The Megastore recommends.

gross.

1. A double-triple-quadruple schedule. It's true, I have a day by day text doc that I keep a running
'gotta do' list; a Word doc that I have devised to be a calendar of the last five weeks of the semester (I always do this); the calendar in Outlook that is, like, a really mean and exacting god; and various Post Its that tell me the status of discrete projects (like my grading--that is a really, really, really full Post It).

This is absurd. But somehow, it makes me feel slightly more on top of my game. My game is Crush the Captain, and it would be a terrifying game if I were actually Captain of my, you know, LIFE.

I love you so much, V.

2. Vegetables. Oh vegetables! You are soulful, mute magic. When I am feeling tired and worn out and beset and begrudging, a dinner made principally of you will save me from nearly everything. Thank you for your variousness. Thank you for being from Brussels and also from my freezer, in the form of not very recent corn. With rice and sautéed mushrooms, I felt like my home was the best place, and my dinner table the best place in my home. Vegetables, you complete me.

like a knife with superior engineering.

3. A well-attuned tool. I have recently pulled my mandoline out from its tidy cupboard, the better to make very thinly sliced carrots and peppers and fennel for a salad. The people, the mandoline is superb. The mandoline has totally upped my salad game. Thinly sliced everything makes a salad feel sexy and thrilling. I'm so glad I bought my mandoline however many years ago, because now that I have rediscovered it, and I'm eating all the thrilling salads, I kind of feel like a genius prognosticator of this precise moment, when my brain realized that, in the future, I would be in a condition that requires salad, suave, shaved salads,
and would therefore require the proper tool to make them.

poor burden-head.

4. Sleep. Not that I'm getting any or anything.













> POEM. <