refined carbohydrates, leisure time, and the mentally ill

In our town there is a small Italian pastry shop and cafe, where as a condition of admittance you must relinquish at least three hours of your life. Generally, this amounts to spending the next one hundred and eighty minutes with a foamy cappuccino and one of their outrageously delicate caramel glazed palm leaf shaped cookies. My husband loves this place, it is his own Pyrenees in Marin County. I have anxiety issues and must be productive at all times, so it doesn't work out so well for me. But I do have a counterpart just a block away, my own little enclave of the upper West Side, and this is in the cozy office of my psychiatrist. BlueCross PPO, I love you. Dr J is whip-smart, beautiful, doesn't suffer fools, and I envy her for her wardrobe. She owns the cutest jumpers I've ever seen. And she says all the right things, like the time when my in laws were planning an extended visit ("if my mother in law was coming for three weeks, I'd take a shotgun and blow my brains out") or the time when I complained that my husband's friends do tend to drink, and drunk grown ups make me uncomfortable ("sweetheart, if I had to sit through one of your vegan raw foodist events, I'd light up a joint too.") Usually, I walk into her office pretty much convinced that I am a crazy person, and by the time I leave, that craziness has been downgraded to an only slightly abnormal response to a bizarre world. So today, in spite of the fact that my mother is going on her fourth week of weird non specific back pain, I left her office today with relatively little teeth gnashing and hair tearing. And then waved at my husband, still in front of the pastry shop.