at all inclined to fire and brimstone, and my poor, long-suffering mama didn't let me near anything suggestive of scary stuff, because I tormented both of us enough with what I only imagined. There was NO reason at all for me to even be aware of Satan. Nevertheless, there he was. I was afraid if I looked down the hallway to the bedrooms in the opposite direction of my room, I'd see him, so I had to jump from the living room door to my bedroom door to escape him (probably not a distance of more than two feet, so what difference was that going to make? You can't demand logic of a two-year-old.). When we moved into our new house, we didn't have doors on the closets yet. I remember my 8-year-old self waking in the middle of the night and "seeing" the devil's face in the garments hanging there. I've never slept with a closet door open since! In that same new house, I had a gripping conviction that the floor vents in the basement were a direct conduit to Satan. It probably goes without saying that it took a roaring command from Mom or Dad to get me to go down there after dark on my own. And to tell the truth, I don't know whether that suspicion came before or after a dream I had about a luxurious purple satin bedroom, the devil, and Hershey's Syrup---but that story will have to wait. I lived in fear (for much longer than I care to admit) of suddenly coming across a pair of devil-red eyes peering at me from the darkness of a window or unfamiliar room or even my own quiet mind. Did I sleep? Not much---nor did Mom, who probably couldn't understand why in the world two of the most practical people in the world had this nervous child who imagined such crazy stuff. And I'm not even going into my obsession that the world was going to end or we were all going to die in a nuclear blast. If you don't know my family, I can't stress enough how remotely opposite this was of their logical, calm, non-neurotic ways.
All this and more amounted to the fact that I was notoriously easy to scare---and who can resist that temptation? All the way through college, if I watched scary movies with a group of friends, SOMEone would have to sneak up and scare me, just to hear my bloodcurdling scream. (Remember the "Is it live or is it Memorex?" commercials, where the recording of the soprano's voice shattered the wine glass? I could do that from three towns over.) Even now, I don't watch things involving devils or demonic activity after dark. I have a DVR to save me from myself. That was what I used to calm Mom a couple of years ago, when she discovered my short-lived but intense interest in Ghost Hunters; she was horrified that I would even think about watching such a thing, knowing how nervous I used to be. That's when I knew for sure that my childhood had probably scarred her as much as it did me!
Blessedly, though, I find that much of my admittedly humorous torment has subsided. I've been watching The Walking Dead and Trueblood after dark for a few years now. Zombies and vampires---pshh! Is it all so stylish now, done with tremendous attention to detail but in context with modern life that makes it more interesting than terrifying? Or is it, as I suspect, less frightening in comparison to the difficult vagaries of everyday life that makes the fiction entertaining now? I can't say for sure yet. In the meantime, I have a Walking Dead marathon paused that I have to get back to before bed. Hope you caught it, too. And don't forget to check your closet and shut the door before you go to sleep tonight!
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