Sculpin

There’s this hippie high-fiber cereal that used to be called “Optimum Zen”. I both bought the stuff occasionally (I’ll try nearly anything with ginger in it) and rolled my eyes at the name for being such a dharma-burger. But now that they’ve changed it to something blander, I kind of miss the old name. At least, I miss making cracks about how all that fiber leads to the direct experience of emptiness.

I didn’t think I’d ever say this, but I regret hanging up on a telephone survey person. Because now I’m wondering what on earth her script would have had her say next. Even more, I wonder how long she could have kept up that colossal perkiness. At some point, you’d think, just about anybody would start to deflate.

Our opinions are worth something; that’s why these media researchers can bundle them up and sell them. But we don’t get a cut of that money, not even a micropayment to the charity of our choice. It’s daft. I’m not going to agree to that, and certainly not to someone who’s just pulled me away from my book.

If you enjoy discomfiting people who call you up and bug you for your opinion, you could do worse than to ask whether you’ll be paid.

At the Lake City market yesterday, a couple of women walked by carrying bundles of huge, brightly striped hoops. I approached and asked, “Um, pardon me, but, uh, what’s with the hoops?” Turns out I was talking to Carrole Johnson of Cirquesse Hoops, who’d been talking to the folks at Mieko’s about starting up a hoop dancing class there. (I didn’t care for Mieko’s, especially after the remodel, but for a hoopdancing class I might rejoin. Maybe.)

I’m sure I was staring at the hoops pretty hungrily. “But,” I said sadly, “I’m not even sure I can hoop. I had a herniated disc.” At which point the other woman, her mother, piped up and said that she was fifty-six years old with a bad back and it had done her a world of good. Meanwhile, Carrole was demonstrating a little bit, and wow does she look graceful. Hm… maybe…

Well, heck, I’m in. Josh and I went right up to Home Depot and picked up a length of 3/4″ 100-psi irrigation tubing and a few connectors. Using these hoopmaking instructions from JasonUnbound, we made a 42-inch hoop with 1.5 pounds of water for weight and took it out for a spin. It’s fun! I suspect it’s a little small for Josh, who was having some trouble with it, but I got it up and spinning awkwardly counter-clockwise, at least for a while. Pretty soon I was dipping my hand into the hoop-space as it went around and a couple of times I even managed to turn with the hoop, more or less.

The extra weight makes it easier to keep the momentum going. It also makes it a wee bit bruising at first. I can’t have been actively hooping for much more than fifteen minutes, but it looks like I’ve been punched over and over by something with tiny fists. I think I’m going to try one of those ridiculous neoprene slimmer belts to give myself a little padding, at least until I’m a bit more fluid. I’ll tell you, I may be bruised, but my back feels great.

On the advice of the generous and indomitable Kitty Kerosene — thanks, Kitty! — I sanded down the inside of the hoop, making it significantly easier to manage. Fancy gaffer tape is in the mail from Identi-Tape, enough to use on an awful lot of hoops. There’s still plenty of tubing left. Come join me!

Carol isn’t the only one who was kind of freaked to hear that I was “on a diet”. I gather I have earned something of a reputation for over-enthusiasm. But here’s what I’m actually doing now.

My rules:

1. Shoot for 1200-1400 calories a day. 1200 is not better than 1400.
2. Write everything down in a food diary.
3. Use smaller bowls.
4. Weigh in daily and track the moving average.
5. Get what exercise I can.
6. Use trustworthy information sources to help decide how to stock the fridge and pantry.
7. Money is not the issue. Shell out for tasty fresh food.
8. The body is the ultimate authority.

The thing is, the body is not my enemy. My body is often a lot smarter than the rest of me. So, I figured, what if I capitalized on that? What if, instead of imposing a lifestyle on myself from without, I were to radically trust myself with my choices? As long as I hit my caloric marks, everything is fair game for eating. But here’s the catch: I have to actually want what I eat. And I mean the food itself — not the idea of the food. Not the marketing of the food, the nostalgia of the food, the cultural significance of the food, or even the supposed dietworthiness of the food. I try to engage with the food object as fully as I can, without preconceptions, and then pay attention to how I feel as I digest it.

And it turns out that — having broken myself of what felt not unlike an addiction to big piles of complex carbohydrates — what I actually want is pretty smart. I do want a whole lot more protein than I would have guessed. I love nuts, beans, olives and olive oil, shrimp cocktail, fancy tuna, fresh fruit, dry Cheerios, cruciferous vegetables, Greek-style yogurt, excellent chocolate, thin whole wheat spaghetti with guasacaca, beef jerky, highly flavored cheese, and the occasional Gardenburger. I hate cheap chocolate, and I’m surprised to find that my body thinks that potato chips aren’t actually all that. Neither are french fries. (I was all “OMG French fries yum!! want!!”, tried one, and was surprised at how much I did not care. I cared that Josh was having a treat and I wasn’t; the treat itself, eh, not really.) And as for industrialized cheese, how did I never notice how weird it smelled? Industrialized food in general — you know, it’s salty and fatty and sweet, but beyond that, it’s kind of boring.

So I’ve lost some twenty pounds by doing the me thing, within some caloric limits. You can call it a New Lifestyle if you like but la la la I can’t hear you.

ETA: okay, there’s one more part: some call it the “no asshole rule”. Nothing drives me to the crunchy snacks quite like anger and frustration. The Buddha is said to have advised that it was better to go alone than in the company of a fool, and I’m taking that advice.

Having googled around a bit, I learn that the one-slice sandwich trick is an ancient Weight Watchers technique called the “twofer”. I suppose you do save a hundred calories or so by not having the other slice of bread. To my mind, though, that’s not really the point.

Not that I won’t take it. Some of you know that I’ve been on what I’ve been calling the Stick ‘n’ Twig Diet. It’s not really that dire, particularly because I’ve been using it as an excuse to buy a lot of delicious, expensive fruits, vegetables, and fish. Sometimes I have to remind myself that I am a spoiled middle-class hippie now and I can have all the local asparagus I want, thank you very much. I rationalize that while wild Oregon shrimp is expensive, heart attacks are really expensive. I like to think I’ve learned something from my herniated disc experience; cheaping out on the jackhammer rental was not cost-effective.

It’s basically a Mediterranean-type diet that I’m doing, heavily informed by the Harvard School of Public Health and the World’s Healthiest Foods website, with a little special attention to my grain consumption. I’m luckier than many: not only can I afford it in terms of time, money, and energy, but my metabolism seems to be pretty much bog-standard. There is the problem of weight loss exacerbating the dysfunction of damaged nerves, but I’m learning to deal. It appears to be working pretty well. I’m now about ten pounds over my fightin’ weight and I’m not fed up with working at it yet.

Next month I’ll check my blood chemistry, which is the point of all this. Some numbers came back a few months ago that startled me, and my doctor kind of shrugged and said, “Hey, lose some weight.” But, gosh, a lot of things can make those numbers look screwy. There could have been some other things going on besides my thunderous BMI of 26, and there’s been some excellent reason to consider them. (As I said to a friend, “Yeah, I know that when you hear hoofbeats, you should think horses, not zebras — but not if you live down the road from the zebra farm.”) No likely alternate explanation looks to be terribly urgent, from what I can tell, so I didn’t kick up a fuss, but… Look, I like my doctor. I like him very much indeed, overall. But I had to wonder: as long as I was overweight, could I really count on getting timely, appropriate medical treatment? How much did I want to bet? Did I want to bet my health? Because that’s what I was betting.

So I’ve been taking off a chunk of the nearly forty pounds I gained on Depo-Provera back in 2004. Some of that fat I arguably needed; the rest, not so much. It was an interesting experience, gaining that much weight in the space of about three months. I’d known that we lived in a fatphobic society, but I’d had no idea that the fatphobia kicked in at such a moderate weight. As far as I was concerned, my new size was ordinary and unexceptionable. But I could see the social world around me getting subtly chillier — not my friends, but people with whom I’d casually interact.

I told myself I was imagining things. I informed myself that I was just silly and awkward about my new shape, and all I needed was a better wardrobe and to carry myself more gracefully. I bought a few decent shirts, joined a yoga class, and eventually became a Pilates fiend. I felt better than I had since my early twenties, built a ton of muscle, and discovered my inner jock. I learned to carry myself more like a dancer. For a while I sported a diabolically fabulous haircut. And I’m telling you, folks, it wasn’t the clothes, the body language, the confidence, or the mind-body relationship that was most at issue. It was, in fact, the fat.

Now that I’m a good twenty pounds down, I see things happening in reverse. I think I look pretty much the same, but the world is reacting to me differently now. I thought I’d revel in having that privilege back, but the truth is I do not. But there it is: I go out to lunch and the guy at the counter seems really happy to take my order. The young woman wiping down my table is a bit more enthusiastic than I’m used to. I get on the bus and accidentally drop a quarter, and the bus driver grins sympathetically and tells me not to worry about it. The world is warming up again. People seem to act as if they know me. When I’m not feeling baffled at my strangely friendly reception, I feel like a spy from Plumpland, slimmed down for my secret mission among a strange and deluded people.

I know somebody whose daughter, a very small toddler, is starting to figure out the rules of human interaction. She likes to answer the phone and say, “Hello! How you you? Blahblahblahblahblah!” Literally “blahblahblahblahblah” — it’s what she says when she runs out of words, which happens often.

I can’t decide whether she’s not quite clear on what words are, or whether she has a precocious grasp on the realities of phatic communication, but I lean toward the latter. All she’s trying to express is, “I am talking now in a socially appropriate manner,” and she gets that intention across with admirable efficiency. I can think of a lot of adult conversations that could be reduced right down to “Blahblahblahblahblah,” though they’re not necessarily so friendly. It would have saved me plenty of time and trouble if I’d recognized that a couple of decades ago.

Fact is, I kind of wish we could all just go ahead and follow that kid’s lead. Blahblahblahblahblah, friends!

I swear, I’m not actually having a writer’s strike. It just looks that way.

For those catching up, it was about a year ago that I massively herniated a disc. Good ol’ L5S1. I can’t be accused of doing things by half measures; this thing was a centimeter in its smallest dimension. I pretty much extruded the whole contents of the disc. I basically put a bullet into my spine made out of my own meat — ewww.

The good news is, I had excellent medical care (Dr. Ren of the Polyclinic is exceptional!) and I’m making a good recovery. From what I’ve read, I’m way the heck out there on the lucky end of the bell curve. As of this writing, I’ve gotten away without surgery.

I still have some daily minor discomfort — my recovery may be miraculous, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Still, it’s rare that I need to take anything at all for it unless I’ve spent some significant part of the day doing some very particular physical motions. I can pretty much do anything I could before and now it’s more a matter of how long I can do it. (I do avoid long car trips and any kind of twisting under load.) My balance is coming back, slowly but surely, and I can walk a few miles now. Unfortunately, my post-herniation gait is something like what you’d see if you crossed Charlie Chaplin and an ambulatory pile of laundry. There’s no spring in my step at all; it’s flumph flumph flumph, dumpy and awkward, with my right foot kicking out to the side goofily. I’m working on it; it’s coming along.

The bad news is that my recovery’s slowed down and I have a lot of digging out to do. I guess I kind of expected that when I was able to walk again, however ridiculously, it’d all be gravy from then on out, but it doesn’t work that way, and ye gods is there a lot to do. The deconditioning alone… damn. I kind of fell off the face of the world last fall when I recognized just how much crap I had to do and how slowly and carefully I was going to have to do it. At that same time I was coming to grips with just how life-changingly crappy most of 2009 had been. I wasn’t prepared for how emotionally taxing having a painful injury like this would be, especially in the post-crisis stage. It overwhelmed me, and I apologize to folks who reached out to me and didn’t hear back from me. I’m back now.

One of the first orders of business is plain old housekeeping. At this point it’s more like Combat Housekeeping. When I was stuck in bed, I liked to imagine that Josh was keeping the rest of the house more or less in order. This was an obvious fantasy — Josh is one of the most clutter-prone people I’ve ever known. But since I couldn’t get out there to see it, I figured I might as well keep my hopes up. Well. It’s pretty much a warren of filth and disorganization, is what it is. But we have attic storage now, at long last, and together we’re digging out. At the rate we’re going, this could last until June.

Today I’m working on the pantry, which is full of food that expired last year. (The chickens are in heaven – so many treats!) What’s left seems mostly to be beans. This is largely my fault; whenever I see beans on sale, I think, “Oh boy, I like beans! Look how cheap!” And then I buy them, sometimes by the case. And they accrete. Looks like we’re going on the Legume Diet for the next who-knows-how-long.

Josh is taking the overthinking of beans to dizzying new heights; he’s made a project of recording the weights of the drained beans in various cans. Turns out that the bigger cans were a pretty lousy deal for us. I suspect that we got a bad case, but I’m hesitant to buy another can of beans to compare.

So that’s pretty much it: beans and cleaning up. Glamorous, huh?

ETA: I have ten jars of honey. Ten. Yes, a lot of them are different, at least one was a gift, some of them are varieties that are relatively hard to find, and yes, honey has a shelf life of centuries, but still. Cripes. I think that’s enough honey.

Mary Daly has died. It was with mixed emotions that I learned that this afternoon. When I read Gyn/Ecology and Wickedary in 1991 or so, I thought they were the biggest piles of bullshit I’d ever seen, in content and in form. Having started in on that line of thought, I could hardly help pursuing it — her work was such irresistibly loopy, maddening crap, so fractally obnoxious in ways that cast unexpected light on what I thought, felt, and knew. I didn’t give a good goddamn for her status as a grande dame of feminism; she had bats in the attic, all right, and I set out in a private fury to identify them, bat after bat.

That’s how Mary Daly wound up being important to my development as a young feminist, not to mention my development as a person who can fail to give a good goddamn. Even almost twenty years later, rereading a little of Gyn/Ecology‘s preface, I find ways in which she is juicily wrong. I feel lucky to have had her work to react against. For all her flaws — and there’s a vast taxonomy of them, as I recall — she was brave as hell, and her work scratched open a small, new opposing bravery in me. Ave atque vale, old Lunatic.

Glenn Greenwald reported last Thursday that the ACLU has lost a major donor who was responsible for 25% of the organization’s budget. This donor, who got caught in the credit crunch, was the ACLU’s largest single source of funding. This on top of the major cuts they took last year due to the economy.

Josh and I used to be ACLU members, but I’d dropped them from the donation list after they sent what seemed like weekly beg letters to our address. I still support their work, though, and this seemed like reason enough to open my wallet.

There’s no good way that I saw to avoid getting on the ACLU’s dead-trees mailing list if you give via the website. But if you call them at 1-888-567-ACLU, they’ll make sure you’re not mailed. The fellow I talked to was charming and helpful as I explained that I did not want to be contacted by anyone at any time for any reason. He was right there with me on that one.

Makes a great Xmas gift! Merry Christmas, Josh! Seriously, if anybody reading this is wondering about a last-minute present for me, I’m not kidding about donations being great Christmas presents. That’s why they’re on my Amazon wishlist.