2002-06-19 - 1:26 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "The Wheels on the Bus"

The problem with uploading journal entries is that I see the song on the internal soundtrack, and then whichever song is the most annoying then gets stuck in my head. "The Wheels on the Bus", for godsakes! James Lileks started it this time, although I've sung it with Kelsey before. He was singing it last week with the Gnat.

Y'know what I am jealous of? People who get excited about fruit and vegetables.

There are people who will talk about a particular favorite vegetable the way chocoholics talk about chocolate. It boggles my mind.

At Jake's christening (Alicia's new baby), I was talking with the minister's wife, whose daughter is a natural-born vegetarian. When the daughter was a BABY, she preferred fruits and vegetables to meat. Wouldn't eat meat. I was floored. I'd heard that babies love meat, usually.

Now me, I am a pasta/rice/bread person. If I can only eat one thing, that's what I'll pick. Meat comes next, then, vegetables, and last, fruit.

(No, wait. I am a sauce person, first and foremost. Very little is worth eating unless it has a sauce on it. It doesn't have to have any butter or milk -- Poindexter hates both and won't cook with them -- but it's gotta have something.)

As I think I've mentioned in the past, the list of vegetables that I consider edible, even tasty when prepared well, has grown by leaps and bounds in the last five years. I think I can say I get *excited* about eating broccoli, sweet peppers, and certain kinds of beans (black and navy beans, primarily).

But I'm still working on liking the rest. I can't get into mushrooms, unless they are chopped and mixed with herbs. Can't get into zucchini. Tomatoes are gross unless crushed and seasoned into a sauce.

I will snack on raw carrots, celery (oops, sorry Kit), and (the snack I am eating right now) sweet soybeans. I like spinach salads and cucumbers. Corn and potatoes are okay. That's about it.

I am somewhat reassured by the fact that although my list of vegetables is small, the ones I do like are among the more nutritious ones. Spinach, broccoli, sweet peppers are supposed to be pretty good for me.

Most vegetables I prefer to eat raw or just barely heated. Mushy vegetables make me gag. Broccoli, though, I prefer cooked, and it has to have a sauce. Currently we make three different low-fat dishes with broccoli in a sauce: a hoisin sauce, an orange/soy sauce, and a wine/lemon/balsamic vinegar sauce. If you give me broccoli in one of these sauces, I have to be careful about how much I eat. There's a lotta fiber in that there broccoli.

Fruit, well, forget it. The only thing I can eat an appreciable amount of is Fuji apples. No other type. I can eat a couple strawberries, and then I start grimacing at the tartness. I get bored with red grapes after about ten of 'em. I like melons, but hate cutting 'em up all the time and when you buy 'em pre-cut they look slimy. Sigh.

So, you fruit/vegetable freaks, do you have recommendations on stuff I can try? Remember the sauce issue. :)

So, last couple weeks I've been working on a project that's a spinoff of the Project From Hell of this spring. True to form, I ran into problems and difficulties that made everything take five times as long as it should have.

I used to be so hopeful during that project. "I think I can do this in a few hours." After several instances where "a few hours" turned into "two days", my supervisor started teasing me whenever I'd say I hoped to be done with something. "The triumph of hope over experience?" he'd say.

Lately I've noticed that this is the story of my life. The triumph of hope over experience. I am just an incurable optimist. You'd think at some point I'd learn, but it seems that I always believe that something will be a little different next time! Really it will! It'll be better!

This could be pathetic, I suppose, but it doesn't seem to affect me in a negative way, and I do seem to have enough sense to get out of situations that really won't change. This is mainly because I remind myself on a regular basis that PEOPLE DON'T CHANGE. But everywhere else, when experience proves the hope wrong, I don't get upset. Because the hope always wins in the end!

I'm trying my damndest to come up with an example -- one happened just the other day -- but I can't. Argh.

Anyway, so I was extremely amused to read this in last Friday's Bleat:

"...The Itsy-Bitsy Spider (and was there ever such a song about the triumph of hope over experience? Spider! Buy a clue! Avoid the waterspout!) and my all-time least favorite, the Wheels on the Bus."

Maybe "The Itsy-Bitsy Spider" should be my theme song!

(We always sang "Inky-Dinky", though. What's this "Itsy-Bitsy" shit? And it's DONDER, Blitzen; not Donner.)

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