What was I doing?

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Longtime readers know I occasionally get fixated on bellybutton-gazing-type pointless ponderings, and then feel the need to share. This weekend was all about the human capacity to consume mass amounts of information, and then fuggetaboutit.

In college I had this professor, who was absolutely phenomenal, in spite of the fact that her classes never actually covered what they were meant to. She spoke several languages, and said she had forgotten several as well. She spent a year in the Amazon doing research for her doctorate, and learned to speak the local dialect, but not long after her study was complete forgot most of what she learned. It’s not uncommon, tons of people grow up and forget a language they knew quite well as a child. Or perhaps you took French all four years of high school, and then in college, and spent six months in Paris for a study abroad program, and now you can barely order foie gras (gross). It’s amazing, really, to think a person could spend the time to learn a language fluently, only to have it slip away from disuse.

I have two degrees in Anthropology, and spent countless hours studying, writing, and cramming my head with theories. Maybe, and this is a big maybe, I retained 15% of what I learned. Yes, I remember the basic principals and theories and whatnot, but no longer the specifics of who said what, when and in what context. That’s pretty pathetic, especially considering the amount I have left to pay off my student loans, and years of my life I dedicated to my studies. On the other hand, fifteen percent is a hell of a lot more than I remember from high school, and if I had to put a percentage on the information I retained from those years, it would probably be .00000001%. So maybe I got my money’s worth in college after all.

Anyway, I’m more interested in the things we forget aside from what we learned in school. It’s one thing to fill your head with information for a test, vomit it out, and then forget about it when it no longer serves a purpose. It’s an entirely different thing when we forget something physical, like pain, which we fortunately have the ability to push out of our minds. Just ask anyone with multiple tattoos or piercings, or better yet, a mother with multiple kids.

To me, the most bizarre form of forgetting is when it’s personal, like names of people and places and restaurants we once knew. Sometimes we forget things we shouldn’t, and as a result end up making the same mistake repeatedly. I’m sure everyone knows a person that swears off dating assholes, and then conveniently forgets all about it when the next douche bag comes along.

Our capacity to forget about heartbreak can be both good and bad. Yes, it’s harmful when a person consistently falls for the wrong person, each time neglecting (often purposefully) to remember how painful it is when the relationship goes south. However, forgetting heartbreak is probably more useful than not. It allows us to get over that bad relationship, or maybe the good one that we thought would never end but did, and move on with life. And how could one possibly bear to start anew with another person if they couldn’t let go of their previous breakup?

Okay, end bellybutton time. I have errands to run, and of course, forgot where I put my keys. Happy Monday y’all.

A ninja, Mom, not a Ninja Turtle.

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My mom is a character. She’s a lot of fun, and also very funny, though she doesn’t always mean to be. Remember when I told you guys about my tendency to get things wrong? Well that trait came from my mother. Once, my dad relayed a story he read in the paper about a rash of robberies perpetrated by men dressed like ninjas. My mom’s response was, “What do they do about their shells?”

My dad looked at her with confusion and asked what she meant.

“You know, their shells. Wouldn’t that get in the way?” This time she pointed at her back with her hands. My dad was silent for a moment before he burst out laughing and said, “Ninjas, like nunchucks, not Ninja Turtles.”

So, yeah, I come by it rightly.

For the last fifteen years or so, she’s worked with Alzheimer patients and the elderly. She’s quite gifted at it, really. I admire her for this, because it certainly isn’t easy. Unlike other societies, where the elderly are revered, we have a tendency to forget about our senior-est of citizens. Not my mom, she does all she can to make their days enjoyable.

I’ve visited my mom at work on occasion over the years, and while her patients with Alzheimer’s might not know who she is, they do know they love her. Their faces light up when my mom walks into the room, and she has a way of getting through to people that are normally unresponsive. Part of that is because she is a patient and caring woman, but there’s another ingredient too – she likes to have fun, and she wants every one else to have a good time as well. She’s always been that way.

Growing up, I had the best slumber parties. All my girlfriends loved my mom, and she went out of her way to make sure we had a blast. And we always did, so much so that my poor dad would drag a blanket and pillow into their bathroom, which was furthest away from the sound of screaming and giggling girls, and sleep in the bathtub. My mom, with enough whining from us, would also agree to cart us through the neighborhood to toilet paper houses. This, by the way, wasn’t as bad as it sounds. We only TP’d our friends’ houses, or maybe some boy one of us had a crush on. All our parents knew each other, so there were no hard feelings. Usually. 

I was in the 8th grade, and a gaggle of girls were spending the night, one of which had a big puppy love crush on some guy that none of us knew. So, we convinced my mom to take us to TP his house. When we got to the street where the guy lived, the girl with the crush was suddenly unsure of which house was his. My mom became concerned, because while it was okay to let your hoodlum children toilet paper the house of someone you knew from PTA meetings, vandalizing a stranger’s house was bad parenting. Or something. Anyway, my friend finally figured out which house it was, my mom pulled around the block, and out we tumbled from the car, each with a roll of TP in hand. Approximately one minute after we began tossing rolls into the trees, a very, very angry man ran outside shouting obscenities. So we split. I hid in a bush two houses down with a friend, and we could hear the angry guy yelling and the sounds of feet hitting the pavement as he tried to chase my friends down. Eventually he came back to his house, where he stood for a minute or two muttering, before he went back inside. As soon as the door shut we took off down the block to find my mom.

Who, as it turned out, was no longer there.

I will never forget my friend’s shocked reaction. She repeatedly said, “I can’t believe your mom left us” while we walked home. I couldn’t believe it either. About five minutes later my mom pulled up next to us with eyes as big as saucers, looking frantic and blabbering a million miles a minute. Apparently, in their hurry to get away from the pissed off homeowner, my friends piled into my mom’s car like sardines and shouted at her to leave. There were so many girls, all of which were yelling over one another to tell her what happened, that my mom never noticed two of us were missing. It wasn’t until they returned to our house that everyone realized I wasn’t in the car.

Needless to say, that incident scared my mom off of being our toilet paper transportation. It was too bad, she was a great getaway driver.

Happy Friday, y’all. And all you mamma’s out there have a wonderful Mother’s Day.

Food shouldn’t be an enemy. Neither should your body.

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You know, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve considered writing a post about women and eating disorders. Lately I’ve read a number of disturbing things, both articles and blog posts, that finally prompted me to address the issue. There’s so much to say that I could probably write posts on the topic for the next month.

Take this morning, for example – I read this article in Marie Claire about juicing. In a nutshell, there is a lot of concern that juice cleansing has the potential to lead to an eating disorder, or exacerbate one already in existence.

My response to that information was, no shit.

I was 21 when I first heard about the Master Cleanse. It was right after I moved to Los Angeles, and the woman that told me about it extolled the virtues of detoxing, which conveniently included losing at least ten pounds. As soon as I learned the cleanse consisted of nothing but water, cayenne pepper, lemon juice and maple syrup for ten days, I said no thanks. I’d much rather eat normal food and work out.

Later, I worked with a girl that did the Master Cleanse every three or four months. She’d lose a ridiculous amount of weight, and be bitchy the entire time she cleansed (probably because she was fucking starving). Then she’d go off it and regain all the weight, plus a little more. It was hard to watch. Although, and I hate to admit this, there were a lot of girls at work, myself included, that sort of admired her strength to be able to complete the cleanse without eating. How messed up is that?

This was over a dozen years ago, long before Demi Moore started tweeting about the Master Cleanse. Now detoxing and juice cleansing are all the rage, and touted by celebrities and personal trainers as being healthy. There is nothing you can say to convince me that sort of behavior is good for you. We are meant to eat, for Pete’s sake. Sure, okay, you eliminate all the toxins from your body and blah blah blah, but if you fill it back up with crap again, then so what? That’s called yo-yo dieting, and pretty much everyone agrees it’s bad for you. But if you refer to it as ‘cleansing’, somehow that makes it okay? Nope, I’m not buying it.

I have a theory that almost all women suffer from some form of eating or body dysmorphic disorder, and that a lot of them probably won’t admit it. I don’t have any scientific facts to back this up, however, I’ve known very few females in my life that have a healthy attitude about food. I suppose there have been a few here and there, but by and large, almost every woman had some sort of issue with food and/or their body (which usually go hand in hand). Issue, by the way, can mean any number of things. Some binged and purged, some just binged, some went through periods of anorexia, or worked out like madwomen so they could eat cupcakes and candy bars. Working out is good, I try to do it daily, but working out for two hours straight so you can eat a pound of chocolate for dinner is not healthy. I’ve known women that obsessively counted calories, turned food into points, and refused to eat on any day that ends in Y.

I’d like to say it comes from living in Los Angeles for most of my adult life, and it’s no secret LA is a very looks obsessed city. But, growing up in Texas, practically every girl I knew had a problem of some sort too. Girls constantly worried about being overweight, even though most of them weren’t. Sadly, the result of that mentality was that there were many girls with moderate to severe eating disorders. And the notion of skinny as some sort of virtue didn’t just come from the girls themselves, it also came from their mothers. Everyone was always on some kind of diet, and I’m sure if anyone knew what juicing was at the time, they all would have done that too.

I don’t believe this is a new phenomenon, it’s just more out in the open now. This fixation with body perfection has been around for a long time. Earlier this season on Mad Men, there was a scene in which Sally Draper accused her mother of monitoring her food intake. Sally would be only a few years younger than my own mother. If the women I know in that age range are any example, then I think many young females of that era were indeed pressured by their mothers to be thin. And their mothers, I’m sure, felt similar pressure in their youth. And so the cycle goes.

That isn’t to say the cultural obsession with being thin stems solely from our mothers – the media plays a large part. But sickly skinny models and photoshop are a post for another day. I only bring up the Mad Men example as a way of saying the issues of food shaming and eating disorders goes back quite a ways in our society. It is deeply ingrained.

I’d like to think we grow out of having unreasonable expectations regarding our bodies. I did, but it didn’t happen until my mid 20s. Prior to that I always thought I would look perfect if only I were five pounds thinner. The funny thing was, I’d lose those five pounds, and I’d still think I needed to lose five more. It was silly. I couldn’t give you any one thing that acted as a catalyst for me to stop thinking that way, I guess it was a combination of growing up and becoming more secure in who I was as a person. That’s a vague explanation, isn’t it?

Perhaps the thing that’s kept me from writing about eating and body issues is that I don’t have a solution. I wish I did, because it’s very difficult for young girls to navigate their way through all this, and probably more so today than it was for previous generations.

Old School

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Over the weekend I was dancing around the living room while listening to New Order when my husband moseyed in and sat down. I stopped what I was doing and offered to change the tunes, because he hates New Order, but he shrugged and said it was all right so long as dancing was involved.

Earlier in the day we had to go to Home Depot for something, and he told me how, when he was a kid, he and his friends used to go there to buy sheets of linoleum. They’d spray it down with pine sol and practice break dancing. I can’t even begin to tell you how entertaining it is for me to imagine my man doing this, because in all the years we’ve been together, I’ve never seen him bust a move. Well, actually, that’s not true. Before we started dating, we went out partying with some mutual friends, and while walking down the street at about midnight he did a little b-boy spin on the sidewalk. But other than that, nothing. Maybe I need to purchase some linoleum.

Anyway, it’s a good thing we didn’t meet when we were fifteen, because we would not have been friends. Our musical tastes were drastically different.

I was all:

Man, was I angsty. I also spent a considerable amount of time sneaking cigarettes in the girl's bathroom.

Man, was I angsty. I also spent a considerable amount of time sneaking cigarettes in the girl’s bathroom.

And he was all:

My husband was super blond, on the track team, and practiced break dancing in his spare time, apparently.

My husband was super blond, on the track team, and not hell bent on being a rebel without a cause like me. Then again, he did practice break dancing in his spare time, and attended a small, private Christian school where dancing wasn’t allowed, so I guess he was a bit of a rebel after all.

I’m fairly certain he would have thought I was weird, and I would have thought he was lame. There was a brief time during our preteen years in the 80s, however, when we might have had music in common.

Can I get a hell yes from those of you suddenly taken back to their sixth grade dance?