Acceptance

"Quitters never win, winners never quit, but those who never win AND never quit are idiots." -- Despair.com

I know a lot of women my age who talk about how they can no longer eat whatever they want without gaining weight, as they did when they were younger. I can't remember ever being able to do that. I have struggled with my weight since I was eight or nine years old. My mom comes from a long line of teeny tiny Eastern European Jewish women. I do not take after her. I have the misfortune to physically resemble the women on my dad's side: Midwestern farm women, built along far more utilitarian lines.

I have been through all the stages of grief regarding my weight, although not necessarily in order. Denial: well, that can't really be sustained very long in this society. It always amazes me when people think that if people only KNEW they were overweight they would do something about it. I've got news for those people: we know we're fat. We're reminded of it every day, kids especially. If being told you're fat made people lose weight, there would be no overweight kids.

Then there's Anger. I've had plenty of that. At my lousy genes. At my lack of willpower. At size-zero actresses who create expectations most normal women can never reach. Bargaining: mostly with myself. (You can have that frappacino, but only if you walk to the Starbucks instead of driving.) And, of course, Depression.

But what about Acceptance? Am I permitted to get to a point in my life where I can say, "This is as good as it's gonna get"? To accept that my body and metabolism and willpower vis-a-vis food are what they are?

I used to think that everyone could lose weight if they just tried. I thought this because I had done it. After spending most of my teens extremely overweight, I lost fifty pounds during my last year of high school and first year of college. It was the only time I was anywhere near my "ideal weight" and, looking back now (although I never would have admitted it at the time) I realize that I accomplished that feat through behavior that could only be described as borderline eating-disorder.

The two times I ever easily lost weight in a healthy way were after my two pregnancies. I'll tell you right now, the best weight-loss program in the world is breastfeeding. Twins work best, but a large (over nine pounds) singleton baby will get the job done also. Each time I stopped breastfeeding, though, my weight rose back to about ten pounds heavier than before I was pregnant.

Then I hit 35 and my whole body just went to hell. It no longer mattered whether or not I exercised or what I ate, my body wanted to be a certain size and it turns out that size is about the same as I was at sixteen (go figure). Only now I no longer have the time or energy to fight nature. Now I have three kids and three cats and a house and a job and the metabolism of a woman approaching 40.

What's more, I don't WANT to spend the rest of my life fighting with my body. I do not want to be like my maternal grandmother and still be fretting about my figure when I'm in my nineties. I don't want to be like my mom, who raised three children, has two graduate degrees and a high-level government job, but seems most proud of the fact that (excepting pregnancies) she has maintained the same weight her whole adult life.

One of my teenage daughters has been playing a song over and over recently (I can't really complain, I did the same thing when I was her age). The refrain is: "I want to be perfect, but I'm me." That line has been echoing in my head even on those rare occasions when the song isn't actually playing: my new mantra as I try to get to acceptance.

Stuff I've Been Reading, Part 3

Is it just me, or has fiction gotten weirder? I'm not talking about traditional sorts of science fiction or fantasy fiction. Nor am I talking about the recent popularity of books about ghosts or vampires or other sorts creatures that have a long tradition in literature. What I am talking about here is a recent trend in contemporary fiction towards the just plain weird.

In a previous post I believe I referred to two particular books as "weird," "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime" and "The Lovely Bones." Really, these books are only mildly weird. "Unusual" might be a better term, or "quirky." They have unconventional narrators, certainly. But the events of "Dog in the Nighttime," though seemingly implausible, are not beyond the realm of possibility. And "Lovely Bones" seems, so far, to be a straightforward ghost story.

Also in this category would be Audrey Niffenegger's "The Time Traveler's Wife" and "Her Fearful Symmetry" which are stories about time travel and ghosts, respectively, although fairly odd ones. I enjoyed reading both of Niffenegger's books and yet came away from each feeling vaguely unsatisfied. Perhaps it was because I wasn't wild about either of the protagonists. It's not that I expect (or even want) characters without weaknesses or flaws; I just find implausible the way Niffenegger's supporting characters react to her flawed hero and heroine. It is one thing to tolerate a difficult person. It is quite another thing to be so enamored of a difficult person that you will put up with all sorts of supernatural crap just to be with the him or her.

Getting slightly weirder, we have books like Michael Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay." The book is about comic books and comic book writers and, I guess for that reason, Chabon incorporates some comic-like elements into his mostly real-life story. However, I found these elements to be a distraction. I preferred his equally absurd "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" (although, to be fair, this might be because it is much shorter) up until its conclusion -- a rediculous International Zionist Conspiracy-type plot of the sort that I have no patience for whatsoever.

Moving on to weirdness of the off-the-charts, what-was-that-author-smoking-because-I-need-to-get-me-some-of-that variety are two books that I am almost at a complete loss to explain. The first is Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything is Illuminated." This book intersperses the protagonist's search for the person who saved the life of one of his relatives during the Holocaust, with a surreal history of an Eastern European village. I had a difficult time getting through the surreal passages (I may even have skipped some -- I can't remember and don't think it would have made any difference anyway) and came to the end of the book wondering why the author chose to bury a moving story of human frailty under all that absurdist garbage.

The second nominee for weirdest book I have ever read (I never read "The Metamorphosis" but it would probably be in the same category) is "The Raw Shark Texts" by Steven Hall. I am now going to summarize the plot and you are just going to have to take my word for it: A man wakes up with total amnesia and discovers that he is being hunted by a shark which is made out of words, but is still capable of literally killing him. There were elements of the story I liked and elements I didn't, but there is really not much more I can say about this book -- you just have to sort of go with it.

How I Ended Up Here

"Scratch an incompetent teacher or . . . college professor and half the time you find a displaced first-class automobile mechanic or a goddam stonemason."

-- J.D. Salinger, "Franny and Zooey"

There is a man who works down the hall from me who I barely know, but who I am absolutely sure is in the wrong line of work. For one thing, he is about ten times the introvert I am (if you know me, you know that is really saying something) and yet he is in a profession where he frequently has to interact with other people. Also, I don't think I have ever seen him smile. Ever. If he rarely smiled, that would be one thing, but never? That is an indication of a person who is not happy with where he is.

I sometimes wonder how he came to be where he is. How did he come to chose a line of work that is seemingly so antithetical to his personality? Did he think he would eventually get used to it? Was it what other people thought he should do?

That is why I am in a job I can't stand: because everyone besides me thought it was a good idea. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to blame other people. They were giving me their honest opinions. I just failed to take into account that I am weird and tend not to like things that most other people like -- bananas, for example, or yoga.

I have made this mistake before. When I started college I decided to live on campus, even though I was attending a school near my home, because this was what other people thought I should do. "Get away from home." "Be independent. "Experience the real world." These are the things that everyone said. Never mind that suddenly spending 24 hours a day among a couple dozen total strangers was about the worst situation someone as introverted as me could find herself in. Never mind that dorm living bears absolutely no resemblance to the "real world" whatsoever. The upshot, as I should have known, was that I hated it. It made me physically ill and I moved home after one semester. Although I continued to go to school as a commuter for a while, I quit before actually finishing my degree. I often wonder if I might not have done so had my initial experience with college not been so overwhelmingly negative.

So I really should have known better. My head -- and the heads of many people whose opinions I respect -- was seeing the positive aspects of the job I'm now in: the location, the hours (sort of) and, of course, the money. Meanwhile, my heart was asking, "Is this really what you want to do?" I went with my head and here I am.

Part of the problem is I don't really KNOW what I want to do. I thought that by the time I was approaching forty I would know what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I don't. So I guess I'll stick with this job (for the money -- there's really nothing else I get out of it) until I figure that out.

Stuff I've Been Reading, Part 2

It always bothers me when I don't have something to read. It makes me feel a bit aimless. Even if I don't have time to read at the moment, I like to know that there is something waiting for me when I do have the time. So, if I find that I have finished a book and don't have another one ready, there are a couple things I can do.

The first is just to re-read something I like. This explains why I have read "Pride and Prejudice" a dozen times or why I spent this past summer re-reading the "Harry Potter" series. There is something very appealing about being able to pick up a book and know that I will enjoy it -- not having to worry whether it is complete waste of time. (Maybe other people don't worry about this, but I do. I consider my reading time very precious and get annoyed when I find I have wasted it on something like "The Shipping News".)

But there are, of course times when I feel I have re-read all my old favorites too recently to want to pick them up at the moment. Or maybe I just want something new. In these situations my strategy is to flail wildly around a library or bookstore or, more recently, the internet until I find something that looks good. (Best website for inexpensive books: half.com. It's like going to a used bookstore without having to actually GO to used bookstores, which tend to smell funny and attract very strange people.)

This tactic has produced some mixed results. I just finished "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime" by Mark Haddon which has to be one of the weirder books I have ever read. It is written from the point of view of an autistic fifteen year-old boy and is like nothing I've ever read before. There were a lot of times I wasn't sure whether something in the book was meant to be funny or sad. Probably both, which was what made it so compelling. I read Haddon's "A Spot of Bother" a few years ago. It is also weird and funny and sad.

I just started "The Lovely Bones" by Alice Sebold, which is also a very unusual book in that it is written from the point of view of a dead teenage girl. I will warn you that, very early on, she gives a rather graphic description of her rape and murder, so you should probably avoid the book if you would rather not subject yourself to that.

On the less positive side, I tried to read "The Bourne Identity," which someone had recomended to me. Plotwise, it was okay and there are some very suspenseful passages, but I just couldn't get over the rather contrived and wooden diologue. I ended up giving up on it halfway through, which is something I rarely ever do. I can actually only remember two other books that I found myself literally unable to get through. (That is, books that I chose to read and couldn't get through. I am excluding books that I was assigned to read in school, which I was rarely EVER able to get through.)

One was "Tom Jones", which my sister gave me one year for Christmas and which I fully expected to like, but there was just too little going on in it. When I came to an entire chapter that did nothing but explain what was going to happen in the next chapter, I decided I just couldn't go on.

The second one was "The Plot Against America" (also a gift, this time from my dad) which I tried to get through TWICE, but with no success. Philip Roth seems to have the uncanny knack of taking a unique and potentially interesting plot and making it dull and pompous. If you want to read a book with a World War II alternate history, a much better choice is Len Deighton's "SS GB," which imagines a successful Nazi invasion of England.

By the way, I am completely aware that book titles should not be put in quotation marks, but I have not yet figured out how to underline things on this blogging site. If you know how, please feel free to pass that information along.

Stuff I've Been Reading

The title of this post is a blatant steal from one of my favorite authors, Nick Hornby and therefore it seems fitting that it be about his books. Hornby had a column by that name in a San Francisco literary magazine called "The Believer." Those columns, which were collected in three books, were about the books he had bought, the books he had read, the books he had started and never finished and the books he bought but would likely never get around to reading. It is a situation that reminded me immediately of my dad, so I recomended that he read the first collection, "The Polysyllabic Spree." As a result of this, my dad gave me a copy of the book for Christmas which, if you know him, isn't all that surprising.

These are nice collections for those who, like me, love Hornby's writing style. They are funny, frequently absurd, occasionally touching and give those of us who already buy too many books an excuse to buy more. I finished "The Polysyllabic Spree" and got about half way through "Shakespeare Wrote for Money." It's not the book's fault -- I just got a bit tired of essays and wanted to read fiction for a while. I haven't yet returned to it, or to the last collection, "Housekeeping Vs. the Dirt," but I don't really feel bad about that, seeing as Hornby has already confessed to owning so many books he will never read them all.

I also recently read Hornby's latest novel, "Juliet Naked." I'm sorry to say it was a disapointment. Which is not to say that I'm sorry I read it, just that it ultimately left me feeling unsatisfied. It is largely about people who are obsessed with music and musicians, a subject which he had already visited in a much more satisfying way "High Fidelity."

Although, frankly, the protagonist in "High Fidelity" has always seemed to me like a rough draft for the character of Will in Hornby's absolute best book, "About a Boy." The book, which was made into a movie starring Hugh Grant (one of the best film adaptations of a book ever made, if you ask me) explores the relationship between an aimless narcissist (played by Grant) and the awkward misfit of a teenage boy who to whom he inadvertantly becomes a father figure. The book and film are equally hilarious and sweet and I highly recomend them both.

If you are in to memiors, which I usually am not, Hornby wrote one called "Fever Pitch" about his obsession with the British football (that's soccer to us Americans) team, Arsenal. I was surprised how much I liked this book, to spite some of the minutia about English football teams and players. I think it was because Hornby reminded me of my husband, who has a similar obsession with our local (American) football team. I found myself reading passages aloud to him because they could have been taken directly from his life as easily as Hornby's.

Also worth reading are Hornby's "A Long Way Down" and "How to be Good." Although both have somewhat unsatisfying endings, they are both so bitingly funny and insightful about some aspects of human nature that I didn't really mind.