......Sodi-yum

I am an addict. For years I've avoided facing my problem, but I can no longer deny my dependence. I used to try to convince myself that I have some sort of taste bud disorder which makes everything taste bland, but I need to come out and admit my enslavement to salt. I put salt on everything. Love it. That practical joke where you loosen the top on the salt shaker and a ton of salt comes pouring out all over someone's meal? Wouldn't work on me. It would just save me a few extra shakes of the wrist.

I never really thought I was overdoing it. Everybody uses salt, right? There's a salt shaker on every dinner table in America, right? Everybody sucks the salt off pretzels and spits them out... right?

My husband has always given me a hard time about my salt intake. He likes to tease me about it - jokes that he's going to buy me a saltlick for Christmas, asks me if I'd prefer my engagement ring to have a giant salt rock rather than a diamond. "Could've saved a lot of money!" He makes this joke at least once a month.

One evening he hid the salt shaker and watched me rifle furiously through cupboards and drawers, tearing apart the kitchen as my dinner got cold. I didn't suspect him, as it's not uncommon for me to lose it myself (I often carry it around the house, double-fisting it with a granola bar, my delicious alkaline security blanket).

He only gave it back to me once he realized that I actually wasn't going to give up and eat my dinner without it. The look on his face as I snatched it back from him with my sweaty little hand was my first clue that I need to cut back.

"That stuff's gonna kill you," he said sincerely, as he buttered his corn, potatoes and both sides of his bread, "You'll shrivel up like a slug." He and his brothers spent a great deal of their childhood killing various bugs and, apparently, mollusks.

The next day, as I cheerfully salted my salad, the double-take from the waiter got me thinking. I hadn't even tasted it yet. How did I know it needed salt? I tried to remember the last time I ate a meal and didn't add salt to it. I couldn't.

I slept terribly that night. I dreamt of Lot's wife, her glorious crystallized skin sparkling in the sun, screaming, "You'll shrivel up like a slug! A SLUG!" You'd think in such a nightmare that she'd be chasing me, but it was the other way around. I woke up salivating just before I could take a huge bite of her arm.

The next day I decided to find out just how dangerous salt is. I thought it would make me feel better to read something like, "Excessive consumption of salt could maybe cause a teensy bit of hypertension when you're, like, 100 years old." I should have known better. A paranoid person like me knows: if you really want to freak yourself out, Google it. Whatever it is, there is an article somewhere on the web just waiting to "inform" you of the catastrophic results of whatever you just did/ate/touched.

So as it turns out, health professionals recommend no more than 4 grams of salt per day. I was encouraged at first, because 4 grams sounds like a lot to someone who doesn't remember a single measurement conversion from elementary school. Another search put me in my place. One tablespoon of salt has 18.25 grams of salt.

Holy. Shit.

Sure, a whole tablespoon of salt (over 100 shakes, per my experiment) is a lot, more than even I use in a day. But still, it became very clear exactly how far over the recommended intake I am. To make myself feel better, I quickly Googled the lethal dose - about 1 gram of salt per kilogram of body weight, consumed within a "short period of time." Once again, that sounded like a lot to a metric-stupid American. More Googling. One kilogram is a little over 2 lbs. So if each tablespoon of table salt contains 18.25 grams of salt.....

I panicked....was Wikipedia seriously telling me that eating 3 or 4 tablespoons of salt in a short period of time could KILL an average sized person?!? My tiny mother, who weighs less than 90 pounds, could be killed by 2 1/2 tablespoons of salt?!?

What the FUCK?!!!????!

I mean, yeah, that's a lot of salt. But at the same time...that's NOT a lot of salt!! It almost seems like you could accidentally eat that much salt! Say my tiny mother was making a pie, which called for half a cup of salt (yeah, I know, that's a ridiculous amount of salt and no pie in the world calls for 1/2 cup of salt, not even a salt pie.....mmmm.....salt pie....). That's 8 tablespoons, thus a lethal dose for even a 300 pound person. Say she keeps her salt in a high cupboard, so she gets up on her step ladder to get it. Say she measures it while standing on one foot on the step ladder. Say she slips and the measuring cup goes flying into the air and she opens her mouth to scream...you can just imagine! I'd better not wait too much longer before warning her about this.

And while I'm freaking out, let's bring my daughter into the mix. My five month old daughter weighs about 14 pounds. Less than half a tablespoon could kill her! My precious little girl! I'm surprised my breast milk hasn't killed her!

The news was pretty sobering. It occurred to me - what if I'd never even picked up a salt shaker in the first place? If only I'd known this information sooner. Surely I'd be smarter, prettier and taller, and I wouldn't have had Dorito breath when Nick Masarrachia finally kissed me in the 9th grade. I wouldn't even have been EATING Doritos, because I would have been turned off by the sodium content.

At the end of the day, I don't really intend to quit salt. The best I can do is cut back, and even that's going to require a little rehab (I need to look into salt gum,or maybe a salt patch). One thing I have absolutely given up forever is Googling. Do you really want to know how many calories are in your Starbucks danish?... I mean, really, that shit is just upsetting. Why do you need to know the long term effects of "new carpet smell" on babies? Don't you know that according to Google, EVERYTHING causes Autism? Googling is way more dangerous than a sodium overload, at least for me. Because once you realize you've been eating more than five times the daily recommended allowance of salt every day for years upon years, every surprise is a potential heart attack.

......I am not interesting

I don't know why anyone starts blogs anymore. I've talked myself out of it plenty of times (most recently when I discovered that Blogger doesn't let you indent your paragraphs...who the fuck are you to decide if I get to indent my own paragraphs? Fascists...). What's kept me from starting a blog for so long is the fact that there are so many interesting bloggers out there. It's intimidating. I'm as scared of them as I was of the popular kids in high school.

One blog I subscribe to is written by a TV weather girl who starts charity organizations in her spare time, has had three books of poetry published and just made an appearance on Jeopardy. She blogs about her everyday activities...you know, meeting with editors, interviewing for a new TV host job, that sort of thing. On her homepage is a picture of her sitting at her desk, drinking from a Starbucks cup with her trendy laptop and her trendy dog. Short skirt, (probably non-prescription) glasses...she looks just the way Blogger Barbie might be packaged in her little pink box. Her blog is interesting and all, but ultimately your hatred is what keeps you reading.

On the other end of the spectrum you have the millions of uninteresting people and their stale, mildewed blogs about what they ate that day and what their cat is up to. You can't help but wonder if they know they're boring. Then you think that maybe they know they're boring, but they're hoping that blogging will make them more exciting. Say someone cuts in front of me in the grocery line - if I post about it on the internet, does that make it more interesting? If someone I don't know reads about it, does that make it more interesting?

What about now? Is it interesting now?!

It was the lame bloggers (or "Blah-ggers," if you will) who pushed me to start my own. It brought out a very childish side of me. They're as boring as I am and they have blogs, I wanna blog, no faaaiiir!!! So here we are. But I do want to clarify a couple of things up front, so that there's no confusion...

1. I am not interesting.

2. I am aware that I am not interesting.

Moreover, I am not blogging in an attempt to become interesting or "cool." I have never, ever been cool. I surrendered the fantasy a long, long time ago when I realized that I don't have any of the right clothes. That reminds me, has anyone else noticed that all the teenage girls are wearing stretch pants now? What's funny is that wearing stretch pants in the 6th grade is what made me uncool. Forever. That is, the actual stretch pants made me uncool at the time, but the hesitation and constant self-assessment that bred from my classmates' reactions to the stretch pants made me permanently uncool. It's interesting, how poly-nylon blend can change the course of your life, isn't it? Or maybe it's not...

Don't misunderstand - I'm not bored, lonely or unhappy. I'm just not interesting. I attribute my lack of intrigue mainly to my happy marriage. There's nothing less interesting than a happily married couple. No one yells, no one throws anything and a lot of Discovery Health Channel gets watched...it would make you sad if you knew how excited we get about Shark Week.

Why then would someone who is totally aware of her ordinariness start a blog? To be honest, it's really just an attempt to put energy into something other than my home, my husband or my daughter (I know...even my reason is boring). See, it was recently suggested to me that I "get a hobby" after I had a twenty minute conversation with a friend about my baby's poop schedule. She was just a little too gentle about it (her tone was kind of 'talking someone off a ledge'-ish), and I knew I was in danger of becoming one of those moms. You know the type. The ones who start Mommy Blogs, the WORST of the uninteresting blogs.

"McKynlee rolled over today!!!" Great! Get on the phone and call your husband and your parents, the only three people in the world who give a shit. Videotape it, mark the event in her baby book. Care! But understand that the general public does NOT care what McAshlynne ate for breakfast. McFinnigan's teething may be an acceptable topic at your Mommy group, but it doesn't belong on your blog. I realize that since I get as excited as any other new mom about my baby (who, by the way, does not have an annoyingly modernized McName) and her monotonous everyday activities, my Mommy Blog would be just like everyone else's...filled with "news" about her sitting up and pictures of the new jammies I bought her.

The hard part about being uninteresting and trying to think of blog topics is that they're scarce. I'm not exactly overwhelmed with options the way an interesting person might be. I can just imagine Oprah agonizing over whether to blog about her TV show, her magazine, her humanitarian efforts, her world travels, her celebrity friends, etc. The point being, there won't always be a point.

So with no interesting life, no topic and certainly no excuse, it is somewhat apologetically that I start this blog in hopes that someone other than my parents will read it and forgive my frequent (and improper) ellipse usage. Though I don't intend to post about the bread that got moldy in my fridge, do yourself a favor and don't expect any fireworks here. I'm just putting myself out there, trying a little too hard to make some sort of statement, however intangible it may be...the Tuxedo T-shirt of blogs. I'm grateful that you made it this far...