Last night I had three sweet potatoes for supper.*  Eh?  I have a thing for sweet potatoes** & I eat a lot of them, but the theory is that I cut up a panful***, & this lasts me two or three days depending on what else is on my exotic & action-packed menu.†  However.  I am often working while I eat††, especially in the evening when the sweet potatoes appear†††, & last night I had hit a particularly exciting bit of story-in-progress & the pan of sweet potatoes was right there, because I was already into the exciting bit when the timer went off & I couldn’t be bothered putting a single serving in a bowl, so I kept absent-mindedly picking up another chunk & putting it in my mouth.  Some indeterminate length of time later, I prodded my chopsticks‡ into the pan & . . . couldn’t find anything.  This roused me from my story-stupor enough to look &, lo, I had eaten all three sweet potatoes, at which point I realised I felt rather full.  ‡‡

Ah, the wandering mind of a writer.‡‡‡  I feel there must be something wrong with a profession where you’re delighted when you discover you’ve lost your mind for several hours.  This is one of the things dogs are for, of course:  Yo, you there bent over that weird flickering flat silvery thing, you with the door key, the harness & lead, the crap bags &, crucially, the biscuits, I haven’t been out in HOURS!  I want to go for a hurtle! I want to go for a flat-out, shoulder-destroying hurtle THAT INCLUDES BISCUITS!ɸ  The important thing about a dog is that they will start nagging you sooner rather than later.  Towards the end of a book I will be losing my mind for longer & longer intervals, as the story takes over, & if, for example, you have ME & you go six hours without eating, you will fall on the floor & need resuscitating by the ambulance crew you’re too weak to hit ‘emergency’ on your phone for ɸɸ, possibly because your phone is still on the table being a thesaurus, or possibly because you’re very old & your ideas of advances in technology have to do, for example, with safety matches that don’t strike on anything to fire up but need that strip of something-or-other on the matchbook or the box, which always runs out before the matches do, which, because of the variability of the strip, is a slightly better idea than practise.  Like much of technology.  But a mobile phone is definitely a technology, or a century, too far, for a little old person with ME who hasn’t eaten in six hours.

I’m better off eating too many sweet potatoes.

& no, of course I’m not going to tell you what the particularly exciting bit is.  Don’t be ridiculous.

* * *

* Gosh!  This post is going to be even more thrilling than the one about central heating!

** ::EXTRA-BORING HEALTH FOOD JUNKIE ALERT [which goes on & on]::  They’re fabulously good for you.  They’re anti-inflammatory^ & full of antioxidants^^ & vitamins & minerals blah blah^^^.  The additional thinginess of my thing, however, is that as a grim, humourless sugar-free harridan, sweet potatoes taste like candy to me, & how about cramming down an entire package of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups followed by the biggest bag of M&Ms you could find, a few Mounds & Almond Joys & maybe a box of Turkish Delight to finish off?  & afterwards feeling SMUG & SELF RIGHTEOUS??  So, you know, yeah, sweet potatoes.^^^^ 

^ ME—I think all auto-immune stuff—comes with a lot of aches & pains & these do not get better with age.

^^ Oh, look it up.  Short form:  they slow down the going-to-pieces thing that all bodies start doing pretty much from the moment they’re born, & actively prop up & improve some of the crumbly bits.  The immune system, for example, which those of us with auto-immune anything tend to be a little obsessive about. 

^^^ beta carotene, for example, which is good for your eyes, & I’ve needed glasses since third grade, & I forget what does this+, but they’re also good for your gut, & you know how the gut biome is big in fashion these days?  Spare me.  I’ve been slogging through this ghastly swamp all my life because I’ve always carried stress & worry in my gut.  Gak urrgh.  At least gut trouble being fashionable makes reading up on it easier.  Yay?

+ You can look it up.  I am not, repeat not, a font of wisdom.  I am a font of fantasy. 

^^^^ Anybody out there struggling either with the idea of making enormous diet changes because their body is saying ha ha ha yeah I could put you in bed or a wheelchair if you don’t, or struggling with making those enormous diet changes . . . listen to me not lie to you here.  It’s not easy.  IT.  IS.  NOT.  EASY.  I’ve done it—I really am this grotesquely holier than thou—but it is not easy.  One of the things that sheds a little light on a dark path, however, is unexpected tangentials, like the startling gosh-wow sweetness of sweet potatoes.  Back in the day I had a fabulous recipe+ for candied sweet potatoes that generally brought oohs & ahhs & occasionally tears of ecstasy from equally-sugar-addicted dinner guests.  This sounds queasy-making to me now.  Fortunately.  Enormous life/diet changes do work.  But getting there is NOT EASY. 

+ I probably still have it somewhere.  I never throw anything out.#

# As I think about it, there will be more than one.  There was the caramelised brown sugar one & the drowning in maple syrup one—at least.=  Back in that day I had a major sweet tooth.  The funny thing is, I still do, I’ve just slid the marker on the chart way far back.

= & no, I’m not going to fish them out & post them for you.  There are a gazillion candied sweet potato recipes on line if that’s your fancy.  I don’t really know where my boundaries are about food & habit & standard practise & society, but I do object to how flapdoodling hard it is to live the health food junkie lifestyle.  Sugar—among other popular foodstuff facsimiles—isn’t good for you;  how bad it is for you depends on who you read, & how your own individual body reacts to it.  Moderation in all things, except when your individual body says nope, not with this thing.  This will start to stray into my hostility to conmed@ if I’m not careful:  I have ME, yeah, but it’s also a kind of dustbin diagnosis that includes all kinds of things, since nobody knows definitively what it/they is/are.  I’d be on a dozen different drugs if I went to doctors, while they patronised & guinea-pigged me & my peculiar muddle of symptoms;@@  no thanks.@@@  I’ve found a way to cope that works for me, & I’ll keep on with it as long as it keeps working.  & that really is yaaaaay. 

@ Conventional medicine:  ie medical doctors & their ilk & their world

@@ & most doctors—not all, but an awful lot of them—still pooh-pooh the idea that nutrition is really, really important.   &—gosh wow—can be life changing.  Or quality-of-life preserving.  Which makes it almost impossible to have any faith in anything else they want to tell me.

@@@ You want to scare yourself silly, go read some statistics on prescription drug use in the elderly.   Listen, I DO NOT KNOW what the answers are.  I’m fumbling along one day at a time here in this one-rat lab experiment.  But I do remember when Peter came out of hospital after his first stroke with a giant handful of prescriptions.  I went home & started looking them up, right?  & some of them were listed as incompatible, because all the up-themselves specialists hadn’t bothered to check anything outside their speciality.$  Fortunately Peter had a good, old-fashioned GP who sorted things out.  What happens if you don’t have a paranoid wife & a good old-fashioned GP?

$ I imagine I did some screaming about this on the old blog.  Or maybe not.  I was pretty worn down, those days.

*** It may reassure you—those of you who have read this far—that there are limits to my holier-than-thou-ness.  Apparently roasting your sweet potatoes is not the most excellent & healthful way to cook them.  But I like them roasted.  Cut them up, drizzle with a little olive oil, and roast till they turn golden & start getting a little brown around the edges.

† They’re maybe even better the second & third nights because when you reheat them they go goldener & browner around the edges.

†† If I’m not working I’m probably reading. The standard family dinner where you sit around & chat is the stuff of nightmares to a cranky introvert.  It’s fine for the occasional special event^ but as a regular nightly ritual??  SHUUUUUDDER.^^ 

^ especially when the food is as good as my local step daughter in law produces.  She’s actually willing to cater for my peculiarities.  Her commitment to family duty is vertiginously high.

^^ Living in a one-human household+ is quite good protection from this cauchemar.    

+ I’ve never met a dog that requires chat. 

††† “)*&(%^$£”}]#???!!!!!! blood-boiling con-ratbag-founded ME energy spikes AT WEIRD TIMES OF DAY OR NIGHT “)*&(%^$£”}]#???!!!!!!  ME has a perversity ratio that puts mere infuriating inanimate objects to shame.  There’s a chicken or egg question here though.  Is my particular case of ME so doolally about time because I was doolally about time already?  I can tell you my doolallitude has got a lot worse since the ME.

‡ Sic

‡‡ Rats!  I was looking forward to my exotic & action-packed hummus!

‡‡‡ OH COME ON.  Microthumpingmoronsoft is telling me that should be minds of a writer.  WHAT?! ^

^ Don’t tell me they know something I don’t know.

ɸ & a real meal in a large bowl when we get back.  With more BISCUITS after.

ɸɸ  Do not, repeat not, say anything to me about the fabulous health benefits of intermittent fasting, because I will bite you.  Fasting only works if your metabolism can put up with it.  Since ME is a many-splendored thing, possibly there are people with ME out there who can fast.  I am not one of them.  But since I’m an alternate-health junkie I kind of keep up, even when I don’t want to, with the latest fashions in ways not to have to get involved with conmed.  & you get idiots with clubs clouting you with the next humungous & spectacular & THE ONE, THE ONLY ANSWER TO EVERYTHING!!!! big thingummy doodah in alternate health like every other field of human endeavour.  Arrgh.