Wednesday by the numbers

November 15, 2006 by Wendy

1. There is a college English class somewhere that has I’m Not the New Me as this week’s assigned reading. The instructor is letting me read the student responses on their class blog, and let me tell you, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a group of eighteen to twenty-two-year-olds discuss your love life from five years ago.

2. Chris and I saw a movie at the Music Box last week, and about an hour after we left I realized my wallet wasn’t in my purse, so we went back to the theatre to look for it where we’d been sitting. Which was a little hard since the next show had started already, and it was dark, and I had to guess which row we’d sat in and then crawl around patting the floor like Helen Keller, Custodian. And was it really so hard for you to comprehend that I was looking for something, O Thursday night Music Box patrons watching loudQUIETloud? Because it was pretty niceSHITTYnice how you couldn’t be bothered to reach down and check the floor around you for the thing I was looking for. I know it was asking a lot for you to miss five seconds of Pixies concert footage and all the highly important plot points and expository dialogue that came with it, but for fuck’s sake. I did manage to find my wallet, no thanks to the girl whose indifferent Fluevogs were resting against it the whole time.

3. This morning we had a substitute instructor for our fancy “Lifting Weights to the Beat of Hateful Pop Remixes” class. Usually I don’t care either way, but today I actually missed the squeaky and totally unintelligible instructions our regular instructor gives while doing the final abdominal exercises. She says, “Nggh hnn urnnnuh-nun errk! And errk! Nurr heen! Heen! Hnnrk errn grnt to four! Grnnk!” I know the routine, so it’s not a problem, but really, it’s like being drunk-dialed by a Fraggle.

4. Here is an informative letter from a very kind veterinarian named Bob Groskin in response to my last NY Times piece. He breaks my heart a little by pointing out that I might have been able to find a vet to save Bootsy. But then he helpfully suggests other humane ways I could have killed him. I did read about the clove oil in my research and in retrospect I wish I had looked a little harder to find it. LISTEN TO DR. BOB, PEOPLE.

5. Today is Day 36 of This Thing I’m Doing, and I’m still planning on writing more about it. We went to Michigan for the weekend, where I sullied my innocence with a few Swedish meatballs and some Chinese food, but somehow I managed not to return to my old life of crime and fried cheese.

6. I’m cooking Thanksgiving dinner for the first time ever, and despite all my quasi-vegan ambition, I am totally going to cook a turkey. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Have I evolved yet?

November 8, 2006 by Wendy

Yes, I think Kirstie Alley looked great the other day. No, I still think she’s a disingenuous preening ass who loves to pretend all her publicized sashaying is for some greater good of womankind. But good for her for making it easier for older and heavier women to appear on Oprah dressed like bitter concubines. Next!

Today is good, what with all the unwanted pounds and Republicans and Federlines that we’re getting rid of. I weighed myself this morning, and while I’d hoped the results had been little better and that my metabolism had taken over both the House and the Senate of my Fat Cell Congress, I’ve still lost ten pounds in four weeks. Chris, who is a guy, has lost about ten times that in the same amount of time. I know human biology dictates this. I would kindly like to inform human biology that I’m on the Pill and don’t happen to have any needy little bitty babies depending on my body fat reserves to protect them from the cold prehistoric world. Is there any way I can just upgrade to a childless hussy biological model, where I can use my body fat reserves to absorb vodka? No?

In my shoes

November 5, 2006 by Wendy

A couple of you have pointed out that This Thing I’m Doing sounds a little like the Weight Watchers Core Program, where you eat only heartbreakingly sensible whole foods and don’t have to count any POINTSâ„¢ because your metabolism is just too bored to even bother turning it into fat. Or something like that. So I can sort of understand if This Thing sounds awful because it sounds like Core, because who the hell wants to be on Core? It’s like the Weight Watchers short bus. It’s the orthopedic shoes of WW, really, and you stomp around sadly mumbling “me no allowed to eat bread” while everyone else at the WW party is on the other plan, wearing their sexy Flexy high heels and telling stories about their fabulous lives where they get to eat daring little portions of cheese and flirty slivers of cake every day, woohoo! And you wonder how everyone else can stand to wear those POINTy little shoes, because you never got used to how they felt no matter how hard you tried.

Okay, so that’s another weird analogy for how I felt the last time I did WW a bit over a year ago.

I also never really took to Core because the recipes were pretty awful. To be honest, a lot of the dishes in that Eat to Live book are kind of brutal, too, with things like Raisin Coleslaw and Anti-Cancer Soup (oh, let me pound my spoon with anticipation), and if making those had been my first experience with This Thing, I don’t know how it would have turned out. Chris had the book to begin with, and he’d found a couple of recipes that didn’t make you want to pound your fingers flat with a twenty-eight-ounce can of beans. But like I said, I like how it’s going so far. More later.

This thing I'm doing

November 3, 2006 by Wendy

…is why I lost the seven pounds last month. I guess some of it is due to the swimming and the walking and this class I’m taking at the gym, all of which are technically part of This Thing in the broader sense of its thingness. But that’s all stuff I’ve done before, whereas This Thing I’m Doing is different, for me, at least. This Thing I’m Doing is a vegan diet.

Well, it’s vegan in the sense that there’s no meat and no dairy. I really should call it something else, though, since I’m not concerned with avoiding various animal-product ingredients like gelatin and honey (because I guess I don’t care enough about the poor horsies and the bumbly bees). I’ll also allow myself something with meat or dairy once in a while. So it’s a cheatin’ kind of vegan. It’s cheagan.

Mostly, though, it’s eating a ton of vegetables and limiting everything else, like bread and starchy stuff and nuts. It’s based on this book and this plan. And yes, I know exactly how dour and dull and totally unlubricated it seems. But somehow, it’s not really like that. Somehow, I like it.

And I like better than Weight Watchers. I know for an awful lot of you who read this site, WW works for you; it just wasn’t working for me anymore. The reasons probably have more to do with me than with the plan. For me, doing WW was like having a crazy mother; a well-intentioned but obsessive and inconsistent and maybe even drunk mother. (Yes, I know that watching Mommie Dearest the other night probably made me think up this analogy.) But really, some days I’d be all, “WW Mommy, may I have some cake?” And she’d be half-passed out on the couch and she’d go, “Sure, shweetie.” But then other days she’d freak out and make me do all these bizarre chores, and I’d be like, “But WW Mommy, I don’t want to count out and line up all the Cheerios in the box,” and she’d scream that if I didn’t do it I wouldn’t be a good little girl, and it was all my fault for eating that cake. You know? Well, maybe you don’t, and that’s okay. But with me and This Thing I’m Doing, every day is pretty much the same. And I know the kind of inner mom that comes with This Thing is sort of boring and you probably wouldn’t want to come over to my house after school, so to speak, but I’m a lot less nuts now. Right now This Thing feels better than pretending I can have it all, which is what I did in the past.

That said, it’s a LOT of work, like a shitload of cooking and planning and shopping. It would be even harder if there weren’t several really good produce stores nearby and on my way home from work. Chris and I are doing it together, which helps a lot, and our fridge and freezer and pantry are vast expanses of nutritional no-fun-at-all. And we love it, perversely.

The only thing I’ve been counting is days. Today is Day 24 of doing This Thing, which puts it in perspective a little, because after the first week it’s easy to delude myself into thinking that I’ve been doing it long enough to have completely rearranged my DNA. Uh, no. And I weigh myself again next week. I’ll tell you how it goes.

Every day these days

October 18, 2006 by Wendy

On Sunday Chris and I went to the zoo, like we’d been wanting to do all summer, and so what if it’s not summer any more? There are only two slight disadvantages to going to Brookfield Zoo in the fall, which is that the flamingos are in storage and Baboon Island is deserted. (You really need to see Baboon Island. It’s like the animal equivalent of MTV Spring Break. And do they even air that anymore? I have no idea.) There was a sign that said “The Baboons are having their annual medical check-up,” and I imagined all the baboons lining up to board a big school bus driven by a kindly nurse. Mentally I am still eight years old when I go to the zoo.

We saw the monkeys and the penguins, like probably everyone else does, and we saw a traumatic video of a giraffe being born. (It just falls out! In this bag! Like chips in a vending machine! Only freakier!) We saw this little African deer thingy, I don’t rememember what it’s called, standing practically sideways on a rock, chewing and chewing and chewing. We overheard all kinds of hastily made-up animal facts from parents of little kids. (“I think the rhino is getting ready to hibernate, Tyler, and that’s why it won’t come out.”) We followed around a peacock (aka Nature’s Bling). We stayed until just before dark, when the zoo grounds were getting deserted and spooky and lovely. I have so much to do, so very much to do, so many things every single freaking day these days, but I liked Sunday.

One of the many things is swimming. When I was at Ragdale last month I started going to a pool at a nearby college in the mornings (well, okay, so I went twice), and I liked it so much I started using the pool at my gym. I like it because all you need to remember to pack is your suit, and when you get to the pool there is no aimless wandering around like on the gym floor; there is no thing you have to get on, or wait for; no TVs or magazines that you feel you should look at while you’re waiting to get off whatever thing that you waited to get on. When you’re in a pool, the only thing you have to do is stay alive. And it turns out I’m pretty good at doing that.