Light and Momentary

Slaw Dogs and Farewells

This weekend was my 35th high school reunion. I ruled out the idea of going pretty soon after I heard about it; I knew I'd be teaching my summer class until the day before it started, and it seemed like it would be a scramble to get to southern West Virginia in time. My friend Angela was going, but I wasn't sure how many other friends I would see there. I graduated in a class of 424, which means there are a lot of vaguely familiar names and faces, with fewer and fewer true connections as the years go by.

So I didn't go, but then I spent the whole weekend looking for new pictures and updates and surfing a strange tsunami of nostalgia.

I have a lot of Feelings about West Virginia. I was eager to leave the state the entire time I lived there, and at the same time it still feels like home. One of my friends posted a picture of her tray at the King Tut Drive-In, which still looks a whole lot like it did in the 1980s. "SLAW DOGS!" I commented. "Wonder how far I'd have to drive to get a slaw dog?"

Are slaw dogs just a West Virginia thing? You doll up your hot dog with chili, cole slaw, chopped raw onion, and yellow mustard if you can abide it (I cannot). In my experience most people outside of West Virginia think (or at least my husband thinks) that the idea of cole slaw on a hot dog is pretty weird, but most people are wrong about that. It gives you a little crunch, a little sweetness, a little contrast. I've spent most of my adult life in a hot dog landscape dominated by Chicago-style dogs, which will never not seem weird to me. I saw that picture of a drive-in slaw dog and I could practically taste it: the softness of the bun, the kick of the chili, the bite of the onion, the hint of slaw dressing.

That is an odd nostalgia trigger for a person who might eat a hot dog once every ten years, but nostalgia is a strange and unpredictable phenomenon.

When I posted about our 25th reunion I mentioned the number of classmates who had died. That number was never going to go anywhere but up, and yet I couldn't quite get my mind around this year's In Memoriam board. Since our 25th reunion, eleven more of our classmates have died. I've posted about a couple of them: the woman who died in an appalling domestic violence incident, the theater pal whose absence still pulls me up short. I wasn't close to any of them, and yet it is so strange to see their yearbook pictures next to dates of death. They were arranged chronologically, and I zoomed in and scrolled through them one by one.

I had the good fortune to be 20 years old, and then 30, and 40, and 50-- and they did not.

The past couple of years have taken an especially heavy toll; there are too many deaths from 2020 and beyond. One man emerged briefly from his COVID delirium at the height of the Delta wave to post on Facebook, begging someone to pick him up at our hometown hospital and take him home. It seemed like a sign that he was getting better-- and then he was gone.

We seem so much older now, all of us. Maybe it's because that decade between your early 40s and your early 50s is the window when most people go gray; maybe it's the result of all those 1980s hours spent lying in the sun slathered in baby oil. I zoomed in on a nametag and recoiled in shock-- that white-haired guy is...RICK? 

That white-haired guy was indeed Rick.

Ten years ago Stella was only 3, and Alex was only 15, and when I think about all the things that have happened between then and now I suppose it is unremarkable that I have more lines around my eyes (so much laughter) and across my forehead (so many surprises, so many worries). I have not set foot in that little West Virginia town in the intervening ten years -- and I had not been back for 18 years before that -- but I could still tell you exactly how to navigate the streets that wind and swoop through the mountains. I know just how to get to the reunion venue, and to the drive-in with its slaw dogs, and then back to the brick house built into a hill, in the neighborhood where I used to live.

It hasn't been my parents' house since 1995. But somehow, unexpectedly, it all still seems like home.

Surprisingly prescient

When I finished Hamnet I was looking for something similarly satisfying. There is a lot of sadness in Hamnet, because it is about a child dying of bubonic plague, but the sadness is embedded in so much goodness. I loved the sense of place, and the illustration of a family grieving together, and the reminder that doing what you are made to do requires time and perseverance (and may never seem reasonable to your parents), and its ideas about how we remember the people we have loved and lost. It was definitely going to be hard to follow. Something deep in my brain said, "Hmm, feel-good books about the Black Death..." (Probably a short list, huh?) Its workings whirred and clicked and spat out...Doomsday Book.

I posted about Doomsday Book when I read it six years ago, but it hits differently in 2022. I had only the vaguest memory that the residents of the Oxford time-travel universe had lived through a capital-P Pandemic in the mid-2010s. Theirs killed 65 million people, which probably earns it the capital P. (Globally COVID-19 deaths are at about 10% of that number right now.)

I was amused (and also impressed!) when I read that the early stages of quarantine in Oxford caused a toilet paper shortage. And one line in particular lands more forcefully this time around. There's a group of American tourists who get pretty shirty (do we say that in American English? or is a British expression springing to my fingertips because I'm writing about Oxford?) about the quarantine restrictions. "In America," one of them huffs, "nobody would dream of telling you where you can or can't go." Mr. Dunworthy says to himself, "And over thirty million Americans died in the Pandemic as a result of that sort of thinking."

I suppose anytime you read a book set in a future to which you are much closer than the author was, you're going to bump up against oversights. When she wrote in 1992 about a flurry of unsuccessful attempts to reach a university administrator on holiday, Willis did not foresee the world in which I keep muting group texts from my colleagues in a futile attempt to be marginally less reachable. ("Email!" I want to tell them. "This is why we have email! Do not text me about fall syllabi when I am not under contract!") Willis is surprisingly perceptive, though, when she writes about our collective reactions to an unknown and dangerous disease-- the way that fear and uncertainty bring out both the best and the worst in us.

Friday night musings

It used to be that when I went back to the climbing gym after a hiatus, my arms would proclaim their unhappiness emphatically over the next couple of days. Once in particular I was so sore that I couldn't lift my hands up to scrub my scalp the next day in the shower.

Today I have a teeny bit of soreness in my arms and a little bit more soreness in my lats and rear delts. I never used to have a sore back after climbing -- never once. But I have a theory: I think that pull-up training taught me how to use those muscles more effectively. When Joe first told me I needed to train my back to get a pull-up, I was like, "Whaaaat? I think you mean my arms." He was right, of course: you use a lot of muscles to do pull-ups, including your lats and rear delts. I think all those months of Joe saying, "Mind-muscle connection, Mom!" have made a difference in the way I use my body now. Which is cool, don't you think?

Tonight I cast on something new, an As You Wish shawl/stole sort of thing. Long ago (in, like, 2014) I bought some lovely deep green alpaca-silk yarn during a Knitpicks sale, and it has languished in the bin of fingering weight yarn ever since, awaiting a suitable project.

The pattern calls for four colors but I am planning to mix it up a little more to use up some odds and ends. The advantage of doing a mystery knit-along after the mystery part is over is that it's much easier to figure out which colors are going to go in which places.

The Writing on the Wall

Today was the final exam for my summer class, and after I proctored it I decided I would not jump immediately into the grading. I went home, I ate some food, I took a nap (in which I dreamed, alas, that Joe fell in love with the single most frustrating student I have ever taught), I put in my writing time. And then, my friends, I went to the climbing gym with Pete.

There was a stretch of time when climbing was our thing. Joe was mostly away at supergeek boarding school and no one had ever heard of COVID-19. Pete and I would spend a couple of evenings every week sweating our way up to the top of the wall, joined by Joe when he was around. [Insert a heavy sigh in memory of 2019: you don't know what you've got till it's gone.] Pete still goes regularly with his friends, but I could count on two hands the number of times I've climbed in the past two years. I don't enjoy their outdoor climbing options as much as the indoor walls, and they have not been great about COVID mitigation practices. Pete either climbs outside or climbs in a mask; neither option really appeals to me.

But it turns out that if you go in the middle of a weekday afternoon, you might have the place to yourself.

When you hire young adult staff in a college town, it's natural to have a lot of turnover. We used to know all of the route-setters' names: the guy who always put a toe hook in his routes, the lone female with her distinctive setting style. All of the old setters have moved on now, and the new routes are not the same. 

Climbing is like a time-lagged conversation. The setter says, "Here, I am making a puzzle for you -- can you solve it?" If you have comments ("your puzzle is very hard"), you can submit them by scanning a QR code at the bottom of the route. Over time you can get a sense of what to expect from a particular setter. (Sometimes this means you are 40 feet in the air yelling "I do not like this move! Why does this setter love this move so much?") 

Today I was noticing my unfamiliarity with these setters. I would stand at the bottom of the wall, trying to read the route and feeling flummoxed by their figurative handwriting. Or I would get partway up the wall and think, "Now what??" Some of it is that I just haven't been using those skills lately, but some of it is also the turnover at the gym: I don't know this new crew. I don't know what they think is fun or hard or novel.

I'm pretty sure they're all taller than me. It's a little frustrating to be climbing a route that should be within my abilities, based on its rating, only to find that I do not have the wingspan for it. Pete says maybe as I remember more climbing technique the routes will feel less reachy, but we'll have to see whether or not that's true. My guess is that most of the people setting routes are 6' men, whose imaginings about the abilities of 5'6" women are a leetle off the mark.

Anyway, climbing remains a super-fun way to make the happy neurotransmitters fizz in my brain. I sang out "DOPAMIIIINE!" as I sailed down from the top of the first route -- there's something so satisfying about solving the puzzle and seizing the topmost hold with both hands.

While I was digging up links to old climbing posts I came across this video from three years ago. You'd never know, watching it, how many tries it took me to figure out the moves at 0:10-0:16. Maybe it's a good time to get back in the groove.

Put that on a T-shirt

I was cleaning out my closet this week, because months after my observation that my old blouses do not fit my new shoulders, they were still sitting in my closet.

I was texting Joe, because he's the person I always text about lifting, and I said, "It's not that I want less muscle. It just feels weird, in a culture that prizes petiteness, to say, 'No, actually, I like these broad shoulders. I am planning to stay in bigger clothes.' Patriarchy, man." He texted back: "How can you overthrow the patriarchy with small delts?"

This, I feel, belongs on a workout tank top.

 

 

Happiness Awaits

The Slaw of Happiness varies in its veggies but its dressing is pretty consistent. The recipe I got from my internet pal Jodie more than 20 years ago is this: to a cup of mayo, add 1 T. apple cider vinegar and 1 T. sugar. You can vary it to suit your own tastes: make it a yogurt-mayo blend, use lemon or lime juice in quantities that suit you instead of the vinegar, and change the amount and/or type of sweetener. You want a dressing that's mostly creamy, with some tang and some sweetness.

To this dressing, add a big pile of small pieces of cruciferous veggies and their friends. Shredded cabbage is fine. Finely (finely finely) minced broccoli is also good. Grated salad turnips are scrumptious. (I never use the ordinary purple-shouldered ones; salad turnips are solid ivory, sometimes called Japanese turnips. They are milder and sweeter.) You could probably use just about anything in the brassica family. Radishes that you have manhandled through the food processor and coated in slaw dressing become more pleasant, less pungent versions of themselves. If you get kohlrabi in your CSA share and you have no idea what to do with it, peel it and shred it and cover it with slaw dressing. No one at the dinner table will have any idea that you're feeding them something unfamiliar and kinda weird-looking in its natural state. It's just another bowl of slaw. 

When I said "and their friends" in that previous paragraph I especially meant shredded carrots, which are sweet, colorful, familiar, and cheap. From there you can go in a variety of directions. Do you want some minced red onion? Maybe some chopped scallions? Maybe something with a little crunch, like sesame seeds or walnuts? If I am using broccoli, I will probably go with wee small bits of red onion (a habit left over from when my kids were small: strongly-flavored foods are often less objectionable if they're cut into teeny pieces), a handful of raisins, another of sunflower seeds, and some crumbled bacon. If I'm using cabbage, I might also toss in some grated apple.

Basic formula: dressing, shredded something-or-other from the brassica family, shredded carrots, plus a couple of additional ingredients that please your palate. Here's to happy microbiomes!

Things that make me happy

1. Hamnet. You guys, this book is so good. I downloaded a sample when it first came out, but I found that I did not want to read about children dying of plague in July of 2020. The sample sat on my Kindle for a long time, causing my thoughts to run in a loop: you loved those other Maggie O'Farrell books -> maybe you should give this one another try -> but children, dying of plague -> but you loved those other Maggie O'Farrell books, etc. Recently Overdrive suggested it to me when I was looking for a different library book, and I thought, "Sure, why not?" I want to find out what happens next and also I do not want it to end. I love the writing, I love the characters, I love the world they inhabit. So so good.
   
   
2. This may seem unrelated to item #1, but there is actually a direct link: I love weightlifting. I was thinking back to the other two Maggie O'Farrell books I've read: I Am I Am I Am and This Must Be the Place [affiliate links]. I have a tactile memory of reading This Must Be the Place. I very much wanted to know what the characters would do next, but I was sitting very still, purposefully still, while I turned the pages to find out. I joked about it at the time, even though I did not feel much like joking: I had sustained a mayonnaise injury, and my back kept shooting out fiery tendrils of pain when I moved the wrong way. 
   
   Since I started lifting heavy things I have been (knock wood!) completely free of the random back and neck pains, from twinges all the way to immobilizing fiery tendrils, that had plagued me at unpredictable intervals for my whole adult life. I would have thought I was reasonably strong in 2017; I had completed a 10K and a triathlon earlier that year and I was doing yoga with some regularity. I cannot say with certainty that the disappearance of cricks in my neck and pains in my back is causally related to lifting weights, but the timing is definitely suggestive.
   
   
3. Does anyone remember hearing about the Slaw of Happiness? It was a gentle little joke, right? Haha, slaw can't really make you happy. But! You guys! In that Next Level book I was just telling you about, the authors say that women at midlife need to be eating cruciferous vegetables every day. They feed your gut microbiome, which is adversely affected by perimenopausal changes, and which is linked to mental health in ways we are just starting to figure out. The authors also assert that cruciferous veggies are rich in a compound that is important for optimizing the hormonal milieu, but I have to admit that I am a little vague on the differences between estrone and estradiol and all of their cousins.
   
   The authors say you should put frozen cauliflower in smoothies, an idea that causes me to retch a little if I even think about it for too long, so I'm not saying that I'm going to run with all of their advice. I do, however, think it might be smart to whip up a nice big batch of the Slaw of Happiness. Or maybe another batch of Speckled Slaw, which I made for the first time on the Fourth of July. I was not sure what our guests would think about raw beets in slaw but they scarfed it right down.
   
   
4. Item #4 may also seem disconnected from its predecessor, because German sock yarn and funky beet cole slaw do not appear to have a lot in common. But I got them both from the Modern Daily Knitting site, and they are both bringing me joy. I cast on a new pair of socks for Marie today, after finishing up Stella's newest pair over the weekend. The picture does not do justice to the yummy saturated colors. If I could only knit one thing with one yarn for the rest of my life, it would be Zauberball socks. I also bought a Zauberball in fiery gorgeous shades of orange to make a pair for myself. Mmmm, I can't wait.

How about you? Reading anything good? Are you tearing off to put cauliflower in a smoothie? Do tell.

That was unexpected

In general I try to avoid writing about gloomy things in this space, but the biggest ongoing gloomy thing in my life has been getting me down this week. Imagine my surprise when I walked into church this morning and the accompanist said, "Would it be all right if I added some alto harmonies today?" I had never suggested this; she had always seemed a little reluctant to sing. I am virtually certain she does not read my blog and could not have known that just yesterday I was pining for someone with whom to harmonize. 

It turns out that she is not reluctant to sing; she is only reluctant to sing all by herself. It was so delightful to sing together today -- such a joy. 

I have posted occasionally about the frustrations of praying faithfully for a lot of years about an important question where the answer to date has been NO. It's a hard NO to hear, friends. Sometimes it just squashes me. But this is the second time in the past few months when I have said to myself, "I am feeling so SQUASHED by that big NO right now" -- only to receive an immediate and surprising YES about something else that was small but close to my heart.

After Mass I tried to explain to the accompanist why I was so grateful that she decided to take the plunge today, out of the blue, and offer to sing alto. I teared up in the middle of my explanation, which could have been weird. But she's been hearing a big ongoing NO in her own life, and she understood. Sometimes it's a sudden unexpected YES that helps you to remember whose you are and where you're going. It reminds me forcibly of this Screwtape quote. It leaves me feeling like I can carry the weight of the NO for a while longer.

Harmony

I miss making harmony. 

It's partly because of the pandemic and partly because of personnel changes at church, but the days in which I could always slide into a weekend ensemble are over, at least temporarily. While it lasted, it was a great combination of flexibility and structure. The directors picked the music; they would let me know which Masses needed people and whether it would be most helpful to have voice, flute, bass, guitar, or (very rarely) keyboard. I just had to show up and do what they asked me to. Usually I played or sang a pre-written part, but exactly often enough they would say, "Can you just use the chords to noodle around? Play something pretty." And I would.

These days I have a very small role in the music program: I am a substitute cantor at the early Mass when the usual cantor is sick or out of town. But the part of me that needs to make harmonies with other people is swelling up internally, like a-- I started to say like a boil, but maybe we'll say like a pupa instead. We'll hope it's more of a butterfly phenomenon than an abscess phenomenon.

When I am washing dishes these days I don't want to sing by myself. My brain feeds me a line of music to sing like it always has, but lately it is a harmony part instead of the melody. This morning it kept running a loop of this specific spot from the new Brooke Ligertwood album. (Do you hear the harmony part too? The one that starts out a third above Brooke's melody line there?) I love the bass part in that song, too, but playing the bass alone feels even lonelier than singing a harmony part by myself.

I think this is why I've been listening to The Chicks so much this year: Natalie Maines sings in exactly the right register for me to harmonize with her, sometimes higher and sometimes lower. Last night I picked up Pete at the climbing gym just before Goodbye, Earl started playing over the car speakers, and I tried to coax him into singing it with me. "Mom," he said, "is it maybe a little strange for a Catholic to sing so enthusiastically about murder?"

"Um," I said fumblingly, "self-defense and murder are viewed differently in moral philosophy?"

But really I just wanted to sing Martie Maguire's harmony part as loudly as possible.

The Great Escape

Today is my birthday, when I often I reboot my new year's resolutions, and so I made a special point of going to the gym this afternoon. I had a pleasant lifting session, and afterward I decided to hop on the treadmill and run some intervals.

This decision was prompted by the book I just read, after it was mentioned by my friend Angela in a recent comment. It's called Next Level [affiliate link], and it's about fitness at midlife. I liked it a lot. I was especially taken by their recommendation to focus heavily on intervals, rather than moderate intensity longer distance efforts. 

There were two barriers to doing an interval workout right after lifting. One I knew about in advance: I hadn't taken my beta blocker. "It will be fine," I told myself. Short little intervals, plenty of recovery time. So I climbed on a treadmill for the first time in forever (kind of like Anna, who also failed to anticipate trouble ahead), and warmed up with a brisk walk.

I cranked up the treadmill speed for interval #1 and immediately discovered barrier #2: I had dressed for lifting, not running, and the bra situation is different. Less confining, because there's no bouncing around in the weight room. "Short little intervals," I told myself. "You can do this." But there was an immediate cry of "FREEDOM!" from the chestular region, kind of like Aretha belting it out in the Blues Brothers. I persevered through the interval and recaptured my escapees. I took a minute to catch my breath, and jacked up the speed again.

My escapees did not want to be recaptured. RESCUE ME, they cried as they made another break for it. At this point I was committed to finishing the first set of intervals, and I just hoped that my reassembly maneuvers were not too conspicuous. The escapees would untrammel themselves, and then I would re-trammel them when the clock ticked past the 30-second mark, like a weird and stressful dance. I kept attempting to rearrange things discreetly, though in hindsight it does not seem very likely that I succeeded.

Maybe, I thought to myself, maybe now that I have warmed up a little my stride will be smoother and less bouncy. "Did you hear that in there?" I asked the mutineers. "Smoother and less bouncy!" (All the normal middle-aged ladies negotiate with their breasts at the gym.)

They sang back the very second the treadmill sped up again. "We want to break free," they crooned, like a better-endowed version of Freddie Mercury. "Is this really NECESSARY?" I said with a certain disgruntled emphasis. By this time they knew what was coming. Like the people singing "Freedom is coming!" they got louder and more certain until, by the end of the last interval, I couldn't take any more of the clamor.

The book says I should work up to three sets of intervals, but I figured two was plenty for today.

Too tired to sleep

When my kids were little I noticed a strange phenomenon: if their naps got interrupted, I'd expect them to fall asleep early and stay asleep. They were extra-tired, right? They needed the sleep even more than usual, right? It was so exasperating when it didn't work out that way. They couldn't fall asleep; they couldn't stay asleep. I was pretty rigid about naptime and bedtime during those years, because everything deteriorates when people aren't getting the sleep they need.

This observation is true for the middle-aged people in a family as well. I told you earlier this week about my recent interrupted nights. "I am going to bed nice and early," I said to myself last night. "I need a little extra rest." I was SO annoyed, SO SO annoyed, when I sprang awake at 4:15. I tried to go back to sleep; it didn't work. But as I lay there I had a little flash of insight: it is much easier for me to sleep well, to ease in and and out of sleep painlessly and to get good restful sleep, when the conditions are right. Exercise makes a big difference in my sleep quality, and I have not been exercising consistently since I got COVID. And here is something that just dawned on me, almost 52 years into living in this body: accumulated fatigue makes it harder for me to sleep well. My brain is better at restoring itself overnight when it is not running a sleep deficit.

So. Instead of lying there trying to will myself to sleep, I got up and did my morning stuff and then I went for a short gentle run. (I've been worried about getting back into running because I know someone who went into COVID with the same benign arrhythmia that I have and came out of COVID with a life-threatening arrhythmia requiring invasive treatment. So I said to my husband, who probably thought I was being absurdly paranoid, "This is the loop I am going to run. If I am not back in 20 minutes, something is wrong. Please come find me and make sure I didn't throw a clot.") 

After an entirely uneventful run I betook myself to class, where I felt reasonably perky. This afternoon I decided that instead of slogging through my list of tasks I would try to nap, with low expectations. I often can't fall asleep in the middle of the day, but today it worked and it was GLORIOUS. I woke up feeling a zillion times better -- motivated to cook a yummy dinner and get my writing time in afterward. (It was going to be a meaty version of stuffed chard (bulgur, ground meat, chard stems, onion, garlic, fresh mint and oregano), but my chard leaves wound up thoroughly boiled instead of parboiled. Only a few were stuffable, so I minced the rest finely and stirred them into the remainder of the filling. I liked it a lot and the kids did not complain.)

I like to think I have better emotional regulation skills than a toddler, but I too find that everything deteriorates when I am not getting the sleep I need. It is so much easier for me to catastrophize about difficult students when I am short on sleep, so much less straightforward to say, "I have a lot of agency in this situation: I can ignore it, or have a low-key conversation about it, or have a conversation-with-consequences about it, and I get to decide which of those things to do." 

Hurray for rest! I think I am going to go get some more of it.

Rent-free

I think I need some new strategies for dealing with people who frustrate me.

One of the things about working with young adults is that your job requires a lot of interaction with people who are still figuring out professional norms. What's the line between self-advocacy and entitlement? When should you ask for what you want and when should you suck it up, buttercup? Some of us are still working on answering those questions in middle age, so it should not surprise me when 22-year-olds get it wrong. And yet-- color me surprised.

Today I have been thinking a lot about a series of irritating interactions with a particular young adult, and I have been reflecting on my difficulties in letting those memories go. Some degree of recall is important for evaluating our future interactions, but the residual indignation probably does not serve me well. When my inner monologue is a loop of "Can you believe it?" and "Why would someone think that?" -- it's time for a new script.

Any words of wisdom for me? How do you pull the brakes on a particularly exasperating train of thought?

Updates

• The fatigue that was squashing me last week is better, for which I am grateful. Still haven't tried to go for a run.
• Pete has spent the past three weeks in Germany, but he is coming home tonight. Tonight! I can't wait to see him.
• I hope I didn't kill his plants while he was out of the country. That boy has a lot of plants. There's one between his bed and the wall that is looking preeeeeetty crunchy. Was it crunchy when he left? Is "behind the bed, out of sight, brain befogged by COVID" a reasonable defense? Let us hope so.
• I am a week into my four-week summer class. I think it's going fine. I like teaching this one. It's the fifth time I've taught it, and In my experience students are often pleasantly surprised by it.
• A tip from me to you: if you are traveling by air, leave yourself more time than you think you need at the airport. I sproinged awake too early this morning when Pete texted me from Frankfurt to say he thought he might miss his flight.
• He did not miss his flight. Or the next flight, even though the layover was a lot shorter than planned because things were so bonkers at the Frankfurt airport.
• I am tired from my small-hours sproinging. I just found myself looking suspiciously at the word fifth, wondering if it should contain an additional letter somewhere. Like, fifhth? or perhaps fiphth?
• Ergo: bullet points. And an early bedtime, even though I will be sproinging out of bed in the middle of the night to give that Pete a big hug.

Wiped

I think COVID did a number on my fatigue resistance. If I don't get enough sleep, I am just flattened. In general I'm doing fine, but I have to pay attention to the amount of rest I am getting. I had a short night and a full day, and I am just...toast. It feels like being 30 weeks pregnant with undiagnosed anemia, which is my personal benchmark for The Tiredest I Have Ever Been.

I am 18 days out from my first day of symptoms, and I was a little sicker than I expected for a little longer than I expected, so I suppose this isn't especially surprising. Here's hoping an 8:30 bedtime will do the trick. 

An underrated driver of the obesity epidemic

If you search Google Scholar for "obesity epidemic causes," you get the same tired stuff you've been hearing for years: we're eating too much hyperpalatable calorie-dense food, exercising too little, and creating a dangerous spiral as we slowly strangle our pancreatic function and bork our bodies' capacities to respond effectively to glucose in the bloodstream. Maybe you'll see some speculation about mysterious environmental factors that we don't understand. Could it be something in the water?

The thing I did not see when I searched "obesity epidemic causes" was a thing that seems painfully obvious to me after reading Intuitive Eating: our go-to remedy, a short-term fix, is exacerbating the medium-term problem. It seems plausible to me that it is significantly worsening the long-term problem. Where's the science on that?

Because it is something in the water, so to speak. Virtually every woman who is currently alive has been hearing for her entire life that maybe she would be better, happier, more pleasing to the fellas-- if only she were a little trimmer. What's on the cover of every woman's magazine? Diet advice. What does every social media algorithm serve you up reliably if you are a middle-aged woman? Diet ads.

But what if mainstream approaches to dieting are the problem, not the solution?

Something like 80% of the time, people who go on diets regain the weight they lost -- often with a few bonus pounds on top, often with a panoply of hidden changes in the hormones that regulate weight. We don't want to think it's true; we certainly don't want to think it's true for us. Because we're going to do our diet RIGHT; we are embarking on a new slim-and-trim life! And yet, statistically speaking -- take it from your friendly neighborhood PhD -- 80% of people are going to fall in the 80% of people.

If we're concerned about obesity, maybe we need to stop recommending a behavior with the potential to worsen it. If the effect of the large majority of mainstream diets is that people wind up at or above their starting point, with metabolic changes that will make it harder to lose fat in the future, it's time to consider some different ideas.

Some time ago I posted a link to Casey Johnston's mind-blowing avocado post on Instagram. If you haven't seen it, it's worth your time -- not just to glance at, but to think deeply about (she has a longer blog post here in which she tells more of her story). As a society, we are pushing women and girls toward a mode of being that is ferociously bad for them. We are telling them to eat less food than their bodies need. A 1200-calorie diet is appropriate for a small child, but it is not enough food for a grownup! Why is Noom raking in a gazillion dollars a year telling people to eat like small children? We tell women to disregard their hunger signals in the name of "self-discipline," and we normalize this to such an extent that even MEDICAL DOCTORS proclaim themselves STUMPED about why their bodies keep taking over and demanding to be fed. I read that Jen Gunter piece when it came out, and I thought, "Oh, that does sound puzzling." I read it again this year, and now it reminds me forcefully of those nights when I have fallen asleep on the couch even though I really meant to get more work done: sometimes your body says, "If you keep refusing to listen to me when I tell you what we need, I'm just going to seize the wheel." A world in which a best-selling diet book suggests that women should tape their mouths shut to keep themselves from tasting the food they're cooking is a world with some serious issues about women and food. (The book, if you are curious, is Bright Line Eating; please don't read it, because it's terrible.)

It gets worse: our most "successful" diets erode muscle, because the pace of sustainable fat loss is too slow to attract clicks and adherents. Which further slows metabolism, which makes future weight loss even harder, which makes a sizable subset of women think they need an even more extreme regimen of low calories/lots of cardio.

We know that the bodies of Biggest Loser contestants were still in "OH NO, FAMINE LOOMS!" mode six years after their bouts of unsustainable public shaming disguised as health promotion. We know much less about what it is like to be an ordinary woman in this deeply messed-up culture, one who has spent literal decades saying, "I just need to lose ten pounds. Wait, twelve. Ugh, now it's fifteen. No, twenty." It seems likely to me that as lifelong dieters approach the last third of their lives, they face a number of added risks. Their fall risk is higher because muscle protects us against falls, and waving 5-pound dumbbells around doesn't allow a person to rebuild muscle effectively. Their hip fracture risk is higher, because appropriately sized muscles are important for maintaining bone density, and because "successful" weight loss in their youth may very well have contributed to disruption of the hormonal milieu in the years when they should have been building bone. Given the morbidity/mortality stats on hip fractures, we should regard this particular risk as a hair-on-fire emergency for aging women. Aaaannnnd because rebound weight gain may lead to more visceral fat storage, which is worse for you than subcutaneous fat, they may be looking at even more health risks connected to cardiovascular disease, the #1 killer of post-menopausal women.

So if long-haul dieting has the potential to raise a woman's risk of multiple life-threatening outcomes, why are women still getting the message that we should diet? It all makes me want to stand up on a soapbox and shout: WOMEN of the WORLD, let's RECLAIM our metaphorical AVOCADOS.

Strength training has made me rethink everything I thought I knew about fitness. It started as a fun summertime thing to do with Joe, and then it changed my perspective on a bunch of stuff. After a year of not-always-diligent work, my scale tells me I am now 40% muscle. (The internet tells me that the average value for someone my age is 30%.)

On the one hand, it's pretty cool. On the other hand, I don't think you can live a half-century in this bizarro culture and not have some body-related baggage as a result. I feel a measure of ambivalence about the new shape of my body. It makes sense, on the one hand, that I would need larger shirts to accommodate the delts and lats and traps I have painstakingly built up over the past year. It does not make sense for me to (1) want to be able to do a pull-up and also (2) feel uncertain about having enough muscle to do a pull-up. 

And yet here I am.

I have also acquired some fat this year, as the avocado diagram suggested I might, and the idea of a programmed cut (planned careful fat loss for a period of time that's short enough to avert compensatory metabolic changes) doesn't sit quite right with me at this point in the process of reconfiguring my relationship with food. So I am trying to practice body acceptance after a lifetime of telling my body that its current shape was not quite acceptable to me, and it is slow. But here is one thing I know for sure: I would rather be this shape and feel at peace with the ice cream in my freezer than go back to my former certainty that I needed to avoid all sweets every day in order to keep myself from eating ALL ALL ALL the ice cream.

Maybe I don't sound like a person who is quiiiite ready to be offering advice. (I suggest Fit is a Feminist Issue and the Progressive Strength blog if you're looking for online conversations about fitness -- this post was prompted by some thoughts from Marjorie last month. And oh! How did I forget Casey Johnston's Substack?) But if I were to offer advice to women in my age range, this is what I would say: let's normalize weight-lifting for middle-aged women; let's protect ourselves from falls and fractures. Let's keep showing up to lift heavy things even though change is slow. Let's make normal eating normal again -- the kind of eating in which we listen carefully to our bodies and make choices that are both sensible and satisfying.

Maybe the heart of the message I would want to share is this: it does not make us in any way "better" to chip away at ourselves with unsustainable New! Food! Strategies! that boil down to "eat less food than you actually need." No one is "better" because there is less of her. Oh, my friends, let's be less afraid to take up space.