Hortus Deliciarum

Ciaran, by Ciaran, age 3:

C: You’re SCOTTISH?
Me: What?
C: You’re Scottish!
Me: Do you know what that means?
C: Yes, I know what Scottish means. It means people are different.

Ciaran loves Dead End signs and can tell you where they are on all of his usual routes (daycare, Safeway, etc.) He has composed a song about them, sung to the tune of “Downtown” with lyrics something like follows:

DEAAAD END!! Did you think that there were so many DEAD ENDS! Yes I want to go find some more DEAD ENDS! Let’s go and see some more DEAD ENDS!!

Ciaran, carrying around the flyswatter one morning: Can I take the flyswatter to church?
Noni (my mom): Why do you want to take it to church?
Ciaran, after a moment of thought: It’s my only pleasure.

Me: We’re having steak for dinner.
C: OOOH, steak. Steak is my favorite.
…
Me: Taco salad for dinner.
C: OOOH, taco salad! Taco salad is my favorite.

We go to the mall, where a pedestrian is slow to cross over the crosswalk in front of our car.
Ciaran: COME ON, YOU DEVIL WOMAN!

Watching a street sweeper with Noni.
Ciaran: The driver is a devil man!

(Note: NO idea where he’s heard the word “devil” or learned to call people by it. We are disturbed.)

(and one photo by Mommy)

At 6:33 AM, while Daddy is sleeping in the guest room because of a cold, I feel a warm little body climb into bed with me.
Me: We love you SO MUCH, C.
C: “I love you so much too!”

Katie and Katja have posts on Phys Ed/gym class today and it made me think about my own PE class experience (I grew up in So Cal, so it was more PE and far less “gym” as we didn’t even have a gymnasium until I was in junior high).

My parents were missionaries in Burkina Faso, West Africa. I was a pretty active kid there – I climbed mango trees, rode my bike, and never remember feeling unfit, even when I started to feel fat (and wasn’t).

When we came back to the US, I was still pretty active. I wandered around my grandparents’ multi-acre orchard, weeded, picked fruit, ran up the stairs to the upper level of our playhouse, did jump-rope, rode the old scooter, and only ever felt unfit when my grandmother raced me during her crazily fast morning walk.

Then I hit fifth grade like a brick wall. Leaving aside all the other miseries of a misunderstood TCK (Third-Culture Kid) experience, PE class was a nightmare. I was still pretty fit, all told – doing exercises before the “real” class started up was fine, really. It was the games that became my personal hell. Dodgeball? An excuse for the strongest kids in class to hit the slower kids as hard as they could with the ball. On the one hand, I didn’t want to be hit. On the other, the sooner I got hit, the sooner I didn’t have to play anymore. Tetherball? I have one eye that is substantially weaker than the other and my depth perception, while existent, is frequently problematic. Also, I was short. Combine weak depth perception with shortness and a serious fear of getting whapped in the head with a tetherball and it was a recipe for disaster.

Let’s not forget running. I was one of the slowest kids and, as I started to get breasts and it became uncomfortable to run, I hated it even more. In junior high, all of the pieces fell in place when they called us all up for BMI checks. I found the preserved sheet somewhere (keep meaning to bring it in and scan it) that told me I was in the “overweight” category and, therefore, destined for disease and a shorter lifespan. I was offered diet literature and, at least once a year, had to present my arm for the dreaded calipers. In seventh grade, when the super-speedy future athletes were flying past me, I was so incredibly traumatized by running that I was threatened with not passing PE because I had run the mile in more than ten minutes (or something equally ridiculous).

My mother prevailed on my PE teacher and she agreed to let me run it on my own at my mother’s gym. I ran it in nine minutes and twenty seconds…nothing earth-shattering, but not half bad. Let’s not forget that this was the PE teacher who sat us all down and told her about her father’s heart surgery, where, after his bypass operation, he told his daughter that he was amazed at how strongly he felt his heart beating. Remember, she told us…fat can clog your arteries, so don’t end up like he did. From then on, I have been paranoid about heart disease, even though there is no history of it except in those of very advanced age in my mother’s family.

She called me the “rubber band” because I was so flexible when we did those bloody Presidential Fitness Award tests but I felt like a failure when I couldn’t do enough sit-ups, or enough pull-ups.

The one bright light of my junior high experience was, oddly enough, playing field hockey on the tarmac. Field hockey, you see, was something no one else had played before either, so all of us were on (no pun intended), a level playing field. I wasn’t great but I wasn’t bad either and I loved it. Sadly, it was only a few weeks that we played it before moving on to baseball, or basketball…sports in which I was inevitably one of the last picked and detested with all my heart. Seventh grade was when I started my first diet.

Also, in seventh grade, I slipped and hurt my tailbone, causing what would be years of lower back pain. This was, as it turned out, a blessing in disguise. In my freshman year PE class, I was assigned to the cross-country running coach as my PE teacher. My note from the doctor, thanks to that lower back pain, got me out of running – I could power-walk instead. I power-walked my miles in under 11 minutes but that wasn’t good enough for this guy, who had clearly written me off long ago and gave me a C in PE, the first C I had ever received in my life.

I was so devastated and traumatized by the class that my mom fought back and the doctor’s note got turned into three quarters’ worth of “modified PE,” which involved sitting in the library and doing research on sports. I got to read articles and take quizzes on them. Was it the best choice fitness-wise? Probably not. Was it a better option emotionally than facing a full year of being treated like a lazy fatty by a PE teacher famous for his dislike of non-athletic students? Certainly.

Sophomore year in high school was a little better. One quarter was health class. The other three quarters I took a modern/jazz-ish dance class. I didn’t love it, and I wasn’t great at it, but I didn’t hate it, except for competitions, in which I had to wear skimpy clothes that emphasized my OMGFATness (at least to myself) and made me feel self-conscious and awful. It’s part of the reason I’ve never taken another dance class. I do not want to perform. Moving my body, yes. Moving my body in front of other people? Piss off.

I didn’t take another PE class until I went to France for my final semester of high school. There, at the College Cevenol, I discovered that PE wasn’t so bad. I was grouped with the Arts & Humanities crowd, which meant no uber-sports stars. We all kinda sucked at basketball, and gymnastics (why didn’t we ever have gymnastics in the US? Miss Rubber Band would have done MUCH better at gymnastics?!), and especially baseball, which we played with tennis balls. What a novelty to be the BEST KID IN CLASS at baseball. I think we had to do some laps around the gym but there was no sense that being bad at sports made me a failure, because we were all pretty mediocre and there were definitely people much worse than I was.

How I wish my entire PE experience had been like that at the College.

I took tennis in college. The instructor was a UMass Amherst grad student in physical education. I was plunged back into the sense that I was BAD at sports. A failure…all because I was fat. She was, of course, good at sports. She couldn’t understand why other people might not be and she took no steps at all to help those of us who were worse feel more positive about ourselves. There was a tennis “tournament” at the end of the semester between all the beginners’ tennis classes. I lost my first match and, thankfully, did not have to play any more.

I never took another exercise class in college.

I have been doing FA for nearly seven years now and have never taken another exercise class, period. I toy with the thought of yoga, or dance…and flinch away. I am, you see, the worst in class. Always. Perhaps, if I cover up how unfit I am, how fat, how unattractive, I will never, ever have to feel the deep shame that I felt in school PE classes. I will not have to spend nights dreading the next day, knowing that I would have to run the mile and be one of the slowest kids in school. I won’t be a complete and utter worthless failure.

On Sunday, my husband and I went to get an oil change on my sister’s car (she lives in uber-hippie-paradise Portland and doesn’t need it, so we borrow it) and, thanks to the HOUR LONG WAIT, toddled over to Top Food & Drug across the street.

Grocery store love, my friends, grocery store love. It probably falls somewhere between a Safeway and a QFC/Central Market and has a nice selection of foods we can’t find at our local Safeway. I bought a couple of old-fashioned cinnamon sugar doughnuts, a couple of lemon yogurts (why is lemon such a hard flavor to find in yogurt?!), a bottle of Pinot Noir, and something else that I have now forgotten. While I was walking through the meat section, I was seized with a violent craving for cotto salami.

Now, you have to understand…my parents were po’ when I was a kid. They’re still not rich, what with the part-time pastoring and the self-employed contractor thing but when we got back from Africa, my mother was a stay-at-home parent and my dad was a contractor, so their wallets were not overflowing with cash. We never ate out. Literally never, unless you count the fast-food that my mom let us have on Fridays when she was still homeschooling us. Oh, and the occasional pizza meal from Little Caesar’s (buy one, get one free!) with crazy bread.

So for lunches, we got leftovers or cheap sandwiches. My brother and sister loved bologna. I couldn’t stand it but LOVED cotto salami. My favorite way to eat it was to stick a slice of bread with a slice of salami on top in the microwave and cook until the salami went bowl-shaped and the juices sank into the bread. Then I’d put on a second piece of bread and eat the whole thing. DELICIOUS.

When I started reading ingredients and listening to the Michael Pollanites of the world (as well as urban legends about how they sweep up the floors at the end of the day and make hotdogs/lunch meat out of it), I stopped eating cotto salami. In 2003, when I discovered Overcoming Overeating and began the long, wonderful, occasionally painful path toward size acceptance and food freedom, I started eating things again. On our monthly? bi-monthly? visits to Burger King, I let myself have mayonnaise on my BK Broiler, a Coke instead of iced tea, and French fries. Yesterday I had a few Cheeto puffs, reveling in their faux-cheese. I even eat “real” salami. But in that grocery store, standing wistfully in front of the cotto salami, I looked at the ingredients label (beef, beef hearts, blah blah) and put it back.

I can eat cinnamon sugar doughnuts (the only kind I’ve wanted lately, passing up other doughnut-eating opportunities because I knew they wouldn’t have the right ones), Cheetos, chocolate mousse cake, French fries, and just about every other food I wouldn’t let myself eat during my dieting days but the voice is still calling a foul on the cotto salami.

Nothing in that salami will kill me (well, barring an unfortunate salmonella incident). Nothing in “beef, beef hearts” is so terrible, except to first-worlders terrified of offal, and I wanted it. Why could I not pick it up and purchase it as freely as I purchase other formerly forbidden foods?

Why did I forbid myself the salami, when I truly can’t think of another food that I’ve been unable to purchase in the last seven years? Why?

Why are psychological obstacles so difficult to overcome?

I’m an introvert. I don’t intend that in an Introverts Anonymous way but just as a (slightly proud) statement of fact. I like being around people much of the time but then I need to hide in my Introvert Cave [tm] to recover.

These days I play the extrovert much better. At our Myers-Briggs workshop here at work, people were genuinely surprised to discover that I was an introvert, because I have to be extroverted when I cover for our receptionist, or when I’m dealing with people’s problems. I have to act as if speaking to a stranger is the highlight of my day and act friendly. Most of the time this isn’t a problem – but it does mean that when I get home in the evening, I’ve learned that I absolutely have to take twenty minutes to myself to get energy back or I get impatient with my family members.

I hate the phone, most of the time, except when talking to very specific, very special people, although I can cover that up very well at work (a temp sitting next to me once commented that I was just SO professional on the phone and she’s right – I’ve learned to play that game well, but that doesn’t mean I like it).

For all that extroversion, I find friendships these days to be much harder. When you start working instead of being a student, suddenly exposure to people in a meaningful setting decreases dramatically. My very best friends from college all lived in my house – we saw each other nearly every day (even if the sum total of that interaction was watching a friend march in and upend sugar into her coffee, or watching another friend steal bagels from the supply by the toaster). My friend Michelle and I specifically scheduled classes with each other because we liked having discussions with each other about them, even when we disagreed, which was frequently. We’d head down to Haymarket or the Fresh Pasta Company and, over hot chocolate or pasta alfredo (for her) and a chicken parm sandwich (for me) and cannoli, served by Fergus the cool waiter, would commiserate about annoying people in the class and discuss aesthetics, or religion, or those ANNOYING ADAS IN THE FRONT ROW THAT NEVER SHUT UP!

In graduate school, I found my “movie friend” that I hung out with on a regular basis. We’d go see movies a couple of times a month, if we could, and have dinner at our favorite pasta place, or tempura cooked by her partner. I had other friends there too, with whom I could spend time between classes gossiping, talking about classes, or complaining about politicians.

It was easier to make friends then. Having lived in five different places since I graduated from college, I have struggled to find friendships to match those. I move, or they move, and it no longer seems normal when you find someone you like and invite them to do something every weekend. They have lives, I have a life, and I look obsessive if I ask a friend for cake one weekend and then to a movie the next weekend. After all, come on, Heidi, don’t you have any other friends? The sad, boring, annoying answer is that no, I don’t. Most of them live a long way away and I miss them. A lot.

Friendships at work are different. There’s the “young” mid-twenties clique of girls that I like…but have nothing in common with (and I’m not sure they’d consider me someone I like. Feels JUST like high school). The mid-thirties folks all live too far away, or have shown little or no interest in doing anything more than having chats at work. As ever, I don’t fit in and it feels miserable.

I know more about friendship these days, too. I know how far I’ll go for a friend and how far I won’t. I know more about how to maintain a friendship long-distance, and how hard it is to do.

And I know how much I miss having several good friends nearby. Friends to craft with, and see movies with, and hang out with, who don’t mind if my house is a mess and are as reluctant to leave as I am to have them go. I wonder if I’m ever going to have clusters of friends like that again, where I am aware of having several people nearby who care about me and want to be with me. I hate that I have to work so hard to build networks like that, only to lose them when I move again, as I inevitably will. I find myself not wanting to bother…why find best friends when I’m just going to be brokenhearted when I leave?

I don’t miss college or UT. I do miss the networks of friends I had there and it seems like so much work to try to find new friends to help fill that void of friends far away.

I’m hungry.

I suspect this is due to the fact that I ate doughnuts today (OMG – FAT LADY EATS DOUGHNUTS, ALERT OBESITY TASK FORCE NOW!). We never get doughnuts in our office but one of our delegations brought them in and, miracle of miracles, they had a cinnamon sugar doughnut. Oh wonder and glory, precisely the type of doughnut I’ve been craving for a month now, so I ate it and it was good. The apple fritter, on the other hand, left that greasy film I associate with hydrogenated fats (like when you eat those mini-strudels from the store that are made with shortening and not butter) on the roof of my mouth and my tongue, so I tossed it. I *think* all those simple carbs = hungrier me.

But oh, so worth it!

So now I’m hungry. I’d been bringing turkey kielbasa and frozen peas to work with me, for an afternoon pop-in-microwave-then-eat snack but I’m out of that and I don’t have anything else that’s high protein, so I’m HUNGRY and I really really want MEAT. Have been craving steak (made a perfect ribeye for myself and little lad this weekend while Daddy and Baba were at the Sounders game) and right now I could eat with glee the drumstick from a roast chicken, stuffing, and roast sweet potatoes. That would be perfect. Especially with a huge green salad.

So. So. Good.

Not sure what my mom is cooking up for dinner – hoping that it is high protein, high veg, because the thought of more carbohydrate is off-putting…

What are you/have you been craving?

See what I did with that title there? Double Meanings FTW!

***

I like organic, locally-sourced food. I like growing my own food. I like cooking food and, by golly, I like eating food. So, I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what’s been rubbing me the wrong way about a friend of mine linking to The Clean Eating Mama on her Facebook. I happened to mention the site in my last post, forgetting the joys of pingbacks, so now I feel obliged to explain why, as Tasha, the mama in question, left a very nice comment in said post!

Anyway.

I like all of those things I mentioned. As a middle-class suburban mother, I generally have the time and resources to do all those things. I was raised first in West Africa (growing our own food and local-sourcing, ahoy) and then moved to So Cal, where my parents had very little money and cooked everything we ate. Until I was ten or eleven, visiting a friend’s house, I didn’t know that spaghetti sauce even CAME in jars, because my mother always made hers from scratch. I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve made cake from a mix instead of from a recipe.

The problem is not that the blog in question embraces those things or encourages them, because I can really, really get behind all of that. I love a lot of the content and suggestions on Tasha’s blog. The problem, I think, is that the philosophy of “clean eating” really, really fails to consider the realities of urban existence which, for many people, makes it exceptionally difficult to source locally and to eat fresh fruit and vegetables, because in “food deserts” those options simply don’t exist.

For someone like me, who definitely does not live in a food desert (although this would be less the case if I were not mobile and didn’t own a car), it still isn’t an easy philosophy. My family (my parents, husband, son and I) buys a $50 organic vegetable box per week. Now, while it’s good value for money, $50 for many people is the better part of their food budget for a month, never mind a single week of produce. Not all of that produce is locally-sourced (they do exchanges with other food co-ops for foods in season there but not here and vice versa) but it’s a reasonable facsimile thereof. If I were not able to purchase this box, I could steer toward local produce in the grocery store, perhaps, but generally the best you can do there is to chose US-grown produce, since labels do not make it readily apparent where in the US produce comes from.

Once you know where your food comes from…do you have the money to purchase it? I can buy strawberries (omg, one of the most pesticide-covered foods!) at 2 for $5 for non-organic containers. If I wander over to the organic section of my local grocery store and pick up a container that is the same size or smaller, I will almost certainly pay twice as much, even if strawberries are in season.

How important is that strawberry to me? If I’m trying to feed my child a varied, healthy diet (and I use “diet” in the sense of “things wot we do eat” not “CALORIE RESTRICTION!!!” here) and make sure that he’s exposed to lots of yummy foods, what if I can’t pay $5 for the organic strawberries? To be honest, I don’t pay $5 (or more) for the organic ones. Last summer I made the serious mistake of thinking the local farmers’ market would be cheaper. It wasn’t. A pint of organic strawberries there cost at least $5 and possibly more. My husband and I have a reasonable income. I choose to work because, financially, it’s my only real option. I cannot afford to buy organic for everything I eat.

Let’s not forget that, frequently, organic foods in grocery stores are transported further than non-organic equivalents. In the UK, I could buy non-organic British corn but the only organic corn was transported from France.

What bothers me most, though, is the implication that, if “clean eating” means everything organic and homemade, then what I’m doing is “dirty living.” I don’t like the implication that, if you eat organic, homemade food and get 3-5 exercise periods in per week, you will lose weight. I do not like the implication that weight = good health, or that my goal should be giving up all man-made foods to achieve good health and weight loss. It drives me a little nuts when people (and I don’t mean people = Clean Eating Mama especially) talk about “toxins” and ridding ourselves of things we “can’t pronounce.” “Dihydrogen monoxide” sounds awfully nasty until you realize it’s just water. There are plenty of vitamins that have long chemical names, come from entirely innocuous sources, but sound weird.

Tocopherol? Vitamin E. Ascorbic Acid? Vitamin C. Pantothenic Acid? Vitamin B5.

And, if you take an organic chemistry class, you can pronounce “dibencozide” (Vitamin B12) or “p-aminobenzoic acid” (B10) just fine (and know what they mean, at least mostly). Whether or not they’re good for you or bad for you is another question. Whether or not a specific synthesized chemical is good, bad, or just indifferent for you is the topic of ongoing research and isn’t defined solely by its chemical name.

I agree that minimally-processed foods are probably more nutrient-rich than processed foods. I agree that there are ethical implications to eating locally-sourced produce and free-range organic eggs. I do not think that calling the choice to eat those over other products “clean eating” is fair, even if the goals themselves are good. I think it builds food paranoia and, for some people, contributes to disordered eating (ask me how many times I’ve felt guilty for buying my son non-organic peppers at 2 for $4 rather than paying $3 or more for a bell pepper – is it better to give him a vegetable that he’s guaranteed to eat and will devour whole, like normal people eat apples, or not buy them at all and hope that he’ll go for broccoli today instead*)?

The way I eat is not “dirty” eating. Eating is not dirty, especially when you are eating in a way that fuels your body at a price you can afford. The idea of taboo foods is one that needs to be broken down on all levels, because instead of celebrating that my son loves a bell pepper, or a watermelon, or a piece of broccoli, I find myself feeling guilty that I didn’t spend twice as much for the organic (frequently imported) variety. When other parents are worried that their child subsists only on Cheerios and air, I’m feeling bad that my son is devouring non-organic granola and organic-but-homogenized-pasteurized whole milk.

Because of my history of disordered eating, guilt around food is a powerful force in my life that I constantly fight. I think that encouraging people to eat lots of different foods, to explore seasonal eating (Simply in Season is one of our favorite cookbooks, by the way), and to encourage communities to work with people so that EVERYONE in our society has the option to do those things is incredibly important. I do not, however, think that there should be any perceived dirtiness or failure associated with not doing them. I do not need to feel like I’m building up so-called toxins in my gut because I ate tomatoes out of a possibly-BPA-containing can, because that way lies madness, food restriction, and body hatred.

Eating is eating. I make ethical and personal choices based on my personal circumstances, but it is not my job to label someone else’s eating habits or imply that they are wrong. So long as my family is fed within my means, and I have done my best to feed them the best quality food I can afford, I am doing well as a mother.

Note: I am not trying to say that Tasha intends any of the associations that I made here or that they are not entirely products of my own relationship with food – this is, however, frequently the reaction I have to the Michael Pollan-esque “whole food” movement, because it can lose its connection to individual circumstances and forget how much privilege the (often white and middle-class) people espousing it have to make those food choices and pursue such an exclusive diet. Please do not attack Tasha or her blog! Comments should be kept here.

—-

*He likes broccoli too, by the way. I have yet to meet a vegetable my child will not eat. Not many fruits, either, although he’s always been pickier about those.

I work for a large member business organization, we’ll call it, and because of the nature of our business, our events staff make contact with a LOT of small businesses in the area. One of my colleagues in Events was posting on her Facebook about an event that she’s attending at one of these businesses she knows, so I went to their website to check it out.

It seemed pretty neutral, really, for a fitness company, even if the pictures on the front page are entirely unrealistic (hello, I don’t wear that much makeup on a night out, much less to exercise) until I came across their services page. They explain that their workouts are:

modeled after celebrity workouts and target specific areas of the body. The workouts will not only make you look fabulous, but also build bone density, flexibility and strength. Each program is tailored to fit a client’s particular needs and exercise level, and workouts only require a ball, dumbbells, and a mat.

Oh, hai, sounds interesting! Maybe this is something I should check out. I could do with something tailored to me, something that takes into consideration the fact that I’m really out of shape and need simple ways to work to a level of fitness with which I’m comfortable.

But read on, my friends, read on…

During the five-week programs, all clients are given a food and exercise journal and kept accountable by weekly weigh-ins, measurements and other fitness assessments.

Yes.

This entirely voluntary program, for which you are paying (how much I don’t know, but I’m sure it’s not cheap), will keep you “accountable” because as a business woman (the target audience of said business), apparently you do not have the will power, motivation, or self-control to follow your fitness goals.

So, they need to check up on you with weekly weigh-ins, weigh-ins being, presumably, a “fitness assessment.”

I hate the language of “accountability” when it comes to weight and fitness. Why the hell should I be kept accountable to anybody but myself? Why the hell should I pay for the privilege of being kept accountable (if you can call it “privilege” – to me it smacks of Big Brother)? It suggests that I, as a grown woman, need some kind of external structure to enforce changes in my life that I CHOOSE TO MAKE or DO NOT CHOOSE TO MAKE.

That’s a huge part of the diet- and fitness-speak world. Instead of asserting your power to make choices that work for you in the place you’re in, trainers and diet gurus assert that you should follow their rules, embrace their reality, and follow their instructions for perfect happiness. When you don’t achieve that perfect happiness, confidence, or sassiness, it isn’t their rules that have failed you, it’s you who have failed to keep the rules.

Why does it seem to be so impossible for fitness pros to allow adult women (I can’t speak for the experience of adult men) to be accountable for themselves? If they are tailoring their fitness regime to fit me and my needs, why must they then force me to conform to THEIR weekly weigh-ins, to their measurements, and to their progress markers? Why must those be the “fitness assessments” of choice?

I would hope that these are all optional but the language they use is entirely non-optional. I read those sentences and am shoved back into a world of junior high Presidential Fitness Award testing and dreaded diet program weigh-ins…and guess what?

I am a grown woman. I make my own rules. If they don’t include a walk today, or a goal weight, or “clean eating” (that latter is a rant for another day), then they don’t include those things and nobody, and I mean nobody, has the right to hold me accountable for any of it aside from myself.

This is my first mosaic, created during a day-long workshop at Seattle Mosaic Arts, probably the best money I’ve spent on crafting in a LONG time, except that it has now created an obsession that keeps me up at night, wondering what to create!

I haven’t had time this semester to do more that this single mirror but geometric shapes and the play of light and texture make me want to dig into mosaic tiles and wield clippers.  I love cross-stitch but mosaic engages my creative mind in a different way – it blends my love of collage with a tactile experience that is almost completely unlike the tidy, organized X-patterns of samplers.

I adore both but right now I want to go wild and mosaics are a little wild, a little crazy, and a little out of the box (and a heckuva lot faster than cross-stitch).

Someday I would love to mosaic a full-sized me-shape, full of color, geometry, and light, if space and finances ever permit. 

The colors of this are richer in person and you just don’t catch the way that the light falls on the tiles, reflecting and refracting. I’ve put it in a dark hallway, where it catches and magnifies all the available light, and it makes me dream of far-off, exotic, sunny places with bright white sand and lovely blue water under the dappled sunlight falling through palm fronds.

Mosaics make me dream. Cross-stitch lets me think.

Tags: mosaic

The temptation to write “Sleepless in Seattle” for insomnia-related posts is overwhelming. Alas that it would feel so trite if I were to do so…

I could NOT get to sleep last night. I went to bed around 9:30 and just tossed and turned. My pillows were too slippery. My brain wouldn’t turn off. Under the duvet was too hot but just with a sheet was too cold. I was tired but my brain just would not. stop. working.

I was thinking about all sorts of things. Being done with classes has made me feel like I’m FREE AT LAST (well, except for the pesky day job, and the parenting, and the fact that I’m supposed to be doing an internship at our local historical museum) and I’ve been excited about working on mosaics again. I was thinking that I could do something themed around the four seasons, maybe a four quadrants in a square, which started me wondering what I could design on my own (as someone with little to no drawing skill) and how I’d put it together, and what grout color I’d use, and what tile colors I’d use, and whether I’d stick in some millefiori, and would it maybe be better to do four individual season hangings, etc.

The lady who owns the mosaic shop that I went to for my intro course lost her daughters in the Alaska Airlines crash ten years ago – they were six and eight. That got me thinking about how awful it would be to lose a child, and what I’d do if anything ever happened to my son. Down that path lies nothing but (useless) woe, because why should I figure out how I’d feel if my son died and get upset when, well, he’s alive and, so far as I know, will live a long and happy life?

Still, woe, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it, no matter how much deep breathing I did, or how hard I tried to think about other things. Mosaics and dead kids. Nice.

I am excited about the mosaics, though, although I still haven’t figured out how I want to pattern it. This weekend is a long-needed haircut but next weekend I will take a few hours for myself and wander forth to the mosaic studio.

And really, I’d like to sleep well tonight.

Tags: mosaic

I have a recurring dream. I am hunting for an outfit for a special event and searching through my closet, or visiting a plus-sized clothing store. I start looking, feeling depressed and suddenly, just when I am losing hope, find something perfect that I know will fit. It could be a bra that is simultaneously comfortable and attractive, or a piece of sexy lingerie that fits just right and looks beautiful, or a gorgeous top that’s girly but not over the top and makes me feel lovely.

In my dream, once I’ve found that perfect piece, I start to find more. Linen with tiny crocheted lace details, or beaded silks. Rich colors, luxuriant fabrics, and styles that make me feel elegant and attractive. I am surrounded by beautiful clothing that fits me just as I am, and I wonder why it’s suddenly happening now, why I’d never realized that I had all of this clothing available before, and I am so excited and happy…

And then I wake up.

And then I get dressed in my work clothing – a pair of Right Fit polyester pants that do fit wonderfully but are either in charcoal or black, and a shirt that probably doesn’t fit quite right but is the best I could find at the Avenue, or Catherine’s, or Junonia.

And I feel okay. Dull, unlovely, and unoriginal, but at least acceptable for a “business casual” environment that lets me err slightly on the side of casual, so long as I look okay at the reception desk while I’m covering for the receptionist’s breaks.

I have always hated clothes shopping. Always. Even when I was a size 12/14 and could fit a lot more clothes, my body image was so distorted that I thought I looked ugly in everything. Now, somewhere around a 28-32 (I think my size has matched my age for far too long, really), I hate shopping even more. I generally can’t fit in Lane Bryant, except for their looser styles. I fit in some Avenue clothes (their 30/32 is more like an LB 26/28, so it depends on the cut) and Catherine’s has my size but is full of old-lady clothes, with a few cute things that may fit okay but never fit well. I look back at my 12/14 days and hate that I had such severe body hatred that I couldn’t understand that I could quite easily have been beautifully dressed at that age, if only I hadn’t thought I looked worse than I did. Now that I’m a size I never thought I could be (oh, God, I will KILL myself if I ever hit a size 24!) but always pictured myself as, I realize how hard it really is to enjoy clothes shopping when you’re a 4X and can’t even try on most of the things you see in a store.

Yes. I could shop online. This is problematic for several reasons.

Polyester. The Right Fit pants are polyester. I like natural fibers but will tolerate the Right Fit because, well, they fit right and I can’t cope with natural fiber Junonia pants that are either too tight in the waist but baggy as all heck around the butt, or fit great in the butt and leave button-marks in my waist. So I deal. Pairing a polyester top with polyester pants, however, is a recipe for static disaster or, when it gets to summer on no-A/C buses in Seattle, hellish. I’m a sweaty person and always have been, even when I was much thinner, and I don’t like feeling as if I’m in a plastic bubble of torture. If you’re not fat, take a look at some plus-sized clothes stores (online or brick-and-mortar) sometime. 90% of it is polyester.

Sizing. I appear to have a wacky body shape (see Junonia pants disaster above). I have large upper arms and thighs. Actually, I’m pretty proportional, as hourglassy figures go at my size, but I’m short and right on the line between petite and regular. That means that petite-cut pants are too short but regular ones can be a little too long (or a lot too long – Evans, I’m looking at you!). Oh, oh, and let’s not forget the debacle of cardigans. I found a lovely maxi-sundress in Catherine’s a few weeks back and searched for a cardigan to go with it (I don’t like my upper arms. They are bingo arms and I am seriously self-conscious about them, as I recall the high school teacher we mocked back in the day because she had OLD LADY FAT UPPER ARMS! This is karma, biting me in the butt…er…upper arms.) I kid you not – every cardigan in the place went almost to my knees. I’m JUST UNDER AVERAGE HEIGHT, PEOPLE but I looked as if I were a five-year-old trying on my mom’s clothes (she’s smaller than I am, by the way) and I gave up on this dress that I adored because I could not find anything to cover my arms either in Catherine’s or Avenue.

Let’s not forget that I can walk into Catherine’s, say, and try on twenty pieces of clothing (I’m not exaggerating) and come out with two, or maybe three that look right. I don’t mean “look thin” – I mean “fit correctly.”

Now, take those problems – size plus polyester, and that excludes a lot of online shops. The ones who aren’t all polyester tend to be the shapeless clothes places that I am absolutely positive will end up creating the muu-muu look that I always dreaded as a teenager. Thing is, if I order from them to see if they do, I get charged shipping. Oh, and when none of the five items I order actually fits me properly, I get to pay for shipping BACK again. I add at least $20 in shipping for every clothing order I place.

I forgot to send back my last Junonia order in time for returns, so I’ve got three tops that fit me extremely badly, that I won’t wear, cluttering up my bedroom.

And very little of it, even when it does fit, makes me feel good about myself.

What an incredible, incredible thing it would be to look through my closet and find beautiful, well-fitting clothes. What a marvel to be able to walk into a brick-and-mortar store and know that I could find lovely things that fit me in my style.

The prospect of learning how to sew, so that I can make these things for myself, is daunting, because I don’t just have copious amounts of time for a new hobby, and that’s without learning how to alter patterns (which don’t generally come in my size anyway), and pick out the right fabric for a pattern, or know whether or not that pattern will actually look GOOD on me instead of crappy once it’s all put together.

It’s all too much work and, really, SHOULD it be so much work? Why can’t a fat woman walk into a store and find beautiful things at a reasonable price?

Tags: clothes, shopping