Checking In

I'm working on the fourth chapter. I've re-written, or re-organized what I'd written, or thrown out what I'd written, the first half about a dozen times now. I feel like Cinderella sorting lentils from the ashes so that she can go to the ball: it's a task I'll never finish & so will never go on with my life.

I'm looking at chubby chick lit, whick I blogged about for the AFG site a while ago. This is on a grander scale & involves media figures & movies & TV as well as books.

It bugs the shit out of me when these books have the heroine newly thin after a hundred pound loss bouncing around in a bikini. As weird as I find Gwyneth Paltrow dressed up as a fat girl, the fat suit above is, at least, almost the truth of what deflates, what we are left with.

I'm on my food plan & today was a challenge. I'm boarding Mad Malachi, a three-year-old black Lab who is crazy like a rocket, & have Henry, a year-old Lab, around during the day. The mayhem was unbelieveable although Mally is at my left almost six hours after being sent home from any more World Class Wrestling & seems to be zonked. At 6 all I wanted to do was eat. I had breakfast again & as I was hefting my bowl to go get some more I thought, No. Not now. Let's see if you really want this, later.

We'll see how "later" goes. I've taken a Klonopin & may pass out soon.

The other problem is have is smoking vs. sugar-free calories.

Actually, that's TWO problems. The first is that I came back sick from seeing my parents, with a borderline bronchitis that has almost cleared up now. Smoking was not only bad for it, it tasted terrible & felt terrible. So I cut w-a-y back. I'm down to about a half a pack a day but the price is that when I'm out with the dogs -- or as betwitched by them as I was with Mally & Henry this afternoon -- I suck on sugar-free hard candy. It makes my tummy grumbly, is cloying, & distresses me. Gotta start watching this more carefully.

The second problem with sugar-free hard candy is that it claims to be FIFTY PERCENT LESS CALORIES.

Dear Sweet & Low,

I would like to apply for the position of grammar checking your products. Your butterscotch candies, which are not nearly as good as Werther's, by the way, are NOT fifty percent less calories. They are fifty percent FEWER calories.

I'm sure more literate consumers would buy your candies if the little wrappers that fall easily out of pockets and into the gutters would be more likely to purchase the Sweet & Low variety if only you fixed this simple but annoying problem.

Sincerely,

Frances Kuffel

Oh well..................................................................

I responded to an incredible post by Beula this morning that I'm realizing that every time I eat off my food plan, which is one of several first steps to the little hell I call Hating Myself, I'm handing victory to my enemies. The least I can do is not give them more than they already took. It's the thinking of someone who's angry. It would be about time I got angry except that I have to, one way or another, knock this chapter out.

I'm excessively tired of reading about fat chicks, dieting, addiction, et cetera. There's a biography of J.S. Bach on my bookshelf I want to read. Instead, having checked in without saying much of anything, I'm taking a Sarah Ferguson "inspirational" book to bed with Daisy & Malachi.

Sweet dreams everyone...

Be it ever so humble...

<>

2.oo p.m. Sun City, AZ 6/26

Ah, the Bat Cave. There's no place like home, even though I've been up for 27 hours (with catnaps on planes), Henry just chewed the back of one of my favorite flip-flops, I got eaten alive in the dog run by little flies & I'm retaining so much water that the skin on my shins feel as taut as a drum & there are creases in my ankles as though I've been wearing too-tight Mary Janes.

It's warm & humid out today but a shower has solved the worst of it & a diuretic will help drain my drums. Red wine & airplane travel do this to me. I'm sore from sugar & slipping on Henry's stoop a week ago & landing on my butt with the small of my back jammed against the step behind me. But the dogs are exhausted from an hour of fetch in the swelter & I'm sitting in my robe thanking God it's not 120 degrees in shadeless shameless sunshine.

I did not do this trip abstinently or even with much dignity. One night, in fact, I levitated into a dozen cookies & the next day my mother chirped, "Oh! We have some cookies, don't we? I think I'll have a cookie." No, I was forced to say. They're gone. "But we just got them yes- -- oh. OK."

She knows.

I knew only that the package wasn't there with a dim recollection of eating a couple at 3 a.m. But the package was in my room, empty. Scary.

Do I regret this? Of course. It's embarrassing, it's not keeping my pact with God, my sponsor, my program, you.

But I studied my compulsion to really go at it in my parents' house. I'm increasingly imprisoned there -- too hot to get out much, a new car that's confusing to drive, my mother on oxygen with extremely limited energy. The squirming of being expected to...something. Tell them things that are too complicated, or simply to talk when I don't really talk very much. The boredom of the frequent naps they lapse into, Dr. Phil & Wheel of Fortune. The need I have to get away with something, to get something of my own when I'm with them.

I told a friend this morning that I sometimes long to be able to tell my mom the stuff I would have five or ten or fifteen years ago. How I operate out of depression. The little romantic heartbreaks I've had lately. I can't. Her world & her life are slowly but inexorably imploding & her job now is to breathe, sleep, take pills, conserve her small energy to pull through another day, most especially for the sake of my blind father. It's my turn, now, to listen to her frustrations, prognoses, aches & attacks. To lay my deeper feelings on her would be another worry to nag her into living under the cloud of worry that my father's needs already thicken her lungs.

So I talk about the dogs. I tell them the simplest things about my book. I showed her my pictures on flckr. I ask for news of the rest of the family & old friends. I answer her questions & describe what I'd like to do by learning decoupage, how much I like taking photos. I bought her Memoirs of a Geisha because she said she didn't know what was the must-read that she'd like. (Personally I found Middlesex to be pretty boring despite my mother's adoration of Oprah.) I ask about the past.

Mostly I slept, great droughts of sleep that took up hours. I'd wake to read the chubby chick lit I'd taken along -- Little Earthquakes, Eating Heaven, I'm the One that I Want, Size Fourteen Is Not Fat Either. I helped my father get a couple of Marine Corps ribbons he's missing & ordered some extracts to make more syrups after I helped him make fake maple syrup (as a science experiment: it's neither cheaper nor better than Mrs. Butterworth's). I wrote out instructions for using the DVD player & tried to figure out how he could record on his four-track tapes for the blind. I read him his Musical Heritage catalogue & wrote out the order, read every single kitchen gadget at Target to him & described each toaster oven to him. I left them with a cake & peanut butter cookies that I had not eaten most of.

I was pleasant company except when my mother drove (yyyyoooowwww!) & when they bickered because my dad kept changing his mind about dinner. I don't know if I would have been more "present" without food or nicer. I'm grateful it was only six days away from my humble home, two of which were spent travelling. I'm not grateful for the thunder storms that kept us an additional five hours in Houston but it was wonderful to see Daisy this morning, who leapt into my lap & then gave me a long & reasoned lecture on my crimes. I went out for French toast before picking her up & that was nice, too.

Too nice, in fact, to use as a reason to go out & do any more damage.

The humans of the Italian greyhounds I was supposed to stay with cancelled -- a loss of several hundred dollars but a gain on the foothold of sanity for me. I'm very tired now: do I risk a two-hour nap? Am I capable of doing anything else?

It's good to be home with you again -- I missed you.