seeking surface condition

My mother and niece left yesterday after a week long visit. I am resurfacing, reclaiming and basically regrounding myself today, a task that will take, I'm sure, much more than 24 hours.

For months now, my mom and I had talked about her coming out to Denver (from Ohio) to help re-organize the newly redone kitchen. My mother is a great organizer and cleaner extraordinaire, and she's also one of those people who cannot sit still for any length of time--she needs a "project". I should have known that the kitchen would only take her a day to organize, and we'd be left with six more days to fill with various projects, not the least of which was keeping my 15 year old niece entertained.

To her credit, though, my niece was pretty loose about the whole trip--she and I haven't really spent a whole heck of a lot of time together in the course of her life and I think it was just good for us to have a chance to reaquaint ourselves with one another. She too is a clean freak (it's in our genes, though it seems to have skipped me for the most part) and was Mom's right hand girl when it came to the Reorganization of My Lesbian Daughter's Life.

From the kitchen they moved into the pantry. Then the living room. Days passed. We took a trip to tour the Celestial Seasonings tea factory (actually great fun) and see the mountains; we ate out, went to farmer's markets, tooled around Denver's historic neighborhoods. Mom started going in the basement and poking around, "resurrecting" things that she thought would be better used upstairs. She carried a tape measure everywhere. I had visions of her finding some random film container of bud that I'd hidden in one of my pot hoarding moments and how I'd then have to come up with some bullshit explanation as to why there were drugs in the linen drawer.

They moved to the foyer. I was getting antsy. After telling myself, over and over, that my mom's need to change and organize did NOT reflect badly on me, nor did it mean that everything in my life was somehow wrong, I suddenly lost the ability to let things roll off of my back. I was disconnecting the t.v. to move it to its new perch when something in me snapped. Granted, I'd just come from the Gay Pride parade (which my mother treated like Depravity Come Home to Roost), having taken two whole hours to myself to do something I really wanted to do, and was feeling a little, shall we say, annoyed at mother's rampant homophobia. I'd had no time to myself for what felt like a year. My niece, god love her, was like velcro at my side all the time. I'd left the parade without venturing down to the Festival itself because my niece was making noises about wanting to go to the mountains and I had to get home. I didn't want to go to the mountains. It was already noon and I wanted to hang out with My People. But at that moment, my people was my family, and I had to compromise.

So I get home and the Organizational Jihad has been busy: they are ready to move the t.v. I am tired. I am tired of feeling responsible for my guest's happiness and appetite, tired of homophobic ignorance, tired of watching my mother's manicness, tired of my niece's clingyness. I want time to myself and I want people to stop fucking with my shit. I end up crying, and saying some stupid below-the-belt crapola that I don't even mean, and suddenly I'm the out of control bad guy around whom everyone must walk on eggshells. I have a familial history as this character, and I hate it. No one else sets me off like my family--isn't that always the case?--if you asked any of my friends, they would tell you that they didn't know this kind of anger existed in me. But it does. And it's not just anger. It's seething rage. It's rage I've learned to control and keep in check, anger that stems from being misunderstood and ignored and from never feeling pretty, or worthy, or seen. The difference between me when I was 20 and raging and me now is duration--I cried for about 5 minutes and felt better, and it was done. 15 years ago I would have wept for hours. Of course, my Mom knawed at my words like a dog with an immense rawhide, and she's probably still mulling over it all. Not much I can do about that.

I appreciate their help, I really do. But I also just got married, and my wife is now gone for three weeks dealing with her family, and I miss her, and my mom never congratulated me on our wedding, and the only thing my dad could say when I told him the news was "oh my goodness" over and over and then "well I guess this is what you wanted so you should be happy" and though I know I can't do anything to change the way they see gay marriage (a cancer on American morals, that's how) I still expected a little more graciousness, a little more excitement. They say all they want is for me to be happy, but the subtext has always been that they want me to be their kind of happy, a cpicture-perfect copy of suburban idyll hell, where a woman is in her place, where the good folks are Bush-loving, Fox-TV watching, Limbaugh-listening, money/status obsessed perfectionists. I'd rather grow a tail and join the circus with all the rest of the freaks, thanks.

As you can well imagine, I haven't been doing jack shit with WW. I don't know when I'll get back there, frankly. I don't have the energy right now, and I'm feeling really vulnerable and shaky. I'm still at 235, the magic number, mostly because I'm not eating much. I don't have a desire to, really. Unfortunately, I DO have a desire to drown myself in a vat of single malt or a growler of IPA, and I DO want to sit in my garden all day and smoke and write and read. I suppose the writing and reading aren't so bad, but the other stuff won't do me one iota of good. I know this. But I'm still resurfacing, coming up for air, and I'm still feeling like I can't make my lungs work right. And my heart hurts. Longing and disappointment mixing with blood and tears beating like a drum in my chest. Send oxygen. Send love. Send rice cakes.

it's a stressebration

Curious, really, the way stress eating can segue into celebratory eating. I noted that. I've put an end to that. Maybe this is how we get off program. I guess emotional eating can encompass a lot of emotions. I just know that the whole ungrounded/stressed thing of the past few weeks let up a few days ago, and then it was like, hooray, we've moved, let's go out to eat (or have some champagne/cava and at some point I had to step back (this may have been while I was out on a walk) and say, whoa, better watch this, and so it's not like pulling myself up out of a hole so much as it's like that bit where you are falling asleep and mini-dream that you've slipped off the curb (or something equally ankle-bending/small falling) and then you kind of jerk (full-body) awake. So I'm awake again, and though sleep on the physical plane is vital, this particular vein of lapsing consciousness it is a-not-so-good.

I'm awake. I'm up. I'm alive. what do I want to eat today?

routine schmoutine

Bouncing off of Stine's post, I hear the word routine and think "blahty blah and boring...Ta!"

But she's onto something there. When it comes to food, predictability and built-in safety nets--be they in the form of carrot sticks or a walking buddy or menu planning--seem to be the necessary "evils" of weight loss. But the true evil is spontaneity. You see your neighbor after work and she asks what you're doing for dinner--when you respond with "dunno," a door in the universe flies open and in strolls the question"wanna grab a pizza?" Now you're caught: you have nothing planned because you haven't gone to the grocery store yet this week and MAN, a pizza sounds good but there's this THING you're trying to do and it does not involve a secret (or not so secret) assignation with a pizza.

Convenience and spontaneity can ruin a perfectly good OP day. Harrumph. If it happens to be a day wherein you already feel like a distant relative of Moby Dick, you're in luck, because you'll probably say to your neighbor "no thanks, I have dinner plans" when you really don't and you're starting to daydream about a pepperoni pie. But if you went to the gym that day and have barely eeked out 15 points yet for the day then...why not? You can just have ONE piece, right? Frankly, this line of thinking feels horribly backward.

So this routine thing. I guess it HAS been a part of my past successes with WW, and if I'm to continue down this road to wellness, I've got to slam that Universal door as soon as it flies open. Maybe I'll add a couple deadbolts for good measure. I have to let go of the notion that there is something wrong with (read: that I am out of control otherwise) food routines. It's that balance monster again come knocking. Good thing I added those locks. I might just need me a bouncer though, for good measure.

where'd i put my routine?

I want it back. I want the predictability of it, the way it's more or less always there, the way I can count on it. I want the backdrop, the background, the (good) foundation. I know I'll find it again, but right now, this unsettledness, it's taxing. That's why I need to make me some carrot sticks. That may be the first thing I do in the new kitchen. Carrot sticks, and maybe figure out which drawer gets the knives (which, by the way, are all down in Olympia, at the knife-spa). It's not about boring routine. Nope, it's about having this healthy base from which to explore. Food is a big part of it, but so is an exercise routine, and I'm thinking it might be time to really focus on expanding that...but first, this business of moving.

ACK! i'm back

Oh what an adventure I've had. Oh what trials and tribulations, joys and gut-wrenching sorrows.

First, I weighed myself this morning --rather reluctantly, I might add -- and I'm at 235. PHEW. Only one point eight pounds gained whilst I was off in the wilds of B.C. getting my ring on, er, I mean, getting married.

The secret? Chalk it up to the centuries-old P-Cubed Diet: Puke, Poo and Pause (for rest).

Yes, mere days prior (four to be exact) to the nuptials I became violently ill with what turned out to be a virus that was sweeping through mid-eastern Montana and Wyoming--it was so bad that health officials closed the visiting hours at Billings Memorial because too many people were already sick and they couldn't risk a greater outbreak. Let me tell you, whatever this was, it was NOT PRETTY. No doubt it would pose a significant health threat to the elderly and infants--one loses so much water so quickly that any immuno-compromised individual would be totally dehydrated within an hour. All sense of time is lost. I don't know why this happens, but it does. I spent hour long stints in the bathroom and felt like I'd been hovering above the toilet bowl for a mere five minutes. A four hour "nap" was, according to my body, just the beginning of a 14 hour long slumber occasionally punctuated by yet another rousing rendition of Mud Butt.*

Dear S., my wife-to-be, tended to me like a nursemaid. She is incredibly good at taking care of my whiny ass when I'm sick and, much like my mother was, pays little mind to contracting the nastiness because she's too concerned with my well-being. On Thursday morning, dear S. and I set out for Nelson, and S. got us there mere hours before she too succumbed to the hell that is PCubed. She spent all of Friday in bed. That's right, the whole day before her wedding was spent shuffling between guest room and bathroom, bucket in hand. I was, of course, dispatched to get the marriage license and flowers. Now, whose brilliant idea was it to send a nauseous woman into a floral shop? Suffice it to say, I ended up in the backseat of a minivan smoking a bowl of famous BC herb in an effort to calm my stomach whilst my comrades-in-marital-arms grabbed some coffee. I watched as pounding rain smeared the coffeeshop sign's letters, and thought of S. back at the guest house, sleeping away this nastiness. When my friends emerged with their coffees, they were welcomed by a plume of kind smoke and a little-less-barfy but completely blubbering bride-to-be. We sat there for a long while then, talking about what it meant to be married, how expectations can ruin an otherwise perfectly blissful day, how marijuana is the medicine of the Goddess.

Suffice it to say, S. rose to the occasion and I recovered and we were happily married in a quaint little chapel-turned-community center in Balfour, British Columbia, on June 3, 2006. We were pronounced "truly married and partners for life". The weather was unbelieveably perfect, the location sublime, and those in attendance helped us pull off something that, alone and sick, we could not have done ourselves. And to top it off, as we paddled out onto Kootenay Lake right after the ceremony (S. in her taffeta and I in my Sir Gawain gown), Daisy Mai Pickles jumped in and swam after us. Note: Daisy had never been swimming before. She'd expressed so little interest in the water that we thought all hope of her being a lake dog was lost. But we were wrong. Her celebratory swim was the best wedding gift ever.

I have many more stories to tell and pictures to share, but for now, here's a few, including one of me driving home (ah yes skanky driving hair)--I like this one because you can see my hand (with my new ring) and, well, this is pretty much how I look when I'm driving through Montana--intense, searching, & totally struck.

a horse with two names

earlier today, while riding side saddle across the box-strewn living room atop my pity-pony, I was jonesing for some Barbara's Cheese-Bakes and a nice, hoppy, IPA (Snoqualmie Brewing's Wildcat would be the one). The good news is that I did not ride said pony down to the co-op, but rather, did a kind of graceful dismount and had a big bowl of Nature's Path Puffed Corn with Vanilla soy milk. Yes, it would have been far more virtuous not to cave in to emotional eating, but I'm giving myself a little break here, because this business of packing and moving, it's tweaking me, and, well, I've opted to make better choices rather than deny myself my food-crutch entirely.

Compromise, the distant cousin to both Denial and Virtue.

stumbling through maintenance

I'm in maintenance mode. That means keeping within 2 lbs of my goal. So far so good, but it feels a little strange, because with the craz(ed)iness of life, I haven't felt particularly grounded in my food patterns.

Instead, it's been this general sense of balance-- counting points as best I can, but also striving to think of + and - in the more general sense, like if I had a big lunch, to go for a small dinner. I sometimes wonder if this is how the few (and far between) people who are sensible eaters approach things. Do they not overthink? But do they give it some thought?

Things will settle down soon, and in the meantime, I'm gonna try to get some of my framework back in place, to give me that sense of structure that I need.