Once upon a time, I was a Girl Scout. I wasn’t very good at it. That is, I did the arts and crafts and participated in events but I was taught not to talk to strangers so the notion of approaching people to sell Girl Scout cookies to them was contrary to all that I’d learned. My parents furthermore detested door-to-door salesmen, so why would I wish to become that myself? In my eyes, the Boy Scouts had WAY more fun. They went camping and all sorts of neat outdoor activities while the Girl Scouts did things like make Christmas ornaments with popsicle sticks and yarn and sew and sell cookies.

From an early age I called bullshit on gender stereotyping by mixing up the mannerisms and activities generally associated with either. I played outdoors, played video games, and defended kids who were bullied. I had pierced ears with gold star earrings which I’d carefully selected (it was that or hearts) and would run around in a dress even as I explored the empty tree-filled area behind the park. I had both "boy toys" and "girl toys" and would help my mother in the kitchen as much as I'd run around my dad's workshop and build things.

After hitting puberty, for a time I wore a mix of boys’ and girls’ clothing before my sister convinced me that I was pretty and should dress in things that accented it rather than shrouded it. I took up playing D&D, reading comics and manga and continued playing video games. At some point in my tweens I became obsessed with learning about wilderness survival and found that I had way more male friends than other girls seemed to.

In adulthood, it surprises me when people are taken aback by the things I’m interested in. I suppose that it shouldn’t be news. Despite the types of shifts which have occurred within our society, people innately feel the need to categorize. It also happens with other facts about me such as being an artist or a vegetarian.

This afternoon, someone in the office who has known me for about 8 years explained my owning and using an espresso machine to make lattes (rather than drinking the drip coffee in the communal coffee pot) by telling the visitor that I’m vegetarian.

How in the hell does that even make sense?

It was actually amazingly funny to me and I had to stifle a giggle. To her, I must be a pod from an alien world. That’s pretty awesome, and it makes for a catchy name: Jalapod.

In fact, that's what I'd call my band: Jalapod and the Stereo Types.

Continuing yesterday's tangent about my tendency to deconstruct everything, I felt that I should mention a particularly practical application for it.

I like cooking. In particular I enjoy tweaking existing recipes as well as creating originals. When I eat something that was prepared by someone else where I can’t just ask for the recipe – something from a restaurant or grocery store – I automatically begin my usual process of breaking it down into ingredients. When I get something from the grocery store this is very easy, as of course all the ingredients are listed on the package. Still, the biggest question for me about restaurant food is the spice mixture and proportioning. Once I sort out at least the bulk of the ingredients, I then theorize the manner of preparation and then set about recreating the dish at home. My intention isn’t to straight copy the original’s flavor, however, but to make it into my own thing and tailor it more to my specific preferences.

Now, that’s incredibly useful. But it also comes with a funny quirk: I also tend to eat base ingredients by themselves. While this sounds pretty normal insofar as main ingredients are concerned (veggies, fruits, grains etc), when you get to all the little additives that gets pretty weird.

Allow me to state that I don’t do this all the time. It tends to be a brief spat of taste-testing, where I get a taste for the particular thing and eat it a few times, generally in small quantity, before moving on with life. I don’t even pantomime that this is a typical behavior, and I find it pretty funny particularly when I mention it to other people and witness their freaked out reaction.

Fun examples of this oddity:

• Protein powder (as a vegetarian fitness instructor I have a variety of smoothies and shakes that I toss protein into)
• Spices (particularly smoked paprika, which is one of my favorites)
• Dry goods (ex: wheat germ, rolled oats, chia seeds, hemp seeds, etc which are added to recipes but not eaten on their own)
• Butter 

That last one happens only once in a great while and not in any great quantity, but much to my parents’ befuddlement I would literally eat butter out of the tub when I was a small child. I also highly coveted single-serving creamers and would drink them. I was apparently born this way. The good news is that insofar as deconstructing and reconstructing recipes is concerned, because I know the taste of the base ingredients so well it makes identification considerably easier.

One of my unique personality traits is a persistent tendency to deconstruct everything systematically. This is something that I have done for as long as I can remember, much to the chagrin of my mother (paragon of all knowledge and thus the beacon to which I would flock with questions). One analysis was mentioned previously in the Shoe Flies blurb. Another I can recall happened when I watched the first live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie in the theater at age 8. When Michaelangelo handed the money to the pizza delivery guy, I immediately turned to my mother.

“Mom, where did he get that money? It’s paper money, so it couldn’t have been in the sewer because it looked fresh. They don’t know April yet.”

I believe at this point she admitted that she didn’t know, and thus I pressed further.

“They can’t have jobs because they’re turtles. Did they steal the money from those guys they beat up earlier? That’s the only place they could have gotten it from. If they DID steal it, they’re not very good role models!”

My mother told me that it was a movie and I wasn’t supposed to think about that. That I needed to just let it go. However, I puzzled over it further all the same and never did reach any better conclusions aside from their having stolen it. If after all they found the money by chance in an alley or somesuch, they couldn’t have a reliable income that way, which means they couldn’t have eaten pizza as much as they did (or anything else for that matter unless it was discarded in the trash, or again they stole it).

There are other ways in which this quirk of mine has manifested over the years. More on that later. For now, all you need to know is that Shoe Flies make no sense and the Turtles are unsavory thieves.