A Sweet Corn, Cherry Tomato, and Farro Salad Drenched in Pesto. A Tonic Fennel Salad with Cherries. 🌽 🍅 🍒
Loosey-goosey slightly juicy salads that will make you a better person. Or at least make ME a better person.
“YOU’RE GOING TO SPOIL THAT CHILD ROTTEN” was something strangers said to parents when I was growing up, often in situations where it was absolutely none of their business, meaning usually. Today, it is not okay to say this, the idea being that there’s no such thing as “spoiling” a child—that none of the gifts or considerations you give them could possibly mar the miracle of their existence.
And I’m very down with that, even though children scare the hell out of me with their raw honesty and eerie habit of looking straight into the souls of strangers and promptly announcing what they’ve seen there in a very loud voice. I dig their curious, open, chaotic vibes. I also keep my fingers crossed when I’m around them, hoping they won’t announce something horrifying that they’ve intuited about me.
But I’m pretty sure it’s okay for me to say that I am spoiled rotten. I’m self-spoiled. The older I get, the more spoiled I become— and it’s rather humiliating. I have to have certain things and have convinced myself that I deserve them, even though there’s little certifiable evidence of this.
For example: I go through a ridiculous amount of eucalyptus bath salts because, I suppose, I have become too good for plain water? I own a Big Berkey to filter my drinking and cooking water but I also drink gallons and gallons of seltzer, as if there’s no tomorrow. I imagine that the bubbles improve my personality.
But not very much. My social filter—that invisible net woven from minding one’s own business and not being a giant pill when everything doesn’t go one’s way—has been broken for at least 20 years, a fact I seem to luxuriate in. If I end up sitting next to you at the movies and you rattle through your purse for longer than 20 seconds or breathe loudly or have what I consider a stagey laugh I have to find another seat. Why are the seats so close together? It’s not like we’re in coach, being flown to Spain.
And I am pretty sure a man I dated while living in NYC broke up with me not because we weren’t right for each other but because I asked a guy sitting next to us in a crowded casual restaurant to stop singing along to the music on the restaurant’s sound system. It was such an assault on my sensibilities that I even remember what song he was singing: Stone Temple Pilots’ “Vasoline,” which I may have asked other strangers to stop singing; it was the 90s.
What’s more, all of this has less to do with my standards of quality or any standards at all than it does with the simple fact that I’m self-indulgent and neurotic. I feel like it’s a bit late in life to try to rein this in. What am I going to do: completely change my personality? Impossible. I’m going to continue to be the absolute worst in a variety of ways.
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