Seven Ways to Cheer Up When You’re Feeling Eight Below

1. Make something completely decadent with items already in your cupboard. Thankfully, even when I’m living extra-lean, there are always baking basics lying around here: cooking and baking are important balms for me. Cocoa, shortening, sugars, flour: check. What else is here? Hmmm…arrowroot powder, a bag of frozen cherries, some pinot noir not so good for drinking, but fine for cooking, and an influx of balsamic. Voila!*

Enjoy the first cupcake, while it’s still a little warm, by yourself and Ooh and Ahh out loud. Then call a couple of people who you know will also delight in a simple bout of vegan decadence, and share cupcakes with them on the porch during a perfect summer evening. Done!

2. Take a bath: don’t rush, and be sure to soak your head.

3. Be Mr. Rogers. Go and see the people in your neighborhood, and don’t be in a hurry. Take the time to have more than a two-minute conversation with the sweet woman at the mini-mart you buy smokes from. say hello to the folks at the coffeehouse. When people on the street stop to pet your dog, let them play with her as long as they’d like. Have your coffee on a chair with the homeless guy who can’t ever decide if his name is Pete or Elmer (I have no idea what that’s all about), but who always calls you “darlin,” tells great (albeit drunken) stories, and who people always rush by. Hope he found the five bucks you put in his hat when you saw him sleeping on the sidewalk last week, as you have before, but say nothing about it: it’d be nice for him to feel he had a secret admirer.

4. Clean and change all your bedding. It doesn’t matter if your sheets aren’t 400 thread count, if there are piles of laundry around your bed, or if there are no fresh flowers nearby. Sliding into fresh clean sheets and closing your eyes always feels like you’ve landed in a posh hotel.

5. Laugh. That isn’t a challenge when in sharing a headslap over this with Sarah, and mentioning that you almost told the questioner that if vaginas could expand so much you’d be thrilled, since you’d FINALLY have a place to keep your keys where they wouldn’t get lost, she shares this gem: “I have a multi-month archive of persistent emails from this 12-year-old kid who was convinced that if I wasn’t keeping things (e.g., an egg, a can of Pepsi, my wallet) in my vagina at all times, I was “wasting space” and was immoral in the same way as people who don’t turn off the faucet while they brush their teeth. Just walking around with this big, empty handbag between my legs, not doing anyone any good. It makes me think their must be some sub-genre of horror writing about empty, cavernous, enormous vaginas? People falling into them, never to be seen again?”

6. Remind yourself that lotuses grow from the mud. If something beautiful can continue to grow in the unforgiving cement of your backyard, then for fuck’s sake, so can you.

7. Open your email and find out you’ve been unanimously nominated for an award that Jocelyn freaking Elders won last year. Dayum.

* Incidentally, the cupcakes are an adaptation of an Isa Chandra Moskovitz’ recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, a cookbook I use much too often for my own good. The changes I made include using balsamic vinegar in the cake rather than apple cider vinegar: I always do that w/vegan chocolate cake; the balsamic makes the chocolate taste richer. I also shredded some gorgeous cherry/vanilla/dark chocolate into the mix and on top that Beppie (that was SO nice, gal) secretly arranged with Mark to have sent to me, and added orange extract to the cake and the kirsch because orange is gorgeous with chocolate, and makes cherry taste more tart. I did the cherry filling a bit differently, adding the red wine and skipping the sugar (who needs it with all that icing?). Too, her vanilla icing recipe is to die for, but I let it sit in the mixer for waaaaay longer than she suggests: a good 20 minutes makes it fluffy as anything. Adding some ground vanilla bean is also a help.

filed under Heather Corinna | Auntie Heather's Helpful Hints | Happy!
posted on Friday, July 20th, 2007 at 11:47 am

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