Stir Fried Rice and Advance Directives

"If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?"
Chuck Palahniuk

If I were nominated to serve on the Supreme Court, Congress probably wouldn’t approve me. I hasten to add that it’s not what you’re thinking: i.e. because my dues to the California Bar Association are almost ten years overdue. It’s the other criminal activity I have engaged in during the course of my lightly checkered past. Let’s face it, who hasn’t at one time or another committed an illegal act like, say, failing to return library books on time.

I was reminded that today when I went to make pork fried rice to use up the leftover pork shoulder roast. My favorite Chinese food cookbook is “Victor Sen Yung’s Great Wok Cookbook”. You might know this author as “Hop Sing, the Chinese cook on the ‘Bonanza’ TV series”. My copy of this 1974 edition was due at the Department of Public Libraries, Montgomery County, Maryland, Silver Spring a while back. Specifically: 2/14/75.

In my defense, I was moving to San Diego then, and plus the book is really good, notwithstanding that I didn’t particularly care for Bonanza and the homoerotic overtones of all those guys riding horses; or that I envied Little Joe’s perfect frosted hair. Perhaps not so strangely, he’s (Victor, not Little Joe) never steered me wrong, or should I say, “stirred” me wrong, particularly when making fried rice.

Which isn’t a terribly smooth segue to the topic of today’s post: posting about stuff besides gardening. In fact, it’s no segue at all: from stir fried rice to blogging -- unless you want to consider the existential similarity that when either are good, they are very very good, and when they are bad they are inedible, or illiterate, or both.

Truman Capote famously distinguished between what he called writing and what he called typing. I am not so discriminating, I carelessly type my outrage du jour or whatever I’m inspired to write by what I happen to be reading. I submit that sometimes typing is the best way to vent, particularly when you have, over the years, had your own personal spell-check learn all manner of profanities, thus preventing it from whinging about their prolific use.

But back to posting. I make no apologies. My garden blog has, much like my life, overflowed the tidy stack of garden-oid topics like a stack of 2011 financial stuff being assembled for the tax lady that I just knocked over this afternoon. Like this once tidy stack, like my blog, now spills all over the floor with posts about train rides, fried rice, lethally incompetent bureaucrats, and the therapeutic benefits of posting the accumulating evidence that there must be some conspiracy that is making me feel old, sore, tired and in need of updating my advance directive.

Which brings me back to the other part of the title of this post: Advance Directives, updating. After due consideration, I’d like mine to depart from the state-approved form into a more creative writing exercise. I’m still polishing my customized AD but here’s what I’ve got so far:

In the event that one – no make that two – or more of the following conditions are manifested in my behavior:
a) Drooling even when sober;
b) Wearing diapers someone else has to change;
c) Letting my once excellent personal hygiene practices slide like congealing gravy down a volcano of mashed potatoes on a chipped dinner plate;
d) Become just another tedious old lady whose spittle-punctuated rants involve rage at inanimate objects that piss me off;
e) I happen to wake up one morning as a different person and cease to be the devoted, compassionate and generous friend/relative/sister/favorite aunt who you all know and love:

I hereby authorize my authorized representative to respectfully hold a pillow against my face so I can “Say goodnight to Mr. Pillow”, subject however, to the following:

In the event that said authorized representative determines that greater comedic value can be realized thereby, authorized representative is hereby authorized instead to dress me like a Franciscan nun and write with a magic marker on my pristine white over starched bib: This is what happens if you don’t make the Nine First Fridays, or you have sex before marriage; and prop me in a folding chair along the path to the parking lot after Mass. (For the record, I must have made 8/9 of dozens of First Fridays and effort should count here).

Notwithstanding the foregoing however, and subject to all the other provisions of this advance directive without regard to the degree said provisions may be found inconsistent or simply contradictory, please change my diaper sometimes.

(Finally, imagine you were trying to set a record for keywords or labels for a post that were extremely unlikely to be seen in each others' company. If you were, I just did.)