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The Day After

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Happy Thanksgiving indeed! What’s really important here is what you’re having for dinner the day after Thanksgiving. You want Mexican food. You know it’s true. You’re tired of turkey and potatoes and all the weird side dishes that your family loves, like the shrimp-flavored craisin bread uncle Henry brings every year but almost nobody eats.

Yes, Mexican food. It’s on everyone’s menu. Those delicious beans with cheese, rice, tomatoes, and fresh avocadoes. That’s what you were thinking all along. My only suggestions have to do with how you prioritize the ingredients.

To serve the best Mexican food, you want lots of tortillas just hanging out there, available for whoever wants one. A great way to serve those is warm, delivered with a set of tongs, as if you’re handing out steamed towels at the spa.

You’ll also need refried beans, of course, by the gallon. Whether they’re totally vegetarian or infused with delicious, nutritious bacon grease is completely up to you. It’s a matter of personal style. Do, however, make sure you provide a lot of them. Without beans, the meal may only qualify as Southwestern food. To be authentic Mexican, it has to have beans.

The last essential item is sauce. While the Italians have their marinara, the Mexicans have their salsa. Not talking about the music here. It’s all about the food, and the salsa that belongs with Mexican food is a tomatoey sauce, not unlike marinara, but different in that it is usually a bit spicier and less pasty. When serving up Mexican food you should have no less than seven different types of salsa at varying degrees of hotness.

So the above are the essentials. The following though, are only if you want ‘em.

Rice is fantastic. It definitely rounds out a meal. Cooked right, it can seem like an essential part of the meal. Once you know that you already have grains in the tortillas, you’ll likely agree you don’t need more grains on your plate, so rice can stay or go, it doesn’t matter all that much.

Cheese, like rice, makes a meal even better, but it just isn’t integral. You can have a bean burrito, or you can have a bean and cheese burrito, but you can’t have a cheese burrito—that’s just a quesadilla. Quesadillas are the only food in which cheese is absolutely necessary. Narf! But aren’t quesadillas 100% Mexican? I ask myself. Okay, maybe cheese is an essential ingredient. I’ll let you decide.

Lettuce is great too, but it’s not essential, even in its role as a vegetable because the role of vegetables is fulfilled by the salsa tenfold. The only thing less necessary than lettuce would be corn chips.

Let me tell you about the corn chip. The corn chip is a tool. That’s all he is. He’s a tool for scooping, shoveling, or pushing the other food around. Eating the corn chip is as optional as Beano or cilantro. Serve up any of those three last items at your preference and your prerogative.

And, you know, it doesn’t hurt to be thankful the day after Thanksgiving. Estoy agradecido por la comida Mexicana.

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch on Pexels.com

The Last Leaf

Is it pointless to rake leaves if they haven’t all fallen off the tree? Would you wait until all have fallen but three? Two? One?

Or do you just pray for a big wind to blow them all into someone else’s yard?

There’s a best way to do this autumn activity. I’m still trying to figure out what that best way might be.

If your leafblower breaks, do you use a rake? If your rake breaks, do you use your hands, or feet? Are you the kind of person who prefers to mulch the leaves with a mower? Do you rake them up and put them in with the compost? It’s probably the best way to use leaves. That’s how they’re used by nature. Leaves are the top of the topsoil. Leaf piles are frequented by fat worms. Worms love the loamy part of the naturally decaying piles of leaves. That part at the bottom where it’s all damp and the leaves are barely discernible as leaves because they look more like dirt—that’s where the worms love to be.

Do you pile the leaves in your garden, hoping to attract worms? Do you play in the leaf piles, rolling around, covering yourself in leaves, and hoping not to find worms?

Do you turn the leaf piles into the garden soil with a trowel, a shovel, a rake, a hoe, or a tiller? How close to the earth do you get? Are you the kind who really gets in, so that every part of you gets some dirt on, or are you the kind who lets the natural world go on doing what it does?

Then again, maybe you’re in the middle of the spectrum. Maybe you dig a little dirt, rake seven leaves, and then let the rest of nature go on as it would without you.

The natural way is probably the best way, if you can get away with it. Some people put themselves into slavery by joining an HOA, and then the HOA dictates to them when and how the leaves are moved. If the HOA commanded the people to ingest and digest the leaves in their own yards, they would have to do it. Contractual obligations, you know? Well, you can praise the Lord every day you don’t belong to an HOA. Those people suffer, while the rest of us enjoy watching the last persistent leaf in the tree like a dog watching a squirrel, or a squirrel staring at an acorn.

Therapy

When you say the word therapy, it brings a variety of things to people’s minds.

There’s physical therapy, mental therapy, and aroma therapy.

A lot of these require someone else to direct you toward the end result of being whole again, however, I’m here to say you can do it yourself. With the right amount of knowledge you can perform all the critical therapies on your own body and mind.

This is not an excuse for you to skip therapy sessions with your doctor, whether that doctor is a PT (physical therapist), or a psychiatrist. The objective view you get from them may be essential for your recovery.

Aroma therapy may even require a guide at first, though when you learn what scents you need and what works best for you, then they might not be as necessary. You’ll be guiding your own aroma therapy in short order.

Mental health therapy can be corrective, when you absolutely need that objective point of view, or preventive, in which you can do all the work yourself. Creating a sturdy foundation of mental health can be as simple as swimming or going for a walk. You can set your own prescription of bike rides or runs with the dogs. You can paint a picture or let someone else paint you. (And I do mean that in every sense of the phrase. Who knows but you might like to see your portrait or get paint all over your skin. Therapy, anyone?)

When you find what keeps you sane and physically fit, you might stick with it for a while. Don’t be afraid to try new things. There may be more than one way for you to stay fit in body and mind.

Some common ways to do your own therapy are:

Work.

Conversation.

Scrapbooking.

Visiting friends and family.

Nature watching.

Sports.

Art.

Praying.

Meditating.

(I had to check that last one, to make sure I didn’t spell it “medicating”. Even though people commonly self-medicate, I don’t recommend it.)

20 reactions

Occasionally in life we’re confronted with those incredibly grouchy people who simply cannot be persuaded to find the good in anything. On those occasions it can be helpful to be armed with a few phrases to either interrupt the grouchy pattern or create enough of a diversion to make an escape.

Here are 20 potential responses:

Wow! Someone needs a nap!
…And a juice box!
Did you forget your meds?
Oh. Whoa. You’re ready to go postal. Someone call 911!
You really need Jesus.
Is that your political face? The voters are running scared.
Did your dog die?
Did you die…on the inside?
Who let you out of the rest home?
Are you channeling Hitler?
How long ago did you work for Hitler?
Are you rehearsing for a horror movie?
(Stare at their forehead.) I can’t even see the lobotomy scar.
Encouraging ganja use wherever you go, right?
Aww, does oo needs a dahpoo change?
If grouch energy could be stored, you’d fuel the nation.
If you keep making that face, it could get stuck that way.
(Bark whenever they speak.) (Every word.)
(Yawn.) Too boring. Could you spice it up a little?
(Put in earbuds. Stare at your phone.)

Bonus response:

21. You really, really, really need Jesus.

Weird Things

We all do weird things. Here are a few of the weird things encountered recently and collected specifically for this list:

She cries out for control when she has none. He dunks his bread in everything, even his glass of milk. That guy sneezes louder than seems necessary. He passes gas constantly—a loose sphincter. She saves bags inside other bags. She doesn’t save boxes the same way. They take drugs to escape the pain they don’t really feel anyway. He swerves his car when he sees cats and dogs in the road. Is he trying to miss, or not? That other guy never leaves his seat on the curb by the gas station, except when he sleeps on the grass beside the gas station. They like to buy him gas station nachos. No one knows what he drinks. No one dares ask. How does he wash the nachos down? She dances to all the wrong songs. He peals his fingernails instead of clipping them. The guy with the beard flies airplanes—made of paper. She knows a lot of French words, but she doesn’t ever dare speak them in case some French person might be listening. She said so in English. That other gal plays guitar. She doesn’t use a guitar pick, she uses her fingernails. Her friend plays the same way, but she prefers when her nails are broken, rough. He bows to people randomly. He doesn’t know why he acts that way.