Potpourri

Inspirational song: Night Fever (Bee Gees)

Somewhere around season 4 or 5 of The Walking Dead, they started making a point of rhapsodizing about sorghum as a superior food source. There was at least one full episode dedicated to an attempt to scavenge a cache of seeds or milled sorghum, that failed at a time when the protagonist group was on the verge of starving. And then multiple times over more recent seasons, they referred to it again, in very clear language. I started wondering whether one of the sponsors of the show was a sorghum lobby in Georgia, where the series is filmed. I probably would never have noticed it, had I not gone through my dietary odyssey over all these years, trying and failing to go gluten free for fifteen years before I did it for good. I tried so many alternative grains, and I tried so many processed foods that claimed to be safe. I tried to drink gluten free sorghum beers, and they still upset my stomach. I tried some of the GF all-purpose flours that included it, with disastrous results. I couldn't tell whether the culprit was sorghum or something else that caused me grief, but after years of avoiding it, I thought today would be an okay day to test the theory. I made a fridge-cleaning approximation of biscuits and gravy for breakfast (it was vaguely close, but only vaguely). I used an all-purpose flour that included sorghum, and waited to see what would happen. My stomach is bloated tonight, as I expected. Kinda hurts a little too, again, to no surprise. We had our weekly game night, and I wore my nearly-completed cosplay outfit, sitting uncomfortably on the couch at my neighbor's, wondering how soon it would be before I could be alone and unbutton my jeans for comfort. I spent hours trying to talk myself into sitting back up long enough to blog. I even told myself I'd just write a few "I feel like crap I'm quitting" kinds of sentences. I still put it off.

And then I found the best thing on the internet. Scrolling through Twitter, someone mentioned the hashtag BlackHogwarts. They had retweeted J.K. Rowling's acknowledgement that she had seen it and was enjoying it. So I followed the link to it, and found the first pure joy of 2018. I spent half an hour giggling and guffawing out loud. A few times I laughed hard enough that I could barely breathe. And blissfully, I laughed so hard that my stomach stopped hurting. It was marvelous, for me personally, and for humor at large. On a day when people around the world are spun up with outrage over naked racism coming from Washington, when TV anchors are finding it imperative to swear to be able to accurately report the news, and people holding their breath to see how the long or strongly reverberations of today's scandal will play through the rest of the world, it was so nice to be able to tune out everything else, and belly laugh my way back to feeling good. I was reminded that people are clever, often exquisitely so. I don't get to feel like I love people in general often enough. This made me love just about everyone.