and lo, the turkey is brining

I'd like to say that my initial preparations for turkey have assured that no is going to suffer a hideous poultry-related death at my hands, but frankly, I'm skeptical. I am doing the brining, probably the single most traumatizing cooking experience of my life, in which I mix things that *should not go together* in this world or the next and then rinse my turkey with my hand in unmentionable places, then lower it into the soup of iniquity.

The worst part is that it keeps floating to the top, and I'm holding it down to make it take water, and I'm thinking, yes, this is how I saw myself in my youth. Drowning a dead turkey. This is my dream, and I am living it.

Seriously. *Brining*. Brown sugar and water and Black Sea levels of salt and fresh (not dried, why make this easy on me?) thyme and an entire *bottle* of dried rosemary. It looks eerily like a beach gone bad with oil spills. Now it rests in the refrigerator overnight until I take it out and do frankly *sick* things with herbed butter and apricot glaze and pray that I get a good lawyer when they bring me to trial. Cause seriously. Ewww.

On the upside, I got to go to the grocery store and giggle myeslf into a hernia looking at the mini-gangbangers, out in gear, seriously debating which onions to buy and carrying around baskets of produce. I just--it's a total spirit of the holidays thing. I don't know. The older I get, the more freakishly weird I get about holidays and tradition. My mother's corn pudding--I can't stand it. It's corn and it's pudding and in no universe I have lived in, written, or read about should corn be involved in anything called a pudding, but she makes noise like she won't make it I'm in tears. I was in literal tears about four years ago when the subject of a Thanksgiving Roast was broached (to this day, no one has ever dared so much as breathe that a turkey won't be on our table. Fear of Me is strong here.) It's Thanksgiving. There will be turkey, there will be cranberry sauce, there will be rolls and butter and a cherry pie and godforsaken corn pudding and by God, that's how it is. And gerkin pickles, apple rings, and green bean casserole. There will be all day grazing later, in which I pretend that I have no food rules, mix my dressing and turkey and cranberry sauce on a roll, dump it in a bowl of gravy, and *enjoy*.

It's got to be the food. When you're a kid, you eat your own weight at the speed of sound. You can't really *love* it like an adult can, who lives with carbohydrates and fear of hypertension and the word cholestrol hovering in the air. Then it's almost a fetish. You look upon the Thanksgiving table and pretend that you don't know any multisyllable health words and just enjoy it. Revel in it.

Then again, I have similar reactions to the mention of candy, chocolate, and coffee, so maybe it's just me.

In other, less intersting, but strangely entrancing news, I am getting vaguely attached to the copier/fax/printer we have at work. I have low tolerance for multifunction devices--they seem to break too often and one function goes, everything goes. But this sucker makes faxing easy. And it has a touch screen, and I love touch screens. I may be pickng up a sadly understandable fetish for office equiptment.

I haven't talked a lot about my job these days becuause there's nothign to say. I mean, the bathrooms are *amazing* and always have sufficient toilet paper, there is hot water like there is no tomorrow, hand lotion for use after, paper towels that absorb, and the stalls allow one room to well, do your thing. And you see why I started talking about the bathrooms as a highlight of my day, becuase I'm bored out of my mind. And I don't say that lightly, because I make boredom an art, but the best part of today was the thirty-something page letter we got from someone who is actually crazy, in the needs-medication-now way. I wish I could transcribe this sucker, because it was--beyond stream of thought surreal. This is stream of thought surreal after a hit of acid and some shroom action. I read every word, hypnotized. I can't even prove there were sentences. But wow.

Work is boring, yes, and I suppose after a year and a half of frantic activity, that's not the worst thing in history ever. But I honestly have one of those jobs that has no reason to exist. On the other hand, I spend all my free time--and it is a *lot*--replotting everything I have ever written, and I was actually sitting there, sketching out the HTML and CSS to recode my site on a pad, because it would take longer than typing. And require the aid of a cryptologist to read.

Many and varied are the reasons I type everything I can, and speed is a lot of it, but also the fact I cannot cannot cannot write legibly to save my life.