All Lemon, No Zest

Yesterday my friend told me that her teenage son had done some sort of self-analysis questionnaire at school, where they ranked themselves on certain qualities. He said he had declared himself very low on honesty (and yet he told her, so can even we believe this ? The mental gymnastics involved in understanding that philosophical conundrum are beyond my level), and ranked himself high for love. He marked himself low on zest.

Zest. What a funny thing to ask teenagers about. By and large a lot of teenagers are probably hormonally zest deficient some of the time. As are perimenopausal women. What a societal error it is for there to be so many teenagers living with perimenopausal women.

My own teenager and near-teenager seem to be reasonably adequately zest right now (this is subject to change at any moment. Also they are at school right now* so who even knows how they’re feeling.)

But I am not zesty right now. I am, as my husband accurately observed yesterday, all lemon, no zest.

It is unfortunate this this low zest period is coinciding not only with living with teenagers, but also with being told it is time to resurrect my blog/substack/it probably has a new name I’m not across. Because I have a new book coming out in a few months and it is now time for me to pivot from the locked-in-a-wardrobe-writing part of the process and into the trying-to-make-people-want-to-read-your-writing part of the process. And I’m no marketing expert but I think people might prefer to read writing by zesty, positive, energetic people than depressed, overwhelmed sourpusses. Zest is what you need to sell books.

So as of this morning I am on a Zest Quest. It’s only midday and I have already done many things to bring more zest to my life.

They are, in no particular order:

• Bought a pair of leopard print pants without trying them on. They fit and they are comfortable and I love them. They cost only $25 from Kmart, so there is the zest-sapping worry that I am a fast fashion tragic and contributing to the decimation of our planet by that industry. So that probably renders them net zest neutral.

• Battled the login gremlins and reset nine hundred and fifty passwords to enable me to crack into my son’s iPad and download the streaming app so I can watch the Oscars while I work on this. Given that I have been putting off writing this for actual weeks now, and I have now managed to get going, this is a zest positive activity. Even the fact that I have watched precisely none of the nominated films isn’t killing the zest. Nor the fact that I haven’t won any Oscars and probably won’t ever.

• Roasted up two trays of vegetables. According to the acupuncturist I saw on the weekend as part of my ongoing quest to relieve the plantar fasciitis pain in my left foot, my body is highly inflamed. I am a towering inferno. Eating an anti-inflammatory diet will allegedly correct this. (And yes I have watched Apple Cider Vinegar on Netflix but I really want to believe this acupuncturist because she is very nice and seemed very confident. At the moment anyone who gives me hope that I will not always feel like I am walking on broken glass is my guru.)

So I roasted up a bunch of cauliflower, capsicum, sweet potato and other rainbow hued planty things and lectured my husband about how these are MY roasted vegetables and neither he nor the children is allowed to eat any of them. He backed slowly out of the room with his hands up in front of him, which is becoming his default method of leaving rooms ever since the perimenopause came to live with us. Upon reflection, I realise two trays of roasted vegetables are likely extremely safe from being eaten by anyone else in this house and my defence of them was unnecessarily extreme. I ate some for lunch and they were very nice. It would deplete my zest to wash up the baking trays so I have not.

Once I get my zest back, please tell me what, if anything, you would like me to write about on this blogstack or whatever. Without suggestions I am very likely to just witter on about other symptoms of perimenopause, not just plantar fasciitis (although I do have more to say on that, for instance do women of a certain age get it because we cannot have babies and therefore back in prehistoric times we were most useful at this age as snacks for sabre tooth tigers? Is plantar fasciitis designed to slow us down, to be eaten by the predators, thereby giving the young and fertile and the kids and the men the opportunity to escape? If so, rude.)

I’m feeling a bit daunted by what I’m going to write about. When I began blogging, many years ago, I wrote about my kids, but they are now the aforementioned teens or near enough, and don’t really need their business splashed all over the internet. Apart from parenting them, my time is now spent in roughly equal parts worrying that I won’t ever come up with another book idea, helping my parents get to medical appointments, and trying to fix my foot. None of that seems like anything a normal person would want to read about.

I’d love you to throw me a prompt. Ask me anything. Otherwise it’s plantar fasciitis until the end of time. I’m going to try to write here once a week. Surely even I can find something entertaining to say once every hundred and sixty eight hours.

Also, if you would like to pre-order my new book, Your Friend and Mine that would be great. If enough people preorder it the bookshops will think I am a Very Big Deal and inherently zesty. Let’s see if we can trick them, shall we? You can order it from your local Meg Ryany independent bookshop, a less independent, more Tom Hanksy bookshop, or even a great big Darth Vader seller of all things. There will be no judgement from me. (Firstly how would I even know; secondly all my judgement is reserved for myself.)

Also also, if you know anyone who has a dearth of waffly substacks in their life and might enjoy mine, please encourage them to sign up. It’s only going to get better from here.

Love, Jess

*LOL. I wrote this on Monday and was interrupted to fetch a sick kid from school. Here we go…