But they never expected an Italian ghost!

 It has seriously been a blur the last few weeks. I've been slipping between extreme bouts of depression and inability to function...I am so close to winning an award for "longest time between showers by a person with full access to a shower and clean, running water"...and cooking. Cooking a lot. 

So let's talk about what exactly it is I've been cooking, because today's outing really was hilarious to me, but it made me remember that I've been meaning to blog about all of the yummies I've made over the last few months...for...well...months. 

Now I can do it all in one gigantic post. Hooray, efficiency! Depression has its benefits!!

Several months ago, circa the spring, I was foraging every chance I got. I learned so much this year about what's edible in my yard if I just...don't make my daughter mow it. I've got purslane, plantain, clover, yarrow, dandelion, two varieties of nettle, the list goes on and on. We had an abundance of violets this year, so I wanted to do something with them. I took Alex with me to grab about a quarter of our violet population...gotta leave some for the pollinators and other critters!...and I made violet syrup.

Look how pretty!

LOOK HOW PRETTY!!!! That was after steeping overnight. I boiled it down with sugar after that, and it turned a truly ugly shade of grey. So it's been hiding up in my cupboard. Derek also reported that it didn't even taste like violet, it just tasted like syrup. Well. So much for that. I'll double the amount of flowers next year. Or triple them. I picked my flowers late in the spring, so I didn't have as many to grab up, but we really did have a bounty this year. I'll easily be able to triple the flowers without starving my other yard visitors. 

I also attempted to forage a fuckton of dandelions so I could make dandelion soda, and dandelion syrup, AND dandelion jelly...at one point early this spring, our entire lawn was blanketed in dandelions. But I also went about dandelion collection too late in the season and I couldn't forage enough to make one thing, let alone three. So no dandelion goodies were made this year. Next year for sure. 

My next big make this year came after we got home from Ithaca. In one of my Ithaca recap posts, I wrote about the irresponsible amount of vodka we bought in Ithaca, and I cannot recall, but I feel like I mentioned wanting to make limoncello with them. So.

I spent 100 smackers on sorrento lemons. The real deal. The tasty yummers that are prized in limoncellos across Italy. 

In case you can't tell, these are what scientists refer to as, "honkers". Check it:

My brutishly large hands for scale. 

I made a LOT with these lemons. First, and most importantly, I made limoncello:

This batch contains vodka made from grapes from Six Mile Vineyard right outside of Ithaca.

This batch is from the Ithaca is Vodka vodka. Made from NY corn! What a treat. 

And I made a third batch, but I made that one with Grey Goose, and it did not need to be photographed. The other things I made I did not think to photograph, but I made a gallon of lemon basil switchel with basil from my garden. I made a gallon of standard lemonade. And I made about a pound of lemon curd that Alex and Derek ate on various store bought cookies. I love to bake, but I only have so much energy to expend. And those lemons really took it out of me. It takes HOURS to peel them, for real. 

When we went to Six Mile Vineyard, Derek and Caryn (those fucking traitors) both tried the orangecello that was made in house. I couldn't let that stand, so I made my own arancello with three different kinds of oranges, though it's meant to be made with blood oranges. I just couldn't get access...affordable access...to any, having blown my citrus wad on lemons from the Sorrento Peninsula. 

I also ALSO made liquore di basilico. I'm not sure why it isn't just called basilcello like the rest of the citrus liqueurs, but whatevs. I did not take a picture of that while it was steeping, because it looked fucking disgusting. Just like....sewer water. I put about a half pound of my sweet basil from my garden in it, and I am adult enough to admit that I added green food coloring when it was done, just because it needed to be green. Not grey. It isn't like, hulk green or anything, it's a very pleasant tint. It has a few more months of aging before it's ready, though it has been strained and emulsified already. All of my cellos from this year have. Now they just need to mellow for two years, and they're ready to go. My last year's batch isn't so bad, Derek and I tried them a couple of months ago when Allen was here. They need more time to deepen into themselves. Anyway, I have made a fuck ton of alcohol in the last year. I made a big ass bottle of gin from shit I foraged last year, and I should have written about that, but whoops! I didn't. I want to do it again in the spring, with different ingredients that I know more about now. so I'll document that next year. 

Moving on!

Alex had a birthday party in late July, and I made her and her friends cupcakes, but with all of the trans flag colors. I learned how terrible I am at filling cupcake liners to the proper line, and also how terrible I am at putting three different frosting colors into one piping bag. 

I wanted them to be all marbled, but instead they were messy. 

I love to bake, but I never promised that the things I bake are beautiful. They aren't. Aesthetically pleasing bakes are clearly not my calling. 

It's me! Wearing a shirt that SHOULD have said "more girls should kiss me", but oops. 

This isn't baking, but it is worth mentioning: Derek and I took a trip to Keakuk to go geode hunting. Which...if you haven't been, is a wild experience. It's where you go to a creek bed, you pay someone to be there, and then you spend hours and hours doing fucking back breaking physical labor to MAYBE get some geodes. Real white people shit. 

Our dig site!

I realize that it is going to look like Derek is the only one doing any hard work...I assure you this is not true. I took photos every time I took a water break, which was every seven seconds, but during those other seconds where I was working, I was working hard, ok? Real hard. 

You can't see the left side hole in that photo, but I dug out that ENTIRE thing. I was fucking sore for days. 

I  hit a REALLY great vein, which is why I excavated so much of this geode cubby. I couldn't stop finding geodes. 

My muddy grabbers for scale. 

We have since carved through almost all of our geodes, but my photos of those are lost, I guess. They aren't on my phone anymore. Actually, thinking while I type, I think I just moved them to another folder in my phone. But I am too lazy to check. They're all very  nice geodes, though!

Here is Derek's haul:

This is Derek's haul before he took over the vein I found. I had been hammering and chiseling and digging away for like, two hours, and my arm was tired, and I needed a break, so I was benevolent and offered him my area. In the picture below, you can see the position that I  had been in for literally hours, hammering and chiseling and getting rained on and finding geodes. Derek had been digging around right behind my blue bucket, and having none of the good luck I had had. 

I do not have a pitcure of his bucket AFTER he dug through my vein, but he got a lot more geodes. And he's since cut through them and polished them up beautifully. We are aching to go back, but we have so many other places we want to explore for great rocks a lot closer to home. We were going to go up to Haunted Ridge this weekend, but I got a few last minute shoots, so no dice. 

About...uh...a month and a half ago, Derek and I went apple picking. I haven't gone in years, and I really wanted to pluck several bushels and immerse myself in the kitchen for several days, making all kinds of delicious apple fuckery. 

"Grab as many bags as you need" is delightfully non-specific for an apple hoarder like me. I can't even fucking EAT apples and I was glee ridden at the challenge. I will take ALL of the bags, thank you. 

Isn't there something so wonderful about sun warmed, freshy apples right off the branch? 

My forever hot man piece, being an apple connoisseur, roaming from tree to tree looking for the finest Missourian apples.  

This was the lane I gathered the most apples from. Jonagolds. 

We only ended up picking two bags. Forty dollars worth of fresh apples, minus the ones Derek ate while we were picking. The orchard lanes were littered with fallen apples, and all I could think about was grabbing them up, washing them off, and making cider and butter with them. I hope that's what they do to minimize waste. Either that, or they let the deer and critters come in and eat all of the lovely floor goodies. Though I suspect it's the former, as there was an abundance of apple butter and apple cider in the little market you pay for your apples in. 

So Derek and I took our twenty pounds of apples home, and I got to work. First, I made apple butter.

I slathered six pounds of various apple varieties in sugar, cinnamon, and a proprietary blend of spices, mixed them up real rough, just like I like, and then put them in a pressure sauna for three hours. 

BEHOLD!

Mushy and spiced and truly a wonderful smell. Next, I blended the ever living fuck out of the mush with an immersion blender. 

Ta da!! Apple butter!!! 6 jars, canned and wonderful.

Alex reported it as being scrumptious. Derek reported it as being mmmmmmm. I cannot report any of it, because I cannot eat real sugar. Sad face for me. 

Next, I made pickled apples. I fucking LOVE pickled apples. Derek was not a fan, Alex didn't want to try them, and Alex's bestie Kailani did not know how she felt about them, so I'm left with a gorgeous jar of pickled apples that I can only eat one slice every few days, and that is a travesty. They're fucking bursting with flavor, they are complex and sweet and sour and punchy. They should be on everything. Like as I write this, I'm eating some kimchi jjigae and it would be gorgeous with some pickled apples and my chili oil. I just had oral surgery, though, so nothing too spicy for me. And also no sugar for the last four years and until forever, so no pickled apples either way. Booooooooooo.

I used the honey from the apiary in Ithaca for these pickled apples, too. Hooray!!

What did I make next? I made hand pies. A fucking metric fuckton of hand pies. 

 Now. 

I have been keto since November of 2018. I was SUPER STRICT for the first three years, I counted every fucking macro with precision. I wing it now, and I stay between 20 and 40 carbs per day. I am a vegetarian, but I eat vegan more often than not. 

I miss baked goods. Like, there are keto dupes for various baked goods, sure. Some of them are even good. But when it comes to fruit pies, I hadn't yet found a keto dupe that was easily made vegan friendly. When Derek and I were still on island, I saw a video about a keto apple pie using chayote, and an almond flour crust, so I splurged on chayote (they were like, 5 bucks a pop on island, and I needed three. That's a LOT of money to gamble. AND we should talk about the criminally high rate of groceries in places like Hawai'i and indigenous lands...), came home, and made my pie. It was...alright? I wasn't wowed, and for the money I spent making that pie and the time it took, I just wasn't impressed enough to try it again, or even tweak the recipe, to make it worth the cost. So I ate the pie over the course of a week and a half and felt not terribly great about the experience, and I tucked apple pie away as something I just couldn't eat anymore. 

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when we picked all of these gorgeous apples and I knew I wanted to make hand pies for Derek and Alex. I took to the internet and started digging for keto apple pie dupes. I didn't have to dig very far, I found one for zucchini. I had read about zucchini being a dupe for cooked apples, but after my chayote experience, I hadn't been enthused to experiment again. Time makes fools of us all, I guess, so I was like, fuck yeah, let's give these green monsters a try. 

You. Mother. FUCKERS. 

Zucchini hand pies fucking slap. They slap HARD. I could not tell for one fucking second that I was eating zucchini. It looked like apples, it smelled like apples, it tasted like apples. Derek and Alex were both completely fooled. We have a fucking WINNER!!!!! Oh I was so excited!!! But I needed a crust. 

So I really scoured the internet for a crust that sounded like it would be sturdy. It took me awhile to find, but on this weird little corner of the internet...the christian keto corner...I found a crust that is just god damn life altering. It's firm. It's not mealy. It tastes and bakes just like a laminated crust would. And I was gagged over it. 

That doesn't look like zucchini. It looks like chopped up apples. 

Look at my little hand pies!!!!!

Derek is folding his arms because he's so mad that it's zucchini that tastes like apples. 

These were seriously fucking amazing. I've made three batches of them since, and another batch of the crust was used for keto pumpkin pie that I spent two glorious weeks eating for breakfast every morning. Adulthood RULES. Did I take any pictures of those? I think I did, I need to check my phone. Oh delightful! I did!

Look at these little ANGELS! Except angels aren't real, and these keto pumpkin pies are. Eeeeeee!

They even have that good sink in that I look for in an excellently made pumpkin pie. Don't give me some aesthetically smooth pumpkin pie...looking at you, Costco...give me the sink in that tells me it was made with love. 

Eat your heart out. That perfectly crisp, firm bottom is everything I want in a pie. I really cannot overstate how fucking impressed I am with this keto pie crust recipe. It is fucking amazing. 

Look at that. Perfect texture. Perfect size. Perfect breakfast. I love pumpkin pie. 

Back to the apples. Obviously I made Alex and Derek hand pies, too, though Alex and her friends ate almost all of them. I made them two versions. One was apple chai, and the other was caramel apple. I was told that both were delightful. What they weren't was aesthetically pleasing. 

I didn't use an egg wash to close the pies, and I also overstuffed them. I was experimenting with different ways to seal the crust, going for ease and efficacy over looks, and succeeding at neither thing. They look like pale biscuits that someone kicked into the dirt and then spit on. Yikes. Not my finest showing, but again, they are said to have tasted lovely, and that's what counts. 

Alex's friend was spending the night one night and saw me cooking, and asked if she could help me. So Kailani and I made apple jelly together! 

Another few pounds of apples, cooking down into juice. 

Et Voila! Apple jelly! Kailani got to take home the little jar on top, not because I'm too stingy to give her a big jar, but because I couldn't taste it and I was worried it would be bad and I didn't want to send her home with gross apple jelly and then have so much of it go to waste. Thankfully, everyone said it was truly tasty. Hooray! I'm the  best. 

My next big cooking project was keto cinnamon rolls made with ChocZero "honey", and this was an absolute fucking undertaking. I believe I called it a saga when I told Amber about it. I took about fifteen minutes worth of video while I was making the cinnamon rolls and I can't lie about this: I was positive they were going to be an absolute fucking disaster, because I fucked up the recipe. I put the fake honey in where it didn't belong. 

But they were a smashing success, and I ate them for breakfast every day for a week. It was meant to be twelve servings, but again, I am an adult, and I get to define what that means. SEVEN FUCKING SERVINGS IT IS. Well, eight, because I ate one the night I baked them. I want to make them again, but I am still on the mend from oral surgery. The tail end of the mend, but the mend just the same. I don't quite have the energy. I worked out today and it was a chore. I'm amazed how like, connected my face is to the rest of what my body goes through. I felt the same way after I broke my arm. The things I couldn't do after that were astounding. The things I STILL can't do, all these years later. Thanks, I hate it. 

I have also been tinkering with tiktok copycat recipes made keto and having a great deal of fun. Mostly with macaroni and cheese. I was obsessed for a bit with jalapeno popper mac and cheese, though I kind of accidentally stumbled on that recipe myself more than I copied it. When Derek and I go and have a day in STL, we try and center it around a meat cheat day for me so we can it up Salt and Smoke. I want to like Pappy's so bad, but the brisket at Salt and Smoke is superior. I am so sorry, Pappy's. Anyway, I order two pounds of brisket, take it home, then make make and cheese with it. I add jalapenos to it, and the keto mac and cheese bechamel uses cream cheese, anyway, so bam! I'm ahead of the curve, tiktok! But I just saw french onion soup mac and cheese and immediately had to try it. And I did that Saturday, and holy fucking holy. It is absolute divinity. I don't even want to imagine my life before french onion soup mac and cheese. 

I tried to explain it to my dad and he was very confused, but he also wouldn't stop talking over me long enough to hear my explanation of it, so h e can remain in the dark. I'll make it for him in a few months. 

Cooking is a thousand percent my love language. Cooking for people and creating for people. I painted this on Rhyann's wall in their room:

It isn't perfect, or finished the way I personally wanted it, but Rhyann said they liked the blue band without anything in it, so I left it the way they preferred it. After all, it isn't ME sleeping in there. The door is still in need of finishing, and now I've only got about four weeks to finish it. Yikes! That's pressure. 

This, and school, is everything I've been up to lately. I suppose I should do an update on what's been going on with school, but I'll save that for another blog. This has taken me literally days. Maybe weeks. Time to publish this and be on my way. I can't fucking believe it's almost time for a photo rundown of the year's sessions. Where the fuck has the time gone. 

Speaking of, I think I've had this blog for ten years now. I put a lot of them into drafts, mostly because they were silly, and others because they were about Dan and how much I was pining over Dan, and I feel a deep sense of shame about those particular blogs. I am thinking about resurrecting them, just because like...I shouldn't be ashamed of how I felt, or how I needed to write about it, or how I expressed myself in my mid  to late twenties. I've grown a lot, and I hiding the things I've grown from doesn't make them any less real, it just like...perpetuates the idea that we should hide the things we consider bad, even though it can definitely be a tool in showing others that growth happens and we're all human, nobody gets it right all the time. 

But uh. I will be re-reading all of those blogs to double check. I think a lot of them also have just like...startlingly bad photography in them. From a time when I thought I was so good and I was just...really not. I wonder what I'll think of my photography in another ten years. 

It isn't a maze? Well it feels like a maze...I'm already lost.

 I have tried my entire life to like celery. I have put in what many historians would qualify as "a heroic effort". Celery plain? Tried it, hated it. Celery cooked? Tried it. Stringy. Worse tasting. Hated it. Celery with peanut butter and raisins? I would inevitably scoop out the peanut butter and raisins and try to eat that by itself, but the wild, wicked slime of celery's awful flavor had tainted the two best things about what is, all over, an awful fucking lie of a snack. Celery is a bullshit food. It smells gross, it tastes worse, and I am ashamed that so many dishes use celery as an important base component. I don't know who sanctioned that idea, but they should be fired. The closest I have gotten to enjoying celery is drunkenly eating buffalo wings at a bar in Colorado Springs, feeling sad for the pathetic, limp, and strangely warm stick of celery, dipping it in ranch, and thinking to  myself, "...huh. That's only kinda gross. I could maybe eat this sober." 

I was wrong. I have tried for years to enjoy celery with buffalo sauce and ranch, but I think there must be a magic to those two things that only works with alcohol. 

When I was younger, I was not allowed the decadent and wonderful snacks that my friends parents got them. At my house, we had rice cakes, carrots, celery, peanut butter, and raisins. An absolute barf all around. My step sister and I would come home hungry, but because we had the worst snacks available, we had to busy ourselves doing other things to forget that we were hungry. Our parents got together when I was in, I believe, 4th grade. That would make my step sister a 2nd grader. We were both pretty young, but because I was older...and bossy...I pretty much dictated what it was that we would fill our afternoons with. 

I created elaborate, detail oriented stories that we acted out. We had a LOT of stuffed animals and Barbies, because Stephanie's mom and mom's family just showered her with gifts. She had so much stuff it couldn't all possibly all be played with just by her, so I was allowed to play with some of her toys. The first stories I developed were for our stuffed animals. Mostly our bears. I had a Snuggles bear from the 80s that was my go to stuffed animal, given the perfectly imaginative name of Snuggles. I had a lot of imagination, but I spent it on other shit. Naming was inconsequential. Initially, the bear stories were kind of lackluster. I would need a few years to really get into my imaginative groove, so you'll forgive me for not exploding out of the gate with an intricately woven tale for my stuffed animals to play out. 

The first thing I remember really getting into with imagination play time was my stuffed animals hosting elaborate feasts for regal-type gatherings. My step sister had this coloring book that was...and I can't believe this is true...food themed. Specifically eurocentric/colonizer holiday food. The big ones were represented...easter, july 4th, thanksgiving, christmas. Some random food stuff was thrown in there, like candy for halloween, and candy for christmas, and candy for just random days. I tried finding coloring books from the 90s that just featured food in the hopes of stumbling across the images I used with no luck, but I guess food coloring books are still a thing, because I found this, and it is VERY much within the shade of what I was working with as a kid. I would color these images meticulously, I would do  my best to shade them, and then I would cut them out with the utmost care so they just... looked like 2D food. I had a folder of these coloring pages so I could reuse the images and not crease them. A crease in the food drawings I colored in myself would take away the REALNESS. If you're familiar with The Little Princess movie, and how Sara imagines glorious feasts for herself and Becky by verbalizing all of the smells and the aesthetics, that is absolutely what I was doing with my stuffed animals and their sumptuous edibles. My step sister asked if we could tear the food up as they ate it, to show that it was being devoured. I applauded her dedication to the illusion, but that dopey cunt just didn't understand that the food pictures needed to stay PRISTINE. She was never allowed to touch my colored turkey and mashed potatoes. 

Every year at Christmas, we were allowed to open one present on christmas eve, and that present was always always always pajamas. This is something I found to be desperately fucking dumb when I was a kid, and it is now something at 38 that I get upset if I can't do every holiday for my own kids and spouse. Five pajamas is a lot of pajamas, but it's a ritual hill I will die on. 

Full disclosure: The piece of the story I am about to share is going to be quite vague, and that is not intentional. I couldn't recall which aunt got married, and I only landed on my aunt Renee by default. I was maybe 5 when my aunt Mary got married, and while I was a flower girl, anything I wore in that wedding I had long grown out of. My aunt Mei-Ling got married thirty years ago this year, and I am almost positive I was in her wedding, as well, but even at eight, I would have grown out of the things I wore in her wedding, and I also think her color scheme was black and white. That leaves my aunt Renee. Got it? Got it. Moving on toward my possibly incorrect details.

Family ties mandated that I be a member of any wedding party for my family members when I was a little girl. I was in all of my aunt's weddings, and Renee was the last family wedding I was in where it was an obligatory role to be filled. If memory serves, Renee's color scheme was turquoise, and because it was the early nineties, the dress I wore was a turquoise monstrosity made of lace, with an asymmetrical peplum skirt made of satin, or a similar material. I hated the dress, I believe the dress had color matching gloves that I hated, as well. And really, I shouldn't talk too much shit. I think someone's mom made the dresses for Renee's bridal party. Ann? My memory says it was my uncle Wayne's mom, but my memory is not always reliable. 

But. But but but. 

There were shoes. Turquoise dyed, medium height heels, and they were my very first pair of heels, and I. Loved. THEM. Wearing heels made me feel so glamorous and grown up, and when I tell you I wore those heels EVERYWHERE, I mean everywhere in my house. My mom wouldn't let me wear them out. I wasn't even technically supposed to take them out of their box in the closet. As if my vanity and stubbornness would listen to such a ridiculous directive.  So I wore those turquoise heels around my room all the time. 

I had grown tired of my food parties with my bears. I could only imagine so many reasons to gather at a feast, and my step sister was never keen on adopting an accent or doing different voices, or even implementing story lines full of intrigue, so there really wasn't much upward mobility in this imaginary game. I turned my attention instead to my desire to be a D-I-V-A. I wanted to be famous. And I think this is something I've mentioned occasionally in my blog, that I harboured a deep desire to be loved and worshiped by throngs of fans. It didn't even matter WHAT they adored me for, just that they did. I believe I've also mentioned that my mom didn't let me listen to era appropriate music, I had to listen to the oldies station. So I turned my attention to imagining myself as an absolutely BELOVED stage performer. A dual act, even! I was a singer AND a dancer. 

And listen. 

There are SO FUCKING MANY amazing femme acts from the 50s and 60s. The Ronettes? Come the fuck on. The Supremes? FUCK YOU THEY ARE AMAZING. The Shirelles? And don't even get me fucking STARTED on Freda fucking PAYNE (though I do believe Band of Gold is from 1970) or Dusty Springfield. Did I choose to be a dancing singer for any of these performers that I myself was a massive fan of to act out my fantasies of being an incredible artist?

Nope. 

Instead, I went with Del fucking Shannon and The Four Tops. And no shade, The Four Tops are fantastic. I really love them. But I have no idea why I went with them, and I really have no idea why I went with Del Shannon. I guess I was super into subversive performance at the ripe age of ten. 

I had a three song line up, are you ready for this? My opener was Runaway, by Del Shannon:

A real crowd pleaser. 

I followed up with I'll Be There by The Four Tops:

A classic.

And my big finish was Bernadette, also by the Four Tops. I guess I imagined myself to be the Four Tops more than I imagined myself to be Del Shannon. 

I  may not have been playing with 2D food and stuffed animals anymore, but I still had use for the table the feasts had previously been held on. I needed a stage. Unfortunately, the table was an unreliable venue. It was rickety and unbalanced. What's a girl to do when she needs a stage to perform her gender bending oldies covers? She uses a chair! But not just any chair...one of these bad larries:

It was textured. It was wobbly. It did not have enough room for my big ass feet. But I made it work, because I had to literally be above my crowd, so I could look down on them as I performed. 

And I really put my all into the performance. I choreographed a dance to each song. Dance is being a little generous, actually, what I did was repeat a series of wild hand gestures in perfect time to the rise and fall of each song while I swayed my hips and occasionally moved my feet, because if I moved them too much I would fall off of my tiny little stage and hurt myself. I had an outfit, too. 

One of my favorite pairs of pajamas I ever received at christmas was a two piece set of long johns in a very soft fabric. Like...like a brushed llama. The fabric was a delicate cream color, and it had a floral pattern all over it that just absolutely screamed Laura Ashley. I was wild about these pajamas. I would have worn them to school if I could have, they made me feel so pretty. Even prettier than the Princess Jasmine pajamas I had gotten two years earlier that I had long outgrown, but still stuffed myself into, despite the vaginal wedgie, because I loved pretending I was as beautiful and brave as Princess Jasmine was. These pajamas were it for me. If I had died, falling off of that chair in a tragic Del Shannon related incident, my final thoughts would be fervent hopes that I be buried in those pajamas. And I finished off the outfit with the turquoise heels from my aunts wedding. 

In my head, this was a LEWK. I was just fucking killing it aesthetically. Murdering style and serving it up to anybody who came near me. I can tell you that the crowd of stuffed animals and poorly tended Barbies, often showing up to my concerts nude because I guess I was really feeling a Coachella style approach to concerts, really loved my sense of style. However, in reality, I had a mop of frizzy, untamed hair on my head, in a matching pajama pants set, with turquoise heels that pinched my feet. This is very much how I feel like dressing circa now when I have a full on bout of depression eating me up inside, but I have to go somewhere nice. I'm not sure if I can qualify myself as ahead of my time or not. I'll leave that up to the lawyers. 

Around this time, my little sister was born, and my mom was home on maternity leave. I was 11 at time, and I was desperate to soak up any time with my mom that I could, even though my memories of her at this age were either frazzled because she was parenting a newborn and an 11 year old and a 9 year old, or her being really fucking cruel about the art I created by laughing at it when I shared things like poetry, or stories, with her. So any way I could just...be around my mom and have her be quiet and nice was an opportunity I jumped at. She would put on soap operas. She was a massive General Hospital fan, and this was like, General Hospital Golden Era. The Luke and Laura super years. When everything was honey hued and fucking DRUHMAHTICK. 

A dangerous thing for me to watch, especially in light of needing to take on a new imagination game, as I was fast growing out of my shoes and that chair was just too small for my developing body. General Hospital gave me ideas of malicious grandeur, and I moved on to creating elaborate stories for Barbie.

 Poor Barbie. 

Nothing nice ever happened to Barbie in my barbie games. Because Stephanie's moms bought her so much stuff, we truly had an embarrassment of Barbie riches. The Fold N' Fun Barbie dream house?

 Stephanie had it, so by extension, I had it, too. We had add ons, like Barbie's bubble bath:

And I think this must have been a holdver from like, a thrifting excursion or something, because when I went to look this up, it said 80s. And this heady era of barbie capitalism fever dream was definitely in the 90s. 

Parked outside of the Barbie foldable house was Barbie's RV:

My Nonni got me the Barbie Stable (complete with Horbie, the Barbie horse! That isn't actually the horse's  name, but it should have been), and it was a whole little thing. Barbie and Horbie matched, and Horbie had like...her hooves were stamps, I think. Little horseshoe stamps. Barbie had this whole like, disco fringe look going, and I recall a lot of silver stars that I was meant to be able to put in my own hair, but having coarse, frizzy, curly hair, they only ever knotted my hair up and got lost in the mess. OH MY GOD, OK, I WAS CLOSE WITH THIS BARBIE, but I was so wrong about the name. Oh my god, this delights me to no end, because this Barbie was my second favorite, and it's so funny to see her almost thirty years later. Behold...Western Stampin' Barbie and her Western Star Horse!

BARBIE'S COUNTRY WESTERN BOOT SPURS WERE STAMPS, TOO. How could I forget that??

While I appreciate the practicality in the jeans Barbie is rockin' on the back of that box, you know that isn't what Barbie was ACTUALLY wearing. Western Stampin' Barbie chose form over function and wore a silver lame' miniskirt:

But look at the FRINGE. The big hair, the boots, the fucking HAT, and the earrings. Barbie is an icon, if not an impractical idiot about how to dress when riding a horse.

We had Barbie's pink convertible:

We had Barbie's Grocery store:

Our barbies truly wanted for nothing. 

Nothing except peace. 

I put my Barbies through the absolute RINGER. Ken was an abusive alcoholic that lived to beat on poor Barbie. Barbie was sad and miserable, and in love with the local horse cop, Brad (Brad was another Ken, but we couldn't have two Kens, for obvious reasons). Of course, Brad was a cop that rode a horse, not a horse that worked as an officer of the law. Barbie was strictly into humans, and pretty fucking bisexual, might I add. Again, the more I recount stories from my childhood, the more embarrassed I am that it took me into my twenties go go, "YUP. I'm queer." 

Ken always wound up dead at the end of these stories, covered in ketchup to sell the idea that he died in a horrific, painful death as karmic retribution while Brad and Barbie made out passionately over Ken's lifeless corpse. 

While Barbie has been set up as many things by Mattel...she's a grocer (hard working entrepreneur!), a veterinarian (diligent medical professional!), a ballet wiz (graceful and talented artist!), an ice princess (ice princess!), these forced titles were a little too...not crimey for my tastes. Barbie was an innocent victim of patriarchal misogyny and physical abuse about 50 percent of the time, but the rest of the time, Barbie was a bank robber, an art thief, a rodeo start that stole all of her prized horses from a rival rodeo star, Barbie was a chameleon. Through Barbie, I was able to channel my budding penchant for elaborate fantasy stories, and toxic relationships with abusive men. 

I went and spent some time with a family friend on San Marcos island, and while I was visiting, she took me to the Teddy Bear Museum. This trip absolutely rekindled my love of imagination time revolving around my stuffed animals, so I learned to split my time between abusing and tormenting my Barbies and making my stuffed animals go on absolutely fucking BONKERS adventures. And I was like, David Lynch levels of intricate in these stories. I wrote books on various things that concerned whatever storyline I had in store for my bears by measuring how big the pages would be in my bear's hands, cutting out a bunch of sheets to fit that size, stapling them together, and literally writing for hours about things like surviving a flood (for days I played bears when it was storming). I came up with really fucking dumb bear related names for authors, the one I remember being the most prolific was also the least imaginative. Bear E. Naut. This was something I was proud of twofold: one, because I was writing it, and a bear I was not. Get it? Gross. Secondly, because I spelled NAUT the way that you spelled astroNAUT, and my bears were great adventurers! 

These forays into my past make me loathe myself and love myself more in equal measure, so it all evens out by the time I'm done writing. 

I was curious to see if the Teddy Bear Museum was still around...it is not. It closed in 2005. I truly loved the whimsy of the place, though. It was modeled to look like a massive forest where teddy bears just....lived their little teddy bear lives. They moved, they sang songs, they had adorable little bear homes in fake trees. There were bear houses out and about. I wandered through this museum and I longed to have a set up like this for my bears to live out the elaborate plots I wrote for them. No dice for me, my pillow forts that I made when the bears would run into a rough patch on their adventure to whatever far off land they needed to explore (one time they had to go to the moon for gold. I can't remember why they needed gold, or how they got to the moon, but I'm sure it was all very reasonable). 

Bears and barbies were like...a gateway drug. I had the taste for story telling now, and I wanted to be able to relive the wonderful yarns I was weaving. 

So when I was about thirteen, MAYBE twelve, I wrote a screenplay. An entire screen play. There were lines. There were directives for what a camera would be doing. There were set changes. There was intrigue. There was drama. There was a demand made upon my step dad by me to film this, and he fucking acquiesced. So now we had a film crew (my step dad and a handheld VHS recorder). We had a set designer (me). We had a wardrobe supervisor (me and my step-dad's mom, who took me to the thrift store and let me buy whatever costumes I needed to tell my story). We had props provided by the wardrobe supervisor. And we had a star (me) and the person the star benevolently allowed to play alongside her (my step sister). I am sure this has long been recorded over, but at one time, a video existed of the one and only play I have ever written. Are you ready for the plot?

Two princesses from rival kingdoms visit each other in an attempt to kill the other off, hoping to accumulate their land and wealth. Each princess, on their visit, overhears the other plotting to kill her. They both die, because they're both stupid. 

Now the last sentence is not what I wrote in the screen play, but it is the gist. Initially, I had written it so I outsmarted my sister's princess and she ended up dead and I ended up richer and more powerful (don't act so shocked), but this made Stephanie cry foul, and her dumb dad made me change it. I wasn't about to let her live, OR let them get along, so instead, I had them both fucking merc'ed by a THIRD, surprise princess. 

Legendary.

By the time I hit 14, I had stopped playing with barbies, I had stopped playing with my bears, I had stopped with my imaginative flights of fancy when I was forced to play outside, because my peers made me feel like a baby for still using my creativity to enjoy myself. I felt dumb for longing to pick up my barbies and throw Ken over a cliff because he beat her so, and I felt childish for wanting my bears to have a 2D picnic in the Amazon because they were searching for a special kind of grape that cured Bear Flu (that was a fun one). I still wanted to use my imagination, but I didn't want to do it in a way that I would get made fun of. 

So I went back to my roots and played Singing Competition. The game was, I would sing, and no matter how badly I sang, my step sister had to give me a perfect score. Not imaginative, not creative, but I was a winner every time, so it was definitely fun for me! My sister did not have as good a time, though. I had to make the game somewhat involved for her, so she was allowed to give me a song suggestion at the beginning of Singing Competition for me to sing. And she would give me something awful, like Metallica, and I would throw a fit and say, "NO, THAT ISN'T THE GAME, TELL ME TO SING MARIAH CAREY'S HERO!" and she would pout, tell me to sing Mariah Carey's Hero, and after I sang it, she would give me Five Stars and I would win. 

Singing Competition was my favorite. 

But eventually, she grew tired of this, too. And I had nobody to really play with me. Not even my baby sister, who was three, could get into my imagination games...so I just...had nothing to do anymore but imagine my elaborate crushes could be into me, even though I looked the way I looked. 

I have been fortunate enough to not fully give up on my imagination. I live a pretty rich, vibrant life in my head. I write short stories when the mood strikes. I day dream constantly. I dream up photoshoots and try and figure them out with Derek. I dream up trips we can take. I dreamt for years about a life with my oldest in it. I have spent thirty plus years using my imagination to save me from heartache, to make me forget when things aren't going the way I want, to help me, in a dozen or more ways, to become the person I am, right now, writing this blog. 

In the extreme vastness of the things I have imagined, of the many things I have created for myself in a world without limits or boundaries, the ONE fucking thing I could never imagine is taking a bite out of celery and going, YUP. That hits the spot. 

I can imagine just about anything. I just can't imagine that. 

Is it time to eat?

Way back in the way back times, maybe in my late teens, I carried a bulky burden of existential dread surrounding aging. I remember having the concept of a "scary age"; an age where, if I didn't have everything I dreamt for myself accomplished, I should just give everything up and welcome death. At 17, my scary age was twenty three. Twenty. Fucking. THREE. Because most teenagers have no real concept of time, I assumed that having a college degree, figuring out who I was, and perhaps finding a partner, were all things that could reasonably be accomplished in a five year period. I'm not sure if I miss being that oblivious and naïve or not. 

I accomplished none of those things by the time I reached my scary age, though I did move the goal posts a bit. My new scary age at 23 was 30. Thirty seemed proper scary. I noticed that nobody made excuses for doing dumb shit in your thirties, that was what your twenties were for! I was frightened of having to have everything all figured out in seven years. Thirty seemed scary not for what I might not accomplish, but for what I was expected to become upon reaching that age. Responsible. All knowing. Capable. I didn't get to live a lot of my teenage years like my friends did, so I spent a lot of my twenties engaging in the hilarious, dumb, irresponsible behavior that 16 year olds get to do without reservation. I did drugs, I fucked around, I bounced from job to job, I tried on so many different iterations of myself with lightning speed, abandoning them just as quickly, and I truly enjoyed the process. 

Turning thirty didn't turn out to be the nightmare scenario I dreamed up for myself. It was a difficult year for me, but those difficulties were not related to my socioeconomic status, my lack of a spouse, my lack of a degree, or my lack of a "career". I didn't feel unfulfilled as an unmarried woman in college without a spouse, I felt fairly free to continue discovering who I was. I picked up a sense of agency and ran with it. 

My thirties have been the most interesting decade of my life so far. I've come to find an ease in the day to day that I never got to have as a kid, and I appreciate the safety of the most mundane aspects of my life. Do I fight with my husband? Absolutely. Am I afraid he's going to beat me if I defend myself? No. Am I broke? Oh yes. Is that brokeness coming with food insecurity, or housing insecurity? No. Am I concerned that one day, I'll walk in on Derek packing and telling me he sold the house out from under me and I have 24 hours to get out? No. All of the problems I have come with a gentle promise of an outcome that won't leave me in a far worse place than I find myself currently. I understand the privilege I have here, and trust that I do not take it for granted. I came up desperately poor. I've gone hungry. I've been homeless. I've been abused. I know what the other side of this ease looks like, and I think there may always be a small part of me that is convinced I've dreamt it all, and I'm still at the mercy of the wildness of the Las Vegas streets. I recognize that all of this could come crashing down around me at any moment. Capitalism is unsafe, even the parts of it I like, so that lives in my head, too. But for the most part, my thirties have given me the ability to reflect, figure myself out, give myself space and forgiveness, and come into my own. There is nothing scary for me about these years. 

All of that being said, I noticed myself having a small...I guess panic the other day. 

I turned 38 on July 26th. The number itself isn't what bothers me, I feel amazing. I work out every day, I eat well, I garden, I relax, I spend time with my kids, I take vacations and don't feel like I HAVE to recharge during the time off. 38 feels young, I feel young, I feel fantastic. Being close to 40 isn't a thing I'm freaked out by because of the expectations I had as a kid of what 40 would look like or feel like. I've blown away the ageism I had growing up. What bothers me is I feel like I'm getting too old for people to take me seriously in the things I enjoy, and that I'm running out of time to really cement myself as someone who does X thing. 

I think this the most about photography. I find myself freaking out about being a 38 year old that is trying to carve out a niche in mermaid photography. I started doing it in Hawai'i four years ago, and I carved out a pretty good space for myself. I was doing pretty well when covid hit, and then when covid restrictions eased, I started up again and was doing better than I had been doing before. When I left island, I had quite a few inquiries that I know would have spawned into more business, word was getting around about my photos. I was laying a foundation for myself, and I am having to start all over again in Missouri. I spent a year trying to find places I could go to do mermaid shoots, and it's been HARD. There are places here that work, but they're all at least two hours away, if not more (echo bluffs is only an hour and a half, but all of the other places I love? Three hours MINIMUM). It was a struggle initially to find models to go to every location I wanted to market, though that struggle has substantially eased, enough so I have two locations up and marketed right now. But I'm still starting from scratch again, and I feel like pushing 40 is too old to be selling a fantasy that most kids get over before they hit their mid teens. This, of course, is not true. Most of the people I've worked with, model AND client, have been older people. I think the oldest client I had was in their late forties, and the youngest people I've shot that AREN'T actually children are in their early twenties, and everybody else has fallen in between. Clearly, this is not a fantasy that is limited by age. But I FEEL like it is. I feel pathetic, at almost 40, to be peddling mermaid photoshoots because it feels inappropriate for my age. 

It isn't, though. Fantasy has no age limit. And photography as a profession has no age limit. I don't need to be twenty five to be a photographer everyone takes seriously, but something in my head tells me that photography as a job is for the young. That I squandered my time to be taken seriously, and I should just stick to real estate photography, which is technically the title I should be saying when I tell people I'm a photographer. 90% of my work is real estate. And I'm no snob, I make good money, and I've gotten much better at it than I was when I picked it up in Colorado circa 2012. WAY better. I enjoy it, and I suspect I won't ever stop doing it, but I want to get to a place where only 20% of what I do is real estate, and the rest is all portraits, mermaid, boudoir, or otherwise. I'd even take weddings, even though I have never really liked the high stakes stress that comes with that. 

There's just....a tugging in the back of my head that tells me I'm too old. Maybe it's the distribution of people I see in the industry? Most boudoir photographers are straight, cis men (gross. Grossssssssssss. GROSS. I hate it. I hate it so fucking much), and another large portion of boudoir photographers are young cis woman. I know my experiences are anecdotal, but a VERY small percentage of boudoir photographers are my age or older. I've met hundreds of photographers, no exaggeration, and I've done the aging legwork. It makes me feel like I just...missed my window, and I need to calm the fuck down and stop trying to be something I've aged out of. Creativity doesn't have an age limit, really, but society does, and I feel like I low key buy into the idea that my abilities and my worth are dropping in value, minute by minute, and as I age, I will get uglier, and who wants ugly people taking their photos? 

I used to love this game called Mindtrap. It was less a game and more a box of riddles. I recall reading through all of them when I was like....nine or ten...and being able to solve none of them, and needing to look at the solutions. I would read and re-read the solutions, and it was like teaching myself how to think better. The one I think about the most says that you're walking into a barbershop for a haircut. There are two barbers, one with a great hair cut, and another with a really fucked up hair cut. Which barber do you select to cut your hair? Mindtrap says you pick the barber with the fucked up hair to cut your hair, because obviously they cut the hair of the barber who looks fantastic, we leave out all nuance and other questions from the equation, we don't bother to ask how their CLIENTS look, we don't even ask if the barbers cut their own hair! We just make assumptions, and that's the right answer. Of course, reflecting back on that game at 38, particularly that question, I realize that I wasn't really learning how to think better, I was learning how to feel smug about assuming SMARTER than other people assumed. But I still think about that scenario with the two barbers all the time when I think about my own career as a photographer. 

Photography is all about aesthetics. It doesn't quite know how to be anything else. You may feel when you look at a photograph...I know I sure have a fuckload of feelings when I look at some of my favorite photos. The works of Sally Mann, Diane Arbus, Gordon Parks, Leonard Freed, and Raymond Depardon give me alllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll the fucking feelings (mostly envy, because they're all so fucking talented. Or at least, revered for their unique eye instead of talent. Like Diane Arbus and Sally Mann), but...it's a feeling from a LOOK. The look sets the mood, I can't feel the mood without looking at it. Do photographers do the same thing? I feel like people are more inclined to choose a good looking photographer than they are an unattractive photographer, or an aged photographer, because there are all of these assumptions about how that ugliness, or that age, will be projected onto their finished work. I can't say for sure, I've done zero leg work on any of this. But it's the primary motivator of my fear that I am getting too fucking old to be taken seriously as a photographer. 

There is a caveat to this, of course...I will be taken seriously as a photographer if I glam myself up. If I am always in a full beat, hair coiffed, clothes on point, people will be like, oh yeah. Yeah, she's a photographer I can trust, look at her! Instead, I just look like a regular human femme with somewhat manageable depression. Right now I can't quite bring myself to shower (I restarted my meds today, so hopefully in a few days I'll be back on track and feeling good enough to manage basic hygiene), so my hair is stringy, I'm in athletic leggings and a sports bra, and I kinda smell. I couldn't show up looking like this next to another femme photographer who looks all cute and put together and have someone choose me as the photographer. There is no Mindtrap riddle for this scenario...I get left in the dust for myriad reasons. It's one of the reasons I love being a real estate photographer...I get hired on my portfolio ALONE, and I can show up looking however the fuck I want (95% of the homes I shoot are staged and empty).

The point being, I am not in a panic over aging, I'm just...panicked about what my aging will signal about my capabilities and my talents.