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Reading: Littlejohn and Richard II Moving: 30'10" Nordic Track: 3.35 miles. I should warm up. Also 100 crunches and 100 leg lifts. Listening: Black Crowes and Pearl Jam Watching: Gorgeous weather |
19 December 2000: FatYeah, yeah, like exercising four of the past five days means anything. It's not enough to build up a pattern, let alone a habit. Especially when the third day was spent baking and eating Christmas cookies with Haitch. But it's a start. Last winter and spring, when I belonged to the Y, I don't know why I felt no discernable change. I went to the gym four days a week, stayed an extra half hour at work so I could take a 90-minute lunch for a full hour and more in the gym, stair-mastered every session, and did at least a section of the weight circuit. And I sweat. Late in my tenure, a woman I work with whom I had always considered to be matronly and judged to be rather broad in the beam, a descrption I picked up from Patrick Dennis, showed up in an introductory tour one day. Always such a generous, benefit-of-the-doubt-ing person, I thought something along the lines of "ha." Eight months later she has lost fucking thirty-five pounds and lengthened her stride, and her shoulders have de-stooped somewhat. Meanwhile, I fit into fewer and fewer of my clothes. Meanwhile, my shoulders are becoming rounder. Meanwhile, I notice in photographs the fat in my arms and how wide my hips are. Meanwhile, that copy box of ten reams of paper feels heavier than it used to. Meanwhile, I have less energy and collapse into sluggishness with less reason, less prompting. A pre-emptive question: do I always notice when one year follows another's calendar? Not always. But when my anniversary falls on a Saturday, I know that the year is following 1995's calendar and that RDC's birthday will be a Monday, which was the day I started at Hateful. I worked that first full week at Hateful with a cold toward the end. Somewhere in there the office manager told me there was a gym in the basement. Mostly free but for a five-dollar deposit for a passkey. Then it was Thanksgiving. The Monday after Thanksgiving, promptly at noon, I started. I started on a stationary bike because I hadn't used a StairMaster (which is what I call all of them, failing to distinguish among LifeSteps or any other brand) since my second stint at UConn (ending May 1994). Soon after the new year--1996-- moved to the StairMaster. That machine was mine. I probably pushed my heartrate into the dangerous zone almost every day. I poured sweat. I pumped two-pound handweights--no holding the handrails for me. Four or five days a week, 30 minutes at least. I don't recall how many floors or calories or whatever the measurement, but it hurt in that wonderful way exercise can. Three minutes of cooldown on the stairs, and later an additional five or ten minutes on the treadmill with the incline cranked up as high as it would go. Eventually I started doing a few weights on the limited Nautilus. Plus I did abdominal exercises then as well as in the morning before work--it was a long lunch hour. In addition to all this, we were poor. There were few desserts, no snacks, and my office was in DTC, the Denver Tech Center, office buildings in the middle of the plains. You couldn't walk to the post office or a cobbler or any shop at all, let alone a library or a museum or any number of restaurants and can I emphasize how much I love working downtown? So I ate the lunch I brought with me (a cheese sandwich) and nothing else during the day. That helped too. By February, I was noticeably sleeker. I had not been to Aspen since Christmas, and my sister and her roommate both commented on how much thinner my face was. I went out dancing with everyone after work--and this is restaurant work, so "after work" meant "well after my usual bedtime"--and danced and danced and danced with my new and improved aerobic capacity. In hiking boots, too, because it was past midnight in Aspen and February and that's what I, practical fuddyduddy that I am, was wearing. Round about April, with the weather warmer and with me just beaten down with hating the job, at which I spent many pointless idle hours, with being poor, with being in Denver away from water, with a pointless argument with my once-best friend, I needed the sunshine. I went for runs that were more walks at lunch. I sat on the grass next to fake pond and read. In sum, I worked out less. In June that job and I went our separate ways. In July I started temping for a consulting firm that needed me 45 hours a week--8 to 5:30. I had a half hour for lunch and no gym. Grandiose plans to exercise before or after work never came to fruition--I might have done some crunches of a morning, but that was it. Lunchtime had been a great time for me to work out--I wasn't at home, couldn't go home, I was already up and awake, and exercise was a great stress reducer at a job I loathed and despised. I have never been good at waking up earlier to exercise when I could be sleeping, but occasionally I had been good at exercise between work and home. When I graduated from college in December of 1990 and moved home for the eight months before starting grad school, for Christmas my father bought me membership to his gym. It was immediately on my way home, the only detour being its actual driveway, and both my parents belonged too. It's not as if I had a social life in Old Lyme that going to the gym impeded, and after January of that year there was, sadly, no dog waiting at home to be let out and fed. I took aerobic classes with my mother and pedaled stationary bikes side-by-side with my father. That was kind of nice. (Also in the gym that winter of 1991, I got addicted to CNN.) Back at UConn that fall, exercise continued to be a great stress reducer. I was thin without noticeable effort from the summer of 1991, when I got all heartbreaky and miserable--and went off the pill--until I left UConn again in May 1994 and was again on the pill. I swam a lot and used the aerobic machines--StairMaster and bikes and treadmills--occasionally. Swimming was hardly a sacrifice and I did that a lot, and later I lived in a household of fit, exercising people so I could coast along in the wake of their discipline, and later still when I lived with RDC, I had to walk through or around the field house to leave campus and get to our apartment. Then I left UConn and failed to pin down a good job. I temped a lot, worked at Kinko's, and floundered in northeastern Connecticut. My dressmaker noticed that I gained some weight between my first measurements, in mid-winter 1995, and spring. Under my wedding dress that June, I wore one of those vicious backless strapless bras that cinch around your tummy in an unsuccessful attempt to buttress themselves enough to hold up your breasts, but its constricting me wasn't the only reason I had a distinct paunch under its waistband. Then in the late fall and winter of 1995 and 1996, I exercised compusively as described above and was as fit and trim as dog food, and then I didn't. My father visited us in Denver in September '96 and I took him to a Colorado Rockies game--my first and last, I hope, professional sporting event. We had gone out to dinner beforehand and, sitting in the stands, I noticed the waistband of the jeans I had bought the weekend before I started at Hateful was uncomfortable to the point I unbuttoned it. At the time, that was a purely after-a-meal effect, or so I thought. Two weeks later my mother visited us. (The one-two shot. Oof.) She wanted to make me a suit for Christmas (and that's a story too). To show her what I liked, I modeled the sleeveless apricot suit CLH had lent me the summer before to wear to Renaissance (her restaurant) and later gave me. I wore it--I wore the hell out of it, to paraphrase Terri McMillan--temping late summer and early fall 1995, and again in spring and summer 1996. Now, in fall, my mother said, "But that suit's too small for you." And so it was, just months after I had enjoyed my peak physical condition as an adult. I mean, in May of that year I had been so thin that I had worn long underwear under my jeans, a pair of pale blue Gap jeans I'd bought as an undergrad and not the huge baggy things all the hip kids are wearing nowadays. It's four years later and that suit's even smaller for me. That September, the buttons down the front of the sleeveless jacket had gaped a bit. I tried to tell myself this was because I had swum so much in the apartment complex's pool that summer, but the truth was that my bosom was back. If I could zip the waist of the skirt now, which I doubt, my arse and hips would consume so much cloth that the skirt would be even shorter, showing even more of legs that no longer should be displayed. Happily, the houndstooth, winter interview suit I bought in November 1996 still fits, jacket and skirt. But the linen, summer interview suit I bought when I left UConn in May of 1994 does not. I cannot button the trousers, though the jacket is boxy enough that it does not gap. The other day I mentioned clothes I bought in 1989 and 1991 that I no longer fit. After ten years, some people might exonerate me from them. What about the yellow silk sheath, spring 1994, which no longer falls empty over my hips but is filled by them? What about the denim shorts overalls--winter 1996--I love and adore but which now make me look like a barrel? What about the only non-jeans pair of trousers I own, khakis also from winter of 1996, which I cannot now wear first because of panty lines and more recently because of the waist? And the others? The Perfect Little Black Dress, linen, square-necked, wide-strapped, short-skirted, $45 down from $80 in Filene's the spring 1990 shopping with my friend Anne from Millstone? Another woman might wear it as snug as it is, but not me. When SSP saw me in it for the first time, he fell out of his chair. When I went out to play pool with LKW and CXJ in it two years later, it didn't have the effect on CXJ that I had intended but a lot of LKW's friends at the pool hall asked her boyfriend for my number. It doesn't look that good on me anymore. The Other Little Black Dress, rayon, scoop-necked, wide-strapped, slit-skirted, another hand-me-down from CLH, that I wore to JUMB and AMB's surprise 30th anniversary party in June 1994? Skirt's too tight across the hips. The beautiful sleeveless teal linen dress that buttons all the down the front that RDC bought me because it was Right, despite its being Right Out of the Budget, when we saw it while shopping for his mother's birthday present, May 1994? I can wear it, but when I sit the buttons at lap-level gape. The dress that typifies, for CLH, my crunchy approach to wardrobe, the lavender paisley dial-a-dress jumper I found at Jordan Marsh May 1987 while looking for sundresses, that has been my favorite dress for 13 years now despite not having, since my last Tretorns went belly-up, shoes for it? It's not meant to be fitted--a fellow at Millstone asked me why, built as I was (this was summer of 1989, when I was unnaturally thin), I dressed like Annie Hall--but the top button, the one at my waist, is snug. The fleece pants RDC gave me for Christmas in 1998, so that I wouldn't have to wear jeans over insulated long underwear (an impossibility by then anyway) or bibbed nylon ski pants when I just wanted to play outside in the snow? They're not meant to be baggy, but the sight of me in them--from, say, brunch at NBM's back in October--forces me to acknowledge that I am now Agnes Gooch, Auntie Mame's broad-in-the-beam secretary, and, unlike for Agnes, Auntie Mame's encouragement, "Nothing that a good girdle can't fix," doesn't work for me. The ski pants that RDC bought me winter of 1994, to encourage me skiing? Okay, the reason I hated skiing my first time, February 1993 at Okemo, wasn't entirely due to the jeans-over-long-underwear that I could pull off, though movement would certainly have been easier had I been otherwise garbed. I liked my morning lesson on the bunny slope just fine. If, after their morning besting each other, CXJ and RDC had, say, tested my abilities before ruthlessly bundling me onto a lift away from the near-horizontal bunny slope and expecting me to be able to manage a green run that I remember as being steep as the Eiffel Tower, then maybe I wouldn't've fallen numerous times and been miserable and wet and stomped down the mountain carrying my skis over my shoulder and gotten as steamed as Yosemite Sam and sworn off the sport forever. Getting ski pants the following winter, 1994, did help. I even did Excelsior at Whiteface Mountain near Lake Placid that spring break. Go me. Those ski pants now? Hoo boy, ask me how tight they are in the crotch. My arse and belly just consume too much fabric. Now ask me how happy I am that we plan to snowshoe this winter to save ski-lift money, that I don't have to wear the stupid boots (even more uncomfortable now that my calves are even fatter, but bone-breakers even when I'm not bovine) or the stupid pants. So. In December 1997, I came home to a huge wrapped box in the living room. I wondered that RDC had bought bookshelves, which we needed badly, without asking me, but that annoyance was nothing to what I felt when I unwrapped the thing and found a Nordic Track, which was even less in the budget than shelves. The Nordic Track provoked me into confronting him about this really extravagant foible of his, earlier examples of which I've forgotten and later ones including the kitting out of the television shrine this summer, the digital camera he gave me last Christmas (I was going to render him one on paper out of 0s and 1s), and Blake's bigger cage a couple of years ago (something that we had in fact decided on but which was a done deal when I got home so that I didn't even get to see Blake exploring his new digs). In the fall of 1997, I was taping Northern Exposure every morning. After the Nordic Track joined our happy home, I Tracked to Northern Exposure (fast-forwarding through commercials) all winter long. Then it was summer again, and I biked and swam and hiked. In the fall of 1998, TNT started playing ER, but--marvel, OMFB, at my rationalizing--at 5:00. When I got home, I could either Nordic Track to the broadcast (and deal with commercials), or tape it to exercise to later in the evening, but that wouldn't work, everybody knows that, because if I don't exercise within ten minutes of getting home, I'm not going to exercise at all. So it goes. Haitch and I used to walk five miles almost every Sunday. That hasn't happened in a long time. Then there's the house. This summer, in the house instead of an apartment complex, I had no pool. I swam a mile twice a week, but not the casual laps at the complex pool every evening. Closer to downtown, we stroll through City Park instead of walking 3.5 miles up and down the Highline Canal. I walk 2.5 miles one way to work and bus home instead of pedaling 13 miles round-trip. It was so hot all summer long I barely moved. Often, if not every day, I buy lunch. And now I'm fatter than ever. In the house, the Nordic Track is permanently set up in the family room. In the one-bedroom apartment, there was no room, and between uses it lived folded up in the walk-in closet in the bedroom. In the two-bedroom, it lived mostly set up in the study. You only had to unfold one bit, and you could listen to music in the study or wheel it into the living room and watch television. Now, you can exercise to television or music or movies and the track is permanently unfolded and set up. Because the ceilings are low, it's on the lowest possible elevation. I could shift it higher since I'm a few inches shorter than RDC, but at least I don't have to wrangle the upright and lock it into place. I want this motivation to last. I had planned to start the Monday after Thanksgiving, as I did in 1995--those perpetual calendars forever assigning Meaning to innocent days that haven't even happened yet. I know I have to eat lunch--Monday and Friday and yesterday and today I did, and I worked out happily, while Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of last week I neither ate nor exercised. I know I have to exercise immediately after getting home, which means RDC has to vacate the couch and CNN, despite "Moneyline with Stuart Varney." I know I have to just do it, and in a few weeks my elevated spirits, general feeling of superiority, and improved self-image will have enough momentum to carry me forward. And then, of course, it will be spring again, warm and poolless. But perhaps by then I will have also motivated enough to get a dog. Walkies! Meanwhile, Haitch and I should spend more Sundays walking and fewing baking cookies. Which was also fun, if not wholly successful. The chocolate rolled cookies have nutmeg and cloves and cinnamon in them. I'm not all that adept at transferring cookies between cookie cutter and baking sheet. Those that weren't amputated by my clumsiness were still too spicy for Haitch's taste. Then the chocolate snowballs, or snowrocks, whose batter is delicious but whose recipe, I have decided, cannot be modified. I have always made them with butter counting on better taste and healthfulness, butter instead of shortening. And they never come out right. In a recent issue of Food and Wine, in a column about making biscuits, the author says that substituting Crisco for lard sacrices flavor, and substituting butter for Crisco sacrifices texture. So, damn it, health be hanged, I'm going to make another batch with hydrogenated oil. Hopefully those will be poofy, nice little half-domes, instead of the flat, too-crispy snowrocks I make. The cream cheese pressed cookies turned out fine but weren't as fun for Haitch as they should have been because she couldn't get the hang of the press. I suggesting doing that thing you do with your parents, putting a hand on the gear shift or whatever to get a feel for it before doing it yourself. She did a super job dyeing the batter anyway. We have green Christmas trees and blue-marbled flowers and would have red flowers if I hadn't run out of red dye. Oh, and to finalize the batter I took out a pastry cutter, which would mix such a stiff batter better than a spoon, whereupon Haitch suggested a mixer. I have never used a mixer for cookie batter. That poor thing chugged along (on "whip," the highest setting) and got its blades full of batter, whereupon I would lift them out and they'd spin themselves free, flinging batter hither and yon, but mostly hither--I didn't get any on my shirt, f'rinstance. Haitch held on to the bucking bowl--it was some tenacious batter--and I was glad RDC didn't walk in. Years ago Haitch and I were making smoothies in the blender but I had kind of forgotten the rubber ring that goes between the pitcher and the blade, the ring that keeps the stuff in the pitcher in the pitcher, so when I turned on the power frozen blueberry juice ran out the bottom. Our laughter attracted RDC, who was extremely displeased, but he didn't have a sense of humor that year. After presents and pizza, Haitch gathered her things and I got a ziplock for her to take cookies home in. I knew she didn't like the rolled cookies, and I asked about snowrocks. She just looked at me. Nothing like a friend you don't have to lie to. Last night after exercising, after dinner, I made mochaccinos. These I didn't even suggest in front of Haitch. I tried to tempt her with one once, and she bit into it happily and chewed a few times before noticing the coffee flavor. She spit it out. The recipe calls for unsweetened cappuccino mix, which as far as I know doesn't exist, so RDC reduces a mess of coffee for me, getting a lot of flavor out of very little liquid. Also it calls for ground hazelnuts, and a cookie press. You've got to grind those hazelnuts to dust, otherwise chips get stuck in the press. And since the batter is brown and solid anyway, you really don't want hazelnut chunks in it making its texture even more like dog poop. With that appetizing lead-in, I have to say that they're really yummy. A little chalky, which makes them good for dipping, but powerfully coffee-y, powerfully chocolately, and a little hazelnutty. And I rolled some more cookies and decorated them in my expert fashion. But I have to get some more cocoa before I can make hydrogenated snowrocks. --- I am reading Littlejohn again. I decided on it as good fodder for the 3WA Guess the Author thread, opened it at random, typed in a quote, and immediately was caught up. This book is so fraught with painful truths, told so simply, so subtly, that you can't get through a paragraph without being wracked by empathy. Except for the sections Georgia tells, which are weak. Suzey suggested this book in our last year in Storrs. I miss her; I miss having a personal relationship with my book purveyor. I sound like a born-again book-buyer. As I am. I lent it to my father when he visited and wondered what he'd make of it. I knew he'd like Littlejohn, as anyone who loves dirt under his fingernails would, but it's a hard book to read, and I don't mean for Owens's vocabulary (which isn't obscure) or penchant for playing fast and loose with linear narration--unlike Beloved, at least every chapter is dated so while they're not linear you know when you are. I should have just bought myself another and let him keep that copy--he did like it--because I think he was offended when, two years later, I asked for it back. I am like a dragon with my books. Smaug felt the smallest cup that Bilbo took, and I lent Sooby Into the Wild over a year ago and can feel it missing. That's an easy one to replace and I shouldn't be so possessive. Speaking of Smaug. Last night as I toiled with my cookies, listening first to Christmas music and then, what else, the Cowboy Junkies, RDC called from his study that he'd downloaded something for me. He started playing it when I was in the middle of something sticky and uninterruptable, and I didn't pay much attention over Whites Off Earth Now or the rattle of baking sheets on oven racks. I could barely make out the voice, which was male, British, and old. I couldn't hear distinct words. I could tell it was Tolkien though. RDC found a 1952 recording of JRRT reading The Two Towers. I've only read The Lord of the Rings through two or three times, and listened to a Recorded Books Inc. production of it the summer of 1996 (that was a treat--George Guidall's voice makes me weak in the knees). But I could sense the rhythm of the language. Tolkien. I read Littlejohn instead of Richard II over breakfast, and on the bus since both our Shakespeare anthologies--RDC has Pelican; I have Riverside--are not bus-sized, and over lunch. There aren't a lot of literary characters I want to take in my arms and rock and hug and also emphatically shake the hand of, especially adult characters. Atticus I'd ask to adopt me. Or, if he wouldn't lay his hand on the top of my head in his one gesture of affection, just to shake my hand. Of course I'd love to tickle Bigwig behind the ears--but I'd shake Hazel's paw. I'd play with Mandy, squeeze the stuffing out of Aslan--hmm, that sounds bad, like when Shift put the skin over Puzzle--and listen to Salamanca's stories. Littlejohn wouldn't take kindly to a stranger, especially a female one, asking for a hug, of course. But I'm sure he'd be glad of a smile from a stranger. --- Knowing state trivia is a little perq of of the job. Ages ago I learned (the hard way) which state is bordered by the most other states, and how many and which they are. Today I was tallying how many people to make a reservation for, on my fingers. Apparently there is a way to add or multiply this way--Holling did it in "Northern Exposure," which is of course definitive--but I only know how to count up to 99. Your right fingers are one through four, your thumb five. Forefinger is one, forefinger plus thumb is six. Your left forefinger is ten, your left thumb fifty. So. Watching this, Tex held out his fists to show which months have 31 days--the knuckles have 31, including the left and right hands' forefingers next to each other as July and August, and the trough months have 30 or 28. You could maybe cut a deeper trough between your left pinkie and ring finger if you couldn't otherwise remember that February has 28 or 29. This reminded me of some how-your-mind-works puzzle, by which you recite the months in chronological or alphabetical order. Chronological I can do like singing the alphabet. I can do alphabetical, but I have to think about it. Tex left out January, July, and June before giving up at October. So Tex told me about the Ur-boss who knows everything about the states--the names of every legislator for the past 25 years, plus legislative staff--and their trivia. Which state capital has three words in it? I immediately warmed up with Baton Rouge and Little Rock but then drew a blank, so I did my circus act. I can name not only all the states easily, but in alphabetical order, plus the capitals:
It took me to Tennessee to think of Salt Lake City. And I confess I drew a total blank at New Hampshire and left out the Norths until I got to the Souths. Anyway, the state bordered by the most other states is Tennessee. Clockwise from the north: Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Missouri. Eight. Of course, I always remember the number seven, but working around the map in my head I can name the eight. Anyway, apparently there are lots of other such three-word capitals, bordered by how many, trivia questions coming my way soon. I am the Terrible Trivium. Speaking of the Terrible Trivium, I noticed a New Thing at Amazon the other day, the Amazon equivalent of the Lists of Fives, the desert island books. I started culling ISBNs for the usual suspects--Watership Down, To Kill a Mockingird, Possession, A Wrinkle in Time, Phantom Tollbooth (hence the Terrible Trivium reminder), and then I remembered why, indeed, Amazon is Just Not Good Enough. I can't put Mandy, The Shadow Guests, or The Avatars on an Amazon list. Just because Amazon can't make a profit on them doesn't mean they're not Necessary books. |
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