Tea Stains on Parchment

There are just so many books. There are thousands upon thousands of novels, adding up to what must be a limitless number of pages. There are so many that it is impossible to read every book, even every good book, no matter how much I read. I will never be able to read every book on my ever expanding list, and sometimes coming to terms with this is difficult. There will be conversations I can't participate in, symbols I won't analyze, authors I may never meet. With so much page turning, I used to think that I had to constantly keep moving forward. That is, continually reading books I had never read before, expanding my repertoire of "have reads." But as I've grown older and read more books, including some that are really important to me, I have found that is not the case. Rereading a book can be just as important and transformative as discovering a new one. I have thought of books as friends, and I think about them often, but I hadn't been a very good frien...

I'm sure we've all seen a number of increasingly strange hummus flavors surfacing in the supermarket. One of which being sweet flavors, like brownie batter. When I first heard this, I was completely appalled. Chickpeas? With chocolate? Disgusting! But then I saw some Buzzfeed article (it's always Buzzfeed) saying that it was absolutely delicious, cures cravings, tastes so chocolatey. Basically, chocolate hummus is some fudgy miracle dessert. So I had to try it, and I will try anything (within reason) once. So I found dessert hummus at Aldi, where it was just cheap enough that if it were awful, I could throw it away without feeling guilty. I had my choice between vanilla bean and fudge brownie. Obviously I went with brownie, partly because chocolate is always better and mostly because the vanilla one looked way to much like normal hummus with black specks in it. I also couldn't imagine vanilla covering up the unmistakable taste of beans. But maybe it makes sense, beans...