mac-n-sneeze (or, my intention was not to write about sex)

Okay, two things here in this limited space of time I have on this lovely Friday during which I have to crank out so much work that I'm feeling a little like orchestrating my own prison break. It's just too gorgeous outside and I'm cagey in here--all I have to do is turn around in my chair and I've got a snapshot view of the downtown skyline and the hazy mountains rising behind it. Ah, a little relief for my wayfaring soul--looks like the air quality in the mile high city leaves something to be desired today. Perhaps the wind will pick up and blow that nastone-ness out on to the plains.

So I heard from a couple of people that my blog yesterday came across as sexual, mostly because of the line about getting Hot Doc's number. What? I thought I was being silly, maybe funny, but there is nothing sexual about hoisting oneself onto a cold examination table and having one's feet placed in stirrups, legs wide open. So the doc was hot. I had to call her something. So we got her number. It's not like I've called her, or have even contemplated it. Did a red flag not raise--indicating that this was not a tawdry moment during which I seized the opportunity to pick up Hot Doc--when I spoke of my chilly vagina?

And this thought: how easy it is for me to speak of these things, to assign words to the parts of my body that ordinarily go unacknowledged and damn near ignored...is it in the saying that I roust them from their deep slumber? Is this one of the steps toward my embodiment or just another way to create distance? The modifier and the modified. Or mollified, as the case often is, anything to soothe this seething that churns and burns beneath the barely-there differentiating membrane. My protection from, well, everything.

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I, too, was a whole-box eater of mac-n-cheese. I will admit to a degree of snobbery here, too, as I refused to eat any generic versions of the stuff. Like my cohort-in-blogland, I cannot make the stuff now and think that I will have one "serving". One serving = one box. I would make mine with tons of black pepper, and always sneezed as I cranked the grinder ten, eleven times over the saucepan of orange goodliness. Rarely was this stuff allowed in my parents house--instead, I ate it almost exclusively at my family's cottage in Ontario, Canada, in the Kawarthas. I was raised a cottager, and often spent two month long spans there in my youth. Long days lolling on the dock were punctuated by my sneaking up to the cottage and making myself a box of kraft mac. I recall a couple of times when my sister ribbed me hard for eating a whole box. I recall how easy it was to eat a whole box. I also remember hiding out down by the frog pond, my trusty tupperware full o'mac and cheese tucked securely under my arm then opened like a treasure box in the diffuse light of an lake country afternoon--the slow and deliberate savoring of my treasure made possible by spearing each little log of pasta with the tines of my plastic fork. My best friend in the whole world, Fullness, sat beside me, cheering me on.