Whinge

Tai wins: the asterisk hid a download of an '83 Eyeless in Gaza recording, though their best is undoubtedly their 7" Kodak Ghosts Run Amok with "China Blue Vision".

Did surprisingly well the past two days: an apple, tekka maki and gari, mushrooms finger-picked out of leftover pumpkin risotto. My mother feels too sick to bother preparing eggplant parmesan for dinner. I'll heed this rare alignment of stars and brew us cups of honeybush once Oprah retreats. I moved back after a brief and undignified second intensive-partial-inpatient treatment. Food issues are never raised in concern at home, only humiliation. Like standing in the middle of the grocery aisle contemplating a processed food item, asking, "Would you keep this down?" Eyes darting to the other carts who tune us out with the muzak, hoping for sympathy, saved face. It's not her fault. Her daughter's throwing up is a tantrum, an artistic temperament disdainful of suburban sanctity. My mother and treatment team act the same way; instead of merely asserting authority, they rub in dependency. They label anyone different as difficult. True, I chuckled at heteronormative appeals to fertility or nonsense about Barbie's real-life measurements but ate everything on my plate (except for pork, rice, and green beans, permitted refusals) and dutifully discussed My Past with the idiot counselor who never hid her checklist. If they suspect their own impotence, your transcript reads umanageable.

I'm technically EDNOS, purging disorder as opposed to bulimia. The diagnosis reeks of wannarexic self-identification in "pro-ana" spheres, and I avoid it. The last psychiatrist my parents tried - Holly, at a Christian practice with Focus on the Family pamphlets in their waiting room - deserves some credit for the distinction. I have the raw anger of the bulimics, none of their impulsivity, the avoidant behavior of the anoretics without their perfection. I have a healthier relation to food than most. Thank the gardening, cheesemaking, and other quasihipster culinary sustainability hobbies (someday, apiculture) I should share with obsolete Transcedentalist utopias or a lesbian separatist commune like Alapine. Cooking allows more control than eating. Why let eating disturb you if you know your purging undoes it? I can't think like that anymore with physical complications in the way of our escape clause. I'm too aware of food and lost any pleasure in abstention months ago when the pain started. We all know fat does not mean recovered.