fat girl issues

This is a weird thing to talk about, but it happened today, and I want to record it for some reason.

This afternoon, some of my friends were kind enough to invite us to a picnic. It was elegant, with wine and champagne and delicious food, and the weather was wonderful, and we laughed a lot and it was just great. There were a couple of kids and babies - I got to use my patented method of making infants laugh, which is 100% guaranteed - and having my kid have someone to run around the fields on a Sunday afternoon with was a really big bonus.

Sunday afternoons are rough for us. I love working on weekends, and Eric loves working on weekends, but having a small child who no longer naps or, in fact, STOPS TALKING AND HOPPING ON ONE FOOT, makes it hard. Ian wants to play Uno. Ian wants to walk to the lake. Ian wants to ride his bike. Eric and I are usually exhausted and want to fall asleep in front of Redskins football with no one talking to us or hopping up and down on us. Sunday is the day we are most likely to give one another a hairy eyeball from across the room, to communicate the message "Ian needs attention. WHY aren't YOU giving YOUR CHILD some attention? Hummmph, grrrr, tsk."

So we were at this picnic, which, as I said, was absolutely lovely. I was sitting in the shade enjoying a glass of wine, and Ian was frolicking through the fields and most of all I was not at home folding laundry and watching Disney Channel and trying to convince an excitable child that sitting in the living room playing Qwirkle is a good substitute for playing on the monkey bars. Because it means I don't have to walk to the playground and risk falling asleep on the bench.

Ian, taking a brief break from frolicking, came and asked me if he could go to a playground he could see in the distance. No, dude, it's too far, I said. If a pack of wild butterflies attacked you, I couldn't get there in time to save you.

Ian said: Sure you could. You could just run.

I said: Oh honey. You know I don't run.

I meant it to sound funny, like Doctor Smith from Lost in Space or Edwina from Absolutely Fabulous. Like, goodness me, run? Surely you jest.

I also meant, dude, you know I cough myself hoarse from the exertion of getting out of the car; running across the field would make me cough up an entire lung, at least.

But the truth is, I don't run.

I'm not sure I could.

And I called this 'fat girl issues" because I think this is a substantively different feeling for a fat person than for an average-sized non-fit person. I felt a kind of shame when I said it that I haven't felt in a long time, hitting me like a surprise wave when you've turned your back.

I don't know quite what to do about this. I am unhappy with my level of fitness (which we could call 'negligible". At best.) My lungs, with this damn cough, seem unlikely to be much help. My kid's taking karate, and watching his first class made me want to move my body (but not get yelled at or made to do pushups or run laps, which the older class did.)

Hmmmmm.

I was sitting on the floor in front of my closet - Ian's school is now, as well as assigning homework, assigning home-play, 60 minutes of physical activity per day away from school. I know this is good, really I do, but jeez...

Anyway, in the interest of physical activity, I was looking for my sneakers (still AWOL, incidentally.) Our closet doors are mirrored, so after determining where they weren't, I slid the door closed and was examining my hair. I was looking at the silvery bits around my crown.

Ian plops down beside me. "What are you doing, Mom?"

"Well, I was looking for my sneakers, and now I'm looking at my shiny silver hair. See?"

"OH MY GOD. THAT IS SO AWESOME." It's like you have mermaid hair."

Okay, aside from the fact that my 5-year-old says OH MY GOD occasionally like some tween...that's pretty cool.

Yuck.

Okay, so here's the short update:

Ian started school in August, and I caught a cold. And I still have it. I have had a chest cold for a full month. Whine moan whinge, right? Blah blah blah.

And blah blah blah is kind of how I feel. I am sick of coughing, sick of tissues, sick of feeling exhausted and sore from the hacking. I've been through antibiotics and a short round of steroids. The doc assures me that this is not pneumonia or anything else dangerous, just the aftermath of an infection that's over. (Keep an eye out for our new feature, "Ask a Lifelong Hypochondriac"! Recurring theme - "I wasn't really worried about it being something dangerous until the doc assured me that it wasn't anything dangerous.")

Anyway, since school started, life has been kind of focused on basics - catching the bus, meeting the bus, homework, dinner, bedtime. Packing lunches. The occasional jigsaw puzzle. We're spending quite a lot of time together, which is very nice, and Eric has been quite - I don't know, agressive? that doesn't seem like the right word - about dad-ing. He's dad-ing up a storm, frankly, as well as working a lot, which is great. I'm finding that I actually have time to form a thought now and again, which continues to be mildly surprising.

Anyway, that's what's been going on on this end. We're reading Alice's Adventures in Wonderland again.

I can't imagine where he learned that

Ian is finishing up his homework at the kitchen table. Homework for the early weeks of kindergarten consists of coloring, cutting and pasting, and yet we have found a way to do some term-paper-level procrastination this weekend.

Me: I think I have some smaller scissors over here; would you like them?

Ian: No thanks, these are fine.

Me: Seriously, let me get you a different pair.

Ian: No. These are really okay.

Me: Because you seem to be struggling a little...

Ian, through gritted teeth: NO. THESE. ARE. FINE. THANK. YOU. MOMMY.

so Ian and I stopped by the Indus market a day ago, for some stuff - tamarind, mango pickle, coconut milk to supply the summer-long fish curry experiments - and he asked for a frozen treat. I had never had any Indian or Pakistani popcicles, and frankly, I haven't had great luck with Asian desserts.

(Yeah, of course, sticky rice , and honey balls, and that space-ship looking thing at the Indonesian restaurant with the ice chips and the tapioca balls and the green layer that flouresed in the light....Sure, each of those things was great. Nonetheless, I approached the freezer case with mild trepidation. If nothing else, I didn't want Ian to get a bad taste and dramatically spit out the cuisine of another nation onto the floor of the market. In front of the proprieter. He wouldn't do it to be rude or gross, he just....you know, he's 5. When something bad is in his mouth, he gets it out.)

I shouldn't have worried. I am now pretty much obsessed with Kulfi, which is a frozen pudding popcicle that Indian kids eat (they buy them on the street from the kulfiwalla, no kidding, who I'm sure, incidentally, does not play "Turkey in the Straw" at wake-the-dead volume. The way our Blue Bunny Truck guy used to in our former neighborhood.)

It is about a thousand times more delicious and complex and wonderful than any Good Humor pop. Ian had a pistachio one, which he adored, and I had a white, pudding-y one with cardamom, cinnamon, rosewater, cream and sugar. And maybe some pulverized almonds.

There were several brands in the case, in popcicle and ice cream cup form. Ours were conical shapes in a translucent plastic container. I can't find the brand name.

So go and eat kulfi. It'll make your summer.

well, I was close.

Since seeing the martial arts movement piece, Illuminate, in the DC Fringe Fest a week or so ago, I have had a number of conversations about martial arts. A couple of people have asked me what branch/style my friend Chris teaches, and what the cast based Illuminate on.

And I would say: "It's some kind of Korean style, like maybe Tes Too Do or something."

And people would nod and say, oh, yeah, I think I've heard of that."

Well, here's why:

According to Wikipedia, it's Tang Soo Do, the Korean pronunciation of the old way of writing (唐手道, "Way of the Chinese Hand")

This is Tang Soo Do.

And this is Testudo.

Why yes, I am quite the expert on every single thing in the entire world. Talking out muh butt. Again. Thanks for noticing.

Help!

okay, so here's the deal.
I'm the 50-year-old mom of a kindergarten kid.

I got referred to as Grandma again on Tuesday.

It wasn't rude, like "here, don't forget you spicy nuggets, Grandma." Another parent was actually encouraging her kid to not interrupt Ian. "Can't you see," she said, "He's talking to his grandma."

I know there are many women my age who ARE grandmas, and they are active and involved with the kids and and vital to their families. There's nothing wrong with being a grandma. I would be proud to be a grandma, climbing around the Chik-fil-a playground with the kid.

But I'm not. I'm proud (as well as rather put-upon) to be a MOM climbing around with the kid, and I as much as I don't want the idea to bug me - it does. A little.

People who mistake me for something I'm not usually mistake me for a man. (I got called 'Sir" on Saturday at Artscape.) And sometimes people assume I'm a lesbian.

Neither of those bothers me.

And yet I am desperate to correct people who call me Grandma.

I have always been told I looked young. Younger than I am.

So help me, internet.

Is it the utilitarian clothes? (On tuesday, I was wearing a black t-shirt in a jersey fabric, and black shorts, hoop earrings, rings, and black flip-flops.)
(Is it the flip flops? Oh, good Lord, please don't let it be the flip flops, I can't go back to wearing shoes. I can't.)

The practical haircut? My color? (Current color - brown roots, bleached tips, daily pool abuse.) My hair's not grey, and I have an actual tan (for the first time in my life.) I have freckles, but not age spots or visible sun damage (see above, first tan of my life.)

If it's because I'm fat, well, I'll just have to live with that. I could be less fat, but I don't see my lifelong morphology changing anytime soon.

PLEASE make some suggestions. I want to look like me, and the me I picture is funny, active, curious about the world, artistic, and not old.

Help me, internet! You're my only hope!

Illuminate

Some friends of ours had a very surprising show in the DC Fringe Festival - you'd expect friends of ours to have a magic show (and a couple did), a postmodern clowning sort of thing (also true), perhaps some sideshow or drag or burlesque or a dirty puppet musical (not this time.)

These friends would not have identified as theatre artists. They're a bunch of guys that we know through Chris, who's a dear friend we met through magic. His other love (along with philosophy, church history and bridge) is martial arts, and a bunch of his friends created this movement piece with enough pathos and humor - plus really excellent live original music - to be a play in the festival, playing to standing room only crowds.

It's all coming back to me now.

Ian is stalling bedtime by dressing a large stuffed animal, a green-and-purple dragon, in swim trunks and a rash guard.

Me: IAN! I asked you to brush your teeth 10 minutes ago! Put that down and finish getting ready for bed. I'm not going to tell you again.

Ian: Sorry, Mom, but at this point, I have to do what's best for the dragon.

Just finished watching The September Issue, about Vogue and what it's like to create a monthly fashion magazine. And what it's like to work for Anna Wintour, the editor in chief, widely known as the meanest woman in the world.

She doesn't come off as the meanest woman in the world in the film.

However, this lady up here, Grace Coddington, who is (oh, let me grab a copy that's lying around here somewhere) (Because if there's not a Vogue, a New Yorker and a cookbook somewhere around, it must not be my house.) Anyway, Ms. Coddington is the creative director, and the film turns into a meditation on her - her art, her eye, her history, the way she sees fashion. She comes across as a down-to-earth woman navigating a sea of laregly manufactured drama, an artist among merchants, a sensitive soul and an island of charm and good humor.

She clomps around in flat shoes, loose at the heel - the same shoes in every scene, with every utilitarian black ensemble - and walks like a truckdriver, as so many models do. She was raised in rural Wales, and won an amateur modeling competition in 1960, which led to her work at British and then American Vogue. She's marvelous.

The other thing I LOVED about this movie was the way it was shot, and the fact that, though it's documenting a project with deadlines (and in fact, communicating a sense of urgency is very much part of the filmaker's job here) , the film lingers wonderfully over a designer's process of creating a garment, and shows the beauty and excitement of couture showings in a really, really excellent way. Yeah, I'm a sewer, so a nicely-felled seam and an interesting pair of shoes really does it for me. But this is a beautiful film.

Comprehension is not an option.

"Making it easy to understand is what got us into the mess the church is in today. The last thing we need to do is make it easier to rationalize. NO! It is time to make the Word strange, in the same way that Christ made God strange by dying on a cross and being born of a woman. Comprehension is not an option. Participation, however, might just open the human imaginary to a level of understanding we never dreamed possible."

I direct you to this essay not because I am scandalized by decisions of the CofE - none of my business, really, we have our own fish to fry over here - but because Billy Daniel expresses this quite beautifully.

before anyone from my community jumps in my stuff, let me be clear.

to me, there is a world of difference between living out the gospel message that the Kingdom of God is at hand, and "making it easy to understand."

Dinner tonight: F is for Flounder. Too.

this came out just stupidly, ridiculously good.

Thaw 3 flounder filets (we got a pile of frozen fish at WalMart a couple of weeks ago, which has turned out to be a very good purchase.) Start that about 2 hours before you cook - the best way to thaw them is to seal the frozen filets in a ziploc bag and set them adrift in a bowl of cool/room temp water.

For this, you'll need 2 large frying pans and one medium saucepan.

Slice one small sweet onion and about half a pepper. (I had remnants of a red and an orange one.) Put your cast iron skillet on over high heat, give it a glug of olive oil, and sizzle the onion and pepper for about minute or two. Salt and pepper them. Then, in the interest of not having them get too brown, splash some water into the pan - not quite enough to cover everything - and keep the veg moving as it bubbles away.

Between stirs, put a saucepan of water on to boil, and put 2 dinner plates on the counter.

After the water in the onion pan has mostly evaporated, add a lot of chopped garlic - I used 4 cloves, and I could have stood another one or two. Lower the heat to medium high, keep pushing it around the pan.

Throw some orzo - probably 2/3 of a cup - into the boiling water in the saucepan.

Put your other frying pan over medium high heat, and let it sit. Cover one of the dinner plates with all-purpose flour and then sprinkle with Old Bay. Don't go crazy, you're not boiling crabs, but a little Old Bay is great with flounder.

Generously glug the latest frying pan with olive oil - more than a film, less than a quarter-inch - and when it's warm, dredge each filet in the flour and spices and start them frying.

Stir the onion pan; add some tomatoes (I used canned; you could use fresh. Either way, squish lots and lots of liquid out of them. It would also be great with sun-dried tomatoes, snipped small.) Turn the heat under that pan down to low. Add a tablespoon of capers. The stuff in the pan should be lumpy rather than soupy, but not all the way to dry.

Turn your fish once.

Test your orzo, and if it's done, turn off that burner.

Turn off the burner under the onion/tomato/pepper/caper mixture. Stir in a sliver of butter.

Remove your crusty, light brown fish to the other dinner plate that you put on the counter. (A heat-reisitant spatula us really good for this - a more rigid flipper could separate the crust.) Don't cover, it'll get soggy.

Peel an orange or a couple of clementines. Separate the sections, pull the pithy part out, and drop the sections into the tomato mixture. Stir, and let sit for a minute or two to let the orange warm up.

Plate each serving as a thrilling, messy pile.

I believe this will be even more amazing with more savory stuff in the veg - more capers, more garlic, a tiny pinch of red chili flakes, or a small amount of strong ripe olive.

But for a 20-minute, weeknight, just-got-home-from-the-pool dinner - dude, seriously.

It was hard for us to describe this without using the f-word. THAT is how good it was.

Stuff to Do When You Discover that you just don't give a shit.

Several times a day, for the last week or two, my husband has gazed over at me and said "You okay? How're ya doing? Okay?"

It only took about 10 days for me to notice this - that this was happening repeatedly, and that it might mean something.

I tried to answer him this morning.

"How ya doin', sweetie? You okay?"
"Tell me why you're asking. Do I seem other than okay?"
"Yeah, you seem kind of...angry or something."

Well, that's just silly. When I'm angry, there can be no question. There's no "seem"-ing. Everyone knows.

But I took a second to think about it, and I started to say:
"I don't know, I've been feeling kind of..."

and then Ian broke into a spontaneous dissertation on the powers of various Mario characters. And I shot myself in the head. With my finger, but still.

Eric nudged me back on topic. "You've been feeling...what?"

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe feeling disconnected? Like nothing has very much to do with me."

This is potentially quite bad, since I have a job, a marriage and a kid that have very, very much to do with me, in which I need to remain deeply interested and intimately involved.

I may be having a little depression flare-up. I had one last summer, and I didn't recognize it, because I had never in my life been a LITTLE depressed.

So all day, I've been making a list, which I will now share with the internet:

Things to do When You Discover You Just Don't Give A Shit

1. Clean the kitchen. Nothing is fun or interesting anyway, might as well do those things that everything is normally more interesting than. Put away the laundry. Empty the dishwasher.

2. Gather all your clarity and focus and think back about what balls you might have dropped at work in the last 2 weeks. Go over your emails. Immediately reply to those ones you 'forgot'. Go over your calendar for next week. Perhaps make a more detailed 'to-do' list than usual.

3. Do not go bathing suit shopping. I really, really need a second, and, should I find one, a third swimsuit, since we go to the pool every afternoon and my one suit is aging ungracefully. Of course, the price of a decent suit is coronary-inducing, and of course the affordable suits at WalMart are no match for my pulchritude.

If by any chance you are in the market for an expensive but excellently-made and long-wearing plus-sized bathing suit, I totally recommend Junonia, which has great merchandise and great service. With God as my witness, I'm getting my surfing wet suit there...one day.

Anyway, I love shopping, but I recommend steering away from stores on that first day that you discover that you don't give a shit. Whatever size you are, it's wrong, and nothing looks good, and the merchandise is all ugly and shopworn. Don't do it.

4. Declare a moratorium on whatever the Endless Conversation is in your house. Whether you go in endless circles about Pros and Cons of Growing my Beard In or What Color to Paint the Bathroom, Volume 9000, or The Car Made a Weird Noise or Is Yoshi a Turtle, No He's a Dinosaur, No He's a Frog, blah blah blah blah BANG. We get 24 hours off from that. And if someone forgets, and brings it up, the clock starts over. Sorry. I don't make the rules. Oh, that's right, I do. Well, sorry.

4. Play cards with your kid. It's low-impact. And he'll lose interest before long.

5. Grocery shopping is okay. It might spark your interest. Not staple foods, though. Make someone else go for those. I went to the Indian grocery for chutney. They had 20 kinds!

6. Knitting is kind of boring, but getting something finished feels good. Make things in sprints.

7. STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM COMPUTER SOLITAIRE.

8. Get enough sleep. Tranq up as necessary.

9. Speaking of - if you happen to be a walking pharmacy, er, prescription med user, you might think back over your week and take a look in your medicine cabinet. This is a bad time to miss doses. You think it doesn't matter - I always think it doesn't matter - but apparently it does.

10. Watch cartoons. Bob's Burgers and Regular Show are a good fit for mild depression, and the Amazing World of Gumball and Adventure Time are nice when you start to feel a little better.

Dinner Tonight: Summer Salad

It doesn't seem quite fair to post this recipe, as it requires advance prep - I made the garlic-infused oil last week for another dish, and I decided to cook the wheat berries this afternoon without knowing what I would do with them. Nonetheless, here what I did -


Cook some wheat berries. (The way to cook wheat berries is to combine 1 part wheat and 3.5 parts water in a pot, bring to a boil, cover, lower the heat and simmer for an hour. I cooked a cup, because that's what I had left in the bag in the freezer.) Let them cool.

Open one can of black-eyed peas. (Hum chorus of 'tonight's gonna be a good night' here.) Drain, rinse, empty into a huge bowl. I used Goya, 15.5 oz.

Chop into small chunks half a cucumber, half a red pepper, and half a yellow pepper. Core and squeeze the seeds and runny stuff out of 2 small tomatoes, and chop those also. Throw all that stuff in the bowl with the beans and grain.

Now it's flavoring time. Chop up about 2 tablespoons of something spicy. I had a new jar of hot gardeniara, which is pickled vegetables -green beans, okra, carrots, celery and peppers - in olive oil. (This product makes an annual appearance at our house on the Thanksgiving relish tray, along with the olives and pickled watermelon rind.) Fresh or pickled peppers or probably some hot sauce would also be good. You need to mince them up really small, though, so they get disbursed through the grain and beans. Throw that into the bowl.

Now give it a couple shakes of that cheap balsamic vinegar.

I was about to give it a tiny splash of olive oil, but then I remembered! A week ago, I had poured a small container of olive oil, and thrown in a whole lot of chopped garlic, basil leaves, rosemary needles, the end of a jar of capers, and some peppercorns. I had spilled about half of it, the day I made it, and had used a bit on pasta, but found it underwhelming. However, it was great today! I do believe I will be keeping a small jar of that brewing at all times.

So throw in a couple spoonfuls of that, making sure to scoop up some garlic and capers and leaves.

Toss, adjust seasonings. Some raw sweet onion would also be good, if you have some handy. It'll need flaky salt and fresh pepper.

We ate ours with crackers and sardines, as I was in a sardiney mood after listening to today's The Splendid Table.



Adorable knitted sardines via The Daily Green

Also this is quite delicious

http://artsyville.blogspot.com/, a perfectly lovely blog
via Brady on Facebook.

The reason the internet was invented.

1. @PeanutTweeter
via my brother. Random (they're NOT random, they're the funniest tweets in existence) tweets placed in the mouths of Peanuts characters. Not all work safe. Luckily, my kid can not yet read much.




2. The Vintage Collective's flickr photostream.

HUNDREDS OF PAGES of old graphics - illustrations, monograms, esoteric symbols, dingbats, plus some great contemporary designs they inspired. Plus photoshop tutorials. Heraldry! Ships! Insects! Scientific implements

just all sorts of ridiculously cool stuff, and most of it is covered by Creative Commons. This is an amazing resource. It's the personal collection of a gent named K. Sandberg.

A movie I loved.

Semi-related thought (or stream-of-c0nciousness blathering) - didn't I used to love fiction? Didn't I used to read PILES of fiction? Didn't I used to write fiction, occasionally, and aspire to write fiction professionally? (Some of you haven't known me that long, but the answer to that is YES.)

I have 34 items checked out of the library right now. Aside from some animated videos, all of them a non-fiction. I haven't gotten a novel out of the library in perhaps 3 years.

This film, which I loved, is a documentary, short on interviews (short on talk of any kind) and long on concert footage and people staring out tour bus windows.

Whenever anyone asks me what my favorite film is, I answer Stop Making Sense, which I realize is nothing but concert footage.

I wonder what this means about me.

This is odd.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1381464/Bunny-rabbits-compete-jumping-course-Dressage-set-world-storm.html

Microblogging on a full-feature platform.

Opening day at the pool in our complex.
First family to visit the pool.
First people to swim in the pool in 2011.
First injury of 2011.

we are awesome.

Getting our stupid suits on and finding towels and car keys and things was SUCH A HUGE PRODUCTION that I spent the 1-block walk thinking mean thoughts about my husband and son. Weren't we just at the beach last week? Didn't we have a fabulously relaxing and agenda-free time? Why is it causing more stress to go to the pool for an hour than it did to go to another state for 3 days? Why is everything in the world such an enormous pain in my own personal ass?

And then it was time to cross the street. My stopped on the curb, took Eric's hand, and said "You hold Mommy's hand."
"She's carrying the towels, dude, she doesn't have a hand free for me to - "
but I shifted the bag to my shoulder and took his hand.
We crossed the street, the sun dappled through the leaves overhead.

Ian grinned.
"Look! A happy family. Just like I wanted."

When we got to the other side, Eric and I each laughed and apologized to each other for contributing to one another's grumpage.

And then Ian slipped on the pool deck and sliced his chin open.

awesome.

we're never leaving the apartment again.

Statistically Improbable

Statistically Improbable Phrases used in our household today:

"Porcupine Mega-Zord!"

"enjoying the Great Zucchini"

Given recent history. I realize that a new blog post from me is also.