thecounterintuitivekitchen

Recently, the magazine Woman’s Day starting appearing in my mailbox. In this magazine are articles that begin with, “If you coupon…” and consumer round-ups of items to make your desk “pretty,” ie. get yourself a “chic clipboard.” There is also a two-page ad spread about kitty litter that asks you to “Rate your stank face!” AND there is a two-page advertisement for “Tails of the Old West,” a fake dog that is wearing cowboy boots on his hind legs, a hat, a fake mustache, or perhaps a real mustache in a fake dog’s world, and some gear that indicates it’s a horse-top law enforcement professional (spurs, badge that reads “Sher-ruff Paws”). It’s also wearing… a bolo tie! Did I mention that it’s a wiener dog? Because it is. It is a wiener dog.

Unfortunately, Sher-ruff S. Paws is “strictly limited to only 95 casting days before the original mold is destroyed.” What the fuck, Woman’s Day? I can’t make a purchasing decision like this in three months plus a long weekend! I got so frustrated that I had to turn the magazine over, and you know what I found? I found Woman’s Night. Upside down, because night is just day turned over. And you know what you do at night, woman? According to the upside down and reversed cover image, you camp in a whimsical natural burlap tent festooned with paper craftgoods four feet from your well-lit front door with, and I know this because the hair color of the adult woman and the young boy are the same, your son.

What I wonder about, though, is Woman’s Morning. I am a woman, and I have mornings, or there are mornings, and I am a woman who exists during that timeframe. I think they don’t even bother with the concept because the demographic they’re going after has, across the board I will wager, shitfucked mornings that cannot be adequately addressed by any amount of advice or lists of things on chic clipboards.

If any of the Woman’s Day readers are following the magazine’s advice or sharing the experiences of women in representative articles, then there are women stuffing coupons into pouches while trying to make adorable edible snails out of a slice of kiwi, a breadstick, some cream cheese, and pomegranate seeds to put in lunch boxes.

And some of these women, who have learned from Woman’s Day how to dress up jeans or have a sexy Saturday date night with the same pair of dangly earrings, like those earrings are LIARS and not just one thing but a thing that can be interpreted variously and used for numerous purposes, like highly trained Russian spies in a Tom Cruise vehicle, well… some of those women have been pistol whipped by their husbands but stayed anyway until they left or the husbands shot them but not fatally and then those same husbands committed suicide. Things are real out there, even if you have the cutest clipboard.

I think no woman’s magazine aimed at women with school-aged children dares to offer advice about mornings because the only thing between relative peacefulness and various suburbs going up in flames is the tacit agreement to shut up about however mornings get handled. The process need not be improved.

My mornings are not bad, despite the fact that I am not biologically able to be awake in a good way before 9 a.m., but I have to be at work at either 8 or 8:30 and a bunch of things have to happen between 6:30 and then.

Sometimes I am asked to make mac and cheese by a small boy who is wearing no clothing other than sky blue socks and a purple fleece blanket, cape-style, and I must clarify that we are not a conceptual Japanese restaurant where customers dine on pasta while seated on functioning toilets. I make the kid wear clothes and eat breakfast food for breakfast, but I myself have had the following items for breakfast:

• Coffee and nothing
• Nothing and coffee
• Cold lasagna
• The very thin heel of a loaf of bread, toasted in such a way that the thinnest edge is charcoal colored and crumbles away when the toast travels through the air to my mouth
• Veggie burger still frozen in middle
• The Trader Joe’s knockoff of Pirate Booty
• Brownish leftover avocado, mashed up with salsa, eaten on crackers
• Multiple bananas
• A frozen waffle that I warmed in my lap on the way to work, which gave me an ice cream headache in my abdomen, and which also would not budge, I sensed, from my lower esophagus until I drank enough piping hot coffee to help it dissolve
• Pita bread that was in an improperly sealed bag and was thus super crispy and shattered when I bit it

Here are some other things I have tried to eat for breakfast, reported to be the most important meal of the day and who knows what happens to you if you don’t get to eat it:

Organic raspberries that looked like so:

 

Some kind of gluten-free coconuttish oatmeal type deal that was so good for me it wouldn’t even absorb water:

 

Nor did my oatmeal-eating  knife get used the way one would hope, as I didn’t eat the delightful tap water soup plus coconut shreds that is in that mug:

 

Also! The same day I tried to eat these I saw this on the street:

Thassa tree hunk in some telephone wires. Por que?

 

BUT I also found the perfect desk ornament for myself:

So I’m a winner. I am really just a huge terrific beautiful queen, just really such a queen, let me tell you, the facts speak… it’s, you know I’m the best thing that ever happened to the Secret Service and I tell you what… my tower is beautiful, Pence is, he’s… look, I won’t tell him he CAN’T disagree with me, though who would because I have a terrific brain, and it’s gonna be a beautiful thing, when, why can’t we use nukes? I like that Putin. But Pence, he does what he likes, which is what I like him to do. Except he won’t date my daughter, because if she weren’t my daughter, I’d probably be dating her. Also, the hairspray, you do it in your own home and now they tell you, oh no! You can’t use it. In your own home! And mine is terrific, just so  terrific and beautiful, all gilt and gold, Melania on the bear rugs, which are real bears, by the way, my sons killed them from a pope mobile, totally enclosed, so safe. But the hairspray? How can it hurt the atmosphere if you’re using it in your own huge beautiful home? I’m telling you, they are liars.