That Convention, And Sugar, and Stuff.

Apologies for the greater-than-usual space between blog posts here, everybody, but I've been really sick. I mean about as sick as I've ever been in my whole life, not counting the time I was in the hospital for a week with abscessed tonsils, and definitely sicker than I've been in at least ten years.  It started out as a bad cold that I picked up at the convention.  After a week it still wasn't gone, so I saw a doc-in-the-box because I couldn't get in to my Regular Doc. That happens sometimes.  They examined me (poke, prod) and did an X-ray (inconclusive) and decided that I had the beginnings of pneumonia.  So off I went to the pharm to get antibiotics, which then proved their worth by doing absolutely nothing.  Well, I was maybe feeling incrementally better, but I wonder how much of that was popping ibuprofen to keep the fever down and guzzling cough syrup and nebulizer fluid so I could breathe.  And yes, I did keep going to work, mostly, though I took a few of the worst days off.  I sort of had to.  It's a small firm and if I ain't here, stuff don't get done. (I had this horrible feeling we'd end up going to trial, but that didn't happen, thankfully.  Me in a suit at the plaintiff's table coughing up Lung McNuggets every five minutes would have just made a great impression on the jury, I'm sure.)

Then my ears and throat went south on me. Both ears swelled up so I couldn't hear, and my voice got so distorted I could either speak in a whisper or AT A SHOUT but nothing in between.  So back I went to the doc (the Regular Doc, this time) and he said, "Well, whatever they gave you isn't working, let's give you something else." And some prednisone, which I completely hate because it wreaks all possible badness on you, from making your face break out and your nails split to making you gain five pounds because you're hungry all the time. But, it also lets you breathe, and let's face it, breathing is kind of a good thing.  And I'm pleased to report that the Something Else has finally started to work. Meaning, one of my ears has opened up, I have a voice at a more reasonable volume and the coughing has pretty much stopped, except for occasional rattles.

But I am still pretty sick. So, I'm still not Doing Anything.  Anything I don't have to do, I mean.  Just going to work and then going home and resting.  I've been staying in bed all weekend, too.  I haven't been to my meditation group or OA meetings in three weeks, and I'm gonna miss all of this week, as well.  I haven't been in the pool since I think April 8 (Joan's mom's birthday; always a memorable date even if she's not with us anymore).  I hired a guy to do the lawn, which I can't afford, but I also can't push a lawn mower around and at the rate it keeps raining around here, the entire house could disappear under the lawn if I let it go more than a week.  You don't wanna see what the interior of the house looks like, either, though I've kept up with the laundry and the dishes pretty well.  When one of us is sick, the slack just don't get picked up.  It's like somebody hit "pause" in early April and the tape just hasn't really gotten rolling yet.

So for anybody who's missed me, that's where I've been.  If I'm breathing all right I'm going to try to get back in the pool this Saturday, which coincidentally is the last Baylor Saturday swim until fall.  Forget the long distance stuff for now.  I mean really, forget it.  I have fond hopes of making it to 1200 meters my first time out. Realistically it'll be June before I can knock off 2000 meters, and if the 5000 meter race were in July, like it usually is, I'd be pretty worried right about now.  But it's not. Rumor has it they're kicking it to September because the water was so warm last year that some people got sick (hey, it's an outdoor pool, and it's summer in Texas).  Rumor also has it that they're canceling the whole thing. Now that last part would suck, but I am but a minion in the swimmer heirarchy and not in charge of things like scheduling. If they do cancel it, though, I will find some other race to swim in, even if it's not as long.  There's a great one in June, that I won't be ready for, but you have to raise like $500 just to start anyway and it's for cancer research, which is not my favorite charity.  Cancer research gets plenty of money.  Women of color, torture survivors, underprivileged kids and cooperatives that foster economic development by way of providing farm animals to needy families, not so much.

But anyway.  Back before I got sick, I went to this convention.  This was Overeaters Anonymous Dallas's annual convention, and I was also on the planning committee (though, as they say, I was not on the results committee).  It was pretty well attended; about 130 people, not counting the streams of small children that came and went from the conference room next to us and kept shouting stuff for Jesus.  (Really, they were better mannered than most groups of conventioneers, but they were kind of loud.)  I ran around handing out serenity coins and was in a skit and so forth and suchlike. And I might have actually learned something, which, you have to admit, doesn't happen every day.

The main speaker was what we would call a "Big Book thumper."  If you're not familiar with AA parlance, the Big Book is the blue book called "Alcoholics Anonymous" that was first published in the 1930s and is still pretty much upheld as the single most important work in the literature of addiction and recovery.  OA is based on AA so it follows the same principles, the Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions and all of that.  If you wanna know more about this stuff and the history of and so on, check out any of the videos on this page or this article.  Anyway, in the Big Book, there's a paragraph right before it lists the Twelve Steps that reads something like, "Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path."  (And just for the record, I love that 1930s parlance.  "Rarely have we seen a person fail..." Doesn't that sound better than "You won't screw this up if..."?)  And the speaker was reading this section to make a point about something or other, which completely escapes me now, but one word of it stood out in my head in great big letters with glossy highlighting and multiple exclamation points.

The word in question was, "thoroughly." The thought I had at the time was, "I ain't doin' this right."

I mean, we know I'm addicted to sugar.  (And if you didn't know that, now you do, so you can be included in the great royal We.)  That's not a secret.  If you're addicted to anything, you're not going to recover unless you get rid of the stuff.  With alcohol, this is simple, if not exactly easy.  Look at the ingredients.  If it says, "Contains alcohol," you don't drink/eat it. Simple.  With sugar, though--Sugar is ubiquitous.  There's lots of it around, too.  It's in everything from the bread you buy at the store to ketchup (yes, ketchup actually contains enough sugar that the American Diabetes Association recommends you phase it the hell out of your diet, or at least your kids' diet.  No foolin'.).  Peanut butter has 3 grams of sugar in it per serving, unless you're buying the "natural" kind, like we do.  Even stuff that tells you it has "no added sugar" probably still has plenty of sugar, in the forms of corn syrup, fructose, galactose and so on (because our government lets food manufacturers list these separately with food ingredients like they aren't really sugars, which they are). So it's probably impossible to entirely get rid of added sugar in your diet.  However, just because it's impossible to be perfect doesn't mean you can't try really hard to get rid of as much of it as possible, and when I took a look at how hard I was trying, the answer was basically, "Not very."

I mean, yes, I don't eat most junk foods anymore, and I try to stay away from stuff that's made to be sweet, like cakes and cookies and things like that.  But there were loopholes.  I'd somehow convinced myself that frozen yogurt, for example, had less sugar than ice cream and was therefore okay to eat. (Which it does, but not much less, and it varies by type and flavor, so it's really not a good guideline at all.)  There were two other foods I couldn't seem to stop eating, either.  Chocolate and breakfast cereal.  Yeah, breakfast cereal doesn't really seem to be a big deal, but if you stop and look at the package labels, a lot of breakfast cereals have a heck of a lot of sugar in them.  And chocolate--well, it's chocolate. Even the bitter varieties that I was eating to ward off menstrual cramps (which did work, actually, though the success kind of came and went) still have plenty of sugar in them.  I get a serious, mad rush from added sugar.  If I snarf down something with a lot of sugar in it, especially on an empty stomach, something happens to me that's very much like what I imagine cocaine would be like.  I could never afford cocaine to test this theory, though.

So I came back from this convention pretty well convinced that I had to get rid of as much sugar as possible. And then I got really sick, and I ate whatever was there because I didn't have the energy to cook, so I'm kind of just starting now.  I've been able to quit the frozen yogurt (partially because it's expensive; I mean like $5 a fix--that's almost as much as a dime bag of heroin).  I've been able to quit the breakfast cereal, because Joan buys the groceries and I told her to quit buying it and she did and we ran out and now there isn't any.  I'm not sure about the bitter chocolate, though I made it through this last menstrual cycle without munching on any of the stuff.  But I'm pretty optimistic I can pop ibuprofens instead of bitter chocolate and the world won't end.

So now it's time to look at all the little things.  Read labels.  Check ingredients.  Figure out ways to get the amount of added sugar down to as little as possible.  I think I'm going to have to start making my own bread again, for one thing, because I know how much sugar I put in bread when I make it (very little) and I know how much is in the loaves you buy at the store (lots).  Oh, that's just heartbreaking, being forced to make my own bread (I love making bread, though I don't actually eat that much of it).  I'm making breakfast smoothies with tofu instead of plain yogurt, because plain yogurt actually has 8 to 10 grams of added sugar in it (yogurt! Plain yogurt!) whereas tofu has none whatever (and it's cheaper, too).  You have to blend it longer, but that's okay.  I will be eating a lot of fruit.  I love fruit, it's sweet, and because there's all that fiber and nutrition and stuff in it, it doesn't hit my brain like a cocaine rush. I can happily eat fruit instead of sugary things.  Well, mostly happily.  Well, sometimes grudgingly.

But I'm gonna do it.  What's more, I'm gonna do all that other stuff, like call people (I hate calling people; maybe I'll just text people) and work on the Steps and all that. I think Joan would call this "drinking the Kool-Aid," but hey, I'm a nicer person without the sugar.  I'm like actually sponsoring somebody now, which means I have to be responsible and set a good example.  Bleah.  Today I managed a 15-minute walk at lunchtime.  And I'm getting right back into the pool.  As soon as I can breathe, that is.

He Had Me At "Motherf___er"

So a little while ago, Joan showed me how to load a "podcast app" on my cell phone.  In case I forgot to tell you this, my new car talks to my cell phone. Put one inside the other and I can talk to people through my stereo speakers and stream music from Pandora.  Which is pretty cool.  But not nearly as cool as having a "podcast app." I've subscribed to a couple of podcasts, including one about history, one about space science and two or three about Buddhism.

I have, most of the time, a half-hour commute to work.  Sometimes a little longer.  I'm seriously annoyed to discover that for ALL THIS TIME I could have been learning stuff on the way to and fro. I have, like, six months of lost time to make up for.  So there's not a minute to lose.  At the moment I'm making my way backwards through what is by far the coolest podcast I've ever discovered.  It's called "The 12-Step Buddhist" and it is absolutely awesome.

It's run by a guy named Darren Littlejohn.  He's a yoga instructor, "life coach" (whatever that is--I have yet to hear a good definition) and a few other things.  He's also a person in recovery who happens to be a Buddhist.  He's Tantric and I'm Tiep Hien but the principles are basically the same, and best of all, he's addressing the fundamental thing, the thing that gets you in the most trouble in 12-step meetings of any stripe when you bring it up: Despite all that talk about defining a Higher Power of your own understanding and that the Twelve Steps should work with any faith or even the lack thereof, the Program is very, very Judeo-Christian.

Really, there's no way of getting around that, no matter what they tell you at meetings.  The Twelve Steps came out of the Oxford Group's Six Steps and those were based on the Bible.  The Oxford Group was a Christian mens' organization and it didn't change much when it morphed into Alcoholics Anonymous.  The people who wrote the Big Book were Christian, and the way the whole Program was set up followed typical Christian principles.  (In fact I was once told that if I didn't become a Christian, immediately, I would never recover. No kidding. I've been told a lot of stupid things by a lot of stupid people.) Sure, technically you can work the Program if you're a Hindu or a Muslim or even a pagan, but all of those faith systems presuppose a belief in some kind of deity, whatever you happen to call it.  Buddhism doesn't presuppose that (and doesn't deny it, either).  If you try to get a straight answer from ten Buddhist monks as to whether or not there's a God, you'll get twenty different answers and 400 deep discussions.  So if you need a Higher Power, and your tradition doesn't really have one, what's a Buddhist to do?

Well, one could do a lot worse than listen to Mr. Littlejohn's podcast or read his book, The Twelve-Step Buddhist.  It came out in 2009 and he's written other books since.  While you're at it, you might wanna pick up Mel Ash's The Zen of Recovery, as well; I think I've mentioned him on this blog before.  But back to Mr. Littlejohn.  The parallels here are a little eerie.  He moved to San Diego fairly recently.  During one of his blog posts, a big airplane flew overhead, and I thought, "I know exactly where he lives.  He lives in Little Italy."  (Or maybe Banker's Hill, but my money's on Little Italy.)  He talked about Overeaters Anonymous for a while in another one of his posts, which was awesome because personally, I think OA gets ignored in the recovery community.  (I mean, it's just food, right?  It's not illegal to possess it and nobody's going to kill you if you deal in it.)  But the thing that really got me was his explanation of what it's like to be enlightened vs. not enlightened.

Paraphrasing very roughly here:  Let's say you're an alcoholic.  You drink, you rage, you yell at your loved ones, you cause a lot of misery.  The next day you wake up, realize that you caused a lot of misery, and you're miserable.  So you drink more, to feel better.  And you rage again and you yell again and then the next day you--yeah.  And this keeps going on and on because you don't realize addiction is a sickness, you don't know that you're sick, you don't grok that your sickness is following a predictable path, and you don't understand that there's even a way to get out of it, much less that you might succeed if you give it a try.  Until somebody comes along and says, "Hey.  You might be an alcoholic.  Why don't you give AA a try?" And maybe you do and maybe you don't but the point is, now you have new information.  Now you know there's a way to end this endless cycle.  Once you know that, you can't go on drinking in ignorance.

Being unenlightened is very similar.  You go about your predictable routine.  You suffer, and you cause suffering.  The next day you realize you've caused suffering and you feel bad, but you don't know how to not cause suffering, so you do it again, and then the next day you feel bad but you don't know how to not cause suffering and...you get the idea.  Until somebody comes along and says, "Hey, there's more than this."  And now you know that there's a way out.  And once you do, you can't keep bumbling mindlessly along...

I'm not explaining this very well.  What I'm saying, though, is I got it.  I mean I really got it.  It went straight past my cerebral cortex and down into my lizard brain.  I've been a Buddhist for a while now, seven or eight years, and nobody's ever explained it to me in a way that made that much sense.  I mean, wham.  Straight to the brain stem.  I almost drove off the freeway in sheer surprise.

Yes, I listen to his podcasts while I'm driving.  I'm not sure what a good idea that is, because he has a pretty soothing voice.  Anyway, if you're interested in Buddhism or the Twelve Steps or both, you might wanna read what Mr. Littlejohn has to say.  If nothing else, he's engaging, funny and profane. One of his blog posts is called, "Get Nondual, Motherfucker."  That pretty much sealed the deal for me right there.

What God Do You Want With That?

An actual post about Buddhism.  Will wonders never cease.  Yeah, okay, I've been a little remiss in the whole point of this blog's existence.  So here's my latest little sermonette.  It focuses on the existence of God, something which I, as a Twelve-Step person, am not supposed to be questioning.  But I do, all the time.  The brain doesn't turn off just because it's supposedly vital to my continued survival.

I heard Buddhism described once as "a religion without a god," assuming that Buddhists don't believe in God.  Well, you'd have to ask a Buddhist.  Actually, you'd have to ask ten Buddhists, and then you'd get twenty answers and forty deep discussions.  Yes, I know I've said that before, but it doesn't make it any less true.  Still, to call Buddhism "a religion without a god" is kind of a misnomer.  Buddhism, like Christianity, spread over a large area in a relatively short period of time, and like Christianity, it basically overlaid the religious practices that were already in existence and sort of absorbed them.  When Christianity showed up (relatively late) in Ireland, many of the local Celtic and pagan gods became part of the new faith.  "Oh, you have a god named Bridget? Well, you must mean Saint Bridget!  Let me tell you all about Saint Bridget..."  Oh, and the Horned One/Forest God?  He kinda didn't fare so well.  You see a horned being in Christianity, he's probably not good news.  I'm just saying.

In the same way, Buddhism has a slew of higher beings called bodhisattvas and arhats and other

weird-sounding Sanskrit names.  One of these guys is named Skandha, the Buddhist guardian against temptation to overindulgent behavior.  I kid you not, Buddhism created an entire being to ward off the mad urge to have more than one cookie with dinner.  I happen to know about him because my therapist, who was perhaps becoming exasperated as to how often this God thing kept coming up, said, "Why don't you just look up some of those bodhisattvas and pick one?"  I picked Skandha because he looked like the leader of a motorcycle gang.  Seriously, doesn't he?  It's something about the helmet.  And maybe the chestplate.  
But I feel really stupid trying to pretend Skandha's following me around, eternally on the lookout for extra cookies.  It just feels kind of silly, like having an imaginary friend.  The truth is, I didn't believe in God well before I became a Buddhist.  I told my Lutheran pastor that I didn't believe in God right before the big Christmas service.  He said, "What God don't you believe in?" and I was kind of stuck for an answer for a minute there, but then I said, "The Old Testament God."  He said, "Well, I don't believe in that God either."  Which was reassuring, especially for a Lutheran pastor, but then he ruined it by saying, "That's why we have a New Testament."

I asked my Buddhist monk friend ChiSing if there was a God and he said it didn't matter if there was one or not.  When I pressed him on it, he said that if there is a God, he needs to be enlightened, and if he's enlightened already, well, then that's just grand, isn't it?  Which is just irritating in the extreme, but then, conversations with Buddhist monks often are.  Still, I would say most Buddhists probably believe in God.  At least, the ones that I know seem to.  Some of them actually mention God from time to time.  Others talk about "the Universe" taking care of things, and something like the Universe is so exponentially huge and beyond human comprehension that it might as well be God.  I also meet Buddhists who think that the whole question of whether or not there's a god just isn't one that's worth spending a lot of mental energy on.  There either is one, or there isn't one, and (tossing up the hands in dramatic fashion) we have no control over it anyway.  Buddhists are big on not having any control over things.  So are Twelve-Step people.

Lately I've been thinking of taking on Google as my Higher Power.  Google has all the answers.  It doesn't necessarily have correct answers, but answers--it's got 'em.  If you want correct answers, forget Google and go talk to your friendly local librarian.  She'll help you find them.  Hm, maybe the librarian should be my Higher Power.  I live with a librarian already, so it'll be a short trip to church.

Anyway, I still don't believe in God.  And if the question is, what God don't I believe in, then the answer is, I don't believe in the god of Abraham or the god of Peter and Paul.  I don't believe in Thor, either (but I kind of wish I did).  I believe that the Bible is basically a history of a people who decided to use their religion as an excuse not to get along with their neighbors.  We're still using that excuse today, every day, all over the world.  We may have all these neato technical advances and we may have extended the boundaries of science catrillions of times farther than our forefathers ever thought possible, but as far as becoming better people, we have evolved exactly zero points since the Bronze Age, and I think religion has a lot to do with that.

What I  do believe in, is fate.  I believe in signs and portents, miracles and wonders.  I believe that there are certain threads of space and time that are meant to come out a certain way, and that eventually they will get there no matter what steps in front of them.  I believe that there's a  kind of cosmic force, if you will, that makes us all alive, and that force is inside every being that lives or has ever been alive or ever will be alive everywhere in the universe.  I believe that if an energy force can have an intention (and I believe it can), it wants us all to do the right thing, and maybe be a little nicer to each other.  I believe if you get in touch with this intention, then your life and the lives of everyone around you will become infinitely easier.  And I believe that one of the ways to get in touch with this intention is Buddhism.

Though, to be honest, the I Ching coins and the Tarot cards don't hurt.

Pregnant With Contradictions

July Swim for Distance Progress Report:  11,200 meters (about 6 1/4 miles)
Charities Benefiting: Mercy for Animals, Goods 4 Girls Africa, Survivors of Torture International
It's not too late! Pick a charity of your choice and sponsor me by the kilometer, the meter or the mile. Put aside your chosen denomination of currency and send it to your charity at the end of the month. Oh, and let me know which charity you picked so I can list it here. You'll feel better, I'll feel better, your charity of choice will feel better. Win-win-win!

Hi, I'm Jen and I'm addicted to sugar.  (Chorus: "Hi, Jen."  Jen: "Hi.")  I'll bet some of you didn't know it was possible to be addicted to sugar, seeing as most of us ingest it in fairly large quantities every day and no harm seems to come to us.  But it is.  Check out this "60 Minutes" video or these news stories: New York Daily News, CBS News, National Institutes of Health. That said, though, you all know how addiction works, right?  You take a substance, maybe even only once, and you then discover to your dismay and chagrin that you now can't get along without that substance.  Something in your brain has fundamentally changed and without the substance, you not only can't function, you might get very sick and even possibly die.

This is why people who are addicted to substances will do ridiculous, illegal and even crazy things to get hold of the next dose of whatever it is they're addicted to.  Why they'll keep on taking a substance even though it's obviously causing problems in their lives, like causing them to lose their jobs or breaking up their marriages.  That guy who broke into your car and stole your stereo was probably addicted to something or other (car stereos have a very low resale rate, I'm given to understand, so it was probably something cheap, like crack).  And pregnant women, even if they know or suspect that whatever they're taking may be bad for the baby, will keep right on taking it.

Actually, in the case of pregnant women, it's even trickier.  Suddenly withdrawing from an addictive substance, like heroin or cocaine, can cause a miscarriage.  If you're pregnant and addicted to a substance, it's much better for you and your baby if you take maintenance doses of the substance.  Makes sense, right? Keep the mother stable, keep the baby stable, especially since addiction to opioids (ie, heroin, oxycontin, vicodin; the class of substances most commonly abused by pregnant women) hasn't been proven to cause any damage to the baby (or at least, the link between opioids and birth defects is "not well understood".)

You probably know where I'm heading with this.  Yep, the good ole state of Tennessee, which recently made it a crime to be a pregnant woman with a substance abuse problem.  In Tennessee,   prosecutors can now charge a woman with an "assaultive offense or homicide" if she takes illegal narcotics during her pregnancy, if "the child is born addicted, is harmed, or dies because of the drug." You'll note there's no standard of proof in there.  The state doesn't have to prove that the drug caused any kind of problem; it's basically a "because we said so" provision.  Lucky Mallory Loyola is the first woman to be arrested under the new law.  I think you should get some kind of prize if you're the first one to be arrested under a law.  Like, maybe free legal counsel, or something.

Now, let's ponder this.  There are 168 drug treatment centers in Tennessee (I looked it up).  Guess how many take pregnant women?  21. So less than 13% of drug treatment placements are available for pregnant women.  All the same, it's fine to toss them in jail if the state thinks the drugs might have harmed their newborns.  And what happens to the newborn while all this is going on? They're not staying with their mothers in jail; there's no nationwide policy in the United States that allows women to stay with their newborns if they're in prison, and Tennessee isn't one of the states running a pilot program that would let that happen.  So I guess the kid goes to foster care, or maybe to family members if DCS is feeling generous.

By the way, it's not illegal to smoke while pregnant.  It's not illegal to drink while pregnant. Both of those activities have been proven to cause actual harm to babies.  It's also not illegal to go skiing while pregnant, and while there aren't a lot of ski resorts in Tennessee, surprisingly there are a few, and you'd think they'd have at least thought about that while they were making it illegal to have a verified medical condition that most people can't do anything about without help (and see above re: how much help is available, ie, close to none.)

The ACLU is already challenging this law in court, and they have some pretty good precedent; no less than the Supreme Court of the United States told the state of California, way back in 1962, that it wasn't a crime to be a drug addict. And I'm gonna steal this whole paragraph from drugwarfacts.org:  "The prosecution of a pregnant drug-addicted woman infringes upon a woman’s right to privacy, as established in Roe v. Wade. In Roe, the Supreme Court held that the right to privacy, 'whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action ... or ... in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.' Advocates of the right to privacy contend that a woman does not lose her right to privacy simply because she becomes pregnant, and the constitutional right to privacy 'extends to both women and men, regardless of their biological differences.' Advocates therefore contend that because the Constitution does not differentiate among persons who are able to enjoy the right to privacy, the pregnant woman remains a 'person' as defined and protected under the Constitution. Hence, the State’s mechanisms — prosecution by child abuse, endangerment, controlled substance abuse, manslaughter, and homicide statutes — infringe upon a drug-addicted woman’s fundamental right to privacy because these mechanisms punish her simply for exercising her constitutional right to procreate."

You also can't treat pregnant women differently than nonpregnant women, or differently from men, under the law.  That pesky 14th Amendment. Astonishing as it may seem, pregnant women are human beings, and therefore persons.  If you don't believe that's so, ponder this: At what point in a pregnancy does a pregnant woman lose her civil rights?

Further, it's illegal to leak somebody's medical records under HIPPA.  So how did this woman get arrested in the first place?  If I were her lawyer, I'd look into whether any cause existed to arrest her at all, being as the evidence was obtained illegally.  Good thing I'm not a lawyer, though, because I'd take all the cases like this, never get paid, get burned out, quit on the whole human race and drive my Lincoln into the San Diego Bay from the top of the Bay Bridge, if I still lived in San Diego, which I do not.

I think I said that in another blog post. Well, so sue me.

More About This Lutheran To Buddhist Thing. Part 3.

Believe it or not, this blog has a mail service.  Yeah, it's not as sexy as Reddit or an RSS feed, but if you comment on here with your email address, and you like actually want me to, I'll add you to the list of people to whom I send new posts as they're posted.  Mostly I'm sending it to certain family members, who wouldn't read my stuff otherwise.  Too much trouble to check my Web site every Thursday (well, most every Thursday) or they're not on Facebook or they don't like to browse on the Internet or whatever.  This is convenient, in a way, because if I wanna talk about them, all I have to do is not send the post when I'm done.  Yeah, it's kinda cowardly, and there's that tree-falling-in-the-forest thing (if a post is posted on Blogger and there's nobody around to tweet about it, does that post still exist?) but I get to get plenty of stuff off my chest that way, without hurting anybody's feelings.  And really, would you want to send a post critical of a person directly to that person?  Even if you did, you wouldn't do it, if you were a Lutheran.  It's way too direct and problem-solvy for a Lutheran.  And I was once a Lutheran.  So there you are.

This here is one of those posts. Yep, another discourse on my ongoing confusion with religion.  Which started pretty early.  I think I was about five.  Apparently in some Sunday-school discussion, we'd been talking about the poor widow who only had two shekels to give to the temple, which God appreciated much more than the sacks of gold brought by the more well-to-do believers because she gave all she had.  (You might think God would just give the two shekels back and say, "No, really, I'm fine without these.  Please take them and, I dunno, buy food for your kids or something." Maybe God would.  But temple administrators?  That's a whole nother story.)  Anyway: It occurred to me that I had a lot more than two shekels and I wasn't giving God all I had, which was evidently bad.  The most valuable things I owned at the time were my gold birth ring and a collection of Barbies.  The ring was a lot more portable.  So after the service one Sunday, I sneaked into the sanctuary, put it on the railing in front of the altar (the altar was off limits; even before paralegal school, I knew the before-the-bar rule) and left it there.

Well, you know how this ends.  Somebody saw me and turned in the ring, and the pastor figured out who I was and returned the ring to my mother, who returned it to me.  And I got in all kinds of trouble about leaving important and valuable things just lying around places (and at church, no less).  What was I thinking?   I don't remember if I explained about the poor widow and the two shekels, but I probably tried to (at that age I was still trying to explain stuff; I don't think I gave up on that until I was thirteen or so, and one might argue that in fact I never really did).  Anyway, the whole religious aspect of this incident just got totally overlooked. Which, again, if you're five, is all manner of confusing.

Everybody gets mixed messages from their parents.  It's part of being human, I think.  My bag of mixed messages, when it comes to religion, runs something like this: It's very important that we go to church every Sunday.  Because it's just something this family does.  You need to dress up and look pretty so we can look nice as a family but don't try to look nicer than anybody else or do anything else to call attention to yourself.  Yes, they talk about religion there, but don't listen.  Be attentive to your Sunday-school teachers. Just don't believe anything they tell you.  Because religion is a bunch of crock, really.  Don't believe in God.  Or if you do believe in God, don't tell anybody.  Especially not people at church.  They'll think you're a holy roller, and you don't want to be a holy roller.  There is no devil and there is no hell but you shouldn't ever lie, cheat, steal or have sex, because otherwise you'll go straight there when you die.  Finally, the way you feel at church is not important and you shouldn't pay any attention to it.  If you get involved with religion based on the way you feel, you'll end up in a cult or living on the streets with the Jesus Freaks. But it's very important that we go to church every Sunday.  Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

You can see how this might get confusing for a five year old.  Hell, I'm 45 and I'm still confused.  Even during the whole last five years I was living at home, when I refused to go to church and waged World War III about it with my mother every single Sunday, I don't think we ever once had any kind of actual religious discussion.  By which I mean, "This is what I believe. (Statement.)  What do you believe?"  That just never, ever happened.  Again, I'm 45 and about all I can tell you about my parents' religious beliefs is that I don't think my mother believes in God at all and my dad might believe in intelligent design, based on something he said once in a discussion about evolution ten years ago.  That's it. That's all.  If one of them ever dies, I suppose we'll have the funeral in the Lutheran church, but for the life of me I don't know why.

The tricky bit, here, is that I really wanted to believe in God.  It's very comforting to think that if you need help, there's somebody up there who can send it, and that if you fall down, somebody will pick you up and put you back on your feet.  I could wrap my brain around the concept of God, but I couldn't really believe in it.  And Jesus was right out.  I mean, the guy was cool--long haired radical, taught people to do what was right instead of what was popular, wanted his flock to take care of the widows and the orphans and anybody else who was obviously having a hard time, ended up dying for what he believed in--but the son of God? (Actually, he never said that.  He called himself the Son of Man.)  None come to the Father but through me? Nope.  Couldn't do it.  Could not even for one second believe that God would just pitch you out if you didn't come by way of his caddy.  That was totally antithetical to anything being God would mean.  And by the way, I do have at least a shaky grip on what being God would mean.  So far I've absolutely refused to play any video games that even hint that you control the environment, like SimCity or Black & White or even virtual fish aquariums. And I thought the scariest part of The Talisman, by "Big Steve" King and Peter Straub, came near the end, when Jake was with the Talisman for the first time and realized that by holding it, he had become God.  That sort of thing upsets me tremendously.  I cannot handle it.  And so this I can say about God with complete certainty:  He is not me.  And I was never cut out to be Him.

(Yes, even in my manic phases, where sometimes grandiosity takes over and I start believing that everything I do takes on Extreme Significance and therefore must be done Exactly Right.  Thank God for meds, because seriously?  That sort of thing gets old quick. There's only so many times you can walk down Fifth Avenue between B Street and Broadway at exactly 11:15 in the morning on a Wednesday in order to avert the Something Bad that might happen. Sooner or later you just have to get some work done.)    

So to end the story if it has an ending, after some 26 years in the Lutheran church, a lot of years as a nonpracticing nothing-in-particular and these last four or five as a Buddhist, I have not the foggiest idea to whom I'm praying.  I could address my prayers "to whom it may concern," but it's easier to just say God. You know, that supreme being I don't believe in.  I believe in a Higher Power (yes, 6 years in OA hasn't been a total waste of spiritual time), but what that is, I couldn't tell you.  I believe in a sort of universal force for good, something out there maybe made up of all of the beings that ever were, are or will be, that just sort of wants what's best for everybody and thinks we should all be a little nicer to each other.  So Buddhism fits this pretty well, seeing as Buddhism isn't terribly concerned about the nature of God.  As my Buddhist monk friend told me, "If there is a God, then He needs to be enlightened.  If He is already enlightened, then we should strive to be like Him.  If there is not a God, then we don't need to worry about it."

He said that.  He really did say that.  Honestly,  I could just smack him sometimes.  Which would be a very un-Buddhist-y thing to do.  And my Higher Power probably wouldn't be happy about it either.

Give Us A Sign, Oh Lord

Thanks to meds and lots of other things, I don't often have full-blown anxiety fits anymore.  Even when I do, they're mostly small affairs, remedied by a look at a bank statement (oh good, I didn't really do that) or a case file (oh good, I really did that).  Because, odd as it may seem, I know what I'm doing most of the time.  Especially at work, screw-ups are rare.  They happen, but they're rare, and they are usually fixable.  And in my personal life, such that it exists, I more or less Handle Things.  I'm the chief quartermistress in charge of wardrobing and laundry, the head chef, preparer of (most) meals, the balancer of budgets and the cleaner of things that need cleaning (or, to be fair, the director of persons to things that need cleaning.  We're in this marriage thing together.)  But then, it's not every day that I come home from a day-long OA meeting to a sign that looks like the one on the left here.

Yep, that's it.  The Sign, Oh Lord.  Our house is really on the market.  Somebody is really going to buy it and we are really going to have to go and live somewhere else.  Here's the MLS listing.  Below is a pic of our front door with the lock box, so that realtors can come and go (by appointment, only) to show our little Dallas palace to potential buyers.  I pulled into the driveway (so as not to block the sign from view; I don't think I can park on the street anymore) and just sat there for a few minutes trying not to cry.

And then, because of course this had to get worse, my idiot neighbor came out of his house.  (Warning:  If you buy this house, you will have an idiot neighbor.) He wanted to know how much and who was in charge.  I gave him the real estate agent's card and got inside as fast as I could.  I knew he was interested.  I just knew it.  From the second we started hauling boxes of books out of here and taking them to a storage unit, he's had his weird little eyeballs on us.  I think he wants to buy it to rent out, which is fine with us really, but I hate hate hate having to talk to him.  He kind of scares me.  

Why?  Because he's the male of the species.  Well, that and he's not safe around a chainsaw, but that's another story and shall be told another time.  At this day-long OA meeting, there was this workshop about sex and body images, and one of the speakers said something that I thought was very profound.  She said the whole time she was losing weight, and she's lost over a hundred pounds, there was this constant battle raging inside her head between wanting to be thinner, and thereby both healthier and more attractive to the opposite sex, and being scared of the opposite sex and not wanting to lose her layer of protection against looking too attractive.  She'd been molested when she was about four.  I have lost count of how many women I have heard at OA meetings say that they were molested or otherwise sexually abused when they were children.  Literally lost count.  I guess some women turn to drugs or alcohol to deal with this sort of thing, but it looks like an awful lot of us turn to excess food, and bulimia, and anorexia.  And when it was time for comments from the audience, I was waving my hand so I could say, "Me, too!  I got fat to keep men away, too!  I was molested, too!"  which is usually not something I'm terribly excited to tell people. 

Anyway.  I got inside, had my anxiety fit and went to the first thing that's guaranteed to calm me down a little: Food.  First I heated up some of the leftover enchilada casserole from the other night, and then I had a few graham crackers with Biscoff spread.  That's not really a binge--pretty close to a regular meal, in fact, and it was dinnertime--but figure this out:  Daylong OA meeting.  Brilliant insight about reasons for being fat.  And what do I do when something bothers me but come in here and eat.  Anyone who doubts the addictive power of food, particularly sugar, really needs to spend a few days with me when I'm trying to get off it. (Surprisingly, however, Biscoff spread doesn't have much sugar in it.  Only 5 grams a serving.  So I dodged a bullet, there.)  

In retrospect, it occurs to me that our idiot neighbor buying our house might indeed be the perfect solution.  He'd have himself for a neighbor, and no one else would have to put up with him.  And my anxiety fit's more or less over, so I can, I dunno, hide under a blanket with Caesar the Cat for the rest of the evening and just hope nobody wants to view the house past seven on a Saturday.

Or maybe watch a horror movie.  As if life isn't scary enough.

Talk Thursday: Resigned

So we're going to trial on a case that I was more or less sure would settle.  I don't know why I bother guessing anymore, because I've been wrong so many times.  The one I'm positive will go to trial settles way before mediation, the one where I'm sure we'll settle, nobody blinks and we're at the courthouse for days flinging unrelated side motions at each other.  When we go to trial we're very damn good at it, thank you, but we'd rather not.  We'd rather just reach a good settlement for our client, because trial is both expensive and risky, and hard on everybody from a nerves and exhaustion standpoint.  But a "good settlement" is often hard to define, and our definition doesn't match the other side's definition by the time we're talking about whether or not to go to trial.  So, off we go.  Hope nobody needs me the second and third weeks in September because I'll be indisposed.  Busy, too.

Meanwhile, the Talk Thursday topic-o-meter is down to me and Cele.  I'm not sure how that happened, but I have scads of good topic ideas, so don't worry, Talk Thursday fans.  I'm just kind of wondering what happened to everybody.  Maybe that whole life-getting-in-the-way thing again.  Me, I think I'd go a little crazy if I weren't writing this column (or another novel or--or something).   So I keep churning out the words, resigned to my fate.  Or somebody's fate.  What happens if you get the wrong person's fate? Do you get to trade it in?  Seems like there should be a fate exchange someplace, because I think I'd be a great marine biologist or test pilot or Buddhist monk or inventor of nifty office products.

Not that I'm not a fine paralegal, but I'm sort of having a midlife crisis here.  Or menopause. Or something.  First sign: Driving like a maniac.  Or like a Texan, more to the point.  Listen, I used to drive in L.A., and Texas drivers flat out scare me.  When I start driving like they do, something is definitely wrong.  Second sign: Sugar. I'm not supposed to be eating sugar in quantity.  It messes me up, plays hell with my meds and makes me feel rotten, after I feel good for maybe ten seconds.  I'm trying to get off it altogether, and I have uneven success; three days free here, four days there, maybe two days over there.  I got up to 60 days once. When I suddenly start eating lots of the sweet stuff, something is definitely wrong.

Third sign: Forgot my laptop this morning.  I think it's been at least two years since I've forgotten my laptop on a Thursday, especially seeing as this is the first Thursday after Eid-al-Fatr and therefore my first opportunity to get back to Afrah and snarf down some of their amazing pita bread.  Something is definitely wrong.  And has been wrong for a while.  And so, after seventeen years of marriage and roughly six months of continuous nagging from my psychiatrist, I'm seeing this guy.

Yeah, okay, this guy is a psychologist/therapist.  So it's not as exciting as it sounds.  But this is interesting.  I've only been to see him three times and it already feels like a matter of life and death.  As in, I'd better show the hell up and work hard or who knows what could happen.  This isn't a problem; I'm very obedient with health care professionals.  After all, I'm paying them to tell me what to do.  It would be kind of stupid to pay them to tell me what to do and then not do it.  (Well, okay, there's this one exercise my physical therapist gave me that I'm kind of slacking off on, but I'm doing all the other ones.)

I've been down this road before, or a road like it, or at least a road that had similar signposts and a big statue of Sam Houston in the middle of nowhere. (I-45 south of Huntsville on the way to Houston.) That guy (they're always guys; women therapists make me really uncomfortable) told me when I moved to Texas that I needed someone to keep an eye on me.  In contrast to my usual being-obedient-with-healthcare-professionals thing, I completely ignored him.  In retrospect, he was probably right.  I find this both embarrassing and annoying.  I am, after all, a grown-up.  Looky: House, car, job, cats, wife.  I should not need "looking after." But then, I shouldn't need to go to OA meetings, and I totally do.  I should not need to avoid alcohol, and I totally do.  I should not need all kinds of things that I'd probably shrivel up and die if I had do do without.  So you might say I'm resigned to needing things I wish I didn't need.

Here's another thing I need: I need to dash off to work now.  Because sooner or later I'm going to need a pay check.

Talk Thursday: Sobriety

Back in October of I think 2006, Joan and I went to see comedian Jeff Dunham at some tony club in Addison where I would normally never set foot, not being the kind of person who goes to tony clubs in Addison (or any elsewhere, for that matter).  This was one of those places where, not content to mug you for your ticket money, they also expect you to buy two overpriced watered-down drinks in the course of the evening.  Seriously, even the beers were like $5 a pop, a price not to be outdone until the new Cowboys Stadium opened in Arlington (I'm told $6.50.  Are they exaggerating?  I don't know.  I don't do football.)

Anyway, the show was pretty good and I'd mostly stopped grousing about having to buy drinks and somehow I got away with buying only one.  It was a little blue frou-frou thing with an umbrella sticking out of it, and it was ungodly sweet and very thick.  I don't remember what they called it, which is kind of a shame, because I think the last time you do anything ought to be memorable.  But I didn't know it was the last time, of course.

I drank the silly thing very slowly, over the course of the whole show, and by the time we left I was pretty much sober.  I drove home, no ill effects.  Then, the next morning, all hell broke loose in my digestive system.  At first I thought it was something I ate, but I figured out pretty quick it was something I drank.  I figured it out because this was a link my brain had been trying to make ever since I turned 21.  For no apparent reason, I'd suddenly come down with what seemed to be the stomach flu and be miserable for days.  Then I'd suddenly be fine again.  The docs hadn't been able to figure it out, generally because by the time I got in to see one, I was over it.  (Nothing more annoying than a healthy person in a doctor's office.)  I wasn't too worried, since it went away by itself.  But it was puzzling.  What caused it?  Lasagna? Chinese food? Excessive political debates?  Why did it appear and disappear with such frequency?  Questions, questions.  Then came the morning after Jeff Dunham and suddenly there was an answer.  She drinks alcohol, her stomach rebels.  That's it.  It's that simple.

I've since gathered that alcohol kills the friendly bacteria that live in my stomach and points south, making it difficult to digest food and leading to certain unpleasant results.  Luckily for me, this problem has an easy solution: Quit drinking.  So I did.

 Thus began my six-year odyssey into The Land Beyond Alcohol.  Interesting times were had.  For one thing, I had random cravings for beer at odd times of the day and night for about the first six weeks.  I figured this had to be psychological, kind of the Ghosts of Alcohols Past.  I mean, I didn't drink very heavily, and I wasn't a beer-after-work-to-relax kinda gal at any point.  I did, however, have an unpleasant habit of wanting to keep drinking until the alcohol was gone.  (And to be fair, the same applies to espresso, chocolate, champagne, ice cream...) Portion control?  Never had it.  And I didn't act like an idiot when I was drunk--particularly--but I did do things I wouldn't do normally, like sitting through a video of a friend having her labia pierced.  There are things one does not really need to know about one's friends.

Time went by and the ghosts quit bothering me.  I ended up in OA and ran this story past a guy I met there who was also in AA.  He said it sounded like I didn't have a problem--yet--but was well on my way to developing one.  "It sounds like you quit just in time," he said.

Maybe.  Unfortunately, Demon Sugar took over from Demon Drink, and we were off to the races.  I've been trying for the last year to get off sugar, and knocking off the alcohol was a piece of cake, if you'll pardon the expression, in comparison.  In fact I've come to regard sugar as cocaine, particularly in the form of cake frosting.  (Remember, the cake is a lie.)  Doughnuts and breakfast pastries?  Gateway drugs.  If I could freebase sugar, I'd do it, but I've tried and it just kind of turns to sludge.  It's also kinda painful when you snort it up your nose.

I did, however, have one miracle period when I went 60 days without sugar.  If I did it once, I can do it again.  Today, incidentally, is Day 4.   Not that I'm counting.  Oh, of course I'm counting.  One thing people with substance abuse issues often do is get obsessed with numbers.  And that plus quarter to seven minus eight or nine bucks to Afrah for this nice dinner plus four slices of pita bread equals the end of this column.

Talk Thursday: Expectation, Reality, Evolution

I'm not supposed to watch the news.  Well, let's just say my doctor "strongly suggested" that I not watch the news.  Something about that half-hour parade of dead people, plane crashes, gruesome murders and, oh yeah, all the weird crap that goes into the presidential election is, uh, Not Good For My Mood.  So, okay, I quit watching the news, and for the most part I've quit going to CNN and MSNBC.com, unless I'm really bored and I've already been on querytracker.net and I can't think of anything to add to this work-in-progress of mine, which just cleared eighty pages without bothering to tell me what in the hell it wants to be about.  I have definitely stopped trolling the CNN chat rooms, which I think I said was something like throwing rocks at hornet's nests filled with very dumb hornets that come out and yell at you because they can't figure out that stinging you will get rid of you faster.  (Really, people should be nice to hornets.  It's not like they mean any harm.)

But then there's Twitter.  I can't go half an hour on Twitter without somebody tweeting a link to something utterly fascinating, and while it usually isn't gruesome, dead or weird, it often manages to make me angry.  Lately it's the Republican war on women, which they say isn't really happening, which just goes to show that in addition to waging a war on women, they are also out of touch with reality.  I'm glad the GOP's new agenda is to ban abortion, make birth control expensive, punish women for having sex, pay women half as much as men doing the same jobs and pass laws declaring that pregnant women lose their civil rights at the moment of conception, because honestly? That jobs and the economy and fixing the deficit thing? Bor-ring. I can't imagine there are any Republican women reading my column but if there are, and you're going to vote your party ticket in November, please, for the love of God, comment and explain why.  Because I don't get it.  Being female and voting Republican is like being bovine and voting for the carnivore ticket when there's a perfectly valid vegetarian option.  Either you hate yourself or you hate all other women. Or--or what?  I don't know.  I don't get it at all.

Which brings us to today's topic. (Okay, it doesn't, really, but humor me.)  Expectation is, I think, something we're all born with, and a primary source of suffering.  From the time we're little kids we're taught to expect that certain things will happen; our parents will love us, there will be hot coffee every morning, we'll get a Baby Thataway for Christmas or whatever sectarian holiday we celebrate around the Winter Solstice, and the people we care about will never go away.  Then reality hits: Our parents can't really love us because no one ever loved them; coffee is too expensive; the Baby Thataway either doesn't show up or doesn't work; and Grandma dies of cancer when you're seven.  Not that this really stops us; we form new expectations as we grow up, and when we become parents ourselves, look out.  Our kid will excel at sports, look great in his Prom tuxedo, go to Harvard, get married and have kids of his own.

It occurs to me that nothing brings every parental dream crashing to earth faster than finding out your son or daughter is gay.  Even if it's not fully true, for a second there it all falls apart.  My son or daughter will not get married have children go to Prom play sports go to Harvard (they don't let gays into Harvard, do they?)  Normally you lose these expectations one at a time as your kid makes other plans.  To lose them all at once must rattle you to your very bones.  No wonder parents freak out, yell and scream, say lots of regrettable things and sometimes throw their kids out of the house.  Wouldn't you, if somebody put on cleats and stomped up and down all over your plans for the future?

Luckily, gay people do get married (in some states) or form lasting partnerships (in others), a lot of them have children (70% of lesbians over 40 have kids), lots of them play sports (U.S. figure skating would die an awful death if not for gay men) and the last time I checked, they were in fact letting gays into Harvard.  That's reality.  And also evolution.  Within my lifetime, which is not all that long, cops could arrest you for being gay in public, or for wearing the clothes of the opposite sex.  As recently as 2002 (ie, just a little more than 10 years ago) it was illegal to have gay sex in Texas. A Supreme Court case put the kibosh on that, but whether Texans have evolved or just been dragged kicking and screaming into the early 1900s remains to be seen.  Frankly, I think Texans in general are both more evolved and nicer than the Texas government, but then, I don't need to tell you that; you got to watch Governor Goodhair make a fool of himself all over the country for months.

So what do we do about this whole expectation-reality-evolution thing?  Well, last night at an OA meeting, somebody said that every moment of suffering he could ever recall came from not accepting the world as it is.  Something's not the way he wants it or he wouldn't have done it that way or this guy isn't doing what he wants.  I think Buddha would be all over that.  Temper your expectations, he'd no doubt suggest, and then point out that the Middle Way, in which we neither cling to expectations nor push them away but merely watch them come and go, is probably the path of least suffering for all beings.

As for reality and evolution--well, they happen all by themselves.

Practicing Medicine Without a License

I went to an OA convention this weekend. Well, part of one, anyway. I never did get my shit together enough to actually register for this thing, so I just showed up on Saturday morning and paid the day registration fee. It was pretty cool, though, all things considered. There was a great motivational speaker, a couple of nifty workshops, a decent lunch (the restaurant was completely FUBAR, but that's neither here nor there) and a lot of people I know were there, so I got to chat with everybody. Sunday was a bust, between a massage appointment (yay!) and the Oscars (boo!), and I ended up going to bed somewhat early and missing the "big awards" at the end. Nobody tell me who won Best Picture. I'm hiding under a rock until The Hunger Games comes out.

So, today I went to the Post Office at lunchtime to send yet another partial to yet another literary agent (yay!). This did not go well. It kind of never does. I get weirded out, paranoid, think that everyone is staring at me and am sure I'm going to be caught at any moment. Caught doing what, I have no idea. The whole thing is Scaley and Fang territory if I've ever been there, and Caesar, the cat who keeps dinosaurs out of my kitchen, is usually miles away and fast asleep.

But, okay, I got there, and I mailed the package, and I was on my way back to the office when my blood sugar hit the floor. In a great example of I-should-not-be-driving-in-this-condition I managed to miss my turn, get on the freeway for no apparent reason, get off one exit later and loop back to the office around the High-Five interchange, which was inefficient, but worked, I guess. I made it to the elevator without falling down and grabbed a package of Skittles out of the candy jar up front, snarfed them all down in one gulp (no chewing necessary) and kind of fell into my chair, waiting for the sugar to kick in.

I hate this part. My whole body is telling me I need to keep eating until the sugar kicks in, which takes a little time. My brain, on the other hand, knows it just had some sugar, that straight sugar is really bad for it, that a titrated dose is the only amount I'd better have, and that if I have more I'm probably going to be right back in this position in a couple of hours, only with a nice splitting headache to go along. So I sat there, as I often do, gritting my teeth and going, "Come on, come on," until the sugar kicked in, which it did in about ten minutes. Then I was able to get up, go into the kitchen, get my lunch, eat it and behave like a fairly normal human being the rest of the day.

(Annoyingly, I have a lollipop in my car for such emergencies. Completely forgot about it. The brain does not engage when the blood glucose drops below 60.)

Anyway, as I was eating, I was reading stuff from the convention. I found this flyer about things to consider when you're making your food plan. It was all good stuff, good advice and so on, until I got to No. 14: "Have I diagnosed myself as hypoglycemic so I can eat many times each day?"

Oh, yeah. Hypoglycemia doesn't exist (it's even bolded for effect) and I'm making this up.

For Buddha's sake, who wrote that flyer, and where did they get their M.D.? This has been happening to me since I was a little kid. It's worse when I eat sugar. It's better when I have meals about every three hours. I don't have to eat a lot. Just a piece of fruit and some cheese is fine. But I really don't need to burn extra energy hopping up and down trying to convince people I have a "real" disorder.

Okay, maybe I'm overpersonalizing this, but the tone these things are written in comes across to me as, well, a bunch of sanctimonious bullshit. Not that it isn't well-intended, but you remember the obnoxious kindergarten or first-grade teacher you had who used the royal "we" when she meant "you" all the time? Ie, "We don't poke other people" or "We remember our seats"? Yeah. Like that. I hated being talked to like a six-year-old when I was a six-year-old. I promise you, my temperament has not improved since then.

I'd like to hunt down the author of this flyer and see if he or she is aware of how he or she comes across. I bet he or she would be horrified to be compared to an obnoxious kindergarten teacher. But then, I know how these conversations tend to go. "There, there, dear. We didn't mean you. A real medical diagnosis is okay. It's those other people, the ones that are diagnosing themselves, that this is directed toward."

To which I say, bullshit. If you've been moping around for weeks and all you can think about is how great it would be to slash your wrists, I'm not going to wait for you to be diagnosed with clinical depression before I tell you to fucking call 911. If you have a condition, and something makes it better, why would you not do that something?! Nobody prescribed to me four days a week of swimming in chlorinated water. It just seems to help. So I do it. It's called common sense, people. Believe it or not, it's out there somewhere.

Seeing as my language is deteriorating, I'm cutting off this blog post before it gets downright un-religionish. But you see my point. Besides, Joan is wiping the foam from my mouth and taking the keyboard from my hands. Bye, now.

Talk Thursday: The Buffet Rule

Ah, you say. At last, Jen is going to stop fooling around and do something serious. She's going to talk business, high finance, politics. Explain how the middle class tax rates are higher than the tax rates on millionaires and how capital gains taxes are largely to blame. How instituting regressive taxes now, in the middle of a recession, will only cause a greater drag on the economy and cause more people to fall into poverty while causing millionaires to remain largely unaffected. Yep, that's what I have in mind, all right. Have a seat on the La-Z-Boy, pop open a bottle of Chateaubriand and pour it into your Waterford crystal glassware, because I--

HA HA HA HA HA!!! I knew I wouldn't make it through that paragraph with a straight face. I'm amazed I got as far as I did. No, people, I'm here to talk about food. The Buffet rule. Possibly the most important rule ever instituted in the life of Jen. The Rule is, or was, very simple: Stay the hell away from buffets. They're dangerous. Forget regressive taxes, we're talking regressive eating. Because, honestly, does anybody ever go to a buffet with a plan to have a nice simple meal and hang out with friends? No. You go to a buffet to chow down. To eat until it's coming out your ears, and then to stuff it back into your ears. If you don't knock down at least two thousand calories, you're going to have to stop at an Outback Steakhouse afterward and eat an entire Bloomin' Onion just to keep the universe from falling out of balance. It's all about the food, and as much of the food as you can possibly manage.

The first year I was in OA, I wouldn't have gone within a hundred yards of a buffet. I was having enough trouble with this whole idea of just eating enough food to, you know, live and be healthy, rather than enough food to feed India for a year. Going to a place with scads of food, lots of it being stuff I wasn't supposed to eat anymore (like a dessert table--who in hell needs an entire dessert table?) was just Right Out. Restaurants were trouble enough.

But then something happened where I had a Dr. House kind of epiphany. Our friends T and T wanted to go to the Golden Corral for dinner. (I dunno if you've ever been to a Golden Corral, but it's the buffet to end all buffets, bested only by practically every other buffet on the planet. Let's just say that beauty queens and supermodels do not eat at Golden Corral. Once in a while you might see a decent-looking dude, but he's usually there with his mom.) Anyway, I tried to talk them into the nice Mexican place down the street, but they were pretty dead set on Golden Corral. I think it was shrimp night, or something.

So I pulled up in my car and sat there for a minute. I couldn't believe I was going to walk into a Golden Corral, and I likewise couldn't believe I was going to walk into a Golden Corral and not eat two or three of everything on the dessert table. (Addicted to sugar, remember?) So I sat there, and I fretted, and then I started to have a conversation with myself as though both of us were rational adults. "Jen," I said to myself, "you live in America, in our time. There are going to be buffets. Someday you're going to be at a wedding or a business meeting or something, and there's going to be a buffet lunch or dinner, and you're not going to be able to avoid it, so you might as well start learning how to handle them, like, for example, now." And I thought about Buddha and the Middle Way, neither grabbing for nor pushing away, and I thought, "I would like to go into this restaurant, have a single plate of food, and enjoy the company of my friends."

And I'll be goddamned if that wasn't exactly what happened.

Since then I have been to other buffets. In fact, I went to a breakfast buffet with Joan last Sunday (took my own cute little container of sugar-free fake maple syrup so I could have pancakes). And while all of them have been challenging in one way or another, I've never been as intimidated by any of them as I was by that first Golden Corral. My friend Kellum took me to lunch at Afrah once and when he saw it was a buffet, he stopped and said, "Hey, is this okay? We can go someplace else." And I was able to say, "Yeah, actually, I think I'll be fine." Which was huge. I mean, I've had this eating disorder since I was about four, people. I don't even really have childhood memories that don't in some way involve food. And I'm a whole long way from cured, but that part of it--the buffet part--is worlds better.

Which, you gotta admit, is a lot cooler than high finance and tax rates. At least, I think so.

Talk Thursday: Dance in the Dark

Okay, that's really last week's topic, but I don't see this week's yet and I have exactly twenty minutes and another cup of coffee to churn out a blog post. Let's hear it for deadlines. People, I am pleased to report that the Web site I was managing for a certain nonprofit has been taken out of my hands, by popular vote, and placed into the hands of another, equally competent (probably more competent) person. My stint is done. It ain't my problem no more. Well, actually, it is in that I've got to get this new person the software and the passwords and everything, and show her How It All Works (oops, I said her--well, that narrows it down to 51% of the human race) but in a few weeks I can Wash My Hands of the Whole Thing. I have never in my life been so happy to hand over a task. Happy dance! (In the dark, where no one can see me and think I might be, you know, ungrateful to have had this Service Opportunity or something.)

You see, I have this disease, which I believe is hereditary. I call it Civic Responsibility Syndrome. My dad has it, too, and I think my mom and sister have a touch of it also. It's like this: If I join an organization, the odds are very good that within a year, I'll end up being President. Not by choice or anything; the job just tends to open up, and I just happen to be standing there, and and and. Which was why, when the opportunity arose, I volunteered to take over the Web site. (Western accent, quoting Seth Bullock from Deadwood: "I volunteered to be the building inspector because I didn't want to be the god-damned sheriff!") Yep, that probably says it all right there. If you're in charge of one thing, then you can't be asked to be in charge of the whole thing. And as they say (well, Alison Bechdel said it, anyway), "She who controls the details, controls the organization."

So. I am no longer in charge of the Web site. This is a good thing. Now, I've got to find some way to not be President, or anything else for that matter. This organization is awesome, but I'm fine with just being a rank-and-file for a while. Maybe forever. Because, well, people, I am having a hard time over here.

Yeah, it could just be one of those mood swings. Or it could be encroaching menopause (I've got some of the symptoms, and yes, I know I'm only forty-two.) But, seriously, things are not going well. I'm not getting to the pool on time, and consequently spending less time swimming once I finally show up. I've (ahem) gained ten pounds since Halloween. I've been on and off sugar, which messes with my meds and sends my brain into the outer stratosphere. This last week I've had an ongoing battle with cake frosting, which is the Jen equivalent of heroin (minus the projectile vomiting). I feel like aliens have possessed my body and are plainly out to kill me. All I have to do is start drinking again and--

No, that would be bad. That would be very very bad. You think sugar messes with my meds...

The trouble is, try explaining to anybody that you're addicted to sugar. They look at you like you're crazy. (Hi.) I mean, you need sugar to live. Everything you eat is eventually broken down into simple sugars. True fact, but large quantities of refined sugar still hit my system like--well, more like cocaine than heroin really, but cocaine addiction really doesn't convey the same sort of picture that heroin addiction does. Lack of needles, maybe. And no, just for the record, I haven't tried either one. Just going on What I've Been Told here. Given my lack of funds (my parents are rich; I am a salaryman, or salarywoman, whatever) and my tendency to abuse any substance available until it's gone, I think that's probably Just As Well.

So, anyway, I don't know what to do about this. Except what I've been doing; keep going to meetings, keep working the Twelve Steps, keep emailing my sponsor, blah blah blah etc. And stay out of the kitchen at work to the extent possible. I wish they'd move the ice machine closer to the door.

On The Existence of God, Or Lack Thereof

Now there's a nice lighthearted topic to discuss with friends and total strangers. If there's a better way to win friends and influence people, I can't imagine what it is. In all seriousness, though, Buddhism has been described as "a religion without a god" by some old dude who was a lot wiser than me. Buddha Himself seemed to think that this was an intractable problem, and predicted that Buddhism would die out within 500 or so years of his death. Which it did, in India, but it had already spread to China by then and was working its way into Japan. And it got back to India, eventually, which just goes to prove something or other.

(India, by the way, has millions of gods. They might have one for every Indian. If not, they at least have enough that everyone who wants one, gets one, and those that don't can afford to give theirs away to friends or family members. "Here, will you take care of my god for me while I run up to the store?" "Sure, in fact, I can adopt it if you want." "Be my guest." Polite bunch, Indians.)

Anyway, Buddhism isn't too hung up on the existence of God. When you read through the Dhammapada, you can get through all five thousand pages (approximately) without once tripping over a reference to the existence of God. Well, unless you count "divine calm," "divine edification," "purity of heart" and stuff like that. Which do sound suspicious; I mean, if they're divine, where do they come from? Gotta be a divine being out there someplace. Or is there?

Pose this question to ten different Buddhists and you'll get twenty different answers, not to mention forty deep discussions. My Buddhist monk friend ChiSing said that if there is a God, He must be an enlightened being, and if He isn't enlightened, He needs to be. I leaned on him a little more (he used to be a Baptist) and he said that it doesn't really matter if there's a God or not; our job in this life is to practice compassion and walk the Noble Eightfold Path. Not because God told us to but because it's the right thing to do. (Is there anything more annoying than the right answer that's not the answer you set out to get? Grrr.)

A long time ago, when I was running with a Lutheran street gang, I told my Lutheran pastor friend I wasn't sure I believed in God. He asked what God, in particular, I didn't believe in. I told him I didn't believe in the Old Testament God with his fits of temper and putting Moses in charge (seriously, is it me or would that guy be the first one kicked off the island on "Survivor"?) and messing with Job's head and almost getting Isaac killed and stuff like that. He said (to my surprise) that he didn't believe in that God, either; he believed in the New Testament God, who said (about Jesus) "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased" and offered salvation for the whole world, no exceptions--"that all those who believe in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life" and all that. Given some thought, I could see his point, but I didn't believe in the New Testament God either. Nor, to be fair, did I believe in Zeus, Jupiter, Hera, Aphrodite, Osiris, Isis, Qetzlcoatl or Thor. (Rather fond of Thor, though. Hey, I'm Icelandic.) I was an equal-opportunity disbeliever. I didn't tell the pastor this, though. Somehow I didn't think he'd take the one-more-god-past-pantheism disbelieving as all that good of a thing.

So if there is no God in Buddhism (and again, that point is up for debate), what's the focus? Well, the Noble Eightfold Path, mainly, and compassion and lovingkindness for all beings. I've met religious folks who don't believe it's possible to be a good, moral person without believing in God. I don't get that. Seems like all humans are born with a tendency to like other humans and want to be with them. It's the rest of the world that gets in the way. And to suggest that we wouldn't be good to each other unless we were afraid of going to Hell--well, that's just sad. That's suggesting that human compassion is moot and we're all just robots operated by fear.

I think they're wrong. I know plenty of good, moral people who don't believe in God. Some of them are Buddhists and some of them aren't. And some of them write blog posts. Cheers, y'all.

Book o' the Decade Alert! For those of you trying to navigate the Twelve Steps with no faith in God, or a healthy doubt as to whether God exists, please allow us to present to you Waiting, by Marya Hornbacher. Yes, it is possible to get sober/abstinent/drug free without forcing yourself to believe what you don't believe. Besides that, though, Ms. Hornbacher is an amazing writer. Check out her earlier books - Wasted, Madness and Sane - for some unputdownable nonfiction.

Talk Thursday: Do-Over

The only thing more boring than writing is writing about writing. That is, to the person outside it. To the person inside it, writing about writing makes perfect sense; after all, it's not like you can talk about writing. Well, I mean, I guess you can, but it doesn't go over very well at parties. Probably because there's not much happening. If y'all could see me now (and one of these days I'll hook up my webcam and blog Live! From Afrah!), all you'd see is a fat chick hunched over a table near the counter, typing like mad on a laptop that's perpetually in danger of having baba ganouj smeared all over it. You'd probably also notice she's one of the few white chicks in the place, and that she's not wearing a hijab, but other than that, unremarkable. Just woman, pita bread, baba ganouj, laptop and much typing. Yeah. That's exciting.

But, anyway, I do like to write about writing. I think the expression we're looking for here is "getting it out of my system." Today in particular I'm practically tearing my hair out because I can't talk about writing. Not to my peeps at work, anyway. I've been working very hard at keeping my working life separate from my personal life, and for the most part I think I've succeeded. I mean, my cow orkers know I have a partner, and that I live in Far East Dallas with some cats and hang with a Buddhist street gang and swim a lot, but that's about it. That I write stuff has not intruded into the office consciousness, at least as far as I know. Course, if it had, I probably wouldn't have noticed; to paraphrase Luke Skywalker, if there's a bright shining center of office gossip, I'm in the cube it's the farthest from.

Which meant there was no one to tell when I got an email from the agent that had requested the first fifty pages of Mindbender. Last week, when I got the first email, I was so busy that all I thought about was where in the world I'd find the time to get together a package to mail and when I'd be able to get myself to the post office. And of course how I'd evict Scaley and Fang, my fraternal twin dinosaurs of anxiety and panic (respectively) from my kitchen so that I could somehow make this happen. But I did evict the dinosaurs and I did get the package together and yes! I even got myself to the post office. And I wasn't expecting to hear anything for a while, but now it's what, about a week later, and here's another email.

It took me a really long time to open this email. I darn near forwarded it to Joan, unopened, and asked her to just read it to me, but that would have been cowardly. I may be crazy, but a coward I ain't. I took a deep breath, stretched my shoulders and my fingers, told myself it was okay no matter what it said, and when I was momentarily convinced, I clicked on the email.

The guy was writing to say he wanted another 150 pages. And I about fell out of my chair.

Uh, what? Another what? He wanted what? I had to do what? How was I supposed to do that? Scaley and Fang immediately materialized in my cube and started making a big mess. Then it occurred to me that this was actually good news and I should be celebrating with the Spirit of Happy, not chasing around the Dinosaurs of Angst. But I couldn't. Celebrate, that is. Because I was at work and no one at work knew anything about this and--then the phone rang. It does that. Often at the most inopportune times.

When I got rid of the annoying insurance adjuster on the phone and the smoke cleared and the dust settled and I'd managed to convince Scaley and Fang they'd be much more comfortable in the conference room, I suddenly realized I was going to have to do it all again. Head back to my kitchen. Get to work. Put another package together. Convince Microsoft Word 2010 to number pages without drawing a cute little border around each one (Whose idea was that? Bill Gates, I hope somebody tattoos a black outline around your face). And do it all in the next couple of days, no later than Monday for certain. Eesh. My first thought was to skip my usual meeting tonight and head home immediately, but Joan (who, seeing as she lives with me, does know about this writing thing) told me no, I'd better go to the meeting. Something about when I get all angsty and start bouncing off the walls, a meeting helps. It's probably safer for any ceramics she might have around, anyway.

So I go forth for a do-over, or a do-it-again, or a same-task-different-pages. Or something like that. Wish me luck. And yes, I know I'm a little manic right now. But be honest; can you think of a better time? And do you think I should take out all that smooching on page 137, or should I just leave it there and let the lips fall where they may? And why am I asking you, anyway? Have a nice evening, y'all.

Talk Thursday: When Next I'm President...

...actually, I should be very careful what I say about that sort of thing. I seem to have the same weird disease as my father has. I call it Civic Responsibility Syndrome. It manifests like this: Every time you join an organization you become President. I watched it happen to my dad over and over again; band boosters, soccer leagues, Kiwanis, model railroaders. In my case I've managed to dodge at the last minute and end up as vice-president, but I gotta tell ya, vice-president of a homeowner's association is not much different than president, particularly when the actual President bails on you, moves to Oregon and leaves you holding the bag two weeks before the termite tenting. Which she scheduled for Easter Weekend. I repeat, Easter Weekend. Only the biggest holiday of the whole year for the 60-some-odd percent of residents in our complex who were Hispanic, and she thought that would be a great weekend to kick them all out of their homes. Thanks, lady. Don't think I've forgotten.

I've also managed to dodge becoming President (or "chair," as it's politely called) of our local OA intergroup. I did it by hastily volunteering for something else. We have a rule that you can only hold one office at a time, so I'm safe for a while. As Bulluck said in "Deadwood," "I said I'd be the building inspector because I didn't want to be the goddamned sheriff!" But I'm on borrowed time here. Sooner or later, people will start looking at me with that godawful smile and say, "Wouldn't she make a great President?"

Eesh.

For this reason, and this reason alone, I never went into politics. But imagine if I had. A bipolar Buddhist blue dog Bachmann clone, making up stuff about the Revolutionary War and insisting that straight people could learn to enjoy gay sex with counseling and enough alcohol. What a fun campaign that would be. And when I won, I'd make my very first phone call to Harvard University, where, probably in a state of mild panic, I'd say, "Send me your very best professors of psychology, philosophy, religion, U.S. history, foreign relations, social psychology and cultural anthropology. No, make that two anthropologists, I want them to argue with each other. And an economist. No, two economist, and make sure only one of them is a Keynesian. Thanks. Oh, and a bottle of anything. And a glazed doughnut. To go." When my illustrious panel arrived, I'd say, "Congratulations, guys (and ladies). You're my new cabinet. Somebody fire the old one. Shouldn't there be a doughnut around here somewhere?"

Because, seriously, a president is only as good as the person he talked to last. Well, at least Clinton was. So I'd like to talk to someone last who actually knew what the fuck he (she) was talking about. I might have a snowball's chance of surviving the first year if I did that. It'd sort of be like an episode of "House." I'd walk into a Cabinet meeting and say, "Al-Qaeda is threatening to harm puppies and say bad things about the nation's children unless we withdraw our big ugly mugs from Libya. What should we do? Discuss!" and then stand back and listen to what everyone has to say. Once everybody's wound down (and I've pried the two anthropologists away from each other's throat, and one of them has managed to get in the last 'Not in my village' and the other one has tossed off a 'Chagnon proved that years ago'"), I'll have some idea of what to do. How anybody runs a country without a Panel of Learned Experts, I have no idea.

Let's see, what else would I do: I'd immediately declassify all the documents about Area 51 and hand them over to WikiLeaks. I'd tell them to make their release look like an accident and make sure my Army chief dude made some loud speeches with some nice big scary words. Then, once the tizzy died down and everybody got over the fact that all we ever did there was make top-secret aircraft and there were never really any alien bodies, I'd radio !X'to on L9 in the M-51 and say, "Okay, they bought it. You owe me 50 quatloos."

I'd close Guantanamo and turn it into a beach. It's in Cuba. It ought to be a beach. As for anybody still there when it closed, I'd get them all jobs at Disney World on the "It's a Small World" ride. That should keep them out of trouble for roughly the rest of their lives.

I'd raise everybody's taxes by the same nominal amount and lower spending across the board by another nominal amount, every year until we had a balanced budget. Then I'd ask what was so hard about this and wait for someone to tell me.

Finally, I'd tell Nancy Grace to shut up. And when she started in on the First Amendment thing, I'd tell her to shut up again.

Unless, of course, that would clinch my re-election. Maybe I'd just tell her to keep it down in there.