First of all, my tastebuds are all fucked up again. (No, thank you, progesterone!) For days now all drinks coming out of my fridge have tasted funny – milk, water, pink lemonade. And those are our only three options in this house, so it’s making me a little bit cranky. I still don’t know if there’s some smell that’s permeating everything or if I’m just off – it might be a little of both, the milk tasted funny soon as I opened the carton. (But not funny-bad, just funny-off… milk does this to me every other month, it’s very irritating.) And don’t even get me started on the ice cubes, they make me want to gag.

I have a funny relationship with food. It’s very love/hate, very extremes. If I love something I want to eat a lot of it. But in the past that “love” column has been very, very small. There’s a reason I am 5’6″ and weighed only 105lbs soaking wet going into college. Food and me just weren’t best buds. (Okay, and the depression really hurt, too.) It was mostly processed crap, too, like most teenagers.

I also have many food rules. Like milk. Everyone knows my thing with milk. There are a lot of foods that I HAVE to eat with a glass of milk or I can’t eat it – among them chocolate and mushroom soup. I have been slowly trying to transition myself over to drinking water with all my meals, but there are just some things I can’t budge on. When I cut milk completely out of my diet I didn’t eat those foods at all.

I don’t like foods mixing. Everyone says “well it all ends up in the same place anyways.” Yes – but that’s not where my taste buds are, thanks. I like to taste each thing individually. I also like to eat just one thing at a time, again so I’m tasting one thing at a time. My perfect meal is when they bring it out in small courses, rather than having everything together on the plate. It makes me a little anxious, trying to decide what is most worth eating first, hot, and what will wait. Too much pressure.

My tastes are very, very sensitive. When someone says, “This has a little kick to it,” to me it means “will light my tongue on fire.” If someone says, “I can barely taste it,” it means it’s too much for me. I eat what other people call bland food. But to me it’s full of taste. Any more and it’s just too much. My husband, on the other hand, adds hot sauce to authentic southern jumbalaya. (I won’t get into the time he mixed his ketchup with hot sauce and didn’t tell me. That was just WRONG.)

Oh, and I have to have sufficient light to eat. And a table of some sort. Den oftentimes turns down the lights really low when we’re eating dinner in front of the TV and I freak out at him and tell him to turn it back on, I can’t SEE. At picnics I have been known to wander helplessly around with a full plate of food because there’s no place to sit. I can’t eat standing up. I just can’t.

As time goes on I find myself expanding, but not in the way I always thought I would. I figured it just wouldn’t be as important, that you eat with less discrimination, that my “issues” would fade – but that’s not the case at all for me. I still am very picky, but there are more foods that I would classify that I “love.” I discovered that I love cucumber, and mushrooms, and shrimp, and zucchini. Den and I like to eat out – and I definitely have become unhappy with the typical fast food junk. I love going out for a good meal – the kind with fresh ingredients, new tastes, small portions. I don’t go out to stuff myself, I go out to experience food in ways that I don’t know how to cook it. I want to walk away thinking, “Wow, that was amazing!” The best meal I ever had was a shared three-course meal that cost around $150, at the MGM in Las Vegas. It was beyond fantastic.

But even despite my apparently high-end tastes, I sit here and marvel at how good a tomato sandwich can taste with nothing more than some salt and miracle whip. Most of what I eat is so very simple, and yet I feel like I’m not missing out anything.