Identity Crisis Abating

You've shown so much support, concern and wisdom in how to handle my unwitting parachute jump, that I owe you both thanks and the partial resolution.

I think the metaphor I felt earlier this week was standing on sand as the tide moves out. I see it now as an identity crisis, not helped by simple things like not being able to get hold of my sales rep at the Canadian drugstore from which I order my steeply discounted Zoloft (don't worry: I ponied up the $40 for a two-week supply and will do it again if I have to) or wondering when a client would pay me.

It's pretty easy to see now that I and my agent, in tandem, made enough noise at my editor to get a verbal, positive response to the revised manuscript I turned in eleven weeks ago: I needed, to told my editor, to know where I stand with her in order to stand. I've become a kind of aunt to my parents which is shocking at the immature age of 52. The silence regarding the thing I love best in the world -- writing -- stripped me of an enormous part of my self. As soon as I got the validation I needed (the manuscript will be accepted), I felt like I could breathe and plan to move on.

The next masks, of course, and fashioned to suck me away from everything I love, are depression and compulsive eating. I know how much my mood is improved by being abstinent. I know how much more I can feel that I'm a writer and an author. By accepting the restrictions of my food plan, I can accept more easily the fact that I really can't do anything about my parents' situation, that it's their journey and by being with them, the journey stops.

The only person I'd like to talk to about all of this (it's so complicated; we've been through so many rounds of discussion and argument; their moods change three times a day) is my brother. His last response to me was to go to church and pray. That's good advice but not quite sufficient. His wife is in the loop so the loneliness of the looniness isn't as acute. So I have one tool and one action: accept the need for me to let them assess their happiness, health and peace of mind.

My favorite dog moves to the `burbs next week. The failure of a couple of family members to respond is another feeling of loss. I could get tremendously angry at losing my abstinence but I don't, frankly, have the energy. I have just about enough energy to try to make in through Day Two and to thank you all for listening. I'll be in the Rooms tomorrow.

Kicking and Screaming into Acceptance

The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous has a very famous section that all 12-steppers know: "...for acceptance is the solution to all my problems". It means letting go of trying to control people, places and things, and it's a very good idea.

The idea, however, is under trial by fire, as it were, and while I'm kicking and screaming against getting sick with another depression, I'm also sad and scared by how much has careened out of -- well, I never pretended to have control, so maybe the word is out of its customary places in my life.

I need to list what's making me wring my hands.

• I turned in the revision of my book ten weeks ago. I know that it's going through a legal vetting but I finally begged my agent yesterday to try to shake five words of reaction to the work itself from my editor. She duly emailed my editor and said I'd be expecting her call yesterday or today. No call. Do they hate it? Is it too hot for the ledgal department to permit publication? Is it going to be canceled? How much revision will I need to do of the last round? I'm feeling hurt and angry that my editor can't take three minutes to email, "Some good work here. I'll be in touch soon with more specific comments" or "I have some major problems with what you've done which we'll need to discuss in depth". I can't count on any part of it -- the timing, the revisions, the money, the commitment. Worse, all this belies faith in my work and in the praise my editor shared with me before the revision was done.
• My sister-in-law was maybe going to come out to take author photos of me. My brother said in an email last week that she was checking into flight. No word. I'm feeling frustrated and confused about how to proceed and angry that if she comes, I'll be put on the spot to clean and prepare for a guest. I'm confused as well about whether to book another photographer or simply use my PFT photo.
• My mother is home with my father. He reports she is getting stronger but also that she's had some bad breathing attacks (she has congestive heart failure). They've been sleeping in their recliners because it's too hard for Mom to lie down and/or because she's not breathing well. Of course, my father is being run ragged and no one is particularly worried about what this is doing to his 93-year-old health. I feel guilty for not being there; scared of the inevitable; angry that I have to deal with this and angry that they aren't going into assisted living up in Montana ASAP.
• I never know when I'll be paid by certain clients. My funds are low. It make me angry because they'd sure as shit say something if they were failed to be paid. And I'm scared because with extra expenses of nursing and moving, I can't ask my parents for help.
• One of my favorite dog's owner just told me he and his wife are putting their apartment on the market and will move to Westchester. I'm sad because I'll miss her desperately and scared about income. Nor do I know when this will happen.
  
• I abstain from sugar and then I give into it. I eat at night when I can't sleep -- I'm powerless over sleep, too -- and because I feel both as though I need consolation for the faults of the day and because I deserve the punishment. I can't count on myself and my sponsor is out of the country for the next month, so I can't count on her either. This makes me furious.
  
• My concentration is shot. I can remember one thing at a time, can't read, can't focus on anything that asks me to step out of myself.

Helplessness. I am besieged. Even the editing project I have, which I struggle to concentrate on, is in a state that I feel helpless to do more that point out the flaws, with little idea how to really fix it.

What are the common threads that threaten my peace of mind? Anger, frustration, fear, estrangement from myself and from the parents I've relied on for 52 years, hurt, lack of faith, loneliness.

I feel as though I've built my house on the tide line and the foundation keeps sliding further out to sea. But each day I get up, more often than not feeling vile from the food of the day before, and suck up the hope that I'll get something done or run into serendipity or that somebody will recognize that I simply, fucking exist.

Sunday Night Soliloquy

It's after 11.30 pm. The weekend is over. The dog that is making me insane will be off my hands tomorrow & I can settle in to "routine". I took a shower & washed my hair. I'm abstinent. I showed up for all the dogs under my care today. I called my parents. I culled a lot of papers & mail off my desk. So why am I ready to put my clothes on again & go out in search of my pals, Ben and Jerry?

I have a project I'm deer-in-the-headlights over. Until I finish it, I can't really move on to other projects. It's convenient, because each project is scarier than the one before.

I'm also fighting a depression, which is a most selfish place to be in. After almost five weeks of family in two months, there's not much of me left & I don't want to give in to reading or writing, things that feel as heavy as a stack of bricks & which will take me away from this narrow stifling place that is, at least, mine.

I'm frozen in place. Ice cream will not make it better, at least not tonight. I've got to break out of this cell but not for Key Lime Pie ice cream. I'm scared.

Brought to You from Facebook...

Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions. Pass it on to as many people you like. You can't use the band I used. Do not repeat a song title. It's a lot harder than you think but as the list spirals down to the last questions, you'll find yourself surprised by its power.

Have fun!

Pick Your Artist: Joni Mitchell


Are you a female or male: Woman of Heart and Mind
Describe yourself: Big Yellow Taxi
How do you Feel: I Don't Know Where I Stand
Describe Where You Currently Live: Two Gray Rooms
Describe Where You Wish You Could Live: California
If You Could Go Anywhere, Where Would You Go: Free Man in Paris
Your favorite form of transportation: Ray's Dad's Cadillac
Your best friend is: A Strange Boy
Your favorite color is: Blue
Your favorite animal is: Daisy Summer Pipers
Favorite Time of Day: Chelsea Morning
What's the Weather Like: Eastern Rain
If your life were a tv show, what would it be called: I Wish I Were in Love Again
What is Life to You: Waiting for the Car on the Hill
Your Relationships: Sweet Sucker Dance
Your fear: Last Chance Lost
What is the best advice you have to give: In France They Kiss on Main Street
If you could change your name, you would change it to: Hunter
Thought for the Day: No Apologies
How I would Like to Die: Taming the Tiger
My Soul's Present Condition: Song toAging Children Come
My Motto: Help Me

Rrrrrhhaaaayyyy-gunnn

Oi. I've been through the mangler of dealing with the ongoing parental crisis. My father and I haven't had a true fight in a long time -- maybe never, because he's Dad and I'm Kid, and now I'm not the Kid -- but we had a real fuss late last week when I asked if we could make inquiries about getting and staying on assisted living waiting lists so that he and Mom can move when they're ready.

This was the most innocuous of requests, especially because my brother would move them back to Montana within the month if he was the boss of them. Dad wouldn't hear of it. The argument got weird fast: what, he exploded, if Mom dies? The ratio of women to men in their retirement community is 16:1, you know. (Hunh???) No one would be happier than I to see either of them go on to new partners but what did this have to do with the fact that Mom is alive, can't walk much, will never drive again and the isolation this will impose?

"What if I die first?" he burst out again. "Then Mom will stay in a nursing home," I said, a bitter fact but inescapable. "I've taken a couple of tumbles myself," he lashed out. "Do I need to be in assisted living?" "Not as much if you used your white cane," I said.

What did any of this have to do with a refundable deposit on a long waiting list?

I think it had to do with painful emotions, which my father has been careful to avoid all of his life. Fear, anxiety, helplessness, suspense, confusion, resentment, loneliness, love, sorrow and grief -- I don't know that I've ever seen those feelings play out so volubly before. He's been the Doctor and the Colonel and now he depends on strangers to change the batteries in his hearing aids and wonders if he has the money to cover what could be a very expensive future.

I've seen laughter in my father. Graciousness, intellectual passion, silliness and playfulness, affection, admiration, pride, generosity. I've seen and experienced his harshness and anger but they've been short-lived. This is new territory where Slavic stoicism is more dangerous than it seems because it's crumbling.

Later that night I heard him telling my aunt that there was no way he'd go into assisted living, "it would drive me bat shit." I went to my room and cried, called my brother and got the commiseration I needed but was still so angry I couldn't speak to him for a day, thus waving the flag of "Francie Is in a Mood". Even my mother asked, when I stayed home and cooked dinner instead of being in a car with him, if Francie Was in a Mood.

Yes. Francie Was in a Mood. She was in the mood to scream or twist his wrist behind his back. She found some alone time instead of doing either.

Thirty-six hours later he called a friend in Montana and my niece and I heard him saying it was time for him and Mom to move up North and into assisted living. Lisa came into the dining room with wide eyes to find my eyebrows hovering above my head, which was spinning. My mother can't remember having a shower and my father is changing his mind and using phone calls to relative outsiders to tell us what he's thinking. It's like everyone's speaking in Voices.

I realized in that episode that I was enabling him as surely as if I was buying bourbon for a drunk. As long as I'm there, he doesn't really have to face the fact that he can't see and that life without vision at 93 years of age is limited. Who will tell him his tomatoes are red or that he can take the plastic tops of his Aerogrow garden? Who will read him the catalogue for the Library of Congress Books for the Blind? Even Mother won't be able to do many of these tasks, unable to walk that far or get her breath to talk that much.

The nursing home where she's been finishing rehab has announced that she has plateaued. The Medicare Express has turned Local. They're urging assisted living or keeping Mother in the nursing home, which would be the death of her, and Dad has announced he's bringing her home on July 24th, two months after her fall. He's given my brother the go-ahead to put down a deposit for one of the places in Missoula, which is giving my brother the same kind of chilling thrill that Dad's blindness gave my mother by putting him in charge and giving him a new sense of being the jury.

I don't understand the financial fiascoes my father has ignored and that my brother feels is Dad's shrinking capacity to run his own life, but I have cottoned on to the fact that when Dad charges in to remove Mom from the care facility and doesn't want to talk to my niece (she's a hospital social worker and knows Medicare better than God -- she's been our savior) first because he's got to get bars up in the shower, he's acting on all those frightening emotions rather than the logic we can allow at the remove we have from the situation. I managed to convince him Lisa needed to be involved in every inch of the next week in order to secure the next round of Medicare benefits and I managed to get through to him that in the 20 hours a day he won't have a nursing aide to help out, he needs to find the time and ways to take care of himself. "If the neighbors ask you to go water-walking, say yes and ask a friend to sit with Mother. Let's get an intercom system so you can watch TV in your bedroom when she's in the den. Don't be afraid to ask Monica (their aide) to look at your tomatoes or take you to the hardware store."

What have I missed?

Mother is going to take an enormous toll on him. I know this because he took an enormous toll on me and everyone kept telling me, "Take care of yourself," a concept I couldn't follow through on. I have little experience of really taking care of myself, and even less experience in saying out loud what I need and what I will do to take care of myself. This deficit should have been clear 30 years ago but it took the last six weeks to really get it.

I have it easy, too. My father isn't going to be able to leave my mother for a psychic spa, whereas I'm beginning to understand that the first thing self-care consists of is largely to leave people to their mistakes and frailties and live at a remove from them.

Maybe this will be easier when I can get to sleep on Eastern rather than Pacific Daylight Savings Time...

The Angels Are in the Details

I'm trying to decide whether to postpone my return to Brooklyn. My niece is due to arrive in Phoenix on Wednesday but we have her in mind for my mother's release from skilled nursing to home and we know Mom won't be home for several weeks yet. I haven't gotten hold of Lisa and in the meantime, Dad has a doctor's appointment and I witness his struggle with tasks like his remote controls and hearing aid batteries and his peremptory attitude toward Mom and the staff. If one stays a week in this environment, there's going to be one Breakdown Day. Mine started the day before yesterday and finally cracked open last night. There is a question as to whether my mother's fall was caused by a small stroke and her records from the hospital and accute rehab don't include a CT of her brain. Dad is a little flippant about it while I want her attending doc to schedule a work-up.

In short, it's all very complicated and sad and I often find myself at loggerheads with my father about any number of things.

I am a Daddy's girl, so when I say that my dad can be a bastard, I say it after I've given him a LOT of latitude.

Still, the nursing home has been a revelation to me and not entirely in sad or scary ways.

It takes so little to brighten a few moments of the residents' day. Yesterday I wore a red and white toile skirt and every woman I passed who was sentient remarked on how pretty it was, how much they miss girlie dresses and skirts in vivid colors. There was a traffic jam on the way from my mother's room to the lobby, which is sunnier and more comfortable than the nooks that are a jabble of television non-watched by residents who are wheelchair and dementia-bound, and I had to ask a woman if I could move her wheelchair so we could get through. She didn'y understand at first but acquiesed when I explained again. I found a spot she seemed to like and, as I walked away, I trailed my hand across her shoulders.

She said something as I began to push Mom on. I bent down and asked her to repeat it.

"You'll be back soon, won't you?"

What could I say but yes?

One insentient patient had dropped the lambie she holds and nurses on. I stopped to pick it up and lay it in her lap. The woman next to her looked me deeply in the eyes and said "Thank you." So, too, I was able to communicate in a normal voice Mother's tablemate's desire for a second bowl of clam chowder last night, the first semi-solid food she's been allowed in quite a while. She thinks the staff ignores her when it's more a matter of not hearing her soft voice and tendency to tuck her chin into her chest. That soup was the best thing she'd ever tasted.

Of all the treats and sensible things that have made my mother's life more bearable are the down quilt my niece gave her for Christmas and the plush yellow Lab puppy I sent her. She calls it Taffy, after the first dog my parents had, and she takes it everywhere, as many patients do. I'm surprised that she remembers she has it, given her memory loss, but it was an instant success.

This stuff breaks my heart, although the facility is the most loving environment I could imagine, with jolly nurses' aides and PT staff who pass through the seas of wheelchairs and stop to talk and touch, two resident dogs and a cat. I wish the chaplain guitar trio that performs every week would switch from Jesus music to the Marine Corp anthem, which I got Mom's dinner companions singing last night, or to "Dancing Cheek-to-Cheek" -- songs that these people know in the recesses of their minds and need only the tune to bring them to sudden animation. I wish the food was better (one of my father's and my fights has been over taking dinner to Mother: he says it insults the staff).

Mostly I wish I didn't have the feeling that I'm fucked if I stay and damned if I leave. If I stay, I'll eat and lose valuable time and time with my beloved Henry, who is moving to the suburbs in August. If I leave, my brain will be three hours behind, wondering if Dad is OK, if Mom needs lotion rubbed on her swollen legs, if the doctor is pressed to order a neuro work-up. That worry drains the value of my time at home as well.

One Foot in Front of the Other

I'm sorry for the silence. I got back from Arizona on the 10th and went straight into dogs and cleaning my apartment in anticipation of my nieces' arrival on the 15th, then showing them as much of New York City as time, tickets and energy permitted until Friday morning. I slept most of yesterday. Writing this blog looks to be the crowning personal achievement of some very draining weeks: I go back to Arizona on Thursday for ten days. This will give my brother and me a chance to catch up on our parents' situations -- there are many -- in person, and to be there in case Mom's next nursing facility discharges her earlier than we would like.

I'm walking around these days with my heart in my throat and sometimes in my nose, that tickle of tears coming. We have a lot of changes to make for my parents that are going to be difficult. Mom's fractures need time to heal. We're getting on managed care waiting lists in Montana so that they'll be near family. We'll have to pack up their house and put it on the market. Dad has had to accept that he needs outside help at least a couple of days a week. Medical facilities have their own agendas with Medicare reimbursements that they toggle without sharing records and even my niece, who is a hospital social worker, can only guess at what help or hindrance those records regarding rehabilitation progress contain. We're all exhausted except for Mom, who is slowly losing her mind.

My abstinence is in pieces. My favorite dog, Henry -- Mr. Happy -- is moving to the `burbs in August. I'm out of cigarettes (quitting lasted 8 hours yesterday until I was making reservations to go to Arizona at 11.30 at night) and Zoloft and the place I order my antidepressants from has not returned my email or phone calls. I have not had much Daisy Time and will have less in the months to come. I have to pull myself together today. Get a two-week supply of Zoloft (the withdrawals are horrible), get my food in order, speak to my sponsor, start writing my blogs, start paying attention to the gifts instead of the broken-ness of my life.

Mostly, I think, I have to realize not only that this is what life is and that food doesn't solve it, but that This Is What Life Is. Parents age, and they die. Dogs move. Separations occur. I suffer from depression, food and nicotine addiction. I have talents. All of these things require day-to-day responsibility and acceptance. And none of them are the end of the world. At worst, they mean periods of great grieving -- but my life will probably move on if I'm not hit by a truck or something. There will still be lilacs each spring, Neapolitan mastiff puppies, yogurt, naps.

And yet...Mom! The woman who made me dolls from hollyhock flowers. Who read me fairy tales and told endless stories from her childhood. Who was a dead ringer for Madeline Kahn and sooo elegant.

It's OK to have a breaking heart.

The Swimming Dilema

God help me, "dilema" does not look right. There's no dictionary on my father's comuter's tool bar, so please assume I'd do a better job under other circumstances.

I'm hoping to go swimming today. The problem isn't getting time to do it, it's that I need to be chaperoned in by a resident of the retirement city where my parents live. & the chaperone has to have a gust pass punch card, which my father and I couldn't find. A neighbor has offered to take us today if my father's obsession with upsy-downy tomato bags doesn't overtake us. The pie (which I didn't eat) took up so much of yesterday that we visited Mom as she was finishing dinner and was put to bed, a move that elicited a sound of pain so horrible I had to step into the hall to say Hail Marys, my fallback prayer for the worst moments of my life.

My father and I have begun to make phone calls to friends. Perhaps we sense The Time is coming. I don't know. He says only that he misses "Mommy," his ocasional phrase of enormous affection for my brother and my sake. I have no idea what I'm thinking any more except how sad I am. When I said goodbye last night, even her hands were tucked under her covers, like a child. I was crying -- I hit meltdown yesterday -- and said "I love you so much, Mom," to which she replied, "That's all that matters, isn't it?" Her question was partly wry. I know she wants more than words, more than visits, more than the photo albums I brought that caught her attention. I think she wants to be well and, more realistically, to be released from so much pain. She has crippling arthritis, not life threatening but much harder to live with than her pulminary condition.

And I think, like any scared child, she wanted Dad or me to get into bed and hold her, and warm her.

All I could tell Jim when we spoke later that night was to be prepared. He's coming down next Saturday. I don't like thethought of leaving my father, blind, on his own for four days again.

My food isn't perfect by a long shot. I wanted some wine more than I wanted pie, and I had 2 glasses diluted with water and ice. Jim laughed that it was a fair trade-off and I agree. Slightly lit, I proceeded to make my father bacon and eggs and ate the remainder of the eggs and a bolw of grapenuts, which I'd had for breakfast, the only other meal I had yesterday. That was a "good" food day for me. Actually, it's the best so far.

I keep tellling myself how many people -- you among them -- are pulling for me. This is life. I always say I want a life: well, this is what life is. Draining, bewildering, demanding, fractious, disoriented. I have to learn to BE in it, do what I can and not eat. And if I can do that, then someone else who is struggling and eating might have some hope they didn't feel before. It reads corny, for which I'm sorry. But for now, my livelihood is how I deal with my mouth and my body. I don't have the luxury of certain kinds of privacy.

So there are a few answers: I can't go swimming on my own; my brother isn't here sharing the pie; my father is simply more at ease knowing I'm here to find pie tins and pass on phone numbers; and I'm kind of a wreck.

Thanks to all -- love, fmk

Event Horizon

Radiating from my parents' bedroom is a series -- a long series -- of lectures on astronomy. For three days I've been moving through a drift of phrases -- quarks, supernovas, quasars, MCDI -- some of which makes sense and a lot doesn't. I haven't stopped to watch the lectures with my father because it's an eight-part series and I arrived somewhere around Disc 5. Still, all this cosmology has come to characterize my personal time here so far, and I am now standing as close to the event horizon -- that threshhold at which matter gets sucked into a black hole from which it cannot escape -- as is possible while defying the siren song of gravity.


Time moves so s-l-o-w-l-y here. An hour feels like three. Dad is immersed in relativity but not so much his relatives. Conversation is limited to astronomy, my mother's medical condition, when my brother last called (always within the hour), what to have for dinner. Right now he's taking a break from "the afterglow of the big bang by making the filling for a strawbery-rhubarb pie.


Great.


I've had enormous support and prayer in this endeavor of visiting Unlimited Food Land so I feel, for you and for me, that I need to check in and say I haven't had sugar or flour but it's getting dicey.

One other thing besides my knowledge of how many people are rooting for my abstinence that I have to remember is how Mom brightened when I walked into her room on Thursday wearing a white tank top (I NEVER wear sleeveless clothes but I figure what the hell) and a white capris: a bit of my Other Body's figure is beginning to come back and it made her really happy. She told Jim I'd "slimmed down a lot" when she talked to him yesterday. In a way, I resent winning aproval for losing weight but I don't think this is the time to quibble over my worth according to body size and I, too, of course, am happy to be wearing sunnier, more form fitting clothes. I had more confidence when I talked to Dr. Kidney because I wasn't a lump that could allow him to presume me stupid or lacking control when I walked out to the nurses' station and cornered him. It's an entirely weird thing, this morphing and its two-sided blade of pleasure-giving and confidence on one edge, and privacy and...I've always been me on the other. Sort this out for me, if you can. I'm confused even as I'm going to have to go out and show my father how to make pie crust with the new Cuisineart.


I'm not used to not moving my body. Each day I ask if we can go swimming and Dad tables it for another day. The heat and the lanscape are not inviting for walks. I came out with a pile of articles I tore out of New Yorkers before throwing that magazines away and my head is swimming with trains to Tibet, the physiology of laughter, monocular vision, the New Jersey container ports, Facebook ten months after it started...


Will I or won't I have pie?


Nights are awful. My father becomes loquacious on the six mathematical equations used to measure the distance of stars, or on my mother's rapidly deteriorating mental faculties. Then im calls and wants information I can't give him yet. Dad stays up late and I wait for a double dose of Klonopin to take over, which it only seems to do the next morning when I pull myself from sleep.


I've at least managed to install a wireless router so Jim and I can continue to work while we're here, and we're going to be here a lot. But I feel like I'm in lockdown prison ward and pie sounds like an escape.


My mother has, it was finally determined, fractured her pelvis and upper femur, none of which requires casting or immobility. When she was aken to hospital, her kidneys were barely functioning, her blood pressure was dangerously low, she had fluid in her lungs and her electrolytes were wacked, so she was in cardio for several days. The nephrologist was dismissive of her chances of ever coming home again and got downright caustic when he learned my father is blind. "Resthome?" I asked and he gave a short laugh and said, "Please. We call them `managed care units' here."


The social worker in charge of making transfers from the hospital to rehab had to argue with Dr. Kidney to have Mom admitted. That was Thursday and she'd gotten her very first shot of morphine in her entire 87 years an hour before we got there. Yesterday, Friday, she had no idea she'd been moved to rehab. I asked what her PT and OT sessions had consisted of; she had no memory of three hours spent in therapy. My brother called in the middle of the visit; 15 minutes later Dad asked what Jim had to say and she couldn't remember (although why should she? I repeat myself to him because I can't remember what I said and because there is nothing TO say there's nothing worth remembering). It's going to take time to assess all this and part of her OT is cognitive functioning.

But God it's sad and scary to see, and it's an inevitable state to which she is moving, whether it's this time or not.


Dad misses her but is furious she put herself in harm's way and fell, furious that she's seen her internist the day before and her BP wasn't investigated or the fluid rattle of her lungs pursued. He complains that when he offers to share a lecture series on something like the origins of Judaism, she prefers to watch Dr. Phil. I don't think, given his nature, he has any other way to emote except through anger. All Mom wants is for "my husband to warm my hands" and I have no idea what Dad wants, besides rhubarb-strawberry pie and not to be scared any more.


I want to go swimming, not eat between meals and to cry.


That's the news from Desert Woebegone. Thanks for hanging in there with me.

Beating Off the Black Beast

This was the weekend I was gonna do it. I was gonna go outside the Bat Cave, get on a subway, see things, do things. I even took Monday off with the idea of getting a Qi Dong massage after seeing my psychiatrist. While abstinence is never in the bag, it's time to start working on Phase II, which includes getting a life beyond Hicks Street.

Then, on Friday night, the phone rang. My brother called to tell me my mother had fallen and was in the cardiac care unit with a broken hip. Upon arrival, her blood pressure was extremely low, her electrolytes were doing jigs, she had water in her lungs again and her kidneys were close to failure. I got off the phone, made plane reservations and called my father to tell him I'd be there Tuesday. "Oh, you don't need to, honey: I just got off the phone with the orthopod and nothing is wrong."

So I called American, got a sympathetic agent who canceled everything at no charge and promptly started freaking out.

I got up Saturday in a nervous twist. I looked at the clock. I had to shower, dress up, go to a meeting and then up to Lincoln Center, then home to a dinner party. I began to gag. I was rooted to my chair. I couldn't move. I watched the clock tick past the meeting time. I did some major hoisting of boxes and clothes around and looked at the clock, now ticking toward the School of American Ballet workshop performance. I froze, unfroze long enough to take Daisy out, came back and went to bed with America's Next Top Model, which has now superseded Seinfeld for availability. All Tyra All the Time. I called my friends who were having the dinner party to tell them what was going on, straggled through the shower and, while I was dressing, called my brother. They had misspoken about her hip. It was fractured. There would be a surgery as soon as her vitals were back up.

I know that my mother could not survive surgery.

My friends are very, very close friends whose ministry is old people. I believe everyone has a ministry, whether you believe in God or not. Mine is Fat Ladies. Theirs is old people. It was a good place to be before I trudged home to wait out my brother's word on booking a flight.

I woke with a dimming headache on Sunday and went back to bed as Daisy ate her breakfast. I called the friend I was going to a dance performance with and begged off. By that afternoon, she was back to no fractured hip. She has a fractured pelvis. Jim and I decided I'd better get out there.

All of my neuroses about leaving the house had leapt up and I was starting to think the Black Beast was waiting in the hall. I was shaking and addle-pated. I couldn't leave to go to the store. All I wanted to do was stay in bed.

Somewhere in that miasma that Sunday became, I was sitting in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette and drinking instant coffee. I really needed to get to the store but I knew I couldn't. Some dishes had accumulated. I looked at them and knew I couldn't wash them. It was going to be bed for me again. I was very, very scared.

I got batshit at Mom and Dad's house. It's 100 degrees there, their pace is slow and needy, there is nothing to do. I eat. I eat all the time. I picked up my 90-day coin two weeks ago and had, Sunday, 106 days of abstinence and a loss of 41 pounds. What would I be in a week? I've worked SO hard this winter and spring, getting abstinent, writing, getting my depression into remission. I was facing a trap in which the only exit is sugar.

I decided to wash one dish. I washed all of them. I decided to brush my teeth. I decided to go to the store. I decided to put some stuff that sprayed out of my reorganization project away. I decided to take Daisy to play ball. We ran into Boomer and his owner and we had a good talk about what was going on. Daisy got her ya-ya's out.

I made my reservations.

Then I went to the Safeway website and ordered the food I need when I walk in the door on Wednesday night. And then, despite being a couple hundred dollars shy of paying in cash, I made my flight/hotel reservations for Prague in the first week of September. I need that trip to be real when I get to Arizona. I need those dates set in concrete so that no one expects me to be anywhere else. I need to hang on to the Frances I want to be in 91 days.

I went to bed late but made real coffee, washed my hair and saw my psychiatrist. Everything in New York seems to be a do-over. Chase could process some of my banking but I ended up having to finish it in Brooklyn where there is a WA-MU unit. I had only last night realized my passport expired earlier this year so I'd run out the application but needed photos. The photographer wasn't there so I had to go back. I had to go back to the bank, as well, because I hadn't left a comfortable margin in my checking account. Then I had to go to the post office and send off my passport, which they're saying is taking 4 - 6 weeks.

I'm kind of packed. I need to do laundry and my Psychology Today blog, but I need to put up a post here saying I'm still scared about Arizona. My father just made a comment about people we should notify and then said, oh not them unless she doesn't make it. I'm scared I'm losing my mom and I know she's in such terrific pain that she's starting to want to go. I respect that. But I want to be there -- THERE -- for both of them, and that means not having my head in a loaf of bread. I want to come back on the 10th being HERE, for me, for my nieces who are coming to NYC for the first time in mid-June, for the work I need to do -- get out of the Cave, start interacting with the real world -- in order to be THERE in Prague. And I need to be prepared for the wide trans-continental planes on which I may be between five people. Do-able if I don't lose it in the 10 days to come.

I'll post while I'm away -- that's part of my plan, as well as going to meetings (I wonder what a senior citizens' community eating disorder meeting is like?) and staying in touch with my sponsor. I'll trade the Black Beast off for the Red Beast if I have to and march around in a fury. But I hope I simply get through it and come back to my own ecstatic yellow dog who doesn't much care what I weigh.

Thanks for reading.

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."

Free Fall

I turned in the revised draft of Angry Fat Girls on Thursday, then a slightly changed version on Friday & swore to my editors that was it, I wouldn't play with it until I heard from them again. We tweaked jacket copy so that it was less sensationalist & also made more literal sense (when did the word "raucous" take on the meaning of hilarious and romping? Its proper definition is loud & hoarse -- oughtn't the marketing department know that? Isn't "raucous" one of their favorite words? If publishing doesn't take this stuff seriously, who will?), & now I'm...empty-handed on a 3-day weekend. Call it post-partum angst, aided by food poisoning, the nervy push to finish, my neighbors 7 1/2 hour party in the garden where the beer keg was 12 inches from my window. I'm in free fall & just have to hunker down to survive myself.

As hard as this book was to write and then go in & revise -- five women's worlds of pain is not a thing one wakes up to eagerly in the morning -- the deadline of it gave me a surge of purpose. Now, intermittently, my purpose has to change.

I don't like change.

There is my novel to work on.

There is my Fourth Step to work on.

My niece & grand-niece are coming four four days in June, so there is planning & housekeeping to do.

It's time that I learned to leave the Bat Cave without a dog &/or a grocery list. My stomach wraps itself in a knot of protest at the thought but this semi-phobia must be attacked.

But sickish and shaky, drained of words and my habitual insanity-loyalty to AFG not yet worn off, I get to be weepy & depressed this weekend, more imprisoned than usual in that I had to shut my windows on a lovely day yesterday while late-twenty-somethings sang pep songs over the air conditioning.

But two really interesting things happened yesterday in between naps.

I got a wedding invitation from my cousin's daughter -- I think this is a cousin once-removed? She's one of the few cousin's kids I know & I'm slightly sad that I won't make it to Beaverton, OR, for her wedding in a couple of weeks. I went to her registries however & ordered a Solid Gift -- a complete set of something essential. It was perhaps twice beyond my realistic means & I'm being very tight-fisted these days as I work at paying off debt.

So why did I do this without a second thought? I wasn't that sickly.

It was because I realized that my mom, on oxygen 24/7, very feeble with arthritis, nearly 88 years old, is in these sorts of matters, no longer the matriarch of our little Kuffel Pod. That baton passed to me & so I acted accordingly.

I find it interesting to think of myself as a matriarch when I'm single & childless. It goes against all those horrid Anne Tyler novels.

Daisy and I ran into the owners of a dog I used to walk. The dog died & they moved to a nearby state. I gawped at seeing them across the street -- it was dusk, I was heavy with tears at being alone, un-feted for turning the book in, lost without the book, sickish, etc. They were in the neighborhood for one night & said they'll come pick Daisy & me up soon to meet their new dog. That was lovely but they went on to urge me to apply for one of two writers' residencies with which they are intimately connected. Daisy, she said, will be allowed. It could be the perfect transition between Brooklyn & Seattle, & had I been less insane yesterday would have given me stuff to think about.

The good news is -- & really, ALL of this is based on good news that's merely depleting news as well -- that I was abstinent. I'm not Speedy Gonzales today. I slept in late. I've done little to promote my life in the directions I want it go. But I feel about 25% better & I could actually be tricked into feeling completely better, which was not possible yesterday.

Things are in a state of change here. Not big change but enough change to scare me. There's a 12-step saying I love (one of the few). If a normal person has a flat tire, they call AAA. If an addict has a flat tire, they call suicide hotline.

That, alas, would be me.

Now if I could make my Microsoft '98 dictionary thingie come back to tool bar, I'd be...happier.

A Paws for Station Identification

The revision of Angry Fat Girls is due on Friday, 120 hours from now. I'm now working from a list -- have I established this point? Have I defined what this term means? Have I overused the following words? What is the arc of the story? My next task is big but I confess I've gotten to the point that it's all one blur unless I'm in the task. & that task is for after taking Daisy out for a run and writing this post before the feeling fades in the petty irritations of the guy who gave me & Dais a dirty look yesterday and not wanting to go grocery shopping.

It's good, every once in a while, to have a heart-stopping moment of near death. I had one on Thursday when Henry slipped his leash, ran into the street & got hit by a car.

Time stood still. He screamed. He scuttled back to me on three legs, holding his back right paw close to his hip. I grabbed him & held him close, then backed away to feel his leg. We were a block from a veterinarian & I turned in that direction, hoping he could make it there. By the time I looked back he had walked out the pain in his leg and was smiling up at me. Henry has the best smile.

We went home & I began fretting about what to do. I mean, he had tread marks on his rib cage. He began hacking & I began poking around his belly to see if it was hard, was there internal bleeding. He'd smile again and roll over for a belly rub. Finally I stopped in at a grooming shop, the owner of which was a vet tech for many years. "I always err on the side of caution," he said and advised me which veterinarian to take him to.

Terrible person that I am, I saw my hopes of going to Prague being pissed into the gutter. "Bring him by," Tom said. "I can take a look at least." I hustled Henry over. He jumped up on the counter & began eating cookies & Tom laughed. "If you see any lethargy take him in," he said, "but there's nothing wrong with this dog."

Then came the email I had to write to his people, in which I said I'd understand if they fired me. Mr. Henry wrote back serenely and thanked me for the update.

The relief was another moment of time standing still, & the relief was hours long -- a long walk taking him home, waiting for his owners, laughing weakly together about our concern as Henry humped his bed & Daisy humped Henry.

He's alive and alright!

I pulled my guts together to tell them what happened and I've been absolved.

Daisy is alive. I'm alive. Kids are practicing African rhythms in the basement of P.S. 8. The iris are blooming. I'll finish this revision in a week. I'll go to Prague. I'll go to the movies before I go to Prague. I could walk forever. I think my skull is touching the sky...

It lasted over night & into Friday, fading slowly. I remember that as Henry, Daisy & I waited to cross Old Fulton Street on the way home Thursday night, I had the sudden thought -- or even premonition -- I'm going to get married.

Relief is one way to live in the moment, although the cost for that kind of relief is so dangerous & so challenging to all my selfish desires to appear perfect & have my treats that I can't recommend it. By the time I stopped to talk to Tom, I was the worst dog walker ever. It was only when Mr. & Mrs. Henry & I were talking over what to watch for that Mrs. Henry asked if he'd been rubbing his ears as much this week. I had called their attention to his habit of going down on his head first & they'd been using his ear drops since. "His ears looked pretty bad last week," Mrs. H. said.

Oh, I thought. I forgot that I KNOW these dogs. I know when Hero's going to take several dumps in a walk & I know when Boomer will pick out a random stranger he thinks should be sprawled on the pavement. I know when Henry wants love and when his ears are bothering him.

Relief: Life vs. guilt. But when life wins out, it's s-w-e-e-t.

Close Encounters of Another Kind

I've come to an uneasy truce with the revision of Angry Fat Girls. I do as much as feels fresh and right and then I either quit or do something else and go back to it later. Certain days, usually Wednesday through Friday, I may not write at all. I'm busier with dogs and tired in that interim so I try to do something to ease my life around writing then -- a load of laundry, chopping salad greens, paying bills, whatever.

Today was thirteen pages. I gave up when I saw my editor's long note about addressing something or another in an epilogue. Epilogue? You mean, I have to write more on this subject?

Dusk is late now, by New York standards (I miss the lingering dusk of the mountains), and I decided to walk Daisy down to the Remsen Street entrance to the Promenade to see if a fine patch of bearded iris was in bloom yet. They're just starting to come out & I'll go back this week to smell them. Each kind has a different, ineffable scent.

As we began to stroll down the Promenade, a young man asked me to take his picture against the skyline. I did and he told me how much he loved New York, as much as Venice, which he lives near. I told him about my first night in Venice when, jet lagged, I walked across the Academia bridge and saw a full moon rising from the lagoon beyond San Marco. He was off to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge so we walked together, talking of how nothing in Italy works (him) and how nothing in the U.S. works (me). Daisy stalked a chocolate Lab she'd never met and had a drink from the water fountain and we ended up walking up Cranberry Street to Clark where I pointed him on his way to a diner and Cadman Plaza where the Bridge path begins.

I realized at that moment that I could have taken him home with me.

We didn't exchange names.

I was wearing clean floppy clothes and must have been a Curiosity to him. His English was quite good ("one thousand and two hundred dollars") & he was cute. I find myself enormously relieved that we didn't tell each other even our first names, although another part of me thinks it would have been cool to hook up on Facebook. But somehow that long walk we naturally evolved into needs to be just what it was. Chatty, comfortable, a little intimate, natural. It was like the scent of a brick-colored bearded iris. Light & reminiscent of childhood & sunshine, a reminder that men don't have to be work & don't have to be wham-bam.

For whatever reason I feel like telling this story. I stepped out of my usual tense self & just was. It was a connection after a day of wrestling with points-of-view & crying through The Warden.

Remind me I'm capable of it from time to time.

Saturday Afternoon Fever

What a Saturday it wasn't!

I did not go to the Brooklyn Design Festival, in which all manner of future-is-not furniture was on display in unlikely spaces.

I did not go on the Brooklyn Heights Home and Garden tour where I could have ogled Meissen pots and stainless steel kitchens.

I did not go to the Unitarian Church's annual book fair.

Whatever all the crowds were outside of St. Ann's School, I didn't join them either.

The world smelled of flowers and wok oil. I stayed inside with the smell of natural gas and dogs. The pilot light is out in my oven and relighting it means moving a lot of stuff, stretching out full-length on the floor and hoping for the best.

I have no time for hoping for the best.

Today I took out great blotches in chapter 11 of what I now hope was not the necessary information I once thought it was and dumped it into a dummy document. I moved some definitely important and lyrical stuff into another document of usable things I haven't found places for. Then I lifted the first fourth of chapter 12 into chapter 11, stirred until blended and, after 3 1/2 hours, saved it and closed up shop.

As lovely as it would have been to be out in the gray, fragrant, tepid air, I'll take 195 minutes of unconsciousness any day. Especially when it's productive.

I've been struggling with the last three chapters. I am so not out of the woods that I might as well not have a word written. And now, of course, I've read one more book that will have to be referenced, this time Gary Taub's Good Calories, Bad Calories, which is more dense than its critics say on the back cover but is a fascinating expose of what the American Medical Association, the American Diabetes Foundation, Center for Disease Control, American Obesity Association, American Heart Association and most diet books promote as good nutrition -- low fat, high carb. Turns out fat is not much of a worry. Even calories and definitely exercise are not much of a worry. It's overloading the system with insulin, which drive fatty acids back into storage as fat that is the problem.

And now dropping that into the book is my problem.

OK, can we stop harping on sugar now? Pleeeeaaase?

Let's celebrate the big deep pink and deep red peonies on Willow Street. Let's celebrate 85 days of abstinence and 234 pounds/about 36 pounds lost.

This is a totem weight, a fact I didn't realize until I realized that in the last ten years this is the most weight I've lost in one sitting.

Funny how goals aren't or are meaningless when it comes to day counts and scales. The fact of beating my 30-pound losses is big. Being 234 pounds is not a big deal. The big deal will come at 220, 210, 200, etc. But it's the first time I've thought that I will, in fact, have to contend with those numbers and what they mean to me. Having beaten that 30-pound barrier, I'm less afraid of them.

Why would I be afraid? There's something sexual after 220. There is ferreting out clothes from dark recesses. There is tucking in shirts. Mostly, from that point on, I feel that I risk becoming a visible if unremarkable human being again. Which is weirdly sexual.

But let's look at the bright side: it won't happen for a couple of months, if I'm very lucky in the first place, and maybe by then I'll be avoiding the onerous chores of pilot lights because I'm deep in my novel.

OK. That's all.

Answers, for My Sake More than Yours, I Think...

I.

Are you angry because the author [David Kessler] glosses over the reasons people overeat, or because he doesn't offer much in the way of solutions?

Good reading, Susan. I was really furious and perhaps wasn't clear about this.

He all but calls sugar and fat addictive substances but stops at approaching them the way most clinicians would approach alcoholism. He stops short despite having spoken of people who feel out of control or obsessed by food, and writing widely about how sugar and fat stimulate the reward/pleasure/addiction/fear/pain regulator in the brain.

The reasons people overeat are as many as there are minutes in overeaters' lives. Tonight I would go out for Little Debbies because I was lethargic and tired today and didn't do any writing. (This post is supposed to save my ass.) Tomorrow morning I might go out for pancakes because I'm really tired of walking dogs and, hey, I need a little motivation.

In a way, I don't think the reasons people overeat matter. Everybody has to sort that out for themselves. But finding the reasons is not a eureka! moment. If I zone out on donuts in a land where no one can hurt me, all the reasons in the world aren't going to overcome that reward groove I've got going in my brain.

What I'm angry about is that he successfully describes sugar, fat and salt as an addiction but deliberately doesn't use the word or the techniques of the addiction model. He could have at least investigated it.

There was a lot of fascinating material in the book but I don't think anyone is going to lose weight because they read it. I do not feel that way about other books. People lose weight because of reading Atkins or Geneen Roth because they either give an inspiration of how to do it or why to do it.

II.
The God Thing

I'm a doubter by nature, although when I walk into a Catholic Church I immediately believe the wildest fairy tales. When I did my Third Step this time, I decided I would create a god who is at my beck and call. I won't ask him for anything. I demand it.

There is a dusk bird singing loudly in the gardens beyond my window. Daisy has loved me through the emotionally toughest years of my life. I will have very cold stewed apples for dinner. That's my personal, capsule-sized proof that God exists.

I want to yack every time I hear someone say "Goddess, grant me the serenity..." or refers to HP for "higher power". But there are some tangible things that are bigger than me, one of them being my desire to eat sugar, fat and salt. Electricity, my favorite thing (where would ice cream be without it?) is bigger than me. The Rooms and their success stories and support are bigger than me. Inspiration is bigger than me. My sponsor's 20 years of abstinence and affection for me is bigger than me.

So personally I don't have a problem thinking that there are powers beyond my own. And I don't have a problem squooshing them together and inventing a god that suits me.

Some Rooms are really, really Jesus-obsessed. I've been warned that the South is not a good place to go into recovery if you kind of think Jesus was prissy. Some are so new age that my blood sugar rises at the thought of them. Some have a good balance where the god thing isn't too heavy.

But I definitely get it that the God Thing can get in the way. I happen to take it for real, but not very seriously and not very zealously.

If it's what's stopping you from dropping into the Rooms, you can write sarcastic emails to me.

III.
Eaties and Foodies

Everybody seems to see themself in that post. There are moments that I'm a foodie, but when I am, I often want more.

Right now I'm ruminating on how abstinence makes me a foodie more often than I am when I'm not abstinent. I love what I'm eating when I'm abstinent, partly because I'm actually hungry and food is gratifying under that condition.

Goodnight, all. Dream of good things tonight!

If It Looks Like a Duck...

I. Am. So. Angry.

I've stopped in the middle of revising the eleventh chapter (don't get excited: I didn't dig into heavy revising until the fourth or fifth chapter & have lots of places marked to return to) to read a hot new book, David A. Kessler's The End of Overeating. The first half of the book focuses on the power of sugar-fat-salt in our diets and on the food industry which exploits those qualities. Good stuff, albeit in need of editing -- you'll have a lot of "Didn't I just read that?" moments along the way.

The last half explores how to get off the sugar-fat-salt "hypereating" that the U.S. has evolved into in the last 30 years.

Within the first 30 pages, Kessler presents a couple of colleagues with unwrapped fast food candy and bakery products. In discussing the affects of their sight and smell, one of his friends says "'...I cannot control my desire to eat them. I'm obsessing. I feel totally out of control.'" (p. 25) Throughout the book, people liken eating calorie dense food to the experience of a compulsive gambler who walks into a casino. He ends the book by talking about the aversion therapies used by those who treat smokers and compulsive shoplifters, and five pages from the end of the book he writes, "We can lead long and healthy lives without consuming alcohol, tobacco, or other drugs of abuse, so treatment for those addictions can be built around the principle of abstinence. But since we can't survive without eating, we need other strategies for changing our perception of foods..."

Did I mention I was angry? Actually, I'm shaking with anger.

He states early on that he's not talking about "compulsive overeaters" or "bingers" or bulimics, and yet he blandly passes by his colleague's sense of powerlessness and his friend's gambling simile. I really, really need to ask Dr. Kessler: If it quacks like a duck (or fizzes like a rootbeer float), isn't it possible that it's..."an acquatic bird of the family anatidae"???

I talk about 12 step programs for eating disorders all the time in this blog so if you're really adverse to the idea of them, first remind yourself that I have never recommended that anyone go to one. You are the only one who can decide to do that and the day you decide is going to be one of the ugliest days of your life. There aren't many people I'd wish that on.

Next, I advise you to stop reading this now.

Having established, in mind-numbingly over-technical, new-fangled language that made me go back to reread in the same way that a slice of pizza drives me to more pizza even when I hate myself for it (i.e., "incentive salience" = desire-driven, or "hyperpalatable," which means extra tasty and confounds my and Blogger's spell check) that industrial food stimulates serotonin production (also not in Blogger's spell check) and blocks dopamine receptors, he suggests a largely self-monitored cognitive cure.

To whit, did you know that a pint of Ben & Jerry's is a dangerous thing to bring home at night? Maybe you shouldn't eat ice cream. Maybe a diet of moderate portions high in protein, whole grains and vegetative stuff is what you should be eating instead of Big Macs...

By dressing up all the stuff that many of us have been writing about, talking about, doing stepwork over and reading about in swan's down, he's still turned out a duck.

Although fascinating in many parts, especially so to those who haven't dug around to find the heretofore obscurer studies on sugar addiction. At least he's brought half of it out into the clear light of National Public Radio.

The other half is that if neural pathways change over time because of the disproportion of mood-changing neurotransmitters affected by what I eat makes it hard for my brain's pleasure centers to get going from anything except sugars and fats...then I've got an addiction that works exactly like cocaine or heroine or speedballing or booze. And like them, it's degenerating because I need increasingly more to keep my buzz on. (Or off, in the case of serotonin.) In the end, after having taken my life, it will simply extinguish my life.

And I don't see him suggesting self-rehab for that.

Nota Bene: I told my sponsor about this post and she, too, was outraged. She called Kessler a quack...

OK, maybe it's just funny in the moment after a long day of trying to fit serotonin, dopamine & endorphins into as little space as possible...

The Martha Beck book looks interesting & yes, I, too, am glad whenever an expose of the food industry comes out. He does some fascinating work with industry consultants.

One of those Days...

It started yesterday. I wanted to give my morning dogs a work-out & I ended up being out for three hours with them. I barely had time to have snack (cottage cheese & a pear) before I was off to take care of Italian greyhounds. I crashed when I got there. I was suddenly so, so tired...& I had more dogs to walk.

It's my first week back with the full compliment. My foot barely twinged.

I decided to catch up on Facebook a little & took one of those "Everything About Me Quiz" quizzes. I'm fond of Facebook. I've found friends from grade school there & people I was scared of in high school who've turned out to be very cool. I know what my nieces, nephews & cousins are up to. I've made some friends.

But the quiz got me. I answered one of the first statements, "I am________." "Brilliant."

I believed it, too. But a half hour later I was kicking myself for not remembering the names of all the characters in the Palliser novels & nothing about biochemistry. I revised, in my head, that I'm brilliant at what I'm brilliant at. Sometimes I feel brilliant.

I should not have put that sentence out there where everyone can see it. I posted a bunch of new pictures kind of in the hopes of burying it. The statement haunts me.

When I get tired, I get cranky, & when I get cranky I either turn it on myself or on the world. I wasn't sure, as I dragged Daisy back from Henry's house last night, that the world would escape my anger. All I knew by then was that I hadn't gotten hungry for lunch until it was too late & that I was now starving. I also knew I didn't want to stand there & prepare anything. I ordered out. The meatloaf had gravy on it. I scraped it off as best I could & Daisy loved it. I took her for a quick pee-walk & went to bed with Conversations with Other Women in the DVD player.

I set myself up well for today -- tired, stressed, feeling a fake, no writing done, too big a dinner & a really depressing movie that made me think about things I'd rather not think about.

So I pour some milk into my coffee mug at ten minutes before seven this morning but it chugs out. F---. Gone sour. Coffee without milk. Uck.

I step on the scale. Up 1.8 pounds. My rice takes twice as long to cook than it should, thereby closing my option of getting to the store before breakfast & dogs. Then I cook the rice just long enough that I can scrape all the rice out but have to soak the pan. I now have a sink full of dishes to come home to.

The dogs were my reprieve, along with washing my hair & finally chopping a head of cabbage for my salad mix. I stood up from eating lunch & promptly tripped over my feet, nearly crushing the dog AND my knee & spraining the two smallest toes on my right foot.

Which is nearly mended from a fracture.

I'm starting to turn it on myself.

I'm afraid, I tell you, to go out in the world now. I have to walk Henry & go get essential groceries. Many things could happen. I could say any number of stupid things to myself. It's one of those days.

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.

Tuesday Nights with Daisy

I think I'll post over at Psychology Today about the photo question. For anyone who didn't see my response within reader responses here, I'm not sure why they chose that photo except that recent photos of me have been pretty terrible. I'm not referring to my weight in saying that, but to my camo rabbbit fur flap hat & wind-scoured face, the Wattle from an angle, very low light.

As I'm sure you can identify, it's a little weird to be obese & ask people to take your picture. Right now I don't have anyone I trust that much and have access to. I recently lost a friend I hugely enjoyed but found in the end to be mercurial & one-sided. She decided a friendly offer was either poaching on her territory or showed up her work style & hasn't really spoken to me since.

I'm going to pause here to say, briefly, she took the winter photos of me. The sorer point is that I sincerely apologized, although it had to be one of those apologies backed up by a silent "you feel that way," had no intention of taking her client, haven't had any inquiries from the client despite frequent meetings on the street. On my side of the equation, I'd been noticing for a while now that she had me looking up phone numbers and making calls for her from home, felt free to stop by during my work times to use my computer, borrowed a favorite shirt she hasn't returned, called at least once a week & begged me to cover her at work, & owes me a tiny amount of money.

Have I been used?

I didn't mind it because I love her company -- she's one of the few people who can make me roar with laughter. But with all the leaning on me came a false intimacy. She never asked me to have supper with her or took me up on my offers to bring dinner to her house. She called other people to see how they're doing but she called me for favors. It wasn't a friendship & I absolutely cannot see that I did something so bad that she should end it.

The worst of it is that I know her well. I know that she is her own revenge. Her wild quests for happiness are dramas she plays out to distract her from what's really going on in her life -- going on or going wrong. I knew this & I listened to it. I was a fair friend. It hurts to see her around once or twice a day & know she's heaping blame on me for something that was innocent &, if I were the devil incarnate, fruitless.

So I digress. I'll have to find someone to take a decent photo of me for PT. You've seen all the recent ones & have to agree they don't show me in a professional light.

I'd post a photo of my own over there except all the site does is insert the name of the photo, making it gobbledy-gook.

I'm waiting for my Klonpin to kick in so I can sleep. I'm slightly afraid to have idle hands until I'm sleepy -- dinner was good (chopped broccoli, salsa & 4 oz. of chicken) but I'd love something sweet. Better to be busy.

Daisy is fast asleep in the pillows after an unproductive walk. Tuesdays are the horror of dog owners' lives. New York takes recycling pretty seriously & Wednesday is recycling day. Paper in clear bags, plastic & metal in clear bags, garbage cans & bags. At 2 o'clock in the afternoon things get pretty Dickensian on the streets as people with grocery carts, billowing bags or shopping carts park themselves across from the big apartment buildings and wait for the maintenance men to bring out the plastic/metal bags. They then go through them for deposit-back cans & bottles. Each has their territory. A wizened Chinese lady sits on the stoop next door to my building & Daisy goes berserkers when she sees her, partly because the first time she saw her it was raining & the woman was standing under the small awning of my front door. She speaks no English so it was this big deal to convince her move away long enough for me to haul my bucking, barking dog inside.

It reminds me of the bone & rag pickers of Victorian London.

Nights are the dogs' glory, however, because there are so many bags out, all of them smelling of other dogs' pee, lo mein containers, milk cartons & rotting chicken. Daisy has to lift her leg at least two times on Tuesday night & is so distracted by the bags that she forgets to take a dump.

I've consulted with Lee Charles Kelley about some of Daisy's more violent & unminding tendencies. The first thing he has me doing is a change of diet, which was too yang. It sounds a little weird but apparently the stool hardener in lots of kibble brands encourages aggression. I like seeing what she eats -- a scant half cup of kibble & a half cup of chicken, carrots, broccoli, apples -- always the chicken with a changing roster of yin foods. She's obsessed with her new diet. I mean, she always licked the pan, but now she skootches it all over the room. I should be feeding this to her by hand, outside amid the distractions of wizened Chinese ladies & jolly but intimidating mastifs, but the weather has not been kind to me so far.

I think she's been a little more tractable. I'm talking to her more, trying to chatter the focus on to me instead of her enemies (which include blown-over garbage cans &, famously, snowmen). But Tuesday nights are another challenge altogether & I feel sorry that she's going to be uncomfortable tonight. I'll kill her if she wakes me up to go out for a poop.

Life... It's happening, even when it's small.