MIXED FEELINGS

Michael's grandmother died yesterday. I have such mixed feelings about this.

When Michael and I were married, his grandmother and I were very close. She told me that she thought of me as a granddaughter, and I definitely thought of her as a grandmother, and told her as much.

After Michael and I divorced, I called her one day, asking for advice. I felt like...well, after my father died I felt like I didn't have anyone left in my life who had any life experience. Someone who could tell me things like how you cope with living for fifty years with your friends dying. It seemed like someone older would know that kind of thing, and be able to help me figure it out. So this one day when I was trying to figure out whether or not to move across the country, I called her to ask for her advice.

I spoke to her on the telephone, and said, "Well, I just wanted to ask your advice."

She said, "Why, of course, love, you can always call me and ask for advice. Just not money."

I had never asked anyone in Michael's family for financial help, never mentioned money in any context. I was so shocked and offended by this, that I never spoke to her again. That was about four years ago.

And now she's died.

I remember when her husband lay dying, that Michael and I were the only two who cared about more than the money he would leave people. She commented on this at the time, and said that she appreciated it. And now I wonder about her. I wonder who was there as she lay dying. I wonder where she's gone. I wonder if she had regrets for the life she lived, or if she was happy to finally rest. I wonder if she believed the people around her cared, or if she saw in them only vultures, waiting for a final paycheck.

Michael loved her. Michael is by far the purest soul I have ever met. I wonder if she knew that there was one person in her life who loved her out of that pure a heart.

The last time I visited Michael, I said something to him about Matthew, about how he's been pretty cruel to me generally, and how I still believe that people can change. He turned to me and said, "I did." I had forgotten. He was different when we met, but that was so long ago. I don't remember if he was vastly different or what--it was that long ago. But even since we split up, he's changed again.

I laughed and said, "So basically, it's all your fault, because you've set me up with *expectations.*"

I knew I could find a way to blame this all on someone else.

TIRED OF LOOKING FOR WORK

You don't even want to know how tired I am of applying for jobs. I don't see why someone doesn't just want to pay me £60,000/year for just me being me. It seems outrageous.

Anyway, I wish I had something interesting to say here, but honestly, all I can really say is that I have no money and am leading a very frugal life, so I don't do anything terribly interesting. I ride the train, and laugh at the poor grammar on the signs in the Internet Cafe (example: There is a sign over the electrical outlet next to me that says
"Please customers are not allowed to used these main socket." I'm not sure what that means.). It's really that sad.

Peter must have been traumatized by the woman who stayed in my room while I was gone, because he is exceedingly on his very best behavior. He is being *really nice*. When he stays up late and gets up early and makes loads of noise, he apologises profusely. He wants to make me dinner in the near future. It's quite odd.

Hmm.

There are terrorist threats over here, of course, pretty constantly. I'm not all that worried about it. I'll either get blown up spectacularly, or I won't. I also might get hit by a car, contract a deadly disease, or have a meteor fall from the sky and land on my head. All in all, I'm not terribly concerned, although I have given my family specific information about where I spend my time, so that if something odd should happen, they at least know whether or not to worry.

I also explained to them this silly thing about reading a map of London, so I may as well write that here as well.

Mind you, I can read a map. I'm quite good at it. I have an excellent sense of direction, rarely get lost, and can almost always find my way back to someplace I've been before. I don't tend to lose my car, although my car keys are a different story entirely, no, really, I mean it, it's a totally different thing.

But the map here comes in this book called the A to Z, and I get teased for calling that last letter a "zee." At any rate, this sounds like a simple enough thing, but this city is bloody huge, and if you know that you're on page 84, for example, and someone gives you an address that's on page 97, you still have no bloody clue how to get from page 84 to 97, and everyone here seems to know, and they think you're a philistine if you feel like looking at page 97 still gives you no additional information about how to find whatever place it is that you're trying to get to.

They won't explain it to you, so I will.

The thing is that in addition to the street map, you need a tube map. The tube map has the entire city on one page. Then you look at the A to Z, and on every page there will be at least one tube station, clearly marked with the little red-circle-and-blue-line thing that we know and love to associate with the London Underground. It will tell you what tube station such-and-such address is near, then you look at your little tube map, and say, hey! I'm near the Charing Cross tube station, and I'm trying to get to the Elephant and Castle tube station, and I can actually tell where that is!

Everyone does this, apparently, but they don't think to explain it to you if you happen to be, oh, say, a clueless American.

All right. Other vital information for you that nobody will explain:

The butter here is much denser than butter in the US. For a recipe, you should use just barely over half as much as the American recipe requires, and add a tad of water as well.

No ovens have degrees fahrenheit on them. They have gas marks. The conversion is roughly as follows:

Gas Mark	Fahrenheit	Celcius
1/2	250	120/130
1	275	140
2	300	150
3	325	160/170
4	350	180
5	375	190
6	400	200
7	425	220
8	450	230
9	475	240

I still haven't quite figured out how to get sour cream to work in cooking here--theirs is more liquid and less custard-like. It's easy enough if you're cooking cooking, but if you're baking and want, say, a sour cream topping for a New York-style cheesecake, then you're screwed. By the way, don't try using crème fraiche, because it turns sort of buttery when it melts, and you end up having what amounts to a grainy deep-fried cheesecake. It's revolting. Just trust me on this one.

Hmm. You can get Patak curry paste here, which is thankful. Müller yogurt is rather good, as is Lurpak butter. You can also get Hellman's/Best Foods Mayonnaise, so no worries on that count. It's a bit difficult to find flour that isn't self-raising, and the brown sugar is a little off, so I recommend getting half light brown, half dark brown, and using both when cooking.

The beef is actually fine, it's just that nobody seems to know how to cook it. For a while I thought that maybe the beef itself was different, but no, not really. Just a lot of people who haven't a clue how to cook it.

I'm trying to think of other cooking-related hazards I've encountered, but other than the Vanilla Debacle, that's all I can think of at the moment. When you do finally find vanilla, odds are high they've done something weird to it so you need to use 1 1/2 times as much as you usually do to get it to taste properly.

By the way, on the train yesterday, I saw seven foxes on my way in! Seven! Er, I don't mean they were on the train, I actually spotted them from the train windows. Foxes are just about the cutest things ever, though. There's all kinds of Legislative War going on over the tradition of fox hunting, which many people see as cruelty to animals. I'm torn, of course, because foxes are, as I mentioned, quite cute, but then I can see that they probably need some kind of humane control. Hunting them down to be torn apart by dogs, however, doesn't strike me as particularly humane. But then again, I'm American, and I feel weird having any kind of opinion about local political issues.

That being said, nobody here seems to have a problem with forming an opinion about American politics or policies, so I really should feel free to.

They've just passed some kind of pedophilia legislation, which makes it illegal to befriend a child for the purposes of grooming them for sexual exploitation. So, you know, if a pedophile were to buy clothes for a needy kid, that would be against the law.

I guess the thing that bothers me about this is that I know that there are plenty of people out there who just genuinely like kids in a non-freakish kind of a way, and it bothers me that anyone should have to feel afraid to help a child, or make their childhood just a little more nice.

In other news, my sisters are completely freaked out about the fact that I had another fainting spell here. I swear to you, I am really trying to eat enough. The last time in Spokane scared the crap out of me. I could barely function for over a week. I don't ever want to go through anything like that again. The doctor told me that if I don't maintain electrolyte balance and proper blood sugar, that I might not make it to the hospital next time. That scared me, mostly because the whole process is really awful, and one imagines that the process of death would be even more uncomfortable. I am not not not going to end up killing myself because of not eating. Not.

Now all of this writing about cooking has made me hungry, so I'm going to go to the store, purchase some things, and then take the train home and cook something. See? Food. I'm even taking multivitamins, which don't exist over here, but which I had the foresight to pack in my suitcase.

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