A Functional Adult Cooks Vegan

I decided to cook vegan tonight.  Actually, I decided to cook vegetarian, but I accidentally ended up cooking vegan, which is like leveled-up turbo status vegetarian!  INFINITY BONUS POINTS!

But cooking vegan was harder than I thought it would be.  I'm a major meat eater, mostly because meat is delicious.  It's so easy to cheat when cooking meat - if you just cook a sausage, and put it in a crappy Costco hotdog bun, it will be delicious because IT IS A SAUSAGE.  Cf. beef hamburger in a crappy hamburger bun (also delicious); see also that's what she said.

There is no cheating with veganism.  Here is the secret to cooking vegan, as stated by someone who has now cooked at least one vegan meal:  you cook a crapton of vegetables.  

Shocking, yes.  And surprisingly DIRTY - but more on that later.  I decided to make lentils and rice, which is a pretty doable recipe I got from a very inspiring NY Times article about eating sustainably.  It's also easily vegan, though I usually make it with sausage.  This time, though, I decided to mix it up by using beets instead!

I thought at first I'd just chop up the beets and throw them in the pan with the onions and garlic I cook at the beginning. But when I went to my trusty friend Google to inquire "cook beets" (Google is an efficient friend who doesn't need pleasantries or extra words), all the hits strenuously insisted that I had to ROAST the beets in the OVEN or they would be GROSS. Unfortunately for my plan, that vaguely recalled that I had read something in one of my many cookbooks about beets being gross unless roasted. I hadn't actually read how to cook beets, but I'd read that, because I read cookbooks like hermits read travel guides - the pictures and the stories are good enough for me!

So I guessed I had to roast the beets in the oven. The recipe just said to roll them in oil and bang some salt on there (I'm paraphrasing), but I looked at the beets and thought I'd give them a rinse first. Which was when I was reminded that beets grow in the dirt and do not just appear fully formed in the produce aisle of Safeway. Those beets were DIR-TAY. I scrubbed them for what felt like forever to get all the dirt off, and the sink looked like I had spilled a post-apocalyptic ant farm in it.

And then I had the dripping wet leaves to contend with. At first I tried to rinse all of the grit off of them before I set them on a wad of paper towels, but then I didn't have enough room so I set the wet but still dirty ones on top of the ones I'd already cleaned, so I had to start a new wad of paper towels only for clean ones, but the only place to put that was across the kitchen (kind of on the stove) and so I dripped water on the floor after every gritty leaf I washed.

I finally got the beets in the oven and the greens clean in a pile. I made the lentils and rice pretty easily; I've made it several times before and then only obstacle was CRISIS THERE IS NO BROWN RICE HUSBAND WHY DIDN'T YOU BUY BROWN RICE oh I guess it's okay the recipe says I can use white.

Beets.  Yup.

So then it was time to deal with the beets.  Internet told me that I could peel the beets just by kind of rubbing it and bam, peeled.  But here's the deal, INTERNET, beets are REALLY HOT when they have just come out of a 400 degree OVEN.  Not to mention SO MESSY.  I tried to do this and mostly ended up hurting my fingers and also looking like I had committed purple murder in the kitchen.

Getting my Lady MacBeth on

My ah-ha moment came when I realized that Husband has a stash of latex gloves for working on his old car, which might provide some insulation against burning beet finger death.  So I popped those on, but the stupid beets still weren't peeling, so I had to bust out a peeler and just sort of push it at them.  It took forever.

This is how the purplocalypse began

I finally got them peeled, and wilted the greens in a pan, and put them on top of the lentil mixture, and check THIS out, fools:

Full five points for presentation, AMIRIGHT?

SUPER PLATED vegan dinner!  Hoo-ah!  That's right, I am a modern lady able to make sustainable vegetable-based dinners for myself and my modern husband.  And it was ACTUALLY TASTY.  The Internets may be on to something in re roasting beets in the oven.

Of course, the kitchen is still full of purple CSI evidence.  

And it's only two hours since I ate dinner and I am somehow starving.  Are Jelly Belly jelly beans vegan?  I think I need a second course.

A Functional Adult Gets Handy

… No, not handsy. I respect most people’s personal space. Mostly.

Handy. Today, people, I did something almost worthy of the really mature bloggers with whom I am mildly obsessed! I helped Husband build some work benches! Mostly. Most of some work benches! I got my hair cut and came home and used a power tool! To drive screws through brackets into lumber!

Okay, I apologize for the excess of exclamation points; I told my mom she was only allowed three per page and I ought to be consistent. But it feels remarkable to have been so productive in the literal sense of the word: we produced (most) of something. 

Impressive, no?

And as you can see, I did not chip my nails in the process because I have discovered the wonders of gel manicures. People, they are amazing; my nails have held up for five days now. (If you are a guy, trust me, this is a long time because manicures are an exercise in futility by which you paint your nails to have the paint IMMEDIATELY begin flaking off. It amazes me that the paint on my car has been fine for 17 years when just now did I discover a process by which nail polish can last longer than 17 minutes.) 

This is what we’ve made so far:  

Yeah, they don't look SO much like tables.

They aren’t connected yet because Husband accidentally had the guy at the store cut the shorter side connecting pieces too long, so now we are going to buy a saw to trim them down ourselves. I voted that we buy the saw (rather than have the store shorten them for us) in the hope that if Husband develops an affinity for woodworking, some day he will make furniture for INSIDE the house and not just for the garage. 

I want him to be able to make furniture because I’m constantly amazed by how expensive furniture is, perhaps from having spent part of my childhood in a very timbrous – wait, no, I mean timber-filled – area of the country. There were trees just EVERYWHERE. On Earth Day, we didn’t go plant trees, we cleared ivy off of the millions of existing trees. So when I look at the price of wood furniture online, I am BAFFLED. It’s just trees and labor! How can a teeny nighstand cost $1000? This is why we bought all our furniture from the very chic store of Craigslist. It’s amazing the deals you can get when people are cleaning out their inlaws’ houses.

Anyway, the plan is to get him to become a master furniture maker in his free time, obviously. But in the meantime, I hope we’ll finish these workbenches soon. I’m somewhat eager to see how much this manicure can really take. Maybe I should go visit my parents and do some ivy-clearing to pick up lumber for the next project. 

A Functional Adult Uses Social Networking

As a functional adult, I don’t use Facebook in the way I once did when I was a callow youth.  Facebook launched at my college a few weeks before I attended admitted students weekend as a senior in high school.  The girl whose dorm room I stayed in showed it to me, pointing out its most excellent use - for looking up sundry cute boys one might encounter in one’s classes.


This was the primary use to which I put Facebook for two years.  And then it launched the photo feature - a miraculous online photo album where I could see all of my own pictures and also all the ones my friends took that they always forgot to e-mail to me.  The photo feature has also had the promising side effect of ensuring that presidential elections 20 years hence will involve infinitely more salacious photographic evidence of ill-advised youthful decisions involving .  It’s a wonderful world we live in - less than a century ago, many people didn’t even know FDR was in a wheelchair.  By the 100-year anniversary of FDR’s election, we will have seen every trashy Halloween costume of both major candidates:

Reporter:  Ms. Finkelwurst, do you recognize this photo of you at Halloween in 2007?
Candidate Finkelwurst: Candidly, I don’t think I’d recognize anything from that night.
Reporter 2:  Ms. Finkelwurst, what was your thought process in deciding to dress up as a “sexy Finding Nemo fish”?
Candidate Finkelwurst:  Well, Mr. Finkelwurst and I had just started dating and he mentioned that he really liked that mov...
Finkelwurst Chief of Staff:  We’re out of time.  Thank you all SO MUCH for coming today.

So that was and is clearly an amazing feature.  On top of, of course, looking at the profiles of whoever was cute in my classes.  

But no longer being an energetic youth full of too much free time and singleness, my use of Facebook has changed.  Now, it consists of:

1)  Using my phone to check in to places where I am at any given time
2)  Posting pictures of food I am eating
3)  Not getting Facebook messages people send me

I suspect the reason I do the first so often is that I’m so proud of actually going places when I do.  I actually spend most of my time rotating between three places:  work, my couch, and my bed.  Go to work in the morning, leave and proceed directly to couch, then slowly drag myself off the couch on to the bed.  Rinse and repeat.

So I get SO EXCITED when I am somewhere else I feel the need to notify all my friends, family, family friends, friends’ families, friends’ ex-boyfriends, ex-boyfriends’ friends, people I took an English seminar with once, people from two years ahead of me at law school, and a few former professors.  Hey, look everyone!  I don’t just live on my couch and get unhappy that my friends don’t have any funny new gchat statuses!  I WENT SOMEWHERE!  I BOUGHT SUSHI THERE!

Which leads into my second Facebook activity: posting pictures of food.  I love food.  Eating it, cooking it, awesome.  It is also one of the few non-horribly-boring skills I have.  No one wants to look at a really cool supply and demand graph I drew showing where a monopolist would set their price given a certain production function and a certain demand curve (leading to an easy derivation of the marginal revenue curve).

Trust me, I've tried.

But I feel like people might want to see when I made a really cool brunch:

Egg...

Or baked a cupcake into an ice cream cone:

That is my real hand.

Because other people like food too!  And might actually be impressed that I can make tasty foods - because even though it’s not that hard, people sometimes think it is.  Plus, even if I didn’t make the food, I do just get really excited about eating it.  Not unlike my grandma’s dog, now that I think about it.

And the third thing, well, Facebook, that’s not really my fault, is it?


So I suppose I use Facebook ultimately in bald attempts to attempt to convince people that I'm cooler than I am. Which hasn't changed that much since before I was a functional adult trying to impress the fellas in Econ 102(a).

A Functional Adult's Decor

I have this one blog I read.  (Okay, I read a lot on the Internet.  Just go with me here.)  This blog is formidable.  Formidable and formidable, in the French, which to the French means just so great.  I'm kind of obsessed with it, because the couple that writes this blog feels like what I could be if I lived in a parallel universe where I really was a functional adult.

The amazing blog in question is called Young House Love; it's a home decorating blog by a young married couple. They and I have certain similarities and certain differences:

Similarities we share:

• In late 20s

• Married

• Blogging

• Went to college (I think)

• Lives in a residence

• Wishes home to be unique, personal, tidy, and attractive

Things true about them entirely untrue of me:

• Has small child (!!!!)

• Extremely energetic and hardworking

• Have blog with at least one comment during blog history

• Self-employed

• Owns their own house

• Has a home that is unique, personal, tidy, and attractive

I dare you to take a look at the projects they accomplish on a routine basis and not be impressed, if only by the sheer number of colors of spray paint they own without being taggers.  They are incredible.  They are Canonically Adult – so Canonically Adult that just reading their blog makes me want to lay down on the couch with admiration.

Though sometimes, it inspires a more motivated response.  One day, I mused, why can’t I do this?  Why can’t my home be precisely this classy and chic?  Why can’t I…

Okay, upon review of the various projects they do, I’m definitely not laying tile. That’s out of control.  And I’m not reflooring anything.  I could probably spray paint something to a different color, but I don’t have any fun but wrong-colored things laying around my house.  I could go buy something!  But stores are usually closed by the time I get home from work, and I sleep through all the garage sales on the weekend.

I then began listing all of the obstacles to my own home looking as whimsical, sophisticated, and clean as theirs. That took too long.  So I stuck with just the living room:

• Important decorating elements of living room include two stuffed dinosaurs, a Lego TIE-fighter, a remote-controlled car being driven by a Lego Stormtrooper with a Lego Darth Vader riding shotgun, a model sailboat being sailed by a small green stuffed owl

• Also there is this reindeer skin that Husband brought back from Finland one time, which I worry will make Santa angry if he sees it in the event he can fit through our tiny fireplace

We call it Dasher.

• Said fireplace has pink stains on the brick from time red Christmas candles dripped everywhere

• Various cobwebs that I can’t reach, and don’t want to try lest spiders leap out at me

• Contains a 6-lb bucket of Red Vines from the last time my mom and dad drove down to visit, and my mom felt that she needed Red Vines for the trip down, so she bought this bucket at Costco.  She apparently did not feel a similar need for the trip back up, since it is still here.  Friend K eats them occasionally when he comes over.  Also, half-empty box of candy canes next to it.

• A picture I just leaned somewhere because I have nowhere to hang it

• Cracks in one wall from the few years when the landlord refused to acknowledge the roof was leaking, and the wall swelled up with water

• Totally inexplicable water damage on the ceiling

• Husband won’t let me repaint the walls because he hates calling our landlord about anything, mostly because the landlord usually doesn’t answer unless we threaten not to pay the rent until he calls us back

These were some formidable obstacles, the mere listing of which exhausted me to the point I needed several episodes of The Big Bang Theory for rescuscitative* purposes.  But over the next few weeks, I occasionally saw an opportunity to make something a little nicer in the house and took it.  I finally hung up the picture frame that had leaned against an end table for four months.  I tried to hang up my work clothes as soon as I'd changed out of them - or, I tried most days.  And after we had a bunch of champagne corks left after a party, I put them in a Mason jar and put that in the bathroom.  It looks kind of pretty.

Yay.  Decor.

 As the above, minuscule steps show, I'm hardly a reformed home guru now.  As I type this, I am looking at two plates piled up next to my computer with PopTart crumbs on them, a Heineken coaster (brought by Husband from Germany six years ago), a lip gloss, and what I think is the install CD for my webcam.  But maybe there is some small hope for me yet.  
Maybe I'll convince Husband to let me paint over the cracks in the living room walls yet.  And actually do it, too. 

*  A real word.

A Functional Adult Gets the WORST Headache

Ways dealing with a headache is different, now that am functional adult:

• Have own laptop
• Have husband to bring juice / water / other fluids
• Do not have mom to bring juice / water/ other fluids.  Or to make special foods of sympathy and concern.
• Need no one's permission to lay on couch all day, groaning occasionally
• Have Kindle to attempt to read, rather than old-fashioned book
• Will have to drive self to doctor and miss work to do so

Ways dealing with a headache is the exact dang same as before was functional adult, legal adult, or imagined adult (i.e. teenager):

• Head hurts too much to read anything, be it laptop, kindle, or anything
• Caretaker has additional things to do other than pity me / provide juice
• Still hate everything and everyone on TV because they are not curing my headache
• Considering medical feasibility of head transplant
• Of necessity, whine about headache to whoever out in Internet-land will listen
• HATE HATE HATE HATE headache

A Functional Adult Does Her Taxes

Last year, after the taxes were done, I took them to H&R Block for the "free second look" they were advertising on the television; commercials full of people getting extra money back from the government!  Huzzah!  Only after I went there, they tried to get us to pay more taxes because they didn't recommend we deduct more than a certain amount for charity lest we get audited.  Which: 1) huh?  2) If I did get audited, I wouldn't care, insofar as I am not cheating on my taxes and 3) NO THANK YOU PAYING MORE MONEY FOR NO REASON.  

But the H&R Block accountant was suitably impressed and surprised at how well the taxes were done - even before their "professional" "help."  Since then, I’ve been feeling pretty darn smug about my ability to get the taxes done and get them done right without the help of some fancy-pants accountant.*

*Note: I don’t think H&R Block is actually that fancy-pants; I saw no celebrities in their local office when I was there.

Of course, when I say “My ability to get the taxes done,” I do of course mean “Husband’s ability to get our taxes done,” because he did all of them last year while I was going through my thrice-yearly freakout about studying for finals, which involved a rigorous process of dressing like a hobo whilst wildly paging through textbooks.

This year, I have no finals.  So I instituted a new  practice of vaguely assisting Husband as he plugs numbers into TurboTax.  You could argue that since I have a degree in economics, I ought to be the one doing the taxes, but since he has a degree in mechanical engineering, which means he could build a computer, which means that it makes sense that he use the computer to do the taxes.

Plus, he’s the one earning more of the money, so it’s mostly his fault we have to pay them anyway.

Assisting wasn’t so bad, at first!  Mostly because it consisted of consisted of my sitting on the couch next to him reading this article and laughing out loud.  Pretty hard.

Husband:   I’m trying to concentrate here.

Liz:  I’m sorry but this is HANHAHAHAHSNORFHAHAHA.

H:  Seriously, I’m trying to figure out this form.

L:  Okay.  I’m sorry.  Snerble.

*five minutes later*

L:  laughing silently to herself

H:  Okay, now you’re shaking the couch.

And then I went and got some rice going in the rice cooker.

Despite the initially easy-going nature of the process, it got frustrating once the rice was in the cooker.  I recount the process of going through this year's possible charitable deductions:

H:  Did we donate any money to School this year?

L:  Yes.  $25.

H:  Do we have any record of that?

L:  I thought they were supposed to send you something in the mail?

H:  No.  You’re supposed to keep the receipt.

L:  *astonishment*

H:  *sighing* Do you know WHEN it was?

L, mentally:  It was right after that one girl kept e-mailing me to give to the class gift, and I was like dude, I’m not even ON campus today, and then I finally gave and then she e-mailed me AGAIN and I was like I JUST GAVE TODAY ARE YOU SERIOUS?

L, aloud:  No.  May?  June?  Just skip it.  It’s $25.

H:  Did we give anything to that other School Public Interest Fund?

L:  Yes.  $67 dollars.

H:  Any chance there is a record of that? Or a date?

L, searching her gmail account for “donate,” “donation,” “donated,” “doughnut,” and “donut,”:  Uhhh… no. 

This is the (okay, not the ONLY) problem with taxes.  It’s this bizarre system that requires you to keep a million pieces of random paper around your house, which is ludicrous in an electronic universe.  I need a robot butler who scans this crap in for me and saves!  In searchable PDFs!  In a folder labeled “Stupid Receipts You Will Need For Tax Time, Gosh I Hate This System Too!”

… or I guess I could buy myself a scanner.  And scan the stuff.  And make the folder.  Which I had literally never thought about before now.  Huh.  That would make a lot of sense.

Though it wouldn’t cure the tax code’s various bizarre distinctions.  For example:  why can undergraduate students deduct the cost of text books, up to $2000 (or whatever) but graduate students count?  Why would earning an extra $500 bucks make me pay $4000 more in taxes – wait WHAT?  Why does TurboTax keep asking us if we have a farm or a railroad?  How many times can I tell you that I am not a farmer?

Oh, sure, these are first-world problems.  But I am at the unfortunate intersection of first-world problems and the absence of fancy rich person resources to throw at them that years of watching movies has led me to believe I ought to have.  I just pay $19.99 to get a logo of a cartoon woman who will “chat” with me to explain why suddenly this program is calculating that I owe more in income tax than I earned last year.  I don’t have a great, shady-looking but totally legit guy with a Rolex to make me some somehow-legal tax shelter in the Caymans.  Even if I could manage to get myself to the Caymans, I would have no tax shelter in which to stay.  Both me and my taxes would be stuck outside in the tropical rain. 

And as the preceding paragraph reveals, despite the afore-mentioned econ degree (which involved taking several classes on tax policy taught by very renowned professors), I don’t know that I actually have any idea about taxes in a practical sense other than that the payment thereof gives me less money to spend on, er, Us Weekly and ... blogging clothes?  Hypothetically speaking, of course.  If anyone knows if having a blog means I can deduct sweatpants as a work expense, LET ME KNOW.  

A Functional Adult Goes to the Doctor

I went to the doctor with the unassailable conviction that I was getting capital-S Sick.  Not just the kind of sick that I might have used in high school to convince my mom I couldn’t go to school, no, Sick for Real. 

I avoided the terrible magazine selection (mostly periodicals called things like Parents Health Thinks) by shrewdly bringing my Kindle with me.  Mwah ha ha.  Mindy Kaling's new book for the win!  Then, it was just being told to pee in a cup, worrying I hadn’t drunk enough water for that, successfully peeing in a cup (girls get extra credit for this), and sitting around in the doctor’s office.  It wasn’t my usual doctor, a nice lady with a last name that sounds like a soda who seemed to appreciate that despite looking like a 17-year-old, I was a Serious Career Woman with Plans and the Need to Feel Better.

No, Dr. Squirt was on vacation and so I was seeing a doctor who was a man.  Hm.  That’s okay, I mused, my childhood pediatrician was a man and also was THE man, insofar as when I got a concussion at a stupid concert my senior year of high school, he told my mom it was great that I was so independent.  Awesome doctor.

This doctor could be awesome, I guessed.  I listed my symptoms for him, discussing three separate problems since I was already in there anyway, and concluded jocularly that I was pretty much about to die given all of that. 

He looked at me with a wise, doctoral look (none of my friends in med school do this yet, so I assume you learn it during residency) and said, “You’re 25.  It’ll get a lot worse.”

Shocked and concerned he might think I was ungrateful for my generally excellent health, I sputtered that I knew, that I was joking.  Then I realized that perhaps this was not the kind of doctor who appreciated a delightful young woman appearing in his office to make brave jokes despite her illness.  He might not have approved of how getting a concussion in a mosh pit showed independence.  He didn’t even ask me if I had a job!  He definitely did not appreciate my Serious Careeritude.  What he DID do was hand me a paper gown, tell me to put it on, and say he’d be back in a minute.

I put the stupid gown on.  He came back.  As he proceeded to squash my abdomen (why do doctors always do this to me?  What is this even testing for?  MY ORGANS ARE STILL THERE, THANK YOU), my mental processes continued as follows:

• Consider making a joke about how one too rarely gets the opportunity to wear an enormous paper towel.  Reject idea.
• Consider joke about breeziness of afore-mentioned paper gown.  Reject as creepy.
• Return to paper towel joke, this time considering whether it would be funnier with something about me using the paper towel to clean my kitchen counters

At this point, I realized that I might have been staring and failing to respond to questions.  The doctor eventually diagnosed me and sent a prescription to the pharmacy, where I spent the next half hour alternating between reading my Kindle and staring balefully at the pharmacy assistant while subtly twitching in the hope she would sympathize with my illness-induced discomfort.  It worked---she finished faster than she’d promised.  God bless her, because I didn’t think I could be mature for more than 15 minutes more.  I had used up all of my maturity at the doctor.