Naked Lunch *

Earlier this week I took myself out to lunch, by myself.

Yes, I'm quite accustomed to taking myself out for solo meals. What makes this one notable, however, is that I went naked.

In this instance naked means without a book, a computer, my phone for texting or even papers to grade.

Anyone who regularly dines out alone knows that the experience is least uncomfortable and awkward when we take books, or work, or something to distract us from the fact that we are sitting at a table by ourselves, surrounded by people eating in the company of others. It's kind of like when we were little kids--if my face is hidden behind this book, you can't see me! I don't know about you, but often I'll just avoid it altogether and settle for something I can eat in my office.

But y'know, sometimes Indian food is the only thing that will do.

There's an Indian restaurant around the corner from the campus center where I spend a couple of mornings each week, and as I was leaving on that day I realized that my life would be incomplete without some naan and biryani. In my car, there was a book I've been reading, my computer, and a stack of papers to grade. I could take any one of those in with me to work on while I had lunch.

I parked and debated what to take in, and decided on: my wallet. Well, my wallet and my car keys (I don't carry a purse on campus center days, just shove everything into my rolly-bag, which is a whole other post for some day). I went in naked.

And it was so strange.

That I ate more slowly and enjoyed lunch more is probably a given. But more importantly, I listened to people interact with each other in a casual setting, picking out which groups were friends, and which were coworkers, and I noticed how much I liked the wall decorations behind the bar, and as I looked out the window, I noticed some topographical and landscape elements I hadn't seen before.

Initially, I felt desperately uncomfortable--no surprise there, really. But by the time I was finished, something had changed. It was as if I had been--for lack of a better word--rebooted.

Yeah, I think that might be the word that I want. So, I had reached a point, between the interminable winter, the adapting to a strange place and strange job, the learning what it means to be alone and to start from absolute scratch, where I was as disengaged from the world as I have ever been. Disengagement, by the way, is exhausting.

So I was rebooted by my solo lunch. Today, I'm having lunch with a couple of girlfriends, and tomorrow I'm going to a cooking class at the local culinary center because, well, I realized at my naked lunch was that although I may believe that I'm wrapping myself in the relative comfort of anonymity, what I'm really doing is condemning myself to a kind of solitary confinement. Because, guess what? Cucumber raita is way better when we focus on it, rather than whatever it is we're hiding behind.

*with apologies to the late Wm S. Burroughs

Suspicious Activity

Bank of America takes issue with my living in New York. Any time I venture beyond Wegman’s for my shopping needs, they send an alert. An alert, if you didn’t know, is where they call, send an email and cut off access to your debit card because of “suspicious activity.” Granted, I can accept that paying $4 for a crappy skinny vanilla latte at Starbucks is suspicious—even so, I was a bit surprised that buying one at the mall a town over was enough to send BoA over the edge.
I probably would’ve handled it better on a different day.

Because nothing in this world can be as easy as I'd like it to be, I occasionally suffer from anxiety issues. Even better, I don’t always know when or where they’re going to appear—kind of like a crazy uncle or an evil clown, really. But no mind. My son turns 8 next weekend. He’s very excited about this. I, on the other hand, am wondering why my baby went, and just who is this kid with a natural talent for snowboarding.

I digress. Again.

So, I pull into the mall parking lot (by Macy's, in case you were wondering). I have my list, my bag, my phone in my pocket, a jacket. And, apparently, a panic attack waiting to happen, though that sucker stayed in hiding until it had a nice audience to work with.

So I walk through Macy’s, into the mall proper and it hits me. If you’ve never had one, anxiety/panic attacks are absolutely wretched. There’s the breathing issue (you can’t), the shaking issue (you are) and the whole world feels like it has gone solid. Walking takes a supreme act of will because you’re pushing not through air, but something with more substance. Jell-O maybe. Or pond sludge. It always amuses me that people think I’m “a strong woman”—that’s because they’ve never seen into my internal quagmire. Anyway.

There I am, standing in the mall, almost paralyzed. It takes every bit of will I have to keep moving forward rather than retreat at a dead run (I’m imagining how bing tackled by some dread security guard in the middle of Macy’s due to “suspicious behavior” would've helped). But I manage to shuffle forward. And there’s a Starbuck’s, in all of it’s crappy-coffee glory.

The problem with anxieties like mine is that if I give in to them, I’m done for. Retreating means that it wins, and that it will be harder to face down the next time, or the one after that until, eventually, I become the crazy woman who never leaves here apartment. Fortunately, I recognized it for what it was, which made it…well, I’m not going to say easier.

Struggling to breathe and to stay upright, dizzy from the internal push-pull of anxiety I forced myself to walk to the coffee kiosk. Each step was deliberate—what I told myself was that I was going to get a cup of coffee, sit down, do a visual survey, then take it from there. That’s the way this mental game works—a baby-step executable plan. Coffee. Chair. Survey. Those things, I knew I could handle. One at a time.

The universe is fascinating.

As I’m standing in line, I’m looking around, watching people get their coffees, wander in and out of the stores. There’s one woman in particular, dressed in all black, in her 50’s with white-gray hair, glasses. She gets her coffee, notices that I’m looking around, we make eye contact. She finishes doing whatever it is that she’s doing to her coffee walks toward me, leans over and says “we’ve all become coffee snobs.” We laugh for a second, she continues on and I get my crappy skinny vanilla latte.

Amazing how random words from (perhaps not so) random strangers can give us the momentum to move forward in moments where we’re not sure it’s possible. I sat, I surveyed, I was finally ready to buy presents for my snowboarding dude.

And then the phone in my pocket buzzed with a message from the Bank of America asking me to please call and verify that I had just spent $4 on a crappy skinny vanilla latte in some weird town in Upstate New York.

9 Things, a List

A list of 9 things I've considered writing about:


*Ghost Cat
*How to Piss Off a Customs Agent
*Tim Horton's v. Tim Horton's (or: why the heck is their coffee better in Canada, and why don't American outlets sell dutchies?)
*The Great Bologna Challenge
*Flat Tires, Clogged Drains and a Dozen Other Things I Forgot That I Know How to Fix
*Call Me Bonnie
*Metaphoric Land Mines and How to Find Them
*Old Lady Walking Shoes
*Tales From the Laundromat

Missing

Growing up, I lived in a lot of strange and exotic places—Alabama, Missouri, Arizona. I can feel your envy from this side of the screen. Not for any reason so exotic as being an Army brat or having free-spirited parents but because my mother, for a short while, was married to a guy who worked as the foreman on an underground cable crew. This was back in the late 70’s/early 80’s. Back before anyone outside of major urban areas had cable. If you lived in truly rural places like we did, you were lucky to get one fuzzy TV station if you turned the rabbit ears just right and it wasn’t raining too hard outside. Sad but true: I was 20 before I finally saw “Mork and Mindy” and trust me, it did not withstand the test of time.

One of the things I learned, between frequent moves and a mother who made misanthropy an art form more tangled than macramé, was not to get attached. Move in, make casual friendships with people then, when you’re gone, you’re gone. Unfortunately, that did withstand the test of time. I’m an excellent casual friend. Heck, I can even be a pretty good serious friend. What I struggle with is being a long-term friend. That “long-term” thing implies that the relationship remains through moves, downturns, upticks and miscellaneous outside forces. It implies that, when the people you’ve come to love and care about aren’t around, you miss them. I have managed to avoid that particular trap.

Or, at least, I had. My husband and son notwithstanding (I keep them with me whether I’m conscious of them or not), I float along occasionally thinking about people I know and love back in Michigan and elsewhere, experiencing a sort of vacant-feeling in my midsection that I ignore because it is uncomfortable to think about or even acknowledge.

It is curious how a single comment in a single moment can somehow change everything. I was at work the other day, my second day back in NY, and one of my colleagues stopped by—I suppose I should call him a friend now—and we were chatting about things. Families, students, books. And he said, at one point, “I’m glad you’re back—I missed you.”

How simple.

What made the words profound were how they were said—matter-of-factly, with no particular inflection or exuberance. I’ll confess now that I often, and to my own detriment, take overly-enthusiastic expressions of affection with a grain of salt. It is a common trait among women to be enthusiastic and social even when we don’t really mean what we’re effusing about (and for those among my friends who are naturally effusive and enthusiastic, I’m not calling you disingenuous, I’m saying that I am cynical), so it was the simplicity that took me by surprise.

To be sure, I have some 20-year friendships, and some younger ones that are important to me, but those are very much the exceptions. Mostly I’m quite talented at keeping people out, at not missing them.

Missing implies attachment. Later, as I was thinking it through, I realized how carefully I had constructed a life in which I wouldn’t miss people—I learned not to get attached because attachment has the possibility to hurt. That weird emptiness in my midsection can remain unnamed and ignored so long as I remain detached.

So, maybe “missing” is as simple as carrying memories with us as sustenance until we’re together again. And maybe, too, it is leaving parts of ourselves with others; taking the leap of faith that allows us to hand over those pieces of ourselves and believe that they will return to us unharmed. More frightening still, perhaps it means that we carry nebulous bits of those we call our friends, charged with keeping them safe and intact until some unknown future time when we put them back together again.

Unless, of course, we’re talking about Mork and Mindy. They’re probably best left to the annals of mostly-forgotten history.

Winter Break

These last four months have disappeared with the kind of fluidity that is most often reserved for birthdays parties, vacations and the first years of a child’s life. They have dissolved into one another with an ease and readiness that, in retrospect, leave me stunned.

They have been 4 very good months, overall. As with any like adventure, there have been moments grace and moments of terror, but mostly there have been moments of calm. It has been the kind of calm that hits in the hurricane’s eye: ephemeral and a bit noisy around the edges, but a calm nonetheless.

I might be lying about that calm thing.

These past 4 months have been chaos. The chaos of living in a strange place, alone for the first time in years and having to figure out what to do when a tire goes flat, the oil needs changing or the storm window won’t close all the way; the chaos of a new job with new faces, vague expectations, hidden agendas and if you’ve never worked in academia know this: we could teach the Beltway a thing or two about playing politics; and the chaos of meeting and befriending new and exotic people (of course they’re exotic—they’re New Yorkers!). The learning curve has been steep; I’ve fallen on my tail-end more than once and stepped in more piles of stinking goo than I care to admit. I’ve offended a few people, hurt a couple of others, and am still trying to figure out what another one or two are up to. I’ve made bad decisions, followed faulty lines of inquiry and forgotten to breathe more than once.

But I’ve also met people I genuinely like, have a job that I love, and feel that sense of home, rightness and belonging in this place. Not bad for a first semester of chaos.

So, as I’m cleaning out my apartment refrigerator this evening, packing up my laundry and presents, cleaning out the bathtub and running the vacuum in preparation for long winter break, I’m going to pretend that when January 20 comes and I’m back in residence, I will remember the steps to this dance that I’m still learning. Better yet, I’ll bring a clean Mason jar to capture some of the vapor that is this time—but I’ll be careful not to poke holes in the lid even though time, like fireflies, sometimes needs some breathing room.

Startbox, my Startbox

When I decided last summer that I was moving here, I had moments of panic when I couldn’t imagine where I was going to come up with the necessary household goods to stock two places of residence. You know, stuff like pots, pans, spatulas.

The nice guy I married suggested a trip to Ikea, homeland of cheap assemble-it-yourself furniture and meatballs. "At Ikea," he told me, "they have boxes for things like this." A few mouse clicks later, I found them: Startboxes.

Startboxes are a marvel of modern engineering. In a 12 x 21 box, I found pots, pans, baking dishes, mixing bowls, storage containers, trivets and an assortment of tools. The pieces fit together like a 3-dimensional puzzle—you know the kind. Sometimes they have money tucked into the middle, sometimes a bottle of wine, and in order to get to the treasure, you have to take the puzzle apart.

There were spatulas, a peeler, metric measuring cups, a garlic press, kitchen shears (among other things) and my favorite of all: a groggy.

Yes, a groggy. It said so right on the package. Groggy.

A groggy, in case you’re wondering, is a corkscrew. A fairly standard restaurant-style corkscrew at that.

By now, 4 months into my apartment, I’ve used the garlic press and the spatulas, the peeler and the can opener. I’ve even purchased and used English measuring cups. But my groggy sits in my drawer, sadly unused. I should go buy a bottle of NYS wine so that I can finally use the poor thing. I think about it regularly, but never do it because here in Wine Country, you have to actually go to a wine store to buy it. Liquor, also, comes from the wine store, though you can pick up a 6-pack of Yuengling just about anywhere. Except for a wine store, of course. And I haven’t yet made it into a wine store.

But of course there’s more to the story than that—there always is.

I believe, as much as I believe in anything, that we are, ultimately, the product of our choices. We make good choices, we make bad ones. How we react to and clean up after those bad ones is also indicative of who we are not just in how we present ourselves externally, but of who we believe ourselves to be internally. Granted, what we do, how we do it, is colored by experience and belief but in the end, who we are is defined by those choices.

I come from a family with well-documented, addictive personalities. Thanks to science, we are beginning to understand and recognize that there are bits of genetic code that help to make those addictions more, well, addicting. So on the one hand, I am a product of those things that were done by others. But it is the other hand, that notion of choice, that drives my decision to leave the groggy in the drawer.

What I know, because of my genetic coding and because of behaviors I have seen modeled, is that the bottle of wine will very easily lead to the bottle of scotch, and the bottle of scotch, well, it’s not something I need to have in my solo apartment. So I choose, each time I drive past the wine store and think about veering into the parking lot, to look out the opposite window at the empty lot across the street from the store.

So my groggy waits.

Meanwhile, the box, my empty Startbox, is in the closet because eventually I know that I’ll be packing up the pots, the pans, the garlic press, and taking them to wherever I go next, be it a house here in upstate New York or somewhere else. I will try to fit the pots, the pans, the garlic press back into those confines though I know that, like other genies from other bottles, they’ll never go in exactly the same they were in the beginning.

Dinner Time

I'll be the first one to admit that I'm not a foodie. My categories of reacting to food are pretty simple: what the hell was that?; I like it; and Oh My God I Think the Earth Just Moved. What particular ingredients or techniques lead to these reactions, I cannot say. I suppose this makes me gourmand rather than gourmet. I can live with that.

Upstate New York has a strong "go local" ethos. We grow our own produce, manage our own dairies, produce our own meat, are home to Wegman's, the mecca of food stores and you can't walk down the street without tripping over countless dozens of "Made in the Finger Lakes" labels. We like local.

Despite this availability of good, locally-grown food what's been challenging for me is feeding myself. Like most of the women in America, I spend at least half of my life on a diet. Unlike most of them, I actually could stand to lose about 40 pounds. American women have terrible relationships with food, always defining our days by whether we were dietarily "good" or "bad." Its a codependancy of the worst kind.

When I moved here, I thought it would be a good time and place to focus on those pounds, show them who's in charge and buy some new pants. It would, I reasoned, be easier to "be good" if I didn't have to worry about feeding my boys.

Hah.

Since I live alone, it seemed expedient if not in fact prudent to build my food lifestyle around the mass availability of Lean Cuisine and Healthy Choice entrees. Quick, easy, calorically controlled. What could be bad about this?

Boxed entrees, for those who are unaware, are remarkably homogeneous. The picture might show macaroni and cheese or Asian potstickers, but in the final analysis, it all tastes like...calorically controlled, microwave-ready food out of a box.

The hell of it is, after weeks of steady box-diet that included the occasional donut or cheeseburger when I couldn't stand it for another minute, I gained 10 pounds.

Granted, the basic weight-loss formula is calories in should be less than calories out. I get a lot of exercise. I do those things "they" tell you to do: park far away, take the stairs, go for walks and bike rides. The plain truth is that I've consistently gotten more exercise these past three months than at any other time in my life, all while enjoying my steady diet of boxes.

I decided, recently, to get serious about it. I planned, portioned and counted everything for two weeks. I had the numbers down to the smallest calorie count that is reasonable for my body and made myself run up and down the stairs at work for no good reason other than to burn those calories. Heck, I even used fat free half 'n' half in my coffee which, if you know me at all, you know is a real sacrifice on my part.

At the end of those two weeks, I stepped on the scale and...nothing. The needle didn't budge. To say I was annoyed would be a gross understatement.

What I decided, after a lot of reflection, was to get rid of the damned boxes. Instead, I would experiment with eating real food. I created some ground rules for this experiement: no boxes, bags or cans. The exceptions were dairy and bread/pasta because I don't own a cow, and while I love baking bread it isn't feasable for me right now. This meant I had to give up the safety-net of my boxes, throw out the carefully-controlled 100-calorie snack packs, not drink diet cola (I did cheat twice on this one), pitch the boxes of breakfast cereal and really pay attention to what I was doing in my tiny kitchen. Beyond those rules, I could have anything I wanted so long as I made it myself. Cookies? Sure--go bake some. Garlic toast with that pasta? Absolutely: melt some butter and mince a clove of garlic.

For the past week, I've cooked everything I've consumed (with the exception of a couple of lunches when I opted for a salad from the cafeteria). Risotto with shrimp, asparagus and bacon. Chicken and cous cous. A to-die-for pecan coffee cake. There were some culinary earth-moving moments in there, though I can't tell you why.

This morning, with a sinking stomach, I headed for the scale while mentally reviewing everything I had eaten this week. Real butter. Cheese. Chocolate chip shortbread.

Before I stepped on the dreaded thing, I thought about how I'd been feeling this week, both mentally and physically, and the answer was: better. I feel unquantifiably clearer, stronger and more energetic. This realization was fogged somewhat by the knowledge that I'd been eating real butter, but no matter. The damage had been done and I could always go back to the boxes next week if this one had proved disastrous.

With my eyes squinched half-closed, I approached that square white beast in my bathroom. I shuffled onto it, holding my breath, mentally preparing myself for a return to portion-controlled swedish meatballs and rice cakes with endless gallons of diet pop.

In a while, I'm going to go and do laundry. On the way home, I will stop at the market to stock up for next week. Ratatouille sounds good. Ratatouille with some garlic bread. Maybe I'll go crazy and bake a nice batch of maple scones for next week. And I have this jar of Finger-Lakes made wet walnuts (which is acceptable because the entire ingredient list is: walnuts, NY maple syrup) that are just begging to be baked in a crust with a nice wedge of gooey cheese.