roast beef sandwiches

I bought some sliced roast beef, provolone, and raw spinach today, and made myself a sandwich for dinner.

Conclusion: next time, maybe another half slice of beef, and mayonnaise instead of butter -- the bread flavor is a little too strong. Also, damn I wish I had a toaster oven. I microwaved one half of the steak roll to warm the meat and soften the cheese, but that creates a slightly odd bread texture.

Also also, I should buy some dill pickles. The question is whether I pay through the nose at the convenience store on the Commons tomorrow afternoon, or whether I wait until Friday/Saturday (when I am going to the mall to buy a laundry bag & some flower pots and to pick up the Girl Scout cookies that should have been delivered to Not the IRS by then) and buy them at either Target or Tops. Decisions, decisions...

Hmm. I should buy a jar of mayonnaise while I'm at it. I have some in packets -- people have a tendency to put excess mayo in prepackaged sandwich boxes, and I am a packrat -- but that's not a functional long-term strategy.

wherein Liz thinks about princesses, sorceresses, and names

Apropos of nothing in particular, I was thinking about phases girls are often said to go through -- among them the princess phase and the horse-crazy phase -- and it struck me that while I definitely did the horse-crazy thing, I never wanted to be a princess. Not once.

As far back as I can verifiably remember (so, six years old) what I wanted to be -- what I imagined myself as in all my daydreams and self-insert characters -- was a reality-warping all-powerful sorceress. When I told myself interminable superhero epics in first grade, I was a sorceress who gave one of the other heroes his powers, and who directed the team on missions because I could see what the enemy was planning. When Vicky and I did baby's first LARPing with our neighbors, I was a sorceress and had magic wand duels with the kid who played a wizard. When I first invented Small, I self-inserted as a mysterious sorceress who lived in a tower in the woods and could have solved all the questing characters' problems in two days if she hadn't been more interested in catching up on her reading. When I dreamed up a sort of self-insert fanfic continuation to Pamela Service's Tomorrow's Magic series, it featured a girl who was basically me by another name as the child of a family who'd kept magic alive through the dry times -- in other words, a sorceress -- and who accidentally cast herself into the future when the nuclear holocaust hit.

All these figures were from explicitly ordinary backgrounds, which is not surprising since they were all based on me. And while I could imagine myself phenomenal cosmic powers at the drop of a hat, it never occurred to me to imagine myself an aristocratic backstory, let alone a royal one. (The time-traveling sorceress fantasy, in fact, was centered around recreating democracy in the radioactive wastes of the former eastern seaboard. And also constructing a town with nice brick houses and a functional sewer system. Look, I like logistics, okay?)

The thing is, I am not certain if that persistent fantasy pattern is an intrinsic part of my character, or whether it's an unintended side effect of my name.

( cut for a vague gesture toward privacy )

That is not a situation likely to foster positive feelings toward princesses in general.

I mean, I'm quite sure I'd have fantasized having phenomenal magic powers in any case -- as I've said before, I have a hell of a power kink, and it clearly goes way back -- but I do wonder if I might have imagined myself as a magical princess if not for that coincidental confluence of names.