changes

I hate being neurotic when I'm not PMSing. PMS neurosis - for me, at least - is valid and expected, and when I feel the onset of hormonal madness I dose myself with chocolate and evening primrose oil and avoid all human beings. When I am not in the throes of PMS, however, it sucks when I find myself still neurotic. Which is to say: ENOUGH ALREADY WITH THE MOOD SWINGS, WHOA. Granted I have a valid reason to be slightly whacked out, but the mood swings are tiring and they make me look crazy.

Well, all right, crazier.

I've spent the past month alternating in between hiding from civilized people and going out with friends - a sentence that makes me sound a lot like Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde, but is terribly accurate anyway. It hasn't been all that bad since, when I am hiding out in the house, I am conquering new horizons of knowledge such as learning how to do housework and cook. So far I have discovered that my inner obsessive-compulsive is deeply satisfied by housework and cooking - something that simultaneously pleases and horrifies my family. For the longest time I have been banned from the kitchen, on the grounds that what I do not set on fire, I burn - but during the past month, stuck at home with no desire to go out and nothing better to do, I decided I might as well learn how to cook. It was funny how I finally worked up the interest - for years, my family has been bugging me to learn how to cook because How are you going to get married and start a family if you don't know how to cook? my female relatives demanded.

I'll marry a chef, I answered blithely. Or I'll hire one.

Recently, though, my mother changed tactics. If you don't know how to cook, she pointed out, How are you going to manage living on your own? As self-preservation is always a good motivating factor, I decided she had a point and should probably start paying attention in the kitchen. After two weeks of practicing and hijacking other people's culinary attempts, I have decided that I will probably never be a gourmet chef, but I will be able to feed myself. Granted, my diet will consist mainly of salads and canned tuna - the sort of things that don't really require the application of heat, which is the area of cooking that is my Waterloo - but I won't starve, at least. Strangely enough, my new ability has made me more interested in the shows on the Food Network, something which seems to terrify my family.

Please tell me you're not going to try to cook that, Freakchild said, warily, when she caught me avidly watching an episode of Thirty Minutes with Rachael Ray, which featured an ambitious line-up of salads, kebabs, and stews. Just because you can make a salad doesn't mean you can make a three-course dinner.

Freakchild has reason to fear - just a few weeks ago, I accidentally set fire to a burger I was heating up in the toaster oven, and she walked into the room just as it went up in flames behind me. I was reading a book, happily oblivious to the conflagration, and looked up only when Freakchild said Um, I think your burger's on fire. Whereupon I turned around, panicked at the sight of the flames, and doused my burger with water.

Nevertheless, it is hard to set fire to a salad, and I am learning to pay attention to whatever I've put on the stove or in the oven, instead of plunking the pan down, wandering off to read something, then running back in a panic when I smell the smoke. I am also considerably more accomplished at chopping up things - it used to take me forever to chop up a clove of garlic. You don't have to chop it up into perfectly uniform bits, groused Freakchild once, watching me carefully line up the cloves of garlic. I am still not the handiest person with a knife, but I am so much better at the chopping-up of things that I made my mother go out and sharpen all our knives. She came back in the afternoon, laughing because apparently the guy who had done the sharpening had been slightly terrorized by the sheer number of knives she had asked him to hone. She recounted the conversation to me: Ma'am, the man said, How come you're sharpening so many knives, all at the same time?

To which my mother answered Well, there's an empty rice field right next to our house, it's a good place to toss a dead body.

If anyone has ever told you you were sane, I told her after she had related this incident to me, They were LYING.

On second thought, the craziness may be genetic ... in which case it's probably a good thing that I'm moving out.