Cheese was my quintessential comfort food. I was the person who made a beeline to the baked Brie at cocktail parties. Baked potatoes, chili and tacos were merely cheese delivery vehicles, a simple base upon which to heap mounds of shredded cheddar and Monterrey Jack. And don't even get me started on the wedge salad. Sure, it's got bacon, but it was the creamy, crumbly, blue cheese goodness that had me at "hello."
My lifelong romance with cheese came to an abrupt halt three years ago when a new doctor – a naturopath – suggested I give up dairy. I'd sought her help for some ongoing health issues, including chronic pain, fatigue, depression and an inability to lose weight—what many now call FLC Syndrome: Feel Like Crap.
For many of us, no holiday season is complete without viewing beloved Christmas movies. Some are old classics we grew up with, while others have become favorites more recently. Remember waiting for Rudolph the Rednosed-Reindeer to come on the family television? In a pre-VHS, pre-DVR, pre-streaming world, we only had one chance to see it. It was appointment TV, and the annual airing was a pivotal event, one that ushered in weeks of tree trimming, cookie baking, carol singing, and the anticipation of Christmas morning. Our current rotation is an eclectic mix of the sentimental, musical, and farcical, generally culminating in our yearly viewing of the Capra classic It’s a Wonderful Life. Despite knowing the plot and outcome and having memorized much of the dialogue, I look forward to the film each season. The opening titles and music awaken something both novel and familiar, nostalgia, but through the lens of one more year of life experiences, somehow bittersweet, like unwrapping t...
A Thing About Writing That Turned Into Something Else Brenkee Photo/Pixabay Maybe you have foodie friends. You know, the ones who are hip to the new hot restaurants, the up-and-coming chefs, and the latest gourmet trends. Then there are the Swifties, who've recently added to their ranks thanks to the blossoming romance between a particular award-winning pop star and a certain tight end who happens to play for my favorite football team. * Enter the “wordies.” We are the foodies and Swifties of the writing world. Some of us are journalists, others are poets, novelists, essayists, songwriters and more. We are the ones for whom words are craft. We get fixated on a random word for no apparent reason, examining it in the way I imagine a potter might do with a blob of clay. We are compelled to get our proverbial hands dirty, to squash that word and stretch it, to pound it flat only to gather it up, fold it over itself, knead it again, observe it from a variety of angles, then decide what...
As seen in the Huffington Post There's a meme going around, the one with two precious little girls in frilly, white matching outfits. One of them stands on the bathroom scale while the other says, "Try again without the socks." It's meant to be cute and funny and, on the surface it is. I'm sure I've "liked" it more than once (along with tens of thousands of other women) as friends have posted it on Facebook, maybe even LOL'd or ha ha'd in the comments, because who among us has not commiserated with a girlfriend about our weight? One particular day, though, I got on my own bathroom scale and when the image of those two angelic preschoolers popped into my mind I was angry. Maybe the meme is just as much about friendship as weight, but I couldn't stop thinking about the heavy implications. What is cute or funny about these adorable creatures obsessing about a number on the scale? Feeling even at the tender age of 3 or 4, that they sho...
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