Wendy McClure

Author and Professional Obsessive.

Menu

Catching up

by

It’s nice that the heat is free in this apartment but we can’t turn it the hell down either. We have eight histrionic radiators which make a big hot fuss several times a day, which is great if you are a Sonoran lizard or a fondue or some other kind of heat-loving thing, but not so great otherwise. It gets worse as it gets colder outside, so if you’re cold in your apartment you should come on over, and open your pores and stay awhile. And then we’ll put some of that hot in a Ziploc baggie for you to take home.

Anyway. How are you guys? How about those Bear people not winning that super thing last weekend? We seem to recall hearing something about this.

I’m still doing This Thing I’m Doing, though the week after we hit the hundred-day mark last month Chris and I took a little break. We had Santullo’s and ribs and burgers oh my, and this time my stomach didn’t protest as much as it did over the holidays, so apparently I haven’t completely transformed into a lily-livered herbivore. I’ve been back on the wagon for a couple weeks now, so to speak, but I haven’t made much new progress yet. (Of course, the vegan wagon is probably not a terribly speedy wagon, you know? Because it’s not like you can use oxen to pull it.)

However, in totally old news that I have neglected to tell you, we made it through the “holiday survivor” challenge at our gym. That’s where they give you a nice little gym bag for not gaining several pounds of festive butterfat between late November and mid-January. We also got t-shirts for trying six new classes. I hope we get a chance to earn pants next, since the ones we bring to the gym were simply bought, with dirty old regular money and everything, and how can you expect to have a decent workout if you’re wearing pants you can’t respect? But whatever.

I was freaking out a little by the end of the challenge, because it was happening right around the time I had to fly to Albuquerque again. I wanted to do my final weigh-in before I left on the trip but the perky gym staff kept telling me, “Oh, that’s okay! You can just do it when you get back!” I wanted to tell them that no, they didn’t understand: I signed up for the Holiday Survival Challenge, not the Death Of A Loved One Endurance Challenge. But I got through them both somehow.

A few days after I got back, both Chris and I came down with some kind of buggy stomach thing that compelled us to sleep straight through dinnertime and most of the next day. When I could finally get myself out of bed I padded over to the scale. If I believed what the scale told me, I could say that I’ve lost twenty pounds since October, but of course I was dehydrated and the moment I actually ate something again, that number flitted back into purely hypothetical territory. It’s going to be awhile before it comes up again. In the meantime, though, we’ve been getting back to our Weights/Hateful Pop Remixes class (now with new remixes to hate!), and I swim whenever I can talk myself into it.

Plus, it’s so hot in here that whenever I shift around on the couch it totally counts as Bikram yoga.

Day 86. (Post-holiday edition)

by

Yes, still counting towards a hundred days of This Thing I’m Doing. The days didn’t stop for the Christmas season, though of course there were a couple days when my sense of purpose sort of got lost in all the tinsel. I figured that would happen. But for once, I didn’t hit an arbitrary OFF switch for the holidays. I didn’t want to do the I’m-just-not-going-to-worry thing, because what does that mean, that I worry the rest of the time? That I spent the last three months being such an asshole to myself that come December I get to eat a whole cheesecake and give myself a hug? Fuck you, Holiday Self-Entitlement! I thought. Up yours, Ghost of Christmas Present! I tried to just stay the course as much as possible.

(At the same time, though, it’s not like things were normal. How the hell could they be? It’s the time of year when everyone puts huge light-up inflatable crap on their lawns and listens to Lite FM all day and buys Chia pets for each other. Suddenly all the food comes from Swiss Colony instead of from nature. The world goes bugfuck crazy for about two weeks, so what can you do? Try some of that toffee, that’s what.)

Anyway, when the (sparkly, glittery, sugary holiday) dust settled, I was okay. Well, except for the stomach cramps I got from eating too many things I don’t usually eat now. Some of this was probably due to stress and travel, but it was definitely also from things like plowing into a stack of belgian waffles at full speed. I have mixed feelings about suddenly being a delicate flower when it comes to this kind of food. On one hand I’m dismayed that I can’t quite enjoy the stuff the way I used to, and on the other hand I feel sort of validated, because hey, all that sugar and white flour and shit really does do a number on me and throws off my senses and leaves me staggering around belly-blind. Yes, I totally just made up “belly-blind.” Because that’s how it feels—like my stomach is a young Helen Keller, all crazed and confused, and let’s say that something went horribly wrong so that instead of learning how to say W-A-T-E-R she only knows how to spell out the signs for S-N-A-C-K C-A-K-E. I know that’s fucking nuts but it’s the best way I can describe it. Anyway, as uncomfortable as it was, it all helped to remind me that This Thing I’m Doing feels better. And it feels normal now, too. Less of an effort and more of a relief.

The new year doesn’t feel like an empty slate to me. I guess can understand how it must feel like that to people, especially after all the holiday clutter gets cleared away. But this year—maybe this one in particular—already feels chaotic and stumbly and difficult, but at the same time, I feel like I’m up for it. The stars don’t have to be perfectly aligned this time.

Yoga-rama

by

Last night at the yoga class we were sitting with our backs upright and the soles of our feet pressed together. “Now, this is the tailor pose,” said the yoga lady. She keeps up a bright but rambling monologue about the various poses, and what their Indian names are, and what they’re good for, and what you should be doing with your belly button, and how, at the same time, you should be keeping that imaginary hundred-dollar-bill clenched in your heinie, to paraphrase her old dance instructor, who used to dance on Broadway, and so on. It might sound annoying, but really it’s very nice. Anyway, the tailor pose. “This is a very good pose to keep the urinary tract healthy,” says the yoga lady. “And it’s called the Tailor Pose because tailors in India used to do it. You know, to keep from getting urinary infections. There’s an old legend, actually, about tailors using this pose to keep their urinary tracts healthy. A lot of the poses in yoga have legends about them, actually.”

First I just listened. Then I thought, “she’s making this up.” Then I considered giving her the benefit of the doubt, because maybe this stuff IS true, or, at the very least, there are true things about it. I like thinking that perhaps there’s Hindu folklore about the village tailor who made the straightest seams and, alas, the crookedest streams. If anyone cares to enlighten me on the subject, please do so!

I think I have lost another two pounds finally. Oh, goody, my metabolism woke up and now I can stop poking it with a stick.

We went to the Brookfield Zoo again on Sunday, for the holiday lights as well as for more traumatic video moments like this one. And for the Mold–A–Ramas, which are much happier ways to see animals being born. (And doesn’t “Mold-A-Rama” sound like the name of a yoga pose? Something where you press your hands together and visualize a warm plastic object between your palms?) Anyway, since the zoo can’t exactly stick Santa hats on all the meerkats and shrews and pygmy hippos, they had special holiday lights projected on the walls of some of the outdoor habitats—these red and green and snowflake-shaped things that turned slowly in kaleidoscopic patterns. It was hard not to imagine the Kodiak bears passing a bong back and forth, but it was very pretty all the same. And, yes, very Christmasy. I’m beginning to feel it.

Day 58

by

In a corner of our gym there’s a paper sign up that says “THE PUNCHING BAG NO LONGER BELONGS HERE.” Evidently this means there’s a new spot for the punching bag and the management doesn’t want anyone to move it back into that particular corner. But the sign seems so much more poignant than that. The punching bag has moved on! The punching bag isn’t going to be your punching bag anymore! The punching bag is on a Greyhound bus this very moment, daydreaming about a better life and headed anywhere but here. Stay gold, punching bag, stay gold.

This is just to say that I’ve been at the gym a lot. I have to say it because I’m not sure if you can see it yet. (And certainly you can’t see me right this very minute through the internet, but you know.) In addition to the swimming, I’ve been doing the Weights/Hateful Pop Remixes class twice a week. I’ve gone fifteen times. I know this because I have a punch card, and after doing sixteen classes in eight weeks I’ll get a free quarter-zip sweatshirt from the gym. A sweatshirt that says, What kind of asshole can’t lift weights for eight weeks? NOT ME! No, that’s really what it says, in the iron-on letters of my mind. But whatever: apparently I really respond to incentives. Chris and I are also doing another eight-week thing, a holiday survival challenge where you can get a gym bag for not getting fat during the holidays. A whole gym bag! And then an bonus T-shirt if you try six classes! We’ll do anything for stuff! We’ll work our asses off for an empty Pez dispenser! For a box of paper clips! I’m almost not kidding! I suppose the magic is somewhere in the eight weeks part, eight weeks or some other chunk of time long enough to forget the beginning but short enough to remind you that it hasn’t been forever and that you’re still pretty much a dumbass.

But the nice thing about these gym challenges is that they attract even dumber people than ourselves. There was a woman in the Weights/Hateful Remix class who did everything so profoundly, blasphemously wrong that I was sure that some Ancient Vengeful Fitness God was going to smite her and turn her weight bar into a snake. She’d do duck feet during squats. Instead of lunges she’d do, I swear, the Bus Stop. At first it was a relief to have Wrongy Lady as the lowest common denominator, but it got so you couldn’t even look at her. I refer to her in the past tense because she hasn’t been to class for awhile and we think she got her sweatshirt already (by doing the sixteen classes in like three weeks, which, hello!, is wrong) and is now relaxing at home, eating cereal with forks and reading magazines upside down.

My weight has stayed the same the past two weeks since Thanksgiving. Well, more likely it wildly fluctuated as Mongol hordes of turkey and butter fat swept through my system, but now I’m back to where I was. It could be worse.

Swimmingly

by

Somehow I like swimming for pretty much the exact same reasons I’ve avoided swimming. You can’t read when you’re swimming; you can’t watch TV when you’re swimming; when you’re all done doing nothing but swimming, you can’t just stumble home without changing, because you’ve been swimming, and you have to shower and make yourself not smell like diluted Ajax, and that takes a half hour or more, and yet—I love it. All these years of fucking around at three different gyms, and apparently you only had to give me a big box of warmish water to make me behave like a real working-out-kind-of-person. Who the hell knew?

(Well, I guess I did go the park district pool near my old apartment regularly for a couple months in 1999. And then I stopped for some reason, like there maybe was a full moon, or else something on TV, or else someone shouted “Hey! Look over there!” and pointed at something behind me, and when I turned back around my swimming motivation was gone, oops.)

It does not hurt at all that my gym has towel service, and good showers, and a steam room. And a locker room that is carpeted and blandly cushy like a new office building, so that my swimming routine feels like a wet but agreeable second job. Which it is, kind of.

Please don’t mind me while I continue to be amazed that I can actually do things that result—in real live scientific fashion!—in losing weight. I mean, I know that I did this before and wrote a whole damn book about how it felt, but at some point I fell completely out of step. And I became convinced that well, it was just me, that I had this quirky little defect that impaired my ability to fully commit myself and attend WW meetings regularly and click repeatedly on my online POINTS tracker thingy every single day. Sometimes I tried to think of this as a special and endearing defect, like Rudolph’s nose or Dumbo’s ears or Britney’s personal judgment. And sometimes I just scowled and got fat. But I guess I just didn’t like going to those meetings and all that daily clicking clicking clicking, because somehow I’ve found time to do the cooking and salad-spinning and planning and swimming and showering and being an all-around trooper who jumps in the air in slow motion until the frame freezes on her dazzling smile, so there! I am cured! (Except I’m still fat.)

The long good-bye to pie

by

The turkey did exactly what it was supposed to do. On Wednesday night we brined the thing in salt water, and while stuffing it into a stockpot in the fridge felt strangely Dahmeresque, it was definitely worth all the creepy extra effort. Everyone at dinner made a point to say that the white meat wasn’t too dry for once. I was just glad that I didn’t kill anyone, though I guess there was little chance of that happening, since I’m so paranoid when I cook poultry that I might as well be wearing a hazmat suit. But once I got past the raw moments it was a great deal of fun to baste the thing with butter every half hour. I was prepared, in fact, to do it for the twenty or thirty hours they tell you it takes to cook a stuffed turkey, except I failed to notice that my fancy brining recipe cooks the whole thing in two hours. Or I suppose I did notice, but I willfully ignored it because, damn it, I wanted it to be long and drawn-out and heroic. It was supposed this whole huge thing where you put a turkey in the oven and then you weep bitterly for five hours and then the oven door pops open and a miracle occurs. But no, it was done at 3 pm and then I had to throw a towel over it like a massage therapist. Oh well, it was still worth it.

Now we’ve been making a great effort to not eat pies, which is easier when there isn’t pie around. Some of this has been accomplished just by throwing out some of the pie. But it’s okay when I made the pie lovingly with my own hands, right? I’m trying to think of it as purely an administrative task. It helps that Chris threw a film festival wake for Robert Altman today and a bunch of people stopped by to watch McCabe and Mrs. Miller and 3 Women and The Long Goodbye and A Wedding. And we offered leftover pie for all to eat while they mourned and tried to follow overlapping dialogue. It worked out well, I think.

Connect with me

Visit Us On TwitterVisit Us On FacebookVisit Us On Instagram