Monday

Sept 3, 2001

a holiday conundrum

Ah, a holiday! Am I spoiled or what? It starts with a walk. North in our neighborhood to Northland drive. It is humid and I sweat but the heat isn't overwhelming. There isn't much traffic, people sleeping in for the holiday. Water has been bubbling out of the pavement around the corner since yesterday and I vow to call the city when I get home. As we come back to SuRu's street, a woman stops and tells us that she has lost her dog, a small one.

"My husband let it out. We don't live here," she says, barely controlling her anger. She tells us the house where she is visiting. It is next to the spring coming out of the pavement. Ru and I walk over there and the husband (apparently) and some older people are coming out of the house. We ask if they've called the city about the water.

"Yes, yesterday," the apparent husband adds and then breathlessly, "They said it's a class 3 leak and they have more class 1 leaks than they can handle. In all your walks around have you seen a little dog?" No, sadly, we haven't as we told the wife.

I get home and get cleaned up. I have to get those abstracts submitted. (Whose idea was it to make the conference deadline a holiday? Why did I put off doing it until the last minute?)

So I do that. I put some eggs on to boil. Why? Well...on our walk, SuRu and I decided that to create more options for our old age we needed to be healthier. And I know I need to exercise and eat more healthy things but also...lose weight.

I gave SuRu my speech about, on average I had gained less than two pounds per year since high school. Let's say I weighed 135 out of high school. About that. I now weigh 180. That is 45 pounds. A lot. Yes. But. I got out of high school, um, this hurts, 35 years ago. Yes. So if I had gained a mere two pounds a year on average I would weigh 205.

That means, I assured her, that with only the slightest adjustment I should be able to go down by a few pounds by age 65, twelve years from now. Maybe get to 168, a pound a year. A mere 3600 calories less of food or more of exercise. Of course, the body doesn't like to lose weight anymore than, really, mine liked to gain more than one pounds some a year. Anyway, I decided to try a tiny adjustment.

We were talking about those Subway sandwich commercials where this guy claims to have lost weight eating Subway's low-fat sandwiches. I assert that this guy ate at Subway (or some fast food place) all the time. He was a college kid, after all. So, he had a pretty good handle on what he ate while fat. By going to the same place (or type of place) and merely eating low-fat sandwiches rather than high-fat ones, he was guaranteed to consume fewer calories. Since he was, after all, still eating plenty o' bread and sufficient calories, he didn't get a starvation effect or anything.

SuRu and I decided our diets were, happily, more complicated. One day we might eat a big breakfast, another none. One day have salads or (me) sashimi for lunch. Another a sandwich or high-calorie food. (Greasy Mexican, even burgers and fries.) We decide our variety of diet is healthier but considerably harder to peg with a 'Jason effect.' (I think Jason is the Subway commercial kid.) By that I mean, if you just eat one way, in one place, altering the pattern should be a no-brainer. (Although, obviously Subway had to help by offering sandwiches with guaranteed fewer grams of fat.)

Anyway, I searched around in my dietary habits and realized that one thing I do all the time is snack on cheese. And I'm not about to stop that either. I love cheese and would rather die than stop eating it, I think. But, I decided that I eat cheese consistently. So, I will make a rule: when I eat cheese (and crackers or bread), I will always eat something else with it. Carrot sticks, slices of raw zucchini, a boiled egg, green onions, a piece of fresh fruit. That way, I will theoretically eat less cheese (and the carb conveyors) and eat more variety of healthy things. I will do this for two months and see if my weight is affected. I may decide to add some other rule at that point or just keeping plugging with this little change. It won't be some 'never' rule, though. (Like never have wine, beer, hamburgers, cappuccino, etc.) No it will be a 'when you eat this, which you do anyway' then you will adjust your behavior. For example, 'when you have a hamburger, you won't have either a sweet drink or fries or chips with it.' Or, 'when you eat tortilla chips in a restaurant, you will pause and drink water after every chip.'

Will this work? I don't know.

But what about, you ask, the eggs you boiled a few paragraphs ago? Isn't that where we took this tangent. Why, yes it is.

See, after my walk I thought I'd have some cheese for breakfast. I had a few green onions and some fruit. But I thought I'd have a boiled egg with it, too. I got out several eggs, because boiling one seemed silly. Four eggs. I thought I'd make some tuna salad for lunch, too.

By the time my eggs were done, it was lunch time and FFP asked me to go with him and Gayle (our bookkeeper) to Houston's for lunch. So I took all four eggs, three cans of tuna, salad dressing, sweet pickle relish, white pepper, lemon juice and a chopped up apple and made a big bowl of tuna. It tastes better refrigerated anyway. I put it away and went out to lunch.

So, I ordered a rare tuna with mango and avocado salad at Houston's. It was good. Very good. And, you know what? I still hadn't had any cheese. See how well this works?

I started a packing list for my over two weeks business trip (with a tad of pleasure at the end). I only have three more weekends to get ready. Seems like a lot. But I like to get the packing nailed and then the travel doesn't seem so horrible. One thing that bugs me is that people are all, like, "Oh, poor you, having to go to all those wonderful foreign cities." Well, my friends, it isn't worth it to me to travel that far for a few free moments. And the company keeps impinging on the vacation I gave myself at the end. So, yeah, poor me. Not really. The work isn't that hard. But dashing from place to place is a drag no matter if it's Europe. Airports in Europe suck, too. In fact, with customs and passport control and the language thing...sometimes they suck even more. (Although they are sometimes a bit more interesting than those here.) For ten days, two weeks, even one week of pure pleasure, doing what I please,. well, then it's worth it to fly some place.

Well, I have to go to work tomorrow, but the l-o-n-g weekend has been nice and a little productive with some fun thrown in.

As the day winds down, I ask FFP if he wants to take an excursion. I have a pile of five books to take my dad so he has some reading material. After we drop those off and pick up a couple he's finished, we go to Barnes and Noble.

I'm feeling truly relaxed. I look at whatever I please. I engage in a favorite pastime: I open interesting books at a random page and read a sentence or two. A novel called The Grand Complication by Allen Kurzweil yields this:

The abandoned ham and cheese sandwich posed a similar conundrum.

Now, conundrum is a word I like. And juxtaposed with ham and cheese sandwich? Almost made me buy it. Except for all the books I have at home, unread.

Home again, I have some of the earlier-made tuna salad and, yes, some cheese. I have a couple of green onions with it to honor my goal on the cheese (mentioned above). I don't have any crackers or bread with it.

Forrest pores me a Jack Daniels with ice and water, I almost catch up with the papers and all feels right with the world.

sketch after a painting in the Louvre, October 2000 by Nancy Hise Lilly

"Vision is the art of seeing things invisible."

Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects; from Miscellanies (1711)

What do you choose to do?
In that next moment, the one that, while we are speaking became...
Now.