Letting out your inner teenager

When I was in my teens I loved making mixtures. I learnt to make fudge in one of my friend's kitchens on a play date, and being a sweet tooth of epic proportions, I memorised the recipe on the spot. The next time I went to her place I learnt how to make butter bricks or as we New Zealanders call it, Hokey Pokey.

I used to brew up these concoctions of almost pure sugar on a regular basis, and when I discovered how to make eggnog and cinnamon toast in year six, I added them to my sweet, gooey comfort-food repertoire.

I found that like raw meringue, raw cookie dough was also wonderful to mix up and consume, and sometimes I'd even stoop as low as guzzling condensed milk, stored in our fridge to make mayonnaise, directly from the tin.

There was nothing finer than coming home after a hard day doing algebra, (or anything that remotely strained my brain at school), making a mixture in a pot and falling in a heap on the couch. I'd balance the pot on a cushion and a tea towel, so I didn't spill anything and spoon whatever mixture I'd concocted into my mouth whist washing trashy daytime soap operas, or occasionally Sesame Street.

There was something immensely comforting about that particular form of what we GenX teenagers called zoning out.

In the mid-eighties the Faulklands crisis raged, and with it I grasped the very real possibility that we could all be annihilated by nuclear war. I had, through my church, become friends with the most unpopular girl in our high school. And on the bus ride home become friends with her worst enemy. My family had moved to Auckland from Masterton, a small farm servicing town in the Wairarapa some 65 kilometres north of the capital, Wellington. In that move we'd gone from my father employing a number of my classmates' parents in his swathe of cleaning, pest control and auto valet businesses to being dirt poor. I watched my mother loose ten kilos during those early months in Auckland due to sheer worry. And I myself navigated my new circumstances and sexually promiscuous group of friends with more than a little trepidation.

I went from a giggly, funny high-achieving kid to a sullen, withdrawn teenager, forsaking almost all of my former hobbies in a matter of months, I think because my parents no longer had the money to fund my former lifestyle and also because it took all the energy I had to deal with the changes inside me and around me.

Zoning out was a comfort in all that turmoil, a defence mechanism. The sugar provided sweetness, in what was an increasingly bitter and complex world. The trashy TV shows and the innocence of Sesame Street diverted my mind from my own and the world's problems. And so I would sit and blob out.

Thinking about my last post, I feel everything I wrote is true. I have a unique opportunity decide my own struggle and I can strive and move forward with all my worthy projects. But! I'm not going to beat myself up for the video games and nocturnal TV watching.

I think sometimes we all just need a fucken break!

With Putin waging war on the Ukraine, and China posturing over the airwaves every second week. With forest fires and interest rates, with the requirement to make ends meet in an increasingly expensive world, (both physically and emotionally), is it any wonder we need to zone out sometimes?

So, this week I'm going to work, very gently, on my sleep problem. But I'm also going to unleash my sullen inner teenager and allow her do a lot of sitting on the couch playing Tetris and Angry Birds.

Last night I beat up a raw meringue mixture and ate it delightedly in front of my horrified housemate. And then when my fifty-something body couldn't cope with the downstream effects, I let out a number of very gassy farts whilst raging at MAFS on the couch.

It felt amazing.