Sugar might feel like a love language, but it isn’t one, but dang it sure feels like it sometimes, doesn’t it? My relationship with sweets is probably more nuanced and affectionate than my relationships with specific people in my life. It’s the bad-news rebound boyfriend and the great frenemy of my days. I know this, and I set decent boundaries for myself at home. Still working on those boundaries around others, particularly with my cake friend.
My husband and I used to have several food rituals when we first started dating. It felt like romance. One was that we would keep a package of Oreos in his freezer and eat them with the Very Vanilla soy milk. Another was to make root beer floats. That was separate from the giant waffles we might have eaten that morning. Part of how we lost 100 pounds between us was that we had to notice our patterns and agree, together, that we would replace them with something else. It’s a lot easier when you both agree. That’s not always as easy to do with more sporadic relationships. When it’s someone you don’t see as often, it doesn’t feel like a pattern - until it does. Until you catch it in action. Through a research and investigation process that included astrophysics-level mathematics, I figured out how to break my personal code on weight gain. I reached my goal weight and was able to maintain it almost effortlessly for over five years. Then two things happened. One, I changed sports and took up martial arts. Two, I made a new friend - my cake friend. Boxing made me ravenously hungry. My performance improved when I started eating more, and things were great for a while. I put on a bunch of muscle and had fun kicking people across the room. There’s this thing, though, called “dirty bulk.” You can add a certain amount of muscle by eating more, but it tends to bring a certain amount of adipose tissue with it, a.k.a. body fat. For women that tends to be in a ration of 1:1, so every pound of muscle walks in with its arm around a pound of fat. It was all fine until we moved to a new apartment, downstairs from a family of chaos muppets, and suddenly I could only get half as much sleep as I needed. I didn’t see it coming because I had been feeling so strong. Since I was doing something new to me, I felt like I had broken my pattern, and I didn’t realize it would happen again even though I’ve been through it half a dozen times in the past twenty years. All the symptoms that, for me, are correlated with higher body mass came back. All of them! The migraines and the night terrors and the depleted immune system. Suddenly I was getting sick a lot. That led to missing a bunch of classes. Then I couldn’t keep up. Just as I was in need of more and more recovery time, I was getting less and less sleep. Finally I had to drop out of my gym and try to take some time off to recover. Did you know that? That working out in the 90%-capacity range too often without enough downtime will affect your immune system? It happens to endurance athletes but it didn't occur to me that it could happen from any sport. Anyway, there I was, all dirty bulked and back in the same spiraling pattern that drove me to try body transformation in the first place. I knew - I knew through spreadsheets and years of tracking metrics and enlisting an engineer to crunch my data - I knew I needed to drop weight. I needed to be able to sleep, and I needed to corral my dirty-bulk eating habits. Otherwise I didn’t see how I could get back to any kind of fun or interesting workout again. We moved, I started getting the sleep, I cleaned up my diet. I would drop two pounds and gain it back, drop two pounds and gain it back. Stalling and stalling. Finally it clicked. I was nailing it in all areas, doing what I needed to take care of myself. Then I would literally lose all my progress because of this one particular loophole. The cake friend! I had to tell her. “I’ve gained weight.” “Me too!” “Nearly 20 pounds since we met.” “GASP” “But we lose it so quickly!” “*I* don’t! It takes me three times as long to lose a pound as it does to gain it. I can gain two pounds over a weekend and take the rest of the month to burn it off.” Then we started talking about how much we love our favorite neighborhood restaurant, the one with the gorgeous glass display and eight flavors of vegan cakes. Every time we went out, brunch lunch afternoon tea or dinner, this is where we went, and we always got cake. We agreed to stay out of there until we were both back on track, and we did. We tried a few new places. I went there with some other friends, all of whom were also doing the whole January thing, and lo and behold, no cake! Then my cake friend and I went out again. The waitress brought out the dessert menu. I was *completely full* and cursing myself inwardly for not putting half my food in a box. I realized my friend was fluttering her eyelashes and looking completely stymied over the dessert menu. “Oh! I see. You’re not going to eat dessert in front of me.” “And I’m definitely not going to share it!” We both laughed, and the waitress laughed, and then we both got desserts and we both ate them. I was still full the next morning when I woke up, like Thanksgiving-dinner full. Granted, I ate a pound of Brussels sprouts, but still, it’s not the best feeling. Why can’t I say no to you, my darling? There are a bunch of answers to this conundrum. I’m extremely fortunate and privileged to be in this situation, rather than, say, an alcohol or heroin situation. I don’t have to shut down my friendship to save myself. I could invite her over to our place and cook at home. I could (rather easily) make a list of new places to try that don’t have a tempting dessert menu. I could ask to have half my entree boxed up and save it for lunch the next day. I could get a Sharpie marker and write NO! on my hand, since I can’t seem to get it out of my mouth. Or I could do the more fun version, which is to start distance running again. My cake friend and I have talked several times about run-walking together. I realize that I am the gatekeeper on this, and I’ll have to be the one to choose the time slot and get us going. We could both be running a 10k together by this fall, no problem, or maybe even this spring. Then we can eat all the cake we want, which is probably the only situation in which you can really have your cake and eat it, too. I had to take my husband to the emergency room on Friday night. This is the year that I turn 45 and he turns 52, so it’s unsurprising, right? Two middle-aged people in the ER?
What may be more surprising is that, as usual, we were in there for a sports injury. Friday night is sparring at our martial arts school. Muay Thai. We also have an MMA team. The rest of the time slots are for organized classes, and sparring is the one time that students have license to fight “for reals.” My husband took a boxing glove to the surface of his eye, probably the thumb but maybe part of the strap. It happens. That’s dangerous! I’m thinking it so I know that everyone else is. It’s his body to ruin, though. Bodily autonomy means we accept one another’s right to get tattoos, donate blood, have cosmetic dentistry, and, yeah, sign the waiver to get punched in the eye if we want. The guy who “did it” is my husband’s good friend. He doesn’t know yet that his errant blow put my hubby in the hospital. We probably won’t tell him because he would be horrified. He’s a middle-aged dad and he certainly didn’t do it on purpose. The injury was a corneal abrasion. It will likely heal so completely that a couple of weeks from now there will be no evidence that anything ever happened. The copays for the ER visit and the antibiotic eye drops were under $100. No harm no foul. We accept these types of outcomes as acceptable risks for our hobbies. What’s strange to me is that most people would shy away from such a dangerous sport, and yet the likelihood of being in the emergency room on a Friday night is far higher for other, more ordinary, types of activities. I would have assumed: bar fights, car accidents, maybe an overdose or alcohol poisoning? It hadn’t occurred to me how full the room would be simply due to flu season. There was also a large notice on the door in red ink, giving special instructions to anyone who might have MEASLES. Oh great. One of us gets punched in the eye wrong and now we’re both at risk of exposure to freaking measles because a bunch of our neighbors can’t comprehend the concept of herd immunity. Get your shots, people! It seems obvious to both of us that infectious disease epidemics, or pandemics, are far more dangerous and deadly than a punch in the eye. It’s just that we’ve all seen a lot of action films but, in our generation, we haven’t yet seen many of our relatives, neighbors, and coworkers DIE from measles, whooping cough, mumps, influenza, etc. Not yet anyway. The other thing it’s hard not to notice is that we are likely the only people in the ER who got there due to a sports injury. In our culture right now, it’s almost impossible to say anything true and useful about my observations without risking an affront to someone’s sensibilities. Instead I’ll try to skirt around it. At our age, nobody would be surprised, at all, if either my husband or I had to go to the emergency room due to a heart attack, stroke, or other coronary type event. I know that’s true because we hear about this kind of thing all the time in our social group, among our colleagues and neighbors. After age forty nobody is surprised by anything. When we go to the doctor, they ask us what medications we’re on. I can still pass for somewhere in my thirties, so I can say ‘none’ without pushback. When my husband says ‘none,’ they always assume he didn’t understand the question. “NO, what PRESCRIPTIONS are you on??” “NONE!” Medical professionals can’t believe that my husband, in his early fifties, doesn’t take anything. At his age he’s supposed to be on statins and a raft of other stuff, at least five separate prescriptions on average. With his heart rate, blood pressure, and cholesterol level, it doesn’t compute. They think there’s no way that a guy of his age group can have those results without medication. I can also say that nobody is asking the right questions. I’ve been plant-based for nearly thirty years, since I was a teenager, and my hubby has been 98% plant-based for the past decade or so. It literally never comes up. Nobody is testing us, or enrolling us in any studies, or even asking, “So, what do you eat?” There are absolutely no data being generated about our lifestyle for the rest of the world to ponder. We’ll just keep waiting. If he’s still practicing Muay Thai in his seventies, like our friend B, maybe then they’ll ask. If I’m still out trail running in my sixties, maybe then they’ll ask, but I sincerely doubt it because all kinds of people run ultras at well above that age. The data come from the people with the worst outcomes. Data come from “patients,” not from healthy people. Not from men who can kick a target six feet off the ground in their fifties. Not from women who can crank out fifty full push-ups in their forties. Why? Because people hate hearing about it! I think this is because we aren’t able to connect emotionally with the image of Old Me. We can’t truly imagine ourselves being elderly. It’s also very, very difficult to extrapolate from our minor daily behaviors to any kind of decade-long trend line. We hate nothing more than the idea that what we do today can add up to trouble at a later point. It’s preachy! Stop talking about it! When we think of bodily autonomy, and the concept that it’s “my body to ruin,” what we mean is “hey, everyone buzz off and leave me alone” as far as body image, habits, food intake, sleep schedule, how dirty my coffee mug looks, or anything else, anything else at all. I DO WHAT I WANT DO WHAT I WANT. It’s much harder to think of in terms of, “I have the full and total right to wreck myself doing burpees in the mud, sparring, and going on wilderness expeditions.” We think exertion is more dangerous than what everyone else is doing. Though personally I’d rather go blind from martial arts than from diabetes. One thing I did notice in the emergency room was that almost everyone had a buddy. A spouse, kids, grandkids - everyone had someone to call and ask for help. Everyone had at least one person who was willing to sit with them in the middle of the night on a Friday. Probably what is really dangerous is to become isolated, to refuse to connect or engage, to avoid ever asking for help. It’s worth thinking about. What do we think is truly dangerous, and how do we structure our lives to include or avoid certain things because of our perceptions? I knew something was wrong the moment I walked in the door. I had about three steps in the hallway to feel that sense of impending dread, and then I saw him.
My husband was sitting on the couch, head hanging down, eyes closed, with his hands in his lap. He was holding a napkin. I knew he was hurt. Because of the napkin, I assumed it was his hand. “What happened? Did you tear off your thumbnail?” “No, it’s my eye,” he replied, and it was almost like a lever switched over inside me into Action Mode. There were just a few problems: I was pouring sweat because I had just come back from my workout; it was dinnertime; and our dog had apparently been extravagantly sick in the bathroom. The other set of problems: I was scheduled to teach back-to-back workshops at a conference the next morning, and I had planned to spend the rest of the evening running through my slides. What I do in crisis situations like this is to start talking to myself. I ran through the next obvious steps and made sure I had them in order. Call advice nurse. Find health insurance card. Take dog out. Give him a dose of metronidazole. Cut the pill in half. Clean up disaster on bathroom floor. Microwave quick dinner, feed man. Take shower and get dressed. Write down instructions from nurse. Make sure we both have our wallets, keys, and phones. Call Lyft. Most of those steps hit the list in random order, as I thought of them, and I mentally shuffled them into their correct place in the task list. Somehow I had accomplished all of it during the 40-minute hold for the advice nurse. I did a perimeter check and two bag checks, grabbed a protein shake for myself, and we were off to the emergency room. My husband was effectively blind. He couldn’t even open his eyelid, it was so swollen, and if he tried to use his good eye, the injured eye tracked with it. When the admittance nurse asked him to rate his pain, he gave it an 8. “He has a very high pain threshold,” I added, because we had both had a casual discussion about the pain scale recently and we agreed that a 9 was “involuntary screaming.” I knew he would never claim an 8 unless he had to. We got to the ER at 9:00 PM, in the midst of flu season. An injured woman took one look at my husband, leapt up, and offered him her seat. I found us two adjacent seats around 12:30 AM. Until 2:00 AM, I was still thinking about how I was going to make use of this experience as an anecdote to introduce my workshop on “The Organized Leader.” We got to see a doctor at 4:30 AM. By that point, my dreams of glory had been let go. I was prepared for a series of outcomes, including an admittance to the hospital; emergency surgery; the loss of my husband’s eye; and permanent damage to, or loss of, his vision. I had run through fallback plans for each of these, thinking of next steps and calls to make. Of course I had the good sense not to tell him any of that. I know him well enough to know that he was doing the same, and also thinking, of course I would never tell my wife any of this. We wouldn’t want to scare each other. We’ve both learned many of these planning skills together, through life lessons and by seeking out information for the advanced scenarios. We spent three weeks backpacking through Iceland together; we took first aid and CPR classes together; we went to martial arts classes together. We both recognize ourselves as leaders, and leadership only really matters in emergencies, such as Someone Might Lose an Eye Tonight. It turned out okay. My husband had a corneal abrasion, quite large, and I got to see it enhanced with glow-in-the-dark dye under the special lamp. Oddly, both our dog and I had had the same type of injury in the past couple of years! What I had, compared to my husband’s, was like a small paper cut versus scraping all the skin off one’s knuckle. Our dog had to wear a cone for a week. In this situation, I had true empathy, because I had literally shared his experience. It helped me deal with the frustration of having to let go of my big opportunity. We got home at 7:00 AM. The sun was already up. I helped my temporarily blind husband up the steps and got him home, just in time to take our dog out again. The veterinary medicine had worked, so at least we had that going for us. Then I emailed everyone on my team and texted my director to alert them that I wouldn’t be attending the conference. We finally got into bed at the time I would have been finding my seat for the keynote. I knew I would be missing a lot. I had scheduled a planning meeting and a group photo with my team, all of whom were volunteering in various slots. My workshops were the result of a month of campaigning to include a new category of topics on the slate. Not only had I succeeded in making my case, but I was chosen to teach them myself. Plausibly I would be called onstage for a minute for one reason or another. It was the four-year anniversary of my foray into public speaking, and I had looked forward to celebrating this, vanquishing a fear and turning it into a strength. I’d stride confidently into a ballroom and deliver the material I had been polishing all week. I’d change lives! I’d send my audience out, transformed and inspired to tackle tougher problems! Instead, I graduated into a new level of leadership. I passed the test. I demonstrated the value of everything I had put into my slides. It’s not our stuff or our calendars that we are “organizing.” It’s our relationships and our values. I was able to keep my head on straight and get us to the hospital largely because I keep an orderly home and manage my mental bandwidth. I strengthened my marriage. I even remembered the dog. One day, I’ll present my workshop. Maybe I’ll be asked to teach it more than once. The material will only be improved by this experience, and my motivation will only have intensified. Being organized isn’t about making pretty binders or choosing just the right paperclip tray. It’s not about getting promoted. It’s about mastering the situation, about knowing what to do even when everything feels impossible. Leadership is about realizing the infinite power you have to help others and work toward a better outcome. It’s a simple question. Why him? Why this guy?
If you’re a hiring manager, I’m obviously asking you why you want to extend an offer to this applicant. If you’re a police officer, I’m asking why you think this suspect did it. Fair to ask, right? If you’re dating a male person, and someone asks, Why him? ...shouldn’t it be immediately obvious? Wouldn’t you have a list of reasons? Wouldn’t you also wonder why the question came up? I can think of several happily married friends about whom nobody ever asks, why that guy? Why him above all others? That’s because you always see them laughing together. They have a happy home and, if anything, they’re maybe a little smug that they’ve found each other. Unfortunately, I keep meeting others where it isn’t so clear. I mean... really... why him? Can you please explain what you like about him? The toughest of these cases are when the guy is checked out. Either you never see the two of them together, or if he is there, he isn’t participating in the conversation. He’s making no effort to make friends, share anything about himself, be amusing, or maybe even grunt in response. It’s always surprising how many couples don’t like each other’s friends! Like, what, did you expect that when we got together it would be JUST US forever, no social life? Worse is when the guy is rude. Pointlessly rude to basically everyone: friends, coworkers, waiters, innocent bystanders. Worse still is when the guy is rude TO HIS DATE. Do you ever notice this? When someone is dropping little snarky remarks and sarcastic observations, about the person they’re supposedly in love with? When you stop to think about it, you can’t recall a single nice thing this person has had to say? Maybe it’s just me. I feel like this happens a lot, though. What I’m looking for when I see a couple together for the first time is simply what kind of connection they seem to have. Most couples have a hidden language, where they don’t even need to make eye contact to communicate. They have body language and facial expressions that nobody else can read. They may not always agree, but they do know what the other is thinking. A lot of family members can do the same. If these shared signals seem to be missing, then maybe this couple hasn’t been together long enough yet. The next level is any sign of mutual positive regard. In a good relationship (friends, family, and especially romance), they should like each other, respect each other, and love each other. That seems pretty basic, not much to ask, but in reality it’s not all that common. You usually only see two out of three, sometimes just one, and sometimes zero. Like him. You enjoy his company and think he’s fun to be around. You find him interesting. His sense of humor works on you. You can talk to him about anything. Ideally he feels the same way about you. Respect him. You believe he has a value system and that he lives consistently with those values. You may not share all of them but you have a pretty clear idea of what’s important to him and what he believes in. The more you know about him, the more impressed you are. You’re proud of him for at least one reason. You’re pretty sure he feels the same about you. Love him. You feel affectionate toward him, you feel a warm regard and want the best for him, your heart swells a little when you think about him. No question, you know he feels it too and he’ll say it loud and proud. It’s a match when you both can check off all three boxes. What tends to happen when someone is in a bad match, but doesn’t want to admit it, is that they start making excuses and trying to explain away evidence that this guy actually kinda sucks. Why is he never around? Wherever you are, he’s not there. If you go to a party he doesn’t come. Doesn’t he share any of your interests? Why does he keep making those negative comments about you? Does he think he sounds funny? Doesn’t he realize we’re your friends and we don’t want to listen to him pick on you? So uh, no offense but what exactly attracted you to him? (Since he doesn’t seem particularly into you, and he also doesn’t seem all that nice, or charming, or funny, or smart, or good looking, or...) Is it true that he still refuses to say the L word for some pretentious adolescent reason? Like the normal type of relationship that every other human being has is somehow beneath him? He’s capable of some rarefied and pure love from another dimension, only nobody has reason to believe it because he acts cold and withholding? It’s honestly shocking how many dudes hold back the L word (for months or years or forever) and still get 100% of the affection and attention of a normal man capable of normal behavior. You’re not original, you’re a manipulator. Just say it. Or if you refuse, get a bunch of t-shirts printed that say I WILL NEVER SAY I LOVE YOU, EVER, I MEAN IT and wear them on your next two hundred first dates. What a lot of people don’t seem to understand is that a love match is about mutual connection. It’s about the other person’s behavior and how willing he is to engage, to reach out, to put in emotional effort, to communicate and build something just between the two of you. It doesn’t matter what he looks like, what’s going on in his life, what job he has, where he lives, whether he’s a good cook or a talented musician or whatever. All of those things would be true whether he was single, dating someone else, or with you. The only thing that matters is what the two of you are like together, and it should be obvious. It should be obvious that you’re a good match together, that you like each other and you have fun together. You should be able to describe each other as friends. When someone asks, Why him? What do you like about him? I hope you can say, He makes me smile. There are probably a bunch of couples around the world who happen to be named “Harry and Meghan” - particularly because I doubt anyone refers to them as “Heghan” or “Megry.” There is, though, only one celebrity couple so I’ll assume everyone knows who I mean.
I asked my husband what he would do if he were Harry in this situation. Basically “paparazzi killed my mom, this is the most boring job on Earth, I never liked it anyway and now everyone is completely terrible to my wife, BYEEEEE.” What would he do if he were about to celebrate his first day as a free man? Probably watch some sports and drink a (warm) beer on the couch. Then what? We agreed that most guys would just do whatever their “thing” is, but that Harry probably never had a chance to even figure that out. What kind of guy is he? What would he do if he were born ordinary? This is a man who may never have played a video game, stood in line at the movie theater, or made his own sandwich. What would it be like to have no idea how much mustard you like? Or what kind? Or if you even like mustard at all? It’s fairly easy for me to imagine what I would do if I were Meghan. That’s because I live in Southern California. A lot of extremely famous actors, musicians, models etc have homes within ten miles of my apartment, and apparently there are several in the two-mile range. This is the crux of the problem for royalists. Clearly the “wealthy California celebrity” lifestyle is preferable to the “British aristocrat” lifestyle. It must burn their collective bacon. There’s something about the fantasy of aristocracy that really appeals to a lot of people. Note how many princess movies we have, both for kids and for adults, both animated and live-action. Gee, imagine, you get to have servants! And whatever gowns and jewels you want! And you get to have perfect hair and makeup all day every day! And live in a palace! Plus you’re in love with a handsome prince! *sigh* *swoon* *barf* I mean, I got to live the princess fantasy in some ways. I threw a shoe at my current husband, making him fall in love with me, and he elevated me to the middle class. (I was on my way to doing it for myself, but it would have taken me several years longer to make it alone). We danced at our wedding and all that. Then we won the game. We’ve had the incredible good fortune to be both married and able to live in perfect obscurity. We can go anywhere we want, do anything we want, wear whatever we want, and behave in whatsoever manner we choose. The press never reports on us. I don’t think people give enough consideration to this. We have something that money cannot buy, something that every celebrity wants, something truly enviable. We have liberty. If I were Meghan, I know what I’d do. On my first day of freedom, I’d wear my hair pulled back in a low ponytail. No makeup. I’d wear yoga pants and walk around barefoot. I’d read a book. Later, I’d go to the store and load up my cart and then I’d come home and put a tray of tater tots in the oven. Heck yeah! The great thing about this particular dream of freedom is that I can literally live it every single day, and nobody is stopping me. Nobody speculates about whether I’m pregnant, or takes pictures of my cellulite, or follows me around town, or suggests that I should wear high heels with jeans. I don’t have to read rumors about my marriage in the tabloids. Gossip about me and my life would be pretty low-caliber, and that’s okay. Amazing in fact. What I dislike about the aristocratic lifestyle is... everything. All these highly posed group photos and extreme fashion guidelines. If part of the job of duchess is to wear pantyhose and pumps on a regular basis, I’m out. Everything royals do is in the public eye, and those public things they do are not things that interest me. At all. Nary a one. I’m not into that style of architecture, landscaping, or interior design either. I have everything I’ve ever wanted. Aside from privacy and freedom from constant scrutiny, what I’ve wanted has always been BOOKS, comfortable shoes, and access to a wide variety of multicultural foods. Secret love affair with the interesting, mostly ordinary man whom I call husband. Messy pets. Ability to hang out with my wacky family, filters completely off, no dress code, and laugh until I snort. My life is mine, not the community’s. I’m not public property. I have no concerns about Duty or Legacy or Heritage or whatever the heck those people talk about. Nobody follows me around with a gilded clipboard or a little bound ledger, reciting rules and regulations at me, and I don’t have a style guide. The only protocol in my life is dictated by my parrot, who has her own elaborate ways. There seems to be a broad consensus, outside of SoCal anyway, that celebrities deserve whatever they get, that once you’re in the public eye then total loss of privacy is the price. Here, we understand that even famous people want to walk down the street, go to the airport, or have dinner with their families in peace and quiet. We know what famous life looks like, and that gives us sympathy. History always comes around, and around, and around. Eighty-ish years ago Edward VIII abdicated so he could be with the woman of his choice, a decision that gets less and less romantic the more one looks into the details, but it was his basic right as a human being. A baby does not choose to become a family brand ambassador. All Edward and Harry wanted was to be in love and have jobs, to make their own money in the ordinary way. All they wanted, in other words, was to have what we have. An ordinary life, an ordinary love, an ordinary job, an ordinary home. Just for a moment, let’s all pretend that we are abdicating royalty and that we’ve chosen this homely mess for ourselves. Apparently quitting social media in some form or another is a common resolution at the New Year. Who knew? If this is something you’ve thought of doing, this is what it was like for me.
I didn’t make a resolution to quit Facebook. On the contrary. For a couple of years I felt really guilty for not spending more time there. I just couldn’t make myself. I tried forcing myself to make the occasional token appearance, but each time it would end the same way. Finally I realized that I was done and I should stop pretending I was ever going to treat social media like a commitment again. My reasons for feeling ill at the thought of logging in to Facebook might overlap with yours, or they might not. Reasons for doing something else with your time can vary and cover quite a lot of categories. I realized I was losing an average of two hours a day, and I’d rather spend that time reading I kept seeing rants about unwanted game invites and it seemed ironic I got tired of looking at pictures of meat and other badly lit, uninspiring amateur food photography I started thinking that Mark Zuckerberg is a supervillain, that or a cyborg belonging to a supervillain Ultimately I decided to replace the unsatisfying time I had been burning on Facebook over the past few years with in-person social activities instead. The thing I dislike about Facebook the most is the way that people relate in text. The more time I spend away from what used to be a regular part of my day, the more I realize that people truly never act in person the way they do on social media. In so, so many ways is this true! I would be reading through a thread on a friend’s wall, and someone would insult someone else. This happened countless times. There would be this perfectly reasonable, interesting conversation that might have continued for hours or days. Suddenly, someone would pop on and be really rude. This is often the root of “unfriending,” a social phenomenon for which there was not even a word until Zucky came along. It’s not so much that I cared about people insulting *me*, although it happened. It’s that it was so hard to read through a single thread anywhere, on any topic, without it happening. I didn’t even participate in the vast majority of discussions; as a rule, I would only comment if I felt I had something new and different to add, a point to make that hadn’t already been covered. That’s actually another problem entirely - how many times someone would pop up to make a comment that had already been made by someone else. It proved they hadn’t read the whole thread, and sometimes what they said wasn’t even relevant or made no sense. It seemed that out of all the people I knew socially, only a handful would moderate the discussions on their threads in any way. Almost all tolerated routine rudeness or impertinence. I don’t think I’m being too sensitive in this, because as I said, it wasn’t being directed at me. It was tiresome to read through it even when I had never met the arguers involved. This was by no means limited to political discussions! People argued about dog breeds and travel behavior and brands of cell phone and wheat and a thousand other things of little to no consequence. I didn't find it cute or funny. Well, sometimes I did. Mostly I just shook my head and wondered how such innocuous conversations could turn on a dime so quickly. What was making previously ordinary people suddenly so combative and belligerent? Text-based conversations, that’s what. What finally happened in my life was that I replaced Facebook with a social club. It could be anything at all, for others, like pickleball or a book group, a band or the dog park or a yoga class. In my case it was Toastmasters. I started talking to more people face to face. That has always been hard for me, because I’m a shy person and I have struggled quite a lot with social anxiety. It turns out that, at least where I live, most people are really pretty nice. The great advantage of being a shy person is that it can make you into a great listener. If you learn to ask thoughtful questions, you can become a sort of interviewer and draw fascinating stories out of people. They flourish under the attention. Sometimes they say they’ve never told that story before, or that they hadn’t thought about it in years. Storytelling is so much more interesting and fun than arguing! One story inspires another. We get each other going. We laugh, we cry. We pull each other aside to share observations and compliments. We learn, eventually, how to turn even the most innocuous and minor incidents into well-structured anecdotes. Example: earlier today I was walking my dog when a slice of toast landed on the sidewalk right in front of us. I looked up, wondering where it could have come from. Did a gull drop it? Then a woman’s head popped over a balcony. She started calling out apologies. She’d thrown the toast “for the birds” and didn’t know we were there. I laughed so hard! I could easily imagine myself doing the same thing. I wasn’t mad, I was amused and grateful that something mildly entertaining happened that day. Without a storytelling group, I might never have thought to share that with anyone. Not the most fascinating story ever told, but I’m sure it has the potential to remind someone else of another story, and then we’re off. I have never once, not a single time in three years, heard someone insult someone else in Toastmasters. People do give speeches on sensitive topics, definitely including politics at times. Sometimes these are formal assignments in our program. Pick a controversial topic and try to persuade people of your position. I did mine on outdoor cats, and one guy still wanted to talk about it two months later. It happens. But, we laugh about it because we can see each other’s facial expressions. We can hear each other’s tone of voice. We have a history of liking each other and enjoying one another’s company. Is that still true of your experience on social media? Most of my social media “friends” are people I know in person. We friended each other because we met and we liked each other enough to stay in touch. In a lot of cases, though, I think we lost that affectionate regard because our online personas annoyed each other. We liked each other better before social media came along and messed it up. In a few cases, friends have reached out to DM me, or text me if we’re close enough that they have my phone number. Some of them have arranged to come for a visit. This is part of how you find out who your real friends are, the ones who miss you and like you the most. Mostly, though, you find that you care more about them than they care about you. I traded my former Facebook time for a bunch of other stuff. I became a Distinguished Toastmaster. I started having board game parties from time to time. I have text message threads with my family. I also read a lot more books and started up a technology newsletter. When I was active on social media, I realized that it put me in a worse mood almost every time. There would always be something that irritated me or made me sad. When I traded that in for hanging out with other people face to face, I realized that it left me feeling better every time. Laughs and hugs and food for thought, great stories and light hearts. If there was really a way to capture all of that through text, over social media, believe me, I’d never leave it alone. I’m going to let you in on one of our private jokes. Every couple should have some kind of tradition or ritual or inside joke that doesn’t make sense to anyone else. It’s fun! It’s also a way to use teamwork to fight a persistent problem.
M.O.D. stands for Music of the Day. It came about because I absolutely cannot stand Christmas music. When we were kids, Christmas decorations went up the week before Christmas and came down before the New Year. Now it all starts on Halloween. For those of us who grew up in the Seventies and Eighties, this makes no sense at all. Why spend two months on one holiday??? ??? (And why isn’t that holiday Independence Day? Oh, right, because there’s no commercial tradition of gift giving or a $2 billion decoration industry involved. It’s called “the Fourth of July,” not “Patriotic Entire Summer”). Commercial Christmas isn’t a winter holiday, either; it starts in mid-fall and actually ends shortly after winter begins. What the heck is going on? I blame Mariah Carey. I’m convinced that Mariah Carey is an extremely powerful sorceress who uses her octave-spanning voice to hypnotize people, and possibly also create weather conditions. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Notice that she hasn’t aged in thirty years. Change my mind. Anyway, all you need to know is that Christmas music makes me break out in hives, so I started trying to avoid ever leaving the house between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve, and this created an unfair hardship for my spouse, who likes socializing with me. How were we going to hang out at the cafe or go to the movies for two of twelve months every year, if I was going to run for the exits every time I heard sleigh bells? Answer: M.O.D. This is how it works. We take turns choosing the artist, and then we text each other. We both listen to that band for the rest of the day. I keep my headphones on in the cafe, at the mall, in the back of rideshare vehicles, and I make sure not to schedule dentist appointments in December. My honey only listens at work or the gym. M.O.D. works for us because we often go through stretches when we aren’t in the same city. On a few occasions we haven’t seen each other in two or three weeks, and a couple of those we only got 40 minutes together on an airport bench before we were separated again. M.O.D. connects us when we are in separate time zones, missing each other. It all started one year, when I made a calendar with a schedule of secular, non-decorated things to do each day to celebrate or prepare for the New Year. One of those days was “AC/DC Appreciation Day.” I thought we could both hang out and listen to AC/DC. I told my husband I was having AC/DC Appreciation Day and he was totally down. In fact he started listing off other bands that might fit on that playlist. I don’t remember which of us actually came up with the idea for “Music of the Day,” although I’m pretty sure he was the one to make it an acronym. It was something we could do with very little effort, no extra cost, and no commitment. It sounded awesome and we went for it, starting as soon as we got home. Talking about something that sounds like a good idea is one thing. It’s entirely something else when you actually launch and realize that, wait, this is even better than we expected! Sharing musical tastes is not a requirement for long-term love and contentment. Contrary to the belief of music snob pretentious boys everywhere, you can respect one another even if you loathe each other’s beats, because of this mystical 20th-century invention called “headphones.” If you’ve never heard of headphones, they are a technical innovation that goes on your head and both provides your own tuneage while protecting you from the inferior auditory crimes of others in your vicinity. We are fortunate, though, my honey and I, because we enjoy a lot of the same stuff! Namely classic rock, glam rock, heavy metal, and Delta blues. We both also did our time in marching band, so we have an affinity for Sousa marches. Go ahead and laugh, we’re having more fun than you. Plus you can’t fight a man holding a tuba. We have a seven-year age difference, so we each tend to be a bit better versed in a slightly different era. He went to high school during the golden age of hair metal, before I had ever bought a cassette tape of my own, and by the time grunge came around, he was a married dad with a career. This is a major advantage of M.O.D.: we use it to introduce each other to bands that the other might have missed. Our technique on M.O.D. is slightly different. He likes the low-maintenance playlist method, where you just choose the artist and stream whatever comes up. If they don’t have that many albums, you can round out the day with similar musicians. If you only have a couple of hours of headphone time, you then spend it listening to the best of the best. I like the more history-oriented discography method of starting with the earliest album, playing it in order, and then proceeding to the next disc in the chronology. This usually means they sound better as the day goes on. It also means I focus more of my listening time on tracks I may never have heard! One of the greatest thrills for me is hearing something by a beloved singer for the first time, especially after I was so sure I knew every note and every lyric of every track. Playing M.O.D. for the month of December means we each get to choose roughly fifteen bands, many of which the other might have picked first because we both like them. It sounds like a lot until you actually start trying to choose your top fifteen music groups! There’s no reason to quit after one month, though. If M.O.D. works for you, add different bands to your list next year, or just keeping going for another month. Here are some of the bands we’ve played, and if you don’t like them, I don’t want to hear it, just get your own. AC/DC Aerosmith Cake Guns ‘n’ Roses Heart Led Zeppelin Pearl Jam Queen Scorpions Twisted Sister Van Halen ZZ Top It literally just hit me, with one month to go. We’re not coming up on a new year, we’re coming up on a new decade!
A bit poleaxed by this. How did this happen? Where did the time go? Am I going to be feeling this same way ten years from now, when I am... *gulp*... 54? Here I had just been worrying whether I would finish all my resolutions for 2019, and suddenly I’m snapped into a whole next-level perspective. I spent my twenties being broke, big-time broke, but I somehow managed to finish out that decade of my life with a college degree and a driver’s license. (And a divorce but who’s counting) Then I spent most of my thirties with my husband. That was an extremely dramatic change from the previous decade of my life. In fact it is helping with this time-shock that I am feeling right now, to think of when he entered my life and the fantastic contrast between His Time and any Time Before. We often say, “I can barely remember what it was like before you came along,” (to our phones) and it feels very true. Now let’s compare 2009 to 2019. No smartphone Um... what else? 2009 was the year I got married again. There probably won’t be as dramatic a change in my life again, unless we get a grandkid (?) or until we retire. That part of things feels solved. For someone who is single, I would say, don’t worry. I hope you always feel that being single is better than being with the wrong person, or being with someone for the wrong reasons. Marriage is either the best thing to ever happen to you, or the worst... I continue to not own a home. I’ve never bought a house or owned property, and I wonder if I ever will. We’ve moved [counting] eight times since 2009! We’ve also traveled to nine countries together. That part is starting to feel pretty standard. For those who have lived in only one home in the past decade, take a moment to consider that in the context of someone who moves a lot. Not only do we not own a home, we also don’t own a vehicle. I sold my car shortly after we started dating, and my husband’s pickup died somewhere past 200,000 miles. Then we had a compact car for a while, but it was recalled and we elected not to replace it. That’s something to consider in a ten-year context as well: your main form of transportation. Ten years ago, I still had a student loan, we were paying for our wedding, and my husband was still paying both alimony and child support. Fast forward to today and we’re debt-free, living in a completely different financial world. (Saving half your income will do that). Ten years is an ideal block of time to consider your finances. Are you on track to be free of any financial burdens that you have today? Or, realistically, are you going to continue to spend beyond your means, like most people, and find any thoughts of money and debt scary or depressing? (There’s still time) Ten years ago, we lived in a suburban house that was roughly 1800 square feet. We had three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a yard, and a two-car garage with loft storage. We had two couches and two dining tables. Now we live in a 650-square-foot apartment. We’ve been sub-900-square-feet for the past five years, tiny house territory. We got rid of easily 80% of everything we owned, possibly more like 90%. While it seems weird to imagine having all that stuff again, and I strongly doubt we ever will, we will probably expand into a bit bigger home again within the next decade, more for the yard and a possible guest room than anything else. Also because tiny homes are harder to find! Ten years ago, my husband was at the same job he’d held for the previous ten years and he thought he would be there at least until his kid finished high school. We had no inkling whatsoever of the direction his career would go only two years later. He’s been sent around the world and he’s working on his fourth patent. He went from a shared cubicle quad to a private office with a door. Me? I went from a basic secretarial role to whatever the heck you call what I do these days. International woman of mystery. Ten years can be a very, very long time on a career trajectory. Ten years ago, I was unfit, a lifelong non-athlete, homebody, and shy person. Somehow in the past decade I’ve run a marathon, become a Distinguished Toastmaster, self-published a book, visited four continents, climbed a rope, done standup comedy, jumped over open flames, and otherwise completely shocked myself. I’ve also been bit by a fire ant and gotten into the stinging nettles, sing Hey for a life of adventure... In 1999, I wore a size 14. In 2009 I wore a size six. In 2019 I wear a size two. Twenty years ago I was a chronically ill, overweight young woman with a brunette pixie cut. Now, weirdly, I am a thin middle-aged lady with long blonde hair, boxing gloves, and a collection of adventure race medals. I look like a completely different person, I have a different name, I live 1000 miles away from where I started, and the only thing I really have in common with myself is my reading habit. Who am I?? Ten years ago, we had our pets, Spike and Noelle, and we were afraid to leave them alone in a room together for even ten seconds. Today, not only is it amazing and a little tearjerking to think they are both still here, but their decade of friendship is something beautiful to behold. He finally let her snuggle him for a couple of minutes the other day, fluffy breast puffed up against his side. We never had anything to be afraid of, other than the day they say goodbye. Whatever else ever happens in our lives together, we’ve had eleven years of the Spike and Noelie Show; we’ve loved them always. Heaven will be the two of them napping side by side forevermore. Ten years ago, and certainly twenty years ago, I could not have imagined anything about my life today. Not where I lived how I look or my social life or how I spend my time, certainly not the technical innovations that are an ordinary part of my day. Only the love in my heart for my man, my little animals, and my family, that’s all I seem to carry. What will happen in the next ten years? Where will we be and what will we be doing? Who will still be here and who will not? Will we have said everything we should have said to them? Will we do everything we’ve intended to do, or will we do more, or will we squander the days and years? We’ll burn through them one way or another, so let us burn through them lovingly and with all our hearts. We continue our tradition of buying nothing and going nowhere the day after Thanksgiving. It’s going well. Three of us are bundled up in blankets on the couch, and Noelie is sunning herself by the window. Time has no meaning for us today. We’re simply relaxing and doing whatever we want.
Apparently the alternative is to get up early, drive around town, and fight other people for bargains? We went shopping together on this supposed Black Friday once when we were dating. As we idled in traffic at an intersection, we saw something remarkable: One man kneeling on another man’s chest, hands on his throat, while a few bystanders stood there. Our attention was drawn because two pickup trucks were pulled up to the curb, one at a slant, doors hanging open. A road rage incident. Ahh, the holiday spirit in action! We did not feel that adding another truck and more people would bring any clarity to this situation. Instead we drove on, making up new lyrics to It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year. “...and punching your neighbor and drinking some beeeeeerrrr...” Since then, we’ve let go of not just shopping on Black Friday, but owning a vehicle and driving as well. Hanging out at home for Buy Nothing Day has spoiled us. Bargains are not bargains. Usually a sale or a coupon is the retail price of something, artificially inflated and then “dropped” to make it look cheaper. Sometimes it’s a functionally obsolete item, shunted to the side to make room for the new version that’s about to fill the shelves. It’s never a bargain if it leads to months or years of credit card debt. We know this, right? Whatever we buy, we add sales tax, and then we multiply by the interest rate that we are paying on credit. Then we subtract that from our post-tax paycheck. The quick version of this is to estimate that we have to earn two dollars for every dollar we spend. That is no bargain. The pressure is off in my family. We agreed that instead of exchanging gifts, we would put that budget toward visiting each other. We also sponsor a family, bringing them gifts and groceries, keeping them in sheets and towels and that sort of thing. Our family holiday spirit revolves around games rather than piles of packages. I just challenged my mom to online Scrabble. Do you think she’ll play me? Shopping is hard for a minimalist. Not that we’re no good at buying things, just that it’s hard for others to shop for us. This is especially true if they’ve seen our apartment. Nice, thank you for the lovely gift, now where in tarnation are we going to put it?? This is why, when we get a package, it usually consists of a parrot toy and a bag of dog treats. These are things that are guaranteed to get used, and they also have some fun value. Part of why we’re staying home today is that our dog’s days are numbered. He supposedly had only a few weeks to live as of Thanksgiving 2018, yet somehow, magically, he is still here and having a pretty good day. We are in the existentially fraught situation where we literally have to compare a “bargain” to a snuggle day at home with him. That’s technically true for everyone, but we forget. And it’s not just true for our pets, either. I think of all the times I’ve been out shopping with someone, and we come home tense and tired after fighting traffic, bad weather, long lines, and slow walkers. We’re seduced by an endless stream of marketing material into thinking that buying things will be jolly and spiritually fulfilling. Then we go out and try to do it and discover that the process is hollow and exhausting. While we were in line, were we getting what we came for? Love and togetherness? Does the shopping and the debt really translate into caring and affection? Is this what happiness feels like? Joy and delight? Honestly I don’t think all of us know the difference. We’re going for dopamine instead of oxytocin. Shopping expeditions are sometimes the only way that families and friends know how to relate to each other, the only way to have a good time. This is part of where compulsive acquisition comes from. My hoarders may be out shopping with family multiple times a week. Part of the habit is justified by stocking up on gifts, gifts that may pile up for years without actually being given to the intended recipient. There’s always a special pile of gifts received and still in the original wrapping. Sometimes they have the year written on the tag so you can see how far back they go. That’s where our bargains go, sometimes. They go into a hoarded pile on someone’s dining table or into their closet. All that shopping and wrapping, for what? This is why it’s so hard for me to find an exchange of gifts very interesting. I can’t help but see all this stuff in the context of thrift stores, yard sales, and hoarding. What was the exciting gift of one holiday season will inevitably be shabby a few years later. The constant churning of consumer preference creates, as part of its nature, tackiness and unwearable colors and dated fashions that cause us to burst into laughter. They were all desirable one year and a complete joke not long after. That could actually make a fun party idea! Everyone show up wearing a thrift store outfit from an earlier era and wrap up a white elephant gift from a different decade. Throw a potluck using all the dusty kitchen appliances from the back of the cabinet. Make a game out of identifying weird unitaskers, the single-use gadgets that fill so many drawers and closets. Then see if anyone will be willing to take it off your hands. That sounds like work to me right now, though. I’m going to continue lounging around in my pajamas until noon and then see how much cranberry sauce I can fit in my lunch. This is Slack Friday, after all, and I’m not convinced I’m slacking hard enough. I was picking up my library holds when the librarian noticed that I had some vegan cookbooks. “I have some vegans and vegetarians coming over for Thanksgiving,” she told me. I didn’t know what to make of her; she had a somewhat dour expression and spoke slowly. “It’s such a relief,” she continued, “I hate having to cook a turkey!” It was the first time I saw her smile.
While there are undoubtedly at least a few relieved cooks and hosts out there, many of us may be alarmed or annoyed that an alternative guest is coming. A refusenik! An ingrate! Like we don’t have enough to do. What a burden, how rude and selfish and unfair. As if everyone else around the table wasn’t holding out an empty plate, expecting to be fed like so many gaping chicks in a nest. We tolerate picky eaters as long as they only make horrid faces, call everything ICKY and YUCKY and GROSS, and rant at length about The Texture and every other detail of a perfectly fine meal. It’s fine if you’re merely picky; that’s a personality trait. But if you choose to do it on purpose! Like from a food sensitivity! Geez man, just choke it down and go to the hospital later. That’s what I’d do. We’re alienated by each other’s demands around the table. We don’t see our own needs or preferences in that light, those of us who refuse to eat, let’s see, what have I heard from supposed omnivores? Any kind of sauce Anything with a speck in it, like whole-grain pasta Anything that touches something from another part of the plate Raw carrots, although cooked are fine Onions, only raw or only cooked Soup, any kind, or just chunky soup, or just a bisque Individually: eggplant, mushrooms, squash, cabbage, pumpkin, cauliflower, sweet potato, et cetera I’ve cooked for groups including all kinds of sensitivities and weird preferences, and weird preferences masked as sensitivities. From my perspective, everyone has at least one food that they absolutely will not eat, under any circumstances. No sense blaming anyone for it. We have a historically unprecedented access to a vast array of foods from every region on the earth, from every culture, with spices that used to cost a king’s ransom. Salt! Black pepper! Lemons! Oranges! Cinnamon! Saffron even! The fact that we feel perfectly free to reject food, shove it around the plate, leave it to be scraped into the trash, is an extravagance of abundance. We aren’t fighting each other over the last withered turnip and that is magnificent. BTW if you’ve never tried turnips, you totally should. They’re fantastic, much nicer than ordinary potatoes, especially baked in the oven. Anyway. In this year of grace two thousand nineteen, there is no way that any holiday table is going to have a standard set of completely standard diets. Someone is going to have a special need, and those of us who like to cook and play the host are going to have to learn how to accommodate it. Consider it next-level hospitality, an opportunity to experiment. How do we manage? How do we avoid putting our friends in to anaphylaxis or violating their spiritual principles? The first thing is that there must be no trickery. We must agree not to lie to anyone about what is or is not in a dish. That is against the concept of free will. I admit that I did this once, when I was making the pies and everyone else was running errands and the cat jumped on the table and started licking the pie crust. I chased him off, but I couldn’t remember which pie he had his face in, and there was no time to make another one and the store was already closed for the day. I figured the heat of the oven would destroy any cat germs in the pie, shrugged, and carried on like it hadn’t happened. Everyone ate the pie and nobody got ill. It was years before I confessed. If you don’t think someone should trick you into eating cat-lick pie, then don’t trick other people about their food either. Second thing: avoid cross-contamination. Each dish gets its own serving utensil. Each pot and pan has its own ladle or its own flipper or whatever. Next, a lot of dishes can be made in such a way that a taboo ingredient can be left out for one serving, then added in for everyone else. Shredded cheese, butter, or breadcrumbs are a few examples. My mom used to save a raw carrot for me when she made candied carrots, and the same with the yams from the candied yams. (Not raw but not covered in brown sugar and marshmallows, either). It’s a simple yet unforgettable gesture of love, an act of service as well as a gift. As a cook and a foodie, I love to experiment with new recipes. I tend to favor the exotic, with complicated spice blends and fruity sauces and tons of condiments. I married a man who likes foods to be simple. Why make wasabi mashed potatoes when you can just have regular mashed potatoes? It remains hard for me to fathom, but most people gravitate to the simple and unadorned, the exact foods that I find bland, boring, and sometimes completely inedible. I’ve learned to keep the sauces in a bowl, to leave most of my sides predictable and standard. This is also the way to make it easy for guests with special needs to know what they can and can’t put on their plate. Interestingly, most standard dishes can easily be made both vegan and gluten-free. (Salads, potatoes, certain grains, all side vegetables, drinks, some desserts). I’ve done plenty of five-course meals that are corn-free, yeast-free, canola-free, or whatever the need is for that day. It’s only hard when we feel martyred, that it is not fair for this person to “refuse” to shut up and eat what everyone else is eating. When we see it as a chance to be magnanimous, to lavish generosity on someone, to show that ours is a welcoming home, well then, it turns out not to be such a big deal. Ultimately, it can be the most hospitable just to allow our guests with special needs to bring their own food. We can set aside a clean dish and a clean serving utensil. We can lay it out and label it in such a way that it isn’t accidentally consumed by those who can eat everything. We can smooth the process and carry on with the party, making it a non-issue. The social problem of incompatible diets is not going to go away. If anything, this is the tip of the iceberg. More people are going to get laboratory testing and find out that they shouldn’t be eating certain specific things. Next it might be our own turn. As hosts and cooks, we may as well start adapting now, knowing we are learning vital skills that our own families and closest friends may need. We can show ourselves to be generous and hospitable, our homes warm and welcoming, our tables the places to be. We can laugh it off and everyone can have a good time. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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