somewhere over the hump

Work has had me at a standstill lately. We're in a software release cycle, precipitated by an unwary Purple Monkey Prince's big mouth in front of angry client -- said Purple Monkey Prince could have benefited from a calendar and actual familiarity with a software release cycle, at least as it "functions" (naturally I laugh at typing that word) on the Island of the Purple Monkeys -- so we've all been ordered to work twelve hours a day, including weekends. This has been ongoing over the past week and a half. Over the weekend, the CEO popped in long enough to perform sporadic head counts, before evaporating into some mysterious Purple Monkey King oasis that drew the veil of invisibility over his doings. Demoralized enough to be obedient for a change, the rest of us plodded into work, trudged through the rote of software testing, then dragged ourselves home to weep into the bosoms of our families.

Needless to say, this has not contributed to a feeling of general joy on the Island, where the denizens are growing increasingly anxious. Lately, they've become prone to hurling feces at objects moving in their peripheral vision, a testament to the uniquely spontaneous and Big Brother management style that is de rigeur here.

This is also not contributing to my creative side, inconsequential as it is. My attention span is shrinking in direct proportion to my patience, and more than one meeting has been made memorable by my yelling at everyone to shut up, for fuck's sake, shut up and LISTEN, you simian relics of a defunct social experiment --! It is a sentiment that, so far, has won unconditional approval from my boss, whom I suspect would do the same if her voice were capable of the volume that mine is.

It's doubtful whether the evolutionarily mandated abnormalities that attend these meetings have the vocabulary to understand my outbursts. I've seen more than one recipient look baffled at the end of my torrents of eloquence. Still, I find them cathartic, and the other participants' comprehension of my rage is somehow less important than the mere expression of it. In that respect, at least, I've found ample outlet for my creativity. My own vocabulary isn't notable for being either expressive or expansive, but the challenge of spontaneously generating complicated insults to address the Purple Monkeyism of the moment is enough to keep otherwise dormant synapses in the game.

At any rate, those are my excuses. You'll have to pardon me if I'm a little scatterbrained and silent these days.

In a burst of enthusiasm (or at least willful oblivion to the specific personnel issues that are the root cause of our problems) the CFO called in a feng shui expert, who concluded that the reason our company is so dysfunctional is that the freeway running nearby is stealing all of our chi.

The result of these spiritual deliberations has been the installation of a large bell in our department's new VP's office. How this will iron out a corporate culture learned from threepenny comic books and poorly written Chinese Aryan Nation pamphlets is anybody's guess. In idle moments, the Purple Monkeys and I collect in the empty corner office to ogle the thing, fantasizing about the rescue that might come if we ring it often enough and hard enough.

Rescue, like good feng shui, is slow in coming. Our collective contempt for our Purple Monkey masters has at least found a new outlet; the predominence of Chinese workers on the Island has by no means guaranteed any interest in the mysteries of chi flow, as the majority of them appear to think -- not unreasonably -- that the money spent paying for a new bell and the feng shui consultation might have been better spent paying for a cleaning crew that would actually vacuum the two years worth of collected dust, dirt, and food particles that drag at our footsteps, not to mention the multi-generational families of insects that cavort happily in the cobweb mansions that are our windows.

The monkeys operate under the assumption that our current, aggressively lazy cleaning crew is, like the feng shui consultant, friends with the CFO. We vent our spleen by wandering into the corner office during moments of frustration to ring the bell, occupant or no occupant.

Our new VP, being white and Texan, suffers mutely.

Despite all the heart burnings and racking of brain, I've yet to accomplish the most important of my pre-wedding responsibilities, tending instead to get sidetracked by assorted trivialities. God, being in the details, finds this rather amusing, as does Heisenberg, who is showing an increasing tendency towards a split personality that contains more than a hint of snake.

Heisenberg's origins reside somewhere in the back of my subconscious, true, but like most of my imaginary creations, he has since blossomed into a unique entity with little or no relationship to my preferences or desires. The other day he stole one of my wedding dress shoes, for instance, and only yielded to entreaty when I falsely promised him a ride to Cold Stone Creamery. The shoe was safely recovered from the trunk of my car, but I shudder to imagine what will happen the next time I attempt to bribe him. Cats have fickle memories, but they're loath to forget a slight; like women and small children, they have a Biblical approach towards vengeance.

Yesterday he accompanied me to my first wedding dress fitting, riding comfortably atop the massive marshmallow of white satin and dry cleaning plastic. The shop was one recommended by a pair of coworkers, who had taken their own wedding gowns there and been pleased by the result. The web site seemed to suggest a professional entity possessed of at least some gravitas, an illusion composed as much by the suggestion of clothing racks and store fronts as (I'm ashamed to admit) the pictures of white people staffed as tailors and customers.

The reality was a cross between a sweat shop and a 100 square foot mobile home, manned by a small flock of southeast asian women who were collectively oppressed and bullied by the fiery little shop owner. As the best English speaker in the business, she tyrannized over her seamstresses and customers, cowing both with high-handed arrogance.

Heisenberg fell in love.

He followed her around the store with his tail curled over his hips while I stood on a pedestal in gallons of white satin, labored over by a tiny little woman who spoke in a whisper. "... ... ... bustle?" she asked me.

"What?"

"... ... a ...?"

"A what?"

"What kind ... ...?"

"Okay," I said, baffled.

The little seamstress stared at me helplessly until the boss woman stormed by. "Pin it up!" she shouted. "You no just standing there, show her!"

Meekly, she began to fuss over my rear end again.

... to no avail, of course. After the boss dispensed with two customers, bitterly fulminating on the idiocy of one and upbraiding a smiling, bewildered employee because she underbilled another -- "This sleeve take four hour! You charge only twenty-five dollar! That not enough for one hour, even. You have to work extra, extra, you no doing to customer like this. I am boss, I know, you ask me first! You know nothing!" -- she descended on me like a fury and repinned everything, disposing of my seamstress in a froth of irritable criticisms.

"Too much fabric here," she fulminated, (jab jab jab jab) jabbing with the pins. "Dress maker, know nothing." So much for Jessica McClintock. Self-serving and sycophantic, I agreed in a small voice. It seemed safest.

An hour later, I was permitted to divest myself of my dress, and was manhandled into a chair to sign my estimate. "This much," she announced. "I give you discount. Your dress, it obviously not cost much, I not charge you much because it so cheap."

Heisenberg writhed in a hairball spasm of glee. Not being invisible and imaginary, I throttled my mirth. "Do you want cash or check?" I asked shakily.

I drove back to work with Heisenberg, the both of us hysterical with laughter.

south beach wk 2

The end of the second week of South Beach came a little sooner than expected. On the calendar it read something along the lines of "Tuesday." In reality, it happened along the lines of, "Now, goddammit. Now now now now now." That was on Saturday.

I am not, I think, meant to be on restrictive diets -- or, in fact, any kind of diet at all. Being defied infuriates me; rather than taking it as a personal challenge to excel within narrow perimeters, I instantly develop paranoid fetishes about what is being withheld from me, as though that Hostess Twinkie, on the top shelf of the unreachable cupboard, is in some way better than this Hostess Twinkie, currently being experimented on in the microwave. My masterful mother, who in all other ways has the infallibility of a particularly insufferable diety, misunderstood her children -- and, I daresay, her husband -- in that one respect. During our childhood, convinced that hiding her chocolates would in some way thwart our greed, she squirreled them away somewhere she fondly believed to be safe and secure. Tightly locked freezers. High shelves. That sort of thing. Later, she would return to gloat over her booty, only to find the boxes emptied of all but the little paper cups.

Confronted with the evidence, the three of us would invariably maintain that mice must have gotten at the candies, curiously unmoved by the thought that, by our logic, six-foot tall, voracious rodents with opposable thumbs and the ability to use keys on locks remained at large somewhere in the house. It never occurred to Mom that the very act of hiding the chocolates made them attractive; faced with a box of candy in the straightforward, accessible tray of the pantry shelf, the rest of the family would have rapidly lost interest and moved on to other, more exciting adventures, like gluing skis on the guinea pig and building jumps on the roof.

That said, it became painfully obvious during the second week of the South Beach diet that this is not, after all, the diet for me. Despite not actually wanting carbohydrates, I nonetheless began to sneak them into my diet anyway, simply because I wasn't supposed to. I've come to the conclusion that if I was put in a room with a button reading "Don't Push," I'd inevitably push it, just to see what would happen next.

My total weight loss: 4 pounds. The Guy's weight loss: none. And he didn't cheat.

"You shouldn't think of it as a diet," he said. "You should think of it as a lifestyle change."

"Fuck this diet," I said, "and fuck this lifestyle."

Note to self: stop swearing so much.

My diet diary...

Continuation of Phase 1: elimination (or restriction, anyway) of carbohydrates from the diet. Discovered during week 1 that I hate meat and I hate vegetables. However, am eating a lot more of both. On the other hand, find I am eating less in general, so it all seems to balance out.

First week was notable for heavy consumption of cheese. Wonder if it would be a good idea not to tell my cardiologist about this? Although it was all white cheese, mostly....

March 16, 2004

Breakfast: handful of cashews, lots of water.
Mid-morning snack: None. Not hungry.
Lunch: tuna salad plate and water.
Mid-afternoon snack: more cashews, more water.
Dinner: Grilled salmon steaks under light sour cream/mayonnaise/caper sauce, steamed bok-choy with soy sauce.

Most notable today is an extreme lack of hunger. At the beginning of last week, I was ready to eat anything, provided it stayed still long enough to be conveyed to my mouth. Today, I've got utter indifference on my side. I wouldn't have eaten lunch if it weren't for the fact that I'm not sure what's for dinner. (I'll have to figure something out, I guess.)

The Guy has given up craving carbohydrates. Meanwhile, sheer impatience with my limited dietary choices has made me want to break loose a dozen times today and eat a cheerio. I haven't, but it doesn't help that I hoard cereals. Three big boxes of them, sitting at my desk. Haven't dipped into them yet, but suspect it's just a matter of time.

Book club tomorrow. Won't have choice in what to eat, so will plunge in, apologize to diet gods, and punish myself later with celery sticks or something.

Mm. Grilled salmon. It's so good. Pity it's going to give me mercury poisoning.

March 17, 2004

Breakfast: Cashews and lots of water.
Mid-morning snack: None.
Lunch: Tuna salad plate.
Mid-afternoon snack: Gum. I swallowed it by accident, damn you.
Dinner: Vegetable upside-down cake (from The Elegant Broccoli), grilled vegetables in olive oil.
Dessert: Lemon cake.

Book club day, so dinner and dessert are out of my hands. Ah, variety -- and delicious variety. The hostess of book club made an incredible dish out of the Enchanted Broccoli Forest, some cookbook written by the same people who did the Moosewood Cookbook. Odd names for books. Who am I to judge, never having published one? (Note to self: if I do write a book, Foo-Foo Funky Bunny Wiggles would be a good title.) First thing I did when I went home was write down the names of the books. Now they're both on my Amazon wish list. (Note to self: add link in shameless plug, later.) (Second note to self: Done.)

Worried consumption of carbs at dinner and dessert will result in renewed cravings. Find that I don't care. Ate a lot at dinner, though; it's true that carbs, while good, don't really make you feel as full as protein does. Probably a damn good reason for that. Don't care about that, either.

All in all, diet's going well. Odd side effect: strange dreams. Had a bizarre one last night. Dreamt I was at my clinic in New Jersey, except it had somehow relocated itself to New York. For a medical facility, it was crawling with opinionated parrots, who kept climbing up and down my legs and offering me absolutely unwanted advice. Confused the doctors, who kept trying to pick up the parrots and use them as styluses for their touchpad laptops. Parrots got irritated. Then the damn birds found a giant slug in another room that they started to eat, which was rather hard on the slug, except part of it broke off and turned out to be a caterpillar, which promptly oozed its way to a bench and became the world's largest chrysalis. Dream also featured my sister and lots and lots of maggots. Woke up still trying to scrape them off my hand.

Decided it was definitely a work dream. Parrots probably company executives. Slug probably software product. Maggots probably . . . change my mind. Maggots probably company executives. Parrots probably my coworkers. Don't know what my sister was doing there, except she's supposed to come home tomorrow. Wonder what tonight's dream is going to involve.

March 18, 2004

Breakfast: Laughing Cow cheese.
Mid-morning snack: cashews.
Lunch: Tuna salad plate. (Hate tuna salad.)
Mid-afternoon snack: nothing.
Dinner: Chicken melt (grilled chicken, avocado, cheese, onion)

Carbs had result after all. Tossed and turned all night with too much energy; had dream I was trying to eat spaghetti, which for some reason was a tortuous experience. Couldn't get the damn noodles on my fork. Woke up exhausted and sore. Might have been gnawing on my barley pillow. Odd taste in mouth, but pillow looks healthy.

Barley is carbs. Bad. Bad.

Sako's back in town. Picked her up at the airport. She was hungry, and is now sitting next to me while I type this. She's eating a massive bowl of kimchee ramen. I'm considering hating her.

Requires too much effort. Will gnaw on this pen instead, and wonder if wedding invitations count as carbs.

Felt extremely thin and sexy today. Also felt peculiarly blond. Has something to do, I suspect, with my relative blindness today; had eye doctor appointment to get contacts, and he had me try on a pair (for fit only) that had a slightly stronger prescription than I needed. Had 20/15 vision for the first time in my life. Took 'em off -- he said he'd order the correct prescription -- but was left feeling disoriented and, yes, blond for the rest of the day, as though being unable to see clearly somehow divested me of the responsibility of caring what people around me thought. Can't see you, you can't see me. Something very comforting about that attitude, should do this more often. Said stunningly idiotic things all day, and caught myself headbanging to the noises coming from the highway behind the building.

Want to be blond. Why couldn't I have been born a blond? Being born Japanese is just close enough to tempt me, and just far enough to be frustrating.

Bother.

March 19, 2004

Breakfast: forgot. Busy doing the kill Purple Monkey dance at work.
Lunch: Chinese food with coworkers I can stand! --Braised mushrooms, hot and sour soup, avoided rice (well, okay, maybe a mouthful.)
Dinner: Pork chops, sauerkraut, steamed and pounded cauliflower.

The Guy is getting to use his grill a lot, which is good. We love that grill. He loves it with an incestuous, slobbering love. I love it like I love any kitchen appliance: with distant courtesy, a vague suspicion, and a show of intimate friendship in public.

The Guy is also enamoured of the cauliflower dish, which is still surprisingly good. One benefit of this diet is the brand new recipe, and a closer acquaintance with cashews and Laughing Cow cheese, which is not Swiss, no matter what they say on the package. Pretty sure damn things are packaged in China. No longer considering weight loss a benefit. Suspect that all the weight is being lost in my breasts, as rapidly starting to be able to see the shadow of my nose cast on the floor when I look down. Since my face isn't really three-dimensional, that shouldn't be happening.

Lunch consisted of Chinese food. Well, can't have Chinese food without rice, can one? Fortunately, we went out. Can't understand why the Chinese food the Purple Monkeys order when doing company dinners and lunches is so bad, considering a good 99% of the employees (excluding the token white and Japanese people) are Chinese.

Can't believe I asked that. Of course I know why: Purple Monkeys are cheap, and want to spend less than $1 per person on food. Quality not an object. Think they order their Japanese food from the same place. In fact, positive of it, since both restaurants are named exactly the same thing, and are located in exactly the same street address. Japanese food you have to order in Chinese from a restaurant called Suzy's Wok for less than $2 a person is not good Japanese food.

March 20, 2004

Breakfast: none.
Lunch: Chicken salad sandwich with light Italian dressing. Half a pickle.
Mid-afternoon snack: Cheese party! Cheating galore.
Dinner: Sashimi, edamame, chilled tofu, karaage.

Cheese party, thrown by book club member. Much cheese and cheese-related dishes: cheesecake, cheese, cheese tarts, cream cheese fruit pizza, etc. Can't have cheese without something to spread it on. Ugly place for diet. Good place for me. Screw this diet. Wanted sushi for dinner, complete with rice. Coaxed the Guy. Tempted him. Waggled the prospect of eating actual good food for a change.

....bastard refused to cheat. Went to Japanese restaurant -- decent Japanese restaurant not named Suzy's Wok -- in Mountain View called Masa's. He vetoed all my suggestions. Had a protein dinner. Bastard! Don't see why have to not cheat, when I've already had lots of bread in the afternoon. Had to spread the cheese on something, didn't I?

Love cheese. Found lovely white cheese at party; must get more of it. Should ask book club member what it was called. Cardiologist won't mind. It was white. White cheese is good. She said so.

Wonder what makes cheese yellow? Wonder if it's food dye. Wonder if there's white food dye out there somewhere. Wonder if I could make some. Radishes are white.

March 21, 2004

Breakfast: scrambled egg-beaters, mushroom, onion, ham scramble.
Lunch: nuts.
Dinner: Steak, steamed broccoli.

Bugger. Non-cheating day. Had to. Spent entire day with the Guy, and he kept watching everything that went into my mouth. Not sure I want to marry him after all. He's mean. Also, he's protein-based. Think I want someone who's not already on my diet.

March 22, 2004

Breakfast: no time! no time!
Lunch: meetings!
Mid-afternoon snack: fuck this.
Dinner: Curry. And Brown Rice.

Don't think this is a diet that's going to work for me.

Sako and Tara and I went shopping. Got makeup and bridal underclothing for me. Got bridesmaid dresses for them -- damn, they look good. Better than I will in my wedding dress. Fuck the South Beach diet. One of these chocolate croissants would be right up my alley.

right hand or left?

Wedding talk ahead. Be warned.

So the weekend before the weekend of disease, the weekend of pestilence, the weekend of plague -- namely, a few weekends ago -- Tara and I trooped down to Macy's to begin this tedious task of registering. I took Tara because she has both taste and style, things that I lack in abundance; the Guy, who by all rights should have been my escort, demonstrated a indifference to the whole process that bordered on the offensive.

"I don't care," he said, burying himself head-first in the couch. "Just get whatever you want."

Well, you know. That's just rampant provocation.

I am not, nor have I ever been, a "girly girl." At the age of 30 I have successfully managed to navigate through life without ever having learned how to apply make-up, how to set a table, how to accessorize, or how to shop. My few attempts to use my feminine wiles have had mixed results; true, I get what I want, but when the victim of said wiles is laughing so hard he has overcharged his gag reflex, I can't help but feel it might have been more dignified to bypass seduction and make my demands like an honest person. Selecting the domestic niceties that make a house a home-- well. Let's just say I've never been Martha Stewart, jailbird or no, and leave it at that.

Don't get me wrong. There are few things I find more fascinating than good china. After all, it's so, hm, round. And shiny. And anyway, you know, china. What's not to thrill?

Tara brought her 7-month old along, fortunately, and I entertained myself with haphazard babysitting while Tara exercised the sound consumer judgment I obviously lacked. She quizzed the salespeople, asked intelligent questions, inspected different brands, and generally came across as one of the bright lights of Consumer Reports, while I puttered after her with my fingers firmly wedged between her child's budding teeth. Unfortunately, she drew the line at the selecting and the deciding. "Well, what do you like?" she demanded.

I eyed the long, gleaming racks of extremely breakable plates, like fragile tombstones for my adolescence. "Eh," I said. It was my motto for the evening. Eh.

Tara may have taste and style, but she was remarkably uncooperative in bestowing any of it on me. Beyond happily pointing out to me the most egregious violations against aesthetic harmony, grace, or class -- plates featuring dogs playing poker, for instance -- she was perfectly content to trail after me, occasionally removing one item or the other from her daughter's mouth.

Eventually, I came up with a system wherein I wandered down the aisle of You Break You Buys, and anything that bored me after a count of four (a completely arbitrary number, so don't bother wondering) would go into the reject list. Insofar as systems go, this worked better than most I've concocted over the years. At the end of my jaunt down the aisle, I had a list of rejects, and a list of survivors. Unfortunately, I found that I'd rejected all the classy plates and retained instead every single plate on display that was so ugly, it required a second look to verify its existence.

Insofar as methods went, this was obviously not a success. I dithered some more.

In the end, it took four hours for me to make enough choices to build a list; dragged kicking and screaming to the wire, I stabilized enough of an opinion to narrow things down to two different china patterns, and deferred actual decision-making until a later date. "I'll ask the Guy," I told Tara, and ambled out of Macy's as triumphantly indecisive as I was when I'd first drifted in.

This is not atypical of me. In all fairness, the important decisions -- whether to buy a car, whether to move, whether to change careers -- I can make without difficulty, arriving at some divinely-inspired course based on random fluctuations in Pacific Coast cloud patterns. Given a choice between cars, for instance, or new cities to live in, I'll point randomly at one or the other, and then spend the rest of my tenure in car or city being happily convinced I made the right decision.

On the other hand, take me to a video store and demand I pick a movie to rent, and the rest of the evening will be spent in tortuous fluttering, as though the movie I choose to watch that night will, in some indecipherable and unfathomable way, unalterably change the entire direction of my life.

(It is perhaps unnecessary to observe that this drives the Guy mad, on those rare occasions he can unravel himself from his adoration of my every delicate, perfectly-formed toe. Despite having learned better, he still submits himself to erratic vexation by presenting me with choices at the local independent rental store. "This one? This one? How about this one? What do you think?" Every so often he'll actually hand me a DVD, usually some atrocity out of Hong Kong involving guns, anorexic Asians with long hair, and a poorly spell-checked description on the back. "Look at this," he'll say, and wander off to spy on me from behind a rack. I presume he thinks that if I hold onto the DVD, it will be something I want to watch.

"What will you do when you have kids?" the Guy demands. "By the time you decide what they'll wear, they'll be ready for college.")

Even after reducing my choice of china to two different patterns, I still spent a good half-an-hour worrying over them until even Tara, the penultimate shopper, thought it was past time to go. It takes time to make a trivial decision.

The Guy, dragged unwillingly to the same store by a promise of food, inspected the two different patterns. First he looked at one pattern. Then he looked at the other pattern. Then he went back to the first pattern. "That one," he said, pointing. "Let's go eat."

It took him less than a minute. I took offense. My feelings on this matter were not entirely unakin to the woman who, having spent four hours creating a splendid dinner for her family, watches them sit down, finish eating in under three minutes, then charge back to the television to catch Wrestlemania.

"Get back here!" I roared. The china rattled. "Ponder, damn you! Ponder!"

The Guy, looking crushed and more than a little martyred, slunk back to the china, and for the next hour grew increasingly restive as I towed him from display case to display case. He brooded at dinnerware, pinged at glassware, fingered linens, and glared at pots and pans under my ruthless tyranny; only sharp objects -- knives, mostly -- prompted the slightest spark of interest, and I followed him around the silverware displays, doggedly replacing every utensil he fondled. At last, utterly squashed in spirit, he was released into the wilds of Macys while I went to consult with the registry assistant. When I returned to claim him, I found him gaping vacantly at expensive crystal.

I think it was an important bonding experience, personally. He trailed me to the Cheesecake Factory, drooping, and I wrapped my arms around him in the restaurant foyer.

"I love you," I said.

He stared at me skeptically.

I patted him kindly on the head. "Good boy."

south beach wk 1

Phase 1 of the South Beach diet requires the removal of all carbohydrates, the introduction of a lot more fiber, and the elimination of bad fats inasmuch as is possible.

This goes on for two weeks. Two weeks. What the hell made me think this was going to be a good idea?

March 9, 2004

Breakfast: 2 egg omelette with lowfat cheese and ham.
Mid-morning snack: skipped.
Lunch: Greek salad (romaine lettuce, tomato, grilled chicken, olive oil and vinegar)
Mid-afternoon snack: Right middle fingernail.
Dinner: 4 oz London Broil steak, grilled. Mashed cauliflower with salt, pepper, organic butter, and fat free half-and-half. Edamame. Low-fat Laughing Cow cheese.
Dessert: Skim ricotta cheese with vanilla essence and Splenda.

Somebody very wise once said, "Never start a diet on a Monday." Hah. Started mine on Tuesday.

I began the diet by mistake, really. That is to say, I had vague thoughts about going on it, which coalesced into certainty midway through the stunningly unhealthy meal I had the night before. After all, I had cravings for chicken (fried) and steak (fried) and sausage (fried) and cheese (. . . okay, not fried, but only because it gets goopy) all the time. Why shouldn't I erase guilt and call it a "diet" rather than a "terrible lapse in judgement?"

The conscious attempt at atonement resulted in an unenthusiastic jab at making breakfast this morning. Dinners I cook just fine. Breakfast is another animal altogether. I should be on cooking shows, really. Cooking for the ADHD-afflicted! Eggs really are evil bastards, with their smug little shells and their smirking little yolks. They've read Machiavelli. They know how to rule with the iron hand of fear.

Flushed after a titanic struggle with the damn things, I scooped out an omelette the size of my head and slapped it on a plate. A meal large enough for two people, really, or one very hungry man. I cracked open two eggs to make another, smaller one for myself, and started out negotiations with a vicious jab of my fork . . . only to have the Guy come skipping in to announce that he didn't have time for breakfast, he had to go, sorry, b'bye then!

Grimly determined to punish him, I sat down and ate the entire thing.

I drove to work feeling vaguely sick.

The omelette had me full for the entire morning. Lunch I didn't get around to eating until 3:00. Between 3:00 and 6:00, I promptly began daydreaming about Cheerios. Ate half a fingernail instead, counting on it being protein rather than carbohydrates. Went shopping for the dinner as soon as I got off from work.

Craved fruit. Craved fruit bad. Hovered in front of the Odwalla display like a pubescent boy in front of the 7-11 porn rack, all saliva and sizzling urges. Fondled several oranges at the fresh produce section. Frightened a little grandmother with the things I was doing to a banana.

Succeeded in not buying any, though Safeway might have to recall some of their fruit. Score one for self-discipline.

March 10, 2004

Breakfast: 1-1/2 egg omelette with tomato and mushroom.
Mid-morning snack: Stick of low-fat string cheese, 6 almond chunks.
Lunch: Salad. Romaine lettuce, tomato, mushroom, celery, ham, low-fat ranch dressing.
Mid-afternoon snack: Low-fat laughing cow cheese, 6 celery sticks, peanuts, one stick of low-fat string cheese.
Dinner: Roast chicken with zucchini stuffing, almonds, one stick of low-fat string cheese.
Dessert: Skim Ricotta cheese with Splenda and vanilla essence.

The Guy was at the gym, and announced he was meeting someone for lunch. After I'd made him his omelette, of course. He ate it anyway. I gave him instructions (and a massive lunch) to take with him; he's too lazy to read the book, and compensates by YMing me through the course of the day to ask questions. He announces that he ate toast.

"NO TOAST!"

He stays carefully silent after that.

I'm starving by lunchtime. Starving. The salad is absolutely the most unappetizing thing I have ever encountered; I am obviously no chef, and should not be allowed to handle raw vegetables. The romaine lettuce tastes like it was dipped in lye after washing. (Did I use dish detergent? Did I remember to rinse?) The tomato tastes like the buttock of my 90-year old grandmother. I end up saving all the ham until last to wash the taste of the vegetables out of my mouth, only to discover that I hate meat.

I hate meat. And I hate vegetables. What the hell am I supposed to do now?

Eat cheese.

Lots and lots and lots of cheese.

The Guy YMs me plaintively over the course of the afternoon. He's not only eaten breakfast and second breakfast, he's eaten all the snacks I packed him before lunchtime. He's complaining that he's hungry. Eat your lunch, I tell him. An hour later he's back on YM, whimpering about his stomach being empty again. The man's a bloody hobbit. I don't know if he's going to be able to take this. I have to get him more food tomorrow. I stop by Safeway to get dinner supplies and pick up a massive Oriental chicken salad for him. Chew on that, buddy.

When I head back to work, I'm hungry again. Not really hungry, mind. Just Get This Taste Out of My Mouth hungry. I settle for a Laughing Cow cheese wedge, which I eat with celery sticks. A coworker wanders by ten minutes later, and finds me licking the foil cheese wrapping. Which, by the way, I wasn't realizing I was doing. This South Beach diet is a little hallucinatory.

Dinner --- oh god. Not more meat. I catch the Guy eyeing the basket of apples with a longing eye. "Can I have an apple?" he asks in a small voice.

"NO!"

I distinctly hear him sniffle as he turns away. If I weren't watching him, I think he would have fondled one. Tomorrow I'm cooking fish and tofu. God, I'm sick of protein. Why did I think this was a good idea? I'd kill a small evangelical missionary for a bite of this apple. This round, firm, plump, juicy, glowing ... it smells so good .....

March 11, 2004

Breakfast: String cheese. Celery.
Mid-morning snack: skipped.
Lunch: Chef salad from Safeway. Turkey, ham, cheeses, lettuce, a little ranch dressing. I hate green things.
Dinner: Chicken portabello sausage/chicken spinach parmesan sausage & sauerkraut.

The sausage was from Dittmer's. I like their sausages, and I like sausage with sauerkraut, but I think I'm going to be skipping this particular menu item for a while. Other meals make me feel heavy. This one makes me feel obese. Also, I'm pretty sure my blood sugar's gone somewhere ugly. I'm not going to check.

If this is how I used to eat, no wonder I'm a Sherman tank in training.

The Guy professes himself full, but still craving. The man's snacking habits are pathological.

March 12, 2004

Breakfast: boiled edamame with salt. (Not very hungry)
Mid-morning snack: low-fat string cheese.
Lunch: Leftovers of grilled chicken and zucchini. More edamame. (I boiled the entire bag.)
Mid-afternoon snack: edamame, low-fat string cheese, lowfat Laughing Cow cheese, peanuts, celery sticks.
Dinner: Baked salmon steak, roasted tomato wedges with olive oil and basil, pan-fried green pepper strips, miso soup with tofu.

I'm really liking the string cheese. Note to anybody who is going on this diet from a more balanced diet in the past: you might want to invest in some metamucil. I'm not revealing anything about my own bowel movements, mind, but -- I'm just saying.

I probably shouldn't have boiled the entire bag of edamame. That's, what, four pounds? Probably shouldn't have done that. I'm going to guess I'll be a little tired of edamame soon.

Forgot to add salt. Bleh. And meanwhile, what the hell was I thinking, bringing the chicken to work? I hate chicken.

Whew. I'm stuffed. I take it back. Chicken's good. Really need a saltshaker, though. The increased protein diet has been doing interesting things to my thirst level. Edamame and water are a really, really filling snack, though. Color me impressed...

...Don't know if the Guy is handling this diet very well. He's dashing around the apartment like a beleagered squirrel; his attention span appears to have diminished to something shorter than a fruitfly's. Yesterday he dismantled the Playstation 2 and put it together again, then dismantled it again, then put it together again. Today he's running from room to room, pausing every so often to make plaintive complaints about his hunger. He says the diet's making him completely flaky and that it's impossible for him to do any coding...

...Dinner was good. Should eat more fish. I'm starting to like fish. Too bad too much of it will kill me. Mercury poisoning. It's so sad. Oh, but hey! I can have sashimi! That's different. Score! Tuna sashimi for dinner tomorrow!

March 13, 2004

Breakfast: Probably should have woke up earlier. No breakfast.
Mid-morning snack: Well, I mean really. It's a weekend. Is there really any need to wake up before noon?
Lunch: Scrambled eggs with ham, cheese, and mushrooms. Sounds a lot like breakfast, doesn't it?
Mid-afternoon snack: Cup of iced chai. Yes, I cheated.
Dinner: Sashimi--! Tuna, salmon, and octopus sashimi with wasabi and soy sauce, edamame in the shell, stir-steamed vegetables: eggplant, zucchini, and the little yellow crooked necked squashes that make me giggle.
After dinner snack: None!

I went out for the day with Tara to do some bridesmaid dress shopping. No idea what the Guy ate while I was gone. (He made breakfast, though. That counts for something, right?) He keeps complaining he doesn't know what to eat, and I keep telling him to read the book. This holds him for a couple of hours, when we have the conversation all over again. This diet appears to be having a negative impact on his short-term memory.

Had some occasional pangs during the afternoon, but nothing serious. I suspect that the iced chai I had once we got to the mall was what let me surf the tide; it was cheating -- I don't know what diet allows you to drink iced chais, but if anybody out there knows, that's the one I want to go on -- but in all fairness it was quite hot outside, and anyway. . .

. . . hm. I can't think of a single good excuse. I refuse to feel guilty. It was delicious.

Sashimi was nice. Expensive, but nice. I went to the Japanese market and bought three different kinds of sashimi, pre-wrapped (if not sliced.) Made a mess of the slicing, but eh, who cares? Sashimi. The Guy mumbled through the entire meal, appreciative -- I'm so glad I'm marrying a man who has a proper appreciation of Japanese food -- but refused to be satisfied. "It's not the same without rice," he said.

Well, you know. It isn't. But I'm not craving doughnuts, so that's okay.

Lost two pounds so far. Interesting. Started out on day one at 134.5. Today I'm at 132.4. I'm going to say it's water retention, just in case.

March 14, 2004

Breakfast: Well, I would've had breakfast, but I was up until about 5 a.m. playing a video game and....
Mid-morning snack: ...and shut up with your judgmental-ness already.
Lunch: California Cobb salad with balsamic vinaigrette. (Boiled egg, turkey, bacon, blue cheese, avocado, lettuce.)
Mid-afternoon snack: 5 cashews.
Dinner: 4 Pork spare-ribs with chutney sauce, mashed cauliflower, steamed broccoli, 2% cheddar cheese, salami slices, cherry tomatoes.

The Guy claimed to feeling odd lately -- like this was news -- but he announced he was doing much better today. We skipped Costco, which promised to be stuffed to overflowing with eager shoppers, considering it was a sunny Sunday. I promised to go tomorrow and pick up some pistachios for him.

It was a nice, lazy day, utterly devoid of exercise. Like a lot of the last four weeks, in fact; Monday I'm resolved to do something about that, whether that be going to the gym or heading into Aikido for the first time in three weeks. I ought to be ashamed, I ought.

Cauliflower was good. I can't wait until this Phase 1 diet is over. I'm bored.

March 15, 2004

Breakfast: oops. Today's Monday. Woke up late, dashed to work, forgot to eat anything beforehand. Dumbass.
Mid-morning snack: Bother.
Lunch: Oriental chicken salad. (Why is it called Oriental Chicken Salad? Is it the little crunchy noodles? Because I gotta tell you Safeway folks, we Orientals aren't fooled. That there's white salad that's too cheap for croutons.)
Mid-afternoon snack: roasted cashews.
Dinner: crashed the second I got home with sick headache, so no dinner.

Monday. Bad mood. Started out on the wrong foot by waking up, thinking it was Sunday, and going back to sleep. Had dream where my subconscious, usually about as smart as facial tissue, abruptly grew a brain and prodded me to work. Woke up and discovered subconscious was right for a change. Damn it.

Why did I think I liked Oriental chicken salad? I must've been delusional.

Now know why I decided to go on the South Beach diet: I was having PMS. PMS doesn't care if you embark on masochistic romps into celery sticks and limp broccoli, as long as you suffer. All very well and good as far as PMS is concerned, but now here I am stranded on South Beach island while PMS sails merrily away on a Disney cruise ship. Where's the support? Where's the love?

Only consolation is that I've hauled the Guy in after me. He's doggy-paddling around the island, looking for something to eat that won't leave him with mercury poisoning, cancer, or a growling stomach. Keep offering to let him off the hook, but he insists on flopping along at the end of it, lower lip firmly pierced. Misery loves company. His complaints have become a soothing balm to my soul.

Bought cashews and peanuts, which are sitting in the car. Should get some. Also have raging thirst, which doesn't seem to want to let up; worried about this, as it is a symptom of elevated blood sugar levels. Morning's glucose was at 154. Maybe they've gotten higher? Don't see why they would, though, since only had a decent sized salad for lunch. Bugger my sugar levels. Bugger this diet. I want french fries.

...no I don't. Wow. I really don't. I don't crave french fries, I don't crave bread, I don't crave pasta.

This is sick. End of one week is tonight. Tomorrow's another week of this. I think I might cry. I wonder if fried mozzerella sticks are in this diet? Should go to the grocery store and check those out.

Tuesday morning note: One week into the South Beach diet. Missed dinner yesterday because I got home feeling ill and instantly crawled into my favorite state: hibernation. Wonder how the Guy feels about marrying a caterpillar? I'm prone to cocooning myself at unpredictable moments.

At any rate, woke up feeling much better. Have decided the reason I'm thirsty all the time is that I'm actually drinking more, and drinking more always makes me feel more thirsty. Don't bother sorting that one out. I suppose my normal state of being is rabid dehydration, and my body compensates for those long intervals by getting hysterically excited when I'm actually bothering to drink water. Haven't checked my blood sugar since it turns out that I've run out of the little strips. Wasted my last one this morning by not having enough blood.

This morning's weight: 131.4. Have lost a total of 3.1 pounds this first week. I'm still going to call it water retention. Color me unconvinced.

Time to start my week 2 diet....

purple monkey roundup

Once in a while it happens that I start out an entry intending to talk about one thing, only to get utterly distracted by my preface and end up talking about something completely unrelated. The previous post's fat talk, for instance. Dull thing, fat. Doesn't really do anything. Doesn't really go anywhere. Won't help you with the dishes.

What I'd really meant to be talking about last time was the purple monkey roundup.

I don't write about work too often -- not often enough for it to register on too many radars, hopefully -- but work is so inextricably linked to my well-being and happiness that it seems unreasonable not to mention it in connection to my current mood. It's possible that within the last, oh, year and a half, I've made myself somewhat notorious at work for a certain -- shall we say, indifference to the ongoing security of my employment? Pessimistic as the mood is in the Support section of the company, a bank of eight phenomenally filthy cubes at the far end of the warehouse, in recent months I've managed to wrap around it an atmosphere of cynicism unmatched even by your average American voter.

It's had a tangible effect on many of our new employees, who pop their heads over my cube wall to ask me a question, only to slough away a little while later with dazed eyes, slack jaws, and suicidal thoughts. Mine is a witty pessimism, of course, though I prefer to view it as "realism." In my own defense, it's not an attitude that's isolated to me; a few weeks ago we interviewed another potential new boss, (which would have brought us to 6 total bosses) and after my colleague and I left the room, the coworker left behind told the potential employee some home truths about our company.

I have no idea whether they even offered him the job or not. Having been on his interview schedule, naturally we were never asked our opinion or our impressions about him. Out of the fourteen various interviews I've been ordered to conduct in the last year and a half, only one was for a job I knew we were hiring for; only one resulted in anybody in management asking my opinion; only one had a resume I had seen in advance; not one was ever hired. It's not the job market that's the problem. It's the extreme idiocy of the employers.

Several weeks ago in a moment of more-than-usual frustration, a small group of us went on temporary strike and sat about, venting our rage. In a Dilbertian moment, one of us who had been at the company long enough to know better, said something so idiotic that it couldn't be allowed to pass.

"I can't believe we just put that onto a live server without testing it first."

There was a moment's silence while we all stared at her.

"What did you say?"

"I can't believe you said that."

"How long have you been working here?"

"--And you said what?"

...and that was when the Game was born.

It was proposed by the grizzled purple monkey, the wisest of the purple monkeys, that from that day forward, anybody who said anything so stupid that they should have known better, would owe money. Not to the person who called it, but to an innocent bystander, whoever happened to be fortunate enough to be standing nearby.

For instance. If Purple Monkey A said something like, say, "Why don't our salespeople know our product well enough to do a demo?" Purple Monkey B who happened to be standing by would yell, "You owe Purple Monkey C money!" At which point Purple Monkey C would wake up and ask what had just happened.

Or if Purple Monkey B said something like, say, "Shouldn't we have asked the clients if they wanted this feature before we removed it?" Purple Monkey C would pounce and yell, "You owe Purple Monkey A money!" At which point Purple Monkey A would temporarily stop trying to slit her wrists with a Swingline stapler, and ask what had just happened.

As a game, true, it lacks something of the morale-building quality; the fact that anytime anyone used the word 'QA' (Quality Assurance to non-techies out there) it instantly ran him or her into debt would, in a normal company, have raised some alarm bells in upper management. This would have been a lot of alarms, since we have 1 upper-level manager for every 2.5 employees.

Unfortunately, most remarks that involved our upper management also resulted in instant accumulation of debt. "I can't believe our CMO--" "Doesn't our CEO know--?" "Do you think the CFO will--?"

So far, I owe $7. I'm winning this game. Purple Monkey C owes me $214.

I started the South Beach diet yesterday, as per my threat -- promise -- of the last entry. It's driving me to drink. Unfortunately, I'm allergic to alcohol; as a sorry substitute, I'm reduced to writing.

Bloggy though it is, I'm going to keep a running entry about my adventures in dieting. The link is here. I'll start a new one each South Beach week, and link to it on the right.

Unless I go mad, first.

From Sako...

i fell two weeks ago in red rocks, nevada when a piece of rock i was weighing broke off in my hand. when i fell, most of the energy was absorbed by my wrist...and head. as i have no health insurance, i thought it would be wise just to leave my wrist in a splint and ignore the chances of a break. what you don´t know won´t kill you...at least in my case.

i attempted to ´work´ the system today by going to the ER in barcelona and asking for an x-ray on my wrist. when i was filling out my paper work, the nurse asked me who i had insurance with back in the states.

insurance?! who do you think i am? a rich person?! i don´t have insurance!
he looked at me as though i was lying. what does this mean? you DON´T have insurance? i do not understand. the sound in his voice was of utter disgust and disbelief. i could have pooped in his coffee and he would never have noticed.
what do you do if you hurt yourself?
um...i go to a foreign country with socialized medicine...?
surely this is an inconvenience for most. what do the others in your country do?
uh...dunno. i suppose they just go without medical attention or they pay out of their pockets.
your government allows this?! you come from such a powerful country and they do not attend to the health of the citizens? i cannot believe it. your president bush can do this to you?
MY president bush?! no, you´ve got it wrong. he IS the president of the states, but that doesn´t mean he´s any smarter than the average dead lab rat.
it went on like this for a while.

i leave for montserrat in the morning and for laval, france on sunday.

I LOVE SPAIN!!!

sako

belly up

The last entry I did garnered the most comments yet, which tells me that the greatest single common thread throughout the American experience isn't love of liberty, love of civil rights, or love of fellow man, but body fat. Admittedly, six people isn't what one would call empirical evidence. This bothers me not at all. Shocking as it may seem to some people, I am fully capable of making arbitrary statements based on entirely spurious coincidence, having at my fingertips not only a medium for expressing said statements, but also an extremely rich and fertile fantasy life that reconstructs the real world in minute detail exactly the way I want it.

So, Reality redesigned. And Americans are fascinated by fat.

(That it happens to be my fat, both good and bad, is just a bonus.)

Me, I'm all for having a serious national debate on the rival merits of the Atkins diet, as opposed to Weight Watchers, South Beach, and surgerical alternatives. True, I might be late jumping on that bandwagon -- seeing as how international news organizations noticed America's enthusiastic adoption of the obesity fad about a decade ago with such stimulating articles such as, "Why is America Fat?" and "The Great Satan Has a Beer Belly," and "They'll Die First -- It's All Good." It amuses me that a country can actually eat itself To Death, much like my friend's father's pet piranha in middle school. The fish was ghoulishly named Wilbur, after the pig in Charlotte's Web, and would single-mindedly consume anything that drifted into its eyesight. It was a source of occasional entertainment to our jaded middle-school palates, at least until my friend grew overenthusiastic about demonstrating its gluttonous gifts and fed it an entire hamburger patty. The results were edifying to say the least, though more for us -- we were callous little horrors in those days -- than for Wilbur, who didn't survive the experiment and eventually sank to the bottom of its tank with an expression of affronted astonishment on its little fishy face. If that's not an object lesson, I don't know what is.

These days I feel like I'm on the actual brink of losing weight, as though the newer, thinner me is a velcro wall waiting at the bottom of a big hill, at the top of which stands the fatter me in a velcro suit, precariously balanced on a skateboard pointed down. There's a lot of excitement in the potential of being thin, and an idiotic feeling of power as well. Some days it seems just within grasp, as though I just have to reach out with my little toe and push off to be sent zooming down, shrieking past the gapes of envious, struggling dieters until I collide with the new me. In my imagination, the fat explodes off me when I hit that wall, squishing away in great gobs of quivering white, leaving me svelte and fresh and thin, by all the holy pickled bananas; it splatters on the pavement in fascinating, Picasso geometry, eventually to be harvested by angry Goth teens looking for environmentally-friendly pancake makeup alternatives to attain that stylish vampiric pallor.

Curiously, the thought of losing my body fat fills me with a sort of dread, for lack of a better word. True, when I was younger I hated my body with the sort of loathing normally reserved for the white maggots writhing out of the dead eyes of your grandmother or, say, George Dubya Bush. Then again, I had all sorts of issues when I was a kid, and my weight was just an excuse for deep soul-searching, general self-flagellation, and all-around self-pity. If it hadn't been my weight, it would have been my race. (It was.) If it hadn't been my race, it would have been my piano playing. (It was.) If it hadn't been my piano playing, it would have been my personality. (It was.) If it hadn't been my personality, it would have been my family--

--did I ever tell you about the time my mother...? never mind.

That was a long time ago, back when eating disorders were something that cool kids did. So long ago that Alyssa Milano was cool. So long ago that even the memory is something viewed through a hazy fog of disinterest, like it involved the hypermorbid, self-absorbed, peculiarly unattractive daughter of the complete stranger who moved in across the street. I look back at Little Me and feel a sort of superior pity, the condescending sort you dispense to roommates you really really want to irritate.

Somewhere between high school and grad school, I sat down and had a therapeutic encounter with my body. We spoke to each other like long-estranged relatives: me the perfectionist mother, my body the wayward daughter who pierced her nose and smoked kitchen sponges.

"So?" said I.

"You hate me," said my body.

"Yup," said I.

"That's not fair," said my body, tearfully. "I never asked to be born. It's all your fault, anyway. I didn't want to be fat. Nobody asked me."

"You're not a good daughter," I said. "If you were a good daughter, you'd work hard, and make an effort, grow up and show some discipline. You'd go through puberty. My God, girl. Aren't you interested in boys at all? Are you a lesbian? Is that it? You're a closet lesbian?"

My body sniffled. "You're always judging me."

...and, you know, I was.

It took a long time, but eventually I grew up. I actually forgave my body for being what it is. It was surprisingly hard, but I managed it, and now the thought of exchanging it for a better body feels, in a curious way, rather like death. My pudgy self and I have gotten used to each other, like two comfortable souls squashed into an arranged marriage negotiated by well-meaning parents. I've grown accustomed to my naked reflection in the mirror, the perfectly round head, the smiling curve of my waistline, the smug, self-satisfied purse of my belly over my pelvis; when I curl up on my side in bed, my tummy collapses next to me with an exhausted sigh -- What a day -- like a secret lover snuggled against my thigh. If the Guy snuggles behind me and slings his arms across my hip, my arm is there first, hugging my stomach to hide it from him. My secret. My belly.

Eventually I'll have to give it up, this comfort blanket of my fat. Someday. Moving on, even in the interests of health, feels like betraying my old body, when it took so long for me to reassure myself that it was okay to be round, it was okay to be plump, it was okay to jiggle in places that were supposed to be firm, yes, even on a woman. I find myself sabotaging this incipient thinness in tiny ways, every day. "I'm so tired, I'll skip the gym just this once." "I don't have time to eat, really, so I'll just go out and get some fast food. It'll just be this once. " "I had a bad day, I deserve some french fries. Just this once."

Maybe tomorrow I'll try being thin. Just this once.

News from the sister front...

so i´m in spain right now.

did you know that if you were in a restaurant and tried to literally translate the word hot dog into spanish, you would be ordering a ´bitch in heat´?

i´ve been staying with a friend of mine who came out to barcelona to take her TOEFL courses...two years ago! a boyfriend, apartment, and one baby later, she has decided to continue staying here. thankfully, spain has not changed lara much. she still has the same witty remarks and sharp tongue, but now they´re in spanish instead of english. i told her that i would come to visit her after the little bandito was born to see what all this mother-baby stuff was all about. imagine waking up every two hours to feed a crying ball of fat (aka matteo). wow. that takes some definite mother-type patience.
we all take our parents for granted (and i´m positive that i will again in the future), but after seeing her take care of the baby day in-day out, i certainly appreciate my mother a whole lot more. i don´t really understand the pay-off quite yet. she feeds him, she bathes him, she even puts him to sleep...and for what in return?! a little gurgle of spit on the shoulder.
did someone not let me in on a sick joke? i´ll try a dog first.

the weather here has been a bit haywire. snowing, raining, sunning...? my goal is to make it out to montserrat (translation: serrated mountain) and go backpacking sometime this next weekend. ideally, we´d like to go climb, but apparently you aren´t supposed to do that right after it rains.
we went climbing in montjuic yesterday. a local cragging place in town that has incorporated a city car tunnel into a bouldering cave.

for a cosmopolitan city, barcelona has been a fulfilling stay so far. the tapas, the bread, the paella...mmm... besides the food, the architecture is especially great since you can appreciate it all over town even if you´re completely stuffed.
for those of you who have not heard of antoni gaudi, he was a spanish architect from the late 1800´s. his most famous structure is the segrada familia, located in barcelona along with many of his other eclectic buildings. commissioned to design the cathedral in 1886, the construction has yet to be finished and still has many more decades of building ahead. with much respect, the cathedral looks like an ice sculpture made by a child on a bad LSD trip.

okay. that´s all for now. i have to go clean baby vomit off of my shirt.

sako

up a down hill.

Here are the results of my lipid (cholesterol) test as of February 11. ¹

Type	Value	Goals
Total Cholesterol	254 mg/dl.	< 170
Triglycerides	275 mg/dl.	< 200
HDL	49 mg/dl.	> 45
LDL	150 mg/dl.	< 100

So, okay. I have this feeling of impending doom.

Some of you remember my last sit-down with my cardiologist who, among other choice descriptive phrases, remarked that at this rate I had the life expectancy of an overwrought lab rat. I'm not personally acquainted with any lab rats, so I can't say for sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Whereas the last meeting with her was notable for her earnest emphasis on imminent mortality, my latest conversation with her was more notable for a definite note of depression in her voice. It's possible I'm making her despair.

It's true that I did get some kudos for having raised my HDL, which I'd improved with much pain and suffering. Literally pain, and literally suffering; each one of those points was paid for with ass-kickings on the Aikido dojo floor. With Aikido, it's not so much the falling down -- which happens quite a bit -- as it is the getting back up again, an exercise that demands not only a prodigous familiarity with the limitations of your ass and thigh muscles, but also a masochism inherent in any offspring of my mother.

"At least that's improved," said the cardiologist gloomily, "but everything else is worse. Your LDL actually went up, and so did your triglycerides. You know that's bad, right? They were supposed to go down?"

...which, in the face of it, doesn't make much sense. My diet has changed considerably since the onset of Imminent Death Syndrome. Greens are up. Reds are down. The amount of roughage I've consumed in salad is enough to make all of England regular. I've eaten enough fish to qualify for Japanese-ness again. Just look at yesterday. Breakfast: Go Lean Kashi with soy milk. Lunch: oriental garden salad. Dinner: Fried ham and eggs...

Hm. I think I've found the problem.

"But they look so healthy in Dr. Seuss books!"

There was a silence on the phone. I could imagine her struggling furiously to swallow her tongue; she was starting to wonder if it was really worth trying to keep me alive. Did I really have anything worthwhile to contribute to the gene pool, after all? Upon due reflection, she thought not.

There are two ways for anybody, even the most recalcitrant of patients, to control her cholesterol. Three, if you count surgery, but liposuction is not covered under my Purple Monkey Medical Plan. In short order:

1. Medication. This is the easy route. On the pro side, it's simple, it's straightforward, and requires nothing more complicated in the way of intellectual participation beyond remembering to pop a pill at dinner, stay away from grapefruit, and not get pregnant. It's true that I have a short-term memory that would make cocker spaniels jealous; it's quite possible that I would, say, mix everything up. It's also true that the Guy might get a good deal of amusement watching me pop a pregnant person, stay away from dinner, and not get grapefruit.

   On the con side, medication costs money. Also -- what if I wake up tomorrow and decide while eating lunch that I want to get pregnant and give birth to a squirming, 6 lb 7 oz grapefruit? What happens then?

2. Control my cholesterol through diet, discipline, and exercise. (Excuse me while I recover from my mirth.)

   Those of you who know me realize full well that 'discipline' isn't a word that exists in my mother tongue of Gibberese. In the Hall of Nations that makes up my personality, Discipline flies the banner of Haiti; very small, very volatile, and prone to revolution at unexpected moments. Diet, on the other hand, is my personal America: freedom for all in principle, but me first in practice. By comparison, Exercise -- eclipsed into insignificance of late by the unholy alliance of Menstruation and Disease -- barely stands a chance.

   The pros of choosing this course to deal with my cholesterol problem: early death would prevent the need to continue working for the Purple Monkeys.

   The cons: I wouldn't be able to enjoy the freedom because I'd be, well, dead.

   It's a close call.
   

Given those two options, the obvious choice was naturally the one I selected. "Medicine," I told the doctor. "Ew. I'm not taking medicine." 'Obvious,' see, is very much in the eye of the beholder. (You don't know these Purple Monkeys.)

Two weeks later, I sat down at the urging of one of my medically trained coworkers, and attempted to write down my meals for the last few days. She folded a piece of paper in half and planted it in front of me. "Put all the junk food, the fried food, the unhealthy food, all that stuff in the left column," she ordered. "Put your good meals in the right column."

I nibbled the end of my pencil and gave it some thought. Kentucky Fried Chicken, I wrote. Taco Bell. Ham and Eggs. Ham and Eggs. Eggs. Ham and Eggs. French fri---

My coworker, hovering over me while I painstakingly extracted my meals from my memory, dropped a heavy hand on my shoulder. "Call your doctor back," she said, firmly. "Go on the pills."

"Wait, wait, wait," I protested. "I was just writing the bad stuff first. Here." And, triumphantly, I scrawled oriental chicken salad in the right column.

We both eyed the entry, she with grave doubt, me with subdued pride.

Then I added In-n-Out burger in the left column.

"I don't understand why you're not already dead."

"I get that a lot."

Today I got the pills.

There are those out there who will be concerned about this, thinking that I'll blithely continue to abuse my arteries with appalling meals. To those people, I offer my reassurances; I have been spoken to, at length, by a nutritionist. The diet will change. I think she might have been Japanese. At the very least, she had to be Jewish. There are few people in the world capable of exercising such guilt on their behalf without a little hereditary help.

The first step, instigated by the Guy, is the consumption of The South Beach Diet, borrowed by a friend.

I hear it's good. Maybe if I deep fry it first . . . .

For those of you who don't know much about cholesterol, a crash course: HDL Good. LDL Bad. Easy mnemonic: H is for 'make Higher.' L is for 'make Lower.' HDL improves with exercise, and actually helps to lower LDL. LDL gets worse with crappy food, too many McDonalds commercials, and the presence of an In-n-Out Burger joint on the same block as your office. Triglycerides are fatty acids. Triglycerides bad. The way I remember Triglycerides is by thinking of them as a really bad girl band from the '80s. Which, okay, doesn't make any sense. Screw it.

what color is your sputum?

I'm wandering around work hacking and wheezing like a nicotine-crazed asthmatic, every so often letting loose with a gut-wrenching cough that sprays germs around me in a cloud of doom ten feet wide. Insofar as beauty's glory is concerned, today is more of a valley than a peak. My face feels an imperialist urge to expand, as if its peers Skull and Brain are pressuring it to encroach on the borders of neighboring states -- Canada, for instance -- in a preemptive strike against polite people everywhere. My nose has taken on an angry redness more often seen on alcoholics and Brits, which I'll admit is a bit of a redundancy in comparison. My eyes are livid and swollen as well, adding to their normal scintillating charm a watery ebullience that could stop a horny rain frog's heart.

In other words, I have caught a cold bug, passed on to me by one of the Purple Monkeys who kept pirouetting their disease-wracked corpses through my cubicle over the last two weeks. Any one of the several could have been responsible for my particular strain of bacterial warfare; every variety of hacking, wheezing, coughing, aching, fever, stuffy nose, runny nose, sneezing, and sputum-expectorating wandered within my sphere before I got sick. For all my new and improved diabetes management, I'm still like the roach motel when it comes to flesh-eating illnesses. Microbes check in. They don't check out.

It hit me on Thursday morning, and by Thursday afternoon I'd left work, driven home, and buried myself under a mountain of cushions. Flamingo, best of the best, had sent me books to wile away my idle hours. Sadly, I found that the reading of Dorothy Dunnett requires something notable in terms of demands placed on the brain -- namely, the presence of one -- so I put away that reading material and fell asleep while listening to P.G. Wodehouse books on tape.

Stayed asleep, in fact. For the next three days.

The Guy, who invariably finds a weakened Yuhri an entertaining Yuhri, took advantage of my fatigued state to plant a massive hickey on my throat. Right in the middle of my throat. There's no hiding it, save by judicious use of accessories, or the sulky combing over of hair across the neck. I lack the former; my dresser has yielded nothing I could use for the purpose save long thermal socks and a particularly springy bra. I lack the Goth requirement for the latter, being now 30 years old and having established for myself a reputation of loud, spitfire jollity that defies teenage angst and insecurity.

Thanks to the ill-timed Guy sense of humor, I am now subjected to the occasional, sidelong stare from the odd Purple Monkey I pass in the corridors. This in itself is not so bad; I could handle the innuendo and leering, knowing smiles. What I find more jarring is the rampant Asian Tact Deficiency Syndrome, combined with a general mentality that appears to have skipped the early, high-school-groping form of sex ed.

Purple Monkey: "What's that on your throat? It is big! What is happen? You fall and hit yourself? What is hickey? It is big bruise! It is so ugly. Shape like big bat! Or penis!"

Lost, thanks to this Purple Monkey-inspired illness:

1. Friday: A lunch paid for by the Island of the Purple Monkeys, at an actual restaurant with actual waiters, as opposed to the more traditional Purple Monkey Island paid-for meal, which consists of KFC tubs or chinese food that would've tasted better if they'd bought from Safeway.
   
2. Friday: Sako's birthday.
   
3. Sunday: Brunch with Tara (and, due to other circumstances beyond our control, brunch with Kimberly.)

Revenge now lies in wandering about the company and coughing on keyboards while their owners are absent. My inadequate scientific training tells me that the person who gave me this Flu of a Thousand Sputums is most likely immune to this particular strain now. Out of all the Purple Monkeys who get sick, the one who doesn't get sick is the one worthy of my vengeance.

I shall smite with the right hand of Destruction, and grind my enemy's testicles into nasal spray.

Missing my sister's birthday -- hi, Sako! -- was, yes, the worst fallout of my sickness. While my family doesn't tend towards high revelry on the subject of birthdays in general, we do tend to offer a token nod towards the celebrant with a phone call, at the very least. Mom, who had the advantage of me in the very fact that she was, say, conscious on Friday, left her a voice message on the only phone number she had for her. Sako called her back when she was gone, and left a message to say her phone was out of service and that she'd call back later.

Mom waited.

Sako never called.

I finally talked to Sako on Saturday, after her boyfriend called and informed me that we had all missed her birthday. "But it's okay," he said cheerfully. "My family all wished her a happy birthday. My mom, my dad, my sister...."

"How'd they reach you?" I asked Sako, in my bleary cold-hazed baritone.

"They called me at the circus," she said.

"They have a number for you at the circus? I didn't have a number for you at the circus."

"And at Lombardi's."

"Did I know you were working at Lombardi's? I don't think you ever told me you were working at Lombardi's."

"And you can't call the cell phone because it's out of batteries and we can't fix it."

"Coincidentally the only phone number I have for you."

So that's that. Even if I had been firing on all cylinders I wouldn't have been able to reach her anyway. In a moment of frustration I reflected that the family of the boyfriend she's intending to break up with know her whereabouts and how to reach her better than her own family. Then, having been Sako's sister for 27 years now, I shrugged and dismissed the matter from my mind altogether. After all, she's an adult and I'm not her keeper, and I spent my Sako bail fund on the deposit for my wedding caterer.

Sako is off to Spain today for 18 days, on one of her whirlwind Insufficient Funds trips that always seem to work out for the best. She was rather brusque on her phone calls -- I was, apparently, not supposed to tell Mom that she was headed to Spain because Sako didn't want the guilt trip. I thought all I was supposed to keep out of Mom's hands was the broken wrist and the ... the other thing, which isn't really relevant here. We (Sako and I) are having a Tiff.

I ordered her to bring me back something fun from Spain anyway. Fights aside, I like presents. I don't see why emotional upheaval should get in the way of sibling greed.