1. Feeling graceful. I took ballet when I was little and was on a modern dance team in middle school, so I think I can dance… but I can’t walk through doors. Still, I like to feel fluid.

2. Books on animals. Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation is a GREAT one.

3. I went to Amazon.com to look up a link for that book just now, and all of my product recommendations were for dry shampoos. I wanted to try one but I made my own instead, out of regular old cornstarch. It works just fine and I’m lookin’ clean.

4. Speaking of products… I’m getting into perfume samples again. I received a sample of Pink Sugar and actually really liked it a lot. Then I bought and ate some pink cotton candy and really liked that, too.

5. And lastly, I’m really grateful for search functions. On computers, in browsers, I’m always looking for something.

Here’s a fun game: it’s called Totem Destroyer and it’s a bit like Jenga. You have to remove a certain amount of blocks from funky, bouncy towers without letting the little golden idol fall onto the ground. Chris and I took turns playing, because we are kids who learned how to share. Try it!

Recently I was thinking about flowers, and how some orchids have prominent petals that actually match the insects who pollinate them. These “landing pad” petals are arranged on the bottom of the flower so that the pollinator, a bee maybe, will land there and nowhere else. He’ll rub his nubbly back against the inside of the orchid’s column, and carry its pollen out into the world.

What if people were like that? Not so much with the mating, but with the signal that comes before it. It’s more than good hair and hard muscles—it’s something that lasts longer and represents a relationship that works. I thought about couples who grow old together, whose personalities match so perfectly: a true, natural love, like insects and the flowers who support them. What would your petal look like for your partner?

Feeling misty about love in the world, I started reading an article online about a type of orchid that looks like, as well as smells like, a female wasp—thus tricking numerous male wasps into acts of fruitless reproduction. These flowers are so much like the real thing that the males will waste their sperm on them (which, ew, the flowers don’t have a particular use for), leaving less available to the real lady wasps! Why would the orchids do this?

So much for true, natural love. These flowers are as self-destructive as reality show contestants.

It is at the edge of a petal that love waits.

William Carlos Williams

After inadvertently Master Cleansing myself, here are the few foods I’ve been finding delicious lately:

1. Saltine crackers.

2. Coffee ice cream.

3. Plain bagels.

4. Pink lemonade Emergen-C packets.

5. Plain whole grain bread.

Chris and I are of course very dear to each other, but nothing has tied the two of us more closely together than our recently shared experience in food poisoning.

I wrote the above with a still-gurgling stomach, but after yet another nap I feel much better. Chris has seen me through various illnesses, like colds and cramps and hangovers, but I have never ONCE seen him sick in the 5+ years I’ve known him. It was a little scary, and that’s why we think it was food poisoning and not just your typical stomach virus, which surely wouldn’t have affected Chris at all. Seriously—he’ll sniffle once on a Tuesday, say, and then I’ll be full-blown sick with the flu on Wednesday, all because of him. And can two people be hit with a stomach bug at the exact same time? Ugh. I can’t wait to not have to share a bathroom.

We decided to throw away most of the food we’d eaten Monday night, even though we’re both pretty sure it was the days-old chicken we’d finished off. That much should be obvious… but the iceberg lettuce gave us pause, too, since it was brand new in a bag and I’ve done enough reading on the web now to be afraid of any vegetable. Either way, I’m pretty happy with the new liquid diet I’ve got going on.

My number one favorite thing right now is the discovery of a cure for the tension headaches that have been plaguing me lately: apple juice. I don’t know why it works but it was a miraculous accident of a discovery because I’d almost bought grapefruit juice at the store instead. I even wrote on Twitter about it, which is where I write all of my deeper thoughts.

Here are the rest of the good things for this week:

1. Drinking more water.

2. Eating more fruit.

3. Vintage Valentines.

4. New shoes.

5. Cross-multiplication.

Apple blossom from Clipart ETC.

1. Being woken up by beautifully singing birds. Come on, springtime!

2. Blueberry tea.

3. Celery green.

4. Chris has a face he makes sometimes that I like to call his “scared baby bunny” face. Usually it’s when I’m looming over him at his desk, preparing to give him a clingy hug.

5. Soothing strained eyes with the backs of metal spoons fresh from the freezer. If eyes are puffy and/or red from crying or allergies or whatever, the spoons will help that, too.