Like any professional melodramist, I like to take my periods of oppression in one-month chunks. October was oppressing me. BOO! October is over! Yay! Between three birthdays that month and volunteering for the LGBT Film Festival here, and making too many plans…I was just tired.

I know November is the direst month for a lot of people since we are sliding choadfirst into the holidays, but I like it. I am making a giant Victorian Thanksgiving, a holiday that, of course, did not actually exist, so if I don’t tear space and time I will be sorely disappointed. And I am making goose, so it will be extra broken (but crazy delicious).

Since dispatches from this blog are often on an (extreme) time delay, I will tell you I have been thinking about being dumped. I realized that I never had been as an adult. Lice at 31, dumped at 32. What kind of late bloomer am I?

It finally, in my usual extremely-slow grind toward self-awareness of any kind way, made me remember getting dumped in high school. My freshman year a really nice and cute boy saw me in a play and decided I was the bomb-ass rip. I have fallen in love with people on stage, it happens. He asked me out and we hung out during the cast party. I was in a daze, coming down from that weird situation with the tres sophistique older man and happy to have a new distraction.

He was a football player. It was not okay for the cute sophomore football player to be dating the weird goth girl. Some other girls I knew as popular began smiling and saying hello in the hallway, which lasted for about a week until he called me up and broke up with me for telling people we were having sex (we were not, nor was I telling people that). Recently I thought about that feeling of being misunderstood and rejected so many years ago. It feels the same! I feel like laughing when I type that. I think I had experienced the entire range of emotions by the time I was 13. I am slightly more sophisticated now, perhaps. Sometimes.

But you know what? I would rather be repeatedly heartbroken rather than married like I was before. Cold comfort, I suppose.

In other news, I have eight weeks of cooking left, then I should have some kind of crap pile that can be formed into a cook book. I’ll be done right around Christmas. I think since I am in the home stretch with it I can allow myself to feel slightly more confident. I have experienced months of worry about failure, but I look at my cooking schedule and what I’ve done so far, and it is not that grueling for someone like me.

I’ll tell you what, though, after so many months of sieving and mincing, and cooking every single component from scratch, I have become even more of a terrifically insufferable snot. Which I will try to keep to myself, except to say, I picked up a book on the library which is all about meat, an unapologetic carnivore’s screed, if you will, and was very disappointed to see it is not indexed AT ALL, but particularly the types of “odd” meats consumed.

I dismissed it outright when the author’s recipe for rabbit called for “getting the rabbit pre-butchered in convenient little chunks.” Of course you are extolling the virtues of rabbit, and why-does-it-not-supplant-chicken-all-together-ing if you have not parted one out yourself. It’s not rocket science, but that silver membrane that adheres to the saddle…tricky. Chickens are like the Fisher-Price of butchering.

Also today I am feeling grateful that I have been watching the fallout of crazy just a few clicks away from me for a few months now. It led to one of those banal realizations. I used to accept that SeaFed was going to present me as crazy to others, as a tool of putting me in a box (all ex-wives are crazy, AMIRITE) and bringing people over to his side (“he had to move away, have you heard about his crazy ex-wife?”). C’est la vie, all that matters is how I am actually living my life, yes?

But after seeing someone else act crazy, really breaking down down their motives and behavior, and strenuously avoiding interacting with it in almost every capacity, I realized that the lie or perception becomes power, in a perverse way. This is why I get texts that say things like “I’m picking her up and this his how it is, SEE?” Missives from a person who lacks control and understanding–a desperate attempt to keep the raft stable for five minutes, to bark like you are a bigger dog.

I have not heard anything lately about his desire to move Franny to where he lives (in spite of her objections). I am hoping other people who think I am crazy talked some sense into him so he would drop the pissing match. So, sadly, my hope is that I am too crazy to mess with.