Bitter

After a minor crying jag, I popped over to I Can Has Cheezburger, and this was the first thing I saw. It doesn't get much more appropriate than this, boys and girls. It at least provoked a burst of semi-hysterical laughter, so maybe I am not that far gone.

I can't really explain why the crying was going on. It just happened. The Man is at work, and I just feel so frustrated and alone and so angry...and once again, there isn't much of an explanation for the angry part.

Chris wrote this post, and voiced the question, "When will something finally be easy?"

That's totally how I feel. Actually, I don't really ask anymore, I just assume that it's not going to be easy, end of story, Amen, Goodbye, Whatever. In fact, it's probably going to be impossible, and why try?

I wonder if so many things came to me so easily in my youth that this business of starting a family is payback for all the easy stuff I didn't appreciate then.

I know this is unreasonable, but it's there, swirling around in my brain with about two million other things.

I start back to work at my primary job on Monday, and I have a really full schedule. The lab coat is going into the laundry, and then it's back to five days of teaching other people's kids about the planets, about polymers, about burps, about fingerprints, and about the five senses. (You see the "other people's kids?" I really need to stop obsessing about that.)

My favorite sense to talk about is taste. The kids get excited about that, because besides yummy or yucky, taste isn't something they really think about a lot. We discuss that there are different areas on the tongue that taste the different flavors of the foods that you eat. We talk about sweet, salty, sour, and bitter, and how they are all different. I explain that bitter foods are usually the ones that kids don't like, because kids have more tastebuds than adults do, so they are more sensitive to strong flavors than grownups are.

Bitter is a flavor that I have never really gotten behind. Coffee is the example that we use in my class, and coffee is something that I drink with so much sweetener and so much milk that it basically doesn't even count as being coffee anymore.

But bitter seems to be talking over my life, somehow, and I hate it. I hate it. I feel bitter and like I am shriveling up inside. There is no Creme Brulee Coffeemate that I can add to make this better. No amount of foam or pumps of syrup or packets of Splenda is going to fix it.

I also feel sour. Sour, like the lemons that I just can't seem to make lemonade out of anymore. Sour, like milk that has curdled, and is only fit to be poured chunkily stinking down the drain, because it was tainting everything else in the fridge.

When I think of salty, I don't think of pretzels or potato chips. I think of tears.

Maybe all the sweetness is gone?

Maybe I caught my limit, and I can't just run out to the store to get more.

Somehow, my emotional taste buds are all effed up, and I have no clue how to fix them.