work in progress


  work in progress 
  Originally uploaded by jenijen.

I love all this rain.  I’m sort of taking it easy today, just working a bit and knitting, doing laundry.  Jumping in puddles with Willow at the school.

So, last night I made beef stew.  I’ve spent a pretty big chunk of the past twenty years as a vegetarian, but lately I’m definitely not one.  I felt kind of bad when I was making the stew, actually, until the damn cow took revenge on me. 

You think I’m kidding.

When I do buy meat, I go all hippie and get the organic, free-range, humanely treated kind.  You know, those hot dogs that are a dollar a piece and the one pound of stew beef for seven bucks.  Partly it’s because I am trying to be responsible about my meat consumption, and partly it’s because meat squicks me out, and I somehow think of the pricey stuff as cleaner.  Or less likely to be icky.  I’m weird, I know.   

I heated up some canola oil in a heavy stock pot, and added the meat.  I was browning it, stirring it all around the pan, when a splat of HOT oil shot right into my eye. 

It was a total fuck you from the cow.

It didn’t really hurt, since eye balls aren’t so nervy.  It just cooked a little part of the white on my eye.  Gross, huh?  My eye didn’t turn a nice golden brown or anything, but the place where the oil hit is kind of red and funky looking.  I hope parts of my eye don’t shrivel up and fall off or something.   

I ate an extra bowl.  It was really good.

One time in college I had this broken blood vessel in my eye.  It looked pretty awful; this obvious spot of bright red blood under the surface of my eyeball.  I had a goofball guy who was in the same program I was (technical writing — which, obviously, I never finished) come up to me, drop to his knees and in this dramatic, anguished way, point at me and say, "Stigmata!  Stigmata!"

Isn’t it funny, how some people from your past — people you never knew very well or for very long — sort of stay with you because of one funny thing they said or did?  When that oil hit my eye, first I thought, "Holy shit!  I hope that doesn’t make me blind!" then I thought, "Stigmata!  Stigmata!"  And wasn’t there a movie with Patricia Arquette?  I bet he saw that on opening day.

6 thoughts on “work in progress

  1. Caroline in NH

    I followed a link here from Not So Virtual Homestead. I find it interesting; we’ve been vegetarians for about 13 years, and will probably eat chicken from our own flock this year.

    Reply
  2. Meghan

    “a total fuck you from the cow”

    That’s priceless. Sounds de-lish!

    I bought a vegetarian cookbook based on some of your recipes. That should buy you some bovine-good-karma. It saved at least 1/2 a cow. YUM!

    Reply
  3. Liz

    I’m getting to this post late, but your last paragraph made me laugh. One of those people for me – a kid I knew in high school really only for one funny comment I happened to hear – ended up moving across the street from me, in a different state and almost a decade later! We ran into each other in the new neighborhood, realized our old connection, and now we’re friends. I never would have believed it if someone had told me the story back then.

    Reply

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