Third Time's a Bust

It's been awhile since I've dated but here's the routine I remembeR: First date, you're just relieved the person meets you at the bar. And that they're dressed. And they can speak in whole sentences. The second date, you're relieved that the first relief wasn't totally uncalled for. And that your date is, in fact, gay. Third date: you start to notice things. The way your date chews. Some pesky political opinion that inadvertently supports Republican ideology even though they think they're just hippies. The run in her stockings. And maybe, just maybe, it's all down hill from there.

This is how I'm feeling.

There were several things that went wrong today with my third nutritionist appointment. The first thing: that on the scale I weighed five more pounds than I did a month ago. Which means I am exactly where I was when I started this whole thing three months ago. I'm willing to give away the fact that that scale reading is not my nutritionist's fault.

And we talked about the problem of not being able to exercise--the new mandates from my physical therapist to rest for the next six-ish weeks. And I asked about cutting back on the meal plan. "What would that do for you?" she asks.

"Well, when I was on a weight maintenance plan before, in the hospital, and they realized I was gaining, they cut a grain and a fruit."

"I'm not doing that. That's not enough food," she says. "And I really think the meal plan is not a place to trim down. Let's think about extra calories elsewhere."

We talked about my weekend with my partner. The few glasses of wine. The meals out with friends. "How often do you see each other?"

"Every three weeks or so."

"So you need to start realizing that time with your friend still counts." Ummmm....what? My friend? I give her what I imagine to be a look of disbelief. "I mean, you're partner." Strike one. Is this is mistake she would make if Cat was my husband?

"I think you also need to think about not losing weight right now. I'm not comfortable with the kind of pressure that puts on you."

"But I need to not gain, either. I want to keep off the 13 pounds I've lost since January. I've gained five pounds."

"I'll give you two. You're wearing winter clothes. And you see how you're rounding up?"

Is she negotiating numbers with an eating disordered person? Like I don't remember the exact reading of the scale last time? And also, should this be up for debate? Or maybe she should address my concerns? Strike 2.

The appointment continues, though I feel like walking out the door. My left ass/hip hurts, as usual. I fidget in my seat. She takes this fidgeting as emotional discomfort. "I know it's hard," she says. "It must be so frustrating."

"I'm frustrated cause my ass hurts from walking over here with my laptop."

I'm likely her worst nightmare. But I don't have the patience. We review the meal plan. We discuss limiting alcohol consumption for the next six weeks. To nothing. Fine.

She talks about eating more vegetables. I explain that I make 1100 bucks a month and vegetables are expensive. She tells me to buy carrots. I discuss the problem of buying environmentally friendly vegetables. "Sometimes you have to trade off some of these rigid values," she says. "You don't want to paint yourself into a box." So it's either cancer and environmental deprivation or weight loss? Strike 3.

As I'm about to leave, she asks if I have change for a dollar so she can fill her parking meter. But I know the basics of baseball: a batter is only allowed three strikes. And I can see a run in her stocking.

"How to Tell Your Doctor a Thing or Two"

I love my p.t., Pam. She's always telling me the gossip in the sports world (which involves a lot of behind-the-scenes dirt on OSU's football scandals--yes, I used plural), stressing about if her football teams are going to win, and chatting about her rescue dog that is too timid for strangers. Really, my twice-weekly visits are a window into a world utterly unlike my own. So even when she kills me, causes two days of pain in the left side of hip and makes my body feel flu-like, I still can't hold it against her. She's likable.

But the doctor that she works with is a little rougher around the edges. She's hard to read. Rarely smiles. Bends me legs and stretches my hips in a matter of fact manner. She seems curt. And as a result, it's taken me awhile to open up to her. But today, I took some of my own advice from the Sociopolitical Issues in Women's Health class I teach: I "told my doctor a thing or two" (I just tried to see if the internets had a link to this foundational women's health movement pamphlet that I use in class but to no avail so you'll just have to trust me....).

She suggested an MRI. Not only am I not significantly improving, but I'm now experiencing sciatica. I pushed her. I asked how the treatment plan would change if the initial pelvic MRI were to prove something. She said complete rest. I said, "Well, given the MRI is going to cost me a $500 co-pay per slide, I would like to try the rest first". She agreed. If some of my symptoms go away, I will still need two or three more slides to see if I have another unexpected problem, like a tear that needs surgery.

Then she offered me "steroid burst" for five days. I thought for a few minutes while she stared at me expectantly. The burst would significantly help pain and inflammation. Finally, I told her I was scared of the steroids. "Why?" She asks.

"Well, I was on steroids a few years ago for some bad poison ivy and I couldn't sleep and it suppressed my immune system so much that I ended up with mono."

"Oh, yah, you won't be able to sleep. That's just a side effect. So I usually tell people to expect that and just get stuff done." Not sleeping is the worst thing for someone with an anxiety disorder like mine. In the midst of exam prep. I explained this. She said we could hold off and see how the rest does. And that some of sciatica is stress-related.

Then she asked what I do for pain. "I take an aleve sometimes, but to be honest, I'm nervous about too much pain meds."

"Why?"

"Because I had some bad internal bleeding a few years ago and I don't want to start something up again."

"What kind of internal bleeding?"

"A mallory weiss tear."

"Oh." She pauses. "What was that from?"

"I was bulimic for twelve years."

"So it was probably from that."

"Likely."

"You're not still throwing up, are you?"

"No." I could explain more here about the ups and downs of recovery but I'm exhausted. It's raining out. It's monday. And I have to go OccupytheOval at noon.

"Well, let's not have you on Aleve." She had been prescribing a high dose of aleve when I first started seeing her. Apparently, medical records don't transfer. "Let's do tylenol. Two tablets. Three times/day. And we'll change your routine with Pam."

And as I walked out, I felt like I had achieved something. I'm not taking meds I'm not comfortable with. In voicing my concern, the doc asked follow up questions pertinent to understanding my body a bit more holistically. And for now, I can hold off on an MRI and take the time to find some student loan money to cover the slides in a few months.

Perhaps today was a small victory against the medical industrial complex.

NPR: An Essential Part of a Treatment Plan

With the gentle lull of the annual begathon accompanying my meals this week, I found myself, as I was microwaving leftover lentils and rice after a late class on Wednesday, donating sixty bucks I don't have to my local NPR station.

I think my reasons are political. I think my reasons are personal. And I know that it's not a melodramatic exaggeration to say that public radio, and the people who invest their time in collecting stories and reporting injustice, have saved my life.

I didn't grow up in an NPR household--my parents are too conservative for that. But when my parents moved us from a working class mill city in Massachusetts to a burgeoning hipster city in Southern Maine, I was eating disordered. I was depressed. And I was a good writer. After taking my first journalism class my sophomore year, one my colleagues recruited me to train at our local community radio station for something called Blunt. And so for three years, I became involved with community radio public affairs: hosting shows on genocide in Central Africa, corporatizing of our city by Walmart; creating features before the days of Pro-tools and other digital editing on re-visioning of Columbus Day and Gay Proms. I fell in love with writing for radio and began to do stories of my own life. And it was one of these stories that clued in my mentor and radio advisor, Claire.

If I hadn't had a reason to write, I'm not sure how much cardiac arythmia and internal bleeding would have had to surface before anyone noticed.

It was Claire I called from the hospital my first New Year's Eve in treatment. It was Claire I introduced my first girlfriend to a few years later, when the pieces of my trauma puzzle were beginning to fit into place and I knew part of my recovery meant coming out.

And from working in Community Radio, I became an NPR addict. It's been my constant meal companion--when I'm too anxious to slow down with the food in front of me, when I'm too tired to make it through a plate, when I'm sitting with uncomfortable fullness I tell myself: make it through this one feature story. Then another. And another. Until the moment has passed.

And sometimes it takes several meals of listening for something to sink in. That war that has been consuming my entire adult life: this morning, I heard it. I had been hearing it, of course, for the past 24 hours, but today, over a breakfast burrito and coffee, I teared up. It was over. Our troops--troops we should be apologizing to--are coming home. And I felt a lightness after my meal; a changing of tides; a new story beginning to unfold.

Statement of Professor Support at OSU for Occupy the Oval

For once, I am proud to be a buckeye! Please see below:

Professors Support

Occupy the Oval

On Monday, October 24th, Ohio State students will take their place at the front of a student-led movement to Occupy the Oval.

As educators at The Ohio State University, a publicly-funded state university, we join with educators state- and nationwide who are concerned about the impact of corporate interests and privatization on our ability to provide the world-class teaching and research our students deserve.



We bear witness to...

...the exorbitant debt our students are taking on in pursuit of an education they've been told is necessary to making them competitive in a contracting job market.


...the privatization of the university’s public spaces and goods.




...continued attempts to eradicate the presence of unions from college campuses, relegating the vibrant U.S. labor movement to the pages of history textbooks.

Our students’ actions offer practical lessons in democratic citizenship.

Indeed their protest exemplifies the University's motto: Disciplina in civitatem.

Thus, we stand proudly behind our students as they seek social justice.

We stand with our students as they labor to build a civil society that reflects the interests of all people, not just the wealthy 1%.

How can educators support Occupy the Oval?

* Come to the teach-in speak out on Monday, October 24^th, 2-3pm and discuss with students your ideals for higher education


* Link course materials to the the Occupy moment taking place globally

* Connect movements from your days at university to the struggles students face today

* Debate House Resolution 365, a bill that includes forgiving student debt to stimulate the economy

* Discuss the historical precedence for the right to free assembly, protest, the privatization of public spaces, and the financialization of daily life

* Create an "intellectual scavenger hunt" connecting the themes of the Occupy moment to your course content. Book smarts meets street smarts!

More-With-Less: What Shopping at the Co-op has to do with Wallstreet Protests

I have this cookbook: a spiral-bound number made of a cardboard cover and sun-yellowed typing paper. The cover is adorned with a photo of dried beans, millet, rice, a bit of rolled out dough, making the shape of what I can assume is a dove. It's very flower-child, which is why I was surprised during college to discover it in my parents' collection of homemade church-lady cookbooks (one for every season, every church?) and Joy of Cooking tome. Then I read the subtitle: "suggestions by Mennonites on how to eat better and consume less of the world's limited food resources". Agh. So the hippies had a Jesus-angle.

Turns out, the copyright is the year of my parents' wedding, 1976. As I appropriated the book (as my mom said, "just take it, we never used it much anyway") I've found the recipes for just about every country's version of rice and beans (except, of course, from Western Europe and Scandinavia), cheese dishes from souffle to fondu to torta, stews made from peanuts, and breads from soy flour. As a strict vegetarian, this book became a God-send (thank you, Jesus!), even though there are dishes with meat ("basic meat curry" and "hamburger stew"). Because the cookbook is premised on the idea that there is limited food and a world hunger problem, the Mennonites understand that having a more plant-based diet is beneficial for stretching the world's nutritional resources.

Since then: nutritional research has blown up in the past 35 years. We now understand a plant-based diet is really beneficial for the majority of Americans who have really sedentary lifestyles (hello! I literally read and write for a living). Less heart disease, less obesity if done in a balanced way (and this cookbook leads the way in balancing proteins and grains for you!), more energy. So to know what's good for the individual body is also good for social justice makes cooking more-with-less that much more appealing.

But here's the other, really important thing about this cookbook: it gives you the opportunity to avoid corporate food sources. Recipes involve dried beans and legumes and grains like millet and barley. At the "giant" grocery store next to my apartment complex, I can barely find any of this stuff in more than a one pound/bag quantity. And it's usually in the "ethnic" food aisle. But I'm lucky. I live two blocks from The Community Market, a local food co-op. It's part of the reason I'm paying a slightly higher rent to be in the neighborhood I'm in. Once a month, I walk to the market, load up a couple totes with 60 bucks of dried bulk goods, keeping my grocery bill to 20 bucks a week the rest of the month (unless I buy wine). I haven't actually had a co-op membership before but I've realized something this week: investing in my co-op will encourage me to avoid corporate food as much as possible; it will put money back into my community and my pocket (by my getting a small percentage of the proceeds at the end of the year), and it will be one tiny thing I can do to support the Wallstreet protests.

My food politics have changed since I was an out-and-proud vegetarian (perhaps another post) but one thing remains the same since my early treatment days: I care about social justice and understand that what I consume is part of it. So this week, more-with-less is my stand in solidarity.

Occupy/Decolonize Columbus

Last night I got teary over a bottle of wine with one of my besties, watching coverage of the around the world occupy protests. I know Columbus had a strong showing; I know Chicago protestors got arrested. And I know Rome saw some violence. All of this and I'm beginning to feel like there is a movement happening, locally and globally.

And I'm frustrated. I want a response. I want to believe that I think protesting will work. As my partner pointed out to me this morning, my own jadedness is frustrating me. And in my frustration, I ate a bowl of leftover pasta too early for it to be lunch. But I kept it down. And questioned the ravenous hunger my body was telling me.

Then I thought to myself: do I have time to go downtown, even if the standing causes me physical pain for the better half of the week? I continued to read my exam material around welfare policy and feminist interventions in understanding who are actors in the policy making process (everyone!)

Then I looked up Occupy Columbus happenings. I wrote down the next protest gathering (October 24th, OSU Oval) and began to feel jaded again. When is someone in power going to respond? How many gatherings need to happen? When will peaceful gathering not be enough? And what other kinds of tactics are there?

My partner reminded me of two things (via text message on her way to show support for OccupyChicago). That I can open a credit union account and pull my money from corporate banks before November 5th as part of a worldwide effort to allow the banks to use less of my money--something I've been planning for over a year anyway but haven't done because of the logistical pain in the ass. When I looked in my planner to find a time to do this, I realized I would have to cancel one of my pool visits this week. And I got anxious. I don't want to sacrifice what little exercise I'm allowed.

Then my partner sent another text, her second reminder: "Besides, we live our lives with revolutionary principle and action".

I don't feel very revolutionary lately.

But I think my mental health relies on my doing something. So no pool on Wednesday. To the credit union.And no more using debit and credit cards for every transaction. Banks get something off of that. Cash whenever possible.

And I guess, in my own small undergraduate literature course, I can keep teaching my students about structures of oppression and hope that some of them take it upon themselves to meet me on the Oval on the 24th.

But I want us to be asking for something bigger: I don't want us to be upset, as a country, about losing a middle class lifestyle that was never environmentally sustainable anyway, that relied on oppressive gender roles of a mythic norm. I want us to decolonize. To think broadly about what equality looks like and how the banks have continued to create global inequalities. Then I want us to ask as we're standing in solidarity: what can I do about my own lifestyle? What can I do to dismantle more structures of oppression? What, in addition to the banks, is culpable?

"Occupy" Wallstreet/Decolonize Land: Why My E.D. Makes Me Care About A Forward Movment Toward Leftist Politics

So this might seem like a stretch because I am trying to blog about the process of finding balance in my 28th year, which means, for me, losing some of this weight I've put on in grad school and continuing my e.d. recovery. But I actually DO think that the "Occupy Wallstreet" movement is really important to this project and I'll try to reflect briefly here on why I think this is.

The first thing I feel when I see the protesters from my perch here in Columbus is pure, unadulterated jealousy. Beautiful weather for hanging out on the streets of NYC (even if it is stupid, smelly wallstreet) accompanied by the wafting smell of the Shake Shack Shroom Burgers in Battery Park. And the time not to experience bleary-eyed dissertation reading from the confines of a cold-war style basement bomb-shelter graduate office.

But then of course, I know this makes me sound fill-in-the-blank and bit like I'm missing the point.

And I remember the time I spent in early recovery in the anti-war protests. Standing every Friday at noon outside the post office with Women in Black, joining weekend vigils around New England and New York, which, in my memory, were always in the deepest freeze of winter. There's something about the comraderie that protests facilitate that makes focus on something as important as state-sponsored mass violence that we call wars-on-terror feel like the only important message in the world. These protests brought me outside of myself, made me feel like my letters to the editor and my contributions of NPR as a young journalist were worth something. And it's not that because I'm 28 I'm jaded now. I still think protesting is important. I still think ending this war-that's-been-happening-my-entire-adult-life is really, really important. But physically, my body protests protests. And my standing in solidarity can only be metaphorical.

And here's the bigger reason why I'm "standing" in solidarity. We need a radical left movement. Period. And this is directly related to my mental health.

Once I got past the institutionlizing and not-always-as-helpful-as-it-could-be focus of the eating disorder treatment industry, and I became healthy enough to spend time in self-reflection, I realized all of the ways that my bulimia was a really clever tool for dealing with all of the institutionalized oppression I was feeling related to class. We don't talk about class in the United States (unless, of course, we mean "saving the middle class" which is really about saving a particular heteronormative, patriarchal family ideal stemming from the mad-men-era consumer campaigns of the 1950's), but here is a small microcosm of facts as I have experienced them. Because of my class, and the way we fund public schools on property taxes, I had a dismal early education. So dismal, that not only did we not have access to things like libraries and gyms and cafeterias and after-school programs and arts education, but for a three year-period we didn't even had a building. It was condemned when slates flew off the roof.

This, in turn, made it difficult to succeed in standardized tests (a skill learned early in school and class and raced privileged as a result). It also made it difficult to develop "extra curriculars" that colleges look for to give scholarships. When time came to go to college, I went to public university where, because of poor funding, we lacked resources and internship opportunities. Because I was paying my own way, I worked three jobs.

When my medical team questioned why I was missing appointments or lapsing in treatment, I would explain my work schedule or my lack of health insurance.

And school made me bored and restless. I needed more. After graduating with minimal loans and working poverty-wage jobs (because Maine was already going through a recession), I realized that in order to get into a PhD Program, I needed to invest. So I did a MA for $50,000 of debt. I have succeeded in getting into a PhD program and anticipate entering into the relatively class-privileged field of academia. Except that, with loans between 74,000-90,000, I will have repayments of over $700/month. My partner will have the same. For which we will "pay back" a government that charged us in the first place for education that should be free. Education we got to do social justice work, work the government should be doing.

And we'll continue to only be able to eat the cheap foods--the ones produced from industrialized scraps from corporate America because good food--nutritious food--is being sold by Whole Foods, a corporation that is colonizing land for profit-making enterprise the way Europe colonized indigenous land in North America.

All this to say: we need a leftist movement. We need a government that is responsible for the well-being of its citizens: providing affordable, nutritious food, preventative healthcare, healthcare of illnesses like cancer which are a result of environmental practices of profit-making corporations, free and equal education at all levels, and a legislature free of the persuasive money of the less-than-one-percent of Americans. And until this happens, we will see Americans continue to come up with creative ways to manage institutional oppression, some of these creative ways being extremely detrimental to long-term health and wellness.

Health is not individual.

My health relies on a forward movement toward state principles of responsibility and care.

Principles of profit and exploitation hurt all of our bodies.

Thank you to the Wallstreet Protesters.

The Brunch Strategy

I have a love and hate relationship with the fact that Americans think of eating as an activity. On the one hand: why not build a whole day around brunch? On the other hand, don't we have something more meaningful to do than consume?

This weekend, my partner and I, evidently, did not. Well, perhaps that is a little harsh. We worked on our graduate work and spent time both days together walking the dogs along Lake Michigan but we also planned a whole day around that mid-morning, sweet-meets-savory weekend meal. Cat spent (likely) weeks researching our options, most of which had a one word restaurant name (Jam, Bread, Oil, Fat, Carb....) before we decided on M Henry, located in a neighborhood that would only take about 30 minutes to get to. Our morning: wake up, walk dogs, make espresso and shoot the shit with roomie, walk dogs, leave for train, walk through new neighborhood while scouting out shops to pop into afterward, EAT, visit antique shop with fantastic vintage girl scout camping canteen (which looks like this, but which I still can't justify buying even on EBay), home, work, walk the dogs.

The problem with brunch is that it's trying to count for two meals, I often eat enough for three, and then am hungry for the second meal only a few hours later because I ate a bunch of sugar and salt and then over-caffeinated.

But here's what I've realized after my weekend with Cat that makes brunch successful. We share everything. We go out to eat, we order family style, we don't keep track of how much of what we consume, we just eat and enjoy and wait for fullness.

So when it comes to looking at the brunch menu, we choose a sweet dish (berry blast pancakes!) and a savory one (peasant quiche with green salad!) and swap back and forth until our waiters have returned to fill our water glasses a third time and are dizzy from our passing of plates. Why does this work? Why does this keep us from eating too much? Because we drink water between our switches, to clear our palates. Because switching itself takes time, which slows us down. Because knowing you are sharing food with someone adorable across the table makes you think about what you're leaving for them, causing you to take more balanced bites (not eating all the cherry tomatoes and buttery quiche crust). And you emerge from brunch satisfying your sweet tooth and your lean protein needs. Not to mention: you've slowed down and made an occasion out of a meal. Thirty bucks poorer, you make it to the train with only half a day ahead of you to waste on work.

Kickin' It

The wind outside today made some less-hearty buckeyes wear gloves and scarfs but those of us from New England know better: this is just fall. With the sun bright, the grass dewy, and a hodge-podge of undergrads, I participated in a kickball tournament to raise money for the Dave Thomas Adoption foundation. I was recruited by my PhD colleague, an adoptee herself and an adoption scholar who knows I am always game. Physical Therapy warnings and all.

The following is what I am feeling right now:

The outside of both hips is sore.
The top part of my quads feel like led.
My nose is runny--allergies or on-coming cold?
I committed five hours to kickball when I should have been reading conference abstracts.
Adoption is important.
States should let all kinds of families adopt (read: queer families, however they may come).
There should be a federal law against adoption discrimination.
Adoption is tricky.
We need to pay more attention to kids in foster care. Period.
We need to stop making money off of kids in Korea and China (my adoption scholar friend calls this the Adoption Industrial Complex) and provide the resources people need for parenting everywhere.
We should probably think through, as a culture, what is really needed to parent.
Wendy's chili was a surprisingly good lunch.

Today was one of those days where I probably sacrificed physical health for mental. And I can't say I regret it just yet--as I put on another pot of coffee to get started on my work of the day.