Just yer 19th Nervous Breakdown

Most of the day was pretty good. I’m feeling a little sore throaty, and I’m not sure if that’s the clean sinuses plus the smoking, or the purge, or some combination of the two.

In my body I’m having weird things – neti pot related, I can actually FEEL the sinuses in my forehead and under my pituitary when I’m done cleaning them – purge related, I am losing an old sensation I get from time to time of having like, thick sludge in my bloodstream, and kind of feel tingly blood flow under my skin in some places. (My arms and face. Get your minds out of the gutter.)

So I typed up the days one through five entry, and then in the middle of it Scott got home and I was all of a sudden very very GROUCHY! Man, if he had set out to go to the store and buy every single thing I am not eating right now he could not have done one millionth of a percent better than he did not even trying.

THEN, oh, THEN, he decided that THAT? That moment right there? That was the moment that he decided it would be PERFECT to go over all the things you could recycle and how much you can get for recycled BRASS! COPPER! And Amy Amy Amy – Did you KNOW? Did you EVEN KNOW? That it is less expensive to recycle aluminum than it is to mine bauxite to produce it? And somehow he had misinterpreted Scott, I DON’T CARE, to mean Scott, if you keep telling me this then I WILL CARE, and the more I tried to explain him that no, I really didn’t? Well, the more recycling facts he pulled right out of thin air. And then my head exploded.

GAH. I was in this whole long rant of like – you didn’t even READ the labels and why are you feeding the kids all of the things I am reflecting on the utility of and OMG ICE CREAM IS NOT A FRICKIN NECESSITY. I swear on all that is holy he shops like he’s stoned.

Then I went off on a rant about how he NEVER supports me with the kids and, as if to prove my hypothesis, he got in the middle of something I was asking the kids not to do and explained why he thought it was an okay thing to do, (which, was, by the way, going into our room when we’re not home to make sure we’re turning all the electricity in the house off and OH MY GOD I JUST WANT SOME PRIVATE SPACE IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK?????)

Then I realized that I was very much reacting to the whole evening much like Charlie does when he gets angry or upset. Charlie’s a pretty laid back guy, but when he gets upset? He goes ballistic. Last year when we were driving to Montana he spilled a little peanut butter oil on the rental car seat and “Dammit, I spilled something” accelerated into “and what idiot INVENTED putting oil in PEANUT BUTTER ANYWAY” and “WHY WOULD ANYONE EVEN SELL THIS PEANUT BUTTER????” in a matter of seconds.

I think I might be experiencing withdrawal from something or other. Either that or it’s PMS. From hell. Riding on a tornado.

Okay Daysonethroughfive GO

I am going to lose some of these awarenesses that are coming and going like so many lights on the freeway if I don’t write em down.

1. Day 1 – Friday – I woke up really excited to try this temporary dietary shift. I’d hit Trader Joe’s (Which, can I just tell you, that store has to be 90% hype. They have as much, if not more, pre-packaged processed shit as your local SuperJumboMarket, but they couch it in this… Okay. I’ll say it. I kind of hate Trader Joe’s, not least of all because they suck me right IN to the hype and I walk through going – Oh, I LOVE Trader Joe’s…HEY WAIT A MINUTE…) Aaaaaanyway – I’d hit Trader Joe’s and picked up a little produce and some steel cut oats and some unsweetened dried blueberries on Thursday night. So I woke up Friday Morning PSYCHED about breakfast.

Usually I skip breakfast, or if I eat it I pick up some greasy biscuit thing at the Wawa, or a bagel at Dunkin Donuts. Never, never NEVER do I get up and make myself something from scratch for breakfast, at least during the week. And even then, if I’m doing that, it’s really a family breakfast I’m cooking, and I get to eat because I’m there. So the first plus was waking up and thinking, kind of What can I do for Amy this morning? I got the same feeling I get when I am cooking for company, putting things together just so, creating order out of chaos, thinking of how they’ll react to each taste. So BANG. An awareness – right there, before I started. Like a ton of bricks. It was made more delightful by the underlying smug feeling of superiority I felt toward Oprah, who did her cleanse with people cooking for her, singing her praises. Oprah missed treating herself like company. I didn’t. I KICKED OPRAH’S ASS.

Awareness 2 – Cooking steel cut oats takes about 30-40 minutes, and so instead of my usual, wake up slowly, screw around, grab coffee, take shower, grab more coffee, run out the door at the last minute
there was a deliberateness to my morning. I was more awake, on account of having breathed well the night before, and while the oats simmered I made myself up lunch from a little recipe I love that I stole from Linda over at Losing the Cow. It’s basically a salady mixture of black beans, tomatoes and corn, thrown together with some lime juice and then I think I threw in cumin, but I may have been out of cumin at that point. I left the house feeling a little more accomplished and taken care of than usual, if that makes any sense.

Having taken the time to plan for myself for the day, and having actually eaten breakfast (WHICH, by the way was AWESOME – the steel cut oats are porridgier than rolled oats, giving what is usually accomplished by the addition of milk, and the blueberries added a WONDERFUL and flavorful sweetness), I missed that point in the day around lunchtime where I am suddenly hungry as hell, and wandering off to find the closest fastest bulkiest greasiest thing I can. When I got hungry, I ate the beany thing. I ate it until I wasn’t hungry anymore, and took the rest home. The other thing that didn’t happen, the other thing that was different, was that I didn’t get that after lunch crash that I normally get, well, after lunch.

Dinner was tasty, I had a snack, blah blah blah. Let’s not retitle this blog WHAT AMY ATE, shall we? But you get the picture. The day was a lot about time, I think, and self care, for me, and the fact those things? Actually? Really enjoyable. Not a chore, when you approach it a little differently.

There was caffeine. OH, there was caffeine. But instead of freaking out about how I SHOULD be doing the thing, and now I’d screwed up the thing, and I might as well just trash the whole thing right there, I just, well, I just didn’t. I just kind of shrugged and went – Wow. I am REALLY attached to caffeine. Okay then. We won’t give up the caffeine just yet.

Day 2 – See – Dammit, this is why I should have been writing one through four daily. I don’t remember a lot of day 2. I was fine during the day, felt okay, reconnected with my old friend cantaloupe and remembered how wonderful a cold slice of cantaloupe is in the morning. I felt a kind of discomfort about any eating I did in a rush, or at the computer, or reading. I invented a dinner that, while good, really needs some perfecting, involving tofu, asparagus, mushrooms, red onion slices, garlic, freshly squeezed orange juice and ginger, all over quinoa which was bland, I think because not enough orange. Carly and Sam were in a tiff over dinner, and then Carly was grumpy with me, and that sort of, I’m not sure. I got really self righteous and grumpy. OOOH! Awareness! Drama while I’m eating makes me cranky!

Actually, now that I think about it, that makes some sense, given the drama surrounding meals just about everywhere throughout my life. When I was a kid, being forced to eat hubbard squash, (Which, actually is from the devil), fights between my parents, fights in my first marriage, our first anniversary where I was so hungry by the time we got to the grocery I got completely out of sorts, and my ex-husband actually THREW a tube of liverwurst at me which smashed gloriously across the floor, being a young mother with picky eaters who were not as compliant when I tried to force them to eat things they didn’t like, even recent meals, cooked with a sense of martyrdom and an inevitable falling apart on my part when some kid or another said, eeew, what’s in this????

So conscious eating, maybe there’s an element of creating some peace for myself in the taking of a meal. Eliminating distractions. Maybe there’s a really good, really human reason behind prayer before eating, a gratefulness, yes, but also a setting the stage, creating a space to really BE grateful as we go.

Day 3 – Day three was my only no caffeine day, and I do remember it well. First, in my body, my muscles were begging to be stretched all day. I was busy all day. I met Margie down at the new office, and we measured some space, and within, like, a minute and a half, she’d come up with so many BRILLIANT thoughts on the space that I was thrilled I’d imposed on her. We had lunch, and then trolled a couple of resale shops where she said things like – “No, that’s a dressing table, you need a secretary” and I’d go wha???? She’s got these really magnificent design books that she’s put together, and DUDE, she just KNOWS stuff. (I would bet she could even identify mauve, which, what is that, some kind of tan thing? Or is that taupe?). Anyway – Margie gets her own entry, later, but we walked around like this for about 3 & 1/2 hours and just, well, I can’t speak for her, but I enjoyed her company and just felt most of the time that
I was in the presence of absolute brilliance and I should just keep my mouth shut. (You know, better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt). Toward the end of the day I felt a little tired, and I went to bed quite early, to just let my body acknowledge the lack of caffeine. But generally this isn’t what I do on the weekend. Generally the weekend is my sitting around time, accomplishing nothing productive, and I didn’t feel like doing that. Well, until I actually sat down at the end of the day.

Yesterday, well, I wrote about yesterday yesterday, kind of, and Scott’s home from the grocery store and I’m now feeling quite peevish and self righteous about how he shops. So I need to take a moment or more. I’ll write about day 5 separately, as this entry’s starting to feel like work. And I’m feeling lecturey all of a sudden.