palace of winds

I had a nasty bout of food poisoning in Bali; I ate very little for four days. I also did a mess of hiking and swimming over there, and ended up coming home about 7 pounds lighter. At work my bosses commented that I’d lost weight, followed immediately by a discussion about how you can mention when someone’s lost weight but it’s not okay to point out when someone’s gained. It was uncomfortable; I felt like they were saying So we noticed you’d gotten fatter! Thank you, yes, I feel enormous, let’s please stand around my desk discussing it for a while. My self-esteem has not felt battered enough lately.

I work pretty hard to try to unhook my sense of self-worth from how I feel about my body. It’s a complicated thing, which — I really don’t need to go into. Suffice to say I have spent the last many years bullying myself into feeling good about myself, and most of the time it works well. Fake it ’til you make it and all.

My grandfather died almost 11 years ago now. Tonight I unearthed the journal I kept at that time. Parts of it made me cringe but parts of it I find as beautiful as the day I pasted and stitched them in. It is full of pressed flowers, bits of feather, shards of cds, smudges of make-up, cloth, ribbon, magazine clippings. It also has the things I wrote when he died and in the months that followed as I came unravelled. I was already a desperately lost, lonely person at that time, and something about losing him broke loose something inside me that took a long, long time to mend.

My grandma died over a year ago now. I was much closer to her, and I still can’t think about the reality of it without feeling devastated. Part of me is still numb. But I didn’t lose myself the way I had a decade prior. Life didn’t come all apart.

I don’t really know where I’m going with all this. Just — a reflection, I guess, that I am a stronger person than I was. That I know who I am, and I can trust that, trust in myself. I’ve been feeling restless lately, like something is brewing just beyond the horizon. A sea change. I hope it’s a good one.

Regardless, I am ready for it. I am ready for anything.

The last thing I wrote in that journal: In defiance of loss, I love.

Sometimes you have a bad day. It’s not one thing in particular — a lot of little things maybe, or some little things and some not-as-little things, just all the dumb stressful stuff pressing in, everything moving out of step, creeping up, so that you don’t even really realize until you get home what a shitty day you just had. So you want to take it easy, chill a little, only that turns out to be exactly the wrong thing; you just get all wound up in your head, walking in circles, dwelling.

It’s the kind of day where the filing doesn’t come together, the dust rag leaves behind lint, the radio’s all commercials. Everyone’s busy, no one to help you out of your head, reassure you you’re not useless. No ice cream in the fridge, not a sliver of chocolate in sight, bubble bath’s not going to cut it.

What to do? Tonight, turns out the best medicine is reorganizing the t-shirt drawer. Everything else feels like a ruin, coming apart at the seams, but that drawer is as close to perfect as matters. So, I guess this is a shout out to anyone else on their no good day, and a reminder to myself next time I need it: try starting with the t-shirt drawer.

I love National Camera. I went there last night with my mom and sister for a photo class. We arrived a little early so I could look at camera bags — I’ve had one on my 2010 Spring Binge Shopping list for a while. An adorable sales guy gave me some very sound advice about which bags were cute and which were tragic (my words, not his; I wish I could remember exactly how he delicately described the fanny packs, though, because it was hilarious). I ended up spending a ridiculous amount of money on a Crumpler bag that I adore. It is excellent, and definitely $35 more cute than the Lowepro. Plus it’s called the 5 Million Dollar Home. (I was going to link to a picture of it, but none of them do it justice. Maybe I’ll take one later. And maybe I’ll write a novel! And post those Peru pictures!) (The bag, if you were wondering, did not cost five million dollars.)

Okay, breaking for a second — this is so awesome. I just got my company’s Weekly Digest email, and there was a little article in it about shortening the length of time a particular alert shows on our system. The title of the article? “They Only Have One Week to Live.” I wish I knew who’d come up with that, and who okayed it, so I could thank them. So fantastic.

So anyway, confession time: I don’t have a budget. I kept a really nice one for a while, using Microsoft Money, and all the pie charts and line graphs and tidy reports made my little accountant’s heart glad. But then the ‘horse’ slice of the pie started looking depressingly large, and I got a couple months behind, and I came to a realization that none of it was helping me figure out what was an appropriate amount to spend on anything. I spent all this time entering data and staring at the results, and wandering around the internet looking for rules on spending, trying to find something that would tell me Yeah, you can get that nice couch, or You should really skip the fancy cheese this week.

Apparently spring is the time when I wonder a little bit about money and then go on some cathartic shopping binge: two years ago I mulled over Lasik. (And wow, I totally forgot my Lasik anniversary this year! As an update to that post, I did get the surgery, and life is really better. I can see, it’s a miracle!) (Okay, maybe spring isn’t exactly the only time I whinge about money [see December 06], but I’m going to stop trolling through the archives now, because this is all getting so very far off course.)

My point was, I think, that I don’t budget any more, and I’m a happier person for it. I’m frugal most of the time, skip coffee shops and bring my own popcorn to movies and don’t get my hair cut for seven months, live in kinda low-income housing and work a little side job — all so I can buy a ridiculous bag that I will (hopefully) still be smiling about years from now and get a laptop because dammit I want to use it on the couch, and et cetera.

And I’m starting to feel weird, now, talking about money when I really meant to talk about my cute bag. But I also feel weird deleting this, because I hate the whole money stigma. And I can see from here the circles I’m about to ramble in, so instead I’m going to stop here, with the thought that I am lucky, and life is good, and my new bag? My new bag is very cute.

I consider myself overall a pretty mature person. But I just have to confess: one of my favorite parts of eating beets is pink pee. It makes me giggle like a six-year-old.

Because I just splurged on this bad boy (I actually got the HD, which has a slightly narrower bowl; in white, because it was cheapest, and it looks lovely with the rest of my [overabundance of] white appliances [and, for those who don't feel like clicking the link: it's a stand mixer]), my counter space is at a new premium. I’ve been using an old pair of unpowered computer speakers for my ipod, but it’s just too crowded for that business now. So, compelled by necessity, necessity I tell you!, I bought new speakers. (I can no longer be in the kitchen without an audiobook. I wander around in this daze, not knowing what to do with myself. It’s been hard keeping on-task cooking at my parents’ house. I find myself standing at the counter, staring off into space, trying to place what’s wrong, and then remembering no one’s telling me a story, and then going back to cooking, and five minutes wondering again what’s bothering me…)

The speakers arrived just a bit ago, and they are adorably wee. I’m excited to see what sort of sound they produce. In the mean time I decided it would behoove me to read the manual. The manual, it turns out, is a single half-sheet of paper, printed front and back. I felt I had to share the information helpfully provided on the front with you, in its original form:

This compact travel speaker systme is ideal for use at the office, home, carry where you go. You can enjoy sweet stereo sound produced from the aluminum speaker. Cosmetically designed to match the ipod,it will also work with any portable ipod,mini ipod ,cd players. When used with an ipod. It will also act as stand. It can be powered either through AC Adapter or batteries. The unique design protect the speaker and makes it easy to carry around.

There are some speifications [sic] on the back, but I won’t bore you with the details.

My boss just walked by my desk, where I’m munching on this gorgeous fuschia bowl of beets, and he looks at them all nose-crinkley:

“Ugh, beets?!”

“Yeah! You don’t like ‘em?”

“No!”

“When’s the last time you had them?”

“Never!”

“They’re delicious!” I call as the door swings shut on him heading out to lunch. And so they are. (He left too quickly for me to tell him about the best part, alas.)

I’ve had a couple good clothes shopping experiences lately (though, tragically for my wardrobe and thankfully for my wallet, none of them have resulted in much). After my appointment last weekend I spent three hours at the mall, which was fairly quiet. There was a fantastic saleswoman in The Limited who started a fitting room for me; while I finished picking out a few things to try, she picked out more things for me to try, making outfits out of my random sales-rack choices. It was fabulously fun and I managed to say no to the oh so wonderful $50 hoodie, and all of the other things I didn’t really need.

Sunday I was in Old Navy, being disappointed yet again in their spring selections this year (and their lack of simple white cardigans — why is it that no store on the face of the earth carries simple white button-up sweaters you can throw on over any work outfit? Well, more specifically, said sweater that a) looks nice and b) doesn’t cost six thumbs and a kidney), poking through the disturbing sales racks, when a middleaged woman approached me. Excuse me, she said, I’m sorry, but I’m not from around here (and indeed her accent was — well, I’m terrible with accents, but it sounded Slavic to me), and I’m not familiar with US sizing, but I have a daughter who’s about your size, and I picked out a four for her..?

And it gave me unexpected pleasure to be able to tell her that yes, I wear a four. And it was weirdly flattering, to have someone think I look that size (even though it really shouldn’t be, since she doesn’t know sizes, and so the numbers are as without value judgment as my understanding of European [or, indeed, men's] sizes are). I thought back to November 2004, the dressing room of another Old Navy. I’m surrounded by heaps of jeans: several styles in the size I think I am, the next smaller for fun, the pipe dream. I work down through them and it is the pipe dream that slides on just right, that fastens with ease and has the right give and hug. I double-check the size and stare at myself, turning and turning, moving, sitting, standing, caught somewhere between laughing and crying. I feel, briefly, small. Full of hope.

This journey, this thing that was the weight-loss journey and became the getting-in-shape journey and is becoming the learn-to-love-yourself journey, has been a weird dance of hope and despair, sometimes in tandem. It’s very hard even now, over a year at lifetime, to look only at and think only about what is. What is now, this moment, the things I have accomplished, period. They are, and have always been, inextricably tied up with more and further. The constant shadow of what-could-maybe-be. The ghost of in-Rachel’s-better-world. I cannot look at my body without thinking about the other ways I want it to be. And it’s bittersweet. It’s a hope for better that brought me and keeps me here. But there are times I wish that hope was more willing to take an afternoon off to let me rest on my laurels — and wouldn’t guilt-kick me in the gut on the way back.

And what a strange place this has ended up — but how strangely true. I don’t know how to say it right. That I have hope and satisfaction that is huge and bright and happy and simultaneously telling me that now is not enough; motivation that would be good and simple but for that thin dark thread of wrong, wrong, wrong. The thread I am slowly unweaving.