Not So American Way Days

Imagine how hard it is to describe a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup to an Italian. First of all, many think peanut butter is butter with peanuts mixed in. Some peanut lovers even asked if it could be substituted for regular butter in a recipe. Then you have to explain the tiny little chocolate cup with the ridge marks from the wrapper.....like a cupcake wrapper.  But that doesn't work because few know what a cupcake is. In the end I just had to wait for my next American visitor, because as hard and as often as I look, there are some things I still haven't found in Italy.

I'm lucky to have enough visitors to be treated to some of my old favorites from time to time. And what doesn't make it in a suitcase with a friend is often sent the old-fashioned way. Nestle's Chocolate Chips, Libby's 100% Pure Pumpkin, Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup (not for the soup, for the magic ingredient in green bean casserole) and Heath Bars have all safely crossed the border.

The only thing that was confiscated at the airport was Girard's Champagne Salad Dressing. Who's really going to remember they've got salad dressing in their suitcase when they do the final mental-liquids-double-check before jumping in the taxi?  Do I have the right size toothpaste, is my deodorant solid, where's the sunscreen and do I have too many tubes of lipgloss are the standard questions we ask ourselves.  But remembering where you've packed the salad dressing isn't on everyone's normal list.  What a pity.

Fortunately, it didn't take long to realize that when there's a gap between visitors there's hope that American Days at Lidl won't be far off.  Lidl is a discount grocery store.  I learned about it when I was told I couldn't shop at the grocery store for the nearby American military base which is reserved for members of the military.  I never wanted to be a member of Sam's Club or Costco, but I wouldn't refuse a membership card to the military grocery store if Uncle Sam offered me one. 

American Days lasts one week.  The flyer is covered with the American flag and says, "Scopri il Sogno Americano"--Discover the American Dream.  All of the items are packaged in red, white and blue and all of the products are the brand "MCENNEDY. AMERICAN WAY.'  It seems to me like a slaughtering of McKennedy, which would really be the Irish Way, wouldn't it?  Or maybe I've just never heard of the American McEnnedy clan. Anyway, as long as they keep producing BBQ Marsh Mallows, I won't complain.  

They also make BBQ Sauce Whisky, BBQ Spare Ribs, BBQ Salad Dressing and BBQ Cruspies (peanuts with some kind of breaded shell that also come Sour Cream Flavoured and Hamburger Style and are actually very good).  The truth is the BBQ Marsh Mallows are just regular old marshmallows.  I can picture the marketing team sitting around the table designing the bag when someone interjects that Americans cook them on a fire.  Voila! BBQ Marsh Mallows.

You can find "Cheese For Burgers" which is sliced gouda and "Jelly Extra" which comes in cranberry and blueberry (isn't grape America's best seller?).   The American Style Snack Box has Chilli Cheese Nuggets and Chilli Dip (they sound Mexican to me), Mozarella Sticks (American mozzarella?) and Onion Rings.  There's a "pre-baked" baked potato in a box with quark cheese, which I learned after checking is a common cheese in Germany, Poland, Austria, Switzerland and several other European countries but not very common in the U.S.

I'm still trying to figure out what Sandwich Sauce and Hamburger Sauce are.  I don't think either have ever made it on the list of condiment choices at Big Boy, but according to the Mcennedys, they're American.

I"ll probably never try the Spicy Pepperoni frozen pizza.  I wonder how many Italians have stocked up on those during American Days?  Keep in mind, these are grocery stores in small towns all over Italy.  The Mcennedy American Way products aren't stocked to delight the random American passing through.  The products are there for Italians to get a little taste of America.

We all know a pepperoni pizza is the most popular pizza in America, right?  The only problem is, if you order a pepperoni pizza in Italy you get a pizza with red and yellow peppers.  And if you want the kind of  pepperoni pizza you're used to eating in America you have to order a pizza diavola (devil pizza).....that's a pizza with spicy salami.  

If reading this has whet your appetite, I think you can find Lidl in the States.  If you're lucky, maybe it will be the week of Italian Days and you can get a taste of La Dolce Vita. They'll probably carry Pasta Alfredo, Vodka Sauce and a nice grated parmesan/olive oil mix for dipping your bread--a few things my Italian friends have never heard of.

P.S. There are no spelling mistakes in this piece.  According to the Mcennedys, Chilli is spelled with a double l, Cruspie shouldn't be Crispy and Marsh Mallows is two words.    

Rome Wasn't Built in a Day

The only thing fast in Italy is a Ferrari. Everything else is really slow.

The post office can take up to an hour and that's with only three people in front of you.  It's a place to pay your bills, do your banking and send registered mail (a frequent occurrence in Italy due to the lack of trust people have in one another).  There's a popular Italian proverb that says, "Fidarsi e' bene ma non fidarsi e' meglio" which means,  "Trusting is good, but not trusting is better."  A sad truism worth looking into another day.  Back to LA POSTA.  I seem to be the only one in town that uses the post office to send letters and boxes.  My transactions take about five minutes, but I have to plan for an hour.

You should never plan to go to the post office and the doctor on the same day.  If you pay for a private doctor, you can make an appointment.   If you happen to live in a town where the public doctor that you're required to use takes appointments (rare), you're lucky.  If not, you go with the masses to the doctor's office and wait.  I've found that what works best for me is going an hour before the office opens.  Waiting outside in a heavy winter rain for an hour doesn't seem all that bad if you know you're first in line.  But an hour in the horrible little waiting room (with plastic flowers and framed posters with fold marks) memorizing the order the patients arrived and hoping there are no disputes when it's my turn to enter isn't for me.

Public transportation?  You have to be there 15 minutes early for some of the bus drivers that just might come early and wait an extra 15 minutes for most of the drivers that come late.  Fortunately I don't have to take the bus to the post office or the doctor's office.

An 11:00a.m. wedding means blocking out the whole day.  It starts with breakfast at the bride and groom's parents' houses.  That means as soon as you get up you have to put on your fancy clothes for the 9:30a.m. buffet.  Next comes the ceremony.  They're always long because there's no such thing as a non-Catholic wedding in Italy, is there?  After the ceremony there are pictures in the church just like in America.  Then the bride and groom drive all over town to be photographed at famous monuments and sights and the guests go to the reception place for a snack while they're waiting.  The snack is a heavy buffet.  When the couple arrives the lunch begins (right after the heavy buffet).  Italian lunches last at least three or four hours.  As they're clearing away the long lunch they bring out another little buffet.  After that, many relatives and older guests head home.  The younger folks (like me) stay for the arrival of the B list.  Those are the people (like work colleagues) that were only invited for an evening of dancing and.......yet another buffet!  And this part of the evening winds down around 2:00a.m. when the pizza comes.  That's 16.5 hours in your fancy clothes.      

Live performances with classical orchestras, Italian gospel choirs or four guys playing accordions often have paid emcees.  They're usually overly enthusiastic women in sequinned gowns.  They make a lot of announcements in the beginning and then reappear between every piece to give you a little more of everything except the music you came for.  A concert goes from 90 minutes to 150 in the blink of a few sequins.  

Even the removal of Italian garbage takes a long time.  Running on a little gravel road through some fields I saw a pile of black trash bags.  Each one had a sticker that said, "This garbage has already been reported.  It will be inspected and picked up as soon as possible."  A week or so later I ran in the same place and saw the same bags with new stickers that said, "This garbage has been inspected to investigate unlawful administration."  All I could think of was the old guy in the field with his tractor and trailer (considering the fact that I've never seen another runner or pedestrian in the fields leads me to believe it's just old guys on tractors).  He sees the trash and doesn't haul it away, but instead calls City Hall.  The City Hall guy goes out to the field (in some type of truck or utility vehicle capable of hauling away a few bags) confirms that yes indeed, there is some trash in the field, slaps stickers on the bags to say that he's seen the trash on a particular date and drives away without the trash.  Several days later another City Hall guy heads out (not in
running shoes, but with a vehicle that could haul) to see what's in the bags, slaps on more stickers that say the bags have been checked and leaves without collecting them.  I think it takes less Polish (insert the country of your choice) guys to screw in a lightbulb.

As far as what's quick in Italy, all I can really think of is a cup of coffee.  Some people leave their cars running on the curb and dash in to down a little cup.  They can be in and out before a barista at Starbucks would have enough time to say, "Tall non-fat cocoa extra hot no whip."  (Or do they call it hot chocolate?)  After 25,000 stores in 75 countries, rumor has it the first Starbucks will open in Italy in 2018.  The rumor used to be 2017, but like everything else in Italy, it's slow to come.

I understand why Rome wasn't built in a day.  It's Rome.  But what I don't get is why everyday activities in Italy seem to have become as monumental as building the Colosseum.

A Romantic Chunk of Wax Dinner

Candles are meant to be burned.   When it's not dark there's no need for them because according to several dictionary definitions (and me) candles are burned to give light.  During the day they're on deck waiting to shine later.

An unburned candle is just a piece of wax.  And if you have no intention of burning it, why not buy a little sculpture of a frog that doesn't have a wick coming out of it's head or a colored vase for flowers that might reflect in the sunlight instead of a cylindrical piece of wax?  

I have a friend that had the same two tapers in her candlesticks for more than a year.  In the summer they got so hot from the sun shining through the window that they melted.  I liked them better that way.  It seemed like they'd been burned a little.
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The three candles I gave an Italian friend as a hostess gift were still sitting on her shelf several weeks later in the same way they'd been presented---a small glass with a blue handmade candle in it and two red tapers tied to the side with twine, all worth about 75 cents.  When I asked why she hadn't burned them she said she wants to keep them as a gift.  This is the mom of an 8-year old girl that comes for English lessons and at the end of every lesson we toast marshmallows on candles at my kitchen table.  I thought my gift might inspire the same activity at home, but apparently at her house candles aren't meant to be burned.

Things that are shapes and figures shouldn't be candles.  I received a gold, glittery Christmas tree candle this year which I lit right away.  After a few minutes it was a tree with a big hole in the top and gold glitter oozing down its sides, but I enjoyed the temporary glow a lot more than a gold tree with an unlit wick where the star should have been.  My red, white and blue stars for the 4th of July didn't have a point (no pun intended) after the first few minutes.  I've had fish that turned into jellyfish, an Easter bunny that went deaf and mini-apples that became applesauce.  All of these little disasters make me think the dictionary definitions are right.

Collins:   a candle is a stick of hard wax with a piece of string called a wick through the middle.
You light the wick in order to give a steady flame that provides light.
MacMillan:  a stick of wax with a string in it that you burn to give light.
Oxford:  a cylinder block of wax with a central wick which is lit to produce light as it burns.
Dictionary.com:  a long, usually slender piece of tallow or wax with an embedded wick that is burned to give light.

These are chunks of wax that I don't consider candles.
They're the leftover applesauce, bunny legs and fish lips
that didn't burn.  They're waiting to be melted, molded and
wicked to shine again one day.

But then there's Merriam-Webster:  a usually molded or dipped mass of wax or tallow containing a wick that MAY BE burned (as to give light, heat or scent for celebration o votive purposes).

So according to Webster it MAY BE burned but it doesn't have to be.  Fortunately, my favorite dictionaries have always been Oxford.  Candles have a purpose and if you take away their purpose they just sit there doing nothing.  Isn't it better to shine and live a little than just sit there doing nothing?

Stick People Families on the Move

Stick people families have just started moving to Italy.  They look just like the American families, but their names all end with vowels.  A lot of them ride around in SUVs, just like in America. I guess I should mention that SUVs haven't been around all that long either.  Ten years ago the biggest cars in Italy were station wagons.  And now that Americans are finally wising up and getting Smart cars, Italians are buying SUVs.

A lot of Americans think of Italy as a place of fashion and style and firsts.  That might be true in Milan, but does anyone (in America or Italy) really wear the clothes from Milan runways?  As for my little town in northern Italy I find it far from fashion forward.  For example, finding an interesting pair of shoes means a trip to Paris or Serbia or Berlin. One day I was googling my favorite brand and discovered that they were sold in my town, so I ran (in my running shoes) to the store.  They only had a few styles and it was the end of winter, so I asked when they'd be getting the spring line.  They said they wouldn't be carrying them anymore because the styles are too avant-garde for people in Bassano.  Imagine!  German shoes that I bought in Brussels in 2008 are too avant-garde in Veneto in 2017.

Speaking of shoes, I'd like to address the stereotype about Americans and their sneakers.  I think even guidebooks used to say that if you didn't want to stick out like a real tourist in Italy you shouldn't bring your tennis shoes.  I'm not sure if they've edited that page, but it's no longer true.  The only thing I don't see around here are white aerobics shoes, but anything else that falls under the heading of gym shoes exists.  They even have some dress shoes hidden in a sneaker design that cost 300euro.

So who's following who?

Fixed gear bikes.  I'm not sure that's what they're called or what it means, but I remember this new trend in Chicago nearly ten years ago.  Now it's here.

Gray, brown, black and stainless interior design.  It looks just the same here in 2017 that it did there in 2010.

Wedding invitations with raffia and rice paper.  Nothing new.

How much longer do I have to wait for the good stuff to start showing up?  Stuff like free refills, an aisle of salad dressing, hardware stores open on Saturday afternoon and Sunday (isn't that when we really need them?), travel mugs, heat in cafes, over-the-counter cold medicine and frequent flyer miles?
 
I wonder why the stick people have decided to move here and if they'll miss that stuff as much as I do.  Maybe they're coming to Italy to get away from Trump.  It's a shame no one told them about Berlusconi---one of the few things Italy had first.

Brown Paper Packages

Brown paper packages tied up with strings are one of my favorite things.  I don't remember when it started, but it was so long ago that the only brown paper I could find was in the section with the postal supplies and I usually bought it at Woolworths.  I'm not sure why I started using it, but I imagine it's because it was a lot cheaper than the decorated stuff.  In those days you couldn't find brown wrapping paper next to the Christmas rolls with reindeer and snowmen.

I've always loved wrapping presents. As soon as I figured out there was no Santa Claus, I started to help my mom wrap.  I got so good at it that one time when I was home alone and sulking I unwrapped all of the presents under the tree and then rewrapped them.  I kept it secret until I was sulking another time and yelled to the family, "And just so you all know, in 1979 I unwrapped all of the Christmas presents and rewrapped them.  So there."

My gifts never have tape and there are never knots in the bows.  When my niece and nephew saw someone struggling to open one they used to say, "It's a Tenley present.  You just have to untie the bow and the whole package will open."

Several years ago when other brown gifts started showing up, I decided to adorn mine with polka dots and letters cut from scraps of Japanese paper lying around my studio.  I'm not going to give up on the brown because, like everything else, it will go out of style again one day.  Recently I've strayed a bit and sometimes use the brown paper placemats my friends don't soil when we go out for pizza or the rolls of off-white wallpaper I've found in my attic.

This holiday season was anything but brown paper packages tied up with strings.  (Other than the 77 that I wrapped.)  Almost all of the gifts I received were in bags.  Little bags, big bags, cloth bags, paper bags and cellophane bags.  What happened to good old candycane Christmas wrap and a pre-stapled bow on a small sticky square that never really sticks to the present?  I can remember coming back from the mall with the rolls of wrapping paper and a bag of un-sticky bows.  The tubes floated around in the shopping bag with all of their weight at one end and there was the constant order from Mom not to crush the bows in the bottom.

Fortunately a few of my favorite things in Italy come wrapped.  The grocer wraps the parmigiano, the pastry chef wraps the tray of sweets and the gelato guy wraps the ice cream when you get it to-go.  Here getting ice cream to-go doesn't mean walking away from the gelateria with a cone or cup.  It means spending more than 20 euros on a little styrofoam tray filled with 16 scoops.  I like to watch them wrap my little treats.  They hold the paper tight in the middle, make creases at the corners of both ends and then fold them in to make the triangle flap just like I do (but they use tape).

Even if my birthdays and Christmases in Italy are filled with opening bags instead of unwrapping presents, I'm hopeful that as commonplace as well-aged parmigiano, mini-tiramisu and gelato have become in my life, they'll always seem like little gifts.
 


Every day is a gift if you live in the present.   --Tenley Ysseldyke (maybe)

(Can I take credit for this quote?  As I walked away from writing this piece I said it to myself out loud.  I didn't think I'd heard it before so I googled it.  I found, Every day is a gift.  That's why they call it the present.  But I didn't find mine and I like it.)
 

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme to Grate the Nutmeg

I wouldn't consider the simple life all that simple.  My neighbors seem to pull it off like nothing, but for me it's a lot of work.  I suppose it's kind of like shabby chic.  Shabby doesn't take much effort to achieve.  It's just a matter of time, and all things become shabby.   But striving to look like you made no effort at all (shabby chic) takes a little extra time.


Life in a small country town in Italy follows a few of the Oxford Dictionary's definitons of simple.
--easily understood or done; presenting no difficulty
--plain, basic or uncomplicated in form, nature or design
--composed of a single element
--of very low intelligence
--basic or plain without anything extra or unnecessary


Although some are true (I won't tell you which ones), life is far from easily done and presenting no difficulty.   A simple life is a little bit like most people that have never lived one think it is...the quaint, sweet, charming part.  But one thing it isn't is simple.


I heat my country house with a wood-burning stove.  In early summer a big truck comes and drops a huge pile of wood in my yard.  Three days, 72 mosquito bites and 13 slivers later it's systematically stacked.  When winter comes you have to go out every day rain or shine to systematically restack it in the house.  You light a fire every morning and you stoke it all day.  If you're not home all day, you re-enter a cold house and rebuild the fire.  Turning up the heat seems a little simpler. 


I also heat my beach house with wood.  There's no big truck to deliver it because the house is on an island.  There's never a huge pile because the wood gets collected on the beach a little bit at a time every winter weekend.  Then it gets rolled back to the house in a metal shopping cart I found in my attic. Quaint, sweet, and charming yes.  Simple?  Not so.


And here's the dirty laundry on laundry in Italy.  It starts with a weather check.  If I wash a load now is it going to be sunny long enough for the clothes to dry outside?  Clothes are washed in a regular old American-style washer. Simple.  Then each piece is taken out of the washer, flung a couple of times to get some of the wrinkles out, and hung on a drying rack in perfect order.  The t-shirts go here, the underpants go there and the pairs of socks get paired and hung next to each other.  Next you add the clothespins for fear of the colpo d'aria (hit of air http://10leaves.blogspot.it/2013/10/living-with-bunch-of-old-wives.html) and the rack full of heavy, wet clothes is awkwardly carried outside.  When it's dry it's carried back inside and the clothespins are removed.  Then the wrinkled clothes are removed, folded and organized in a pile in the corner until ironing day (which usually comes after you've accumulated a few loads).  Italian women iron more than just pants and shirts.  I suppose some American women do, too, but I'm not one of them.  T-shirts, sheets, hankies, dish towels and tablecloths are all as smooth as silk (which is really the only thing worth handwashing and putting on the drying rack).  Passing a load from the washer to the dryer, taking it out and flinging it a few times to get the final wrinkles out seems a little simpler.


Washing lettuce isn't on my list of favorite things to do.  And washing it a thousand times?  When my farmer friends offer me fresh lettuce from their fields I refuse.  It takes at least 15 minutes to really clean it.  I know.....you have to wash lettuce from the supermarket, too, but somehow the fact that it's already been in a store makes it seem like it has a cleaner start.  The farmers' stuff is filled with the same dirt I clean from the treads of my shoes after a run through the fields.  But how green, how bio (Italian for organic) how wonderful to grow your own food.  Not for this Chicagoan. It only takes two seconds to cut off the top of a bag.


And the prep for that head of lettuce?  I'm friends with the early morning and early evening bus driver that becomes a farmer at midday.  Last summer I found him in a big field picking weeds.  Not in a little garden in his backyard.  That's doable.  (Not for me, but for many.)  Antonio was in a real field-sized field picking weeds by hand.  I stopped in shock. "Stai scherzando?" I asked.  (Are you kidding?)  He said that instead of powders and sprays, he's the weed killer.  When I asked him if he was really going to walk up and down every row of what seemed like four football fields, he asked me if I was really going to run 10 more kilometers to get home. 


That got me thinking about all of the things I do instead of SIMPLY going to IKEA.  (And I can speak with authority now because I've been to one in Italy.  Once.  It's even got guys directing traffic in the parking lot just like I imagine they do in Schaumburg.)  IKEA sells dishrags and they're only a buck.  So why do I knit my own?  Good question.  And making new candles from the remnants of old ones?  I know they don't always burn that well, but there's some strange satisfaction in watching something that I created glow.  Just like the farmers that find satisfaction in watching something that they planted grow, I suppose.  (And I must admit.  I've received IKEA candles as gifts and they make great gifts.) 


Once again I'll be celebrating Thanksgiving with a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup.  I've gotten over the fact that there's no Campbell's around here and I've learned how to make my own.  It's pretty simple.  And a real grilled cheese with bakery-bread instead of plastic bag-bread and three different kinds of cheese instead of the stuff you peel from the little plastic sheet is pretty good.  But I still miss pumpkin pie.  I know it can't be that hard to make a pie crust (Ritz is in the same cemetery as Campbell's) but I've been avoiding it.  Fortunately I don't have to buy a pumpkin and learn how to turn it into Libby's 100% Pure Pumpkin because a friend sent me a can last year.  The most difficult part of my Thanksgiving prep will be grating my nutmeg.  

Instead of finding a little jar of ground nutmeg at my local market I found a small cellophane envelope with two nuts and a tiny little grater.  It reminded me of the prize in a box of cereal. Grating my nutmeg will probably take as long as cooking your turkey.      

And I guess now is when I'm supposed to say that I'm thankful for the simple life, which is defined by the MacMillan Dictionary as a way of living without all the possessions and worries of modern life.  I must say, the coagulated reddish-orange mass that plops out of the Campbell's can never worried me all that much.  Speaking of which, enjoy your cranberry sauce.   

Losing Control

For a control freak, there are times that having no control at all is just what I need.  My discomfort and panic come from not being in control when I think I should be.

Let's take a dinner party at my house.  It's impossible to remain calm and charming if the guests arrive 22 minutes early.   And when they present me with dessert that I've asked them not to bring?  Lovely hostesses graciously accept it thinking, "the more time together and the more to eat, the better."  Instead, I think, "How could you possibly come early and why would you bring something that I asked you not to bring?"  That being thought (the truth is it's actually also been said) I'm not such a lovely hostess if my rules aren't followed.

There were two times in my life when having absolutely no control gave me peace.  The first was a 6-day journey on the Trans-Siberian Express.  Making the choices before the trip were agonizing because I could control them all.  When should I leave?  How far should I go?  What kind of food should I bring?  Should I take the top bunk or the bottom one?  But the moment I boarded, the moment that I totally lost control of my life for 6 days, I was at ease.  There were no decisions to make.  I couldn't control anything.  I could only get an ice cream cone when the train made one of its three, 20-minute daily stops.  If the stops were at 6am, 2pm and 3am there was nothing to think about.  I got the cone at 2pm and it was okay.  (Not to say that I've never eaten ice cream at 6am or 3am.)      

To be polite, I followed my roommates' schedules for everything else.  I ate when they ate and I went to bed when they went to bed.  I was decisionless and it felt like a real vacation.  Being trapped on a train for 6 days meant freedom.  I had nothing to do but knit, braid the hair of the little girl that was travelling with her grandpa and play poker with the Russian soldiers in the next cabin.  When we went over a bridge, everyone got up and looked out the window.  There weren't many bridges and the guidebook didn't talk about them so I didn't have to decide which ones I wanted to see. I looked when the others looked because it was the only choice I had.

I took my watch off.  It didn't really matter what time it was.  The passengers that had boarded where I had were on my time schedule, but those that had boarded earlier or later in the journey were totally different. I think I crossed five time zones in six days.  In the Moscow time zone I'd left behind maybe I really was eating the ice cream cone at 3am.  But it didn't matter.  I was out of control and it felt good.  If only the Trans-Siberian weren't express.

My second favorite holiday lasted 45 days.  I spent it on my couch with a broken knee.  Much like being trapped on the Trans-Siberian, being trapped on the sofa meant freedom.  I couldn't control anything because the broken knee controlled me. Getting a little chubby was acceptable because it wasn't my fault.  I wasn't disappointed in myself for not running a certain amount of miles each week because I couldn't run.  It didn't mean I was lazy if I read all day, it meant that I didn't have a choice.  And all of these things felt good.

I read three books in Italian after having lived in Italy for only three months.  A miracle. Reading in Italian four years later, I lose my patience.  I can't concentrate because I keep thinking that I should be doing something more productive, so I quit.  Now that I'm back in control I miss the freedom of being confined to my sofa.

Today's tea bag quote:
  Let things come to you.
That's not so easy for a control freak.  But I'll try.

I know it shouldn't take a broken knee or a trip to Siberia to feel free. Most people read as much as they want to read when they want to read and run as far as they want to run when they want to run.  They've set no limits and created no logs.

Maybe instead of being in control and losing myself I should start losing control and being myself.