Gavi, Italy

Hi.  My name is.  What?  My name is.  Who?  My name is.

Hi, I’m braindead.  Completely useless.  No functiona.

For the past two weeks, I haven’t been able to think thoughts.  Or hold ‘em in my head.  Or string ‘em together to make coherent sentences.  I can’t keep up with conversation; I can’t concentrate; but I CAN finally empathize with basic white b*tches when they say they ‘literally can’t even’.  Because I can’t.  I just CAN’T.  Don’t ask me to can because I can’t.

literally

The reason I can’t breathe or perform my duties as an adult human female (let’s be honest – I never cross my legs when in a seated position and will therefore never find a man, according to my mother) is because I can’t stop eating.  Food is clogging my brain.  Pizza, pasta, homemade focaccia – you name it, I’ve eaten it shoveled it into my mouth.  Can’t stop, won’t stop.  Serving sizes are subjective, right?

Working on another vineyard, living with an Italian family IN Italy, I’m incapable of saying ‘no’ to any offer of food or drink – morning, noon or night.  Big plates of spaghetti carbonara, spaghetti with meat sauce, spaghetti with mussels, penne with gorgonzola, tortellini with pesto, tortellini with speck, tortellini with shrooms, tortellini in broth.  I’m on a MISSION to eat Italy out of its Italian food, one heaping spoonful at a time.

When do you get to that point where enough is enough?

with parmesan reggiano, the correct answer is never

Let’s call it research italiano.  How will I know what I like BEST if I don’t try everything?  (Julie Andrews did the exact same thing in the ‘50s.  How else do you think she compiled her infamous ‘favorite things’ list?  Those schnitzel with noodles didn’t eat themselves……)  I mean, sure, in a perfect world I’d be one of those women who only eats until she’s full and says ‘no thank you’ to that third helping of beef Milanese, but I’m just too curious.  What if that third round Milanese is the BEST Milanese?  That’s why people call me whiskers.  Cuz I’m curious.  Like a cat.

if the moon were made of mortadella, wouldya eat it?  i sure would.

So what if my blood-antipasti content is 0.30 and my head looks like a beach ball on a spike?  I’m working my way through the pasta shape dictionary from holiday ribbons and bassinets all the way up to Christopher Columbus’s brimless hat and the Star Trek Enterprise.  It doesn’t matter what it looks like or how it’s stuffed; life comes in many shapes and sizes and you shouldn’t say no to life.

Next week, I’ll tell you all about my assignment in Northern Italy……… tidying grapevines and twisting them around perfectly-spaced metal rods……… living with a wacky yet lovable Italian family……… eating huge plates of pasta with cream sauce at 11pm right before bed……… drinking house red wine that was barreled in the basement (and scraped from the bottom of the barrel so it was extra tannic and extra strong)……… and gallivanting all over Northern Italy on the weekends (Milan… Genoa… Portofino… Santa Margherita… Cinque Terre… Bologna… Venice… Parma) to, you know, conduct more research.

For now, please bear with me while my body digests.  I ate an entire wheel of cheese earlier today and I’m having trouble breathing.

Besides watching the six-part Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country (holy shit, crazy pants), I didn’t have the cognitive capacity to do much else.  I triiiiiiied my best to follow conversations but I’d end up daydreaming and wandering off to my happy place.  A typical dinner table conversation, from MY perspective, would go something like this:

• ‘This girl trying to go to fraternity.’
• ‘She had cancer so she left fraternity.  Six month later, she came back but no one invite her.  No one invite her back!’
• ‘Twenty year later, conductor say to other women why they no invite her?  Why they no invite her back?  No one gave true.’
• ‘One was a judge!’
• ‘And men put barrel of gasoline on boat but boat sank and they didn’t know how to SWIM!’
• ‘Stranded on i-lond for one day.’
• ‘Entire suitcase of chickens!  In airport!’
• ‘Chickens dead, not skinned.’
• Knees weak.  Arms are heavy.  There’s vomit on his sweater already.  Mom’s spaghetti.  Mmmm spaghetti.
• This spaghetti is wooooooonderful.
• What is that……… cheese sauce?  Ugh.
• It’s so easy to twirl on my fork.  Just twirl and eat.  Twirl and eat.  Twirllllll and eat.  I could do this all day!
• How did the Renaissance happen?
• I get the whole ‘rebirth’ part (because I could climb on the table right now and rebirth this risotto…) but how did ANY Italian get ANY work done, let alone kick off a cultural revival the likes of which has never been seen??
• Architecture?  Literature?  Poetry?  Philosophy?  How’d they do it?  No, I’m asking.
• How’d they create so many beautiful things after seven-course pasta dinners?  I’m over here wishing I knew Lamaze techniques……… while the ninja turtles painted the town red (and blue and gold and green).
• You want a poem?  I’ll give you a poem.
• Roses are red, violets are blue, this t-shirt’s gettin’ tight, it’s time to switcheroo.
• If I keep eating like this, what’s the next thing to go after brain function?  Motor skills?
• I think I can……… wait……… wait a minute……… yep.  I can definitely hear myself getting fatter.
• I love when people say san-FRAN-cisco.
• I ALSO love this whole automatic blinking feature of my body. Thank God it’s on autopilot, otherwise I’d be one of those uber creepy Kewpie dolls where the eyelids open & close at random like miniature golf obstacles.
• Does anyone miniature golf anymore?
• Or is that not a thing?
• I wonder if Par-King’s still open in Lincolnshire……
• What the heck is ‘the brown stuff’?  Laura said we’re eating chicken liver, heart, and ‘the brown stuff’?  Must.  Google.  That.  Later.
• Oh my God, there’s tiramisu.

And so on and so forth.

Between the dinner table…… and the lunch table…… and working in the fields…… and weekend holidays…… there was a LOT of time to daydream.  A lot of time to wonder what was the DEAL with European lattes being served in handle-less glassware too hot to touch?  Or why women in those electric razor commercials always demo the product by shaving their forearms and beard?  (B*tch!  Just shave your pits!)

Or IF Jodie Foster really didn’t want Buffalo Bill to find her (while she inched along in HIS home, mind you), then why was she BREATHING SO LOUDLY THAT THE NEIGHBORS COULD HEAR?  Clarice.  Honey.  I know it’s pitch dark and super scary and you don’t want to end up at the bottom of a pit, with nothing but a bottle ‘a Jergens, but come ON.  Hold your nose or cover your mouth or SOMEthing.  Jesus.

All that downtime meant I could ALSO finish Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (which I’ve been savoring, piece by piece, reading and rereading for the past four months).  Sitting at a charming riverside café…… eating my ham & cheese toastie, listening to the river…… turning Hesse’s concept of ‘perpetual becoming’ over and over in my head…… taken with the idea that you are always yourself but, in every moment, you have the opportunity to become something else.  Someone you wish to be.  Always the same and yet perpetually new.  The constancy and dependability of change.  Ugh, I love it.  Needless to say, I cried all over my ham & cheese toastie that day and had a lovely afternoon.

Anywho, yeah, Operation: Never Leave a Carb Behind was a smashing success.  One more week of this bucatini binge and Macy’s might call me up to invite me to their Thanksgiving Day parade.  (As a balloon…… if that wasn’t clear.)

Honestly…… it’s a wonder I’m still alive and my body hasn’t shut down in protest.  I mean, I’m following my Dad’s version of the John Travolta diet so what else do you want from me?

The John Travolta diet is very simple – you eat HALF of whatever’s on your plate.

My Dad’s remixed version of the John Travolta diet is also very simple – you wait until you have two bites left on your plate and then you only eat ONE of those bites.  Just one.  Exactly half.  Oh!  And remember to say ‘John Travolta’ really loudly when you take that last bite so everyone knows you’re on a diet.  [You should see results in 6-8 months or never.  John Travolta.]

I’ll catch you cool cats next week (with a better update).  In the meantime, excuse me while I glue my mouth shut and run around the WHAT?  Did you just say this local nutella is better than actual nutella?  And it’s FORTY-FIVE percent hazelnut?  Well, what are you WAITING for!?  Throw it in the cart already……… it’s not like we’re putting it back.