Y'know why they’re called “Idiot Cookies”?
Tonight I baked cookies for some friends while listening to new Wilco, Happy as Clam. Well, technically I was not baking, just melting ingredients down since it’s a no-bake recipe. While dropping melted chocolate-peanut-butter-oatmeal goo (See? They’re good.) onto parchment paper, (And not only that, but I should write for a freaking gourmet magazine!) I started thinking about how long I’ve been making these cookies.

I used to make them with a friend in elementary school under her mother’s supervision. I guess it was one of those recipes that’s so easy, it seemed like the perfect “starter” baking recipe for kids. (Is it telling how far my baking skills have progressed that these cookies have become are one of the five or six things in my baking repertoire--one of three things I ever really bake at all, in reality?)

When I was in elementary school, this girl – the one I made these cookies with - was my best friend. It was that elementary-school brand of loyalty.

Her family was very conservative and Christian and took me to Vacation Bible School several summers in a row. We listened to Amy Grant in her bedroom while playing Barbies. I think now about how much my mother must have had to bite her atheistic tongue at all this.
I also think about how in recent years, I’ve pared down my memories of that first best friend by reducing her further and further in storytelling. Reducing it to--Well, to what I’ve just written. She was a right-wing Christian. I am not and never was. We were best friends from ages six to 11. Then she moved to another state. The message being: Phew/Lucky me/I went on to have a normal wearing-safety-pins-as-earrings adolescence and look at me now!

But you know, at the time, we had fun. And you know what? I know we must have gotten together out of some fondness other than our mutual love of playing dolls--which was huge and shameful--She was the type of friend with whom I could indulge in this fascination--the costume changes, the intricate storylines--until long after the age most girls had stopped. We were in Girl Scouts together. I liked Girl Scouts. We had all those sleepovers where we stayed up all night, talking and rotting our teeth on Pringles. We must have had stuff of substance to talk about.

Then she moved away and slowly, we lost touch. And now all she is to me most of the time, is this little vignette I pull out in a Getting-to-Know-You story, which is shameful. Maybe I'm something comparable to her at this point. A two-dimensional character in the mind of someone I’ve started thinking of that way.

Enough cheese and beer to choke a horse.
The weekend before last, Hunter and I drove to Madison, where he is moving in January. It was a weekend filled with the fun of seeing old friends who’ve moved up there, meeting cool new folks - and getting to know Hunter’s family better and liking them a whole, whole lot.

It was also my second trip ever to Madison. After the first trip, I left thinking it was nice and kind of utopian, but kind of annoying in an Too-Lefty, Too-White, Entirely-Too-Possible-to-Lose-Touch with the Realities of the World way. Not for me.

This time, I was knocked upside the head with the awesomeness of the place. The bike trails! The community gardens! My friends! The lakes! The yummy ice-cream made by the dairy school! The arboretum! My friends! The bike trails! My friends!

By the time the last afternoon there rolled around, I was filled to the gills with the superiority of this place and just wanted to shut my damn eyes, just wanted to leave - because at that point I was no longer thinking about how much I’ll miss Hunter once he’s gone, but how lucky the shmuck is to be going to live in such a ridiculously perfect place.

Yes, I know: The snow. The cold. The six-month winter. But a winter filled with camaraderie somehow beats the lukewarm business we’ll have down here.

I should explain: It’s not that I am a pathetic loser with no friends in Atlanta.

It’s that I’m a pathetic loser whose friends have all moved to different cities. And I rather dislike Atlanta. Rather a lot.

So. That was Madison.

Someday I'll sell everything and live in my car and here's why.
To go home, we drove first from Madison to Lexington, where Hunter’s parents live, by driving around Chicago, down the length of Illinois. It’s the furthest west I’ve ever been in a continuous car trip. A few years ago, I flew to San Francisco, but that doesn’t really count, because it was far from the action that is the landscape.
On this drive, the highway cut through miles and miles of cornfields. Four hours of cornfields that felt like one vast expanse. Instead of being monotonous – which it could have been - it was ridiculously beautiful.

It was a bright day and we didn’t turn on any music; just talked and looked out our windows. When the sun set, it cast everything in a lavender glow. Tri-armed windmills perched like giant insects casting enormous shadows, and I followed a line of power-lines for miles in the pink/purple light.

When we passed a sign for an intersecting east-west highway whose cited western destination city was in Iowa, I felt a pang. Exotic Iowa! And we could keep going! Nebraska! Well, maybe not so much Nebraska. But Montana! Colorado! ChristJesus; screw it all, let’s go!

Instead, we drove on south, and stopped at a local fast food place to eat. And enjoyed the Midwest accents. And were glad that everything is not yet the same everywhere. And there’s still time to go.

Exploding Head
On Saturday, I was felled by an Evil Migraine. I’ve never had one of these before, but thank god Hunter was there to run to our trusty Internet and see if retching, gripping of head and complete lack of coherence in his girlfriend, were indeed symptoms of a migraine, as he suspected. They were.

So I spent the afternoon locked away in fetal position in the cave of a comforter. As drugs kicked in, symptoms eased and I returned to being something more than a single-celled organism, I became lucid enough to blame the following for my misery:

1. Stress from work.
No, not from work exactly. I like my job. Stress from some of the aspects of work that have nothing at all to do with anything with what i love about what i do. That stuff that can stress any of us out, in any job. There ya go. I just vagued you to death!

2. The effects of waking up Friday morning,
all full to-the-gills of the righteousness of one who’s already been handed her trophy, so positive I was that our president had fallen so hard on his face in the previous night’s “debate,” so excited that the fact of his utter idiocy had been exposed once and for all, to the entire world...

...Only to turn on NPR and hear them talk about the two contestants “parrying” it out, the night before – and to hear a local opinion piece featuring a local woman-on the-street saying Bush had clearly stood his ground and he’s got her vote! (Okay: hooray for standing one’s ground: What about flexibility??? What about real strategy????)
...Only to read in the paper that “Kerry said Bush blundered by starting the Iraq war, while the president said Kerry abandoned his support of the war for political reasons.” Yeah. And that’s about all Bush said. Over. And over again. Between sputtering and whining about the difficulty of his job. Of course, our newspaper is the Cox-owned Atlanta Journal Constitution; I really don’t expect much real analysis from it. Still, the bulk of media attention to this thing was so tentative, so...scared. I had gone to bed feeling righteous, and by the day’s end I felt more alone/crazy than ever.
(Speaking of whining.)

And so on Saturday, as I knew would have to happen sooner or later, my head exploded.