Five pounds

That's how much I've lost since Christmas. The scale is now giving me a number in the 160's for the first time in at least 5 years.

As I've said before, I am NOT a model for how to lose weight. This is because the weight I gain, I gain by depressive eating and bodily neglect. In order to be fat, I need to eat more than feels comfortable, to eat most of that in crash-and-burn carbs, and throw in some big helpings of sedentary on top of it. Right now, at my current size, all I need to do to lose weight is cue my eating to my hunger instead of my emotions, and make sure I have some exercise in my life. "All"--um, yeah, you're right, it's not actually so easy to manage, but compared to someone whose body's set point is in the obese range? My kind of weight loss story is not fun to hear about, or desirable as a goal. I feel a little guilty, actually, like I'm not adequately protecting my inner fat girl. But I'm still really, really happy about it.

I've been at it awhile, at slower and faster paces, but never anything but gradual, sometimes with upwards hiccups. I'm not dieting, I'm just paying attention to how my body feels when I eat, and honoring that: intuitive eating. Sometimes I go up a few pounds, and I figure it was something I needed, physically or psychologically or emotionally, and I don't sweat it. I figure the loss will start again when I'm ready, and so far it always has. After 18 months of watching a downward trend on the scale, I know I'm going to settle in somewhere, and every time I stick at a weight for a couple of months I have been figuring out how to get used to that shape as my permanent (ish) body, but I do think I have a ways to go yet.

I gotta say I hope it's not too soon. Losing weight is like years of depression coming off my body. It's like bringing myself back to myself. It's like taking up a place in the world after retreating to a hermitage. It's like taking a slow journey back to my body-image home, where the body I imagine I have is the same one people see. I won't do it if I have to actually diet, but I would like it if I wound up back where I was before my my size started creeping up. It would feel like a complete recovery--but I'll take any amount of recovery.

Five pounds since Christmas: it's not a huge amount. But it's taken me around some crucial bend, where I find myself feeling fond of my belly again: I have a round belly. I intend to keep it round. It's been round my whole life, but until these last five pounds came off, I didn't like the shape of it. Now, today, I do. It feels good.

My mother's gingerbread recipe

For Turtle Wexler and Phantom. This makes a sweet, cakey kind of gingerbread.

1/2 c. butter, softened--and soften up some extra for hard sauce, too
1 c. sugar
2 eggs, beaten

2 1/2 cups flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. ground ginger
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
1/4 tsp. clove

1 c. molasses

1 c. boiling water

confectioners sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease two 8 x 8 baking pans or one lasagna pan.

Combine all dry ingredients in a medium bowl and set aside.

In a large bowl, cream the sugar in the butter. Add eggs and mix well.

Add the dry ingredients with the molasses and combine thoroughly. (While you're mixing is the time to turn on the kettle.)

Add the boiling water last. I like to use the molasses cup to measure the boiling water and stir it a little, to get all the molasses into the cake. Mix until smooth.

Pour into pan(s). Bake 45 minutes, or until a sharp knife inserted into the center comes out clean. Set out to cool slightly.

While the cake is baking, prepare the hard sauce--this is not really optional, unless you are very silly about your priorities regarding calories and deliciousness. Real, actual hard sauce apparently involves alcohol, but this is how we always made it in our house:

Take some softened butter and a more or less equal amount of confectioners sugar. How much is up to you, but a little goes a long way, though, so I'd start with a couple tablespoons, and you can always make more. Mix with a fork until completely combined. Add more sugar or more butter, to taste.


Eating a bite of hot gingerbread with a dab of hard sauce is pretty much the best antidote to winter I can think of.

Over at Songbird's yesterday, she wrote about the effect rheumatoid arthritis had on her last year, which rang bells for me with my own diagnosis of osteoarthritis, which is a very different kind of beast--it's repetitive stress, rather than autoimmune--but which was my first encounter with a chronic condition in my body.

I learned I had it early in 1997, after spending the fall of 1996 with increasingly crippling pain in my right arm. I was 25. I walked a mile each way to campus, I was a gym rat, I went out dancing twice most weekends, and I was in the middle of a one year night-school course in massage that was revolutionizing my understand of both the body and my body. It changed my life so profoundly that I can't clearly recall what it was like to be me before I was in it.

In massage school, you learn by doing, but also by receiving. Twice a week, we took turns learning how to work on each part of the body, lavishing weeks of attention on the back, with all its overlapping layers of muscle running up the spine; on the thick, heat-generating quadriceps and the hamstrings that insert at the crease where the thigh meets the ass; on the muscles of the hand that actually begin at the elbow and lie along the forearm. Our fingertips learned how to feel through five layers of muscle to the processes of each cervical verterbra. We studied body mechanics and moved from our feet and our hips and our own shoulders as we stood at the head of the table and kneaded out tension from our partners' shoulders.

Before massage school, I felt like I lived in another country from anyone else's body, and as for my own, I trusted my legs to walk and my fingers to make things, and that was about the extent of it. Massage school got me hooked on anatomy and physiology, which made intuitive sense to me and was just so cool. (I realized that while I would have hated medical school, I would have made a pretty good nurse or physician's assistant.) And as I came to understand how it worked, I came to like my own body much better. I also, strangely and wonderfully to me, became the knower of my friends' bodies, not just the friends I made in massage school with oil on my hands, but the graduate school friends who knew me from seminar tables and let me work on them, and later even paid me a little, as I got good enough to feel like I could charge.

In the middle of this, though, my right arm started to hurt, and kept on hurting, and simply wouldn't stop. I finally went to the doctor, who sent me to a specialist, who felt around in my wrist and told me it was arthritis, with attendant tendinitis extending to my elbow. Massage is a repetitive, weight-bearing activity, and writing, typing, and knitting had already put so much stress on the joint that it simply couldn't keep up. I went on a painkiller that made me spacy, and found a brace for my wrist, and laid off everything for a few weeks, then gingerly added things back in as I could. I tried to knit slower. I got a support for my wrist at my keyboard, and a trackball instead of a mouse. I did less writing longhand. I gave up Minesweeper--and, eventually, regretfully massage. I finally accepted that giving one hour's massage was going to cost me two days to recover, and really, I never fully felt the pain go away until well after I'd stopped.

It wasn't hard, accepting that creating and thinking--knitting and writing--were more important in my life than doing bodywork, and that the point had never been to make a long-term career out of it. I finished the course, though, and even took one continuing ed class. I'm not sure how to wrap this up, but that course was worth far more to me than anything I learned for my master's degree.

Bring on 2009!

Hi, all. I didn't really want to check on how long it's been since I abandoned you the last time I posted, but then I checked anyway: it seemed like a million years, but it turns out it wasn't quite two weeks, which for me isn't that long of a gap. The good news hiding inside my tenuous grip on the passage of time is that it got so busy at the store that it felt like there would be no end to it--even though, alas, I knew to treasure every single $1500 day. We were slammed, crazy-busy with lines of people at the register at the high points in the day. I haven't run the numbers on the month yet (the store's closed today) but I suspect I'm going to find we're still down from last December: everyone is, all through retail, and I don't have any reason to believe we're different, but it wasn't for lack of customers. The month started slow, and we didn't have as many large sales, but I'm pretty sure we had at least as many transactions as last year. This is good, whatever financial stuff comes down the pike. We're doing something right, if people in the 'hood are choosing to bring their dollars to us when dollars are scarcer.

I'm not going back to last New Year's Day in any kind of archival way, but I suspect, without looking, that it sucked royally, and last January went downhill from there. This year, I'm feeling okay. It's been a better start, anyway. I've been living my life pretty intensely these past few years, and 2008 was up there for intensity. In the lows I was a furious, sobbing, wreck, curled tighly into myself, unreachable: the highs were like sunshine and chocolate and swimming a mile and the feel of your baby's cheek under your lips. The work I did getting from the first to the second was really fucking hard, not that I was doing it alone--well, that's the point, that's what I had to learn how to do, to uncurl and let myself be reached, to trust the love around me. It's harder than it looks, this trust business. I'm hoping it gets easier, though, that this year the direction is uphill, not down. I'm hoping, I'm hoping.

Food Drive for Equality

Hey all, I'm a little late getting the word out, but this morning Z. was doing her tzedakah thing (she scours the top of my bureau for nickels and dimes and puts them in the pushke) and I remembered about the LGBTQ food drive. Turns out it's tomorrow. To get involved, click on through and find the drop-off point in your area. I'm going to trade in the change in the pushke for bills and this afternoon we'll fill up a bunch of bags at the Acme to take downtown. I think it's a great way for us to be visible this time of year.

Family picture

I had my first-ever parent conference yesterday. I've been ignoring them for three years because I imagined they would go like this:

Year 1:

Z.'s First Teacher: Z. is great. She's your first baby and I've had three and been running this class for a million years, so let me tell you, you're doing everything wrong.
Me: (cries)

Year 2:

Z.'s First Teacher: Z. is great. I am dying of cancer and I'm here on time every day. What excuse do you have for being too depressed to get her to school on time?
Me: (cries)

Year 3:

Z.'s Third Teacher: Z. is great. We sure wish she didn't miss play time every single day.
Me: (hems and haws. Manages not to cry until returning home.)

None of these scenarios happened, you understand, *because* I imagined them, and that gave me the foresight to avoid them. I never even signed up for a conference before this year. Also, until this year, all the times were in the morning, and in the winter I don't do so well with mornings.

This year, though, I signed up. Valiantly, I persisted in signing up, time and again! I missed the first two, because they were in the morning (see winter mornings and me, above), and then I asked if I took an afternoon appointment (they were right there on the schedule) whether Z. would have coverage. Z.'s current teacher said fine, so yesterday I showed up and Z. went to after care for a bit, and everything zipped along. It helped that Current Teacher had written up a two-page, single-spaced evaluation of Z.: it was organized by category like "Social Development" and "Cognitive Development," and she gave it to me in advance and I loved it! It was like getting to spy on my kid in school, and what mom doesn't long for that chance?

The conference was parent catnip, I tell you. Z. is a knockout, an artist, a dancer, a performer, a compassionate friend, a champion of memory feats, full of Yiddishkeit. What could be better?

Well. Her teacher had put aside a picture Z. made of her family. In it, all of her grownups are color-coded. A. is blue, Uncle Donor is red, my father is yellow, etc. In it, my mother, Z., and I are all purple. And I'm vast. I take up a third of the page, and Z. has herself nestled up against me, and we are looking at each other, and everyone else looks into the center, the constellation of her family revolving around us. Z.'s a little too little to make faces that smile, but the lines that represent our mouths are clearly doting ones.

I know I will become more and more peripheral to her. I know that process will be painful to me in lots of ways. But oh, oh, oh. This week my Doodle filled my heart to overflowing.

Two from last night

S.: [relating a Dave Chappelle skit posted on Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog, edited on the fly because of nearby big ears. Go on, watch! Okay, now you can keep reading.]
Z.: (poking Mommy) Hey white person. White person! You look like a white person.
A.: Yes, I am a white person. I knew this was gonna happen.
S.: (laughing)
Z.: Are you a white person?
A.: Sometimes I'm kind of an off-white person.
Z.: (turns to Mama) Are you a black person?
S.: (gasping with laughter, tugs at the dark brown sweater she's wearing, nods. A looks perplexed. S. points at A.'s white shirt. Understanding dawns.)
S.: Z., are you a pink person?
Z.: (checks out color of her dress) Yes! I AM a pink person!
A.: And what is Hunter Dog?
Z.: A FUR person!

* * * * *

Z.: Why can't I sit up with my tushy off my seat?
S.: Because it's a precursor to mayhem.
Z.: Hamalama. (turns to Mommy) What she means is, what she's saying to me is "I don't like you."

A recipe for Jane Dark

Here's the chili we made in our house tonight. It's based on one that AJ from JP made with us a million years ago on a vacation in Maine, but there are variations.

One onion, chopped
Two medium carrots, cut in coins

(The rest can be gathered and prepared while these cook)
1-2 slices jalapeno, minced
2 cloves garlic, pressed
1 tsp chili powder
1/4 tsp oregano
1/4 tsp cumin

1/2 cup green olives, cut in half
two cans diced stewed tomatoes, with juice
one can chili beans--we use the kind that have black/red/kidney beans all in one can
2 tbsp. cocoa powder

a decent handful of sliced, blanched almonds
a decent handful of TVP

olive oil

Heat a tbsp or two of the olive oil in a skillet on medium. Add onion and carrots, stir to coat, then cover skillet and allow to cook until onion is translucent, stirring very occasionally. Add jalapeno, garlic, and spices. Sautee one minute. Add tomatoes, olives, cocoa, and beans, stir, and allow to simmer ten minutes: leave uncovered for thicker chili, but beware that the TVP will absorb some juice. Add almonds and TVP. Simmer 2-3 minutes.

Some good news

My life is way too tied to the computer, but you knew that already.

So there was rejoicing when my new computer came yesterday, and the reason it's so much cheaper than my old computer is that it's exactly like my old computer, except white instead of black. Really. That's it, that's the only difference I can tell. I even bumped up the memory, like on my old one. But it's last year's model of MacBook, and can you spelled "planned obsolescence," boys and girls? It's sort of amazing that the new bells and whistles keeping being priced at more or less what the old bells and whistles cost us, but that's part of what makes us long to spend the money all over again for the new one, isn't it?

In other news, the data recovery people called, and they pulled all the jpegs off my hard drive. Liz has made me think I could have done this for a fraction of the cost all by myself, but Dude at the Apple store was using words like "rust" and "corrosion" and at the time I sent it off I still thought I was going to try to have the old one rebuilt and these guys would have preserved the warranty. Which only had three weeks left on it, right. Who says we make good decisions under stress?

But in the end, I was willing to pay what they charged to have those pictures, and I wound up with a new computer with a new warranty for the same as what it would have cost to get the rebuilt one, and I am deciding not to worry about the money any more. I don't use credit cards much, and pretty much never more than I can pay down the same month (we are in a long, long process of paying everything off) but this is one time when it made sense.

And, yes, another bit of unrelated news!

My shul just made a plea that everyone use this search engine so they'll get a penny a search. It adds up, folks, and you can fill in any charity that's registered. I know the non-profits in your life are hurting, too. You can add it to your F!refox search engine list so it's super easy. Why not? Mitzvahs should always be so easy to do.

Huswifery*

Here's my latest fantasy. It's a warm day, a summer day, almost hot but not in the least sweaty, and we're in a completely private place, dappled in sun and shade. We take off all our clothes. We strip all the beds. We put everything in the washing machine, we let it dry on the line in the soft summer breeze, and when everything is folded in the basket, for one brief moment, one brief, blissful moment before we relinquish our nakedness, there will be not a single piece of laundry to do anywhere in the whole damn house.


In unrelated news, there are two items on my grocery list at this time:

milk
honey

*link here

Gratitude

Yesterday at my parents' table I gave thanks for family and friends and safety and health and Hope and Change, but today is a different kind of day. Today I need to give another round of thanks to the Black Friday sales and to Lo, who thought of me when she ventured out into them, and to Am@rican Expr@ss, which has kept on sending me a card every year even though I stopped using it years ago after I paid the damn thing off. A new computer is coming my way, and I think once I figure in savings on shipping and having a brand-new warranty, it's going to cost me less than the rebuild would have.

Yesterday's thanks were more important, no doubt about it. But today's are nothing to sneer at.

Because life has its charming ups and downs

The breathing study was, on the one hand, a success in that my breathing appeared completely fine, but on the other hand, a dud, in that when people with asthma are in between flareups their breathing is completely fine. So nothing was ruled out or in.

And my dog spilled water all over my computer yesterday morning. The computer is...how you say?...ah. Toast. The computer is toast: this is the word from the folks at the Apple store. It's going to cost an arm to rebuild it and a leg to recover the pictures, and another leg if I decide to get everything off the hard drive.

If I don't start backing everything up maniacally when this is all over, youall have permission to shoot me.

Meanwhile, posting is going to be pretty patchy--no computer at home, and all.

Happy Store Birthday to Me, sort of

The store opened on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, 2005. It was a crazy process, and a long one, and it is not ideal for someone with seasonal affective disorder to be starting a major venture at the exact same time of year, to the week, when her biochemistry takes its annual nosedive.*

But that is what I did, not quite intentionally, but the retail season being what it is, the Saturday before Thanksgiving was the absolute last day I could tolerate opening--in the give and take between me and the contractors, therefore, the Saturday before Thanksgiving was the point past which I would not let deadlines be pushed. There were electricians installing track lighting in the morning, but at noon we opened our doors.

The first birthday felt like a huge accomplishment, and for different reasons so did the second. Last year at this time I was astonished that things were obviously improving. I'd gotten myself into a serious hole and it seemed like I was getting out of it. There were setbacks, but that was largely true. This year, there's still more climbing to do to get out of the hole, but we will emerge. Only it's a little harder to see where we're going after that. The economy is hard. Not horrible around here, actually: houses still sell, and most folks around here are relatively recession-insulated. There's no big company that's about to leave town, and in my case, my customers are the kind who see books as a necessity more than a luxury. But we're still feeling it. We were especially feeling it before the election, but even with the election over and people's moods turning around, it's still hard to see the kinds of steep gains in sales that would make me feel better about the store's long-term health.

I just feel mired. I know that a lot of this is about the time of year, as well as the economy. But I am having a hard time getting things done, as always, and a hard time feeling happy about the things I do get done, which is not always true. It's my bad time of year: mid-November to the end of March or early April.

I'm trying to keep it front and center that depression means that things that would give me a sense of accomplishment, a sense of "hey, I got that done!," don't. They just don't. Instead, this time of year each thing I do just seems to clear the way for the next thing to come at me and make me start the getting-things-done process all over again from the beginning. Sometimes I hang onto tasks I could finish easily as a kind of shield, or I leave little pieces of disorganization in place as a way to slow down the production line a little so it's moving at a pace I can handle emotionally, even if practically speaking I could easily be moving a lot faster. I'm capable of being more effective, but I'm not capable of feeling more effective, so I bring down my level of competence to the place where I can handle it.

This morning, I got change from the credit union, and I got the cake for the weekend's celebration. It was two trips when it could have been one, and both of those stops were places I have been on errands in the last two days and I could easily have gotten what I needed then if I'd made a list and been planful, but sloppiness is more where I'm at. I'll go over just to be around some now, and tomorrow, too. But I don't really want to be part of festivities I can't feel.

It's depressing.

*Kind of like what it's doing this week, right on schedule. It's the annual kablooey! of my sense of pleasure and ability to connect to the world. A. and Phantom are both on me to use my lightbox, and I am, and it's helping a lot, but the other major piece of routine that lets me stay on top of my depression instead of going under it is exercise, and there I am not doing well. The bottom has fallen out of my swim schedule because of what I suspect (after prompting from Phantom) is going to turn out to be cough-variant asthma, though I don't have a diagnosis yet. I have a breathing study on Tuesday, in the slot when I would have been swimming, and the name of a pulmonologist to consult. I'll let you know how it goes.

In case you thought we were done with them

Z.: Will you tell me a bee story?

A.: I'm too tired for bee stories tonight. Maybe Mama will tell you one.

S.: Well, once there were two bees--

Z.: No, not DAT one!!!

Don't tell Z.

Pirates stole an oil tanker off the coast of Kenya.

I'm just wondering what kind of an operation you would need to dispose of two million barrels of crude.

Fall

That's her pirate sweater. In case you couldn't tell.

Principles

So, Z.'s favorite thing about morning playtime is dress-up. She makes a beeline to the dress-up cubbies when she walks in every morning, and she squeezes herself into a pink tutu that is more than two sizes too small for her, because it is all pink tulle and sparkles. There is a pale, pale blue nighty of many flimsy layers. There is a red-violet velour dress with little silver hearts instead of polka-dots. There is a green floral smock. There is a row of purses, on hooks. There is one floppy hat.

And there is a basket of plastic, high-heeled mules, sized for preschoolers.

Dress-up has been bothering my inner feminist zealot for months now (c'mon, you know you all have one). Granted, these are discarded real fancy clothes, and there are no Disney logos, but there is also no boy-gendered dress-up, or even any non-frilly dress-up. I know that our children are geniuses of invention, but the costumes don't offer any obvious path for role-playing--no pirates or doctors or witches or firefighters or cooks or cowboys. There is the opportunity for fabulousness, and I'm not knocking that. Fabulousness is fun. But fabulousness all by itself is not very interesting. Do you keep telling stories about tea parties, and ladies who lunch?

And the shoes. The shoes. The shoes.

They drive me fucking nuts.

But I never said anything, because somehow, I had this idea that Z. wasn't wearing them. I dunno why I thought that. Of course she was wearing them; this is Z. we are talking about. Today I saw her putting them on as I was putting her lunchbox away. I went over to give her my goodbye hug and kiss, and I talked to her about how those shoes weren't good for walking, and weren't comfortable, and weren't good for her feet or her legs.

And then I asked the teacher if any other parents had said anything about the shoes. She said no, and the shoes had just come with the room, and she'd never given them much thought, except to tell the girls they could only wear them on the rug because otherwise they fall too much. (They fall too much!!! Of course they do, they are three-year-olds in HIGH HEELS!!!) And then I told the teacher (who dresses like an old school dyke, even though she is not one) that it would make me happy if the shoes were phased out.

And the teacher was totally fine with it.

So now I think we are honor-bound to buy some good pretend-play costumes for the classroom. Z. is thinking pirates.

Pirate captains.

I'm going to try to be there

I'm single-parenting on Saturday, and 1:30 is prime naptime. But this is important, and it's probably time for Z.'s first protest, don'tcha think? Assuming she's not dissolved into a puddle, anyway.

What I was saying about that bluest-part-of-a-blue-state thing

My ward voted 97% for Obama.

Actually, more than 97%.

Here are the numbers:

Obama: 12,604
McCain: 314
Nader: 20
Barr: 14
Write-in: 8

Because if it's not about the election it's about my kid

My first! ever! RBOC post! It must be November!

• So, I got Z. an Obama/Phillies baseball shirt, too, only hers is an adult medium (so is yours, Mom!), which was the smallest they had. Until such time--if ever--as she grows into it, or gets bored with it, she's using it as a pillowcase by night, and a cape by day.
• Also, she had her flu shot yesterday, only it was a puff up the nose. She did great. I should probably get one, too.
  
• Her class is doing an "All About Me" unit, where they look at who has what color eyes and has how many people in their family and which pets and all of that. Thus, I know that she has brown hair and brown eyes, three people in her family, one dog, and is now 43" tall. That makes her too tall to ride for free on SEPTA and big enough for many many rides at Sesame Place that she couldn't go on last summer.
  
• This makes me feel better about having moved her into a booster seat last week. Once she started wearing her winter coat in the mornings, the carseat straps got uncomfortable for her and there was no more strap to pull, but she looks so, I dunno, untethered in the booster.
• She learned "God Bless America" to sing at the Phillies parade at her preschool last week. Two weeks ago? Whenever that was, with the World Series and all. She thinks it's a swell song to sing for Obama. She's singing it all the time. I wish she knew more verses, if it even has more verses. It's getting old.
  
• Barack Hussein Obama is gonna be our next president. How about that?