A fun perk of needing total control and having endometriosis (which renders control utterly useless) is that I bring almost everything in my bag—my extensive Advil collection wilts from a lack of corporate sponsorship—except snacks, mainly because my favorite snack isn’t portable, at least not if you want it intact. Naturally, I’m talking about rice cakes.
Rice cakes combine one of my favorite things (rice) with a reminder that even though I believe I can shut down chaos if I can make the right decision (peanut vs. pistachio butter?), life still spirals into a joke, a trail of puffed rice grains, truant, on your kitchen floor.
This brings me to the ultimate point of a rice cake: it is the stress snack that stresses you back. When I’m stressed, I want something with crunch, what some food magazines like to describe as ‘toothsome’ and which I prefer to think of as “NONE OF US GETS OUT OF THIS ALIVE; LET ME HAVE MY MOMENT.” I mistake anger for purpose, a substitute that helps me glide across ice-coated panic.
It takes a certain kind of snack to live up to this situation. Toast doesn’t make the cut—it’s too aligned with comfort, and I do not want to be fucking comfortable, I want to pop out my eyes and replace them with Saturn’s moons. Nuts are too precarious: you legitimately could crack a tooth on one. And protein bars? Why? Stress isn’t the U.S. government: it doesn’t care about macronutrients climbing on a pyramid.
So: a rice cake. But not just any rice cake will do: you want the Lundberg rice cakes, not its sad Quaker Oats cousins, which go gummy from shame (they have no crunch capacity). You also want to buy them from a grocery store, as I learned when I bought two packs online. I repeat: do not buy rice cakes online.
In Jessi Jezewka Stevens’ novel The Visitors, an unlikely thing visits, then takes up residence, in the narrator’s apartment. Prone to eloquent, often pretentious monologues about American electric grids, with the studied air of somebody who is self-taught and won’t shut up about it, because it didn’t have to go to MIT like every other normal motherfucker, no; it was special, it was too smart to be stupid—this visitor is, as it should be, a gnome.
Stress feels a lot like this visitor; but in fairness, so do most emotions, especially the unwanted ones. (A wanted emotion: does it exist? Because I don’t believe happiness is an emotion. It’s an experience.) C, the narrator of The Visitors, is quite literally minding her own business—a one-hit wonder artist, she owns a rapidly deteriorating art supply store—when the gnome appears.
Knowing that you’re stressed isn’t, on the face of it, a cure for the stress, much the way that having a diagnosis does not render recovery any swifter, or gentler. “I DECLARE BANKRUPTCY!” Michael Scott shouts on The Office, and the U.S. government doesn’t even sneeze. (Bless you.)
During my senior year of college, while I was writing my thesis, I got very little sleep. I started staying up until three in the morning, watching high-octane love triangles shout and make out. Dawson’s Creek: Pacey and Joey and Dawson. Scandal: Fitz and Olivia and Jake. Grey’s Anatomy: Meredith and Derek and Derek’s hair. Near the April deadline for my thesis, I came home late from a writing session and crawled on the kitchen floor, watched by one of my roommates, as I crooned to the cabinets about yogurt.
I told myself what I was doing—writing, very much out of character, about trauma and recovery narratives—would heal everything that had happened in my family, both for me and for them. And I believed that. I genuinely believed it. Did I ask you for attention, Emily Haines sings in “Twilight Galaxy,” when affection is what I need?
There is a lot I can say about that time in my life, but it’s probably best explained by the fact that even though I proofread my final thesis draft five times before submitting it, I still spelled “police” as “polite,” in a paragraph about police brutality. It’s the kind of mistake that Derek would make, then blame his deep-conditioning hair mask instead.
Since this summer, I’ve spent a few hours nearly every weekend at a specific bookstore in DC; it’s one of my favorite places in the city, a spot where I can go regardless of whether my brain’s in a panic, as it was last weekend, or on vacation and therefore at ease with itself, and feel tethered, in some small way, to the world. I feel more real there, is what I’m trying to say.
It turns out I’m not the only one, either: as I’ve discovered, a few dogs also have a honing device that leads them to the store. Leo and his younger brother Sammy (six months old!) tore in on Saturday, followed by an apologetic woman who asked if they had dog treats. “Leo knows everywhere in the city where he can get snacks,” she explained. “He remembers.”
Wandering into the curtain that divides the store from its back room, Sammy tangled himself in burlap arms. Both Sammy and Leo are goldendoodles; Sammy, with paws the size of bloated baseballs. When he stood up on his back legs, he reached about ¾ of my height—just shy of four feet.
In her poem “Wild Geese,” Mary Oliver writes of the gentleness that can follow acceptance:
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Sometimes I wonder how much of my stress originates from denial: denial of my wants and needs and desires: denial that they exist, denial that I am a person, and therefore somebody who can have ‘those things,’ as I call them, as if they were humiliations rather than human—and that’s because, often, that’s how they feel for me.
Compare that with most dogs, who know what they want and are unapologetic about it. (See biscuit, Leo’s quest.). I’m not saying that their behavior is something we should emulate —self-restraint isn’t always repressive; at its best, it can save a life—but that in their obvious, wagging joy, I find a kind of sentimental courage.
Of course, it’s easier to write than to feel, let alone act on (at least for me). And the disjunction between an impulse and its execution, the ease with which they can be yoked together or forced apart? That’s a whole terrain of wilderness. To navigate it, you could do a lot worse than Yogi Berra’s advice: "When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
Suggested Rice Cake Toppings:
Greek yogurt with za’atar (I love Z&Z’s, which is a local family-owned company and bakery in Rockville) and flakes of Maldon salt; to make vegan, use your favorite non-dairy yogurt!
Smashed avocado with lemon juice and chili flakes and nutritional yeast
Peanut butter and cinnamon and dates (barhi dates are caramel)
Peanut butter with cilantro and Sircha
Big Spoon Roasters’s chocolate sea salt almond butter
Dastony’s pistachio butter (if you want to massively splurge)
Thoughts & feelings!
What’s your small good thing of the week?
Let Me Tell You About Gidget
My phone likes to remind me that I a) take too many photos of a cat and b) take too many blurry photos of said cat. Do you want to clean up your phone? it asks, but really insults. Why would I want to do that? What kind of sick algorithm would have me delete THIS?
Stress originating from denial — had not thought about it that way, but yes. Also hard agree that crunchy/splattery/messy things make the best stress snacks. (Have only had inferior Quaker rice cakes, gotta fix that.)