Tag Archives: friendship

Jan 28

Observations after a week of basically vegan

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Black bean brownies with peanut butter swirls. Weird but delish.

I feel lighter. Not in the sense that I’m losing weight, but in the sense that my gut–which has never given me problems, thankfully, feels even better (is that the right way to say it ?) than usual.

The closest example I can think of is that heavy feeling you have after eating something quite greasy, fish and chips for instance, and how it feels like a brick in your stomach. I feel the opposite of that. Make sense?

I think my stomach looks less bloated, too. I don’t expect this to be noticeable to anyone but me, but when I look at my profile in the mirror, I see a difference.

I’m becoming more thoughtful about eating because I have to (and I want to). I start thinking about what I’m making for dinner as I drive home. Typically I would plan on popping in a frozen cheese pizza because they are fast and good. Now I get home and snack on avocado and crackers to ease my hunger pangs, and then make spiced quinoa and zuchini.

Avocado. It has become my cheese replacement. Happily, it provides me with the same flavor satisfaction as cheese did. Maybe because it’s also high in fat?  I don’t know, but I plan to have our kitchen stocked with them all the time. And when they get really ripe, they can go in the refrigerator where they will stay in that state for a while.

I feel more creative in the kitchen; I feel more frustrated in the kitchen. It depends on my hunger. It’s hard to rethink my default modes (of grabbing cheese and snacking on it), but it’s also enlightening to see how automated my eating has been. I was quite proud of myself last night for making a vegan “cheese” sauce to pour over a bowl of broccoli and pasta. It tasted pretty okay–I had to diverge from the recipe a bit and deal with the ingredients we had on hand, so I think it will be tastier next time with all the proper ingredients.

It’s fun, however, finding alternatives to all the usual recipes. I’ve made brownies twice this week–once with black beans and once with bananas (plus cocoa/maple syrup/etc.) I brought the black bean brownies to a vegan dinner with friends, but didn’t tell them what they were made from until after they had all tried one. We all liked them, even if they didn’t taste precisely like dairy-based brownies; they were still good.

And thank goodness for culinary adventurous friends. The two people I spend the most time with (in addition to my husband) are the wonderful HK and MC. HK has been a vegetarian for a long time, and MC is not a vegetarian, but she likes interesting food. MC has probably cooked more vegan dishes than I have because she likes to cook and she likes to experiment. It helps so much to have friends who not only sympathize with your vegan efforts, but are willing to indulge them in their own cooking in order to have you over for dinner. And their cooking provides continual inspiration that vegan food can be delicious!

I have another lovely friend I will be seeing in Florida soon; she is moving toward vegetarianism for similar reasons I did. When I learned of a (sort of new) vegan restaurant down that way, I invited her immediately because I knew she’d be game to try it. And she is. So happy to have companions in this effort. 🙂

My next culinary experiment is making a supposedly delicious “cheese” sauce from potatoes and carrots…I don’t see how this will work, but that’s part of the fun.

Aug 13

It’s been so long…

My last post is from four years ago! I’ve made some blogging efforts since then, typically with a theme in mind, but none of them stuck. Or rather I didn’t stick with any of them. Then I saw my good friend Cyd last weekend, who is still blogging on the same blog she’s had for awhile, and she told me that another friend of ours was traveling abroad and resurrected her old blog to document the travel, and I thought, perhaps I should just go back to the Puzzle Box. So, here I am.

I had been thinking of a number of topics to kick off this new start to the blog, but then I saw a post from earlier that made my breath catch. It’s about texting and friendships and how I learned my dear friend Kim had cancer. 

Kim died in February of 2012. I didn’t find out until April, when another friend called and asked me if I knew. She had learned by seeing some posts on Facebook that caught her attention. 

I have to admit I’m ashamed I didn’t know for such a long period of time. I texted her during this time and attributed her lack of response to her being out on the town, living it up. She was a gorgeous, young woman who had a big group of friends from work, and who would show up in photos out and about in South Florida, so it didn’t bother me that she didn’t text back. It seemed unusual because she was good about responding, but I tend to not get hung up on such things.

Though I feel bad about not knowing, I also feel confident that Kim knew I loved her. Her death was completley unexpected; she had texted me a photo of her ringing the bell for her last chemo treatment. Everything looked good and chemo was over. Her death was caused by an infection she caught later–I think it was a chemo related infection. The fact that she came so far and then that infection felled her breaks my heart.

As soon as I learned the news, I reached out to her twin sister through Facebook who said she had tried to find me at the time to no avail. She said she hadn’t even thought to look through Facebook; I’m sure she had more pressing matters on her mind than finding all of Kim’s friends and telling them what happened. 

She gave me her parents’ address and I sent them a card and told them what Kim meant to me. They replied kindly and sent me the beautiful program from Kim’s service. 

And I’m continuously surprised my how much I miss her, and how often that hole in my life appears out of the blue. I’m surprised because the last time I saw her in person was in 2010, when I visited Florida. We were not in each others’ lives on a daily or weekly basis any longer, but we had been for three years. One of our professors, upon hearing the news, emailed me to express her condolences. “When I think of Kim, I think of you,” she wrote, and I wept. We were two peas in a pod during our MFA program, both journalists interested in creative writing. When she had trouble with her marriage, she asked me for advice and then stayed with us for a week to figure things out. She included some of my zen-inspired Shannonisms in her fiction. When we were discussing Eat, Pray, Love, we agreed to head off to an Indian ashram at some point in our lives.

She was poised, calm, measured, soothing, funny, talented, a great listener, and a great conversationalist. She was the friend I knew I could call up and say, Hey! Let’s go hike the Appalachian Trail, and she’d say, Let’s do it. We talked seriously of the ashram. We were joking only in the sense that we couldn’t afford it right then.

I miss her.

Apr 2

on texting and friendships

I think about my friends often. I’ve lived in several places and have friends who still live in these places, or friends who have moved to new places, and though I may not call them each week, I think about them often. We send emails, text messages, and occasionally chat on the phone. However, I’m not a fan of talking on the telephone, and I think this is for a few reasons. First, I don’t want to interrupt someone’s day with an unexpected phone call because they may be reading, or on the toilet, or meditating. Second, I’m very comfortable with long silent pauses in conversation, except when they happen over the phone. On the phone, I feel obligated to fill up any dead space that starts building. If we were together at a diner talking to each other and we both fell quiet—no problem. Silence is golden, I say. But on the phone, silence is awkward. Third, I use only a cellphone and the connection is not always clear, or it gets dropped, and I end up talking into silence until the phone starts ringing in my hand. This happens with me and my mom, who is the only person I talk to on the phone on a regular basis and for long periods of time. Even with my husband, if we are apart, we keep our calls to each other very short. If we talk for five minutes on the phone, that is a very long conversation.

I’m a big fan of texting. With texting, you can send a message to friend and not worry about whether it’s interfering with something they are doing; they can answer at their leisure. You can schedule a time to talk on the phone by sending a text and saying, Hey, can we talk tonight? I find it to be a simple way to reach out.

This brings me to an experience I had last week that reminded me of why I’m thankful for texting, but also reminded me of why it’s good to talk to friends directly, too. For the past month or so, I’ve been emailing with a very dear friend of mine about some health issues she was trying to straighten out. Nothing major, but she had test results that the doctor could not explain. We shared experiences with each other, and I gave her some suggestions. I knew she was going to get some more tests done. Fast forward to last week, when I got a text from her that said, in essence, “Hey, remember that situation we thought was nothing. Well, it’s something and I’m going to the hospital now.” Her text included the specifics, and it was the kind of health related news that made me feel as if ice water has been shot through my veins when I read it. What struck me as interesting was that she wrote, “Sorry to tell you this through a text.” I was just glad she thought to tell me at all! I mean, she’s in the process of dealing with this news and making arrangements to get to the hospital, and calling her parents. Text messaging seems like the most obvious way to keep a friend informed who can’t exactly rush to be by her side. If I were in the area, perhaps it would make more sense to call me, but this was a way of keeping me posted, while also maneuvering through the chaos of what was happening to her in the moment. We texted for the next few days as her parents arrived, and she found out more information. When she told me in a text that she was going home, I texted her and told her we should talk soon. She called later that day. And this is what reminded me how good it can be to hear someone’s voice.

During all the text messaging, I felt dreadful. My heart was heavy; I felt impotent to help; I felt sad that I wasn’t closer. It was imagining the worse, feeling bad, googling medical information without knowing a lot of details. I was envisioning tears, fears, anger. But when I talked with her, it was just her, dealing with things the way she always deals with things—she’s strong. That’s not to say she doesn’t have those feelings mentioned above. But before hearing her voice, they were pervasive in my imagination. After hearing her voice, I realized that it’s not that way all the time. She told me everything that had happened, and I responded to one piece of information in a way that made her laugh and laugh (which made me laugh). It lifted my heart to hear her laughing. That’s the important stuff you miss with texting.