Don't Just Do Something --

If I were a Zen practitioner, I'd "let" that title end, "Stand There!"

If only I were a student of Zen.

I would tell you that it rained in the night and that the roses were bowed with water this morning. The sun has come out now & soon they will lift their heads again & perhaps smell a little sweeter for the bump up in temperature that's coming & that will also brown, wilt & kill them as a new crop comes along.

I've been taking w-a-y too many pictures of roses lately. They're in season; before that it was iris, tulips, daffodils. Close-ups. I am bored with Brooklyn Heights & so I've turned my camera on the individual, on the living & the dying, on the things that collect light & rain. On the blatantly sexual. I can't train my lens on the heart of a flower without knowing I'm peering into the Darwinian purpose & honeyed pleasure of life.

I don't know whether I respect roses. They're prissy until they're ready to fade & wilt, their skirts gathered together, their reproductive parts a maze for clever, delving bees. But from sex they cam'st & to sex they shalt return. Only look at that barely visible blood-red center & tell me that this girl is a virgin.

Which is where I could use some Zen.

My manuscript is out of my hands. I've caught up on my other blog obligations at Confessions of a Lab Lady and Psychology Today. I've done some advance cleaning in preparation for my nieces' visit in a couple of weeks. I've returned some emails. Today I have notes for my novel open. But I can't settle down, although getting those notes open is more than I could manage yesterday in terms of what I need to be doing.

I've been poking around psyches instead, always a dangerous business. Car on the Hill is too public to go into details, although I'm dying to because I want those details off my chest & this is the place I dump my brain-junk, so let me quote Mother Goose by saying that I stuck in my thumb & pulled out a plum & said, "What a bad girl am I".

A general mood has been set here, I hope, so in the context of the mood I'm going to say that I don't hide behind other blogs & poke my head out only to comment on them. I want my invisibility as I metaphorically eat forbidden pie so I'm being as obtuse as my accusation/self-justification. Still, can one create memoir without passion dripping off the keyboard in the form of brutal honesty? THAT, I think, you have seen here.

OK, I'm putting on my invisibility cloak again & closing that subject. If you're dying for details, ask & I'll think about responding individually, although only to named correspondents, if you please.

*

The other piece of brain-junk I need to get rid of is a whiny little rant about clothes. It doesn't seem fair to lose 41 pounds (in 104 days of abstinence: just for the sake of stats) & all Big Clothes still don't fit. I have to return a box to J. Jill today & I should be happy to do so: I don't need to spend that money when I have tons of clothes. But it seems to me that my clothes are either egregiously floppy (i.e., the leggings I'm wearing today sag) or ten pounds/one month too big. Where was I that I didn't get properly fitting clothes the last time my body was 229 pounds?

This has to be a general phenom, the righteousness of a serious loss within a weight loss in-progress. "We've come such a long way already," Dorothy protested the Wizard's demand for the Wicked Witch of the West's broomstick. I've traveled the Yellow Brick Road, I guess, but I haven't killed the witch.

& by the time I do, I'll be watching the balloon lift off without me as I lament what else doesn't fit.

"What a brat girl am I."

What Am I???

This is the most wrinkled weekend in New York City. We all knew we were in for the usual April blast of unseasonably warm weather but we couldn't quite believe it. I think everyone had to dig into boxes and bags to find something to wear & no one did it in time to actually iron. It will be 87 degrees today but by Tuesday we'll have highs in the 60's -- & mornings in my down coat which I want to throw away.

Because I'm on the street a lot, I get complaints every day about the cold. "It's cold for April." Well, no, I say. Easter two years ago fell in April & I wore snow boots to dinner & there was snow on the magnolias. "This is unbelievably warm weather for April" & I think of how every year, we have a heat wave & the movie theaters haven't gotten their air conditioning running & all the flowers pop out at once.

It's most distressing for people like Us. Not only are our bodies now much more public, but we have to go through summer clothes for what fits.

For my part, this was an exceedingly pointless waste of time because I had one three-quarter length white t-shirt still in its virgin bag & a pair of linen pants in the closet that I only remembered after opening four vacuum-sealed bags, creating an enormous stack of wrinkles & having to try a lot of things on. I looked OK until we got to the barbecue & Daisy jumped up on my perfect white shirt with garden-muddy paws. (Shoes continue to be a problem because my foot is still slightly swollen & I'm wearing a nifty thingie that compresses the metatarsal bones. It's not cumbersome but it's one more filler between me and whatever hard-soled shoes I have for summer. I had to wear my wool Heflingers.)

I'm sticking too close to a plateau of 240 for my comfort right now, although I have forsaken my scale again after a couple of days of disbelief that I didn't weigh a little less &, finally, a two-tenths loss yesterday morning. That way madness lies. Still, I'd love to lose enough weight to have a field day with all those bags. (And the bags buried deeper.) My winter Rat Clothes -- how I designate my dog walking duds -- are pretty droopy after 30 pounds but I'm not quite into the next size down in my summer clothes.

I wonder if my body is resisting leaving 240. I'm pretty good for a 30-pound loss but have traditionally in the last few years stalled out there & then regained it & some more. I'm desperate not to do this again. In revising Angry Fat Girls, I hit a spot about why I can't settle into Fat Serenity & it was a bolt of electricity I needed.

Or maybe my body, having lost 30 pounds, simply needs time to rest & reorganize.

& then let's remember that I've had three weeks of favoring my right foot. I began walking Hero last week but the biggest walk is the better part of a mile to Henry's. Not only did I feel last week that my foot wasn't ready for four miles, but the last several blocks are brick and cobblestone streets, very picturesque but scary as hell for someone who, every six months, is obligated to trip over nothing & skin her knees.

Until I started walking Hero again -- almost two miles round trip before excursions -- I was having a hard time with dinner. I wasn't hungry, which made me not want to mess up the kitchen or go to any trouble. At the same time, I want to eat. It didn't feel natural not to. Had I simply gone to bed without supper, I'd be having 800-calorie days & that's just stupid.

A dangerous spot for someone like me. H'mmm. Convenience. No convenience foods are good for me. Sweet immediately sounds right. So I'd go out & get Fage yogurt & have that for dinner. It's delicious, abstinent, calorically on target, expensive, & very very dangerous.

I've come to the conclusion I can't have yogurt in the house for a while. If I'm going to have it for dinner, I'll have to walk the three or four blocks to get it.

I'd like to blame my yogurt habit for this stall-out as I pack up most of the clothes & hose them small enough for storage. Many of those clothes fit but many more need me to lose another ten pounds. But I don't think it's only the yogurt. I think it's a whole lot more wrinkly & complicated than that.

Day 72, by the way. 30.2 pounds lost. Anything between 20 - 22 is fair game.

Of Grapenuts and t-shirts: Steps Part 2

Of course Grapenuts are a danger signal. Anything processed beyond freezing or being canned in my house is a warning sign that I'm either going to lose my abstinence or have to do some serious cupboard cleaning.

I don't have very much time today so I want to talk about how the near-end result of compulsive eating, my weight, makes my life unmanageable.

Today I weigh one pound more than I did when I began blogging on Amazon a couple of years ago. Two Five One, folks. I'm in a good place to note how physically unmanageable -- or compromised -- my life is because of Grapenuts.

It's warm out. Not hot but a breezy 80 degrees or so. Five years ago I would have walked in the sunlight to keep warm. Now I sweat through my underwear and have to p-e-e-l off my clothes when I get home. My shorts ride up at the crotch and I have to try to find a private moment to tug them into place. My hair is wet after an hour in the dog run. My back and hips ache from walking.

I wanted to find a big tenty dress with pockets to wear when I walk dogs in the afternoon but soon realized I chafe my thighs. This was a real ugly realization. Just like the bad ol' days.

On top of which, I don't get the sizing of things, partly because I'd about rather slit my wrists than go in to the five stores that carry my size and try things on. The 2X sweat shorts and capris I just got also chafe my things because they hang so low in the crotch and I can't cinch them any tighter. The same size in cotton trousers is too small altogether.

I'd have to hunt high and low for those fat lady stores. Five years ago I'd have bought my dog walking "Rat Clothes" at the Gap and Target.

Why did I keep these things that were too big and why didn't I keep things that were slightly too small?

Because I don't trust myself.

Ouch. Talk about unmanageability. If I can't trust myself to control my eating and my size, what can I trust myself to do and be? My food, which my size represents in this blog, is the front line of how little I believe in myself.

I like what I found and ordered more in the same vein. It doesn't take long for me to be bored with my clothes now.

I have to do more laundry because of the sweat and because my body pokes out to soak up grapefruit juice and chicken. I'm lucky to have laundry in the basement of the building -- but it's $1.75 a load for the sweat and stains.

Needless to say, I'm not looking forward to plane travel next week or the [hopefully] silent reaction of my parents.

And the clothing that spans size 6 - 24 takes up ENORMOUS space in my little Cave. Have I mentioned the chaos I live in???

What was once not a big deal now makes think twice -- cleaning the bathtub and the oven, looking under furniture for a missing dog toy, theater seats.

I've been doing a lot of meetings on open-mindedness to God's will lately and my panic over this day diminished a little when I realized I could simply take Henry home, rather than risk having him eat the Bat Cave while I did my afternoon walks.

It was thinking hard about how to keep myself sane (remember Steps One and Two: "We admitted we were powerless over food and our lives had become unmanageable," "Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity") in order to bolster my chances of staying abstinent, repeating the word "willingness" to remind me that there might be options, divine or otherwise, I haven't thought of in regards to a difficult day, that made that light bulb go off to take Henry home.

But it's 50 stairs, a total of 100 more stairs for the day. My first instinct was to say, ah fuck it: I'll risk my flip-flops. I was thinking of the airless warm journey up two floors. Willingness, willingness, my mantra went on. And yes, I wiped sweat of my face when I got back outside.

I do not look in mirrors, even from the neck up. I do not look at my shadow. The light burned out in my bathroom and it was only because I need stuff in there -- clothes, hydrogen peroxide, hair brush -- that I changed it. I certainly didn't do it to look at myself.

I'm relieved when I can step off the sidewalk to pick up dog poop -- it's another three inches I don't have to stoop.

It's Day 3. I had a cup of brown rice, 1/3 cup fat-free cottage cheese and a grapefruit for breakfast, a salad with 4 ounces of chicken and a tablespoon of mayonnaise for lunch. I feel clear-headed and energetic.

I'm lucky as hell. At 51 and this weight, I will walk dogs for approximately 200 minutes today, including about 250 stair steps. I came home from 80 minutes of three dogs and set to work cleaning said oven, then got in the shower. I chopped eggplant and onion and am roasting them for dinner now. I will prepare to relocate to another dog's house tomorrow, and in doing so will prepare to go to Arizona. All of these things require energy, strength, willingness and strong knees. I can do them. I couldn't do them 80 or 60 pounds heavier.

But I used to do them a lot more gracefully.