Diet Fanatics, Please Listen to Me!

I am going away for the weekend, so here are 1500 for Friday:

Tonight I went out to dinner with the family, and the waitress brought me a hamburger instead of a turkey burger. I haven’t had a real hamburger in a long time, and my kids were already eating so sending it back would have been the worst thing I could do. So I ate it, and it was one delicious cheese and bacon covered mess. I ate every bit of that half pounder and a good number of the french fries that came with it. I wondered if my dinner companions noticed from behind their “Smart Eating Choices” that it was a hamburger not a turkey burger, and if so if they were quietly calculating the calories that I was putting down. And then I wondered, why do I care what they are thinking about my dinner, and then I wondered, why do I think that they would be thinking anything about it? I realized at that moment that I am just hypersensitive now from years spent with people who watch others around them with a “trained” dieter’s eye, making remarks to no one in particular about how many calories are in this food or how much fat is in that, and giving that understanding but extremely skeptical look when you try to say “I haven’t had a burger in so long.” So, I now feel compelled to make the following plea:

People of America, don’t tell me what you eat. Don’t tell me what you don’t eat. Don’t tell me that you are having a big lunch and skipping dinner. Don’t tell me that one piece of frozen pizza is a huge lunch. Don’t tell me that you never keep potato chips in the house. I don’t care. There may have been a time where I found all of this relentless dieting talk bearable, but that time has past. Go on a diet, go on a fast, go on a binge, eat nothing but cabbage soup, just please, please don’t tell me about it. If I promise to notice that you have become smaller, would you please promise not to provide a single detail of how you got that way? I cannot think of any topic I would care to hear about less than the minutia of another person’s caloric intake. Wait, there is one topic I care even less about – people of America, don’t tell me about your exercise plan. I don’t care if you run or walk or jump rope. I don’t care if you go to the gym, have a personal trainer or spend your early morning hours doing exercise videos. Unless you are planning to use me as a back up to an alibi that you have recently given authorities, I do not need to know how many minutes you were on the treadmill or how many miles you ran. If I promise here and now to be happy for your dedication to good health, can we drop it?

I am sorry if I seem insensitive to those of you that like to share your dieting tales. I know some people think of dieting and exercise as a hobby or a mission, much as other people like to talk about painting or helping the homeless, but I have reached my limit. I am not objecting the occasional discussion of Atkins versus Ornish or other aspects of the ever changing information regarding health and how to achieve it. I like to talk about current events. What I do not like to talk about is how much bread you’ve had in the past five days, because while this may well be current information, it is not eventful to anyone but you and your dietician.

And while I am at it, let me express one more dieting peeve. If you are clearly 3 sizes smaller than me and a good 25 pounds lighter, don’t tell me how fat you are. This requires me to say something along the lines of, “you are much smaller than me, so I wouldn’t worry too much,” which compels you to say “oh no you’re not, we’re about the same size.” This is a blatantly false and irritating bit of reassurance that I am not after. I am working on myself, and I am not worried. I had three kids, added about 5 pounds with each one, and hopefully someday I’ll have taken it all off. I can’t worry about it every day because frankly – it is too boring. I would like to start running again if my knees will allow me, and I figure if I am able to do that, in a year or two, I’ll probably have lost most of the weight, but that won’t what makes me happy. I’ll be happy because I can run, and running reminds me of being a kid, and a few hours every week of being a kid will be fewer hours that I have to be a stressed out adult. Another thing kids don’t care about: what other people are eating (unless it is candy) or how much other people exercise.

Oddly, a show I have recently enjoyed in The Biggest Loser. Not the original incarnation, but the one that is on now where the people are only on for two shows. They have wisely done away with the humiliating eliminations that made it like Survivor for fat people (I’m only guessing here, because I couldn’t watch it and I never watch Survivor because I don’t like to see people embarrassing themselves or being mean to each other). Now each Biggest Loser team has four people and you see them at the beginning and then at the end. There is a lot of video of people hiking up hills and running on treadmills, but mercifully little discussion of the actual dieting. The show is chock full of heartwarming details and stories of how fat and unhappy people were, and then you see them the next week (although it is actually 5 months later), having lost 30 or 40 pounds. To a person they are all happier, better looking, and more confident. I feel glad for them because they have all achieved something that is quite difficult, changing their whole way of life in order to change the way they look. Why can I be happy for strangers on TV and tolerate their stories? Probably because I will never see them again. They will never sit their skinny butts down at my dinner table, complain about how fat they are, and consume a plate fit for a mouse.

Hey look, another dieting pet peeve - the guest who won’t eat. If you are coming to my home for a week and you are in the throes of a serious dieting episode, please don’t worry that I am in the kitchen buttering up bacon and adding lard to scrambled eggs that I will then force feed you. I am not much of a plotter and would not be particularly interested in spending a week trying to make you fat. However, the weeklong visitors are not the ones who irk me. You dinner guests who accept the invitation and then refuse to eat anything fill me with rage. I have read the diet books and seen the weight watchers commercials. I know you can save up calories for one big night. I know you can load up your plate with vegetables and drink seltzer so that you don’t overdo it (which is fine, but don’t be obvious about it). I know that you can try one of everything and when you wake up the next morning you will not be any heavier. Therefore, if you decide to be a guest who won’t eat, please stay home rather than come over and make everyone else at the party uncomfortable and inevitably, fill me with rage.

I know some of you out there may be thinking, wow this angry chick must be some sort of porker. But generally I am not an angry person, and I suspect my disgust with the dieting and exercise talk is probably just the focus of my disgust at the whole tone of conversation these days. Everyone needs to trumpet their virtues – dieting, sobriety (not the AA kind, you guys trumpet all you want), piety, superior child rearing (that is a topic for another 1500) - rather than just putting them to use in a life that others can witness and admire. If the average observer can’t tell what kind of person you are after spending a little time with you (provided that you don’t stub your toe while he/she is there because I think that is something that makes everyone drop the f-bomb), will you really be able to convince them just with the things you say? I was encouraged this week to read a letter to the editor in Newsweek that addressed the article written about the book The Mommy Wars (a book about stay-at-home versus working moms). Ms. Jo Ann C. Mullen from Lafayette, Indiana pointed out “This is not the stuff for a cultural war. Is one side really going to “win” and make the decision for every family?” (To those of you out there nodding, please find another blog to read). Really, her statement could be applied to most aspects of our culture that are in the news. Why are people no longer able to mind their own business? Don’t actions speak louder than words?

So for all of you overtalkative, overzealous dieters out there, let’s try something. Let’s go out to lunch, and chat about the weather, and order from the menu without tedious calculations over every mouthful. I won’t get annoyed if you only eat half of your sandwich, just don’t waste my time telling me that you can’t believe how big the sandwich is, that you don’t understand why portion sizes in restaurants are so large (they just are), how full you are, how many miles you’ll have to run to burn the calories, etc. I’ll happily listen to stories about your kids, your job, or your recent dental work, if you will just please keep your eyes and your calculations off of my plate.

A Slug in the Rug

The other day after the kiddies had gone to bed and I had returned to the living room with a much-anticipated glass of wine, I noticed something very odd on the floor near the back door (yes, our back door opens into the living room, it’s government housing). I took a brief look at it and then went back to the couch, and then suddenly realized that what I had on the floor by the door was a 2 inch long slug. A slug in my living room. How do you not notice a slug coming into your living room? Slugs are not particularly small or nimble, they are, there’s just no other way to say it, sluggish. To have reached the spot where I found him, the slug must have been on the move for at least a half hour. How did a slug enter my house and move to within inches of where my kids (who notice absolutely everything) were lying on the floor watching “Unwrapped” before bed? One time I found a shriveled up worm in our basement, but we never went down into the basement, so he had weeks to get into the house and reach the middle of the floor, not to mention the fact that worms are rather fleet wrigglers in comparison to slugs

I briefly pondered what to do with it, momentarily flashing back to childhood and thinking “Hey, I’ll get the salt shaker,” but realizing what a mess that might make on the rug, I went and got an armload of paper towels to make sure that no part of me would touch any part of the slug. I know slugs are not dangerous and don’t bite, but I still have a horrifying shudder-inducing memory of one warm summer evening when I was running up my parent’s front walk and planted my bare foot squarely on the slimy back of a rather large slug. If only I had caught it on the sole of my foot, but no, it squished between all of my toes, an episode that remains one of the more disgusting experiences of my life. Anyway, safely armed with paper towels I scooped up my little slimy visitor and rolled him up and put him in the trash. We have one of those “butterfly” trashcans that you have to step on to open and is very effective at keeping the children from playing in the trash, and presumably is sturdy enough to contain a small slug. However, once I had placed him inside the can, I began to think about what an industrious little slug he was, how he had moved so quickly into the living room while I was putting the kids to bed, and how he was more than likely working his way out of the paper towels and getting ready to slither onto the inside of the lid of the trashcan. I knew that the next morning as I squashed some trash down into the can, I would more than likely make contact once again with that treacherous little slug. What else could I do? I found some shoes, carefully and quickly tied up the trash bag, and took it outside.

(I can only recall one other time that what I put in the trash was so gross that I had to take it out immediately, even though I was in my pajamas and dreading the thought of going back outside. One Sunday evening I ordered a club sandwich from the normally reliable Rittenhouse deli in Ardmore, and settled onto my couch to read the paper and have a little dinner. Imagine my horror when I unwrapped the sandwich and instead of a delicious turkey and bacon sandwich, I found myself face to face with some sort of tuna fish sandwich garnished with hardboiled eggs. Who would design and construct such a sandwich? Even now I feel as if I might gag.)

When I finally got back to my cocktail and pondered a little further about the intrusion of the slug, I remembered another bug encounter that my sister and I had while sharing an apartment in Philadelphia. We had gone out to a concert one night, had a great time, drank a lot, and come home late. We were so tired, we both came in the door and headed toward the kitchen to get some water and head off to bed. What we found on the kitchen floor was a huge long furry millipede looking thing. I say it was millipede looking, because when you learn about millipedes and centipedes in school, they always seem kind of cute, like little creatures that just didn’t know they didn’t need so many legs. That perception, I must say, is completely wrong. They are not cute or even ordinary, they are menacing and mean. Perhaps it was the alcohol, but I got it in my head that I could somehow confront this bug, squash it (like a bug), and continue off to bed. My sister will vouch for me when I say that as I approached the bug and went to try to terminate it, it wheeled around and reared its head at me. That’s right, reared its leg-covered head at me. As drunk 25-year olds being threatened by an angry creature are bound to do, my sister and I screamed and ran into the other room. When we returned to the kitchen to try and come up with a plan, the bug had disappeared under the oven. This was a rather sobering development. Since we did not have a flashlight to continue to hunt the bug, we had to just shuffle off to bed and hope that the bug was through with us. The next day, after a rather fitful night sleep, we told our landlord about our ordeal. He responded “Oh yeah, that’s a thousand-legger, they’re all over the place around here.” I believe the response we were hoping for was “Oh yeah? I’ll call an exterminator,” but clearly that was not in the cards. Although we never saw another thousand-legger, we did keep a sharp eye out for it and warn all of our friends not to try to confront one alone.

I am aware that most bugs are not out to get me (except for mosquitoes and ticks), and I do occasionally let spiders live in my house if they are small and stay near the ceiling. I don’t chase the crickets out of the closets even though they tend to jump out and scare me. I don’t step on ants outside, and in fact I don’t let my children do it either (I tell them the ants are screaming “Mommy, there’s a kid in our house!”). I can appreciate butterflies, ladybugs, grasshoppers, the occasional praying mantis. However, I have been stung by a bee on the bottom of my foot, I have watched mosquitoes swarm all over my sweet unsuspecting children, and I have seen the rather sickening spectacle of weevils rising to the top of a pot of boiling water following the addition of what must have been ancient pasta. These are hard incidents to shake off. I suppose if I lived in Africa, or even Florida, I would have to find a way to live with the buggies (and in some cases, eat the buggies). But since I live in the mid-Atlantic area where every winter we get a respite from most bugs, I am always hoping I will find a way to live bug free all year round.

As a naïve newlywed, I figured that my big brave army man husband would take care of the bugs for me. Unfortunately, one afternoon I came home to find him in the kitchen with some spray bleach in one hand and a racquetball racquet in the other, doing battle with what he claimed was an enormous bee that he had just chased into the disposal and destroyed. I never saw the bee, it may have been quite large, but I would have thought that a rolled up magazine would be the most high tech weapon my husband wielded. Apparently, in his view of the bug world, bugs that bite must be met with overwhelming force (the old “shock and awe”) and bugs that do not bite (namely ants) should be allowed to live in our house. If I don’t want ants in the house, I must get rid of them myself, but my husband will go on the offensive against ants outside the house, which I am totally against. Clearly in addition to talking about splitting household chores, saving money, and raising kids, marriage books should encourage couples to talk about their philosophies regarding pest management.

At least thanks to my husband’s career, I am spared from the one activity that a true bugphobe cannot stomach, and that is camping. My husband’s viewpoint is that he has to camp for a living, so when he is not working, he does not want to be camping. I wholeheartedly agree with him. I will happily listen to crickets and cicadas, but I don’t want to sleep with them. And for now, unfortunately, the army thinks that my husband should be fighting terrorism in Afghanistan rather than fighting bugs in our house, so I guess I am on my own. The slug I found in my living room is just the beginning what will likely be a long year of chasing and swatting and squishing bugs to keep the house bug free for the kiddies and me.

The Beginning

For the past two years I have kept a running account of life at our house to send out as a companion letter to the picture of our adorable kiddies at Christmas time. Many of the recipients find the letters to be entertaining and in some cases, jokingly ask when my book is coming out. Knowing that these are my friends and family, people more likely to say something too nice than too true, still I wonder if I could write a book or find a way to make a living as a writer. The question is, however, are two well-received Christmas letters anything to build a career on?

Right out of school, I took my bright and shiny chemistry degree into the environmental arena, hoping to clean things up and make the world a better place for the future. In my first job, I learned all about Superfund law and tracking down potentially responsible parties for Superfund sites, and then sadly, all about how to apply for unemployment when the lame company I worked for shut down our office following a failed contract bid. At my next job, I learned all about environmental requirements and due diligence for real estate and business transfers, and all about how small business that hire you from the unemployment line will pay you peanuts because they know you are desperate for work. At my last job before I became a stay-at-home mom, I learned all about chemical weapons demilitarization, and then all about how hard it is to turn your child over to even the perfect day care provider.

When I was pregnant with my second child, the army moved us from our home in Maryland to Kentucky, and I took advantage of the move to step out of the workforce for a while. Now I’ve got three kids who are just the way I want them – cute, friendly, kind, nonwhiny, and most importantly, happy. I know their good natures come partly from their daddy’s genes, but I also like to think that I have had a hand in their development, since I have been their biggest influence for all of their formative years. Although I can hardly believe it, in three years, the littlest will be ready for kindergarten, and I will be ready to go back to work (provided that the army stops moving us around so I can find a job). This time off has put me at what some might perceive as a professional disadvantage since I will now have to start over at a new company, prove myself over again, and work my way back up the corporate ladder. Fortunately, I have an abundance of self confidence and no doubt that I can establish myself as a valued employee in short order. Do I want to?

One day during discussions of what each of the kids would like to be when they grow up, my daughter asked me what I would like to be when I grow up. I don’t really know, and probably no one ever does. I don’t have a real passion for environmental regulations, but I do have a certain amount of experience and aptitude for it. When I go back to work, I’ll have three college funds to fill and a retirement to plan and a home to purchase with the hubby. Therefore, the most likely scenario for when I reenter the workforce, involves applying for a job that matches my previous experience, and after spending about a year learning everything I can and doing the best job that I can, slowly becoming bored with it. I’ll wish I had time to go back to school or change fields, but with 40 hours in the office and 4 people at home who need and deserve the attention I am more than happy to give them, I’ll be stuck. I’ll want time to exercise, time to keep in touch with friends, time to watch a good movie and time to sleep in now and then which will leave no time for planning the great escape to a second career. This professional future, I must admit, is rather depressing. So for now, while I have the time to fantasize, I am going to pretend that in three years I could get a job as a writer - a job that would pay the bills and free up all the time that I need for myself and the family. However, while I have always been a well respected writer in the workplace, I don’t think publishers are going to line up to get their hands on my next work based on the rousing success of the Halby Chemical Title Search, or the Programatic Lessons Learned Assessment #50 - New Monitoring Regulations, or even the Program Manager for Chemical Demilitarization Laboratory Quality Assurance Plan.

I have recently been an avid watcher of the reality show Project Runway. Not because of the designers that you “love to hate or hate to love” but because the designers on that show, even the worst ones, can take an idea in their mind and turn it into a dress on a model. The show films them doing stuff with patterns, attaching some sort of black tape to the dressmaker dummies, draping fabric this way and that, and to the untrained eye, wasting all sorts of time. Even after watching the show for two seasons, I can’t for the life of me figure out what they are doing and why a dress that is unfinished with 30 minutes to go is suddenly fitting a model like a glove on the runway. The technical skills and nuts and bolts of fashion design are absolutely foreign to me, and to some extent, so are the nuts and bolts of writing (too many science classes in college). I am not expecting to find the answers to my questions on a reality show, as I don’t thing Project Essay, with aspiring writers hunched over their keyboards, would be compelling television. So while I will attempt to figure out how to be a writer, here is where I will do my writing.

Needless to say, if I am going to get a job as a writer, I’ve got to get much, much, much better at it, and to get better at it, I’ve got to practice. And that, my friends, is where this blog comes in - this will be my practice. I’ve chosen 1500 words a day as a goal, because it seems like it will be challenging without being overwhelming. Having spent my entire life as an overachiever, I have decided to give myself a little leeway and not set any hard and fast rules for this endeavor. Sometimes I’m sure I’ll have more to say, sometimes I will have less. Sometimes I will be on vacation and sometimes the kiddies will be sick or the HP (husband) will be home on leave. But for the most part, I am going to attempt to keep this up at least 5 days a week. Anyway, wish me luck, and if you are ever entertained by what you read here, feel free to tell me. If you are not entertained by what you read here, feel free to ignore me. Thanks!

One more thing…While in Philadelphia recently I attended the Ben Franklin 300th birthday exhibit, and did I feel like a loser when I was done. The man never had an idea in his head that he didn’t act upon, an opinion he didn’t express, or a personal shortcoming that he didn’t try to solve. Like most people, I also have ideas and opinions and shortcomings, and like most people, I often reflect on these things while I am lying on the couch. Eventually, rather than finding solutions, I’ll find something mildly interesting on the TV, and postpone any action until the next day. I once saw an interview with Bare Naked Ladies where they were asked to explain the song “Pinch Me” and one of them (apologies to all you rabid fans out there, but while I like their music, I can’t clutter my brain with their names) said something along the lines of – the average person has moments where he thinks he is ready to go out and change the world, but then he realizes there are 2 reruns of WKRP in Cincinnati coming on the TV, so suddenly he is too busy for the next hour to do anything else (this is a bad paraphrase, but hopefully you see my point). I may never have an idea that leads to an invention or an opinion that the world is clamoring to hear or success correcting any of my shortcomings, but at least I will put aside the housework and the remote for a while each day (after the kiddies go to bed - sadly, the HP is deployed to Afghanistan and not in need of much of my time these days) and attempt to coax my brain into action. Maybe once my brain is functioning, I’ll be able to go out and change the world in some way, even if it is only by providing someone something amusing or distracting to read.