Quodlibets

One of many posts on marriage and weddings

I obviously have complicated feelings about weddings and marriage, which you know if you read this blog for the course of its life before the hiatus.

Nonetheless, Sam and I are doing both--having a wedding and entering into a marriage.  You should know from the outset that there won't be any romantic talk about how it's my day, or how we're starting a new life together, or how much I love him and can't wait to spend my life with him.  I've already BEEN spending my life with him, and suffice it to say that there are still enough gooey feelings in place to convince me that in another 8, 10, 15, 30 (or until the mortgage is paid, ha!) we'll be still hanging onto gooey feelings.

But put simply, we are not getting married because we are in love.  I'm not deliberately being anti-romantic, but when we discussed getting married (which we did), and when we decided to go for it (which we did), love was never part of the equation.  I think both of us understand that the love is there, otherwise why would we even be discussing it?  The fact is, when we entered a 30-yr mortgage together, we made a practical commitment to one another, and it was an acknowledgment of how we feel about one another.  A practical acknowledgment.  The marriage part that followed the mortgage is an acknowledgment that there are some practical benefits of marriage given to us by the government and private companies, and we would like to be able to take advantage of these if we need to.  (I'm speaking of health insurance, above all else.) 

Now, I have incredibly conflicting feelings about this, because I feel a serious sense of guilt that I can get married legally and friends of mine (no exaggeration) cannot.  Because they are gay.  I've often said that I wouldn't get married as long as homosexuals could not, and I find to my sadness that I'm going to.  I could probably wait; the mortgage was the commitment, after all.  But what if (holy crap I hope not) Sam loses his job in retail, and he's without health insurance?  What if (holy motherf-ing crap I hope not) something happens to one of us, something impairing?  Realistically, our families would NEVER ever do anything contrary to our wishes, but at the same time, the best protection in this instance is marriage.  It is what it is.

So we're doing it, regardless of the complicated feelings on my end (and the complicated feelings on his?  Not sure.) and again, it is what it is.

This post is mostly addressing the marriage side of this equation, and the actual marriage--the day to day, the living together, the loving him--that's going to be the easiest part of all of this.  I don't think anything will change from how we are right now, to be honest.  It's the abstract feelings about it that get in the way. 

And then, there is the wedding.  That's for another post.  Probably more than one.

It's so weird to be back here

When I stopped blogging a year ago, it was in the run-up to an election I was becoming increasingly convinced my side was going to win.  And it scared the bejesus out of me; four years before that, I had started the blog as a vehicle for my frustration over the upcoming election, and we lost that one.  (We lost that one, and I don't know if it was the election, or the move that came at the tail end of election season, or the fact that I quit my job [where I'd been working with Sam], or the fact that I was starting an academic certificate program that I felt pretty damn bad about, or what, but I ended up being seriously depressed that winter.  And it was a really bad time in our lives, and I didn't want a repeat of that, if my side lost.)  So anyway, I was scared that we'd lose, or maybe even I was scared that we'd win, and I wasn't sure how to blog about that.

I stopped blogging because I didn't know what to say anymore about politics, and I increasingly had nothing at all to say about my life, because I was having a hard time concentrating on anything except the drama unfolding at a national level.  And I had NOTHING to say about that drama, because what was there to say?  I wanted Obama to win desperately.  I was nervous and giddy when it seemed like he was pulling away with the election, and then terrified that my mounting excitement would jinx the whole thing.

I never said it was a smart reaction, ok? 

So I stopped, and I intended to only stop until after the election.  But then the stoppage turned into a few months, and then more months, and then Sam and I were buying a condo, and I couldn't blog about that, and then Sam and I were talking about getting married, and I couldn't blog about that, and then I was applying to grad school, getting in, spending ten days in prison-like Champaign, and I couldn't blog about that.

It's not that I didn't want to, per se.  I just forgot how.  I mean, I just forgot how it felt to blog about the stuff happening to you, even the big stuff.  I thought about blogging all the time.  Typepad is my freaking homepage, for goodness' sake.  I just couldn't make my fingers type.

So here it is: Sam and I bought a condo.  We moved in, and we love it.  We're getting married next June on our eighth anniversary.  It flowed out of the condo purchase, honestly.  I've started grad school; I'm getting my MLIS (slowly, slowly) from the University of Illinois--Urbana Champaign through their LEEP program. 

My facebook description for months now has been: Things are happening.  That's right.  Things. Are. Happening. 

That list encompasses the "things", and I'm going to (slowly) start talking about them here. 

Unrealistic Expectations

My brother has made some mistakes.  I don't talk about him much on the blog, not because of those mistakes, but because we are in reality very far apart.  8 years is an incredibly long time in a young person's life, and by my estimation, Litty and I will only start to feel close in age when I'm in my later 30's and he's in his later 20's.  We were just separated by too much time when he was little--for god's sake, he was 10 when I left for college.  But in the last year or so, I've definitely gotten to know him better than I ever have, maybe since he was a toddler.  And I have to admit that I like my brother a whole lot.  As he gets older, and matures a bit, he's become a very, very interesting person.  Like I said, he's made some very bad choices--choices that have made him who he is--in his short life, and I think he's paid for those choices. 

And one of those choices?  It may have saved his life yesterday.  There's no way to know whether Litty would have been in that Geology class at NIU, but the possibility exists.  If Lit were still enrolled at NIU, he could have been in that class.  He could have been in the building, he could have been on that quad, or he could have been on campus.  The fact remains that good friends of his might have been, and that's bad enough.  But when I heard that horrible news yesterday, I didn't have to be nervous, because I knew Lit wouldn't be in that class.  I knew, because a year ago, he dropped out of NIU and moved home, and began attending community college.  And I've never been so happy that he made that choice as I was yesterday.

All the same, when you grow up in a town that's only 35-40 minutes away from the college, you know people who've attended.  I'd say that a pretty good number of kids from my town attend NIU.  I'd hazard a guess that anyone who grew up in that town knows someone who went there, or is currently going there.  Or went there themselves.  The shooting at Virginia Tech was tragic, there's absolutely no doubt about it.  But it didn't hit home like this one did.  It didn't happen to US.  It just happened.  And I can't really pretend that this is happening to me, because it's not.  But I didn't have to wonder whether people I knew were safe with VT, because the chances that I'd know someone there were slim to none.  The chances of my family knowing someone at NIU are much, much higher, and that alone brings it home.

The thing is, how do you stop something like this from happening?  There's no way to "lock" a campus to prevent someone from going on a rampage.  There's no way to "lock" up that killer before he commits the crime.  The only answer I can come up with is to get rid of the guns.  That's it.  I'm one of those people who could give a shit about whatever rights people want to claim in regards to owning guns.  I think they're a scourge, and I think we need to get them out of everyday usage.  I can accept hunting guns, but I think they need to be highly regulated.  I don't know that much about guns, but I do know that you don't use every single kind of gun out there for hunting.  ONLY hunting guns should be allowed.  And again, only under highly regulated and hard-to-get circumstances.  If this person, this person who hadn't shot up NIU, hadn't had access to guns, this wouldn't have happened.  Not the way it did, anyway.  He may have charged in there, and he may have been crazy and made threats, but I simply don't think 7 people would be dead right now if he hadn't come in with 3 guns blazing.

I'm having a hard time thinking about it in any other way right now.  This stuff doesn't need to happen.  It just doesn't.  But nobody, nobody will say it.  And that's a tragedy too.

Putting it into words

I read Dooce mostly to laugh.  Doesn't everyone?  Heather's posts about life with Jon and Leta are brilliantly funny.  But sometimes, when Dooce gets serious, I remember why the internets really loves her.  There is an honesty about Heather that hits you right between the eyes, in a good way.  And I don't know about other women, but sometimes, I feel like she is speaking for me. Today's post is one of those. 

I obviously don't have kids, and I've also been pretty clear on the fact that I don't want them.  But actually, I waver.  Every great once in a while, I imagine what it might be like to have a child.  And the truth is, I can't see myself doing mommy things.  I can't see being anything but impatient with a baby, even in my imaginings.  I won't apologize for it, because at least I'm not intending to go into motherhood thinking this.  The only way I could consent to having a child is if I could somehow get past this sense of things.  I can't see getting there, though.  I don't remember if Heather ever talked about wanting a baby, or the lead-up to the pregnancy.  So I don't know if she felt like this, or if Leta was highly anticipated, and the schism in Heather's head about being a mommy was a shock at birth.  But I imagine it's the second, and that's different from how I feel, and I know it.  I don't think my situation is anything like Heather's, honestly.  I already know that I could never stay home with a kid.  I already know that I wouldn't be the kind of mommy that wanted only to be with her child.  I don't think I'd have to spend time accepting that my motherhood would be different from the traditional view of it.  I already know it would.  I accept that. 

The thing I don't know, and the thing that will absolutely prevent me from having a child until I figure it out, is if I could be anything but indifferent towards the idea.  I certainly feel no great passion for it.  Sometimes I find reasons that I think are good--my mom would be the cutest grandma ever, the world needs more children of intelligent liberal parents--and I realize that these reasons aren't good at all.  The most important reason, feeling a desire to parent, is utterly lacking within me.  I joke with Sam about it, how he can stay home with the kid and do all the (traditionally) mommy stuff and I'll come in at the end of the day and kiss the kid before it goes to bed.  It's a horrific thing to condemn a kid to, a parent so uninvolved with their life, and I can't help feeling that that's where we'll eventually end up if we have a child, because I simply have no interest in that stuff. 

Before you all yell at me that it changes when it's your own kids and blah blah blah, you'll love your kid so much all that stuff will go away and you'll love holding your screaming baby and it all makes it worth it, and you know, all that shit, stop and think for a minute if you think every woman who has children is happy that she did.  We are not all the same, just because we're women and possess uteri, and so can you not admit that there might be women who in fact do not organically want children?  And that it might be a mistake for women who are lukewarm about the prospect to go through with it because they are women, and that is what they are supposed to do?  I'm not going to give you a name, but a woman I know recently told me that if she had to do it over, no matter that she loves her children more than herself and that she would give her life for them (they're grown now), she wouldn't have had children.  She did it because it was the 70's and women were wives and mothers in the 70's, and there was no space in her head that allowed her to be childless.  She said she never did enjoy being a mother, never enjoyed the playgroups and the relentless drive to care for the children.  And she stressed that she did love her kids, and felt like they enriched her life, but still.  She wasn't meant for it, and she said she knew that now.

I think I'm that woman.  I think that for the first time, ever, women are allowing themselves the space to live without giving birth, without being mommies, and I think it's okay.  I think I'm one of those women who would never truly enjoy her children, never enjoy the mommying.  I feel so right about this most of the time.  I'm not saying I couldn't do it, I guess, but I am saying that I'm almost 100% certain that I shouldn't.  It's different, and when all those people in my life tell me, "Oh, someday, you will want children, you'll see" I think they simply just do not get it.  Just because I have one doesn't mean I should use it.  It doesn't make me sad, the prospect of never parenting.  It exhilarates me, it makes me feel free, it gives me relief.  I feel more grief about the fact that I might feel pressured to have a child, because I worry Sam will ultimately leave me over the issue.  Again, not a real reason to have a child.

I know I'm not alone in this, and I know there are other women like that one in the paragraphs above, the one who admitted regretting having children.  (Because lest you want to put a name on it, that's exactly what it was.  I have to make it clear; I admire this woman very much for being honest about it, and in fact respect her greatly anyway.)  It's such a no-no, now, to say that you wish you'd done it differently, and not had children, as if that somehow disrespected the children you had.  I don't see it that way, of course.  But I understand that some people always will, and those are probably the same people who will continue to tell me that I'll come around and my biological clock will tick and I'll end up with a fat drooly baby on my knee, adoration pouring out of me with every diaper change and 2 am wake-up.  There's always going to be those people, both in the wider world and in my life.

I guess, like Heather Armstrong coming to terms with motherhood her way, I am in my way trying to come to terms with motherhood my way.  Which may in fact be no motherhood at all.  I say it all the time, but I am still trying to grasp the complexities that fuel my feelings on the issue.  And I imagine I will be forever, as long as I'm still able to physically bear children (shit, if indeed I am.  Because seriously?  Who knows.).  Anyway, Heather's post made me think about this stuff, and now you're reading it. 

Notes on Being Alone

For the five days preceding my trip out to CA for the wedding, I was alone at the apt. without S.  He went out early to visit with friends, and attend the bachelor party (hiking!  in caves!  with no strippers!).  I was mostly not okay with it, because I'm a big fat scaredy cat.  And that first night was terrible, with very little sleep, and lots and lots of jumping.  I was afraid to wear two earplugs, so I just wore one, which contributed mightily to the bad sleeping. 

Clearly, I lived.  In fact, every day got a little bit easier, in terms of sleep, at least in terms of fear.  It still sucked to be missing S, but at least by the end I was sleeping with no trouble.  I do feel like I did talk less, simply because there was no one to share all my little thoughts with.  And it was lonely, I can't deny it.  I think I strong-armed my sister into going to dinner one night, because I was super-hungry for company.  It was such a relief, both to talk, and to have someone talk to me.  It's half pathetic and half sweet--I do miss him when he's not around, but my need to have someone around is a little humiliating.  I don't think I'd necessarily be like this if I wasn't with S, and hadn't been with him for almost 5 years, but those conditions exist, and so I can't really take away those factors from my life, and dude, I was lonely.  That's all there is to it.

It isn't as if S and I spend every waking hour talking, or even acknowledging that the other exists, because we don't.  Often, we coexist, both of us on our computers, doing our own things.  And that's pretty normal, I think.  Except every once in a while, one of us will throw a comment out about something, and the other person will respond, and seriously?  That's the shit that I missed.  I missed him holding me, and I missed kissing him, and I really, really missed hugs, but I also just missed having him around.  This is sappy and gross and I'm sorry, but he's my closest friend as well as my boyfriend, and when you take that away, you have a big lonely. 

Half pathetic, sure, but I still think it's at least halfway sweet.  Oh, and that first hug in the Sacramento airport?  Like the best candy in the whole entire world.  For just that minute, it was worth it.

"I just wanna hear your voice, I just wanna see your face"

Whenever I read a book that I feel is speaking to me, I post-it note pages that have sentences or paragraphs on them that make me think harder than the book is already making me think.  And I'll admit that from the moment I picked up Jennifer Baumgardner's Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics, I knew I'd be post-iting the shit out of the book.  And I did, all the way to the very end of the short book.  15 post-its, which has gotta be a record for me.  There's even a post-it on the second-to-last page. 

Perhapst this is not obvious, but it is obvious to me:  I am a bisexual.  It doesn't feel weird to say that, except that I never do.  I never name myself with the word bisexual, and I'm not sure why.  As Jan Clausen is quoted in the book: "It's certainly the nearest label for my sexuality in one word, and on that level, I don't really mind it..."  In fact, I never say that I am bisexual because what I almost always say is that I am specifically S__sexual.  I mean to imply that right now, my overt sexuality is moored to S; I'm sure I look at other people, but in terms of sex, well, that's all tied up with S now.  I never make any predictions about what would happen if we broke up, partly because I hate the idea of us breaking up and partly because I have no freaking clue. 

Saying that I turned to men because of my horrible, awful relationship with a woman simplifies what is really going on in the situation, but the core of that statement probably holds more truth than I'd care to admit.  And the reasons I fell for S are complicated, as are the reasons I originally fell for my ex (I think I'm going to refer to her as Giraffe), but there is also truth in the statement that I was looking for something that wasn't her, something that wasn't going to hurt me.  And yet that doesn't at all take into account the complicating factor that as the book points out over and over again, I want to have a gay straight relationship.  All the best things about my relationship with Giraffe--the equality, the sense of understanding each other implicitly, the softness--I can't deny that I've sought that with S.  I know that it's true, even if I wasn't conscious of it when I started building the relationship.  It's perplexingly hard to accomplish, because I've been forced to confront that there is also a truth to the idea that men and women simply do not communicate on the same levels.  I yell a lot more in this relationship, because sometimes I feel like I must scream to be heard. 

Which has to be one of the biggest, baddest fears out of all of this being with a man--how to hang onto a feminism that was born out of the love of women.  It's been insanely hard for me to understand how to hang onto that radical part of myself while I engage in a relationship that by its very nature isn't radical at all.  I think that when Baumgardner talks about the idea of being with men as "reverting to old, unhealthy behaviors" she's on to something big.  I can't say it's a struggle every day, but it's definitely a struggle.  Sometimes it feels like a betrayal of myself to be with someone who simply can't ever know what being a woman is like.  I love S more dearly than I ever loved Giraffe (and I'm not afraid to say it), but there are things he will never be for me, that I feel that a woman could.  I'm not sure how cold that sounds, but I know that the flip is true; that there are some things that S is for me that a woman never could be. 

And I'll go ahead and admit it here; there are times when I can't ever imagine being with a woman again, because of certain mechanical aspects of certain intimate experiences.  Plenty of woman have expressed that thought before me, and I'm not the last.  There's something about it that's right, but I can't say that I'd never be able to experience that rightness with a woman.  Or maybe it's that there's a different rightness to being with a woman.  It's going to be incredibly hard to understand just what I mean by this to someone who hasn't experienced both same sex and opposite sex romantic entanglements, because it just is.  It's hard to understand how you could trade one rightness for another, but in being with man, I've done exactly that.  And I'm far happier now than I ever was with Giraffe, though to be fair to both of us, that relationship was dogged by something far greater than bisexual politics, something beyond sex.  (Namely alcoholism, if I'm being 100% honest.)

The whole thing is impossible, when it comes right down to it, to untangle.  It's hard to make a current relationship into an abstraction, into a situation, into words.  I can very easily voice my feelings about same sex relationships, but they're not wholly informed by just being gay; and I can't easily voice my feelings about opposite sex relationships because I'm still on this sort of long walk with S through the territories of one.  I don't know how it will be three, four, five years down the road.  I don't know what I'll miss or what I'l crave.  Perhaps one of the absolute best descriptions I've ever read about this situation, the loving a woman and then jumping to loving a man one, are in this book:

"[she] refers to being with women as like living in London: 'I want to really be in America' she says now, 'but I will always love and miss London.  It's wonderful to visit London.'"

It may seem very superficial to put it that way, but the minute I read it, I identified with it completely.  I mean, it seems 100% spot-on to me.  It is essentially the way I see my own love life right now.  I really, really want to be where I am; I also understand that there is something else out there that's nice.  Just not as nice as where I am.

(I meant to talk about more than this.  This doesn't even touch on things like the idea of a bisexual community, or how loving a woman informs relationships with men in a totally different way than before.  I had thought to talk about how my sense of self changed fundamentally from my earlier experience, and I even wanted to talk a little bit about how power has changed in my perceptions because of my past experience.  These are all topics the book touches on and goes into and made me think hard hard hard.  Maybe later, or tomorrow.  Now I need to go back to working.)

Giving up the ghost (or illusion of one)

I was going to read The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, but when I started reading it, I realized it wasn't speaking to me at all.  I don't need a book to convince me not to believe in a God, because I'm already pretty much there.  I've talked about not being a Christian before, and I think I've even mentioned my phonebooth in the sky fantasty (complete with a literary elephant), but I never can remember how much I've actually talked about when it comes to God.  My history is peppered with God, because of who my friends are, and after high school, I stopped thinking about it so intensively because it was a freedom not to have to fight for the right to be atheist or agnostic (or to go to hell, as I was told repeatedly).  I don't remember the specifics of any of those conversations between very passionate, afraid Christians and me, but I suspect that there was a lot of handwringing on their part, and a lot of questions forced to make me confront how empty my life was without God.

I don't remember when it happened, but I once told my HSBF that I believed in people the way she believed in God, and I know she was trying to be gentle (but came off as triumphant) when she said, "And what happens when people let you down?"  Because no shit, they tend to do that.  People'll let you down at every little corner of your life.  I'm not that naive.  I never said that I believed people were good or that people were faithful or that you could put your faith in people.  I just said that I believed in people.  That in balance, at the end of the day, people would generally give you something to believe in.  I guess I still think that, on good days.

I have a lot of beliefs, in fact, though most of them are trivial and inconsequential.  (Although I'm not quite certain that any belief is more than those two things, to be honest.  Isn't a belief something that can't be proven?  As such, can they ever be things that mean much in our lives?  We may cling to them, but do they get us through the day-to-day?)  I don't know that I can list those beliefs, like a to-do list or a grocery list.  A lot of what I believe seems to be the kind of crap that introspective college students (or high schoolers, I guess) come up with when they want to sound profound, stuff about the essential meaning/nature of life.  Half the time, I'm not sure if I really do believe what I'm espousing, or if I'm only espousing it because at that moment, it sounds very good.  I used to thrive on philosophical discussions like that, but now I find them vaguely troubling and useless.  Who cares whether or not there's a God?  Who cares about souls and afterlife and things that are so abstract as to be absolutely meaningless? 

I'm discovering that I don't.  I don't care about those things.  I mostly care about going about my day in a way that feels true to myself.  I mostly care about loving where I am, and who I am, and who I am with.  That feels more meaninful to me than worrying about what the ultimate purpose of all this is, because when you're worried about that shit, you're missing the actual stuff happening to you, with you, around you.  I suppose that very essentially, I'm not a very philosophical person (In fact, I hated philosophy with a passion.  Took one class, as a freshwoman, and hated it.  It's probably misplaced hatred, at least towards the academic discipline, that happened because when I tacitly admitted I was an atheist in my phil. class, the class jumped on me, incredulous that anyone could not believe in God.  I think I was pretty much done with it after that.  Stupid frosh, at a Catholic school, saying she doesn't believe in God.  My fault, but still.) and really don't care about those questions, when it comes down to it.

It's actually rather surprising, as I always thought I did care about that stuff.  So yeah, thanks Richard Dawkins, for making me realize that I don't care.  That I don't want to waste anymore time contemplating things that ultimately lead me nowhere.

Let's skirt around the topic a little bit more

I sort of obliquely mentioned the fact that I'm doing Weight Watchers again in my post recapping my 26 of 2006, but now I'm going to talk about it for maybe the first and last time in 2007.  I've never wanted my trying to lose weight to be the biggest thing in my life, and I've always felt that writing about it was sort of a problem, because of that.  But the fact is, it does trickle down and cause all kinds of ripples in other parts of my life.  It certainly changes the way S and I eat, because doing WW means that I have to eat in my apartment six days a week.  I've decided that my goal will be to only eat out once a week (okay, twice, if you count my once-weekly lunch at Subway, but that's 100% on plan, so I don't really), which is not what I'd really like to be doing, but right now, if it's a choice between losing weight and eating out, the former wins.

Last time I did WW, I lost 30 lbs. in around six months, and then I got bored and really hungry for good things and just fed up with 22 instead of 24 points, so I sort of lapsed.  I maintained and gained, and maintained and gained, and now I've gained almost all of that 30 back.  It just sort of creeps up on you, especially if you love food the way I do.  I mean, I've just been eating like I can eat anything I want to and not gain weight, which unfortunately for me, isn't true.  I really, really let myself eat what I want over the holidays, too, because I knew on Jan. 1st I'd be jumping into the WW thing full time again.  And I did, and I've been really, really good so far.  My first week was smash-up bang-up good.  I don't want to write down exactly what I've lost in five days, but it's a lot.  Like, a-scary-lot.  It might be due to two things:  a) the alcohol that I drank on New Year's Eve may have added to my starting weight on Jan. 1, and b) I've decided that instead of my allotted 24 points, I'm going to use 22 a day.  Last time I did this, it was the switch down to 22 from 24 that really derailed me, so I figure if I just go by the 22 a day thing, it may help me.  Some days it won't be realistic, and others it will, so I'm just going to play that day by day, and see what happens.  But I have hopes.

Am I miserable?  Kind of.  I wasn't sleeping very well in the middle of the week.  I told S that I thought it was my stomach bothering me--I'm hungry all the time again, even when I'm laying in bed trying to sleep--and the fact that I couldn't stop thinking about Mexican food.  I'm not kidding, either.  I seriously spend at least an hour a day thinking about all the food I'm not eating and all the food I want to eat.  It's like (and bear with me, here) porn in my head, except that it's glistening mounds of guacamole and sensual shots of quesadillas and tacos I picture up there.  Everything looks dreamy and it fills me with longing.  Sex?  Who cares.  I want Mexican food.  See, now I'm thinking about it now, picturing a gigantic basket of tortilla chips and a big bowl of salsa and cheesy nachos and grrrrr.  This is why I can't fall asleep.

And you know, being hungry all the time makes you crankier than shit.  I think I've been okay, but you might have to ask S to get the real picture.  It's the worst at about 5 pm, when I just feel miserable and want to crawl into the kitchen and start eating things, any things.  I've been eating either a banana or some olives in the afternoon, after work, to try to make my stomach think it's got food in it, but it is REALLY not working.  I'm not sure there's much else I can do to make that sort of feeling go away; I've ALWAYS, even when not dieting, been the kind of person who NEEDS food in the afternoon or early evening to even out my blood sugar, or whatever it is that makes you want to kill someone for no reason.  So dieting makes it worse, because I'm not feeling well-fed at lunch, and at around two, it starts, and then by five, even with the banana, or olives, or whatever small snack I decide to eat, I'm crazy.  I get either sullen and snappy, or just plain angry and ready to fight.  You've got to admire S for sticking it out, and dealing with it.  I do.

But at the same time, it feels good.  It feels really good to be in control again, and I know that when I do go out (tonight, for, predictably Mexican at one of our favorite places in the city for cheap, good Mexican), the food will taste ambrosial.  I know that each and every meal I eat out will feel like a gift, and even though that's not the way food is supposed to work in your life, that's the way it always will work for me, because I like it too damn much to feel indifferent to it.  Last night, I had enough to points to count out a serving of those Cape Cod reduced-fat potato chips, and my god, it was like seeing in color for the first time.  I've got to get used to that feeling again, and embrace it, because if I don't, I won't lose any weight, and unfortunately, whatever pressure it is I feel from outside isn't motivating me; it's coming from inside, because I want to feel good in my clothes again.  There's no way around it, now; I want to lose weight more than I want to eat good food every day.  It won't last forever.  We'll see. 

But I promise you, this will be the last time I talk about this for a long time, because I don't want attention, and I don't want any more pressure, and I don't want it to be a "thing".  This is just stuff I needed to say, so I could get past this initial few weeks.

Ohio

The CSNY listening continues unabated.  (Although, after two listens this morning, I'm on to more of an all-purpose mix, probably the best mix ever, created for a dinner party we had.  S chose 30 songs, I chose 30, and voila!  Perfect mix.)  I've been thinking a lot about WHY I like this music so much, and it's got to be partly the voices, which to my ears are perfect.  But I'm thinking it might be about politics too; I know these guys are all the way liberal-almost radical, and that meshes perfectly with my political outlook.  And you know, they wrote some of the quintessential protest songs (Ohio, anyone?).

That led me to think about protest music in general.  I'm sure it's out there right now (actually being done by the Y in CSNY), because I mean, doesn't everyone own a copy of "American Idiot"?  But it's not like it was during Vietnam.  Not even close.  And when I think about that, I think that it can only be due to one thing, and that one thing is the draft.  I'm not trying to be callous, but the people going to Iraq and Afghanistan, as unfair as many of their deployments are, they volunteered for that job.  And it sucks sucks sucks to know someone who is there, or is going there (S's sister's husband may be leaving for Iraq in March or April.  No one knows for sure yet.  But they have FOUR children under 10, and it's just sucky.), but you can be sure that they're there because ultimately, they volunteered to be there, whether they now want to or not. 

But I think that IF there were to be a draft during this war, all hell would break loose--protests and songs and a mass-movement against this stupid war.  I think that the minute you start to take kids (and make no mistake about it, they will be kids) from their homes, shipping them over to do a job that shouldn't need to be done, well, then you're going to enrage most of America.  There may be people in favor of a draft, but I bet any money those people don't have sons between the ages of 18 and 28.  Or brothers that age.  Because I can tell you right now, I'll be put in jail before I'll let my little brother be dragged off to war.  I'd do anything to make sure him or his friends didn't have to go (although, it's to my great sadness that I note that one of his friends joined up right before Thanksgiving; keep Paul in your thoughts, eh?).  I'd do anything to make sure S didn't have to go.  I'd aggressively pursue every legal route, and then I'd leave the country with him if it came down to that.  I'm fairly certain that a draft would mobilize me instantaneously, and I don't think I'm alone.

I'm not saying there's going to be a draft.  When S and I were talking about protest music, and that peculiar set of circumstances that brought the late 60's, early 70's movement about, he expressed his belief that it would be political suicide, for either party, and for any politician advocating it.  I don't think he's wrong.  But he better hope we don't get pulled into any more wars, and that our troop needs don't keep increasing.  Because soon enough, there won't be enough volunteers.  And what then?

Anyway.  Back to my non-political mix.

Red Hot Box o' Questions

So, per my sister, the first question:

would you rather live by the beach or in the mountains?

Sadly, neither.  I'm happy in a city, I've recently discovered.  I'm not into all that outdoorsy stuff, at all.  I hate beaches, and I don't think I'd be happy in mountains, either.  This question is slightly boring, because I can't really think of anything else to say about this.  I'm anti-nature.