Category Archives: friends

…and whether pigs have wings.”

I’ve been writ­ing here, on and off, seri­ously and less than so, since 2007.  But of late, things have been chang­ing because, well– I have been chang­ing a lot in my per­sonal life the last sev­eral years.  For bet­ter or worse, this blog doesn’t quite fit who I am or who I want to be any more.

I still am bipo­lar– I always will be– but that’s not all of who I am, and I’m try­ing to define all of the things that I am besides my men­tal health, and fig­ur­ing out what’s my per­son­al­ity, what’s my pathol­ogy, and how to inter­weave all of those threads into a coher­ent life that I feel is worth liv­ing is a strug­gle that I need to rela­bel– not so much as being bipo­lar as being a grownup who can iden­tify the things that she wants and work on try­ing to make those things actu­ally happen.

I’m trained as a lawyer, but the com­pet­i­tive­ness, argu­men­ta­tive­ness, the nit­pick­i­ness, the focus on trees to the dis­re­gard of the for­est?  Those are things I need to work on and try to move past, because they’re not qual­i­ties that I want to have at the fore­front of how I express myself and inter­act with most people.

Cook­ing?  I still do it, but between the wors­en­ing gluten intol­er­ance and the anorexia my mood-stabilizer instills in me, it’s kind of a crap­shoot whether I can muster the inter­est in eat­ing, much less gag down all the food on my plate and man­age a week’s meals on a reg­u­lar basis.  Out­wardly, right now I am thin, but inside I grew up a fat kid with food issues who knows her weight loss is med-driven.  Com­pli­ments on my appear­ance mess me way the hell up.  Defin­ing myself as a cook is iffy as hell, and I’ve got all these pho­tos of dishes I cook wast­ing away on my hard drive because I can’t find it in me to blog about food any­more.  I’m not hun­gry any­more.

I will likely find a new time and place to talk about many things, from ships and  shoes to seal­ing wax to the newest YA release to  whether it sucks that women’s use of makeup in the work­place achieves bet­ter sales (it does suck, but it works, in my hum­ble opin­ion).  It won’t, how­ever, be here, because peo­ple change and need to make new places for them­selves some­times. I find that I’m at that place,  now.

Thank you to all of you who’ve read here and been such very good friends.  You’re all won­der­ful, and I can still be reached at bipolarlawyercook@gmail.com.

Have you had your mammogram?

Thanks to Cheri at Blog This Mom and her Face­book page for the vid link below and the reminder. Have you had your mam­mo­gram yet if you’re 40– or younger if you come from fam­ily with high inci­dence of breast or cer­vi­cal and/or uter­ine can­cer or you’ve tested pos­i­tive for the breast can­cer gene?

I had my base­line at 30 because my mom was diag­nosed at 40, and I’m good about rou­tine self-exams, but I’ll be 36 this year and it’s time for me to get my sec­ond squish­ing and checkup.  It was uncom­fort­able, yeah– but it’s bet­ter than a blow to the head, and cer­tainly bet­ter than the alter­na­tives, that’s hella for sure.

You can find out about free mam­mo­grams in Mass­a­chu­setts here.

Wee folks and friends

These are our friends Amy and PeteAnd their very pre­emie, very beau­ti­ful daugh­ters, Molly and Madeleine, now each a very gor­geous 17 months old.  This is Amy’s blog, micro­pre­emie mommy.  Amy and Pete are doing the March of Dimes March for Babies on Cape Cod next week as Team Far­rell Peanut, because with all of Molly and Madeline’s med­ical prob­lems over the last year, their med­ical bills topped $5 mil­lion, though thank God for health insur­ance and the under­stand­ing my for­mer firm has extended to Pete, as well as that extended by Amy’s employer.

If you feel moved to make a dona­tion, it can be mailed to:

March Of Dimes
South­east­ern Divi­sion
258 Main Street, Suite D4
Buz­zards Bay, MA 02532

Please make a nota­tion that it’s in honor of Team Far­rell Peanut.  After this last year they’ve had, they deserve all the recog­ni­tion that they can get.

New Year’s Eve Soup and Salad

So, there’s this “cook” thing in my screen name.  And I do it, some­times.  Amaz­ing, I know.

Et voila, proof of the pho­to­graphic vari­ety, because you’re all no, we do not believe it.  All you do is bitch about peo­ple with­out their receipts.  Because you’ve never lost one piece of paper­work in your life.

So.  Recipes, of a sort.

Zuc­chini, shred­ded on the man­do­line, salted with kosher salt and tossed with fresh ground black pep­per, extra vir­gin olive oil, a cap­ful of bot­tled lemon juice (shh, it’s my real gourmet secret) and blood orange sec­tions and the juice of the post-sectioned fruit, all smushed up in my hand as a way of get­ting out my petty frustrations.

And then there was soup.  Lucky soup, all round coin-like shapes of lentils and sausage, green spinach for money to boot.  The recipe’s here at Epi­cu­ri­ous, though I used sweet sausage, not hot.  I’m con­trary like that.

Light and crunchy, sweet and tart– fol­lowed by warm, earthy, hearty and fill­ing.  Not con­trary at all.  Just damned lucky.

Yummy, too.

Yields– lots of left­overs, good for crummy days like today, when there’s shov­el­ing to be done.

Happy New Year, my friends.  May you have bright con­trasts, fol­lowed by warm, pleas­ing ful­fill­ment that sticks with you for hours.

Imagine if we had walked…

Thanks to my friend L. for clu­ing me in to the You Tube Chan­nel that is How It Should Have Ended. Because really, Lord of the Rings? Great movie– epic, even, to use an overused Inter­netism, but, well, after about the fifth end­ing at the end of Return of the King I was all “Get it Over With, Peter Jack­son.” For­tu­nately, these guys fig­ured it out.

(Why yes, I am a nerd. Whyever do you ask?)