Ever do those taste tests in school? The ones where you laid out salt, sugar, a lemon and a bottle of bitters, dipped Q-tips in each substance, and put them on the different parts of your tongue? No? Yeah, I grew up in Alaska and everything they do there is weird. Anyway, when doing this little project, you're supposed to note the different areas of your tongue that respond best to that particular type of taste. This has since been a scientific myth that has been completely debunked, and this experiment proven totally useless. (Where's my tuition refund?)
What I did note, however, while a large portion of my class hated the bitters Q-tip, I ate that crap up. I loved them. My tongue responds to bitter. Dark chocolate, radishes, black coffee. Any alcoholic drink I love I come to find out has a crapload of angostura bitters in it, and then I have like 6 of them. Funny thing is, our sense of bitter is also meant to protect us -- a sign that says "No no! Don't eat this!" Because I imagine, battery acid is say, REALLY bitter.
What the hell are you getting at, D? Well, I discuss the above example because lately, I find myself getting really angry lately. I'm going through the homemaking magazines, looking at the dinner recipes, the family craft projects, the educational tips and I'm pissed. There's nothing I want more in the world to sit at home and homeschool my kids and make steaming pots of homemade chili and organize my books once and for all; to run my home like the finely oiled machine it once used to be when I had that precious resource called time. And of course, I don't have time. I boil a frozen package of dumplings and that's our diversion from the standard pizza. The other caregivers assist with homework before I get home because by the time I walk in the door, it's dinner, laundry, pick up, bedtime, collapse, wake up, go to work, and do it all over again. I find myself seething at my ex-husband, pissed off at what was stolen from me -- and obviously since our divorce necessitated this change, he was the one to take it all, right? Lazy days at the park, stopping off for ice cream on the way home, being in control of my children's education - all things I started pretending my ex-husband packed into knapsnack and stole away from me like a burglar in the middle of the night.
My mother used to do this on a fairly constant basis. "I just want to stay at home with you and make cookies and be with you -- if it wasn't for your father..." Bitterness had creeped in, and unfortunately for her, it made a permanent home. So much so that when my 3 year old child was making easter eggs one year, and a helper stuck two toothpicks in his egg, my mother says to the entire table, "Your father used to say I look like that. An egg with two toothpicks." Not only did it make everyone at the table uncomfortable, it was a blatant advertisement that 25 years later, the taste of bitter still tasted great.
Emotionally, something that gives us a bitter "taste" is something that is hard for us to bear or causes an enormous grief (and I really, really miss my crazy kids). I The Greek word for this is PIKRIA, an intense suffering of mind and body. Maybe it's not our fault we feel that way. After all, we got screwed. Cheated. Totally effed over. Whatever event occurred, we feel bad because what happened WAS bad. So then you get acquainted with bitter. Then you find out, you like it. It's a comfortable flavor -- while other people don't like it, you do! Bring on the battery acid, bitches! Then you are the Bitter show. All bitter, all the time. You know what I found out about bitter people? People get tired of your ass really quickly. They're not going to give you sympathy or understanding. You're only proving you're antagonistic, unteachable, and you sit around having pity parties way too much. Yet I find myself slipping into this realm so much more often that I should. Biblically, it's actually a sin, classified under the "mental attitude sins", like say, arrogance and lust. And frankly, bitterness just plain turns you into a dick.
I'm trying to find ways to remove bitterness out of my life and keep it in my drinks -- after all, even the drink needs some balance. A lemon for sour, ginger ale for sweet. It proves difficult sometimes, but my choices after the crappy event are mine to own. Instead of feeling like I got screwed in the SAHM department, I should be thinking of ways to maximize that time to turn the minimal quantity of time into maximum quality of time, not sit around feeling pissed off that I had things taken away. That's only going to lead to more frozen pizzas baked at 400 degrees with a healthy side dish of mental exhaustion.
Do you ever find yourself stewing in a bottle of bitters? How do YOU snap out of it?
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