The Food Police

There's a wonderful article in the Times today about a doctor who blogs about his life as a medical professional. They reported on his recent take on helping overweight patients - not by lecturing or shaming them, but instead helping them feel more positive about themselves: leading them to understand that they are worth the effort of being healthy and taking care of themselves. No one, he reasons, wants to take care of a body they feel guilty about or are ashamed of.

I think he's right. It's only through the maintenance of a healthy ego that one can be successful at anything they set out to do. For example, I had a bastard of a choir director in college who convinced me that my voice sucked and that Music and I would never be friends, much less buddies on a first-name basis. He was wrong: my voice doesn't suck, but it was years before I was comfortable singing again. Empirically, I realize that I do not have the makings of a Renee Fleming nor will I ever even be a competent music professional. But I enjoyed music and singing, until I ran into him, and sadly, I let his negative influence, shame and judgement take that enjoyment away from me. Authority, as they say, is powerful.

Another example: when I was a graduate student in the Poetry program at Temple University, I had a crackpot professor who thought she was seventeen different kinds of brilliant and clever because she published a couple of books (that no one outside of the walled garden of academe had ever heard of), she didn't own a television and had never even seen an episode of Happy Days. Now, I don't necessarily disagree with the television piece of this equation, but not understanding the post-apocalyptic modernist influence of the Tuscaderos on the fin de siecle works of Fonzarelli - that just ain't cool.

Luckily, by that point, I knew how to spot an insecure loser. All semester, we clashed over the fact that I didn't want to write just like her. I wanted to write like me, and apparently, that didn't really work for her so much. When she told me that I needed to go by my given name, because no one would ever accept Andi as anything more than "a perky little sorority girl name," I knew it was over. Leaving her book-lined, ego-hatchery of an office, I went straight to the authorities and defected into the Fiction program, where I lived happily ever after.

I'm not saying that everyone and anyone with a criticism is necessarily a bad person, or driven by their own insecurity to remark hurtfully on someone else's vulnerability. But I know that there have been many times when I could personally do without the comments, especially when they relate to food/eating habits/diets, etc. Yes, I'm glad that this or that diet worked for your sister or colleague or spouse. Or, it's nice that you paid enough attention to our relationship that you recognize a closet eater when you see one - and that you think it would benefit me greatly if I only eat when someone else is in the room. And it's interesting that you care oh-so-much about what I got from the deli today that you have to ask me about it - how many points are in it, whether or not I should really be eating it, etc.

Within the last three weeks, I've heard all of these comments. And in my head, even as well-meaning as they may be, they don't translate as being love or concern or advice. I hear them as blaming statements, as questioning my self-control, as another authority that tells me that I suck at this being healthy thing, and maybe I should just forget about it entirely.

Just imagine it: you're trying to strengthen your ego, find your soul in all of this struggle, making an attempt to unlisten to all the voices who have told you that you can't do it: telling you you're not competent to achieve this goal or accomplish this task. Then try telling yourself that you can achieve it, accomplish it, deal with it, get to a new place with it. By the time you're through listening to other peoples' voices, you're too tired to hear your own.

But there is one voice I keep trying to listen to: Torah tells us this - wisdom I keep going back to, over and over: it is not up in the heavens that someone else will have to reach up to get it and teach it to you; it is not across the sea that someone else will have to cross the sea to retrieve it and teach it to you - no, it is in your mouth, and in your heart, and you can do it.

Listening to it, reading it, and learning it, is one thing. Believing it: entirely another.

Rotation News

For the moment, I am banning myself from writing about not feeling well. Even though I actually don't feel so hot today. Partly due to the weather, partly due to stress, partly due to the methotrexate - the Yellow Menace - having been injected somewhere along the port side yesterday morning at 8AM.

In today's email I received a document I look forward to every few months - the rotation news from my friend Esther, who is one of the curators at the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, of which I am a proud alumnae. MJH-ALMttH (as my dear, lovely former boss and friend Abby and I like to refer to it) was where I developed my chops as a marketer. My job at the Museum was the prototypical job that didn't feel like a job; it meant more to me than someplace where I sat at a desk and put in my hours. This was for both good and bad reasons: the good ones had a lot to do with our staff, a dynamic, passionate group of scholars and teachers and fundraisers and communications folk, most of whom possessed a vision about our work that went far beyond the day to day conflicts and stupidities that are part of every workplace.

What was tough about working at the Museum, however, was that everywhere you turned, there were stories of sadness. For every miraculous, tenacious, emotionally devastating story of survival, there were hundreds, even millions more of loss. For me, this was personified by the hallways that lined our office suite when we were located at 1 Battery Park Plaza. The walls were lined with portraits of children from before World War II. Some of them survived. Most of them didn't.

After 9/11, as you could imagine, it only got worse.

I hung on for three more years after that, but in the end, the neighborhood really got to me. The worst part was the immediate aftermath; I was literally terrified of being at work, scared to get on the subways in the morning, even, for a while, taking the bus from 42nd and 2nd all the way down to the Battery. I remember reading the first Harry Potter book during those bus rides, covering a lot of pages because it took so damn long. But it was better than being underground, disoriented, and utterly positive that the bomb would explode on the train that I was riding.

When I converted, one year after 9/11, so many of my colleagues came up to Larchmont for the ceremony, and in that hour, I realized that they had, in some sense, become my Jewish family. And what I didn't know about leaving the Museum was that I would never feel that sense of family and community in the workplace in quite the same way ever again; that little rituals like everyone wishing one another a Good Shabbos on a Friday afternoon really meant something. At the Museum, for all of the emotions and talk about budgets and decisions about color palettes and worry about attracting visitors, it was a place where people looked out for one another, where you could really rely on your team to support you, and know that at the end of the day, your work, quite possibly, may have changed someone's life.

So much of workplace life is about going through the motions, empty conversations, tolerating people because you have to; saying that you are part of a team, without ever really feeling it. In the end, I feel fortunate to have had this experience, and even more so when the Rotation News hits my inbox. I scroll through the images of the objects, reading about their history and their small, but key role in the greater story of survival that the Museum tells with such lyricism and poignancy. It may be a simple email, but for me, it is still about belonging to a family. I may not get to visit as much or as often as I would like to, but it is always good to remember that every so often, I can go home again.

And the OneTouch monitor goes to....

The results are in. Blood sugar fasting: 201. A1C: 9.5. For context, normal blood sugar is in the range of 100 - 120. And anything over a 6 on the A1C essentially means, translated: you're screwed.

So, it's time to get those numbers down; time to start taking (yet another) medication. And probably, as well, time to get myself one of those damn sugar meters so I can look forward to bloody fingertips and the end of my guitar-playing days (not that I ever really learned.). Forgive me. I'm basically just whining at this point.

I can't even get an appointment with the diabeasties doctor until September, which may or may not be a bad thing. I am hoping that through Weight Watchers, diligent exercise, and some sort of fracking miracle, I can rid myself of this nonsense and get on with my life.

This is kind of sucky. Traditionally, four days out of the year, on the Andi calendar, are supposed to be somewhat better days because those are the ones on which the four Beatles were born. I gotta say, the fact that it's Ringo's birthday is not really helping me out here. Is it because he wasn't one of the originals? Maybe I should be looking to Pete Best for help here. Or even Andy White, who recorded the single for Love Me Do because George Martin didn't think Ringo had the chops.

Sometimes I can't even figure out why my brain takes these detours. But I would put money on it having something to do with not really wanting to face reality at the moment.

I am, however, digging the Lilias! Yoga and You font of today's image. I guess if I've gotta have some stupid disease, I can still try to be as groovy as possible about it.