Hortus Deliciarum

I do fun things too. Really. Don’t faint from shock…

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See, the thing about NOT being on hormonal birth control is that now I know, when a bad day pops up its hideous head and I start to realize that I’m caught in the incoming tide, that the sadness and nonsensicalness (yes, I know that’s not a word, right? right?) and lazy give-it-all-up-because-you-fail-at-life-ness is creeping up my waist, my stomach, my breasts, my shoulders…is that it’s probably hormonal. Nasty abscess in Female Places [tm] earlier this week plus moodiness now = PMS, and probably my period next week, because that’s how my body rolls when it’s not being tinkered with.

It doesn’t roll back the waters, though, so much as act as a snorkel that I can draw oxygen through to breathe as I desperately chant it’s-okay-it’s-okay-this-too-shall-pass-just-keep-breathing-just-keep-breathing.

The daydreaming turns into self-loathing as, instead of being inspired by other people, I envy them and hate myself for not being them. Not a good enough mother. Not creative enough. Stupid. Failing your son. Ugly. Fat. What ever, ever convinced you that you might be more than an office peon struggling with tens of thousands of dollars in school debt, and for what? You’re not smart, not artistic, not funny, not a good enough friend, not deserving of love. Someday you’ll be all alone, forever, because people will figure out that you’re not worth it and they’ll leave you.

On the Fatosphere we talk a lot about the fantasy of being thin…but what happens when you know, know that being thin won’t bring you any of those things you want, but nothing else seems to either, because you can’t quite find that place where you want to move and be fit, or can afford to have nice clothes, or even know what looks good on you and what doesn’t?

Crazy fractured post, I know.

I read blogs about horrible things that happen to other people, like the incredible Lori, or all the moms who have lost children, or parents who have real struggles, and I find myself just hating what feels like weakness on my part. I have nothing really traumatic to be whining about. I’ve never lost a child, or a spouse, or anyone but my grandfathers, who lived long, full lives. I live in a comfortable home, even if it’s not beautiful. My family is not starving. I have a happy, healthy little boy. What the hell is wrong with me?! What is this stupid, stupid brokenness and what right do I even have to feel broken?!

I would love a weekend where my family went away and I could just be alone at home, getting things cleaned, NOT having to feel like I was failing everyone around me as a mother/wife/daughter/etc. I don’t want to go away on a vacation, because that involves the stress of packing (have I told you all about my recurring packing-too-much-stuff-into-too-small-a-space-in-too-little-time dreams, that leave me drained in the morning?). I just want to be at home. Alone. Without anyone for a few days.

I’ve been struggling lately, in case my infrequent, depressed posts didn’t make that clear. It’s not that I’m perpetually unhappy; it’s that the black hole of despair seems to be so much closer than before and I have to work so hard not to get sucked in (yes, I have a therapist, although it’s been about a month since I’ve seen her because of financial issues for the next couple of months, and I’m on antidepressants, so I’m doing all I can, really – no need to suggest that as an option!). A couple of weeks ago, after arguing with my husband over something stupidly trivial, I had to run to my bedroom, shut the door, and plant myself firmly on my bed, because if I stayed in the kitchen, I knew I’d go for one of the knives.

That scared me.

So, I’ve been going back to my old log-in-the-river safety mechanism of eating more than I’m necessarily hungry for, although not as much as I would have expected (the process IS working, if slowly) and reminding myself that it’s okay to do what I need to do to cope. I’ve also been immersing myself in crafting blogs, not for all of my normal crafting vices, like mosaics and cross stitch, but kids’ crafts – things that I can do with my son that make him feel happy and leave me feeling as if I’ve accomplished something as a parent.

There are some incredible, incredible children’s crafting blogs out there. Garden Mama hasn’t posted in a while, but I covet her life (well, her house, her garden, her creative sense, and the time that she has to celebrate all of those things). It makes me want to cry with longing for a place of my own, an old house, not big or fancy, but full of light and surrounded by gardens, meadows, and maybe a brook or the beach.

This weekend, C and I made a little gnome catapult game, based on the one that link goes to, and there was nothing quite so sweet as hearing my son exclaim joyfully, as he held the first finished gnome, “Oh, look at the gnome! What a beautiful gnome!” I felt…full after hearing it, and spending twenty minutes or so helping him to catapult the wood-and-felt gnomes into a painted egg carton.

And, yesterday, amidst long bouts of data entry, I took a few minutes of break time to make origami flowers out of sticky notes. They’re sitting on my desk now, purple, orange, pink, yellow, and blue, reminding me that I do have a life outside of my job, that I can make lovely things and, most importantly, that I am a creator of beauty and not just a waste of the universe’s energy and atoms. I need that, when I think about the lure of the knife blade, or the throb of my perpetual headache, which only goes away for a few hours before returning, starts up again* and I just want to scream at my not-Garden-Mama life.

That’s the thing about these crafting blogs…I have to be careful about them. They can leave me feeling as if I fall very short of the gentle parenting ideal. My son has electronic toys (honking fire trucks, mostly) and he watches more TV than I’d like (I’m a TV addict and I try to limit him, and myself, but it’s HARD when I come home from a day at work and am just so, so tired that all I want to do is flop down on the sofa and enter a temporary vegetative state). We don’t do enough crafting. My house is full of crap (that is, extraneous Stuff, not actual crap) and my life seems so far from where I want it to be.

So, I try not to get overwhelmed with self-consciousness about the mother that I’m not, the person that I’m not. I’m never going to be Garden Mama, who makes something with her homeschooled kids every day, but I can work on planning a craft each weekend, and an outing of some sort each weekend, so that I spend time with my son. I can buy (when I have the money), creative toys, even if they’re OMG PLASTIC (can I just say, Playmobil is heaven-sent, even if it’s not made out of wood?) and I can encourage my little boy to embrace reading with all of his big, big heart (he’s getting Farmer Boy and the next two Magic Treehouse books for his birthday next month).

Little steps. Little steps away from the ever-present dark.

And maybe, just maybe, if I’m really, really lucky, I’ll get to live in that beautiful, old, light-filled house someday. It would be nice if the universe could give me that much joy at some point before I shuffle off the mortal coil.

—

*Yes, I also have migraine meds from my doc, which aren’t working well, and I’ll talk to her at my annual exam in July to follow up more on this whole headache thing. I’m seeing my usual (excellent) chiropractor, who says that I should *not* be getting headaches based on how my body feels when she does her adjustments and suggests that I reduce the stress in my life, although she knows that certain factors aren’t changeable right now. I can’t afford new glasses at the moment, in case that is triggering the headaches, but will check in with an optometrist when I can afford them. No, I haven’t had any dietary changes that would trigger the headaches either, so far as I know. Again, please no advice on my health stuff. I’m taking care of myself, really, and suggestions right now on that front are not helpful, even when well-intended. Right now they would just feel like more pressure.

Dear JK Rowling:

The Harry Potter books have brought me much reading enjoyment over the years and, as we begin to read them to my four-year-old (who follows along eagerly with every word), they are bringing him much joy also.

But Joanne, why do you hate fat people?

As I read from one of the first (possibly the first) chapters of Harry Potter & The Chamber of Secrets to my son, I found myself compelled to edit the word “fat” from your description of Dudley Dursley at least four times in three pages. This is not because I fear or loathe that word but because you use it in an odious, hurtful way. You see, Dudley Dursley is fat. He is also a reprehensible bully who enjoys tormenting his cousin. But in your mind, it would appear that his fatness is directly linked to his vicious nature. We are beaten over the head with the fact of his fatness over and over again. Dudley cannot just walk across the grass. He waddles. He cannot simply have a look of fear cross his face. He has a look of fear cross his fat face. He does not run as fast as his legs can carry him, but as fast as his fat legs can carry him.

I found myself omitting the word “fat” every time you used it, Joanne. My son can read and perhaps he noticed my editing but I couldn’t help myself, because Dudley’s fatness was not an incidental, neutral descriptor. In your books, it is inexorably coupled with gluttony (in all things, from food to possessions) and stupidity. In fact, in considering the Harry Potter series, I cannot think of one unambiguously good character who is also fat, except the Fat Lady, who is not even a real person, but a portrait. Slughorn is on the fat side, as gluttonous as Dudley (if in a slightly classier way), and wavers between good and evil. Crabbe and Goyle, who are also fat (I may be mis-remembering this because of the actors chosen to play this) are stupid and fat. Evil people are not necessarily fat in Harry Potter, but the fat appear to be necessarily evil, gluttonous, and probably stupid.

You paint the portrait of Dudley’s character as greedy, stuffing food down his throat as if it were his final meal (and, considering that he gets put on a grapefruit diet later, perhaps he had reason to worry). I assume that we are to conclude that this is why he is fat and yet, when you describe Harry and Ron’s demeanor at Hogwarts meals and banquets, their eating behavior is no less greedy or disgusting than Dudley’s, but neither Harry nor Ron is fat.

My son knows that I’m fat. If there’s a fat character, he’ll proclaim me that character for his perpetual imagination games – I’m Fat Sheep from Shaun the Sheep, Ursula the Sea Witch (ha!), and so forth (I’m Hermione, though, he says). We frequently talk about people coming in different shapes and sizes so, as far as I’m aware, he has no negative association with fatness. Reading those pages last night, I could not help but feel sick at the constant bombardment of negativity surrounding Dudley’s fatness.

The problem is not that Dudley is fat, Joanne. Fat people come in both good and evil flavors. That’s life. What bothers me is that your reiteration of Dudley’s fatness is so constant, so pervasive, that his fatness becomes indistinguishable from his bullying, his meanness, his greediness. Even as a baby, his “beachball”-shaped body is meant to be an object of hilarity and scorn. Presumably his fatness marks him for evil even then.

Ironically, fat kids are highly likely not to be bullies, but to be bullied and writing that describes them as lazy, gluttonous, unpleasant, and stupid isn’t going to help this, particularly not when it features in books and films that are wildly popular. The kid who looks like Dudley in this video, where the bullied kid finally hits his limit? He’s not the kid doing the bullying. He’s the one being punched and taunted by his Harry-Potter-sized assailant (HP is frequently described, at least in the early books, as being small for his age). Fat kids are under pressure from all sides and, apparently, can’t even get away from it when they try to escape into fiction.

How many of the geeky, brainy kids reading your books, Joanne, are likely to be fat? If a significant percentage of American and British kids and adults are fat, chances are that a lot of the people who have paid a not-insubstantial sum to purchase your books (in some cases at record-breaking prices for children’s fiction), and to watch the movies based on them, are fat. When you appear to think that fatness and moral failure go hand-in-hand, this is offensive to a substantial portion of your readership.

I was really excited about reading HP to my son but it’s harder now that I remember what I’d forgotten after my first reading, namely, the way in which you portray fat characters as so disgusting, so evil, so greedylazygluttonousGROSS. The books are a minefield now – when my son is old enough to realize (and actually ask about) the fact that I’m leaving out the “fat” descriptor for Dudley four or five times over the space of a few pages, I’m going to have to apologize for you, Joanne. I’m going to have to explain that you are an intelligent, creative woman who has profited immensely from books in which you put out there, for the world to see, that you think fatness is a morally reprehensible physical characteristic. I’m going to have to say that I’m sorry, but that even intelligent, creative people fail to see that fatness simply is. Good or bad character is based on what one does, not on how one looks.

I should not have to defend myself against an author’s biases. My son should never have to be introduced to the reality that a hefty chunk of the population thinks less of his mother simply because she’s fat and that it is entirely acceptable (nay, celebrated) for this idea to be portrayed in fiction so popular that it’s made its author one of the richest women in the world.

It breaks my heart to have to censor any book of reasonable age-appropriateness that I read to my son for any reason whatsoever. Here’s hoping your next writing endeavor is free of fatphobia.

No love today,

-Heidi

Well, I THINK this blog was created at some point in 2008. I could check the Archives, sure, but what would be the fun in that?!

I’m still dragging. This has been Seattle’s coldest spring in nearly sixty years. Literally. It’s been rainy and grey for all of April but the Saturday before Easter, and was rainy and grey for the entirety of the months of 2011 before that, except for a couple of glorious days in February, now long forgotten. I don’t mind rain, really, and cloudy skies make the spring blossoms that much brighter but my body knows that it’s missing out on Vitamin D and I fight the good fight against what I think is a touch of SAD all winter here. Yes, I take Vitamin D (when I remember).

Mostly it’s just school, school, and more school. Trying to keep up with six projects in two and a half weeks (now down to four, having turned in one group project that added up to 54 PowerPoint slides, as well as a brief essay) is a lot when I’m also working. Thank goodness for my biweekly counseling sessions, in which I am currently exploring the concepts of “Heidi is not responsible for fixing every broken system,” “Heidi needs to be creative and do fun things too,” and “Heidi is not responsible for maintaining every friendship/personal relationship that she has without equal input from the other person too.” All three of these are very difficult for me, the brokenness/relationship issues being particularly sticky points because they tie SO very deeply to that TCK (third-culture kid) sense of loss and grieving. For me, as a TCK, I’ve spent my life losing people I love, not to death but to distance.

I can’t write any more about that, I find, without falling apart. We’ll leave it there for now.

The creative bits, well, I need little pieces of creativity sprinkled through my routine – not just a couple of hours of mosaicing on the weekends, as and when I can, but things like taking up art journaling and maybe, when I have the cash, purchasing my dream set of 132 Prismacolor art pencils, a couple of art coloring books, and coloring a page now and then. Little things.

Boring things to everyone else. Sanity to me. If I don’t find a happy medium between my must-do life and my want-to-do life, I will crack and shatter into a million silent, dead, broken pieces.

Before I start yet another whiny post, I want to thank those of you who so kindly comment on my other whiny posts! Your support means the world to me – it’s the reason I keep writing at all, truly. Thank you!

***

I’ve been struggling with first-world problems this week. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned our woes with my son and kindergarten. He turns five this summer and we’ll be shipping him off to kindergarten (well, driving him) in September. Now, I don’t think it’s arrogant of me to say that he’s very bright. Neither do I condemn public schools as all being places of evil (partly because it’s true and partly because TeacherMommy would kick my ass if I did. I went to public schools from the fifth grade on, after my parents got back from their 8-year stint as missionaries in West Africa, where I was homeschooled, and I will always value the education (if not always the peer experiences) that I got there. I had some extraordinary teachers, whom I will remember for the rest of my life.

That said, WA state schools are, as in the case of many state schools at the moment, in a lot of trouble and, having seen my sister’s experiences with local public schools in high school, I’m not optimistic about their ability to meet the needs of gifted children, particularly not those who, for various reasons, might need a little extra attention. It’s not that I think a kindergarten teacher here wouldn’t want to do that…it’s just that, in a class of 23 children, dealing with one who’s exceptionally stubborn, even for a five-year-old, and gets caught up so deeply in reading a book that he literally doesn’t hear me calling his name from two feet away, is a challenge.

His daycare provider, who has three children in public school (so certainly doesn’t have an issue with that), herself recommends private school for him simply because of who he is – it takes a lot of work to explain to him WHY something must be done, because if he doesn’t understand that, he will NOT just obey. He will become defiant and stubborn. I want his early education experiences to be wonderful. I want him to love learning – he’s such a curious little boy, and he loves to learn new things. I want what all parents want for their children: happiness.

We’ve been able to get financial aid from a small private school near us. In exchange, they want us to commit to what would normally be 9 hours of work-in-kind, but for us is six hours, because of my busy schedule. The problem is this: in the fall and spring, when I’d be asked to do this work, I’ll be doing 50 internship hours per semester. I work full-time too, and that means that I have to do internship hours on the weekend, probably on Saturday. So. I’ll be working six days per week.

The school has a thrift store associated with it, where my mom will probably work for several hours each week. However, while they investigate other possibilities for stuff I can do (this being made more difficult by the fact that I do work M-F), the option they’ve thrown out is cleaning the school for 2-3 hours every couple of weeks on the weekend.

Cleaning the school. Yes, being a janitor.

Now, my great-grandfather was a janitor, amongst other things. That’s fine. Working in a service industry takes so much work – and I have a lot of respect for people who make sure that other people have clean places to live and work. I’ve been agonizing over whether or not the fact that I would dread this with every fiber of my being is because I’m being snobbish, but I don’t think it is. I hate cleaning. My own house? Not clean. I like living in a clean place but I’m not very good at doing it. Now, I think I could do just fine mopping floors and cleaning bathrooms if I had to, but it struck me a couple of days ago that it’s not about the cleaning: it’s about what the cleaning represents.

The work I do pays the bills. I’m an administrative assistant and there’s certainly no shame in that. I enjoy most of the people that I work with and, when I can really sink my teeth into a task, I like doing that too. The fact is, though, that what I do doesn’t challenge me intellectually in any way and there are times when I find myself wondering what my one-and-three-quarters master’s degrees are doing for me (I’ve paid a lot for them) if, instead of immersing myself in books and art, I’m pestering people (and making them unhappy in the process) to pick up a package or put their own damn dishes in the dishwasher. I spend forty hours a week doing things that aren’t my first love. The thought of doing an extra day of work, PLUS doing 2-3 hours more every week or two doing work that I already don’t have time to do at home (don’t ask me when the last time was that I mopped my bathroom floor or cleaned the toilet…I could tell you, but then I’d have to die of shame) is…hard. Torturous.

Not because it’s cleaning. I know there are people who love cleaning, for whom it would be perfect. Because it would be an intentional use of my already limited time doing something that I really loathe doing. It would eat into an already packed week, taking time away from my child, nibbling away at the only time during the week that I get to be truly creative, truly myself, truly free and happy.

I resent that. I resent that a rich person, who probably has the time to spare, can pay up-front for everything (and get a discount doing it), while someone like me, who doesn’t have as much in the way of resources and can’t pay up-front ALSO has to work even more to try to give my child the best education and experience that he can have. I’m frustrated with myself, for having made financial choices that affect my son negatively, and most of all, I fear that I’m being snobbish and awful not wanting to spend a few hours each week scrubbing school toilets. I feel like this makes me a terrible person and I don’t like that person I’m afraid it makes me.

First-world problems.

Bless my GP. She tries hard. She really does. She wants to understand HAES and wants to help me on my journey but sometimes we have these moments of complete disconnect, like after my appointment yesterday (yes, I got migraine meds and will take them if I need them). I cannot remember why I said it but mentioned that fat people are accused of having no will power but actually, I’ve got shedloads of will power. Will power =/= ability to change or emotional readiness. I meant it in the context of starting yoga, where I’m finally at the point where I’d do a class if I could find one that was affordable and worked with my schedule. She acknowledged that this was GREAT and then said “Have you tried Weight Watchers and their support groups?”

*headdesk*

I repeated the 95-97% of people gain back the weight statistic, she said “I know, I know…” and said that if there was anything she COULD do to help me with HAES, that she really did want to. And I believe her. She is trying.

But I thought…maybe I should send her a list. Send her a list like the one I gave my doctor back in the UK, which included every diet I’ve ever been on (at least that I can remember). I’ll expand it a bit, to include things I now know are significant that I didn’t see for the warning signs that they were then:

The list. Contains possibly painful/triggering descriptions of past diets, weight loss, and body hatred.

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Tags: diet history

I normally really like dreaming. I’ve been having lucid dreams (mixed with non-lucid) for a long time; I was six or seven when I learned that if I opened my eyes REALLY widely in a dream, it triggered something that would wake me up and take me out of a particularly terrifying nightmare. Since then I’ve had fairly few nightmares, all told, and I generally like exploring my dream world. The last couple of nights, on the other hand, have been disturbing.

Never fear, I won’t bore everyone with all the details – suffice it to say that in my dreams in the last two nights, I’ve been shot in the knee by a sniper while trying to turn in a paper that was late to a professor whose class (and then whose office) I could not find. I’ve been berated by an old friend for not keeping in touch and been engaged to a different old friend. Apparently my subconscious is exploring my lesbian side, which is fine but stressful when I’m trying to catch a flight after having lunch with a group of friends, but still haven’t been served ten minutes before I have to leave to catch the flight, and a cute Canadian customs official is after me about my US passport details, and I end up falling for him and have to confess this both to my female fiancee and to my real-life husband.

They’re horrifyingly realistic while I’m in them and I wake up still scared, only to realize with an overwhelming flood of exhausted relief that it was only a dream.

Stress much? I don’t need a therapist to tell you that I’ve got a lot on my mind, perhaps the largest portion of which is not something I can discuss in a public blog entry. I also feel that something is on the precipice of a huge change; what that something is, I don’t know, but all the possibilities are terrifying and I’m scared. Whether the latter is true I don’t know – what I do know is that the anxiety is causing the dreams and having both my waking and sleeping lives be stressful is tiring.

***

My legs hurt. I seized the three or four hours of windy-but-not-as-freezing-as-earlier hours of afternoon “nice” weather and used them to completely rearrange my deck garden. I put up shelves supported by bricks and concrete breezeblock (the latter helpfully put in place by my Strong!Dad!), shifted all the pots away from the wall to put up the shelves, and then shifted all the pots back on to the shelves, including a number that I repotted. This doesn’t seem like exhausting work, really, but my legs disagree – the muscles on the backs of my thighs are screaming in outraged protest.

And I kinda like it. I liked that I worked hard and that I’m feeling it in my body. I’m trying to figure out if this is a semi-masochistic old “EXERCISE HURTS BUT IT’S GOOD FOR YOU!” tape or what. I do, however, know that my recent desire to stretch is probably going to lead to a yoga class. If, that is, I can afford it. The first eight months of this year have been kicking/are kicking/will kick my butt in financial terms, so finding the money to go do something, even if it makes my body feel good, is hard.

We shall see.

And in the meantime, I’ll worry about that too.

P.S. I meant to say that the deck garden looks FABULOUS and I WILL take pictures, once I’ve got batteries in my camera again. It was a joy – pure and utter bliss – to see my perennials poking up shoots, and my container-hydrangea jabbing out new leaves, and my hellebores, primroses, and violets blooming away. A touch of much-needed life in this especially cold, dreary Seattle spring.

Faith-wise, I’m a bit of a puzzle, what with being an ethnic Mennonite (my last name marks me indelibly as someone with Mennonite heritage)/preacher’s kid/missionary kid/agnostic/questioning person but I follow folks like Jim Wallis of Sojourners, etc. just because spirituality still speaks so strongly to me. He’s fasting at the moment, is Jim Wallis, and I’ve found myself ambivalent about this; it’s his body, and his choice, but really? Fasting? Is there a point?

He’s not fasting for Lent, I don’t think, but it blended together with stories of friends giving things up for Lent: generally things like chocolate or frosting. I find myself…upset by this. If there is a God, what in the world does God care whether or not I have a cupcake piled with frosting, or a Haagen Dasz coffee crunch bar? How does it benefit my spirituality in any way? Why not give up the REALLY hard stuff, like criticizing our bodies? Why not go out on a limb and make a point of helping others – building a relationship with an elderly neighbor who is lonely and/or needs assistance, or something else that compels us to become servants, rather than giving up something that we’re just going to start eating again in forty days (and potentially disliking ourselves for?) Is that really healthy?

So then I thought, what would I give up, if I were to buy into this whole Lent-no-yummy-foods malarkey and I realized something. There is no food out there that would fit into the category of “negative craving” (if I bought into that idea in the first place, of course) that I could give up. Frosting? Well, last week work had a carrot cake to celebrate several birthdays all happening within a few days of each other. I was really craving sweet things that day, so I had a piece and thoroughly enjoyed the frosting (even if it WAS faux-shortening-buttercream). Then I was…done. I didn’t want any more frosting.

I craved a doughnut last week. My husband and I got a dozen mixed from Krispy Kreme, and an apple fritter. The apple fritter wasn’t worth eating, so I tossed it. The traditional unglazed cake that I got two of? Nasty, not worth eating, so I tossed them. I ended up eating two plain glazed and a maple bar in the space of three or four days. Finis. I probably wouldn’t eat a doughnut now if you sat one in front of me (maybe a doughnut hole, though).

Chips? Last week was an “I need ‘junk’ food week” – I pulled out one of the bags of Walker’s Sweet Thai Chilli crisps that I”ve been hoarding from our visit to the UK in January and ate it over the course of the week. This week? Not in the mood. This weekend was a fried chicken weekend – ate lots and now I’m done. If I were to eat anything right now, I’d go for a cucumber and tomato salad, or a mozzarella, basil, and tomato salad. I don’t want anything sweet.

I would crave those things more if I couldn’t have them – if I arbitrarily said that I couldn’t have chocolate and denied it to myself. As it is, I might want another doughnut in a month or two, or maybe not. I might want chips earlier than that, because I prefer savory treats, but I’m not in the mood for them now. There is no single food that I MUST HAVE every day (or want every day but deny myself) that I could give up. A few years ago, that wouldn’t have been true.

Progress has been made. Slow progress, but progress. For me, that is. Obviously there are those who find food restrictions a spiritual experience, and I’m glad that works for them – for me, it’s far more important that these days I don’t have anything that I could restrict and have it be meaningful in any way (namely, that I’d be thinking about it frequently enough to miss it, unless it were salad/vegetables/fruit!) because I allow myself to eat what I want, as much as I want, when I want it…and consequently have far fewer cravings in general and no cravings that I need ever feel that I must deny.

Do you give up food for Lent? What does it do for you?

So, I appear to be metamorphosing into some sort of brain-addled version of me. I’ve had a headache, you see, for over a week now. Closer to two weeks, really, except for a weekend in there when it disappeared and then came promptly back again on Monday. It ebbs when I take ibuprofen, or it might be gone when I wake up, only to come drip drip dripping back into my head as I sit down at my desk. I’m tired, feeling nauseated over the last few days (no, I’m quite certain I’m not pregnant, so there’s no need to ask me if I could be) and I just want it to GO AWAY.

My mom and sister are prone to migraines. I’ve never had them, at least not that Im aware of, until I had two visual/aura migraines earlier this year (flashing light but no pain), but I’m wondering if this is some kind of low-grade migraine that’s driving me ’round the bend. Because seriously. GO AWAY.

GO AWAY! Is that clear?!

Yes, I have an appointment with my doctor next week. In the meantime, I’ve taken one of a colleague’s stash of Excedrin Migraine to see if it helps. I’ve got two projects due in a week, never mind work, and a little boy, and and and…

GO AWAY. HEADACHE GO AWAY.

The sick thing is, I’m vacillating between terror that IT’S A TUMOR! and terror that IT’S HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE BECAUSE I’M FAT! and, really, hypochondria is no fun.

Argh. Return to your normally scheduled happy programming!