Now with only one foot in the grave!

Hey Internets, I'm obese!

I was having dinner with a friend who reads this blog and also keeps up with a lot of people in my blogroll, and he mentioned that a few of those bloggers only use their BMI as a weight loss indicator. And because I still am kind of All Things Weight Loss on the inside, even though I've ostensibly shunned formal dieting and I sit in my work's food lounge smiling beatifically like some sort of oracle of self-acceptance and emotional peace while Gen miserably wraps her hunks of meat in bacon and dips them into nacho cheese and then sacrifices the liver of a wild boar to Dr. Atkins, as soon as he said "BMI" my mind immediately snapped into "Hmm, I wonder what I weigh now?" mode. And even though I was like 99% invested in the rest of our conversation that evening, a tiny little part of me was pining to reunite with my scale and see whether my slightly looser pants this week were actually loose or just stretched out to the point of giving up.

So this morning, after sort of ignoring all this weight loss business in the wake of being Officially Insane in the Membrane, I woke up and performed my little weighing in ritual of peeing, stripping down, and blowing all the air of out my stomach (because air weighs SO MANY OUNCES). I sort of half squinted through my dirty contacts, and then I had to bend over close to the numbers because I really couldn't believe what I saw.

217.5 lbs. Hm.

This is pretty good, considering I was climbing back up near 227 about three weeks ago, right before I had my little mad scene and decided to go for help. And really, the most gratifying part of it is that I've done this completely without dieting. I'll admit that the Wellbutrin seems to be playing its part in toning down my appetite, and that's fine, but I've also somehow decided that fruit is better than ice cream, and water is better than pop, and having a bowl of brown rice and vegetables is a definite improvement upon three frozen Totino's pizza and a bag of honey mustard pretzels.

As my brother's summer job boss would say, "Too cool. Too cool."

So, back to the BMI. When I first started this blog, I dutifully weighed myself and took all my measurements and went to the little government health website that calculates your BMI for you. When I clicked "submit" and a big red block of text showed up next to my BMI of 42.9, I was really sort of taken aback when it said I was in the "morbidly obese" category. I sort of furtively looked around my room for a gaunt hooded figure with a scythe, and then looked down at my body for signs of impending disease or death. I couldn't really find any.

Being morbidly obese to me means having to use the motorized shopping carts at the grocery store because walking to the bread section and back is impossible. Morbid obesity means clothes don't carry your size anymore, and your body starts betraying you in ways that it shouldn't for your age. You limp, you huff and puff on a single flight of stairs, you move slowly and ungainly and simple chores and household tasks are a monumental undertaking. In my mind, morbid obesity means diabetes and heart attacks and maybe the necessity of surgery to help get your body back into fighting shape. I am NOT morbidly obese.

I'm not claiming that I am in any way in truly acceptable physical condition either, though. I'm not good at running, and I can't even do one real pushup, and my body doesn't bend and flex and move as efficiently as it used to, but my blood pressure is low, and my body is healthy, and when I walk I do so quickly and smoothly, and I can work for hours and hours without needing a break. My body, if not aesthetically pleasing or athletic, is at least functional. And yet, I might as well have printed out that big red DANGER sign on that website and taped it to my chest like a big scarlet F, because science and mathematics have decided that my weight was inching me closer to my deathbed with every ounce I gained.

And so this morning after being surprised by the 217.5 on my scale, I remembered last night's dinner conversation and decided to check my BMI just for fun, and since I managed to lower it three points this year, I'm now squeaking just under the morbid obesity line at 39.7. Obviously not so good, but at least I didn't earn the scorn of the NIH this time.

I made a little bar graph of my progress since January, because I don't really think the numbers on the side of my blog give an accurate picture of my gains and losses over the last nine months. There were sometimes I'd weigh in on my calorie counter website, but not here because I wasn't blogging or it wasn't "official" or for whatever reason, and so I stuck those things in on this bar graph to see if I could notice any trends. So, here it is:



I think this tells so much more of a story than those numbers, because it just proves to me how much of getting healthy just has to become ingrained in your mind as a matter of fact lifestyle, and not as an undertaking with an absolute beginning and absolute end. Looking at it like this also lets me be so much more forgiving of the progress (or lack of progress) I've made since January. Analyzing the numbers and realizing I've only lost 17 pounds since January kinda made me cringe, because what have I been DOING this whole time? When I look at the graph, though, I can tell you exactly why the weight spiked. I see February and I can say, "Right, my grandma died in February and I really took it badly." I look at that last little spike and I know that that's where the depression started going out of control and I was eating so much I couldn't breathe and of course there'd be a weight gain when something like that happens. And now there's my new measurement of 217.5, which tells me on paper I'm doing as well as I thought I was in my head.

When I started all this, I really thought that getting to a 35" waist or an under-40 BMI or dropping below 200 lbs. was the absolute most important priority I had for the immediate future. Somehow though, even back then, I knew it wasn't going to roll that way. The bar graph wasn't going to look like the side of a mountain so much as a big, craggy, drama-filled mountain range that just wound on and on and on. If you had told me that in, say, January or even May of this year, I would've been profoundly disheartened to hear it. Now, I'm just kind of "Eh." about it. If I look at the scale next week and it's on 215 or something, then awesome...I'm on the right track. If I spike back up, then I know I need to stop pulling into Taco Bells and start spending more time at the places with the salad bars and the veggie wraps. That's cool with me, because hopefully the aggregate successes will mitigate the times when I can't always keep it together.

But at least now that I know that the government has helpfully provided an arbitrary number to endorse my opinion that my weight (never mind the fact that I commute hundreds of miles each week on heavily trafficked highways and I fly in airplanes and I often fall asleep at night with my back door unlocked and my baseball bat nowhere near enough to protect me and sometimes I try to plug in my hairdryer with wet fingers) isn't suddenly going to cause me to unceremoniously drop dead while playing "Skip to my Lou" with a bunch of first graders, I can stop being so obsessive about alway wearing clean underwear. I just figured that if I did keel over because of my ABHORRENT AND COMPLETELY LIKELY TO KILL ME CASE OF MORBID OBESITY, I at least ought to try make my mother proud.

On Becoming My Own Best Friend

I gotta tell you, this medicine either really works fast or else I'm experiencing the most spectacular bout of placebo effect anyone has ever felt in the history of the world. Therapist John and the family practice doctor who prescribed the medicine both cautioned me to be patient, that the antidepressants take about three weeks to kick in, and not to expect any significant change for at least a little while. I assume they stressed this either because they didn't want me potentially to head back to my house and break open my boxes of razor blades and cyanide tablets and the noose collection that I have lying around JUST IN CASE, or because they didn't want to see me back in their office the following week begging them for a higher dosage or a frontal lobotomy.

On the other hand, I am that girl who goes to a party and has like one glass of wine and still manages to get completely drunk and ends up making out with your roommate's brother's lab partner in your bed with your special quilt your grandma made for you in 1996, so maybe my nervous system is just nervous enough to respond quickly to the drugs. I don't know what it is, but I'm definitely not complaining. As trite as it sounds, it's like the fog in my brain has lifted a little bit, and I can just deal with things better. I was so terrified that this medicine would make me a walking zombie like I was during my brief time with Prozac, but it hasn't so far. I can still be sad and happy and cry, but it's like once it's over...it's over. My little problems stay little, and they don't turn into giant disasters that threaten to ruin my life. I feel tired sometimes, but only at the times when normal people feel that way. I completely astounded myself by lying down for a nap and then waking up 15 minutes later and ready to go. Prior to this week a 15 minute nap would've turned into a 12 hour sleeping jag, so this is incredible.

Another thing Therapist John and I discussed is how to make life easier; how not to expect perfection, how not to stress, and how not to let my inevitable inability to meet my own standards completely get me down. We specifically tackled my eating issues, namely the fact that I'm basically eating myself into poverty. I never realized this until recently, but even though I budget about $400 a month for food, and I spend every single dime of it at the grocery store, I still spend about another $300-$400 in eating out expenses. And the eating out isn't just like grabbing a salad from McDonald's...when I'm really mired down into a deep depression, I can easily waste $40 on a single binge.

I probably had an inkling that this was happening, but it wasn't until I rationalized it out loud with John that I really got what I was doing: My family has always been a family of enthusiastic and prolific (if not necessarily good) cooks. We keep our pantries full, we serve a big country meal at every dinner, and we clean our plates. My ex-husband came from a family who was even more obsessive about having a bounty of food all around; his dad regularly spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars a week to feed the family. So when we were together, we cooked often, and we cooked a shitload of food for every meal.

So I still have these habits ingrained from when I was married, even though I'm spending four nights out of the week on the road, and on the other days I'm usually too tired to cook. There was also the profound guilt of letting a hundred dollars of food rot in my refrigerator every week, and then the tediousness of having to sort through the produce to salvage what was fresh, and figure out each week what I needed and what I didn't, and wasting 20 minutes each morning preparing these elaborate lunches so everyone would think I was super healthy and conscientious when really I went home every day after work and inhaled fast food like I was training for a professional eating career, and then of course the awful feeling of not measuring up to my own standards because I couldn't get it together enough to fix a solid meal every single night of the week. I really felt like a huge fuckup.

So John asked, "Um...why can't you just plan to eat out on those nights?"

Duh.

So I've given myself permission to eat out whenever I need to, even on days when I'm at home because I know I don't like to cook for myself, so I probably won't. I gave my pantries and my fridge one final cleaning, and I have to say that looking only cereal and bread and some fruit and other staples is really kind of refreshing. It's like the simplicity of not seeing piles and piles of food going to waste makes it so much easier to focus on eating healthfully, rather than eating abundantly. And two really fortuitous things about this plan is that my school's nutrition program has started offering a salad bar three days a week, and a baked potato bar one day, so for $2.50 a day, I'm set for lunch. The other thing is that my commute between my first job in my little town and my second job in KC is a veritable orgy of really healthy veg-friendly places to eat. Have you tried the Jason's Deli chain? Oh my, if you haven't, you really, really must. So financial problems hopefully solved, because I figured out I could give myself permission to do something not explicity included in my Agenda for World Domination, as long as it makes me healthier and happier.

And the other thing (and this is one of those moments where it's like I'm admitting I finally learned how to tie my shoes or wipe my own ass and everyone who reads this is probably saying "Jesus, Erin, you're a moron.") is that I've de-stressed myself over reading blogs, or not reading them. I have this awful, awful guilt about writing blogs and having all you wonderful people reading them faithfully and commenting and contributing and making me think when I go for months without looking at a single blog by another person. And it's not because I don't want to...it's because once I start, I feel compelled to visit and comment on every single blog I like every single day of the week. And when visiting blogs starts to feel like my third job, I get a little antsy, and my ass gets numb sitting in this crappy office chair. So, since I'm all about organizing things into little piles and buckets and containers, I have bookmarked every blog I love and have divided the group equally into the seven days of the week, and now I only have to visit four or five a day. And as stupid and basic as that was to come up with, you have no idea how relieved I feel.

I like being nice to myself. Hopefully I can parlay this into other being nice activities, like a house cleaning routine or establishing a non-stressful exercise habit in the near future, because I really haaaaaaaate to exercise and clean my house. Hate them. Hate, hate, hate them.

Maybe with all this money I'll save from not buying out every Taco Bell between here and Nebraska each week, I can hire Merry Maids and have a shiny, be-muscled fellow named Knut come give me herbal body wraps and cellulite reducing massages instead.

It gets a little grimy.

The only negative thing I have to say about New York is that it's a little bit bad for your skin.

My plane touched back down in KC at around 11:30 on Sunday evening and I hit the ground running and haven't stopped since, which is why I haven't written, but I'm afraid if I wait too much longer I'll lose the onomotopaeia that was running on a continuous loop in my brain during my entire vacation.

When I got off the train and into my taxi, I was determined to be blase about the whole affair. My friend had been joking earlier about Midwesterners in the double decker tour busses, with their unfortunate clothing and omnipresent dopey grins on their faces and even though they're my peeps, I didn't want to be that way. I was surprised, too, that as we were heading from Queens into Manhattan that New York wasn't this big, huge THING I imagined it was. When I was a little kid, I used to read atlases and maps like they were picture books, and I memorized the geography of the places I most wanted to visit. I used to be able to name eight streets in any direction from the Eiffel Tower, and I know London like I'd lived there all my life. But New York...New York City was the one that consumed me the most. I followed Broadway with my finger as it sliced through the pink map blob of Manhattan...memorized the location of every park, whispered the names of the neighborhoods to myself like they were a private, sacred liturgy. When I grew older New York became the setting of the books and movies in which I'd lose myself on a Sunday afternoon, where life passed by in a Woody Allen montage of sitting on park benches and window shopping on 5th Avenue, where I watched four rather ridiculous women date, break up, get married, and have preposterous sex all while conducting their own true love affairs with the city where it all happened. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Gershwin, The Met and the Guggenheim and Central Park...everything in New York had reached this enormous, overpowering mythical status in my heart and mind, and when my friend and I worked out the details of my visit there, I thought my entire body was going to explode with the sheer exuberance of finally getting to see what I had built up over the past twenty years. So I have no idea why I decided I wanted to play too cool for the Big Apple, other than my fear of being lumped in with the gaggles of gawking tourists from Des Moines and Broken Arrow, but I hailed my cab and barked out my destination with as jaded a voice as possible in the hopes that I could blend in with the city and its millions of harried, irritable citizens.

The cynicism lasted until I made it to my friend's apartment and he grabbed my hand and made a beeline for the windows of his living room and bedroom. The views...my God, the views in this building! The Empire State Building to the left and off in the distance, the Woolworth Building close enough to see across into its hundreds of windows; from the elevator lobby on his floor the Statue of Liberty looked like a tiny, blue-grey Army man across the harbor. I would've coveted the apartment anyway because of the hardwood floors and the gas range and the superdeep bathtub, but the views had me at hello and I think I would've been perfectly happy perched on my host's window ledge and staring out over the mindboggling expanse of buildings reaching all the way to the mountains of New Jersey.
For the rest of the trip, my vocabulary failed me and I had to resort to the most trite exclamations over and over and over again with each landmark we saw. I think I used up my lifetime quota of "awesome" and "amazing" before we even made it north of Canal St. We went to Chinatown and Little Italy and on the subway and to Rockefeller Center and Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall and Columbus Circle and I've forgotten the rest but we went nearly everywhere. The two things that got me, though...really took my breath away were Times Square and Central Park. I initially didn't want to go to Times Square; we had walked a lot and we were sweaty and tired and it just seemed like such a silly thing to go look at giant billboards and the Naked Cowboy. We ended up going anyway, and I couldn't hide the huge grin on my face as I felt the energy and excitement of all the lights and the people and...just...everything. If I could've hired an orchestra to stand behind me and play Rhapsody in Blue, I would've, because that was the only thing that could've possibly defined a good New York Moment for me.

And Central Park...wow. Oh wow. Wow. That's all I could say, was "Wow." And it wasn't even anything specifically impressive about the park itself (although the giant boulevard with those incredible trees that framed everything so perfectly that I felt like I was in a Seurat painting absolutely made me stop dead in my tracks), but the more I thought about how much planning and foresight it took for those guys back during the Industrial Revolution to preserve 16 square miles of nature and to make it beautiful and special and fill it with exquisite things so everywhere you walked you felt like you were in a story book, the more I started to realize that it was the little things that makes New York what it is. The way every old building seems to hold secrets inside the ornate trimmings on their facades. How the streets of Manhattan were each made a monument to the history that transpired there. How you could walk down the streets and hardly ever see the same type of person in a row. And what struck me the most was just how intricately connected everyone and everything in the city was; 8 million people who manage to live and work and pretty much stay out of one another's way in a city that exists to serve every need they might have. That feeling of being connected, of experiencing the energy and vitality of all those people, of being a part of something bigger than myself...those emotions finally, mercifully made me feel so alive, and it's a high I haven't quite come down from yet.

On the plane ride back to Missouri my usual neuroses about flying were replaced with something a little more zen. I curled up under my blanket and stared out the window as the city gave way to perfectly arranged suburbs, which blended into the huge patchwork quilt of farmland that stretched from Ohio all the way back home. I realized that a huge part of my problem right now is that I don't feel connected to anything here. Missouri is my home, and I respect the people I know and I'm proud of my state and the towns where I've lived, but I don't really feel like I belong here. I never have, and as long as I continue to exist in this culture of country music and cow tipping, I probably won't be able to shake the feeling of being a puzzle piece that got mixed into the wrong box. I don't know if moving to a big, giant city like New York would solve the problem, but I liked what I felt there, and I'd like to feel it again.

I just did some calculations, and I think I could maybe afford a Manhattan apartment if 8 other people lived with me. I totally think it'd be doable if we kept to a strict bathroom schedule and, like, three of those people weren't super picky about camping out on the fire escape. It'd be fun!

So who's with me on a co-op in TriBeCa?

On a Clear Day...

My weekend was pretty nice, all things considering. As I wrote before, my plans to go to NYC to visit a friend were cancelled, but have been rescheduled for this coming weekend. I primarily spent this weekend doing little things; cleaning out my refrigerator, reading, writing a little, and thinking a lot about what to do next.

On Saturday afternoon I drove into the southern suburbs of KC to return some library books and go shopping at the sprawling, faux-bricked outdoor mall that boasts a large number of stores I can't afford, and a smattering of ones I can. This particular suburb is one of the toniest in Kansas City, and the entire two-block area is a monument to providing merchandise for citizens who have NASCAR-type tastes, but Maserati-type pocketbooks. Driving by the Dean and Deluca store that sits catty-corner to the tastefully remodeled McDonald's always makes me snicker.

I stopped at a Barnes and Noble to pick up a couple books and came back out to my car to watch the mall entrances belch out gaggles of shoppers onto the parking lot. It was early in the afternoon, and the sun warmed the back of my neck through my rearview mirror. I glanced at the clock; it was too early to go home, because home meant another grey afternoon inside 1,200 square feet of beige carpeting and unadorned walls. Home meant inevitable sadness, tears, loneliness.

I ended up driving to a park a friend of mine had pointed out near his condo as we were driving to lunch one day, and it was the absolute perfect place to end up....large, clean, and nearly empty except for a B-school type dad and his three screaming, squawking children fishing by a creek's edge. I found a tree near the creekbank that afforded me privacy and a view of my car in the parking lot, and I laid down to read. Since I started suffering from regular bouts of really serious depression, it seems like my concentration has disintegrated with each passing month. When I was in high school, I decided that since I was probably never going to be a pretty girl or a popular girl, I'd at least make a stab at being The Smartest Girl in the Universe, so I read voraciously and memorized any factoid I could get my hands on. At some point during my sophomore year of college, as the crying jags and the lethargy increased, my cognitive abilities started plateauing and then declining, and I never have really regained what I think is a working sharpness of wit and mind. It's gotten bad enough in recent months that I haven't been able to muster up the concentration to make it through an entire adult book without having to reread the first five pages over and over until the words stop swimming and reconstitute themselves into something I can understand. I'm pretty ashamed of it, especially when friends ask me what I think about politics or current affairs or Greek philosophy and I either have to furiously Google what to think or say, or I have to own up and admit I have no idea, because depression has made me stupid.

So until I can start reading big girl books again, I'm on a Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret kick, with a goal of hitting all the Newbury Award winners in the hopes that making it through eighty or so years of baby fiction will get my brain in shape to tackle real writing soon enough. I'm in the middle of Despereaux now, and it's cute, even if I really wish I were reading The World is Flat or something else smart sounding.

Anyway, as I laid there with Despereaux propped up on my chest and my hippie tote bag cradling my head, I felt my eyes drawn toward the latticed canopy of leaves above my head, and the startlingly blue sky peeking through it. I took a picture of it with my cellphone, but the photo doesn't do justice at all to the way the branches intersected with one another, like a latticed cathedral ceiling just out of reach of my fingertips. The photo couldn't capture the way the wind cut the perfect warmth of the seventy-something degree day, so that no matter whether you laid in the sun or the shade, there was no possible other reaction than to close your eyes and breathe one word: autumn. I couldn't show you how the whole outside smelled of that particularly delicious warm scent that gets in my cats' fur after they go outside and I hold them to my face and breathe in deep until the perfume of the grass and the trees and an earth finally put on the cooling rack after three months of baking fades from their skin. But the two hours I spent outside was nearly perfect, save the tiny ants nibbling away at my calves and my arms, and right after I took that picture I leaned my head back, closed my eyes, and actually smiled a genuine, in only momentary, smile of contentment.

I spent the rest of the weekend in a slightly less blissful state; I made the mistake of buying some jasmine rice in bulk a few weeks ago and this morning I woke up to a grain weevil infestation of every single bag of flour, rice, pasta, and cereal I had. After I silently fuh-reaked out, threw away every grain product in my house, and spent two hours watching Anthony Bourdain and scratching away imaginary bugs, whom, I was convinced were reenacting Sherman's March to the sea (if Sherman were these lovely mo-effers, and the sea was my ladyparts), I had a really long talk with some friends of mine about we were going to move forward in our respective lives, and for me specifically how I'm going to get happy in the next year or so. I've been realizing during the last few months that I'm really not happy with my current career, and I'm definitely unhappy with where I live. There are only so many weekends of deciding between tractor pulls or beer league softball games for entertainment before the hoity-toity part of my personality rears its well-coiffed head and demands culture. And while I'm always aware that I have landed a completely cushy teaching job in a great district with wonderful people and I should be going to early church with the 80-year old women and working that kneeler and thanking Christ I have the salary I do for what I do, I really dread going to my job. I don't think I'm a great teacher (at least not a disciplined one), I don't use my voice correctly so I'm going to ruin it in five years anyway and I won't be able to sing or teach, and I'm really shy, so picking a profession that involves eight straight hours of standing up in front of kids and doing my dog and pony show is kind of torture for me, even if they are a captive audience. At least I can bribe them with stickers. And heroin.

And then there's the problem of having no other passion for anything else in the world, unless it's writing, so I don't know of any other career that I'd just jump out of bed ready to tackle each day. I keep thinking that maybe I'd like to be a real writer, maybe a freelance pop culture or critic-type writer for magazines or websites or something, but I don't exactly know how to break in with a completely wrong set of degrees and no experience and honestly I don't really know if writing about your issues on a tiny blog can translate into actual journalism. I have a couple of friends who are freelance writers, and one or two in publishing, so I thought about asking for their opinions.

There is, of course, the "Erin's mom" voice inside my head that makes me feel guilty for wanting more out of my life. Both of my parents are extremely intelligent people...brilliant in some areas, but neither finished college and they both have worked in low paying, kind of menial careers their entire lives. When I got my current teaching job, my mother made a big point of telling me that I make twice as much as she does and of course seem to do half the work since I get summers and holidays off. My father isn't as vocal, nor as indignant as my mom when I say that I might like to do something different, but I can see him wince when I discuss more school or a career change, or maybe a move to a big city. And sometimes I can convince myself they're right; that giving up a decent salary and a low-rent house and a 401K and retirement for a shot at a completely risky career and a lifestyle I can't afford is ridiculous, and I shouldn't be thinking about it.

I think, though, of my friend from high school who got married and decided with her husband to bike to all 50 states for two years, and my friends who've gone on to play in symphonies, or the ones who've spent a semester in Europe or joined the Peace Corp or lived on a polyamorous ecovillage, or even the ones who are slaving away in PhD programs so they can say something significant to the world when they get out, and I want to say that I finally figured out what I wanted and went after it, too. Even if it is about five years later than they did.

Do you ever get afraid that if you figured yourself out enough to actually go for the things that would make you happy, that you wouldn't recognize yourself anymore? I felt that briefly while I was lying underneath the tree...during those four seconds that I closed my eyes and smiled, I stopped being She Who Ruminates and Frets and just became some chick in a park instead. It was a disconcerting feeling, because I didn't know what to do with myself without the depression and the self-loathing and the ubiquitous sense of detachment from a normal life and the people who live it. I cannot imagine myself as healthy AND happy AND satisfied with my career and my friends and where I lived at all. I have no idea who I'd be or what I'd feel like because I never, ever have felt satisfied. Maybe we're not supposed to have everything we want, though. I don't know, but I can always hope that's not the case.

I hit a trifecta of body image remarks today, which was kind of interesting:

My friend Genevieve lost about 60 lbs. after her wedding with the Atkins diet, but has since gained about 20 of it back. I personally think she looks great...tanned, muscular legs, an average frame, and only a little noticeable lumpage around her stomach and back. But since it's Gen's body and Gen's neuroses, she is completely devastated by the extra poundage that's crept on in the five years since she was married. She decided about two weeks ago to recommence her Atkins-ing, and has been so meticulous about counting carbs that when another teacher accidentally knocked over a canister of sugar as we were all preparing our morning coffee, I actually saw Gen duck as the granules cascaded over to her side of the counter, and even though she claimed she didn't want to get her shirt all sugar-dusty, I think she was really secretly terrified that somehow she'd snort sugar through her Eustachian tubes and then Dr. Atkins would rise up out of his cheese gilded casket and take away her ketosis privileges for a month.

Gen eats some pretty nasty shit when she's doing low-carb...today I saw her eat a hot dog wrapped in a carb-free tortilla and she turned down my offer of organic strawberries in favor of some turkey jerky her husband left in the glove compartment of their car after a fishing trip. She's cranky and miserable and she thumbs through the food and wine section of our newspaper like she's poring over letters from a lost love. When someone walks in with a cookie or bread or pasta she acts like we're about to sit down to a meal of anthrax and hand grenades and she turns away from the table, shrieking, "Get that stuff out of my sight!". Basically, Gen is annoying the shit out of me with her diet and how much she's punishing herself and her incessant talk of "being good" or "being bad" or "cheating" and how she's only lost 4.5 lbs. in two weeks and even though that's perfectly acceptable by nutrition standards it's not good enough for her because she's not perfect yet.

And when she said that...that she's not perfect yet...you could kind of feel the wind sucked out of the room, because even though we were all offering our Diet Platitudes and I was hawking the Intuitive Eating book and feeling a little smug because I had dropped a little weight this week (albeit mostly because my new allergy meds make me not want to eat as much and our librarian has brought frog legs into lunch ever day this week and her graphic discussions of catching and gigging the frogs have rendered me appetite-less, and yearning for a trashcan and a quiet corner where I can dry heave until someone from PETA comes with the van and takes me to a better place), we all knew the feeling of being not perfect...not good enough. None of us is an Eva Longoria, or a Cameron Diaz. And feeling the collective weight of a dozen women all knowing what the others were thinking was extremely powerful and sad.

#2: NBC reran the "Womens' Appreciation Day" episode tonight. It's one of my favorites, and this clip from it was the second time my eyebrows raised over some body-image stuff today:

And this is kind of how I feel about the whole "Real Beauty" campaign in general. Every time I read the articles and the blog posts about how celebrities benefit so much from the art of Photoshop and that the media sets unattainable standards for beauty in our society, I roll my eyes, because we've been bleating out this same complaint for at least a decade now, and nothing's really being done about it. Nothing substantive, at least. If we're so adamant about being happy with who we really are, and not participating in punitive, damaging beauty rituals and exercise and dieting, then why aren't there more people putting out more resources on how to accomplish it? Why are the celebrities who claim to be the most ardent proponents of being natural and self-possessed still the ones who voluntarily drop twenty-five pounds to make the cover of Vogue? Why does Oprah still binge diet, and the Dove "Real Beauty" campaign still used coiffed and primped models, albeit plus-sized ones sometimes? Taking the point to its comedic extreme like they did on The Office just reminds me how the self-acceptance movement has great intentions, but there's a flaw in the execution somewhere because as long as we're preaching "You're gonna have to be tolerant of our flaws", even while giving us every available tool to still obsess over them, then women are still going to feel like shit about themselves.

And then I ran across this link on Tom and Lorenzo's site (I like how the Internet can let me pretend I'm on a first name basis like fabulous faux-celebrities like La T.Lo...Les T.Lo? Whatever.), and it blew my mind. I don't really care about how Brittany Murphy has awful undereye bags and how the Vastly Inferior Second Mr. Darcy has cystic acne, but the pictures of Beyonce and Kelly Clarkson and all the modifications they made to their bodies are remarkable. They seriously shaved off two pants sizes from Kelly's backside, at least.

And I guess that's how it trickles down...from the celebrities who stake their bank accounts on silently accepting the fact that they're not good enough for America without Photoshop, to their doctored photos that subsequently land in our mailboxes and on our computer screens to torture us and make us feel completely inadequate next to their unattainable beauty. It's funny to think that somewhere in the monied hills of L.A., starlets and A-listers are having the very same conversations over their $25 salads and Fiji waters that Gen, the teachers, and I had at our plastic lounge tables over plates of beef jerky and frog legs today.

I looked forward to yesterday afternoon as if it were the commencement of some grand vacation, like if I could just hold on until Tuesday afternoon I'd win an all-expenses paid trip to the magical kingdom of Prozac Land and never have to look back. I worked with one eye on my kids and the other on the clock, and when our contract time was up at 4:00, I speedwalked out the door and cursed at the drivers, most of whom seemed to have rescheduled their Sunday afternooon pleasure cruises for mid-week rush hour, the entire 30 mile drive from where I work to where I get to be crazy with impunity.

I arrived, furious at myself for being seven minutes late, and affixed the fake smile I always wear when I go into the office complex where my doctor works, because grinning incessantly at the other elevator riders CLEARLY means I'm just popping into the mortgage company down the hall and not following the woman who is currently pulling her six-inch pink vinyl wedges off her feet so she can pick at the dead skin on her toes into the psych offices. Because I am a horrible person, I always do a scan of the other patients in the lobby and play a quick "What's wrong with them?" game inside my head. I've found this is way more rewarding than in an ENT lobby, because while deviated septums and chronic tonsillitis people are pretty obvious to spot, it's hard to figure out whether the same lank hair and dark circles that I sport everyday as symptoms of not caring enough to take care of myself equates to the same issues for the woman across the room who also looks weary and haggard. It's always women in the lobby when I come to this place...forty-something housewives clutching their office copy of Good Housekeeping to their chests like some sort of genteel, suburban shield...a teenager curled up into a corner chair, fingers tracing over the oyster-pink lattice of scar tissue on her forearm and staring sullenly at the profile of her anxious, harried mother who seems to be trying to balance maternity with the laptop perched precariously on her knee. Everytime I see a self-harmer, my own fingers brush instinctively against the nearly invisible half-moon scars on my own wrists and arms. I don't do blood, so I was a cigarette lighter burner. Somehow that seemed more romantic in college.

As I worked my way through the lobby, then the receptionist desk, and finally back to my doctor's office, I went through my same routine of trying to be ask perky and seemingly normal as possible...."Yes, Erin!" "I'm here to see John!" "New insurance card!" "Great! Thanks!" "I need regular treatment and maybe medicine! Depressed and suicidal, yes!" I'm pretty sure had I kept it up for much longer, there would've been a lithium prescription marked FILL ASAP at the bottom of my purse by the time I left.

But I made it in, and we talked, and for the first time in all the times I've visited John it didn't feel like I had solved any problems, because of the handful of therapists I've visited in my time, John is a world-class champion of helping you figure out the problem and finding ways to solve it. The small, wan woman who saw me for six months in my college town squeaked her office chair back and forth and fingered the trim on her omnipresent beige cardigan (from Scotland, she told me once), and never once offered advice or opinion until the day she prescribed me a tranquilizer and OCD medication, neither of which I apparently needed so I spent the next half-year basically either in a coma or irritable as hell. But the reason I keep coming back to John, besides the fact that in our first session he dropped the f-bomb twice as my heart erupted in a celebration of foul-mouthed kinship and exhilaration that if he felt comfortable saying "fuck" to a stranger then we probably wouldn't be doing much putzing around in our sessions, was that he helped me feel like the crises I perceived in my life were really much more manageable than they seemed at the time. So that's why I could go in once, work on my own for a few months, and then go back in if I needed extra help or feedback.

But this time, as John and I talked, there were a lot more of those characteristic therapist pauses, where he'd squint at me and try to telepathically extract whatever I waswithholding; what it was that was making me feel so incredibly black and hopeless. But the thing was, I was searching my brain too, and I couldn't come up with anything at all. Should I have told him that I recently saw a picture of myself smiling with my mouth open and I looked so much like James Gandolfini that I've since refused to do anything but half-smirk with my lips clamped shut? Was I supposed to say that the single nicest moment of my day is when I check my email one last time before bed, pick up the cat who sleeps on my feet and put her next to my pillow like she's a baby while my other cat follows us into the bedroom and assumes his position next to my hip? That I think the very idea that I'd sate my maternal instinct with an animal while being too terrified of screwing up or neglecting my own child to actually have one is incredibly pathetic? Should I have just advanced three months worth of therapy and had the breakthrough right on our first session back and tell him that a decade of avid navel-gazing gives me the authority to say that every single problem I think I have...of the relentless anger, of not feeling wanted, of feeling worthless, of having overwhelming guilt when I want to have a more exciting job and a more extravagant life...that I can trace every single one of those things back to my relationship with my mom and that really the only big problem I have is how to forgive her but still keep my distance and get over it on my own terms?

Because if I thought those things would've helped in the half-hour time we had, I would've blurted them out. I would've talked and talked and journaled and did worksheets if it could've stopped the way I was feeling right at that moment...the awful melange of relief and terror when John finally wrote out a list of recommended medications on his eggshell blue Post-It pad, turned to me and said "Well, you're officially depressed". So right there on his bone-colored suede loveseat that's almost too comfortable because if you try to lean back you recline so far that you look like Ed Bundy I almost started to cry. And I don't cry unless Grey's Anatomy is on and there's a pint of ice cream and maybe a glass of wine involved. My eyes started leaking when, as I turned to leave his office, he gave me a look of such genuine sympathy that I forgot for a second that he gets paid to be kind and caring. The look he gave me, the little pat on the shoulder, and the fact that he asked, "Are you okay?" and then kept listening...I've been waiting for those things to happen for two years now from somebody...anybody at all. I used to look hopefully at people in stores, at restaurants, on the street, just to see if maybe they saw the actual me who was drowning in all this fat, these emotions, this self-abuse and that they'd rescue me. No one did, of course, so I stopped thinking about it. And it's weird, because when it finally did happen, I had absolutely no idea where to start.

It's funny, because when you finally decide to stop pretending that everything is okay, and you give yourself or someone else permission to start stripping open your veins to see what's really in there, you start actually FEELING things again, and it's so excruciatingly painful. I made it to my car okay, but when I dropped my keys as I was trying to unlock the door, I lost it. I started gasping out enormous, heaving sobs that didn't stop until I pulled off for bottled water at a fast-food restaurant twenty minutes later. I cried when a friend popped up on my IM and sent me a link for a pair of Gucci pumps she had just splurged on. Another friend, whom I was tentatively planning to visit in New York City for Labor Day, called to cancel, and I blamed my broken voice and sniffs on the cold I'd been fighting all week, and when he hung up the phone I burst into tears again and cried for two straight hours until I was finally so sick of crying I started laughing and then I took a bubble bath and cried there too because it seemed poetic and right while my cats sat by the tub and judged me as they are fond of doing.

And the thing was, were I pregnant or a hormonal woman in an hour-long network dramedy, this would be totally funny, because I'd be played by someone fun like Sara Rue or that new Hairspray girl and I'd be crying and spluttering and dabbing at my eyes with a handkerchief that my best guy friend (who I didn't notice for the first half of the season but who later seduces me in some sort of zany but touching episode during May sweeps week where I learn what true love is) gave me at a coffee shop where we meet for breakfast each morning and interact with the charmingly eccentric citizens of our quaint New England town called Stars Hol...oh wait. But anyway, since I am decidedly NOT that girl and yet I was still crying at ridiculous things. I mean, I wasn't REALLY expecting to go to New York City and it absolutely couldn't be helped that he had to cancel, and I shouldn't have gotten so excited at all, but for the late part of Monday and all day Tuesday I got more and more excited because I really wanted to see my friend and I'd never been to NYC, and my brother was going to be there that weekend too, and I just wanted so badly to get away from my town and its black hole of culture and knowledge and the rough people in it and the sad children with permanent Kool-Aid stains on their cheeks and rotting teeth and, and, and...

And I needed to take a step back and realize that once I opened up this whole can of worms, there'd be a lot of nasty stuff leaking out before I started to heal again. And that instead of doing the whole "I'm all right! I'm excellent!" thing that I tend to do until I finally bottom out once every two or three months, I'm just going to have to be oversensitive and easily hurt and disappointed and I'm going to have to learn to deal with all of it until I can finally even my emotions out into some semblance of normalcy. And that'll be okay, especially after I go get a prescription on Tuesday to help me do that.

And funnily (health and weight loss blog...right. I keep forgetting), all this melodrama has resulted in a downward-trending scale again. I guess the same voice that said "You could totally just end this all, but the pills and the vodka are on an entirely different floor of the house and futon is just as comfortable as it was in college and you'd probably not want to commit suicide until you cleaned your bathrooms so your mom wouldn't be ashamed when the paramedics come to haul you out and who's going to feed the cats and would they eat your face if they got really desperate and you're out of black ink for your printer so you couldn't type a suicide note and you know you have a tendency to be wordy so it'd be hard to write it out..." Well, that same voice told me it probably wasn't the greatest idea to buy fifty dollars worth of junk food and eat it in one sitting. My eating habits have been surprisingly ascetic, because I just don't have the desire to do anything but sit around and mope. So, I guess that's good. I have an Official Erin Is Fucked Up Weigh-In of 220.4 lbs. for today, which is a loss of about 3 lbs. since two weeks ago. I'll take that.

Finally, now that I've officially written an entry longer than my senior capstone term paper, I just want to thank all of you very much for being incredibly supportive and kind and generous with your thoughts. I get attached to the little IPs I see scrolling through my site tracker each day...I like waking up with 121.48.73 from Australia, and seeing who's logging on from clandestine government offices or big fancy firms in New York and London. So when I see the names with the visitors and know that you're all human too and you've all been through or if you haven't you care anyway...well, it's the most humbling and gratifying feeling I've felt in a long time. Thank you very much.

A problem in my life.

Elementary school teachers have this bizarre practice of speaking loudly about their children and classes in front of said children in the hopes that somehow their discussion will spur on better behavior. Since I'm one of the cadre of teachers deemed a "specialist", meaning I see every kid in the school for about an hour a week to work on fine arts-related stuff, I get to go through this exchange five times a day with various teachers.

Even though every fiber in our beings are burning to actually talk about stuff like how hungover we still are from Teacher (Tequila) Book Club Night, or how Janeane from the fifth grade wing has been shacking up with her boyfriend who lives 40 miles away and you can always tell when its one of their early-relationship anniversaries because she calls in sick on the same day every month, teachers obviously can't talk about those things in front of the twenty-five or so little darlings who're lined up in the hall and hanging on our every word. So we perform our strange little public school Kabuki performance with one another so the kids can learn how not to be little shits to one another.

One of my favorite teachers in the building made me laugh the first time we had this exchange because as we were droning on and on about SELF-CONTROL, and BEING KIND TO OTHERS, and NOT COLLECTING BOOGERS YOU FIND DRIED ON THE SIDES OF THE BATHROOM STALLS, she finished our conversation with "Well, these certainly are problems in our lives." And that's when I broke my teacher character and started snickering because that phrase just struck me as something you'd hear in an AA meeting that it seemed kind of absurd to discuss as a concept to a bunch of second graders. When I started giggling, she did too, and I shot her a woman power salute with my fist held high and responded with "But we shall overcome." It's become our little tradition to wrap up our class hand-offs now, and the kids even mouth along when we come to our two favorite lines in the conversations, and it's funny. And then I go back to my life of singing "Froggie Went 'a Courtin'" for three more hours and wondering if we could lobby the school board to let us start bringing vodka in our Nalgene bottles this year.

Anyway, I guess that phrase sort of explains my having yet another absence from this blog, and from all of you. Because the Big Problem in My Life...even more of a problem than the fact that my hair will hold neither curl nor highlights, and that my 200 glorious channels of television (did I mention I can pause live TV?) did not include Fox Sports Midwest, so I will have to spend the winter and early spring in a deep state of personal reflection so I can decide whether or not I want to fork over 50 dollars for the MLB Package next summer...my big problem has flared up to the point that my life is rapidly becoming unmanageable again.

Since this is primarily a health and weight loss blog, I try to touch only briefly on the fact that I have a pretty major case of depression. I do so partly because I know how tedious it can get to listen to someone mentally ill talk about their mental illness, and also partly because I never really figured out which came first, me being fat or me being sad about being fat. But over the past several weeks, the realization that my untreated depression is screwing up every fact of my life is becoming more and more indisputable, and at this moment I'm pretty much in a holding pattern until I can do something about it.

When I say that I've been on a diet since I was nine, I'm not exaggerating. Likewise, when I close my eyes and think back as far as I can remember in my childhood, I've been depressed. At least, I think. Or maybe I was just high strung and neurotic as my mom claims. But I remember so many times being so overwhelmed with sadness as a little kid that I'd just cry and cry, or I'd vomit, or I'd stop eating, or I'd eat too much. And the more I think about it, the less I can remember a time when the fact that I felt broken, or malformed, or just not right hadn't shaped the way I looked at everything and everyone around me, and that's fucked up.

There are so many things I despise about depression that I could spend a week just writing about it. I hate the way it makes your body feel like it weighs 6,000 lbs. so everything is harder, and how it turns your bed into the one place you can find solace, so that every evening involves a three hour nap because you don't feel like you can make it until bedtime. I hate how, in the course of writing half of a blog entry, I've had to lie down three times now because the act of not being in a horizontal position for more than ten minutes is just too fucking draining for me right now. I hate how it renders you a succubus to everyone you know...you become this selfish wretch who can only take and take from people because you need so much attention and care, and you can never give back in a sufficient way. I hate how all I want to do is be alone because pretending to be normal around people is just exhausting, and then I sit and wonder why I'm so desperately lonely sometimes. I hate that it makes you seem like such a loser to the people around you...that your house is a mess and you're always broke and your makeup and hair are never quite right and you're always tired, and always behind and always trying to clean up one mess while hiding another. And it's not because you're lazy or slovenly or a fat pig, it's because when you're depressed, one little tiny problem seems so big that when you don't fix it, it causes all kinds of other problems that make your life out of control and no matter how much you work at it, or how motivated you are for a few days or a week, or how many books you read or techniques you try, you can never quite get it all together.

And I finally got fed up with it enough this week to call and schedule an appointment with my therapist...a very patient and indulgent man I manage to see twice a year in spring and fall. I would like to see him regularly, but I don't go because my insurance doesn't cover mental health treatment, and also because when I do go I'm usually not that depressed, so I can stretch out the benefits of one therapy session for several months before I realize I'm not getting much better. My shrink is a cognitive behavioral therapist, which means he prefers fighting demons with self-talk and rationalization more than drugs, but he's always offered medication if I thought I needed it. I've always turned it down in favor of the folders of CBT information and journaling exercises he's given me, because in my years of dealing with this, the medication has never worked. But I think I'm going to go in Tuesday and beg for something...Wellbutrin, maybe, because even when I do self-talk myself out of a major downward spiral, all it does is get rid of the immediate crisis. It never really seems to lift me to a point where I can say I'm not sad, and that's really a pathetic way to be.

So, I'm really sorry that this blog hasn't turned out to be what I hoped for. I'm sorry if this isn't what you come here to read, but I don't know how to write about treadmills and veggie paellas when really my life revolves around pacing between my computer and my bed and eating junk food on my couch. I'm so very, very sorry for not giving back to you guys like I should, because you're all wonderful and I really am rooting for you. Maybe if I can make it 'til Tuesday and turn this around I'll be back in some sort of fighting form.