It was a Saturday night at the beginning of the month, and I was home at my parents house with L. We had traveled in for my sister’s baby shower just after the new year, and my dad was eager to test out two new waffle irons he was given as holidays gifts. (My heart skipped a beat as I realized my mom and I had bought him the same thing, until, in true Papa Floptimism fashion, he pronounced with enthusiasm that he can now have delicious belgian waffles at home and while at our small vacation cottage-cabin-getaway in the mountains. It turns out you really can never have too many waffle irons.) And by test out, I mean, he wanted to eat waffles. So, we had a light and early dinner, cranked up the waffle irons, and I got to work. I was flying around the kitchen in a tizzy, one iron on one end of the counter, the second on the opposite end to avoid overloading a circuit, timing the batters and the flipping and transferring them all to the oven to keep warm when done. And because that wasn’t enough, I was melting chocolate down for a homemade fudge sauce, and gathering the various accoutrements for our decadent dessert. My head was spinning. I could barely keep track of it all. There was batter everywhere. And L looked at me and asked me to stop. And he looked me in the eyes and said to me, “This is the happiest I’ve seen you in weeks.”
Five years ago, I named a food blog Floptimism, and started sharing recipes, thoughts, and anecdotes. “Floptimism,” a nonsensical word that I embraced as being the push-pull of my perspective on life, a pendulum of optimistic desires and pessimistic nature (nurture?). I am many things, but I am not: naturally effervescent, inspiring, happy, positive. But I am, often, in the kitchen. When there’s no agenda or time clock, when I’m just fiddling or futzing, imaginatively creating or sculpting or experimenting — when the counters are my canvas and I just let go, I’m in heaven. I smile. I laugh. I joke. The kitchen helps me recover from those flops in life, when I just can’t seem to find the sun behind the clouds in my mind. That’s what Floptimism is — it’s never giving up on the sun, even when it’s hard to find.
