Project 28: The Farewell Blog

A deep held belief that I've had--and maybe this is a part of the mental illness, I don't know--is that my body, somehow, works differently than most. When I was purging six times a day, I truly believed that my body was invincible. When it was evident that I was bleeding internally and having heart problems, I really believed that my body wasn't sick because sickness would look different, more severe, more desperate. And when I was able to lose 30 pounds in six weeks, I believed those weren't real pounds--they were pounds with slices shaved off of either side, pounds for the less serious.

And I think I believed this to be true about Project 28--that either, it would work so well and I would achieve not just the 28 pound weight loss but the perfect balanced meditative life where mornings would seem so easy I wouldn't need coffee (I'm writing this blog on my second cup), where my arms would welcome a crow pose just for warm ups, where the chronic pain would prove itself just a symptom of my chakras needing to be realigned. Or that Project 28 wouldn't work at all. That my body would prove itself incapable to what "normal" bodies seem to be able to do.

My body, stagnating.

It's hard sometimes when I hear some folks, on the same track I am, talking about how smooth and steady their weight-loss has been, how they seem to be losing in even increments, predictable week-to-week weigh-ins.

Here's what has actually happened for me this year: I've written 54 blogs. I passed my exams and my prospectus (both major milestones en route to PhD), got two more articles out to peer review (one under publishing contract now), did the gritty work of letting some relationships go while working on optimism with others, in a city where I was convinced, a year ago, there was nothing left. I've moved. Twice. I've weathered a long-distance relationship with my partner and figured out more of what's important to our lifestyles. I feel privileged to see my partner working on her creativity and ideas again--maybe this has been my favorite part of the year. I've also seen more of Indiana's prairies and windmills than I've needed to. I started work at a journal and created two more of my own course syllabi. I've explored new ways to address chronic pain--I now look forward to acupuncture and have found that while I'll have painful days, they are less frequent, less severe, and don't last as long.

And here's what's happened with the actual weight-loss: I went up and down and up through my exam period, the last bit because I relied a bit too much on nightly glasses of wine to turn my brain off and my anxiety down. But I did get physically stronger. The hip pain gradually lessoned. I could do more physically. Since Spring Break, when I began this Weight Watchers, I've lost 17 pounds, ten of which are the original Project 28 goal. I have between 15-25 more to go. I'm four and half months into the 12 months of Weight Watchers I promised I would stick to. And it's true that I don't seem to be as successful as others in the program (for instance, despite hiking and biking and working out in the gym this week, I've still gained two pounds from Indian food and ice cream cake and one night of rummy-sangria that ended with a fence-hopping, midnight underwear dip in the pool) but if I wanted to count my success on pounds, I would be doing this weight loss in a completely different way.

I want to be clear. I have a mental illness that involves depression, anxiety, and eating disordered behavior that landed me the hospital for two years. I don't think I am recovered. But I do think I am becoming more patient, more willing to live with my brain's contradictions and idiosyncrasies, perhaps even a bit more balanced.

Crow pose aside.

"Generation Screwed": Thank You Newsweek

I had just gotten home from teaching, walking through 105 degrees of humid, heavy air and reaching my apartment mailbox to find the latest Newsweek, the title of one of their feature articles spread across the top heading, "18-34? You are a Generation Screwed."

I hobbled to the stairs, laden with lunch totes and computer backpack, thinking only of ice cream.

When I reached my door, my cats accosted me with dissatisfied meows as I turned the lock. Throwing my things onto the couch, I turned to address the kibble-growls of my felines, keeping them at arms length with my left hand, scooping their meals with my right. I pour them water, then myself.

I sit, put my feet up, turn the fan up a notch--all with whole fruit coconut bar in hand. Instead of going through my mail and being reminded of the bills (why are they still sending me paper ones? I check "paper-free" every single month) and credit card offers (didn't this industry collapse? what part of grad. student don't they understand?), I turn on my television and roku for an episode of Downton Abbey. Why yes, I think I would like to turn, however fleetingly, to the 19-teens, when women were still talking about suffrage, the flapper era was imminent with the post Great War rising hemlines and headbands, and the working class was still talking about Marx.

The taste of frozen, creamy coconut never tasted so good.

 I wouldn't be reminded to read the Newsweek article for another few days. I circled around it. Wondering what it could tell me that I didn't already know. And I wondered if it was telling anyone else anything they didn't already know. Lowest earning power since the Great Depression. Ten years or war. Highest credit card debt ever. Highest student loan debt ever. First time ever that a college degree does nothing to give you leverage on the job market. Noted.

But I did read it, while waiting for my partner to find her sneakers before meeting our friends for dinner.

And here's the thing about being a proud member of the Screwed Generation: stability is going to look like nothing we've envisioned before. Now that, as I'm writing this, I'm experiencing a temporary bout of optimism, I realize that we have an opportunity to value, more than ever, the only thing we can count on having for the rest of our lives. Our bodies.

What does it mean that, instead of investing in property or business, we invest in our bodies? That we come to value experiences over things? That we dismantle a medical industrial complex that is interested in short-term fixes? That we tell our bosses (if we have them) that we won't bother with a workweek that doesn't accommodate exercise and growing our own food and long, luxurious meals with friends and family?

Thank you, Newsweek, for pointing out the obvious.

Bottoms up.

On the Messiness of a Mango

If it's not an apple or a banana, I don't know how to cut it.

My partner can do this thing with strawberries where she holds the peering knife and the strawberry in the same hand and thinly slices the fruit over our morning bowls of Cheerios. If I am preparing the fruit, her grandmother's german cutting board is out, stained pink in seconds, seeds dripped onto the floor where our boston terrier laps up the juice.

Because it seems like slicing fruit is always a production, I'm not particularly brave when it comes to the farmer's market or the summer produce section of the bourgie supermarket.

Then, last week, I bought a mango. For a few days, it softened in my fruit bowl as I glanced at it, occasionally poking it with the round end of a spoon. I was intimidated. I wondered if I even had the right kind of knife. I wondered why its skin felt so tough. I wondered how that oval fruit became the earthy lassi that goes so well with paneer.

I worked around the mango each morning, circling it in my morning coffee routine.

Then the time came. As I poked the mango with my spoon, I felt a reverberated squish (do squishes reverberate????) I readied my cutting board, the weathered wood in need of a new coat of vegetable oil,   my dependable cerated knife freshly rinsed of yesterday's peanutbutter.

As I cut into the skin, attempting to peel, juice welled into my palm. The skin, like leather, a sticky, solid pile of debris. I shoo the cat away.

Skinless, I cut slices of fruit into a mixing bowl.

The pit is larger than I anticipated. I think there must be more fruti I can get off.

I lift the pit and bite, juice streaming down my chin.

As I wipe my face with the kitchen cloth and reach for my coffee, I think, this messiness is exactly what summer is about.

"Fork over Knife" and the Neoliberal Agenda

I've been taking a break from the blog, frustrated with myself that I seem to be hovering at the 10 lb weight loss mark. Since I told myself I would stick with the WW program for a year, I'm trying not to obsess about the week I spent in Chicago, eating carnitas tacos, ethiopian shiro, Red Mango. But now that I'm back, I've decided to take the time this week to assess some of my food and lifestyle values.

So, on the encouragement of my two C-Bus besties (after the encouragement they received from another mentor), I watched the documentary "Fork over Knife" the other night. The documentary espouses a "whole foods plant-based diet" and the screen time consists of mostly-white able-bodied male athletes, an important move for the film's agenda, which is de-bunking the myth that you will never get enough protein from plant-based foods. Now, I actually mostly agree with the film on this count: I believe that whole foods are both more filling and better for long-term health. In high school I met a peer-turned-good-friend who actually lived on a working family farm (I was a Massachusetts city kid transplanted to Maine in my mid-teens) and her attitudes toward vegetables actually transformed my food-values world. Carolyn taught me how her family, particularly during the growing season, shapes all of their meals around their vegetable dishes, often having two or three at a meal, the animal-based foods functioning as a cursory. I grew up in a world where a tablespoon of soggy, frozen peas served as my vegetable for the day. As someone turned vegetarian at 12, I struggled to get enough food (eating disorder aside) until I met Carolyn. (As you may have noticed by my Chicago exploits above, I am no longer a vegetarian, mostly because I got lazy after discovering a processed-soy food allergy). So I get it.

I think vegetables can be a center-piece--if you can afford them.

The film rarely addressed cost, though. Not on the day-to-day grocery bill cost. There was a health official in Chicago who spent two minutes talking about food deserts and economic inequalities more generally but I guess this wasn't as sexy as watching the vegan doctor's son-turned-fireman climb the fire pole. Besides the fact that the film itself was kind of an editing hack-job (they alternated a bit of nutritional science history with poorly integrated, contemporary lifestyle transformation stories) with ableist masculine rhetoric, I actually had a more serious problem with the film: it's neoliberal agenda.

If you're in the academy, you know that neoliberal is kind of the sexy, critical framework to justify the importance of all sorts of academic critiques for everything from pop culture to the prison industrial complex (or, if your my brilliant partner, you're integrating the two). And despite the fact that we might be a little bit bored by the buzz-word of it, it's actually a useful framework for understanding the increasingly-privatized and individual-based agenda of the U.S. expansionist project. Blahblahblah.

Here's where it showed up in the film. The other main objective of the film, besides debunking the protein-myth, was to discuss how a whole foods, plant-based diet can serve as treatment for a myriad of diseases, from obesity and diabetes (no surprise) to cancer and hepatitis. The mantra was "get off the meds, take control of your health" and "look at how much money we can save the healthcare system if you stop taking your meds". Now, I'm no fan of Big Pharma. I spend months in my Women's Health class asking my students to interrogate Big Pharma and diagnostic models they produce. And while I fully support eating whole foods as much as possible (insert major asterisk here with footnote caveat), I also don't think chronic health problems and diseases can or should be completely in the hands of "individual responsibility". It's not a surprise that everyone in the film is middle class or wealthier, with the kinds of jobs that afford them vacation and flex time, expendable income for massage, acupuncture, and yoga classes, and the comforts of more than just food. Plant based, whole food diets are expensive and until we transform our industrial agriculture system, work day length and unemployment crisis, child care networks, housing and green space development, and address the chronic stress that comes from daily interactions with  sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, and ableism--not mention addressing our actual healthcare model-- we can't expect folks to fix their diseases. My suggestion: a whole foods, plant-based diet, a complete cultural and political revolution, and some compassion.

All of this said, I did re-think last week's carnitas and bought some fresh, spicy arugula and a daikon radish to jazz up my salads this week.

Short Term Body Project, Long Term Body

It's been a little tedious trying to get myself to write lately. I've had a weekend traveling for a journal editing training, followed by a weekend where a year on a planning committee culminated in a successful/exciting/overwhelming/joyful two-day conference, followed by a weekend (now) answering student frantic emails around final paper thesis/outlines. All of this is somewhat usual end of the year academic stuff--a burst of hectic before the doldrums of July and August. But it's also made me worry that I will never get any of my own work done. That the prospectus, since it was passed last week, is as far as I will get. Forever ABD.

And I think these feelings are what leads to the advice I recently received from a colleague, passed on to her from a fellow PhD: "The difference between those who finish and those who don't are about those who just keep going."

And I know for me, it's the smaller projects (planning a conference, working on a journal issue, publishing an article, planning a course syllabus) that make the larger projects seem relevant.

It's this realization that led me to make a decision about Project 28 and the new Weight Watchers Chapter. Combine the short term with the long term. Entertain self with somewhat narcissistic projects--growing my nails out (I am a life long biter), growing my hair long (I made a decision not to cut my hair short again until I have passed the dissertation), complete Jackie Warner's 40 minute power workout without dying. Enroll in yoga class, ten sessions.

I've lost my first 12 pounds on Weight Watchers. But here's the problem that I've noticed with myself: I keep thinking of how I can do this faster, how I can reach my "goal" by my 29th birthday. And I've realized that if I don't just make a long-term time commitment, a full year, I will continue to think in terms of the numbers in the program and not the habits. I will continue to think that it's the week to week that matters. And I'm pretty sure that thinking is a piece of what ended me in the clinic ten years ago.

"The difference between those who finish and those who don't are those who just keep going."

What to do when Mental Illness Kicks your Ass

Well, apparently, the answer to this is to get teary in an unsuspecting feminist professor's office.

I'm not sure if its the moodiness of weight-loss, the ebbs and flows of my ssri's (the "prozac poopout") or the stress of the past year where, encountering several PhD benchmarks (exams, prospectus, IRB approval), I'm left with news that my advisor is leaving--my second one to leave in a 15 month period. Likely, it's a combination of all of this.

And I have to say, this isn't a blog so much as just a note. To let you know I'm out here and struggling to stay optimistic about this process of finding balance. Trying to focus on little successes (delicious mint pea soup made, weekly groceries bought within budget, students' thoughtful writing assignment on connections between racism and homophobia half-graded) and trying to remember that support can come in the simplest of phrases.

"I, for one, am glad you're here."

Ode to the Egg: Part II

As it was coming down in sheets-- one of those early May showers (bring June flowers??? I guess global warming will have us revising that particular rhyme) that thunders lightly in the distance, soaking you in your quick dash home from your evening workout-- I wanted eggs.  The comfort food that has always been around in my house, in the form scrambled at the tail-end of a flu, fried in between white bread with ketchup on days my mom had off from work. But to call this blog an "ode to the egg" would be incomplete, because it is also an ode to steamed spring-fresh green beans, boiled red potatoes, olives, capers, and tuna, between bites of crisp cool lettuce. I'm writing now about the tuna nicoise.

As an aside, this is actually the only dish I like boiled potatoes in. I recoiled from potato as a child, which is pretty much betrayal to my french canadian and irish genetics (though I proselytize with poutine and can drink my weight in guinness to make up for it).

I actually just had to google that to make sure I spelled nicoise right (and as my partner would complain, I evidently need to check my spelling on here a lot more often). I don't know how to pronounce it either. I started ordering it in restaurants in my early days of coming out as a meat-eater. My partner, in her quest to eat all things fancy-brunch, brought me to classic americana-goes-locavore restaurants and I tried various pronunciations. Vish-ee-wah. Vish-wah. No one ever corrected me. I'm relieved I never tried to pronounce the S.

What's fun about ordering tuna nicoise in restaurants is that it always looks different. Because there are so many components, the plating is hard to predict: delicate bites of tuna and capers cupped in lettuce leaves or a pile of potato and green bean mixed with flaked tuna and boiled egg yolk. I think it depends on the politics of the restaurant. Are you with the  99 percent? More union = bigger pile.

And it's just as fun to eat. Boiled potato, caper, tuna. Tuna, lettuce, olive. Lettuce, potato, green bean. You get the picture.

So earlier this week, when I found that this dish could be made a. cheaply and b. with relatively few ww points, I planned for it. The weather made me gravitate to egg. I put on a pot to boil water as I showered. I thought that this dish would be relatively easy and simple. But in a kitchen with only 12 by 6 inches of counter space, it was a  bit of a juggle.

Out of shower. Water boiling over. Frantic rummage in fridge for potatoes and eggs.

Pull out directions. Forgot the part about making the dressing.

Dressing calls for chicken broth.

I only have veggie bouillon and not another pot to boil the water to make it.

I use just water.

I don't have red vinegar.

I remember a woman on my last bus trip to chicago talking about the chinese medicine philosophy of joint health and apple cider vinegar. I use that instead.

My partner's horse radish mayonnaise (how old is that???) falls out of the fridge as I reach for the dijon. Cats run as if that was a beckoning fog horn.

I whisk.

Cats on table. I have learned the art of the one-handed cat-toss.

Cats re-emerge with tuna can.

Shit. How long have the eggs been on?

Shit. I have to cut the stems off the green beans.

Shit. The cheap produce I bought last weekend gave me have-rotted green beans. Cut the rot off too.

Toss in dressing.

Rinse lettuce.

Capers. Olives.

Peel egg.

I'm too exhausted to find a fancy way to plate.

But this plate of textures is exactly perfect.

The Pistachio Girl

I'm that kid that car sick every single time I boarded the back seat of my parents' mini van to drive the 45 minutes to my grandparents' apartment on the south shore of Boston. Every.single.time. When I was real young, I remember my father pulling over three lanes of traffic on the southeast expressway, masshole drivers with heavy elbows on their horns, so that I could open the door and puke amidst shredded tire pieces and cigarette butts. My grandfather was always ready for my with chalky pink canadian mints, my face flushed and sweaty as my sisters walked ahead, complaining of another trip made longer by a nausea no amount of drama bean (what I called "granma bean" until I was 11 because I really thought it was made for traveling to grandma's house and misheard my mother's pronunciation) could quell.

Because of this, it's amazing I ever even had an impetus to travel. I sort of accidentally began studying German in high school (a long story that has to do with a cross-state move and school transfers) and just as circumstantially ended up in a German club (I later found out that our young and eager teacher recruited for lunchtime meetings all of us who seemed friendless and wayward). And so I was bit by the travel bug at 16.

So armed with gum, mints, gingerale, and a healthy supply of Nirvana and Alanis CD's for my walkman (remember those, kids?) I boarded my first transnational flight. While my friends around me read and napped, I could do neither, the pulse of nausea beating like a drum in the back of my throat. So I took to people-watching--limited in possibility from the strapping of my airplane seat. And maybe because I watched her, on and off for seven hours, she is sticky in my memory.

And by she, I mean not her physical body. I actually don't remember much about what she looked like. But I remember her movements. She had what looked like an exam book balanced on her right knee (the knee farthest from me), and her left hand poised as if she were a statue holding a small globe. In her left hand were pistachio, something I had never seen anyone eat before. With her palm full of nuts, I watched as she moved with the single stroke of her thumb a nut. Upwards to the tips of her middle and pointer fingers. There, she would press the nut between her two fingers and her thumb, spreading her two fingers apart gently in the breaking of the shell. Then, meat loosened, she would bring her hand to her mouth, fingers and thumb in delivery. She would then use her fingers to push the shell back into her palm, simultaneously sweeping her thumb in search of a fresh pistachio.

And this was done absent-mindedly as she turned pages with her other hand.

And I thought, "That's what I want to look like when I eat."

On Thursday morning, I boarded a megabus, one of a dozen this year, and took my seven hour trip to Chicago. I remembered this woman, and her one-handed tricks, and bought a bag of dry-roasted pistachios at the gas station stop. I briefly thought, "How many Weight Watchers points are these?" but the points left me as a doled out quarters from the bottom of my purse and payed the cashier. Something tells me the salty memories are worth the over-draft.

Shedding a Bit of Bitch

I am kind of a bitch. And I try as hard as I can to do self-reflection but we live in a culture where women judging other women is a regular pass time. Here's the most recent example of this in my life:

I was shooting the shit with the program coordinator at a local nonprofit where I regularly volunteer. Because I'm in once a week, I've found myself pretty friendly with several of the staff and opened up recently about my weight watchers stint. When I was in last week, the program coordinator mentioned this to another staff member because she, too, is doing the online program. I'll call this staff member Ellen.

Ellen is approaching 60 and has been doing nonprofit work for 30+ years. She's born and raised in the midwest and identifies as a lesbian with a working class lifestyle/budget. She was thrilled to find out she and I could "talk points" and strategize, particularly in relationship to budget-friendly options. She's only six weeks in. As she's talking about all of the "switches" she has made in the past six weeks (which is weight watcher's lingo for not actually changing much about how you eat, just compensating with synthetic, processed low-cal alternatives) she mentioned how floored she was to find out the point values in her current eating habits. A McDonald's double cheeseburger is 2/3 of our daily points. A McDonald's cinnamon thingy is half. She says, "So I'm not doing that any more! I lost 4 pounds a week when I started for the first two weeks." She assured me that the weight loss has evened out to more like a pound and a half/week but she was glowing with this revelation. I notice her khaki pants gaping where her belt was cinched a hole tighter.

I have not had this kind of success. I'm not even sure I'm losing weight just yet. So I'm immediately jealous. Then jealousy turns to anger and anger to bitchiness (which I kept internal). I thought to myself, as Ellen is suggesting this brand of bread that is only "1 point a slice", "I'm not going to do that. I don't even eat bread that much. And I don't go to McDonald's. And I don't drink soda or coffee drinks with calories. Why does she get to lose all the weight? And why is she surprised about McDonald's food?" I think, somehow, that I am more deserving than Ellen.

When she asked me if I had anything I was working on in particular, something I was trying to swap or avoid, I said, honestly, "alcohol." She raised her eyebrows. I felt like jumping to my own defense but thought better of it. I just shrugged my shoulders.

Then yesterday, I made one of my go-to meals that I've been making since late college. Peanut tempeh stir-fry with rice noodles and lots of frozen veggies. I plugged my recipe (and I actually measured my ingredients as I put them into the peanut sauce, since usually I just eyeball and taste test) into the online point calculator. The recipe, in the bowlful amount that I ate (and I often eat two helpings) was almost half my points. And I thought, well, it's not a McDonald's hamburger.....

All this to say, if the weight loss doesn't work, perhaps I'll shed a bit of bitch and remember the complicated (class) politics of women's consumption. And be a bit more mindful of a mouthful.

Is Weight-Loss Self-Absorbed? Wait...Is this blog self-absorbed?

The answer the latter question could very well be yes. The answer to the former I am still wrestling with, as a feminist, as a scholar, as a buddhist-christian-queer-antiracist-socialist.

One of the things that I'm very concerned about is Arizona's ban on Ethnic Studies and their corresponding immigration battles. I teach about this stuff, particularly in my class on American women writers, where we begin with slave narratives and end with Chicana feminist thought, wrestling with ideas of citizenship and belonging and their relationship to a feminist social justice project. My students surprise me with their insights and their varying relationships to activism and history.

Last week I had students read an interview with a black feminist scholar, Evelyn Hammonds, about growing up in the Jim Crow South and pursuing a science degree at MIT in the late 1970's. In a critical writing response, I asked students to make connections to Harriet Jacobs' Life of a Slave Girl and the idea that withholding education is a tool of oppression.

I was surprised to find that many of my students did not know what the Jim Crow Laws were.

That afternoon, intimidators with gun holsters disrupted a peaceful vigil held to recognize the death Trayvon Martin.

The next morning, racist graffiti was scrawled on the side of our campus Black Cultural Center, a building that arose out of student activism and a push of Black Studies (now called African and African American Studies) in the 1970's.

Meetings were held. Undergraduate student orgs representing students of color created a response and faculty and instructors like myself stood in support.

The next morning, we marched from the Hale Center to the Alumnae House to interrupt a meeting of the Board of Trustees. Afterward there was a sit-in, followed by news of more racist graffiti.

As I was marching with students and faculty, I felt the pinching in my groin and the tightness in my tail bone gradually release. There was a dull pain in my walk but it was overshadowed by the energy of the group's movement--the anger, the frustration, the sadness. And I thought, does it matter that my body is here?

I don't have a thoughtful way to end this blog except to say that I think it did, that it does. I'm reminded of the political philosophy of Stokely Carmichael, who understood that white bodies carried privilege that bodies of color did not. So when he became a founding member of SNCC, he encouraged white student leaders to travel to the Jim Crow South because their presence would garner media representation that the local black organizing was not receiving. These white bodies were meant not to be leaders but to listen and engage. To be present.

And I understand today that there are limitations to the work that SNCC was able to do. And I also understand that we live in a different media culture than Stokely Carmichael but I also know that white privilege still exists. And if I can use it for anti-racist organizing, I will.

But I can't do it unless my brain is working. My body is moving. And I am able to stand/sit/write/speak in solidarity.

Please sign this petition--no need to be a student at my University.

It's Always the Tartlette that gets you...and the lychee martini

This week has been a lot of trial and errors with the new Weight Watchers plan. Here are some things I learned:

The Lychee Martini, while a delicious accompaniment to maki rolles and seaweed salad at a friend's goodbye dinner, cost me twice the points as a glass of white wine would have. Lesson learned: I went to bed starving that night.

The spicy maki rolls are twice the points of the regular maki rolls. Noted.

I ate a "tartlette" following a professor's book reading yesterday. The tartlette was no more than three inches in diameter, two bites of creamy, silky custard bedding two single slices of strawberry and kiwi. In trying to find a "dessert" point equivalency through the WW website, I found that this may be as much as a quarter of my daily allotted point values. Used my weekly "supplemental" points so I could have a soup and cracker mini-meal before bed so I wouldn't go to bed as I had earlier in the week.

Veggies and fruits are free, of which I am suspicious. Fruit matters when you are trying to lose weight and/or when you have trouble metabolizing sugars. I am still keeping my fruit to 2-3/day. Slight distrust of system.

Shelled soybeans and avacado are not free. Avacado was not a surprise here but the soybeans were, as I discovered in putting together my sobe noodle, soybean, steamed veggie lunch.

The makeup of the WW website is such that processed, manufactured food is the easiest, quickest way to keep track of your "points". This is a problem. Individually trying to build every combination of foods I eat because I choose local restaurants and often vegetarian options is time-consuming.

I'm still playing around with the "activity tracker", which I don't understand. Limited options of activities that don't include power yoga (pretty sure the website only understands yoga as meditation) and resistance weight-training via balance ball. Many of the activities that I'm allowed to do with my hips are un-trackable.

Final reflections: I have found myself drinking less alcohol and eating more vegetables, both of which are steps toward balance. I am going to talk to my acupuncturist tomorrow about any sort of appetite moderation work but in the meantime, I'm off to finish my buddha tattoo.

Weight Watchers is for Hetero Housewives and other Misconceptions

It's been 7 months since I began project 28.

I have made no progress toward losing my 28 pounds.

I have, however, passed my PhD Comp Exams without having a major mental break. And I finally feel like I'm getting on top of some of my chronic pain. And I'm more balanced, the ultimate goal of the project.

But the prognosis persists: my hips will get better if I lose some weight and tighten my core muscles. Acupuncture helps. Physical therapy helps. But extra weight matters when we're talking chronic joint pain. And I still sit for a living. reading. writing. thinking. kavetching.

I've tried upping my exercise.

I've tried working with a nutritionist.

I'm talking through feelings and compulsions in therapy.

And here's what I've come up with: the average nutritionist can't tell me any more than I already know. This might sound presumptuous but here's the thing: I spent two years hospitalized for an eating disorder, getting nutritional counseling day and night, and I study women's health for a living. And food politics is a passion of mine. I know we don't grow corn we can eat in this country. I know that corn syrup is not the same as sugar. I know what a gluten-free diet promises; and that gluten in the U.S. is different than gluten in Europe.

So the average nutritionist can't tell me anything I don't already know.

I also can't afford anything besides average.

A friend of mine told me about a Weight Watcher's deal. She's a young, breast cancer survivor and is trying to trim up to reduce her risks of recurrence. And I thought "Weight Watchers is great. My mom did Weight Watchers in the 90's." And then I thought, "Wait. Everyone's mom does Weight Watchers." Then, "Weight Watchers is for moms." In the process of a week of considering point systems as a valuation of food and nutrition, my thoughts kept rolling."Weight Watchers is for heterosexuals." "Weight Watchers is for folks with suburban lives." "Weight Watchers is not for queers."

Because it's marketed through the major consumer market of housewives and middle class women more generally, Weight Watchers seems repulsive to me. It would be like buying.....a house with a yard. Somewhere near a freeway where you have to drive to a grocery store. I talked this over with Judy and Meredith, the two most radical queers I know in Columbus. Meredith: "Why would you do that?" Wrinkles nose (which are adorned with hipster frames). Judy: "Because that really works!" Raised her hands in emphasis, exposing an inch of mid-drift at the top of her high-waisted skinny jeans.

And I think about how Weight Watchers no longer requires meetings and weigh-ins. It's all about Apps and online tracking. It is not the 90's.

And also, Jennifer Hudson is hot.

So I begin the process of signing up.

After I in-put all of my information, there's a question on the bottom of the page. "Are you an active bulimic?" to which I am supposed to check 'yes' or 'no'. I try looking for an in-between category. Seeing none, I click 'yes'.

"Weight Watchers is not a program for you. You should consult a physician and a nutritionist."

Well, I've done that.

So I click 'no.'

And begin my counting.

It could be a mistake. It could get compulsive.

But it also could work.

And I don't need to buy everything to use the product. There's an App for that?

Acupuncture Take 3

There's something that seems really indulgent about sitting still for an hour, legs elevated in a plush (leather?) recliner, lights dim, flute music circulating the sound waves of the room. It's 9:45 on a friday morning and I've discarded my socks and shoes by the door. I think, I should be working on my prospectus chapter outlines. I should be responding to student emails about their final papers. I probably shouldn't have downed those two cups of coffee after my shower, Rachel Maddow waking me up with the aftermath of Super Tuesday. I think, from here, I'll get to school do some reading before my 1:00 reading and then, hopefully, have time and energy enough this evening to finish that prospectus bibliography and a conference presentation for next week. And that I should also probably plan something for dinner.

My acupunturist asks about my week. I tell her my anxiety levels are a bit heightened, which happens to me at the end of every quarter when my colleagues sequester themselves to writing and grading and I try to resume a resemblance of a balanced schedule. Can we do anything about that? I ask, my fingers tapping beats onto the recliner arm. I think I'm trying to make the flute music into reggae. Sure. She taps three needle along my hairline. She asks about my walking. I tell her the truth--that I've been much less achey, able to move a little more this week. She nods, smiles, and taps five needles into my left hand. A few more in my feet and ankles, one in my right ear.

I glance around me, two other women and one man getting treatments. At first, I'm not sure how to hold my right hand because she has placed one single needle on the inside of that wrist. I feel my shoulder and bicep tense, a quickening of my heart, then I remember to breathe. In breathing, I consciously release my right arm muscles. As I do, my hand falls toward my torsoe, the needle, unmoved from its position in my wrist, nestles into the leather arm. I realize it, with its pinhead point, is going to work with me.

For an hour, I try to pay attention to the slight twinges and nerve firings in my body. Sometimes my mind strays. I'm beginning to understand how my chapter outlines are fitting together, how my missing link is perhaps one of my main ideas of my Masters thesis. I notice my left hip sinking into the chair and slight pinches in my left foot as it adjusts to this new balance. My body is still though I can't remember consciously stilling it.

And as I sit the needles begin their writing.

The March To-Do List

I've been having trouble trying to get myself to post recently. It could be the post-exam lull. It could be because I feel like I've let "project 28" itself fall kind of to the wayside. It could be because March Madness is descending, and I'm not talking about basketball.

Here are some updates:

In the month of exams, I'm pretty sure I picked up some loose drinking habits. Like, sitting on my couch alone with gossip girl and a gin and tonic habit. So I'm working on keeping track of some of my alcohol consumption--making sure that I'm not just making a cocktail or pouring a glass of wine out of restlessness or boredom.

I've also noticed my stomach feels like an open wound. Could be combination of alcohol, stress, and caffeine. So I'm going to cut coffee after noon. Try to stick to water or green tea.

I'm experimenting with acupuncture. I've now had two visits to work on this hip pain. Weirdly, after the first visit where she worked on two pressure points in my left ear (in addition to many more, mostly centered on my right upper arm) I developed the first ear ache I've ever had and it lasted for four days. When I asked her about it, she said that she had never heard of that reaction before... my body continues to surprise me. Is the acupuncture working re: the hip pain? A few days ago when I went back, she did a lot of points in my left hand, which left me unable to write for a few hours. As I was walking to the clinic, about half mile up the road from me, I noticed I had the usual pinching where my thigh meets my hip, more prominent on the left side than the right. On the way home, I noticed the pain was gone. As I'm sitting here now, cross-legged with the computer on lap, there's dull throbbing in my right ass and if I thrust my hips forward to rearrange my weight, the pinching in the front continues. My acupuncturist told me to try four sessions, about a week apart, and see how I feel afterwards. So, because I'm so desperate to be able to walk and bike and sit without constant need for readjusting, I'm sticking with it.

I'm trying to make myself do my p.t. exercises at least four days/week. My p.t. said I could start biking at five minute intervals in a month if I continued these exercises regularly. Last week I did them twice.

I keep hoping I feel energized enough to get back into my Ashtanga routine, something I've been doing since I was 15. But I've noticed something. I've actually become afraid to move. My body has defeated me. I anticipate pain even when its not there. And as a result, my body feels heavy. I'm out of shape. And I crave more sugar. So I'm telling myself: vegetables and short walks. A few yoga postures--no need for a full routine.

And with that, I have nothing clever to end this blog with. Just a hope that this list will become lived.

PhD Candidacy and Three Salzarac Cocktails

After my successful defense on Monday, I spent most of the week in celebration with various comrades and old roommates, taking the time to reflect on the months when I started my PhD--mono-laden, depressed, uninspired by a gray, landlocked city of passive-aggressive communicators, extreme racialized poverty, and the wasteful wealth of a suburbs that are a direct result of capitalist headquarters. I never thought I would make it, mostly because of my geography. There was also an outdated course requirement taught by a woman who doesn't keep up on her field, a language requirement facilitated by a department that still thinks flash-card memorization is actual learning, and thousands of dollars in student loans taken out to cover health insurance and my partner's on-and-off unemployment due to the city's devastated nonprofit and service industries. My first six months working on my PhD I thought for sure, I wouldn't make it.

And then the morning of the oral exam arrives. I've bought a new shirt, I'm wearing my uncle's tie for good luck. My slacks are ironed. In fact, to wear down the aggressive anxiety that arrived on Sunday afternoon, I began ironing everything in my closet. Then I rearranged the closet. Then I rearranged the living room. And I did my taxes.

So the morning of the exam: there's nothing to do but review some notes in the library, a mostly-superficial attention on my part reviewing key arguments and terminology, outlines for the exam questions I didn't answer (in each of our fields, we chose one of two) all the while wondering if I should have worn a blazer.

When I arrive at the exam room, it has been double-booked. There is a scrambling for a new location. There is an awkward convergence of my exam team in the hall, pats on my shoulder as we settle into our new room. I give my introduction, a summary of how my fields fit together, written out carefully in three brief pages that I have been told should be summarized even more briefly. So I don't look at the pages. I summarize my summary impromptu. There are questions. There is me interpreting the question. Answering. Reinterpreting. Re-answering. Providing anecdotes. Looking in the eyes of my four committee members, wondering what they are wondering.

Three minutes before the end of my two hours, they ask me to leave the room so they can discuss. They let me back in. I have only had time for a quick run to the bathroom, the bottle of water I brought in with me drained now, my throat still dry. They usher me to the end of the table. "Congratulations." No expression. "You've passed. You're ABD." No expression. "Really?" I might cry. Because I'm not sure why they aren't more excited. Everyone, almost simultaneously, releases themselves from the table by pushing their arms out, gripping the oak edge, and wheeling backwards, a silent glide of wheels across institutional carpet. "Let's go do the paperwork."

I'm exhausted. The process itself has been a great physical challenge of waking, reading, writing. Day in and day out for months.

Later, my advisor takes me out. I drink three sazarac cocktails. She keeps pace.

And then my old roommate, a colleague from my MA program in Boston--she struggled with me as we read Foucault for the first time, witnessed my gut reactions as I heard of the deaths of my uncle and later my grandfather, and poured me beer the evening my MA advisor told me to write one third of my thesis over, two weeks before my defense-- arrived, wheeling her suitcase stuffed with air mattress behind her. She held out her arms, smiled, and said, without my saying anything, "And of course, you passed."

And I think, "Not of course."

But my mouth sweetened by New Orleans rye and bitters and two hours of conversation with my advisor, I am feeling the beginnings of elation. But it will take days for it to settle in.

What's this Blog About??? Oh right....balance.

So I began this blog just about six months ago in celebration of my 28th birthday. My goal was to use the blog as motivation/support/dialogue in my quest to find some balance in my life. My partner was about to move to Chicago to begin her own graduate program. I was in need to losing some weight. I was mid-stream in reading for my comprehensive exams (the things that "prove" I "know" enough to begin my own independent research for my PhD), hence making the weight-loss damn near impossible (I sit for a living, folks). But I think my purpose is a bit bigger than finding balance in my own life; for those maybe unfamiliar with the stereotype, in academia, we're kind of told that academics is everything. Like a lot of professions, if you want to be good, you have to give up your life. I think my purpose with this blog is about figuring out how to transform what we think of as valuable sorts of living. And how academics play into capitalist evaluations of lives.

Let me explain by way of an anecdote.

An old student of mine asked to meet with me to talk about graduate school so a few days ago, we met up for coffee. After a brief catching up (after my Women's Health class, she changed her major to Health Sciences with a minor in Women's Studies!) she asked me to explain the process of applying to graduate school. "My parents can't help me," she said, "and I gave up on applications this past fall when I realized how expensive it was to apply." So we talked. I told her about tuition fee waivers. I told her I thought it was totally fine to take a year or two to re-group between undergrad and grad school. I told her the Americorps application she started to fill out seemed like a great option for developing professional skills (I did two years myself and in the end, despite a few gripes, I think I did some good work). After a long discussion, she asked, "Do you ever, like, get frustrated by people that have so much? By people that don't have to worry when their car breaks down?"

"All the time." Then I paused. Took a breath. I tried to summon some of the wisdom I received from my own mentor in my Masters program. "But I try to remember that money isn't everything. That despite class, we can find things in common with people. But I think that anger is important. It's not fair. And graduate school will be harder for you."

We talked through things like financial aid and loan consolidation. I gave her some resources I have found helpful in my own life. I told her about the miracles of income-based repayment. "Don't apply to graduate school because your desperate and worried about paying off loans," I said, adding, "But don't not apply to graduate school because your desperate and worried about loans." She smiled. I asked her to put together a resume and email me in a few weeks. That we would work on this together. It was just a matter of getting started.

And here's a fact: Graduate School will be harder for her. It's difficult to work 12 hour days when you don't have someone rewarding you with a decompression spring break vacation (this is actually more common than you might think among graduate school colleagues I've met, both at my public university and the private one my partner attends). Its hard to focus on writing awesome term papers when, at the end of the term, you know you will be scrambling to find something--anything--that will help you pay a few months of rent before your teaching stipend is renewed. It feels like defeat when you have to turn down conference presentations because you couldn't come up with the credit cards to pay for the plane ticket (graduate programs don't fund conferences like they used to, now that it seems like every humanities department in every university is facing recession-era funding cuts). But this is why finding balance is important.

Because you can't put all of your energy into building your grad school resume. Because there will always be someone wealthier than you pushing themselves harder. And I'm finding out that's okay.

Because getting here and reading and creatively composing ideas is what life is about, right? And graduate school gives us the intense privilege to do just that. And I worry about universities being businesses. I worry about the legitimacy of ideas being based on the length of your c.v. (and idea I have subscribed to myself). I worry that students with good work and drive are being discouraged because of class politics. And here's how this relates to balance: defeating hierarchical class systems means not playing into twelve hour work days (would you want someone at a chemical plant to have to work 12 hours?), not buying the argument that the more you do, the better life you've lived.

So maybe this is a bit buddhist.

But I feel it's important to encourage more diversity in academia. And doing that means understanding that not everyone will produce a lengthy resume and c.v. (for socioeconomic reasons, for dis/ability reasons, for choosing-to-have-a-life reasons) but their ideas and politics and teaching are better for the balance.

Post Writing Sadness

Here's what they don't tell you about finishing your exams: the following night, after some sleep and a few celebratory meals with friends, you will sit down on your couch, stare at the blank television screen in front of you, and feel a pit open in the bottom of your torso. This will be the beginning of an immense sadness that will leave you unsettled for, perhaps, weeks.

I have two weeks until my oral defense. My body feels heavy--not in the way that it feels when it hasn't had enough sleep. I've slept. In fact, I had an amazing dream where my 14-year-old terrier was taking care of a baby wolf (interpretations welcome in comment section). But my body feels heavy in the way it feels after someone close has died. And time is passing in that same way, too-- a passing marked by meals and sunsets but not any feeling of change.

And I wonder, what is it that I'm mourning?

Exams: An Alaska Kind of Feeling

I think I got a gift last week, on the Monday before my exams were to begin. It came in the form of the flu.

So I cancelled my Tuesday class. Slept 19 hours straight (I woke up to talk with my partner for a half hour, then slept more). On Wednesday I went to the store for treat-t0-myself-Naked-juice-smoothies (I prefer the green), chicken noodle soup, and dayquil/nyquil. I began my regimen.

On Thursday I taught.

Friday morning, when my exams were to begin, I woke up, took the dayquil, made some tea, and told myself "You only have to work for three hours, then you can nap." And I did. Between naps, I wrote. It felt luxurious--nothing expected of me all weekend but writing.

When I passed my exams in Monday morning, I felt the whole thing went...well....anticlimactically. Smoothly even.

Now that my energy is back, the tail end of a cold working its way out of my body, my head clearing from the congestion-haze, I am in panic.

So I'm pulling an old trick out of the mental health toolbox. My therapist suggested that, when panic begins to make my palms clammy and my joints jittery, I remember a time when I felt both a little nervous and a lot excited. Because some nervousness is good. It keeps out senses heightened. It keeps our bodies in movement, fingers typing across keyboards. But panic to the point of paralysis is not helpful.

So I'm remembering the morning I boarded a plane to Alaska. I had just graduated college. I landed a job assistant directing a girl scout camp. I had four and a half months of employment ahead of me, two pairs of pants in my hiking backpack, and copy of Anne Sexton's collected poems in my carry-on (they had been my constant companion since I was twelve--explains a lot, probably). My bank account was depleted due to a traffic ticket I had gotten the week before while trying to impress a girl on a first date.

And yet, as my dad took me to the airport with a reluctant send-off (I still hadn't bought a return ticket home--for all I knew, I could stay in Alaska a year and ask my college roommate to send me my winter boots), handing me the twenty bucks that would become my only cash for three days as I was stranded in Anchorage, I felt light. I had butterflies in my stomach. I wasn't able to drink coffee that morning because the nausea was overwhelming. But my body, heart palpitations from eating disorder recovery and all, was in forward motion.

When I landed, there was no one to meet me. I called my new work office and there had been a mix up in my flight plan. Could I find housing for a couple days until they sent someone out to get me?

I paid cash for the cab to the hostel. I ate from vending machines. I slept a night and when I woke, I took in the vista and the sky scrapers and the overwhelming brightness of a sun that doesn't set and I thought, "Well, damn, I'm on my own."

This feeling, tonight, is what I'm going to get back.

This is What Anxiety Feels Like

It's familiar but not comfortable.

My body temperature has risen. My palms sweat and there's an emptiness behind my bottom rib. There's also the usual tightness behind my sternum, piece-y vision speckled by black dots, a feeling of warmth spread across my cheeks and behind my neck.

They say that panic attacks only last about 15 minutes. But I've spent whole days with my mind in a tunnel.

My first real panic attack happened when I began my Masters program. Before that, for my first few years in recovery, I would feel heart palpitations and shortness of breath. I thought I was always having a heart attack. I realize now, though, that this was also panic. And arrhythmia.

For some reason, grad school transformed my panic from something sitting just behind my chest to a full body state. These attacks started around the time my uncle passed away suddenly. And I was reading a lot of Foucault and other cultural theories about power. I began to have existential crisis, fears that my entire family was disappearing, fears that the only thing I'd ever have to look forward to in life was stifling hot subway rides and luke warm coffee, fears that everything was predetermined into mediocrity. Fears that my student loans would come due and I would be left unable to find work, living in a shelter, a person tossed away.

Yoga helped. Medication helped. Talk therapy helped. I began seeing a feminist therapist who believed, like I did, that diagnosis was an inappropriate operation of power. I cut caffeine. I adopted cats.

And there was something about an animal resting in the calm quiet of mid-morning, breathing in and out on my stomach, licking its paws, that became meditative.

I'm feeling anxiety now like I felt then. I worry that in a few weekends when I'm to sit my exams my mind will freeze up. Or my mind will work just fine but I'll discover that I have nothing new and interesting to say. My chest will tighten. My palms will sweat.

So in anticipation of that moment, my chest tightens now. My palms sweat. My neck flushes.

And I think there's no where to go but forward. Student loans in tow. Cat mouths to feed.

And it's very, very scary.