I wish I was genetically predisposed to respond to stress and extreme trauma by losing my appetite and needing to go for a run. Man, fuck those people.

Unfortunately for my pant-size, I channel the extreme emotions stemming from crisis into baking a nine-inch pumpkin cheesecake with gingersnap-pecan crust, two batches of muffins, three batches of pudding, four Thanksgiving pies, 32 scallion and goat cheese buttermilk biscuits, and a rum cake. Thank god there are always six to fifteen other people around, who are only too pleased to numb their grief and exhaustion with one of my many confections. [ . . . ] Continue »

Grab a stiff drink and a yoga mat. On the Indalian path to wellbeing, in these times of economic uncertainty and upheaval, the line between inebriation and enlightenment is . . . fuzzy.

International financial markets meltdown. Take that, prosperity in the era of globalization!

Global warming expected to raise hurricane intensity. You’re too late, Al Gore! Look, The Cliffs of Insanity! [ . . . ] Continue »

Leaving flowers for dead people actually makes no sense at all. I’m not saying we should start leaving soda cans and gum wrappers around The Nana’s final resting place, however, if flowers have no useful purpose for living people (except to make people “feel good”—which really just means they get to show off), then dead people really, really can’t do anything with them.

Let’s just admit it: flowers make us, the living people, feel better. The Dead Nana has better things to do than look at flowers on her grave and compare “her” flowers to the lack of flowers on all the graves of all the total strangers around her. [ . . . ] Continue »

There is a type of deeply revelatory empathy that comes when the average person has a total morbid-obesity eating moment.

Sometimes these moments are private and it’s only while you’re coming down from the high that you are able, with a little perspective and a lot of laxatives, to realize how scary and sad that fatty-moment really was. Laying immobile on the carpet, with all the windows open, stroking the taut, distended, percolating mound of flesh that used to be your abdomen—saag paneer riding so high up your throat you could probably cough up a piece of half-digested cubed cottage cheese—when you think, “Indian buffet was a bad idea.” Oftentimes, however, we are only brutally and painfully shaken out of our four-figure-calorie-blitz-haze when someone else accidentally catches us being a complete fatty. [ . . . ] Continue »