Today I got two emails from Amazon in the States, alerting me of refunds they are issuing to me.  One is for $4.31, one is for $9.17.

I haven’t asked for any refunds.  I never gave back any books.  I haven’t bought anything at those prices.  The order the emails cite as the relevant one is for a couple of books which, at this very moment, are sitting on my window sill.

So… what would you do?

Some issues that I’ll be thinking about as I do my Discretionary Eating Challenge:

1. Entitlement. Will I be really bothered if I’m out, get hungry, and need to wait until I get home to eat (assuming I didn’t pack a snack)?  Because of course it’s not a big deal to wait - it’s not like I’m starving or anything.  There are absolutely no long term consequences of waiting an hour or something to eat.  But I suspect I won’t have much patience for waiting, which has little to do with true need and much to do with entitlement.  I predict I will think: I shouldn’t have to wait.  And of course, there really is no need to wait - I can afford to buy a snack when I’m out.

But the real question is: am I truly buying a snack because I can and it’s no big deal, or because I lack the patience and impulse control to just wait?  When entitlement becomes inability to self regulate, you have a problem.  If I find myself really, really irritated at waiting, that would be very telling.

2. Money. How much money will I save if I’m not eating at Subway three times a week?  Okay, that’s easy to calculate, but what is less easy is all the money I thoughtlessly throw away on bottles of pop, bags of pretzels, sandwiches or sushi when I’m out, and so on.  I don’t often plan dinners out - I eat out because I’m busy and happen to be hungry when I’m away from home.  It’s more a product of laziness than anything else.  I tend to think eating out is enjoyable and sociable and therefore has intrinsic value.  But in real life I usually eat out alone, spontaneously, due to the need to immediately gratify my needs (hunger).  So in my case, I think it will be instructive to see what happens when I don’t eat out any more.  Obviously I will save money, but this will relate to Point 1 too.

3. Spurious convenience.  I predict I won’t really miss processed foods.  I don’t eat much of these anyway (though I do like those packages of fake soy meat, which I call smeat).  I hope that what will happen is I stop buying this stuff, don’t miss it at all, and thereby replace chemicalled food with whole foods.  Processed foods tend to be more expensive, which is a waste, and full of strange and mysterious chemicals.  I’m not one to get all hysterical about chemicals - for instance, I never hesitate to take medication if I feel a symptom that can be helped with some.  So maybe it’s hypocritcal or irrational, but I somehow figure it’s better to avoid the heavily chemically processed foods whenever possible.

4. Environmental waste. This relates to Point 3 because processed foods tend to come with a lot of packaging, which  is generally plastic.  So if I buy less of these things, I will generate less personal waste.  I’m also thinking of cutting way back on plastic bag usage.  I have a little rolling cart I take to the grocery store and there’s no reason I couldn’t just pack my purchases into it without bags.

5. Pop and osteoporosis. I don’t drink tea or coffee, so giving up stimulants really only means giving up Coke Zero.  This challenge is the perfect excuse to finally do this because I’ve been meaning to do so for a long time, because pop is a contributor to osteoporosis.  Here is the blog-appropriate level of science to explain why:  The carbon dioxide in pop (which is what makes it fizz) mixes with the water to form carbonic acid (H2CO3).  The body has to neutralize the acid, and to do so, uses buffer systems.  One of these is to take calcium out of your bones.  That’s bad.  I anticipate this being hard to give up because I do love me some pop, but I’m thinking I’ll work on finding a healthy replacement, such as waters flavoured with fruits.

6. Food pleasures. I’m also hoping that I will deepen my already pretty happy relationship with food.  I really enjoy cooking and take a lot of satisfaction in making healthy meals for myself and Husband.  Every week I plan my grocery shopping and, I guess this sounds kind of lame, but I have a grand old time flipping through my cook books to plan the meals I’ll make.  This challenge will focus me in on these domestic pleasures, and I hope I come out the other side liking it even more.  Of course, I could just come to resent the extra work and hassle and things could get worse!  So I’ll just have to see what happens.

I must say, I’m quite intrigued to do this little food values experiment.  One month isn’t a long time, but I figure I’ll learn some things about myself.  Two more days until I begin!

Husband thinks I’m ridiculous for deciding to do the discretionary eating challenge for August.  We had this conversation in the bathroom, where I was soaking in the tub and he was eating dinner.  I don’t think anyone who eats in the bathroom is in any position to judge what I do, but that’s another issue.  I was telling him about it and the discussions that had gone on around it - sustainability, ecology, nutrition, mindfulness, and so on.  And he pretty much poo-pooed it.  In part because we already live pretty close to the goals (pop excepted), so in that sense it won’t be much of a challenge, and in part because something very important is about to happen:

Football season is starting.

Holy cats!  I sat up in the tub with alarm!

We don’t have TV any more.  This means we have to go out to watch a game, and the only place “out” where games exist is pubs.  Pubs don’t like it when you show up and don’t order food and drink.  But I can’t miss games!  What’s the point of having time off school if I can’t waste it watching football?  My two football instructors are potentials here, since both have enormous TV’s and cable - though Esan has a proper job and a new bride, which probably makes Monday night football at his house a no-go.  Z is the other choice, but he doesn’t like to let me come over lest I be shocked at his bachelorly housekeeping standards.  I keep telling him about my colony of pink mold in the bathroom but it doesn’t change his mind.

Still, it’s only one month.  This is not a forever change - surely at some point I will go back to restaurants.  (Though as I have said, it is a disturbing trend that whenever we’ve eaten at a vegetarian restaurant the food is inferior to that which I make at home.  This was never a problem when I ate meat.  Just sayin’.)

Discretionary eating is the amount of an individual’s food consumption that is eaten after basic caloric and nutritional needs have been met.

I found this on this blog.  I think I’m going to join in for the month of August.  Think of this as Lent, wherein the goal is the reduction or elimination of discretionary eating for one month.

The terms of the challenge are to select from a list of eating behaviours that are wasteful or deficient in one way or another:

• restaurants (money)
• refined foods (nutrition)
• sugar/sweets (processed and refined are bad when eaten as more than just an occasional treat, but of course fruit is totally fine)
• seconds only when hungry (overeating)
• stimulants (meet no nutritional needs)
• vegan (healthiest)

The challenge asks that you commit to either a 50% reduction of your current use/intake of these items, or to a full 100%.  You pick which ones you want to work on, and of course are invited to go the whole enchilada and do them all.  And since I have a long and proud tradition of making eating as complicated and restrictive as possible, I think I’m going to commit to one month of 100% of all of the above.

Holy shit.  I am already freaking out about Coke Zero.

And already thinking of some exceptions that need to be pre-agreed upon: I’m attending a wedding reception next weekend and there will be drinking.  Which I will participate in.  Also, I’ll be doing some travelling in August and it’s just stupid to make hard and fast rules about where you’ll eat when you’re going into the boonies.  Shit, I might end up trapping and eating little mammals, you know?  Never say never and all that.  So okay, let’s call it a 90% challenge.

But seriously.  I’m really intrigued at this idea of just getting back to the basics: no crap food, no chemically laden mystery ingredients, no wasting cash on food I can make at home for a fraction of the price, restricting treats to their proper place: special occasional indulgences, not daily habits.  Eating to satiety and no farther.  Just eating actual food as it actually comes out of the ground, prepared economically.

I still feel entitled to have delicious and varied foods at every meal, so in this sense the challenge does not ask for deprivation as such.   At this point the food I make at home is almost always better than what we get when we go out.  But should I feel entitled to have cupcakes (or other junk foods) at my fingertips, at any time of any day?  Should I view it as a deprivation to eat what I can make for myself at home (particularly when I can go to Safeway and pick any food I want)?  I imagine I’ll discover some interesting previously-unknown assumptions about what I unconsciously think I should or shouldn’t have, should or shouldn’t be required to tolerate, during this process.

So I have three days to guzzle as much pop as I can handle before this experiment begins…!

Here is my stock pot, in amongst the other pots.  Notice that he towers over my former Biggest Pot (top left corner), which now looks like a mewling pipsqueak in comparison.  Life’s tough, Dispaced Pot!  Welcome to being second best!

Yesterday the stock pot helped me produce a scandalous amount of spaghetti sauce.  It was so scandalously large that I ran out of tupperwares in which to freeze it, and had to go through some rather complicated manouvers with ziploc bags supporting one another in pots to fill.  But!  Out of all that effort (and it wasn’t really that much effort, spag is easy), I came away with about ten meals for two.  I freeze them in the right amount for Husband and I to use one package to make our dinner.  Well, usually that’s the case - last night I ran out of ziplocs too so there was probably enough spag for twelve dinners but I distributed the last four servings of sauce amongst the existing containers.

I also made some great corn chili last night, but I forgot to take a picture and we ate it.  But I tell you it was delicious.  The recipe called for cream, so I created a clever work around.  Oh I am so proud of this!  I too a block of very soft tofu and processed it in my blender until it was a liquid, about the consistency of warm yogurt.  This made a perfect substitution for cream because it adds body and protein and fat and all those things that make cream-additions so good, but of course there was no cream.  The only down side is that the tofu still had a touch of that beany taste that it has (this is what comes of being made from soybeans! Hmph!), but fortunately my chili was very bold and flavourful and completely took over the taste of the tofu.

Kiss my grits, inferior pots!

I’ve been thinking in the last two days quite a bit about negativity, mine, and how I’m not liking it very much.  I see it here a lot, because somehow writing blog posts distills all of my negative feelings into these posts that, after I write them, I am sometimes surprised at how angry I sound.  I don’t feel like an angry person.  But the proof is right here - post after post.

Sometimes I feel more a slave to the post than the post a slave to my reality - I think I’ve felt an expectation to be (or at least try to be) witty, and somehow I got the idea that witty is all about sarcasm and snark.  I still enjoy reading other people’s snark… but writing my own is beginning to exact a toll.  You know what they say about lying down with dogs and waking up with fleas.  This blog is kind of a downer.

So, I don’t know that I want to keep going in this vein.  It’s kind of a shame, because let’s face it, vitriol is much more entertaining than virtue.  But let’s also face it, I have a tiny readership, and even if I alienate every one of you, that doesn’t represent much of a loss (In numbers, people… your value is beyond measure and not to be trifled with.).

This is the thing: my life has a lot that is good in it.  More than good, actually, and also more than a lot.  I wonder what would happen if I stopped spending so much time each day really focusing in on what bothers me (which is what blog writing almost always is for me), and spent that time instead on what makes me happy, or makes others happy.  It’s not like irritation is a precious resource which must be carefully stewarded lest world stores of it become depleted.

It’s getting on to bed time and I am always most thoughtful at this time, and most serious, so maybe I’ll be back to feeling cheerfully ranty when I get up tomorrow morning… but I don’t know, maybe I really won’t.

And then I have to figure out what to do here.  Anybody got any ideas?

Things have been awfully intense around here lately, what with homelessness and my ongoing saga of nerve problems.  Can we take a break?  God knows I need one.

Today I went and got a wedding gift for some friends of ours who are recently married.  There’s not much point in keeping the gift secret because the couple can check out the status of their registry online at any time, so I’m going to go ahead and say (SPOILER) I got them some sets of their dishes.  Also, the Bay was having a sale on pots so I bough myself something I’ve wanted for my entire adult life: a proper stock pot.

It’s a beast.  It is so big that I could curl up and take a nap in it.  My other pots cower in fear from this stock pot.  In fact, I cower a little.  This pot means business.  And I currently have nowhere to store it so it lives on the stove, from which perch it stares me down.  What do you do with an aggressive pot?  Why, you make an enormous volume of spaghetti sauce in it, of course!

I’ll also be making a chickpea salad, lentil and cauliflower soup, corn and roasted red pepper stew, and a tomato, potato and pepper tagine.

I tame the pot!

Here is the short version of the appointment: I am in perfect health and there is no diagnosis (which I expected).  There is no treatment, not even for symptom management (which I did not).

Here is the short version of the rest of my day: lots of blubbering and despair.

The happy ending is that I did consult a different doctor, and he says there are indeed a few things to try, which he figures my GP just wouldn’t have known about.

It was a bad appointment.  I was made to wait an hour past my time to get in, and when I did, the whole meeting took less than five minutes.  After telling me there are no treatments at all, which let me tell you, was incredibly awful and hopelessness-inducing, she then went on to give me the speech about how if she doesn’t know the cause of the problem, it can’t be treated, and medical science doesn’t know everything.  This is irritating because a) I already know the latter part, duh, and b) the first clause isn’t even true.  Medicine treats things which have an unknown etiology all the time.  Schizophrenia and depression come to mind as a couple examples but there are scads more.  The field of medicine advances largely through clinical work, where doctors just try stuff out and see if it works, not through research, where a bunch of scientists come up with something and then gift it to the front line docs.  This is not a first-principles-first sort of process - quite the opposite.  Induction, not deduction.  Her comment was largely designed to put me off and shut me up.  How annoying.

Anyway, at this point I will admit to doing something totally embarrassing, which was to start to cry in the office.  Honestly, this whole process has just been going on for so long and has taken on epic proportions in my life and to be told by my doctor that nothing can be done was devastating.  In addition to feeling crushed and scared I was feeling totally embarrassed, and all I managed to blubber out was an apology, then managed to choke out that the whole thing was just rather frightening.  At which point she prescribed me some sedatives to take at the next attack, and gave me a little talk about how we’d work on a solution together.

We need to unpack this a little so you can understand why this was intensely infuriating.  One, I have never once said anything about anxiety in relation to these attacks.  I don’t get anxious when I have them, I get pain.  Pain is uncomfortable and it can be scary but I’m not exactly hyperventilating over here.  So she’s prescribing not based on my presenting problems, and in fact she didn’t ask me about anxiety - what was going on there is she thinks my problem might be some sort of somatizing issue, and doping me up might resolve it.  This played right into my fear of that very thing, which okay, might be legitimate, but also managed to be deeply invalidating and insulting at the same time.  I just felt like she didn’t get it at all, didn’t get how terrible it is, how it entirely cripples and shuts down my life.  You can’t just say there’s no hope and send me away in under five minutes.

And what is this talk of finding a solution together?  Did she not just tell me, in no uncertain terms and repeated several times, that there are no treatments?  Which the fuck is it, there is no symptom relief or we’re working on a solution together?  What kind of solution, exactly, did she have in mind?  Either she was just spouting platitudes, which is retarded, or again she figures it’s emotional in origin.  The fact that I am at that very moment crying into my lap does nothing to help my case for saying it’s not a hysterical problem.  This appointment is the culmination of a year of uncertainty, fear, testing, and worry - after all that, to hear there is no hope, I imagine many people would break down.  This doesn’t mean I’m some sort of wandering womb hysteric.  And if she has some grand design to track my stress or emotional wellness or whatever, she is doing a shitty job of approaching it, because she didn’t ask me about any of those things.

Another possibility is it just kind of freaked her out that I fell apart, and she was trying to be reassuring.  Lesson one in therapy school is to not give false reassurance because people smell it a mile away and it tends to infuriate them.  Someone should give my doctor the head’s up.

Anyway, at this point, three minutes after her arrival, it was clear we had nothing more to talk about, so I left.  I was too choked up to really say much, I just accepted the script for sedatives, and collected my things and left.  On the way out, she says, brightly: “Have a nice weekend!”

I could have murdered her.  Kiss my ass, that’s what kind of fucking weekend I’m going to have.

Okay.  The good news is I now have rock solid proof that my brain and spine and nerve function is absolutely top notch, no problems at all.  I have written here several times “it’s not like I have a tumour” and that is designed to make it look like I’m not worried, most importantly to myself, but the truth is I have been really scared that there’s something growing up there.  There isn’t.  I am intensely, intensely relieved.

I also know that my GP is not the final word on treatment.  Hence my consultation with someone different.  And lo, there is hope.  Also intensely relieving.  But I didn’t know that when I got out of the appointment - at that time I was just freaking out, calling my husband and speaking in monosyllables because, I don’t know about you, but I can’t talk and cry at the same time.  It was actually pretty pathetic.  I’m embarrassed at how poorly I handled the whole thing - emotional breakdown, taking the patronizing doctor talk without challenge, just being a spaz.  Ugh.

Anyway, that’s all done with now.  Today I plan to finish my novel and try to just unwind a bit, you know?  Yesterday was an emotional wringer.  I’m wrung out.

I need a beer.

A friend of mine just got a job in the middle of freakin’ nowhere, central BC.  For those of you who are not British Columbians, let me say the village she’s going to is serious boonie land.  I used Google satellite to check out the town and all I saw was dirt roads and trees and water and one building that might be the school, but also might be an especially well appointed fur trading post.

The place she’s going is about 200 kilometres west of Williams Lake, which is more or less in line with BC’s dent.  (My provice is all jiggly-wiggly on the bottom east side, then suddenly goes up at a 90.  I call this the dent.)  Everyone in Canada lives within spitting distance of the border with the US, because everything north of this is so ungodly cold no one with any sense lives up there.  Except my friend, soon.  So what this all means is she’s moving to a tiny village where you can get mail, but need to drive three hours for groceries.  I think this is so fucking cool I can’t even describe it.

When we were teens, my friend lived in the most rural, natural part of our little farming town.  Her family had a pool so I was basically an additional child (I loves me some swimming), but every now and then an Animal would show up.  Her neighbourhood had all kinds of wild things, including bears.  Animals that are larger than me and not tame scare the crap out of me.  One time I made my long-suffering friend walk me to my car out of fear of assault by A Bear.  (In hindsight, I’m not really sure what level of protection an adolescent girl could have provided, but there you go: I had no brains at that age.)

Anyway, there are sure to be all kinds of wild Canadian animals up there - moose, bears, elk, deer, mountain goats, everything.  I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to see Animals!  I also love a road trip, and a visit, so I have voluteered to help my friend make her move up north.  Not that I’ll actually be helping with anything remotely related to moving - the Sprite Car cannot accomodate so much as a single box.  What cargo space it has will be more than filled with my toiletry bag.  But I’m good for moral support and obscene jokes.

In three weeks, we’ll make the five hour drive to Nowheresville to get my friend settled in her teacherage and spot wild animals.  I’m bringing my camera but I’m not getting out of the car.

This morning I finished creating the powerpoint for the presentation I have to give this coming week.  I don’t like presentations - I get nervous and talk too fast and tend to repeat myself because my brain shorts out and I can’t access fresh material.  To get around this I write really detailed notes, which I more or less just read, but I don’t like this either because it sounds canned and I feel unnatural about it and wish I was just talkin’.

In other news, my chair is too hard, too soft, and just right.  All at once.

I also started work on a take home final exam, which THANK GOD it means the classes are coming to an end.  Christ, it feels like forever.  To you too, assuming anyone who was reading here three months ago is still around.  I read a lot of blogs and the sense I get is that there is a very good reason I have a small readership, ie, I can’t decide if I’m lecturing or sharing at the sleepover or just being a smartass and who the hell likes an inconsistent blog? I have no niche.

Anyway, don’t you hate take home exams?  What you gain in avoidance of exam-panic is more than made up for by the knowledge that you really have no excuse to get less than perfect answers because, hello, all the books and resources are right at your fingertips and there is no time crunch.  Plus, I don’t get exam anxiety.

Compounding this state of affairs is the fact that so far I have learned nothing in class… and out of sulky defiance and a general lack of giving a fuck I have done no reading or learning on my own.  But this exam seems to think I should know a thing or two, so all of a sudden I have to do a load of reading and working which should have been spread out over the last many weeks.  I believe this is what they are talking about when they say the chickens come home to roost.  I shake my fist at you, chickens!

(Whine: how unfair is it that I get no useful instruction and am suddenly called upon to seriously know things? End whine.)

But anyway, if I can get this exam and my final paper done early, I’ll actually get a good length holiday before practicum starts in September.  I’d like to get everything done in the next week and a half and that would be sweet.  Then I could just move the fridge and some novels into the bathroom and live in tub reading for three weeks.