if I knew what I was doing I'd be doing it right now

As you can tell, I've been desperately scraping the bottom of the bin for post ideas. I thought it would only last a week or two and I should just work through it, but apparently it is longer term than that. So rather than continue to bore us all, I'm taking a break until I have something interesting to write about again. Spring break is at the end of the month, so maybe I will be back after that. Have a lovely spring.

7ToF: my heart hurts

1. Andrea's memorial service was today (Thursday). It was a lovely mix of memorable and heartwarming and absurd. And sad. But also joyful. At the reception, there was lots of sharing of memories and wishing that the pre-cancer, wickedly funny Andrea--who loved a party and threw some of the best parties I've ever been to-- could have been there. And maybe she was. The whole thing made me ache. But you know, one of the things that has been brought home to me this week is that life goes on, even when it's not fair and you really wish it would just stop for a few minutes, or at least slow down.

2. Here is the Piano Guys video that they played at the end of the service.




3. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that when I wrote that last post about Andrea, I had forgotten that her mom sometimes reads here. Muriel, who is one of the wittiest, most interesting people I know, lived here several times for weeks and even months to help out while Andrea was going through treatment. We had some great conversations about books and life. She even took a couple of my Jane Austen classes. So special love and hugs to Muriel, Andrea's siblings, her husband and kids, and all of Andrea's family who are so especially feeling her loss right now.

*deep breath*

4. So, really, I got nothin'. But I've already done the thing where I end the Seven Things on Friday before I get to seven, so I'm determined to come up with something here. Hmm. OK, I will pass on a couple of links I enjoyed this week. First: Don't turn away from the art of life - a literature professor ruminates on the humanities.

5. Even if you're not a Broncos fan, it's fun to read this interview, with Super Bowl MVP Von Miller talking to three of his lifelong friends, all of whom have ended up playing in the NFL. We had a bit of an extra attachment to the Broncos this year because their backup quarterback, who kept them in the running while Manning was sidelined with injuries, is from our town and was a year behind our daughter in school (we don't know him personally, but you know, hometown kid).

6. I told you a long time ago that my favorite phone game is Seven Little Words. I'm still playing a year later. It's a great game for word geeks. Sometimes I know the answer because it's something I know (French writer Hugo = Victor, German diacritic = umlaut), sometimes I figure it out because word geeks know how words are put together, sometimes it's purely a matter of mixing the syllables around until I come up with the right combination. Sometimes the clues are amusing (one after another = eleven, a place to find gunpowder = tearoom, manual essential = gearshift, emphatic type = italic). Occasionally the clues make no sense. But I do love it. This is the longest I've ever played a game in my life.

7. This week's Montana Short Story trivia: the iconic western movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, starring Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne, is based on a short story but Dorothy M. Johnson, who lived much of her life in Whitefish, Montana. It's a good story if you can find it online, and the movie is pretty fun, too. Check it out sometime--lots of classic John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart moments.

And that's it. Have a good weekend.

tiny brief update

I'm trying to get back into the habit of posting on Tuesdays and Fridays, but it's not going very well, is it? Not helped any by the fact that the class I'm teaching is on Tuesdays, and I need to prepare for it. So for the next bit, I will probably only be posting on Fridays.

Andrea passed away Sunday morning. If you pray, please say a prayer for her family as they adjust to life without her.

7ToF: End of Winter drag

1. I spent last weekend in Texas for my amazing mom's 80th birthday. The weather wasn't all that great--by some odd meteorological coincidence, it was only about ten degrees warmer there than it was here--but it was nice to get out of town for a few days. Had a great time with my sisters and got to visit with some of my mom's friends that I've known for years. Make that decades.

2. We're to the part of winter that gets to me every year. I don't really mind snow--especially not when it's coming down-- and I don't really mind cold --unless it gets below zero, which is not often-- so early winter doesn't bug me much. But by now, the snow is dirty and the roads are a mess and I am a pale, pasty, mushroomy sort of white so I look like something that crawled out from under a rock. A few days in Texas were not enough to fix that, dangit. My car looks like one of those Jeep commercials where they've been 4-wheelin' it through hubcap-deep mud, but all I've done is drive around on paved roads. Well, slush covered paved roads. Come, spring.

3. FAFSA. If you know what that is, I know you feel my pain. If you don't know, you don't want to know. (It's the enormous, bloody complicated financial inventory you have to fill out for your child to qualify for financial aid of any type.)

4. I've seen several recipes for cauliflower couscous around, but having been bitterly disappointed by the whole hoax that was Cauliflower Mashed Potatoes, hadn't tried any of them. But I finally got around to testing it out this week, and can report favorably. They don't taste remotely like couscous, but it is a great way to fix cauliflower, especially if--like me-- you're not a huge cauliflower fan. One more veggie recipe I can eat happily. It's simple--toss raw cauliflower florets into a food processor, then saute in a little olive oil for 6-8 minutes--but if you want detailed instructions, just google cauliflower coucous and there are approximately four hundred and ninety-eight food bloggers out there who can describe it better than me.

5. (I KNOW it's supposed to be "better than I" but that always just sounds wrong to me, even though it's correct.)

6. The Montana short stories class I'm teaching this semester started this week. So I have been madly reading short stories. D'Arcy McNickle and Grace Stone Coates get a definite thumbs up if you run across their work. Will pass along more names later as we work our way through the twentieth century.

7. Nothing like spending time with Andrea to realize that while I've been angst-ing about midlife transitions, some would be thrilled to go through this stuff. Message received. Thanks for your kind thoughts, all. And in case you missed my reply in the comments, I don't by any means want to make it sound like I'm one of Andrea's main caretakers-- she has many friends, some of whom have spent considerably more time with her than I have. She is much beloved and will be missed.

a placeholder for Andrea

Insert here a beautifully written, elegiac post for my dear friend Andrea, who has battled brain cancer for four+ years. No one ever knows for sure, but she seems to be entering the home stretch. All of us who love her are torn between wanting her to stay and being ready for her sake for her long, torturous battle to be over. I tried to write a post that would do justice to her wicked sense of humor, her insanely detailed-oriented competence at every thing she did, her aliveness. But there are no words. Everything I tried came out maudlin, which she would hate.

She can't really speak anymore but she's still Andrea, she's still in there, inside her battered body. But I don't think she will be much longer. I sat with her for a couple of hours this afternoon. When I arrived I thought I was doing it for her, but it turned out the gift was for me. She is radiating herself. Sorry I can't explain it any better than that.

Pass gently, my dear friend.

7ToF: my kid likes pride and prejudice

1. My eighteen-year-old would rather ski or hunt or play golf or stick needles under his fingernails than read these days, although he enjoyed reading when he was younger. But Jane Austen has won him over. He's reading P&P for AP English and he sheepishly confessed at dinner last night that he kind of likes it. Mic drop.

2. Politics. LA LA LA LA LA *fingers in my ears*

3. So everybody knows that mom jeans are totally lame (even though we all wore them back in the 80s before we had kids, so they weren't mom jeans then). Nobody wears them anymore. They're embarrassing. Except you know what? I bought a pair by accident about a month ago (bought them online, didn't read the description very carefully) and omg I had forgotten what comfortable jeans feel like. They are awesome. I've never worn low-rise jeans, because hello two pregnancies and menopause, but I had made the switch to mid-rise. Not anymore. I have returned to my roots. 

4. I re-read A River Runs Through It this week as background for my Montana Short Stories class. It's too long to read as one of our stories, but it's the gold standard for Montana literature, so I thought it would be good to have it fresh in my mind. It was both better and worse than I remembered from the last time I read it a dozen years ago. I remembered it as more of a fable or a morality tale than anything else, with not much to say beyond setting up the metaphor of fishing and life. But it is more than that: the love of a wayward brother you cannot save, the mix of honorable and dishonorable traits in the same young man, the play of  the narrator's life, lived within the lines, against his borther's wreckless life, inevitably gone too soon. And of course there are some breathtakingly lovely descriptions of rivers and fishing. But it has the annoying problem (shared by Guthrie's The Big Sky, Montana's other literary claim to fame) of a view of women that is so dated as to be almost unreadable. The old dichotomy between the angel in the home and the whore at the bar is blatant. Still, definitely worth reading.

5. Over the winter, our seven chickens were averaging two eggs a day, which is about perfect for the amount of eggs we eat. Then several days this past week there were five eggs. Maybe because the days are longer? (although not much longer, sunset was at 5:40 today.) Who knows. They're tough little things. There's still quite a bit of snow on the ground and they get out and scratch around in it every day.

6. We watched way too much Big Bang Theory a few years ago and got heartily sick of it. We didn't watch it for about a year and a half. But we've been catching up on the episodes we missed over the past few weeks, and they really do have an amazing team of writers. They've done some pretty creative stuff to keep it interesting. If they would just ditch the laugh track it might be my favorite sitcom ever. We've also been watching lots of movies (see previous statement about sunset at 5:40). Most of them were just a way to pass an evening, but if you haven't seen Once, it's really good. Kind of slowly paced, character-driven, with lots of music. 

7. Weight Watchers update: still doing it. Still slowly losing weight. I may not adore it like some do but it's working, so I'm not complaining.

Have a great weekend.

mid-life transitions: the cog feeling

I've talked to two women in the past few days about being in our mid-fifties. Each of us is in a unique situation, but I'm not sure anyone is getting through this lightly. There are physical changes and life transitions and readjustments of expectations.

Since we're all unique, I suspect we feel alone, like we're each the only one going through this. But some things seem consistent. I keep hearing the same things: I thought I would feel different/better/more accomplished. More adult. I thought I would have done something significant by now. I thought I would feel more useful. I thought all this effort, all the gazillions hours of my self that I've poured into my kids, my job, my volunteer work, my music/writing/dance, whatever, would feel more worth it.

Instead, at least for me, I find myself feeling more and more like a cog in an enormous machine. Like everything I've done has mainly served to just move things along, keep the wheels turning. When I was studying theory in grad school, I read Althusser, who proposed that there is no such thing as individual identity. Instead, he thought we all occupy predefined roles (subject positions) in the massive machine that is our culture (the hegemony). When I first read that, I thought it was absurd, but now I wonder if he developed that theory in his mid-fifties, because that's how this feels some days.

(aside: it's entirely possible that was Gramsci and not Althusser. My brain is dying, and I don't care enough to go back and figure it out.)

I've been thinking about this a lot the last few days. This isn't depression-- as you know, I've been through that, and this feels different. Depression is like an endless well of blackness inside me. This doesn't have that black hole feeling, it's just ended up with me re-evaluating the things I do and jettisoning quite a few. I'm reconsidering what's really important to me at this stage of life, and aligning my activities to match.

Maybe the cog feeling only happens to those of us who were dreamers, who fantasized that we would really help change the world, that we would be part of something big. I believed that wholeheartedly when I was younger. But I've told you before, I'm convinced now that the only way we change the world is in the small things, the little ways that we connect with the people around us, the way we carry ourselves in the world.

So the only thing I've come up with so far to work on this is to adopt a defiantly positive attitude-- yeah, well, my life may be a boring and insignificant cog in a machine, but it's my cog, damn it, and I'm going to do the best I can with it.

As with all of these posts, I know this doesn't apply to everybody. There are plenty of people who hit their fifties at full stride and never look back (I see them on Facebook and I sigh with a tiny bit of friendly envy). But I suspect there are more of us uncertain ones out there than are admitting to it.

(This has been sitting in my draft folder for a couple of weeks now. I've re-written it at least three times. Maybe part of the re-evaluation thing is wondering if there's any point in posting stuff like this. But it's late, and I've missed posting on Tuesday for the past several weeks, so here you go.)

7ToF: Weight Watchers edition

Obviously I don't have much to say these days since I missed posting on Tuesday again this week. Not sure when I'll get back to it. Sometimes when I'm driving around I think of half a dozen post ideas, other times my brain is a barren desert. I'm headed to Texas in a couple of weeks for my mom's 80th birthday, maybe that will get me back in writing mode.

The rest of this is about Weight Watchers, now that I've been going for a month. You've been warned. If you're new, you missed all the posts in my old blog about my objections to our culture's obsession with thin-ness, and my absolute conviction that no one except you can tell whether or not your weight is healthy for your body and your life.

I won't re-hash all that right now, I just wanted to make it clear that I'm only doing this because a) I want to be able to keep up with my active family, and b) I'm starting to have some joint problems that I suspect will clear up if I lose a bit of weight. If I hit my goal, I will still be well above the culturally deemed acceptable weight for my height--no worries that I'm going to be fashionably thin, because that's never happening again.

OK. Now that we've got that out of the way.

1. The first question people ask me when I tell them I joined Weight Watchers is if I have to eat their food all the time. The short answer is no. I think you can buy various different snacks that are Weight Watchers brand, but I've never tried any of them. I fix my own food and look things up when I'm at a restaurant.

2. Do I go to the meetings? Yes, I do. The meetings are a mixed bag. On the plus side, they're probably the main reason why I stuck with the plan when I wanted to quit early on. Even though no one would know if I utterly screwed up one week (there is a weigh-in, but it's not public and no one looks at what you ate), still the embarrassment factor of quitting so soon after I started kept me from throwing in the towel. Our leader is upbeat and positive, even a little snarky occasionally, without being overly cheerleader-ish. I have to confess that the meetings can be kind of fun. There's lots of laughter and friendliness and you learn some good tips.

On the negative side, though, it is 45 minutes of listening to talk about food and weight loss and dieting, which is really difficult for me to sit through sometimes. Some of the members are absurdly enthusiastic, which makes me roll my eyes. But in their defense, WW has given them a program that works and some have lost vast quantities of weight using it. I would probably be a bit of a fanatic, too.

3. How does the point system work? You get a certain number of points per day based on your height and weight and how much you want to lose. You also get a set number of weekly points, which you can use for extras. You can divide up the weekly points to get a few extra points each day, or you can save them up and use them to splurge. One woman said that she uses her weekly points for a nightly glass of wine.

You could be extra exemplary and never use your weekly points--apparently that's what a lot of people do-- but that's never going to be me. The second week when I was about to quit, I still had most of my weekly points, so I went to a bakery and bought two 4" peanut butter chocolate chip cookies and ate them both sitting in the car (they were fabulous). I had enough points to do it, it kept me sane, and I still lost a pound that week. That's what keeps me going -- if I keep within my points, so far the system has worked, even if I use my points for stuff that is not at all diet-ish.

4. The good parts about the points system: Pretty much all fruits and vegetables--eaten without added sugar or fat-- are zero points. So if you get hungry, you can have a banana or an apple or a handful of sugar snap peas (or all three) and it doesn't count. The only exception I know of is avocados, which are crazy high points. (Disappointing, because I love avocados.) After a few weeks, you become adept at knowing a handful of low-point foods that work for you so you're rarely without something you can eat, even if you're down to one or two points at the end of the day.

5. The bad part about the points system: You end up chasing after foods that are low points rather than figuring out what you want to eat or what is healthy to eat. For example, there's a powdered de-fatted peanut butter called PB2 that I've been using in smoothies for couple of years now, but I would never have eaten it by itself (you add water to make it into a peanut butter-ish substance). But I do now, because PB2 is 1 point for two tablespoons, and real peanut butter is three points for one tablespoon. Also, many of my favorite go-to quick foods (Kind bars! I miss you, Kind bars!) are off-limits for now because they're so many points. You start choosing your food based on the points rather than any other consideration.

6. But you know what? A few weeks in, once you get the hang of it, you realize that the points sort of make sense. They're based on total calories, with points added for sugar and saturated fat, and points reduced for protein. If you stick to your points, you lose weight. I suppose the literal truth is that for the most part, things are low points because they are low calorie, but while I'm absolutely opposed to counting calories, for some reason this doesn't bother me so much. Maybe because of the freebie fruits and veggies-- there's always something you can eat.

7. The best advice I received (thanks, Mary!) before I joined: when you register, don't set a huge weight-loss goal. First of all, you'll hit your goal sooner, and when you do, you become a "lifetime" member and Weight Watchers is free thereafter. Secondly, the higher the number of pounds you want to lose, the lower your daily points total (I think. I haven't actually researched that, it's just my impression from listening to the talk around me at meetings.) Oprah made a big deal this past week saying that she had lost 26 lbs while eating bread every day, which surprised me. I've eaten bread every day, too, and it never occurred to me that I couldn't, but maybe I have a fairly high points allowance.

So there you go. After only a month, I'm hardly an expert, but I'm starting to feel a tiny bit confident that I can reach my goal, and I was completely demoralized by my weight before I started. That's a plus.

p.s. The point system was completely overhauled a couple of months ago, and many of the people who have been in WW for a long time hate the new system. I can't compare them because I joined after the new system started. The new system is working for me.

7ToF: you were never serious about the craft

1. We had no phone for eight days, and the last three of those, we had no internet service. Major pain. But we seem to be up and running again, even though our DSL still occasionally becomes unbearably slow. I did have a post written for Tuesday, but I decided it needed some more work, and since that was the night our DSL died, it would have required a trip to a coffee shop to write another. So it didn't happen.

2. I would give you the weather update, but you know, it's January. Nothing newsworthy here.

3. I read an article a couple of months ago talking about how stupid recycling is. I was surprised, because to me, recycling just makes sense, like picking up after yourself. But the article made some interesting claims about the relative expense of recycling vs. landfill management, so I've been digging around and doing a little more research. The original article turned out to be a little biased in some of its claims, but still, it's a far more complex topic than I realized. I didn't learn anything that convinced me to stop recycling, but I came away from my research convinced that the best thing is to reduce our consumption of disposable stuff. Which is harder to do than it sounds around here (maybe anywhere), but I'm working on it.

4. One thing everyone agrees on: recycling aluminum is worth it-- it's far cheaper to recycle aluminum than to mine the new stuff. (For the record, paper and cardboard can also be effectively recycled; plastic and glass, not so much.) The main thing we buy in glass containers is beer. I've never been much of a wine drinker-- migraines, you know-- but I do love a good microbrew. Those smart people at our local and regional microbreweries must have been reading the same info about recycling that I did, because suddenly microbrews are available in cans. Until recently, canned beer was the stuff that tasted like piss. But now you can get Fat Tire, Blue Moon, Alaskan Amber and a whole bunch of other good beers in cans. Nice move, microbreweries.

5. I was never a dedicated David Bowie fan, although his music was some of the iconic music of my college years. But I've been listening to his Best of Bowie album some this week, and there are way more songs than I realized that I pretty much know by heart. RIP, Bowie. RIP also to Glenn Frey, although I'm just slightly too young to be as devastated about that as some other people I've heard calling into our local classic rock station. Nice to know I'm too young for something, anyway.

6. But Alan Rickman, *sniff.* I've always had a not-so-secret crush on Alan Rickman. He was just perfect in everything he did, and he was in some of my favorite movies-- Galaxy Quest ("I see you managed to get your shirt off"), Sense and Sensibility (sigh), and who else could have played Snape? ("Unless you wish to poison Potter - and I assure you, I would have the greatest sympathy if you did - I cannot help you." in that snooty, disdainful tone of voice that he had down.) Loved him, and even more after reading these quotations, which I'd never heard before.

7. Weight Watchers update (click away now, all ye who have no interest): The first week I was just floundering around trying to figure out what to eat. The second week I had a terrible time not throwing in the towel--it wasn't all that awful but I hate not being able to eat whatever I want. But I kept reminding myself that a) it's only temporary; b) I'm trying to learn new habits because I failed on my own; and c) I really am eating better food now. There are certain things about the weight watchers system that I'm never going to agree with--maybe I'll write more about that another time--but now that I'm getting used to it, it's doable. This week is going much better. And I am losing weight at the same time that I'm figuring out a plan for maintaining once I'm done, so there you go. Three weeks in, I'm at least willing to say I'll stick with it for another week. ;-)

So....I joined weight watchers.

I wasn't going to tell you about joining weight watchers until after I'd been through the first month, but let's face it-- it's January and I haven't read a good book in a couple of months and if I don't write about this, I have nothing to write about.

I joined online Sunday night after New Year's, and went to my first meeting that Wednesday. I've never been a huge fan of New Year's resolutions, but I had given myself until the end of December to find a way to lose the weight on my own. Which didn't happen.

I thought maybe I should just take another blogging break rather than subject you to my musings/thoughts/rants about points and food tracking. But I finally decided, as I always do, that you don't have to read it. I put "weight watchers" right up there in the post title so you can click away if it's not a topic that interests you. I'd probably do the same if our positions were reversed.

I've thought for several years now that if I couldn't manage my weight loss on my own, I'd try Weight Watchers. Mainly because I know several people who have had good success with it (some of whom read here). But two things kept me from signing up: one, I was so sure I could manage it on my own; and two, I hate tracking what I eat. 

The first thing--I was so sure I could lose the weight myself-- has proven to be abundantly false. I have more or less figured out how to maintain, to stop the upward creep, but I have not managed to lose more than 2-3 pounds on my own. (For those of you who are new, I gained about 20 pounds a few years ago when I was in grad school and went through menopause at about the same time, on top of already being a bit on the plump side.)

The second thing--that I hate tracking what I eat-- is trickier. I've done it (tracking) several times before, and although I start out with enthusiasm, in a couple of weeks I'm playing all kinds of mind games with it and it completely backfires. I end up mentally arguing with the tracking, and losing touch with the idea of developing better eating habits. If there were mind games at the Olympics, I would win the gold medal in a flash. I am terrific at mind games.

But that ended up being a non-issue because WW has a new plan that doesn't require food tracking. I haven't tried it yet--I can manage the tracking for the first couple of weeks, so I thought I'd try the "Smart Points" plan for awhile until I adjust to the new eating style. But I'll probably switch over to the no-tracking system eventually.

I'm not saying anything about the results, maybe never will, because TMI. But I'm hoping the fact that I pre-paid three months will mean I stick with it at least that long. Stay tuned.