Obzocky

Built-in metaphor: today marks the Full Hunger Moon. 51 degrees. Opened windows upstairs and tried not to jump out of them on creative impulse.

Everyone's ten fleshed out this emissary of digital data in such sincerity and uniqueness I reconsidered scrapping the exercise. Also something about the image looks like Communist propaganda. Thank you Vampire, Undesirable Number One, Cinnamon, Eager Enid, and Tai. You're overdue Jani, All.That.Wander.Are.Not.Lost, and Alba.

1) My internal clock runs on a night rhythm, always has. As a little kid I stayed up reading beneath blankets with a flashlight radio and drank warm tapwater tea. A 4-6am to 10am sleep schedule  disdains breakfast, dinner at 9pm demands a smaller portion and thwarts bingeing despite elevated ghrelin.

2) I'm obsessed with plane crashes and failure analysis. Mostly because I'm pteromerhanophobic. Thank me on your flight for mentally repeating mantras that keep our Boeing from falling out of the sky.

3) Too busy fast forwarding a cassette to the Stone Roses' "Love Spreads", I didn't notice a truck running his red light and totaled my car at 17.

4) Thighs touching means no pants in public and nine years in skirts, collared shirts with 3/4 sleeves, high-waisted dresses, drugstore brand black tights, combat boots or wooden heels.

5) I wish I developed artistic ability beyond doodles of faceless people. (A sorry outlet, Pictionary.)  People assume I must be an artist because I’m weird and it kills me.

6) In second grade I started reading the newspaper daily, just obituaries at first. No idea why.

7) I cannot produce an accent in any language I've studied. When I worked retail, customers asked if I was foreign or my parents immigrants, which must indicate some unknown speech impediment. Three possible causes: southern upbringing, Yankee parents, orthodontics.

8) I admired prominent vertebrae at my lowest weight and became an amargasaurus in the bathroom mirror. Hunched profile, tossing back my dry lank hair, roaring like a dinosaur. I weighed myself far more than necessary for piece of mind to perform this embarrassing Cretaceous caricature.

9) I've been out to friends since eighth grade, founded my school district's Gay/Straight Alliance, received a community award for LGBT activism, did an interview about gay youth for the local alternative paper, was nicknamed "that dyke chick," yet family members aren't in the know. This previous National Coming Out Day (10/11) I explained how queer is part political identity, part rejection of binary gender and implied equality of affection in bisexuality to my mother and 22 year old sister. The former thinks I'm (still) forcing myself to be different, the latter thinks I'm (still) in denial about latent lesbianism.

10) Zen sadism appeals to my spiritual vacancy. A favorite koan:  Whenever anyone asked him about Zen, the great master Gutei would quietly raise one finger into the air. A boy in the village began to imitate this behavior. Whenever he heard people talking about Gutei's teachings, he would interrupt the discussion and raise his own finger. Gutei heard about the boy's mischief. When he saw him in the street, he seized him and cut off his finger. The boy cried and began to run off, but Gutei called out to him. When the boy turned to look, Gutei raised his finger into the air. At that moment the boy became enlightened. Another: Say this is a stick and I will beat you with it. Say this is not a stick and I will also beat you with it. Now, what will you say? Accept life likes to fuck with us and suffer your own terms. Would you lose a finger for enlightenment?

Fauxganoff

Unlike reverse thinspo, reverse "food porn" only offends the appetite and any romanticized notions of vintage dinner parties through lurid color photography:

Better than seeing a fish head, Americans?

Banana candle salad with pineapple base, cherry tip, and mayonnaise discharge.

Bologna, sweet potato, and applesauce.

Tuna cream. ("Cow udders?" was the first comment.)

Olive aspic tower.

Mushroom aspic.



Tuna picnic loaf.



No idea what this is... salmon with avocado icing? Rich in glycine and proline!


Fun fact: the 1950's lasting culinary contributions (unlike ring molds) include Cheez Whiz, Coco Puffs, IHOP, and MSG in baby food.


Halfway through the decade, Dwight Eisenhower noticed a similarity between schoolchildren's bellies and the mass consumption of gelatin. He organized the President's Council on Youth Fitness, then shot Kennedy seven years later, who'd taken credit.

Many thanks to Gee, That Food Looks Terrible! for filler.

My mother made an equally abominable and related dish tonight, green bean casserole (condensed cream soup, fried onions) as a side to short ribs. I was excused, arriving late enough from work to get by fixing fruit salad over mesclun while Real Time with Bill Maher diverted attention. Heard a nifty tip somewhere  frozen ginger grates easier, shredding lighter than fresh parmesan. I never thought in high school I'd turn out this banal, the highlight of my day tossing strawberries in white balsamic, pondering a little too long whether to slice grapes or trust them not to roll off the plate whole. Low novelty seeking scores, Holly determined. Then again, I'm no longer a 14 year old girl spitting into porcelain because she can't in her parents' faces. Safety in routine, not a very original thought here. M.C. Escher, notorious celebrant of needless complexities, put it best, "We adore chaos because we love to produce order." But these fears, this restlessness, the failures, aren't pressure to thrive under. You forsake esoteric concepts like ambition or love for the immediate security of basic needs and self-punishment of disruption. I'm losing. Mind, words, flesh. It's just so comfortable.

Schuldturm

Returned from another monthly infatuation vacation at C's before he loses his apartment to money trouble of my own. Fifteen hours tachycardic pacing and the scale registered a loss - 109.2. An indifferent achievement. I want to be held and hurt.  I want to smash through a mirror without a single shard hitting the floor, all reflective icebergs embedded in my body embraced within the frame. Like the ill-fated U.S. auto industry attempt to laminate windshield safety glass. It was nicknamed the "circle of death" for your neck twice gashed by its jagged, cellulose-bonded crown. Feels more believable than the pierce of less than three hundred characters. I am so fucking fucked.

The Seasons Reverse

"Nature is badly arranged, dear boy." - the father of Blaise Cendrars, in his suicide note

The price of kale differs $2.04 between four groceries in town. I went for $.75/lb at the 300,000 sq. ft. international market (finale sale: $.49 a bundle) and slipped sweets into my basket, enough to mock the random appearance of a leafy green vegetable as diversionary tactics. Chili/sugar/salt mix tamarinds, Reed's peanut butter ginger chews, Bali's espresso and citrus green tea hard candies, and a Valentine's promo bag of cherry Tootsie Pops. The bakery ran out of the cheese crowns I always make a point to buy (a single one, purged into its frosted pastry bag). A slice of "Amish recipe pumpkin bread" on the day-old rack offered a cream cheese substitute. Acceptable, so long as the money doesn't go to the actual fundamentalist group disallowing police intervention for rape and puppy mills. Shame steered my cart to the checkout lane of a heavyset girl. She kept chatting to her co-worker restocking flavored cigarillos, paid no attention and passed no judgment on things decided in accordance with Amyclaean silence.

Binge? I never. Sometimes I eat frantically the way Lifetime movies depict bulimia, little pieces taken without utensils from cold and congealed leftovers, not enough to make a proper meal or threaten the waistline of their actress. I don't binge. Lollipop hanging out my mouth. Rooting in the glove compartment for J's Christmas gift, a hobo tool. Eating the misshapen tamarinds three at a time and dropping granules on the seat. Annoyed a three inch fork slows consumption. Wiping my mouth on the back of an equally sticky hand, disposing of evidence when another vehicle pulls up. Over in less than ten minutes. Never touched the hard candies or chews, 19/20 lollipops left, what's the problem? I eat too much high fructose fruit to crave additional sugar beyond the occasional square of dark chocolate or scoop of ice cream. Blame C and the Jolly Ranchers scattered over his desk, a fantastical smell embedded in dreams (and Gerald Lee Mitchell's). Or the Eltroxin, forgotten unlike most of my chewable supplements because drinking is complicated.

We don't outright deny; we adjust, resolve, minimize, compensate. 75% of taste occurs outside the mouth for everyone. True, mostly olfactory, but who'd contradict  the visual feast when you rearrange your fridge again and again, satisfied handling food without gustation, running fingertips over packaging on grocery shelves, chemoreceptors hidden among whorls and stimulated by texture. We adapt, learn differently. I discovered the taste buds on my epiglottis through purging instead of a textbook.

"Drawing on research that shows that perception and mental imagery engages neural machinery

in a similar fashion [to habituation] and similarly affect emotions, response tendencies and

skilled motor behavior, researchers [at Carnegie Mellon University] tested the effects of

repeatedly imagining the consumption of a food on its actual consumption."

By the last experiment researchers determined "mental imagery

can reduce the effort people will expend to get food."

+ 1 for hypnotherapists. Self-help audiocassettes work.

Pollux and Castor and Regulus and Procyon

Holy hell, triple digits in the best possible scenario! Thank you followers sincerely for the support, humor, and poetic asides. The self-indulgence of blogging and eating disorders makes your tolerance for my defenses that much more endearing.

J and I went to the Los Caprichos exhibit today,  Francisco Goya's 1799 collection confronting "human hypocrisy, pretense, fear, and irrationality, picturing them in every conceivable form ... monsters, specters, corpses, and other bitter or callous beings enact[ing] challenges to authority of all kinds, including that of the church and state." His etchings highlighted "the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual." Apt sentiment to borrow for American misconduct, what I touched on in posts prior and always crowds my mind between numbers. Its commentary was brief, translations of titles and the occasional guess to meaning or historical note. We learned prostitutes were called owls under old Spanish slang - anyone know why? Are the words similar? Is it a play on the owl's symbolism, nocturnal streetwalking and heart-of-gold whore wisdom? The art itself was small but convincing. We went too late to eat in the museum café before closing and instead walked around outside, frigid air circling ankles like nipping dogs. Snow's beauty lasts the duration of the false quiet when it falls. Not enough accumulates to look better than lint gray slush collected at the edges of parking lots. J tells me I'm always complaining. Probably. I'm optimistic about our six mile winter hike next weekend, though. And thick striped socks.