I’ve decided to spend a week being French.
This is nothing I’ve done before. I suspect this is nothing anyone’s done before because… why would they? What adult chooses to be French for a week? And what would that even entail?
The answers to these questions are: just because, me, and I’m going to figure it out.
I did not start the day intending to be French. Rather, it happened as a result of not grocery shopping, so we’re running low on almost everything, except for dairy products. We get milk and eggs delivered. I have no idea how we found a milkman in 2023, but here we are. Actually, we are lousy with dairy products because we have standing orders and I forget to cancel stuff and it stacks up then I find myself throwing out $14 worth of expired fancy milk and I’m mad.
Anyway.
Fletch woke me up at 7:00am when he set off the motion alarm in the basement, searching for breakfast meats. (We’d never actually tested that part of the system, so, hooray! It works.) He brought up a frozen chunk of Trader Joe’s carnitas and left it on the counter to defrost. He also set out a container of Kodiak protein instant chocolate oatmeal. Not sure what he planned to make with this unholy combination, but no thank you. He cooks himself something elaborate almost every day, whereas I don’t eat in the morning.
I’m sure not being hungry is a symptom of insulin resistance and that is bad and not eating only makes it worse. But even the idea of food in the morning seems unpleasant to me. I only want a tumbler full of cappuccino until lunch, every day, for the rest of my life. I drink my strong coffee and read my newspapers and do my dorky word games. Often, my day is dictated by my nerd games wins and losses. If I don’t hit genius level on Forbes Frases, I am salty. If I actually get the NYT Connections puzzle, I am insufferable. (WHY IS IT SO HARD FOR ME?) If I hit the trifecta of genius level, getting the Connections right, and solving HuffPo’s Pyramid Scheme without needing a hint, I am pretty much unstoppable.
I normally avoid social media in the morning, as I can’t just let myself get lost in cat videos, but my call schedule is light this week, so I went for a spin on Instagram after my news binge. I ran across a reel of a French woman living in London, making herself a comfort meal on a dreary gray day.
Can you imagine anything more appealing?
I cannot. So I watched.
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