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.

Steps

My sponsor has sentenced me to hard labor as I struggle to get off the sugar train.

I have to do a meeting a day (in our cyber age, one can "do" a meeting rather than "go to" a meeting because they're online or on the telephone as well as in church basements) for 30 days.

I have to call one other compulsive eater each day.

I have to read one page of Alcoholics Anonymous each day.

I have to email my sponsor what I'm going to eat each day.

I have to email her a daily inventory each night.

And I have to start over in my step work, which has always been one of my weak points in the Rooms.

The first step of the twelve steps for compulsive eating and food addiction, based on AA's twelve steps, is "We admitted we were powerless over food -- and that our lives had become unmanageable."

The usual approach to working on this pretty grim step is to do a food history. I've done that -- I've published it, for God's sake. She suggested I move on the second step, "We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity," but I observed that the second part of the Step One, "our lives had become unmanageable," is often overlooked.

Taken with the point of Step Two -- the restoration of sanity -- that phrase is particularly important. These Steps are not so much about food as they are about the mental and spiritual balance I lose every time I lapse.

This has to sound cliche, but as I write these statements I understand the direction they can take me in better than I have before.

I want to talk about the last couple of weeks and the weeks coming up.

Daisy and I boarded at two Italian greyhounds' house for ten nights. The first weekend, I was also "boarding" another dog -- that is, hanging out with him as much as possible, tucking him in at night, getting him out first thing in the morning. That weekend I also had another set of IGs to go in and feed, clean up after and love.

I literally needed to be at least three places at once all weekend long. Following that weekend, I agreed to several nights of 9 p.m. walks. I was back-and-forth between the Bat Cave and the IGs. My yogurt was in one apartment, my salad makings in another, nightgown there, clean underwear here. It didn't take long for me to start eating between meals, eating Bad Stuff, and then eating Really Bad Stuff. I had no internet connection at the IGs and couldn't always make the times for online meetings. My bowels cramped from stress; I was exhausted. I didn't get to any live meetings for a week either. I'm now six meeting short of my 30 in 30 days. (In 12 Step parlance, we call such a marathon a "30 in 30" or "60 in 60" or, God help me, a "90 in 90".)

This is the first day I woke up in my own bed since June 15th.

On Thursday, three mornings from now, I start staying at Mad Mally's house -- he's a big crazy black Lab & he has two cats, one of whom I'll need to inject saline into each day. Daisy and I will stay there until July 3rd, when I leave very very early to visit my parents in Arizona for a week.

Yum: a week with my parents in Arizona in July!

Lately, Step One could be reversed -- "My life is unmanageable and I'm using food to get some power". Of course this power is mostly illusionary, although it did quell some of my rebelliousness about being away from home, living in chaos and resentment and self-induced boredom. I can't quite say that eating was unproductive. Rather it was one of what someone recently called "defective habits," a phrase I like a lot.

My life is unmanageable in an infinite number of ways. Play with a dog and I get puncture wounds and a hug sore bruise on my right thumb. Change a light bulb and cut my big toe on the step ladder (talk about ironies). Spend 16 hours a day at another apartment and mine turns into one big dust bunny.

Worse, by sitting in front of TV with pop corn, I didn't pay as much attention, qualitatively, as I could have to the dogs. By debating ice cream as an option all day, my attention was yet further divided.

I wanted OUT of the prison of obligations, even when I wasn't actually in it. Granted, it's hard to work on a novel when one only has an hour at a time to do it, but I played a few too many computer games when I was home and not enough note-taking or cleaning or other tasks that could be done in a short space of time. I'm one of the people who gets to watch TV because it's the Weather Channel or nothing at home, but I was deep into Bridezilla and, oh-my-God, Tori and Dean Inn Love. I wasn't watching the news or something topical that requires time to get the gist of it. I was sucked into what can be digested as fast as cotton candy.

And my reading went unread. Phone calls were not made. Letters were not written. I used food and junk TV to escape not only my resentment, but the alternative ways of spending my time. I chose unmanageability over sanity and usefulness.

My life feels particularly unmanageable in the areas of my career (no word from my editor, no decision made about rounding up letters of recommendation at an online site, my usual reluctance to work on my book), finances (I'm trying to get taxes and my credit debt under control; I want to get medical insurance), my home (winter clothes still waiting for the arrival of storage bags, desks waiting for me to figure out how to organize, a bathroom gray with grit -- although I did one layer of cleaning my oven this morning ;)), stress (it simply comes AT me; I feel like Tippi Hedron in The Birds) -- and my desperation to escape reality.

I need to thin further about how food increases this unmanageable life of mine. I'll keep you posted if you want to read more...

The Price We Pay

I've decided I can no longer afford to binge -- eating healthy, weighed and measured food has become prohibitively expensive enough.

I'm just back from the store where I spent $16.06 on a 10-ounce can of generic coffee, a container of Fage yogurt, a small box of Grapenuts and a cauliflower.

A package of Oreos and a pint of Hagen Daz is $9.96.

That's a bag of Beneful for Daisy.

Lots of rain here -- restless dogs who would come back caked in mud if they went to the park. I'm reading Emma and deciding what my next step in my novel is.

Oh, the humanity, she sighs...

Not to Decide Is to Decide

I'm in my jammies tonight wondering where the day went & how badly I cheated it. A woulda-coulda-shoulda day that I misspent.

My intentions were to get Daisy & Hero to the Hill for some exercise. Boomer was with us for the day, however, & it all got too complicated, so we had a few prinks on the Promenade & headed home.

Poor Daisy. Hero can take it. Her idea of a fun time at the park is to walk around squeaking a ball at other dogs. Daisy, on the other hand, is there to work. Consequently, she was owly today as well, lashing out at people & other dogs as much from boredom, I think, as from distrust.

I intended to go to a meeting tonight. I had 90 minutes to pull it together. There were three obstacles. 1) I didn't want to, 2) I hate all my clothes (or how my clothes look on me), & 3) a friend has been hung out to dry in a public way & my initial call on her jurors' shittiness needed to be broadened into a case-by-case point. We AFGs are really a pretty civilized bunch -- we should give ourselves some credit for that.

I'd also intended to roast some vegetables but that, too, went by the wayside. Along with getting a copy of my apartment key made (two tries elsewhere have failed), writing (throwing out & starting over) the first page of my new project, & maybe a load of laundry. How does time flitter apart like this? I was up at 5:30 this morning, you'd think I'd get something Real done in the ensuing 16 hours.

I guess I did, though. I'm abstinent. I had two huge epiphanies yesterday that have watered that abstinence. One is that I HAVE to put program first. (Did I make that meeting, 10 minutes from my house that lasts for an hour? Have I made a phone call? Noooooooo...)

The other was walking my 17-year-old Zeke. We were waiting for a light to change & a woman bellowed, "Move your dog!"

"I can't," I said.

"Yes, you can," she yelled back over her shoulder. "He's your dog."

My response? "He's 119 fucking years old!"

I have a friend who gets into these situations & reacts by singing back, "Love you!" As Zeke & I turned back toward his house, I realized the correct response to that woman was, "God loves you, too!"

The Red Beast has been upon me, you see, but not running my whole life. Still, I gotta get to the Friday night meeting.

Cindy Nails It --

Oddly, I had been thinking about another aspect of my moods, one that is more active & more me than the other beasts. I had even been thinking it was Red. Then Cindy responded:

I also have the red demon, she makes me do stuff I regret. Gives the black beast something to talk about. She's pissed and bored of the grey beast and trying to fight back and get even. But she over-does it.

Yep, I thought. That's the one.

The Gray Beast is a condition that happens to me, while the Black Beast is a prosecutor, judge & jury all in one miserable mood. The Red Beast, however, takes a small emotion & builds a jungle out of it. It's not entirely my fault -- I may feel something really uncomfortable or the Black Beast may have really driven home one or another flaw -- but it's my job to keep from using a feeling to wake up my Red Beast & poke his ribs until he (or I) rampages.

This weekend was a case in point. Friday night I went to a wedding. I knew exactly 3.5 people there -- the mother of the groom, the father of the groom, the groom, and I've said hello to the bride. This is in descending order of my involvement with the family. I twisted on the end of a string for months about my R.S.V.P. But talk of the wedding filled our dogs walks & I helped search for Ann's dress & accessories & found myself getting wrapped up in it.

I bought a dress at Victorian Trading Company, which is a brilliant find for those of Us looking for beautiful formal dresses & funky otherwise.

I found the perfect shoes at another Big Ladies Sometimes Luck Out catalog, Brownstone Studio.

I found an Edwardian satin evening bag & had myself an ivory orgy happening.

The trouble was that I had 90 minutes to go from dog walker to Edwardian lady & I find this a most difficult turn-around the few times I've had to really transform myself like that. It's a mind game as well as a shampoo & eye liner game. & then again, the trouble was that I was doing this why? To sit alone in a church & thread through crowds at the reception & force up a conversation at dinner & be the only person there who didn't know anyone?

It was & wasn't that bad. My table mate at dinner knew as many (& the same) people as I did. But I certainly found myself feeling the outsider looking in. & when I'm like that, the Red Beast starts being nasty about the mother of the bride (I first thought she was a drag queen), the bridesmaids (three of them really shouldn't have been dressed in strapless gowns), the dancers (the blonde Connecticut wife barely moved on the dance floor: is she like that in bed??), the bride (this is all about her & her fantasies: it's not a ceremony, it's the ultimate Girls' Night Out).

The Red Beast acts. I stuffed myself with hors d'oeuvres & champagne. I really wanted cake but it was 11.30 when the waitstaff cleared our dinner plates & the desserts looked anything but tempting. I was exhausted & cell phone to the rescued myself home.

The Red Beast was not done. Somehow I was invited to the two families' brunch the next day. I thought I was going to help set up but found myself sucked into the party where there was a buffet of French toast & other crimes. More small talk was called for, although it was easier with the people I happened to sit with, & by 1.30 I was exhausted with all socializing. & I still wanted cake.

So you know what the Red Beast did, of course.

I slept a lot on Saturday, then again yesterday. I'm sitting in front of roasted vegetables after a fairly energetic but paced day. I'm pacing myself after having gone through the Gray, the Red & the Black. Too much shoving & I provoke either of the latter two & given that it's a holiday weekend -- my neighbors are having a barbecue, the neighborhood has been quiet as a cemetery except for tourists dining outside -- I have too many opportunities to feel left out & pitiful & ripe for the Red Beast.

So I walked Daisy & Boomer around Cadman Plaza. I finished two New Yorkers. I went -- gasp! -- to the post office. I only need to survive the next hour or two in order to call it a useful day.

But I have no terms for Useful Days, or Content Days, or whatever else is on the other side of the Beasts. Isn't THAT significant?

Fingers Crossed

Thank you from the bottom of my benighted little heart for your responses yesterday. That I could write about how I've been feeling was, in itself, a sign of my hope that this blip of depression would end soon. It has also been fascinating to me that I can see it, note the symptoms, chart my progress & wait it out rather than giving into it with a full black-out of the soul & communication.

Three things happened yesterday that made me actively resent the intrusion of the Gray Beast.*

I didn't take the dogs down to the Hill because of heavy rain. I had skipped it on Monday as well, telling myself that my fall had made me too shaky but really because I didn't have the energy. I was feeling guilty about their time cooped up in the Bat Cave but at least I was very present for them, cuddling & instigating. Daisy had claimed the prime spot on my flopped over futon, next to me, sprawled so no one could get near. Henry, however, wasn't having any & forced half of himself between us. I reached up & pulled him over so that he was lying sideways on my, his butt on my knees, his head lolling over my shoulder. He slept for twenty minutes that way.

All the dogs are affectionate, & Boomer & Daisy will sit in my lap, but none of them would relax and sleep stretched out on me like that. It was such an act of love & trust. I held very still & put my book down so as not to disturb him.

The rain ended around supper time & I took Daisy for a walk. We ended up at the big park where there is actual grass (the Hill is ground up bark) & a playing field of Astroturf. I took her leash off & she shot off in a million directions, sniffing, playing the puppy, then rolling ecstatically on the wet playing field, throwing herself down to writhe & wiggle over & over again. That, my friends, is what happiness looks like. I appreciated her happiness even if I didn't feel happy myself. It reminded me of what happiness can feel like.

The last thing is maybe a writer's thing. I spoke one good line & thought another yesterday.

I was walking Hero & met Gerry & Molly, who we joined for a block or two. Hero peed & I praised her, trilling when she looked at me expectantly, "Oh, what a pee! You are a cham-pee-n!"

Gerry said, "It was definitely a ten. She could teach us a thing or two."

"I'm a defecator from way back," I retorted.

As Daisy was prancing around the playing field, two people stopped & began doing serious stretching, knee to ear stuff. I sighed to myself that I really resent public acts of yoga.

& then I thought, Damn: what do I DO with such good lines???

The Black Beast woke me up this morning after a bad night's sleep. You've mistreated the dogs, it said. You've been eating way too much food. You're so fat -- you're always going to be fat & you're going to get fatter yet. When are you going to get a manicure for the wedding, h'mm? How are you going to pay your bills? Do you know how much your back is going to hurt by the end of the day? You should really pack up blankets until the new storage bags get here -- the house is a mess. Speaking of messes, when was the last time you showered? When are you going to get keys made & buy cards? Do you KNOW how much money you've spent on clothes lately?

Yadda-yadda-yadda.

I finally, in my second cup of coffee, said, "Enough!" I'd get the dogs out today. I'd try to keep my food by the book. I'd keep my to-do list minimal so that I wouldn't have so much failure at the end of the day.

More to the point, I told the BB, I'm staying in the minute. I'm going to do the next right thing, one after another. I know what they are but I forbid anybody in my brain to talk about it before the minute has arrived. AND, I told the BB, I'm going to thank God for every walk I have to do, for an aching back that means I did the walk. I'm going to thank the guy for everyfuckingthing that happens to me today because no matter what it is, I can react to it properly.

I went into the bathroom to get dressed & realized as I was pulling my socks on that I had been spraying my wounded knee with antibacterial stuff but hadn't actually cleaned the thing.

That is what depression is, I noted. It's not disliking oneself, it's ignoring a seriously skinned knee.

I got out the hydrogen peroxide. It stung; the wound needed debriding that badly.

So is it any wonder that when, twice today, I got dog shit on my hands, I minced my dogs along until I could get to the nearest soap & water & wash up? That's what reacting properly is.

The dogs were smiling & filthy when we walked out of the dog run.


*The Gray Beast is without affect -- with no voice. It's a tactile Beast, preying on me with a heavy gray net that blocks out life & light. The Black Beast, by contrast, is auditory. It has a snarling voice of accusations, reminders, things to do, recriminations & dour predictions.

Dysthymia

I have dysthymic depression -- a low-grade fever of not-rightness that has its peaks & valleys. I suppose that, in the world of depression, a valley is a good thing, whereas a peak is one or more levels more not-rightness. I'm in a peak right now, with just enough objectivity to observe it, describe it, & really resent it.

I can't say what's brought it on. The after affects of much tension, perhaps, or the last withdrawal pains from sugar -- who knows? Today is Day Ten sans Nabisco & the day is early. Perhaps I'll pull a happy rabbit out my hat by the end of the day. I could also be too many dogs & the sense I have that my house & my days are not my own.

I went ass over tea kettle walking Boomer & Henry yesterday & skinned my left knee pretty nicely. It had two effects: a sensation of something breaking loose in my heart-brain, something of sadness I couldn't name, & an excuse to forgo taking the dogs out to the park & stay home & read. I manged to get a spot on the couch & the next thing I knew, Daisy was sitting in my lap gnawing on Henry's face while Hero & Boomer hovered for attention. That's what I mean by feeling that my Cave is not my own.

& when I'm bound by seven days of early & late walks, it makes me wonder when I could do this life I should be having.

Everything feels on hold.

It's been going on a while. I just IM'd a friend that nothing will cure it -- suggestions of "do this, do that" are of no help & only make me angry & frustrated & ashamed -- but myself & time.

There are symptoms with this -- I wake up too early, I'm incredibly forgetful & absent-minded; talking on the phone or in email is almost physically painful. I keep putting the wrong keys in doors & walking out without this or that necessary thing. I'm not keen on bathing or cleaning my glasses or doing the dishes. I'm clumsy (see above, to whit), which includes dropping things & bumping into things. I've lost interest in my camera.

I have very little energy & find myself leaning against walls or slack-jawed in front of a dumb computer game. I could sleep all day long if the dogs let me. It's hard to get interested in anything. I feel overwhelmed by needing to go to the dry cleaner's today.

It's also diurnal. Early mornings are better than the rest of the day. I find myself vacuuming at 8:30 or running errands. I have moments of energy later but they don't last long & are arbitrary, except for the evening, which is almost as lively as morning, when I'm rudely interrupted by a nine p.m. dog walk.

But I'm not eating over it, which is good. I'm trying not let things start a bad day -- the clothes I ordered & didn't fit, or the clothes I ordered & are too big & I just thought, fuck it: I'll keep `em. My thighs itch from the crotches on those sweat pants...

I got to a 12 Step meeting on Saturday, which is also good, & I have a wedding to go to on Friday so I had my hair & eyebrows done -- I was very very gray at the temples. I have no idea how I'm going to survive the wedding party. I know four people at the huge reception & am going because I was asked, because it's "good" for me & because my friend is the groom's mother & will appreciate having someone to dish with later. I have a lovely new dress that I hope I don't look pregnant in. Sugar or no sugar, I'll drink champagne.

Yesterday I made some phone calls -- reordered meds (I'm not out, so don't blame it on that), checked on a bill, etc. I roasted beats & Vidalia onions, which took some prep work. I repacked the clothes I'm returning. I try to do what I can even though it feels sisyphusian & more piles of stuff to deal with appear each day. I know I'll pull out of it if I just wait, don't go cake-mad, start bashing myself for it.

But right now it sucks.

No Sense

The Black Beast has been upon me today & I don't know why. I have been very nearly "perfect" lately & yet I feel as though I am bad -- undeserving, on the brink of disaster, failing at everything. When I look at this mood intellectually, I see it as both undeserving & well-earned. The net result is that I feel worse yet.

I'm finishing another Day Three of abstinence & perhaps withdrawal is to blame. Certainly the cost of night eating is a source of regret in what could be a meager month. Those Somethings cost a lot of money when it's all totaled up. One of my priorities for the year is to pay down credit cards & save some money for an actual, real live vacation. I've frittered away precious funds.

& of course, I am Fat. A friend took a picture of me in my raincoat yesterday & I shuddered mightily. In general, I'm fairly philosophical about photos. In that one, I was teasing Daisy & Hero with a toy & both dogs were caught in mid-leap. It's a picture of the dogs being teased by me, not of me. I get that. But I didn't like it.

The tiredness I've written about is evaporating steadily but slowly. Saturday was a day of sloth until about three in the afternoon. I'd had extra dogs in a hard bitter rain the day before & I was not getting it together. On Sunday, however, I was in overdrive, fussing with the first big wave of winter-to-summer clothes, vacuuming dust puppies & going through a large pile of New Yorkers to decide what I could toss, what I only wanted to read one thing in & those I'd need more time with. My house is in piles as a result but the piles are the sort I can do something about when I have the next burst of energy. My choice this evening, with the last of my energy, was going to the grocery store & returning some clothes or a laundry pile. I opted for the former & by the time I was done, I'd been walking for three-and-a-half hours straight.

Tiredness feels like the paw of the Black Beast.

I haven't had to wake up to regrets about what I've eaten the last couple of days. I've been praying very hard for the strength to keep my food clean & force myself back into the Rooms. I had dinner with friends the other night, got pleasantly tipsy & ended the evening with fireworks over New Jersey while our dogs scampered around. My hosts have been telling each other ever since what a great dinner party that was, a high compliment to my one-quarter part in it.

I've done some exceptionally good deeds -- taken Hero to her vet when there was blood in her stool, taking her stool to the vet, listening hard to a friend in distress. People tell me I am "good" for these things, that I make the extra effort. A friend complimented the dress I wore to do my clean dog walks this afternoon & told me it's too big -- I'd thought it rather small. I walk the streets mentally kicking myself when I've been giving honest work, good deeds, not as Fat as I want to accuse myself of.

The Black Beast tells me I waste time, playing too much mah jongg when I ought to be writing or reading. I've bought clothes that I hope to have reasons to wear, as a way of not eating, & I'm holding it against myself. I put a buck in my savings account for a clean day, 10% of cash I receive, extraordinary feats such as finishing the book or getting three or ten days together. I've earned my little savings but I don't feel like I deserve them. I have friends I need to call or write but I don't feel up to the effort or that I deserve the treat of conversation.

I don't know where this Black Beast came from, but I wish he'd go back there so I can enjoy the bearded iris & diminishing piles in peace.

Finding My Center

I've been both complaining about being tired & not knowing what to write next and contemplating a conversation I had about a friend who is in a constant frenzy about situations he continues to re-enact that result in huge drama and his lack of much else to talk about.

Writing Angry Fat Girls was not a pleasant bike ride in the park. From the time I returned from Arizona in January until April 16, I had not left Brooklyn Heights, had rarely strayed from my beaten dog/grocery paths. I was boarding a lot, doing early/late walks, squeezing in taxes, blah blah blah. I came away stressed out & scared. I felt like I'd disappeared at the same time my body was getting bigger & bigger. Someone kindly commented that maybe I should cut myself some slack, rest, enjoy not having a book to pound myself with. But I couldn't.

Then I had that conversation and realized that my friend's problem is that word we've used a lot on the AFG blog a lot lately -- center. He has no center, or none that he's willing to open up and act from & for.

The human center is the invisible bit of anatomy that functions like a metal detector. It searches for the life impulse -- and sometimes for the death impulse. What makes me feel alive and what mimics feeling alive, what is authentic and what is fake?

I know that when I get too busy looking for clothes, ebay fragments, new books, etc. that I'm mimicking my life impulse. I love all that stuff but it's imaginary. Those capris will be perfect for iced coffee with so-&-so; If I watch Lost Weekend, I'll get some really witty lines for that iced coffee. A piece of Noritake in my grandmother's pattern will connect me to my past & inspire the day when I have a real home...

This is what our friend does too much of as well & in these days of my decompression & floundering, I have quite a list of deliveries I'm expecting. But the pressure I put myself under to find a new book project was, despite the bitch of a mood it put me in, a healthy one. I'm a searcher. I want to understand concepts, facts, people at a molecular level. I want understand myself that way as well, which risks repetition & appearing inordinately self-occupied & boring on a blog or, alas, in a book.

This is my purpose, this search. My tools are mostly words. If I'm not writing, I'm not living from my center. What is difficult for me to understand is that sometimes the search itself must be sought. So all the agonizing of these last weeks was really, all along, part of the stretch to act out of my best self.

I finally wrote down all my novel ideas, devoting a few sentences to each. I emailed a friend who is a psychic about the dilemma, and I emailed the list itself to my agent. They had completely different responses. I felt a little pissed off about being told what I shouldn't do. At the end of the day I sat down & looked at the list again. I hated all of them. A couple required a lot of research & I don't want to take the time after having done a book with a lot of research in it. Another promised to keep me in the same foul psychic place I've been for too long now. I hated the plot of another & didn't know what to do about it.

Which of these ideas that I was lukewarm about was most commercial? This question has also caused readers to respond with warnings against thinking that way, but I was desperate & had to think every which way to settle on something before I had too many more days of being in a really awful mood.

I've had an idea for a screenplay for years that I've done nothing about. What's more commercial than a screenplay? Why is the idea for a screenplay rather than a novel?

And there, yesterday at about 1:30 in the afternoon, as it was time to get ready for dogs, was my answer. The story told itself to me. By the time I left the house, I had names for the characters. I had subplots. I'm certain I can create three crisis points upon which to string the rest along. I am in love with the ease of it. I love it because I love having the next right thing in front of me to do. I'm in love with it because I intend to hand it to my agent the day after Labor Day & if it's awful, I'll have learned something about novel writing, not churned in futility for four months, & can move on.

Or maybe it will be good & be turned into a screenplay.

It has one fat character, but she isn't a main character. There are marriages & romances that work normally. There are children. There are no literary agents, no unhappily single people, no diets, no dogs (maybe). It's just a novel.

& at 2:20 yesterday afternoon, when I left the house to pick up Boomer, I started breathing again. Now I can get back to searching for aspects of truth & lucky phrases.

& today I don't mind that it's raining.

Floundering

I guess the word "flounder" relates to the fish thrashing at the end of the hook or caught in the net, gasping, its wide flat body flailing against reality. But honestly, look at that fish: its face seems upside down...

Which is how I'm feeling.

Lots of sugar.

23 hours abstinent.

Hung-over not only from sugar but weeks of stress & not having the emotional reserve to, say, reply to some emails that spoke to my heart. Flipping through ideas for the Next Project like flimsy rollodex cards. Still doing my Sunday in the Park with George obsession because now I have the soundtrack.

I was weeping through it yesterday as I huddled in bed & was struck by the bit near the end in which the grandson of Seurat realizes & is pushed to realize by the ghost of his grandmother to "move on". Just move. Go. Take a step, any step except backwards. Somehow that retrieved an idea from past ideas that I did nothing with at the time. I don't know what to do with it yet but I will say it involves Jane Austen & that I know I'll have to make jokes about that.

I have little to say as you can see from the transparency of this entry but I feel like reaching, albeit blindly, out. Here are four weird things that annoy me in an amusing way:

1. The technogeek who set up my internet home page as "SearchSave.com". Type in any collective noun -- "love" or "understanding" -- and here are three of the first four results:

"Shop and compare great deals on Understanding and millions of other products."
"Find the Best Deals. Shop for Understanding now."
"We've sorted through the top Understanding sites for you. Quick look ups made easy."

Oh, Lord.

2. Gmail. I'm using it because my normal internet email is wonked but I'm coming to really loathe it. It snoops in the contents of messages & throws a column of supposedly related ads at me. A recent email concerned a couple of writers' retreats & the ads are:

"Chicago Loft Apartments"
"The Lofts at Perkins Row"
"Sky View Parc"
"Luxury USC Living"

They should change the name to BigBrothermail.com

3. Open the lid of an Enenmann's apple strudel box & this is part of what you can read:

"Whether the occasion is dessert, snacking or a breakfast treat, you will find there is an Entenmann's product just right for anytime. Try one today and choose your favorite!"

Ummm... Why put this INSIDE??? Isn't it redundant? "Dessert, snacking or breakfast" are NOT the same as "anytime". I myself have had Entenmann's as my starter and entree, and always as medication.

4. Three cars parked in a row outside the bank this morning. A Hybrid first, then a Jeep, then a car service Town Car idling as the driver waited for his passenger. It was Henry Ford's descent into hell.

Breathing

The first draft of the book is done and in my editor's hands. So be it.

The last two or three weeks have been as stressing as any I've experienced in their own ways. I've boarded out with a dog two weekends in a row, had the manuscript to revise, was doing 8 a.m. & 9 p.m. walks for an elderly dog. My sister-in-law blew in for 36 fun late hours. I didn't dust for her but I did clean the bathroom.

Yesterday I finished boarding out and slept on clean sheets in my own bed after a weekend of sleeping late and watching TV at Allen's house. It's good to be home even if home is [still] dusty, disorganized, cluttered and hairy. I'm excited to be abstinent and deeply perplexed about what to do next.

I was walking Daisy and Henry home from Hero's house yesterday evening, a circuitous walk via the bank in a lighter rain than we'd had most of the day or would have at night. I stopped to take a picture of the lilac tree, which is the sweetest smelling place in Brooklyn Heights and possibly the world right now. The photo can't capture it, not only because one sense doesn't substitute for another but also because the white lilacs don't convey that immediate Proustian blip that purple lilacs on a bush do. Nonetheless, it made me think about being in my body after a long spell of being out of my mind.

By the time we stepped out of the bank, where we'd replaced the two $5 bills Henry had snacked on earlier, it was supper time on Montague Street. The humid air held the smells of hot oil, garlic, spices from the Chinese restaurant across the street, broiled meat from the souvlaki vendors, the underscent of two rainy days that had sprouted mushrooms on the plane trees. My left shoulder hurt from sleeping awkwardly sandwiched between Daisy and Allan; an encounter with a snot of a dog walker a couple of weeks ago that sent Allan and Boomer into a frenzy and resulted in fracturing the cartilage of my right index finger (forget opposable thumbs: an aching index finger is hell) twinged; my feet were glad to be in warm socks in my asparagus-printed rainboots. I was getting hungry and I needed to pee.

And for once I wasn't having a heart attack over what had to be done. I want to clean one of my kitchen cupboards, begin making the change of season clothes, delete a bunch of photos from my computer, round up all the websites I used in the book in one file, answer emails, scour the job postings at the American Writers Program site and run 52 errands -- but the albatross of dogs eating the fringes of my time, the time that should be devoted to writing, the necessity of being social: all that was gone. I could take stock of where I stood.

I don't know what I'm doing next. I want to write a novel. I have four ideas. The one that's most attractive right now is unfortunately closest to the whining I've blogged about and wrote about in Angry Fat Girls, as well as some other elements from the book. Dogs, magick, chaos theory, revenge.

Are these subjects good for me? Am I writing a fictional "project-oire" of one alternate future rather than a true novel? I'm sick of myself after two memoirs: can I stand another round of my obsessions? Is the idea commercial?

This makes my shoulders tense and my stomach rise. It is the next day: quite cool, light rain, my windows admitting the sound of birds, leaves in the breeze, airplanes, rain. My toes are chilly. Daisy is sleeping.

I took my sister-in-law to Sunday in the Park with George two weeks ago and cried from the end of the first act through the second act. I mean, I cried. Tears were dripping off the end of my hair. The pain of artistic redundancy, breaking through to the next personal level, the shoulda's and coulda's of love pierced me thoroughly. I'm not Geroges Seurat, not a genius, although it's plain stupid of me to feint a humility that ignores the thanks I've received for writing Passing for Thin, for chronicling this pain of weight and outsiderness and food obsession. Still, I doubt I'll be part of the Canon the next time a Harold Bloom waves his fat-ass opinions around the world. But I am praying for inspiration, readiness, willingness -- and for staying in the moment, in my body, and another day of using the right key for the next dog's door instead of the futile jabbing of the last couple of weeks.

I think I'll take my scared stomach off to the kitchen to make some oatmeal and take some Naprosin, with a Zoloft/Wellbutrin chaser...

All Bent out of Shape

I poisoned myself on sugar earlier this week. This is Day 4 without it so that must have been Monday night. So Monday night I poisoned myself with sugar.

Take two rather innocuous sugar items & combine them with a sugary Grapenuts sort of cereal & the next day was pretty dreadful. I felt like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Woman for about 24 hours after & it's only to day that I didn't feel ill at the thought of raw vegetables.

So, after a pretty good run of things, did I poison myself? I've got my knickers in a twist over too many things on my calendar & too many things not yet real.

I've had 7 a.m. walks with the 16-year-old Zeke, as well as 3.30 p.m. & 9 p.m. walks. I can't really take Daisy with me because, at 16, Zeke needs to go his own pace (which is mind-blowingly slow & boring) & he's too frail to fight interference on whatever pee-mail must be smelled first. This means I either get Daisy out before or after the morning & night walks. She's getting the short end of the stick & I'm getting the shortest yet.

It's tough when one's day doesn't really end. There's less sense of relaxation &, of course, NO relaxation in the morning. I finished the second-to-the-last chapter this week but until I did, my guts were gurgling over that as well. I haven't started the last chapter yet. I want to. I want to at least take some notes. But 21 Zeke walks as well as my other dogs & the mountain of things that went to hell while I was hell-bent on finishing the chapter have left me in another kind of panic.

Panic & resentment: the order of my days. I'll be paid for Zeke &, although I swear I wrote down the dates to include this weekend, Zeke little human brother informed me Mom is home. So maybe I won't be doing any more walks until Monday.

Little down time -- little time, that is, that I could really sink into -- was the "destructor" that led me from resentment to poison, the destructor I chose.

I am tired of the cold. My hands are especially sensitive to it & yet I have to manipulate leashes so I end up taking my gloves off. My skin is rough that even cotton catches on it.

I am tired of this book that never seems to be done. I'm tired of the prison I'm in with dogs all day & on weekends, the obligation to be writing even when I'm not (especially when I'm not), a profound desire to take everything out of my kitchen & restore it all. I'm tired of being a good girl. So I poisoned myself.

Resentment & rebellion are two states of mind that I absolutely cannot afford. They are, to begin with, helpless by nature. Resentment of dogs & a book to finish is ridiculous. Resenting the cold will get me where? It's not like I can call up the North Wind & say, "We've got to talk. I've been harboring a resentment toward you." Rebelliousness over walks & writing I've committed to & been paid for is rebelling against...me. If I'm going to rebel against myself, why not do it destructively (you spend too much money! Your abstinence sucks!) or constructively: don't spend money, stick to my food plan & cheat the diseased portion of my brain.

& rebelling against the weather falls again into the category of absurd.

These have been Serenity Prayer days. Acceptance, acceptance, acceptance. Get the resentment out of my brain.

The weird thing, though, is that I'm also bent of shape because the book IS almost done. There are so many things I've put on hold for that moment -- going back to the Rooms, cleaning, working on my novel, going to the movies, reading books that don't mention the phrase "BMI," dating, seeing friends, getting my hair colored & eyebrows waxed, going to the Botanical Gardens in High Spring, going on the academic job market, returning letters & emails, taking stuff to donate to Housing Works.

& that's just a start. There is ironing to do. There is John LeCarre I want to read. There are 2 years of New Yorkers in a dusty pile. There is, slowly but happeningly, a trip to Ireland to plan...

All of that has me just as panicked & resentful & scared as the book. I've gotten comfortable out here in the Heights, putting the rest of life on hold. Zeke walked me one block across & up Montague Street last night & I realized that even one block has become foreign territory to me. I'm scared to go out in the world. I'm scared & I don't know where to start first. I'm scared & I haven't started that last chapter that will be the gate to the freedom I crave but no longer know how to use.

My head is spinning. I have inadequate words for individual people. I'm going in all kinds of directions. I wouldn't mind sample part of the poison again even though I feel good eating chicken & broccoli & kidney beans & yogurt on a daily basis.

But here it comes: one more dog to walk. Maybe.

Another Disconnect

My whompus gave out at 4 o'clock yesterday afternoon. I still had to walk two dogs, go in & take care of two sets of other dogs, & walk mine. I was resentful of so much care taking of animals & no time for dinner yet. I needed kibble. I didn't really have dinner in the house. When I went off to visit the first set of Italian greyhounds, I had money & cell phone in my pocket & a menu as a bookmark in Potatoes Not Prozac.

It was after 6. That was more bites out of my energy. I decided it was too complicated to order food AND carry kibble home & besides, when would I eat? I still had another set of greyhounds to go, & my dogs to feed & walk.

If you're waiting for the cookies-&-ice cream binge story, you won't get one. I had breakfast for dinner, one helping each of oatmeal & yogurt, & fell into bed. Today is Saturday & simpler. My dogs & one set of greyhounds to take care of.

Still, I need groceries. Badly. I need to do laundry. Badly. I had intended to go to the bank this morning & get a couple of rolls of quarters. But after walking the dogs & eating breakfast, my whompus said we're not going anywhere. So I didn't. I stacked the dishes in the sink & crawled into bed with the girlies & kind of dozed for two hours. From there I could take care of the greyhoundse & take my own monsters out for an hour of fetch. I just finished lunch & did the dishes. Groceries still loom, & so does whatever laundry I have quarters for. But where's my whompus???

This is one of those Fatty/Normie Disconnects & I'm pondering which is the truth.

Fatty says, "You're fat & lazy. Just face it. If you weren't so fat, you'd have more energy. If you weren't so fat, you wouldn't wonder if this is a patch of depression or a lack of energy. If you weren't so fat, you wouldn't be depressed -- or if you weren't depressed, you wouldn't be fat. Because you're fat you can't figure out why you're so lethargic today so stop trying."

Normie says, "It was a rough ten days. You boarded at Roger's house for four nights & have had Hero & Daisy squeezing you in bed all of this week so your sleep has been disturbed. You finished a tough chapter on deadline but with nerves that had you shaking ten minutes after you woke up each morning. You had three days in which you had three extra dog walks as well as having to spend more time out with Daisy because Hero needed the time to do her business as well. Why in the name of Normality would you think you'd be anything BUT de-whomped today???"

We all spend a lot of time talking about what we eat, ate, wish we were eating, exercise, stress, deadlines...but this is one of those days when I honestly don't know if I earned this lethargy or whether I deserve it because I'm fat. My food has been good -- it's not a sugar hang-over. Most days it felt good to put in four or five hours of walking dogs. Then yesterday, at 4, the batteries stopped. I told Hero last night, as I was putting coffee together for the next morning & measuring out their kibble, that I had to be really really careful not to put the coffee filter on the floor & the kibble on the coffee maker.

It was that kind of tired.

Writing about it makes me think that Normie is the right voice. I remember being thin & having my batteries run out at some point on a Friday. & a two-hour dozelet made it possible to face what I couldn't before -- dogs, dishes, lunch, blogging.

Then my Self-help Normie wants to clamor in that I should "be gentle" with myself today. & I sort of am. I took that nap. But I think I must get groceries today if I want to both productive & "gentle" with myself tomorrow. There has to be some kind of do-it-anyway clause even on a Saturday.

+++

Two or three side notes. You may have noticed that I had my CELL PHONE with me last night. The last person in probably the whole world has gone cellular. I am ashamed that I caved.

I finally figured out the basics of my new camera (this was the week of reading badly written instruction booklets). It can do fabulous things & I feel like one of my best friends has come back from rehab or Boy Scout Camp. It really is a "toy," in the way that toys were when I was seven years old.

Last and not in the least, least, I'm flirting with an interesting man. We have made some conditions for a more serious relationship. He knows I want to lose weight but is OK about how I look now (well...with the book deadline hanging over me, I haven't had a decent brush-up -- washed, let alone colored, my hair in a week; the cold has peeled my hands and cuticles; my eyebrows are out of control; my toenails threaten to puncture socks -- the latter being what I meant by getting groceries today so I could "pamper" myself tomorrow -- I need to shave & generally do the "Merry Old Land of Oz" thing.) But just about each time we talk, he asks if I've been to the doctor or, now, if I'm worried about going to the doctor, & how my weight is.

G'rrrrrrr. This is the WORST question, isn't it? Especially because he's asking because he wants me to be comfortable with me & knows this is an impediment. It's not judgment. I'm not weighing myself & can only say my food is clean & I can walk up a couple flights of stairs with more ease than not long ago. This makes the question worse yet because I can't say, "I've lost 1.2 pounds."

I'm going to have to tell him that I'll talk to him about my food or my weight when I need to talk to him about it but that the question smacks of everyone who made me eat more when I was a kid.

G'rrrrr.

The Red Project

It must be the Catholic short story writer in me that tends to blog only when I can create a vignette or a sermon. I'd like to be a more frequent blogger, who plops down the detritus of the day but I seem to wait for something momentous to happen.

You've been exposed to my dating woes, for which, in some ways, I'm sorry. It brings out the whiniest in me. For a while, I was thinking of the couple of men I liked who did not seem to reciprocate as being "love poisoning". You know, you eat some shrimp & spend the next day violently ill & are shaky for a couple days after.

In the wake of my heart bug, I started a new project, The Red Project. Walking dogs can sometimes be so idiotically boring that I often carry my camera with me. It's gotten so that I've made some prized calendars of my neighborhood & of dogs, at least by people who are under contract to adore me. So in my fit of the blues, I thought it might help to have something ongoing, active, engaging to do, something about love but anti-disappointment.


I decided to start taking pictures of random red things. Some photos worked & some didn't. For instance, an abandoned red shoe made it on to the Brooklyn Heights Blog But some weren't worth the struggle of getting the dogs to hang on so I could snap the damn thing.

I like taking pictures. I can't draw a stick figure without a ruler, so it's amazing to me when my friend Anna, a painter & ceramicist, goes on about my "eye". Who knew? It makes me feel better to have taken a picture, as though I'd done something as creative as making muffins or writing a poem. There is hope when I upload photos into Adobe & then go in to edit them with my very crude abilities. Will they or won't they "rise"? Will they or won't they "rhyme"?

I think I've always liked taking pictures because I remember that when I was a college sophomore in Stratford-upon-Avon on Shakespeare's birthday, there was Moorish dancing on the green & leaning out of a third floor window of a Tudor hotel was a chef. I've never gotten over not taking that picture. It's been more than twenty years. Maybe I'm still trying to take that picture.

The Red Project has taken the pressure off my little foray into dating, although I might still be dating as well. The jury's out & I'm too busy with the book, dogs &, until yesterday, The Red Project to dwell on it too much. Then tragedy struck.

I had taken Boomer & Roger out for a walk in the snow and when we got back to Roger's house, I had to pee violently. I stripped off everything in a big hurry to waddle into the bathroom and my camera -- my primitive, beloved Fuji that my parents gave me a couple of years ago, went crashing to the floor. It takes pictures but the flash is busted & if I set the zoom, I can't move it without turning the camera off.

Last night I took a little tour through readers' comments at Amazon & laid down some, for me, Serious Money in order to reclaim my Red Project.

In the meanwhile, however, I have missed the following photo-ops:

An abandoned Spider Man umbrella in the trash.
A strip of Chinese New Year paraphernalia dangling from a naked tree.
Many wild rain boots.
A long line of men at CVS with armloads of heart-shaped candy boxes & truly awful stuffed animals.
A swatch of red leather hanging in the shoemaker's store.
A swarm of people at the local luscious flower shop making their Arrangements for tomorrow.
A woman with a Southwest Indian bag dangling from her shoulder.
The neon yin sign in the local fortune teller's storefront.

I contemplated buying a throw-away digital camera but I know that trying to upload the disk I'd get back would make me insane. & I have a month's free trial of Amazon Prime so it should be here five minutes ago. Still, Valentine's Day is nearly over & I won't have the knack of it even if the lines at CVS are even more desperate tomorrow evening.

It's kind of a great metaphor for dating. The photos I've seen in my head & haven't been able to take, the photos I've seen in my head that were hopeless when I uploaded them (the three red bottle caps, for example). The photos that are great but blurred. The photos, like the one above, that are almost red & too irresistible not to take & show off. My moderate skill that I've boasted about. The time they steal from the book. How I cheat just a little bit by adjusting this & that with Adobe.

A much more complete metaphor than love-poisoning.

Yep. Morris dancing. With white knee socks & everything.

Dating is not just about you

I'm not in a very good mood.

Anonymous writes: "Dating is not just about you -- it is made infinitely easier, if not just plain old possible, by having enough of yourself left over (after ruminating and obsessing over yourself) for other people."

Anonymous is right -- it's not just about me. But my blog is. This is where I tell my stories & am the first to admit that dating brings out my Inner Brat.

What I think & struggle with (including swings between shame & grandiosity) -- which is what you read -- is not necessarily how I act.

But then you might not know that given that as Anonymous, I don't know if I know you.

& you know, because I've been cyber-dumped & will not be mean to someone who had enough niceness to hook me, I'll be mean to you, Anonymous. As far as I know -- but then I can't know, can I? -- you have not had any niceness with which to hook my empathy, compassion, interest, & services. So, Anonymous: piss the fuck off.

False Romance

So I took my own advice & posted a personal ad. The timing is terrible -- my book is overdue, I have dogs spilling from the Bat Cave, I've told myself I won't put the Xmas tree away until this fucking book is done. & yet, I also told myself & you, when is it a good time? I had a weekend of relative space two weeks ago & did it.

There were a ton of responses. They asked for photos and I had already called myself zaftig. So I sent photos. Surprisingly, because I still hold that old notion that I'm undatable if I'm fat, they responded flatteringly. The couple I met quickly noted that I hadn't lied in my photo -- hadn't sent a younger, thinner version of myself. This is good information.

Inevitably, however, I had to draw some lines. No to the guys who expected sex too quickly without preamble. No to the ones I didn't find attractive or somehow loose-ended enough. (You know: the guy who only wants to talk about himself & who, at the same time, wants to talk about how the world is cheating him. Like that.) No to the ones who aren't in creative or professional fields.

& then I was down to two & they have disappointed me enough that I'm going to be heart-heavy for some days.

I did, however, learn one cool thing: I like a man who somehow or another brings out my ability to laugh, hard, at myself.

& I did one strong thing, which was to ask for a date. When the response was positive but not specific, I realized my instinct that this flirtation was going down hill with the inevitability of a bowling ball. I called. He was on another call & said he'd call back. I knew he wouldn't & fell peacefully asleep. & yes, I turned my computer on upon waking up & checked my email sooner than I normally would & there was no email. I knew all this in advance & gave him the opportunity to come through for his own sake.

Because, you see, I've done some accounting & I think I'm wonderfully datable. I asked myself in doing this if I would date me & said yes. Why, I asked myself. First because I've always wanted a Lab. Then because I'm funny. I'm, um, you know: responsive. I listen carefully. I'm in need of inspiration & so am willing to do new things. I'm a great cook. If I like to know when we'll see each other & whether our routine includes phone calls or regular emails, once that's established I'm insistently independent. So, yeah, I should be dating.

& of course, in the writing of this, Mr. Unreturned Phone Call emailed me quite prettily.

I wish he hadn't. I wish I hadn't responded prettily in return. I wish I'd take myself out on a date.

2/3 addendum: Flash: He broke a tooth. My reaction? What about meeee????

Mr. Boi, meet Francie, Frances's Inner Brat.

More information.

Mirror, mirror

A friend of mine has entered into a romance that her circle of pals has fair cause to distrust. The man has a history of taking direct aim at women and hurting them badly. This isn't one of those "It's just not working out" break-up mo's. He's always been on the look-out for other women, sleeping around, lying blatantly.

I am alarmed -- for her but more for me.

Maybe we need friends, I was thinking as I walked Zeke on this sunny warmish blowy Friday afternoon, to hold up a mirror to us. If you'd said this to me a week ago, I would have assumed you meant that friends tell us when our labels are sticking out or someone has been putting it out that we put out, but today I can see other ways this truism works.

My first reaction to her news was exasperation. Then I began to brood about it. Why should I get my knickers in a twist about her decision? I don't have to see the guy and wonder if he's telling the truth about why he canceled coming over last night. She has offered to keep quiet about it, knowing that her friends are so opposed to the romance: I don't even have to hear about it unless I ask for details.

Further, she's obsessed about this man for so long that this is the opportunity for her to find out if he's really all that and a bag of chips. I'll go so far as to say that she has a double-load to carry in beginning this relationship. She's got to evaluate him in his own right AND police his person for that doesn't match either of their heads. It's gotta to be tense over there in Loveland these days.

My official reaction was to wish her luck and warn her to protect herself. That's the kind of reaction that's guaranteed to have her prodding for what's underneath such a staid line. What was underneath, I began to realize, isn't pretty and I warned her that my curled lip at the thought of what she's doing has more to do with me than with her, and that it's a good object lesson for us both to see how much any reaction we meet with in life is not about what she (or I or you) have said or done.

I could also say that the name of some of what I feel is wrong. I envy her, but I don't envy her getting together with this guy or for having a relationship. I envy the balls she's shown in taking on such a Lothario. I envy her ability to forgive him, or try to.

The night she told me what she'd done, I had a vivid dream of being committed to an insane asylum where I and the other inmates were hearing voices and living in alternate universes. In the audience was the man I once loved. Sitting very close to him was his current lover. Audience? I don't remember why there was an audience. It wasn't Bedlam but for some reason they were there and he was terribly eager to ask me, apparently normal among the mad people, questions. When I saw him I morphed like Bertha Mason, lunging and spitting to get at him and claw his eyes out. The next day I received an email asking me if I wanted to be someone's "friend" on a website I know he lurks on. It was a bogus invitation but of course I had to go look. He looks very happy with his new love. I thought about how I was that pretty when I was thin. I thought about what he said about why "we" didn't work out. I thought about how he wanted to be friends with me as this new relationship blossomed and how I finally said I couldn't do it. I thought about how I dropped the last opportunity to be in touch with him like a hot coal. I thought about how thinking about him still tears my throat out.

I envy my friend's opportunity at a chance with someone she knows, warts and all. I won't have that opportunity.

Distraction! I thought. Other men! But there really aren't any. And so I had to acknowledge that one man I had an ongoing email/phone relationship with point-blank refused to meet me and how I terminated it because of that, how I pushed at someone else when I felt used and he'd dropped me. I thought about all the men kindasortalmosthovering on the periphery of my life and I envied her gumption to open herself up to that world of hurt and the stores of energy it takes even to get to the part that hurts.

"I can't date until the book is done," I said to myself. Well, that's not all that distant now. "I can't date until I've lost weight," I tried not to say. But isn't that a crock of shit? I mean, I'm fat. I'll always be fat. If I'm very lucky, I might get to hide how fat I am in a thin body, but I have a fat head and fat blood and a fat history. Maybe the point is to date someone now so he'll know...the worst of it. I didn't want to write that phrase. The truth of it? The Fat Girl I also love, or who should be lovable as well as the thin one?

Something.

And that, folks, is the first layer of my reaction to my friend's news. It leaves me sad for myself and ashamed of that sadness. Look, the grown-up Frances wants to say to that snarking Francie, YOU dropped two men for being too roughshod on your heart. YOU stated in one sentence how hurt you were and that man disappeared. You've done some good housekeeping in the last year so you don't get to be all regretful about the past you tossed out for very good reasons.

But her chance has reminded me of my lost chances and informed me of how reluctant I am -- and how undeserving I feel -- to court new ones.

It's not about her. It's not even about me wishing I were in her shoes.

It's about me and the mirror she's held up for me to see the state of my heart in.

Back from the Land of Weak Irony

It's Day Three of getting off Christmas Sugar and Day Three of Daisy's and my return to Brooklyn from Arizona. I'm not going to apologize for breaking my abstinence but I will say that I feel like shit in the wake of it. I wasn't walking and being back in business with the dogs is hard on my thighs and shoulders. I'm hungry every two hours as my body readjusts. I won't mention my digestion. And yet it feels heavenly after three weeks of that heavy sodden ghastly mulch I was living in. When I'm In The Sugar, there's no sense of "this will be better when". When I get out of it, I know the first seventy-two hours will be hard and the first ten days dangerous and touchy. So I'm countin' days.

It may sound very strange, then, that I will be thinking about thinking about moving to the Land of Nothing when the Book is done. My mother is ailing and my father is blind. They are scared for each other and scared for themselves. They need me and I want to be there to walk them as gently and intelligently through their end time as I can.

There are pro's and con's to this. I realized how much I miss being treated as though I am not responsible for how much the Safeway clerk, cable guy or waiter hates his or her job. People are friendly, smiling, helpful, accommodating. When the Schwann's delivery man brought in food, he stocked the freezers for my parents, roughed up Daisy, said hello in the most jolly way to my parents and breezed on out in the time it would have taken for a New York City or TriState deliveryman to diss his customers for having paid for his services.

I want to collect my stuff and live with it before I, too, face my end times. My china and furniture are spread out between Montana and Oregon and the things I have in the Bat Cave can't be seen OR appreciated for the crunch of space here. It would be nice to have a full size refrigerator and a microwave and fuses that don't blow when I run my hair dryer.

On the other hand, Arizona is as white bread as any place I've ever seen and the last place on earth I'd pick to live. I find the consumption of gasoline, land, and water distasteful. There are no mailboxes on the streets. There are no people on the streets. There is no recycling beyond newspapers. The houses all look the same and even the city offices are in strip malls.

Like my digestion, I won't go into the lack of greenery and the summer heat.

And then there is being home. I took Daisy out five minutes after getting back and five minutes later we ran into Boomer. At seven the next morning we bumped into Steven, Jonathan, Susan, and Daisy's friend, Chance. The dogs were incredibly happy to see me and I laugh at how I drag myself out on Monday morning to be met with, "FRANCES! IS IT CHRISTMAS? YOU'RE HERE -- IT MUST BE CHRISTMAS! DON'T YOU JUST LOVE MONDAY MORNINGS WHEN WE GET TOGETHER AGAIN!?"

The chances of knowing one's neighbors are slim in the Land of Weak Irony. You may only chat once a year, as you're setting up your inflatable snowman in the front yard for Christmas.

But then I arrive at Newark and find that Daisy's crate had been secured with those police ties. "You want those cut?" the clerk asked.

No, I wanted to say. I carry sharp scissors in my carry-on bag.

"Please," I answered.

So she did -- all but one, meaning I had to interrupt politely, collect glares and clerkly suspicion while I cut the last tie off in order to break the crate down. This is what is considered "service" in the TriState area.

And then again, I talked to one of my dog's humans yesterday evening and we laughed about the dogs until we were on the verge of tears. I ran into a friend this morning and laughed about dogs (it's a theme, OK?) until I hawked up a loogie. I cracked another of my dog's humans up at noon. People get me here. People make me laugh here. My acquaintances are, intellectually if not financially, my peers. We're all fulsome Democrats. There are books in our homes and dreams of hilly forests in our citified hearts.

But a gym would be cheaper in Arizona and some of the year I could take Daisy to the lake.

Back and forth. What I do know is that my dream when I finish this book is to rent a car and drive away. I want to visit every important person from my past and make peace with it. I'll take a miss on three or ten people I actively...well, hate, but I'd like to reinstall friendships, colleagueships, sisterships, auntships and cousinships while seeing how they have fared and shaped their lives in the last twenty or thirty years.

It would seem my parents' end times are shaping how I'm thinking about my own initial descent down the slope.

I Kid You Not

Occasionally I have Chinese or Thai food.

Daisy adores broccoli in any sauce and because I usually cook a hunk of protein (my pals at AFG can tell you how wearisome it is to read roast pork or chicken in my daily food day after day), I often get broccoli in something. Garlic sauce. Lemon grass. Basil. I save most of the rice for breakfast -- if you're on a food plan like mine, rice, fat-free ricotta, almond extract and sugar-free strawberry jam is a lovely breakfast, particularly in summer) -- and toss the fortune cookies in a jar to give Daisy another time.

They may be the only cookie in the world, aside from Fig Newtons, that I could care less about.

Lately Daisy has been on a hunger strike. It's not that she's trying to lose weight: she'll eat anything off the street, bite my fingers off for a cookie, try to rip open trash bags for old fish spines. At home, though, given her nutritious, measured kibble, she goes to sleep.

Other owners of Labradors find this to be impossible. They don't call `em "Lardadores" for nothing.

I think she's pouting over so many other dogs invading her space, even though these dogs are good friends.

If I have scraps of my protein, I cut them up and add them toher kibble, stirring well so that to get the last bit of chicken skin she has to eat her way to it. But yesterday morning, after her kibble had sat untouched for 12 hours and not really wanting to handle chicken at an early hour, I decided to lure her into eating by crumbling a fortune cookie into her bowl.

This is always an event because the fortune is then Daisy's, not mine. Sometimes they're so apt I put them on a little bulletin board on my desk. "Life is never more fun than when you're the underdog competing against the giants," reads one, and "Any impatience you show will only create more stress" is another I'm looking at right now.

Yesterday's, just in case you can't enlarge the photo, her fortune read, "Hungry is the man who finds salvation in a cookie".

You coulda knocked me over with a feather.

The irony -- looking for your future in a cookie. The irony -- my dog who looks me straight in the right pocket as we're walking down the street. The irony -- fooling her into eating correctly with a cookie.

The irony -- that this cookie would fall into my bag of lemon grass broccoli on some weary Friday night.

Do I really need to spell out the mirror image Daisy presents me of my own culinary tendencies?

Oh Lord, the irony.

Musing While I Can

My manuscript is due December 1, 2007. I finished the sixth chapter last evening. Today has been kind of a day off except that I did two big loads of laundry, switched two bags of winter clothes for summer clothes, ran some errands & started reading a screed called Fat: A Fate Worse than Death? This is one angry dudette writing one thing over & over: society victimizes (she even uses the word "sodomizes" at one point) women by forcing them to be thin, wear make-up, try to stay youthful, paint & dye & squeeze & tweeze. I nearly put it down -- I have lots to read -- because the second paragraph uses a direct instead of an indirect pronoun.

The author photo shows a comfortably plump-to-large woman in a big cozy fisherman's L.L. Bean sort of sweater. She complains that her doctor won't tell her what obese is but tosses the word "fat" around in a way that only the once-thin (she gained about 40 pounds in her 50's) & at her top weight can. Which is to say, there is fat & then there is fat.

I've been thinking about the definition of fat for a while -- I think I wrote about it. We need some terms here. There is Misses Department Fat, 14 - 18. There is J. Jill Fat, up to 2X. Then there are the other Fats, on beyond Silhouettes & into the pages just after the underwear section of the Lane Bryant catalogue. I'm not good at guessing weights or sizes but I'm thinking she's Misses Department.

I'm thankful as hell to be J. Jill Fat. Really. I've been Muu-muu Fat & being able to wear jeans & not feel like a freak is still so astonishing to me that I sometimes forget that I am, still, fat.

I have six chapters to write in 26 days. There's no way I can do it if I'm in the food. I love this pressure because I get to be very small, very focused. I pray each morning for abstinence first, then being able to write, then the dogs & then productive use of my time. I go to bed as early as possible so that I'll have energy for the next day.

I spoke to my mom & a friend today & both of them were asking things about the Book that they might ask about my "diet". Are you working? Can you do it? Is it too hard on you?

Deja vu.

But today is a loose-sweater day, a phrase from The Rooms that, in its entirety, is a prayer & intention to wear the day like a loose sweater. No fretting. No having to take a Klonopin because I'm so anxious about dogs & writing that I'm having diahrrea. I don't have the time to get all the winter clothes but I have enough time to get out some.

I had to force myself to go grocery shopping, however. One of the problems I'm facing is dinner & cold weather. I want hot food. I'm tired from the day & don't want to make hot food. I don't have the time, even in today's loose sweater (or flannel shirt & sweat pants), to make a lot of food ahead of time. My freezer doesn't freeze & I don't have a microwave. I had to do some thinking about the simplest food I could make & I made the produce man laugh because he was ready to restock Brussels sprouts & I kept scooping them out. I left him a nice empty bin to replenish.

The grocery stores in the Heights on a Sunday night are frightful. All the yups have been with their kids or shopping, & the students have all been studying or getting over hang-overs (we have an enormous dorm for spill-over housing for Pace & NYU). Suddenly it's getting dark & there's nothing for breakfast! A mass exodus begins & you're taking your chances on getting those Brussels sprouts. The crowd was bad enough that I gave up after I had a couple of day's worth of fixings but interestingly (there is a point to this), the crowd was made much bigger by three people. I believe they were Dutch, who are now the tallest nationality in the world. Very blonde, buying Gatorade in, like, a 12-pack & Nutella. That was all I saw as I paid for my own groceries. They were conferring on every item & took up a HUGE amount of room.

The man maybe had some weight to lose; the women didn't. He had to be 6'4" & the women must have been nearly 6 feet tall. The blondest was wearing a leather jacket that nipped in at the waist. They were the personification of the K.D. Lang lyric about a "big-boned gal...you really couldn't call her small".

Thin people can be a voluminous as fat people. In fact, maybe more. They didn't move through the store with the self-consciousness that a lot of Us have about taking up room, or even that New Yorkers in general have a sensitivity about.

There's another side to this, I'm seeing. Because I'm so conscious, I have all these rules in the store. Put my cart some place out of the way while I gather up yams & apples, usually in front of the cake & cheese cooler where not many people are apt to brouse. Snatch-&-dash. No browsing. Get my groceries on the belt as neatly & tightly as possible so that the cashier doesn't have to search out the bar codes & the person behind me can begin unloading his/her cart, too. Push all the loose carts together in front of the fancy soap display -- out of the way, ready for the stock guys -- & stack the baskets with the handles in place. Pay by debit or in cash -- no signing credit chits that takes up more time.

I get pissy when other people don't play by my rules, when they dawdle over which flavor of Gatorade to pick up or sort through the yogurts without putting the strawberries back with the strawberries.

I'm in a pretty relaxed mood tonight so my pissiness was at a minimum. I'm abstinent & was wearing an L.L. Bean jacket so I wasn't lumbering down the aisles like the Stay-Puff Man.

But it was interesting to see these Olympians in their lack of...what? urban manners...& how much room they took up at every sharp turn of the aisles.

It's like how the skinniest women wear too much perfume, I guess.

+++

Here's an oddity, & then I'll stop & take the chicken out of the oven. A friend & I want to make a gingerbread house for Christmas. I saw a mold & thought I'd get it cheaper at eBay. I probably will. But in scrolling through the cake molds, I came across a lamb mold that we had when I was a kid. It was a killer cake to make my mother said & it was paired with a Santa mold that was impossible.

The lamb was in a heated auction for $41. I grinned & looked for the Santa.

$499.00.

It occured to me that eBay is my den of inequity, next to the bakery shelf. & what I want most from it is my childhood. I didn't buy the Chatty Cathy doll I saw the other night that was said to be haunted & I haven't found the right Mary Poppins doll that I adored. But I have a Francie doll from eBay, dressed in an outfit I still had, & I browse Chatty & Mary every once in a while.

Go figure.