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emjaybee |
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Latest Bite February 20 Looks like it's gonna be another 2-entry month. I never promised you a frequently-updated rose garden. Or if I did, well, I was lyin'. Work is busy again. I'm editing about 4 different series, and hitting my first group of final deadlines. Days pass in a blur of typing and fiddling with Quark documents and catching random factual errors. Like today, I had a book which gave a nonsensical and highly inaccurate description of how a telegraph worked. So I had to go find out how a telegraph worked, whether magnets had anything to do with it*, and oh yeah, keep the description at a fourth-grade reading level. I have also been attempting to write my book due in April, and been a little slow for comfort with it. But I always procrastinated on homework, so this is similar. My muse or whatever doesn't like showing up early. I always do my best writing close to deadline. Unless of course I miss the deadline entirely. *They do, but only with boosting the telegraph signal over long distances or in translating the electrical impulses into codes. You can build a simple telegraph without any magnets whatsoever, provided you aren't sending too far. Now you know. *** Can we all just suck it up and admit that poetry's dead? This writer thinks it's because poets have withdrawn into an isolated subculture, which I think is part of it. And yes, the writer shares the usual bewilderment at the coarsening of our culture, the loss of our heritage of verse. Well, maybe. Or maybe it's much simpler and less awful than that. Maybe poetry was killed by the invention of sound recording, which allows us to listen to music more easily. Maybe whatever place poetry once held in most people's day to day lives, music lyrics have rapidly usurped. Why? For one thing, it engages our senses more deeply. Poetry, by and large, was something we created when we wanted to tell a story rhythmically, but didn't have a musician handy. Once music became so incredibly easy to access, the public chose it instead. If the Odyssey were conceived of today, it would be an opera or a movie (with soundtrack of course), not a long chanted piece. Poetry had a reason to exist, once. I think its rhyme and meter were adaptations to make an orally-told tale more easy to remember. But music makes this even easier...how many of us know the words to the Declaration of Independence because we sang along with Schoolhouse Rock? And though poetry evolved beyond a storytelling medium, especially in the 20th century, it still remained confined to the page, and to whatever language it was written in. Music's emotion can be felt whether or not you understand the lyrics; but poetry is utterly dependent on your having a grasp (an advanced grasp) of its language. It suffers terribly in translation; all the nuance can be completely lost. Music is both more visceral and more effective than poetry. Even a mediocre musician can rouse an emotion in ways that very few reciting poets can. And people who think this means the end of our civilization forget two things.
I guess what I meant to say is, poetry isn't dead so much as mutated. There are verses being written by musicians now that I consider as powerful as any poetry I've ever read. There are also visual artists, actors, and movie makers who use the spoken word very powerfully. Perhaps "Poetry" as a stand-alone art-form existed only temporarily, but it now lends its power to many other art-forms. Perhaps those who mourn poetry's demise are merely unable to see it in its new form. Or maybe I'm full of crap and we're all de-evolving into a cultureless, apelike tribe of ignoramuses. One or the other. February 7 It's been a soul-searching kind of week. Sometime PMS hormones are good for that. Things that you normally push down make you suddenly feel stabby, and so you have to deal with whatever your baggage is, unless you just want to go around slapping people and screaming "Will you STOP breathing through your nose,@#$%! You sound like a *(*&% train whistle!" And then you get fired and go to jail. So yeah, soul-searching is better than doing that. I continue to struggle with my diet, though I'm holding onto it like grim Death. This is the part of the diet I've always stopped at before, when my psychological needs overpower my desire to be healthy. It's the hard part, and up to now, has always kicked my ass. I'm trying to beat that by just being so damn stubborn the bad habits quit and go home. I've never been a drinker or a smoker, so all my addictive behavior is in food. It's a drug, which unlike smokers and drinkers, I don't have the luxury of quitting cold turkey. But I keep falling off the wagon and getting back on anyway, slowly chipping away at it. Honestly, there's people with a lot more food issues than me. It's a wonder anybody ever gets past them at all. When you're dealing with an addiction, you have to try to remember exactly how and why you got started. For me, that involves separating out the normal from the abnormal eating in my life. I was thinking about the way I ate as a kid, and yeah, my mom fed me unhealthy stuff like most 70s moms. But I don't think that was really it. Sometime about third grade, I developed this weird paranoid eating behavior and began sneaking and hoarding food. I had to. For whatever reason, whether I was told not to pig out or there just wasn't enough food cooked, I never got full at the dinner table. I remember sitting hungrily at dinner and restraining myself from grabbing all the mashed potatoes, much as I really wanted to eat the whole bowl. I remember feeling like I couldn't--maybe I was already feeling I was too fat, I'm not sure. I do remember many times adults exclaiming, in a semi-disapproving way, over the amount of food I would eat at family gatherings, so maybe that was it. (Whereas boys, you know, get praised for that behavior, but that's a different rant). Or maybe it Mom just assumed I didn't need that much. Anyway, for whatever reason, I developed a sort of panicky, get-it-when-you-can relationship with food, and became a night eater. I would sneak down after my parents were asleep and get whatever I could easily eat up in my room. Being a kid, I wasn't too discerning, so I ate mostly crap...sweetened cereal, Coke, a loaf of bread, half a jar of peanut butter. Or a whole jar. I was a master at opening the refrigerator silently, and avoiding the creaky step on the stairs. Safe in my bedroom closet, where I liked to read because the light didn't shine into the hall, I would read a favorite book and gorge in private, without anyone to limit me or make me feel bad. I could lick my fingers, slurp, belch, and be comfortable with myself. Some nights I never went to bed at all, but stayed up savoring my freedom, despite my guilt and dizziness over lack of sleep (and inevitable stomachaches). I would occasionally even do it on school nights, but mostly in the summer. If I thought it wouldn't be missed, I would hoard the food up in my room for the next night, too. Stealing food was trickier when I had to sleep over at a friend's house or a relative's. I became a master at stealing rolls to stuff under my pillow while I helped clean up after dinner. If I could do so without being spotted, I would surreptitiously check out their pantry for anything (bread especially) that could be smuggled out secretly and eaten after everyone was asleep. My grandma's kitchen was tough, because she never had much in the house and hardly ate much herself. But I discovered that her jars of dried pasta made excellent midnight snacks....the egg noodles you could just crunch and eat, but the rotini you had to let soften so you wouldn't hurt a tooth. Nowadays I think about that hungry girl, roaming desperately around the house in the dark, and I feel sad. I thought there was something wrong with me, when all along, my body was trying to tell that it needed more. I was hungry for a reason, and so I went into a grim sort of survival-mode. I think what formed my habits were two things. One, the sociological pressure on a girl not to eat too much, especially as I grew older. I would just save the real eating for later, and pick daintily at my plate in public. Two, the stuff I was eating was so low in nutritional value that I never got full. If only my mother had known to feed me lots of meat and vegetables instead of starches and carbs, but she didn't. It wasn't her fault. That's what they told her to feed us. And that's what I became attached to, my "comfort foods." Throughout my life, this pattern continued to affect me. One of the great joys of having my own dorm room and apartment was being able to buy my own food in quanties that kept me from feeling anxious about running out. I never lived on ramen or tunafish so I could spend my money on beer. Food always came first. But as I grew older, I slowly began to feel frustrated that even with my bingeing, I seldom felt full. I had become a grazer, always feeling the need to fill up, no matter that I was gaining too much weight. I think most overweight people have this frustration...it's not that they eat past full but that they can't seem to stay there. I could eat a whole huge plate of sphaghetti, then two hours later, a big bowl of popcorn. And I'd still be hungry a little while after that. Regular, low-fat high-carb dieting was doomed for me from the start. The large amount of food I was eating didn't satisfy me as it was. Cutting back further was ridiculous. My body kept demanding more. Plus the addictive properties of sugar and chocolate caused cravings that make it even harder. It's been a tough cycle to break. The diet I'm on now, when I stick to it, will actually fill me up, which is why it gives me hope. The mental stuff is taking a lot longer than I thought it would though. Even if my body is happier, the habits and fears I associate with eating go way back, and they take longer to root out. And I've had to struggle with some insecurity about the slowness of it, because people give you less respect for dieting, too. They act like you just have no self-control. You know, it's just as hard not to eat a donut when you're bored as it is not to smoke a cigarette or grab a beer. People are always offering you desserts and candy. Convenience stores dazzle you with the candy racks and cookie aisle, and you suddenly want something you weren't even thinking about before, just because you're there. And eating in a restaurant is still an obstacle course of bread baskets, starchy side dishes, and desserts. I have had to learn to say no in a million different ways, and I still fall off the wagon about once a week. But I'm still trying , because really, this is the only chance I have. Give up, and I'm doomed to obesity. I know it beyond a shadow of a doubt, and I don't want to live that way. Figuring out what other way there is to live is more complicated than I ever thought. But it's the only thing I can do.
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