I think you're sauceome.

There are not one but TWO boxes of “Cheese Club” mac and cheese in our kitchen right now. They’ve been there for many moons, they’ve survived much longer than boxes of mac and cheese normally do in my kitchen. Do you guys do this, where you’re alone in the house, you’re bored or depressed or stressed out, and suddenly you find yourself in the kitchen? Usually that ends with me grabbing something to eat in front of the television. But lately I end up in the kitchen and find myself thinking, how did I even get here? Why did I come in here? And I look around and think, “I used to do something in this situation…”

But what I used to do was make, and subsequently eat, an entire box of mac and cheese. The last several times this has happened, I’ve found myself staring at the mac and cheese thinking about how odd it is that it used to bring me such joy, but that it just doesn’t sound very good right now. It sounds really salty. It sounds like my stomach hurting. It sounds like a sluggish afternoon and a nap on the couch, instead of getting stuff done.

I almost feel like I’ve lost something. Mac and cheese used to be my number one comfort food. Don’t get me wrong, I still love a really well done mac and cheese, made with, you know, actual cheese, and with interesting stuff mixed in. But even blue box stuff used to … well, fill a hole, for a while at least, and it won’t do that anymore. It’s a good thing, probably even a very good thing, but it still feels a little bit like a loss.

Does that even make any sense? My brain is a little fried by this hellish project I’m doing at work, and I had yoga class tonight, so I might be a little loopy and less than articulate. :)

That green sweater in the first panel? I wore it every day I could get away with it in high school. I think eventually my mom “lost” it in the wash. There was something crazy comfortable about that sweater, it was huge like a tent, like I could get lost in it, like I was wrapped in a cozy warm blanket. The blue hoodie in the second panel? I wore it until it fell apart at the seams.

I have been thinking about those outfits lately, the ones that I wore all the time, sometimes two days in a row, at least if I wasn’t going to be seeing the same people on both days. At the time they felt comforting, protective, even. I thought they made me happy. I also thought I needed them. At many different sizes, even when I was a size 7 in high school, I thought I needed to hide my body in a tent. Sigh. I’m trying not to mourn for the lost time these days.

I still wear that shift dress sometimes, though. It’s not really THAT shapeless, is it? Or can you not tell from a clumsy pen drawing? :)

So, the thing is, it doesn’t really take all THAT much energy to make dinner, no matter how exhausted you are. Of course it helps immensely if you have something you’re excited about making, and little sea bugs make me pretty happy. I came close to making the whole bag and just eating a bowl of shrimp for dinner, but we have a bag of farmers market lettuce too, and it’s only going to last so long.

I am a little pleasantly surprised at the choices I’ve been making lately. Niles is closing tonight, and to be quite honest with you, usually when I’m left alone I make very poor decisions about food. Or maybe that’s an “I used to” thing. It still feels a little early to tell if this transition is something that’s going to stick around or if it will pass… but I’m not going to hyperanalyze it now.

Anyway. I’m also pleasantly surprised that I haven’t just thrown in the towel on these comics this week. Work is pummeling me, for real. This workload won’t last forever, so at least there’s that, but in the meantime I really am short on energy. Just a heads up, in case tomorrow’s comic is stick figures drawn in crayon.

So! A happy transition. I will confess to you guys that at the beginning of this thing, I might have SAID that I was just as interested in loving my body as I was in losing weight, maybe even more so. That was a lie. You guys probably knew that. At the beginning, my highest priority was always losing the weight. I figured the liking myself more part would come AFTER the weight loss, right?

Only, I’ve been spending so much time examining my own self-perception issues and realizing what utter bullshit they have been, and now OOPS, I like myself more. The crazy thing is, you will laugh so hard at this, is that when you like yourself more, you’re more instinctively inclined to treat yourself better. And that means I have no desire to polish off an entire Rolf’s cream pie (that thing is still in our fridge. It would never have lasted this long four months ago). It means that I want to treat myself better, so I eat better. Only, this way, it takes less effort.

Hey, did I ever tell you guys I used to smoke? For, like, ten years even. One day, suddenly, I didn’t need them anymore. I didn’t even WANT them anymore. It was like a switch went off in my brain, okay, click, we’re done with that.

(Yes I know how impossibly lucky I was for that to happen. I have absolutely no advice to people who want to quit smoking. “How’d you do it, Sarah?” they ask. “Oh, you know; magic,” I say.)

The point of that rambling, unnecessarily long story being that I think a switch is going off in my brain again. There’s been a significant shift in how I see these things lately. And maybe it’s temporary, and maybe smokey head monster will return with a vengeance, but for right now I’m just enjoying his absence.

In celebration, I ate a clementine at breakfast today, so that your breakfast-smileyface has a nose.

Also, I managed to put Persona 3 PSP down long enough this weekend to draw a picture of Persona 3 PSP, and now it is the banner on the lovely and insightful Leigh Alexander’s site. Do you like video games as much as I do? Even if you just said “no,” you should check her out.