Migraine days...

I was going to take a picture of a bottle of pain medicine, an ice bag, gingersnaps and coffee to sum up my migraine days, but I happen to have this accidental shot of my living room and it seemed to say "yeah, that's about how you've been feeling" The light too glaring, the images fuzzy, the overall feeling nauseating.

I've been hording up food experiences and pictures but now I've gotten so far away from their occurring that I have little to say about them.

I have gone from women's "issues" to migraine days without much in between. I have had maybe 3 whole good days in the last two or so weeks. They have been glorious giddy good days, the kind where the absence of pain feels so euphoric. I have not forgotten to eat well or real, but I have not done wonderfully either, I've just existed with my new consciousness intact. No pans of brownies have been scarfed down, though last night I will admit to eating a good 500 calories of "Dirty Chips" (a brand, not my judgement of them) in a middle of the night gotta have it, binge. The first thing remotely resembling a binge of any type since I've started this new way of looking at food and of choosing what is "good." That said, they were part of the former weeks "allotment of dirty chips" yet uneaten, so I won't feel too bad about it, and for extra good measure I'll skip buying any more for another week. Maybe I'll just buy two of the small bags instead of three as well. I don't want to buy just "one" cause that will feel punitive and make me think I'm suffering and then I'll do myself more harm than good with ensuing obsession about lack of chips.

I do best when I have plenty of what pleases me around and instead just show moderation. I have a person in my life, I'll call her my "friend" who is slim and has an opposite view. She has to keep the things far away or she'll eat them all, say, for example Entienmen's chocolate iced donuts (and to be critically fair, they don't keep well and they do seem to taste better eaten in multiples of two or three) Maybe my "friend" has a point, given that she is slim, she must know what she's talking about. Or maybe it's just a particular food that would affect one so. I'm not going to scarf down three bags of reflux inducing mouth burning salt and vinegar chips in the middle of the night, so I'm reasonably safe. Let's face it, if one is in a scarfing down mood, one will likely find "something"....I had a friend who used to re-constitute cocoa powder with butter if she was in a pinch. Never tried it myself but I've kept it in the back of my mind, just in case.

All that said, I am in a strange place with relation to food right now. When I am in a lot of head pain, I don't eat anything, or at least I used to not eat anything. Of late I've been more nauseous with migraine and so I've followed a friends suggestion and laid in some ginger snaps to help with that. (I suppose I could get some kind of ginger capsules to do the same thing but these are "health food" section, rock hard, reasonably low fat and calorie ginger snaps so I think, ok, they will do) I have wondered if I might make my own low fat/cal gingersnaps as part of my real food effort(Honestly I wonder if they are EVER high fat cal , I think the dry hard beast is itself, lean. You can tell I don't think of ginger snaps as a serious snack contender.) I doubt I could pull of baking with a migraine, not without serious collateral damage to Lord knows what, the kitchen, myself (I envision burns on arms, flour fluffed into my eyes, turning beaters on with my hands in the bowl?) so for now, the pre-made things seem a reasonable stand in.

Ok, where was I....food, migraine...yes...so I don't eat when I'm in the worst of it. I don't move when I'm in the worst of it, and talking is nearly out of the question as well though I manage to moan fairly well. Something about the sound of certain notes hitting some spot inside my head as it vibrates....When my migraine is abating, as it is now having gone from a 9 to a 5, food can be glorious. It can't take much by way of effort and there is no telling what I might desire, though it is not a bad guess to say it will be starchy.

I careened toward the kitchen a while ago intent on cooking an evil box of mac and cheese deluxe (something I've not had or desired whilst on my real food path, if I wanted mac and cheese I'd be making it from scratch) and while it was boiling, my eye lighted upon a bagel I'd bought intending to make chips for soup (an entry I haven't made that I photog-ed last week) and remembering I had fresh cream cheese in the fridge, scarfed it down while waiting.

I must tell you, it was seriously the best bagel and cream cheese I've ever had in my life. If I bought a dozen of them and ate them every day for a week, I'd surely not have another that came close, it would at least pail by comparison, likely to the point of grave disappointment. It was a flavor I don't normally buy (Fred's had none of the bins labeled,oddly enough) I am not sure what flavor it was, I could detect poppy seed but when I bought it I was thinking it could be a so called "everything" bagel. It was not a proper chewy one like you'd get in a real deli back east, in fact it was wrongly soft, but my teeth were glad for that fact as I noshed through it, thinking as I did that the Yiddish word Shmear would NOT apply to the amount of cream cheese I put upon it. It was a simple pleasure, the kind that remind me how good it is to be hungry, to have an appetite, how the laborer sleeps best and what grace there is in being able to joy in real food.