I am going to try and write what I eat every day

for a week

for an experiment

Today was sunny

and cold

Corinne was here for breakfast and we ate what we always do- love. We also had eggs with the yolks runny (cause corinne made them and she is good at not breaking them- I always break the yolks- after hundreds of pairs of eggs over many years I still break them- it is impatience, I think). With the eggs we had kale from the backyard (the backyard is a kale forest! a tangled jungle of kale!) that was cooked in browned onions in the cast iron and corn tortillas, three for me (softened on top of the greens) and two for corinne (made crispy in a little oil). This breakfast requires three cast iron pans. My new house has nine cast iron pans, so there are always plenty. We could melt them down and make a meteor, or a ship’s anchor.

While Corinne was making breakfast she was simultaneously making our lunch, because I was shuffling around in a fret, trying to finish my chemistry lab report that I wasn’t sure, exactly, how to do, before fifteen minutes was up and I had to get on my bike and ride to school, in the cold clear fall air, with the yellow leafs on the concrete and the wind that smells like sugar cookies. (There is a cookie ghost in our neighborhood, when the air is clear and cool it smells like sugar cookies.) For our lunch Corinne browned more onions in a pan with carrots and a little cabbage from the backyard brassica forest, and added ground beef and some risotto rice I’d made by cooking rice with some oregano and bay leaf and a square of bullion in a pot. She put this into my little lunch container for me, and sent me out the door to my bicycle and the Mississippi street hill and skool. I am in school now, my school has twenty-seven THOUSAND students and each one of them is a bright and shining individual, and they are all clamoring for education, or the bureaucratic shadow of it, and the institution is filled with alien-bright florescent light and stale blowing too hot/too cold air and everything is free/not free.

I ate my lunch in a big room with little tables and people hunched over computers and other lunches. The beef and rice tasted fantastically delicious, and I stared at the other people eating. I also ate a salad from the dining hall, young leafs in a brown to-go box with red wine vinegar and some sort of indiscriminate salad oil. I ate it mixing bites of leafs with bites of beefy rice, stabbing the leafs with my potato fork and kicking my legs happily under the table.

I met Corinne for a walk in the afternoon because she goes to school downtown too and the sun was out. We went to the expensive overpriced natural foodstore where the only thing I can afford is cooked brown rice, and Corinne got me a little container of raspberries. Berry season is waning, and I am already mourning. I love the berries. Soon I will have to break into my stash of frozen blackberries at Corinne’s house, and eat an entire pie to consol myself.

Corinne and I also shared a strange chocolate health-food bar that had sprouted buckwheat in it. We sat on the sidewalk in the sun against a building and held hands. Corinne’s eyes looked nice and faded in the sun and she has freckles in her ears.

I biked home in the good air of evening and made a manchego quesadilla before leaving to get my hair cut by Naomi. I had risotto rice and leftover pinto beans on my quesadilla. The pinto beans needed salt. Naomi cut my hair in her living room, and then showed me some shoes she’d bought on the internet. They looked like if an architect and a stripper designed doll shoes for a museum, only better. They looked like salmon could use them to get up waterfalls, if they had enough money.

After my haircut I went to the store and wandered, dazed, among all the overpriced packaged health food goods, wondering what I liked to get for groceries. I got another small package of raspberries and the staples, carrots and onions and corn tortillas and such. I also got a hanging plant called string-of-pearls at the last minute for my new cottage (which has a woodstove! and good light!) and put it in my bike pannier to carry home. At home I ate the raspberries and wrote emails and felt pleasure. I think I will go build a fire in my woodstove and read Xeroxed articles for class and feel happiness. And then sleep.