Who am I?
I’m urban-gal from a white collar family. A tom-boy. A geek. The kind where you are expected to make straight-A’s in school, or else. I had writers in my family. An English teacher for a mother who threatened to ground me for making comma splices. A dad who would buy us Junior Chemistry sets so he could monopolize them trying to make things go “boom.”
I’ve a degree in Film. I’ve always wanted to write movies. Or maybe hardcore science fiction. I may have some lofty ambitions because I play video games and am on social media too much. Being “normal” is weird.
The only amazing superpower that I have is an astonishing capacity for scientific and historical trivia. This is ironic because if I didn’t have the ability to program calendar events and alarms into my phone, I would forget to pick up my kid from the bus stop.
I read a lot. I research a lot. I write apparently way too much and blow people’s minds with big words. And I think everyone is exactly as interested in random science stuff as I am. Or at least, you should be, because that’s why you’re here, right?
How did I get here?
The usual way. Boy meets girl (on the internet), marriage (elopement in the bar district of a foreign country), kids (singular)…
Then stuff happened, the way it usually does in life. My son with severe food allergies got older, and began to realize he was different from the others. The allergies they told me he would grow out of, he didn’t. And when I started to investigate the reasons why, I found my way into investigating food. Commercial food. The stuff that we’ve been eating from the grocery store? Some of it is really pretty gross.
You’ve never seen a more motivated person than a mad, sad, and really REALLY grossed-out mom with a toddler who says in his sad little boy voice, “I wish I could eat a granola bar, too.”
Argh.
Okay, so how exactly does one go about making food? Real food. All kinds of food that’s safe for a son with multiple food allergies and that now meets the exacting criteria of someone who no longer has “ignorance is bliss” as an excuse to eat whatever thinking that it’s fine just because it’s sold by a grocery store?
You get all control-freak on it. As much of it as you can, and darn the ignorance. That’s what Google and trial-and-error are for. Right?
This started about “food.” But it’s about more. It’s also about life in general; the joy of learning; re-establishing a connection to the past as well as forging a sustainable way into the future; and growing into being a parent of a precocious little boy.
What’s the meaning of life?
I have it on reliable authority that it’s “42.”