Alecto's Ophelia

Adventures in raw food, or, I feel better now, thank you.

I'm feeling much better now, thanks.

In an effort to distract myself from the absolute panic over an impending 5 solo days I ordered up a juice fast. Actually, I think they call it a cleanse, but whatever. This is nothing I've ever done. As a matter of fact it goes against every grain in my belief systems in terms of what we should or should not put in our bodies and how. It also goes against my belief that we should have an intimate relationship with the food we consume. I am also late to Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma but I appear to have drifted in that direction anyway. 

The whole purpose of the cleanse (I thought) was to create enough physical discomfort to mask the emotional drama because I'm well known for creating physical discomfort to mask emotional drama. Or trauma. Take your pick. As it turns out I wonder if it was something else all along.

After a bit of research, and I'll be honest, it wasn't a lot of research, I eliminated all powdered mixes, cooked or processed in any way food (?) and focused on raw food. I found a very local vendor (NYC and Southern CT only and if you really want to know who and what, leave a comment and I'll send you an email and no, they don't ship) placed my order on the internet and then promptly put it out of my mind until Sunday at 3 PM when I had to drive 20 miles to pick it up. Now, if you've been reading this blog for any length of time you probably have a good idea of what goes on in my kitchen on Sundays.  All the cooking for the week. That's right, all of it. Unless Nanny's cooking something in which case I'm off the hook (she's awesome, this one).

I started early Sunday morning with a trip to the farmers market for the stuff my garden doesn't give me enough of these days. I needed to slow roast some tomatoes for paste (thanks, Kitt, worked wonderfully), make a boat load of Sunday sauce to eat and to freeze, braise some frozen (I thawed them first) lamb shanks with a ton of leftover salad turnips (they're really sweet) some potatoes about to get too starchy and a mess of other veggies needing to be consumed (plus an entire bottle of Chianti, to braise in, not to drink) and then also some red beans for rice to sit and stew in hot sauce for three days in the fridge. We had a potato leak pie for Sunday dinner so there was that too.

In the middle of all this I have to pick up my juice. I leave Cletus baby sitting the roasting tomatoes and bubbling sauce and head out to parts generally avoided. Not a bad neighborhood, per see, just a bit snootier than I tolerate easily. I'm still having trouble with the Prada Moms in Escalades. I pick up my juice at a yoga studio. I am happy about this because I keep thinking yoga might be a nice thing for me to do I've just never gotten around to working it out. When I arrive the juice has not been delivered and there are several unhappy women milling about. It is not really that late, just twenty minutes and the poor guy is stuck in traffic.

I sit down to wait. I have found a book to read and the silence of the space is working for me. Until more women show up and the atmosphere turns a bit testy. After awhile the man is still not here and the women are demanding their drinks and the poor girl at the counter is beginning to lose her cool and I bury my nose deeper into my borrowed book. By the time the delivery vehicle arrives there is a swarm on the back of the truck reminiscent of Filene's Basement in the old days. I am not a pusher. I hate confrontation so I sit and wait. After awhile I get nervous because what if they don't have enough? What if a mistake was made or someone took what wasn't hers? What will I do? I wade into the crowd in hopes of grabbing my three green bags. One of the more irate women is blocked in by the truck. She yells at him to get out of her way. He cannot move his vehicle, there are too many women stuck head and torso first inside. I am suddenly one of them; I dive, I scoop, I bolt. I run like hell for my car nearly getting myself run over by one of the hostile ladies screeching past me and out of the parking lot.

I am terrified.

I go home with my juice, unload it into the refrigerator as instructed and promptly (again) forget about it. I finish cooking and baking. I am light headed with the smells in the house. I want to eat all of it immediately if not sooner. I am beside myself in anticipation of coming meals. I sit down to write the last post and I go to bed. 

In the morning I get up and remember that I am fasting. I am not too sorry yet. I pack literally half a gallon of fluid (properly contained) into my backpack along with my computer and all the other garbage I haul back and forth every day. I get on the train and go to work. The fluids were fine, I was not.

Eventually I learned about juice fasting. I learned this because I googled everything I could find to explain the current state of my body, which was in significant upheaval. I went to bed that night and slept very badly. In the morning it was a little better and off I went again with my fluids. At this point I want solid food so bad I'm ready to chew tree bark (city tree bark even)and need I mention the effect of the re-roasting lamb shanks and lingering scent in the morning?

The next evening, which was last night, I went to bed and slept better than I can remember only waking to disturbingly loud music coming from a disturbingly lingering vehicle at five AM. I didn't go back to sleep. Apparently my body was done sleeping. I can't remember the last time this happened either. I laid there for an hour wondering what was wrong with me and then I got up, went downstairs and ran like hell on my machine (which I'd been doing since Monday anyway in an effort to sweat out as much garbage as possible). When I arrived this morning, on day three of my fast, I felt unbelievably good, nearly euphoric. It is now nearly 4 PM and while I'm looking forward to my prescribed raw fruit and lightly steamed veggies tomorrow, I am not in bad shape at all. I miss my husband, he really needs to come home now but you know, I'm OK.

I wonder about balance, I really do. I also wonder how those women feel today. Better, I hope.

And the next time I feel the need to do this I can bloody well make my own.

The abundance of being alive

I didn't expect much of this garden after the first set of tomatoes more or less bit the dust and most of the carrots and onions didn't bother to do much of anything and the cucumbers turned out round and orange and the squash rotted on the vine and Audrey the pumpkin got out of hand and I did my best just to breathe because that's what brought me here in the first place.

The need to breathe.

I am alone today and tomorrow and two more sleeps after that (not in the car, CG, but I do think of it that way because it is hard to imagine any world that does not have he and me in it together) and I am the epitome of uncomfortable. I have not been alone other than for just one night since I came out of the hospital on Valentine's Day blinking into the sunlight and wondering how it got to be so hard to walk outside in the world. A few of you will know what I mean when I say that the world inverted in on itself and I walked around like some crunched up easter egg rolling off the edge of the universe. I miss MC most times like these because she knew too and it's hard to explain if you haven't had the top of your head come off because words don't come anywhere near doing it justice. It's just a state of being too far off the map for speech. Which might be part of the problem, this need to explain something that probably cannot be said in words. Just breath, maybe. And I'll tell you, neither therapist I've been intimate with for six months could even begin to navigate this paragraph. I just go and write the checks and come home because I am still a good girl in my little compartmentalized ways.

And if it is a good day it's all good and I do what I do and I am satisfied that I have a place in the world. And if it is a bad day I come home and crawl into Beloved's arms and find some amount of peace there. And if it is a very, very bad day and I scream and rail at the world he finds a way, most times, to bring me home again.

He's not here.

I am OK but OK and uncomfortable are coexisting which is a step or two in the right direction. I was never afraid like this. OK, once, when I was pregnant with my boy and I thought about how I would feel if my husband died and I thought, well I have this boy inside me (I knew) and as long as I can get him born all right I will have a piece of something to get me by. I have always struggled with being alone in the world and hold on with all my might when I find a place to put my heart.

And now, really for the first time, I hold on with all my might when I decide to be safe outside my own four walls. I cried last night and fretted up one side and down the other for weeks and finally worked out that none of this was about being alone for four days. It is about being alone forever.

Eighteen months ago we all went to this conference. Eighteen months ago I held Jeffrey's hand and we found an old friend and he confessed to a ten year crush and she blushed and he did and it balanced something and we moved on. We went to dinner, Nomans and Jeffrey and me and another friend who matters like air and is hardly seen at all these days and ate Tapas and drank Sangria except Jeffrey who was still trying to say alive. And we were together and we were happy.

And Jeffrey is dead and NoMans is in San Francisco and I couldn't bear to go without Jeffrey this year even if we hadn't suspended all travel and I didn't want to leave the girls alone for that long with just the nanny. And I know that not all rats bite but I am so very, very afraid that he will not come back the same way that Jeffrey just did not come back and I have no idea how I would even begin to bear that.

Sometimes there are land mines and sometimes there are craters and I'm sitting in one now but I think I can see the end of the other side and I can get there on my own. And that's a good thing.

Yes, well, that

OK, Spartacus, here we go:

1. Where was I ten years ago?
   September 16, 1998, um, lets see, I was at the pinnacle of my tech ed and doc career (almost exactly a year before the shit hit the fan and I moved up that awful slick slope into management where everything slowly crumbled into a hell I'm still trying to wipe off myself (no, I'm not bitter, I'm just still trying to figure out what the f&ck went so horribly wrong)) and everything I did was golden. I was making significant money for the first time in my life and was still trying to figure out why they were paying me to do something that was not only incredibly fun but left me feeling accomplished and competent in ways I had never experienced. I traveled extensively and still liked it. I was in a new relationship that still seemed like a good idea. I did not, however, have possession of my kids until the following summer. That part sucked and was my own fault for not standing up to my ex in the first place. And now that I look at it, it took another nine years before I really took a solid stand.
2. What is on my to do list today?
   I don't really have to do lists because they confuse me. Seriously, they do. It's not that I don't have some vague understanding of what needs to occur (I surely do or I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have a job and my kids wouldn't eat). So here's what I'm thinking of just now. I need to complete my internal security audit, get the Lonely Planet to sign off on it, see if I can't figure out what makes two of those security codes tick and whether we really need them or not before Audit asks me, for the third year in a row, why we have them. I really ought to get going on the waste management templates so that that awfully nice man down south can get on with his plant reporting (he's just hell on Excel templates) but I could maybe avoid that for another day or two because I absolutely HATE how he links his Excel calcs against my very slick database (instead of just using the db calcs that I built for him). I will meet with my boss and his peer to discuss the sixth or seventh revival of a database I've kept limping along for two and a half years and everybody says they can't live without but not many people actually touch it. I will field desperate support calls from local plants and maybe if you haven't pissed me off completely I'll actually take your call (do NOT piss off the only support person you've got). After that I'm going to go home, I had to drive today and did not like it one bit, and finish up the black beans and rice I started last night for tonight's dinner and then I'll start on the spaghetti sauce for Thursday which will be made with the tomatoes from the farmer's market I roasted on Sunday while hanging with the girls and then we'll eat dinner or maybe we already ate dinner. After that I'll read a little more of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma (don't do it unless you're ready to never eat anything from a supermarket, including Whole Foods, again) and then I'll spend some serious quality time with Little Girl and then she'll go to bed and then we'll have some serious quality time with my guy. Whew. That's some to do list. All subject to change at a moments notice with the exception of those last two things. Those will happen regardless.
3. What would I do if I were a billionaire.
   Um. I'll come back to this? Oh, Christ, no, this is one sure way to get me wrapped so tight around the axle I won't move until Sunday.
4. Five places I've lived. Just five? Not possible, how would I pick? I'll start from the beginning.
   Holland Mi, Lansing Mi, Kalamazoo Mi (did I miss any, Mom?), Manchester CT, Moodus CT, Glastonbury CT, Fairfield CT (those are all before I turned 17), Fairfield CT (out of my parent's house), Weston CT, Oxford CT, Ansonia CT, Oxford CT, The Bronx (Van Cortlandt Park), Queens (Astoria), Stamford CT, Stamford CT (I moved), Weston CT. There, that's it to date.
5. Five bad habits. Very funny, again, so many, how do I pick?
   1. I react before thinking, this causes an enormous amount of pain for me and others.
   2. I don't listen to my own body and run it right into the ground more times than not.
   3. I don't ask for help and become overwhelmed and bogged down resulting in pain for me and others.
   4. I tend to isolate myself and don't let people in which supports bad habits one through three.
   5. I do not handle conflict well and tend to hold everything in until I blow. Again, more pain for me and others. Jeeze, that part wasn't fun at all.

I tag all of ya's. Go to it.

Good to be an American

Clearly, with a statement like that I'm likely to have something to say other than I found my dog on Saturday and I love baseball (on Sunday). Here's my guy. We don't know his name yet but we assume he'll let us know. We can take him home in about five weeks at which point we fully expect him to weigh in at about 25 pounds (yeah, you read that right, 25 pounds at 8 weeks). He is a half mask St Bernard.

I've never been to Shea Stadium on account of my Yankee's fanatacism and it was likely I'd be blown up crossing the threshold which is not to say it wouldn't have been worse if I'd gone North to Fenway but I didn't and now Torre is gone and Williams too and I don't love Jeter the same way I loved Williams and O'Neil so when we had the opportunity to go to Shea with a bunch of Au Pairs and their families we figured, what the hell. In the process we found out we had better seats by virtue of NoMan's boss and climbed down a bit from the nosebleeds and had a fabulous afternoon right up until the eigth when they fell apart and then bolted in the ninth when they, The Mets, utterly self destructed and we were afraid that Mets fans might have something in common with Yankees fans when the shit hits the fan and so we scurried...

You can see the new stadium on the right. I don't know what they're going to do with the old one.

Did you know that if you buy bottles of water and or soda from inside they take the bottle caps away and here is NoMans struggling not to spill the bottles that I ended up wearing anyway. It was good to have that much ice cold water in my lap this afternoon. No, seriously.

Here is Cletus in the cheap seats. She likes the cheap seats. I do too except for two things. One: I can't see the ball, I'm too old. Two: I want to vomit every time I look down or any time I look up at the passing planes coming in and out of JFK and LaGuardia. I want it noted that we were approximately six rows from the top. Gasp.

This is not a Met but I sure did admire the man (Jeff Bennett, Atlanta Braves relief pitcher brought in third or forth inning when what's his name, David Wright I think was looking at a third home run):

OK, so there's something about sitting in a ballpark on a sweltering Sunday afternoon (WHICH it was) and the seventh inning stretch comes around and everyone is singing and dancing and later when your Au Pair says that European football games are much more fun you just give her a look that says, honey, we didn't expect you to understand.

God, I do love baseball.

Oh, and um, one other thing. The pellet gun was more than enough. As of five AM this morning we are less two predators in the back yard. He would not let me hang the corpses on a spike as a lesson to others but maybe next time? And I still have five chickens even though one went on walk about early in the week and got all broody in the woods and, well, at least now I have a general idea where to look next time she up and takes a hike off on her own. Eighteen eggs that girl was sitting on. Sigh.

On the politics of politics

I don't know if it's age or time but with each presidential election the issues seem to become more blurred and the screaming louder. I would indicate the direction in which I dress (and for the love of god would somebody Puleeese pick up on that reference we could all USE a little humor these days) but regardless of the revelation I'm bound to take fire one way or another. So why bother? Just so I can add to the screaming? Pass.

OK, having written all that it's only fair to fess up and admit to being just as polarized as the majority. I am as freaked out over Sarah Palin as anybody on the right might be freaked out over Barack Obama and I can give you leventy-leven reasons why too. And at least leventy-ten of them would be fact checked and validated but that's hardly relevant because the idea of voting against versus for something is truly terrifying. In my decidedly humble, if a bit snark like, opinion. But that's the truth of it.

I personally have been voting against benchmarks my entire adult life. And that's not bragging, it's a confession. Of sorts. Yes, I do vote the party ticket even though I don't actually fit most of my party's ideals. Hell, I don't fit any party's ideals. My point being, I vote against the things I find most offensive. Anti-abortion laws, inclusion of church and state and censorship. Those are my big hairy boogies and I choose based on those issues even though the scary party in question may be more supportive of a large number of smaller and possibly less hairy boogies.

My point being that doesn't leave much room for a clear and positive agenda, does it? Might explain all the shouting.

I do not watch political events. I do not listen to political events. I don't watch state of the union addresses unless we've been blown up and or are going to war. I'll read just about anything but I will not actually watch or listen to the circus. Can't do it, makes my belly knot up and my eyes go crossed. Last night oldest daughter needed to watch one of those debatable news type shows that come on after the little kiddies have gone to bed. She needed to watch this for her American Government class and I wanted no part of it. She went off to watch on her own but came back ten minutes later because there was just this yelling and screaming and something about lipstick and pigs.

..................

So I sat down and watched the rest of it with her in an attempt to make some sense of the conversation.

...................

Horrifically painful. We watched four apparently well educated and intelligent people, two men and two women ostensibly one of each from one of each, behave like nine year olds with roid rage. Seriously.

So now I know just exactly why Sarah Palin is the queen of all evil and why Barack is a terrorist but I have no idea at all what either party actually sees in their candidates. None. OK, that's not true. I googled 'Why do Republicans like Sarah Palin' today because, like Amy, I do want to know because I do not understand and I don't want to hear words like maverick and change either unless you can get darned specific about what kind of change and how being a maverick will support that clearly defined change (because I'm a maverick and I can sure as shit make a mess of things when I get to being a bull in a china shop).  Anyway, the first site to pop up was the gay republican site and here's what I gleaned from two pages of text. Sarah Palin has awesome Audry Hepburn like hair and she backed a bill on same sex partner insurance. That's it folks.

So seriously. What is it? Or are we all so polarized by our own fears (me too) that we can only see through a red haze of rage? Have we become a nation of raving lunatics who feel so strongly about so many polarized beliefs that we are all, myself included, making complete asses of ourselves? And is Putin really licking his chops?

Passing by the open windows

It is really very easy to get yourself lost in the world and wind up serving your soul sunny side up to some cosmic parking lot attendant at the train station. I was sitting in my car at the station this morning, not feeling all that balanced, staring at the platform and thinking, what the fuck? My ears and throat hurt and I've yet to recover from the lost sleep incurred during the trip into the city Tuesday night with the big kids to see one of the final productions of Rent (I'm still crying over that one).

And then I got out of the car and approached the platform. I'm reading Jack Kerouac's On The Road from the original scroll which means it's like reading the inside of my own brains at nine thousand miles per hour minus any sort of punctuation or spell check. I rather like it a lot. The rest of you might get to feeling a bit sea sick as most people eventually out grow the desire to be hung upside down by ones feet and spun around until the world forgets the lie of linearity. After awhile I forgot about the soul sucker in the parking lot and got lost in Kerouac's version of reality (I quite like it).

None of this resolved the soul sucking and its really just a bit of a bandaid. Sometimes I need to come home and just get hit upside the head with the desires and textures of my own life. You know, the real part where I operate under the illusion that I'm making up at least a good portion of my own rules. So you know how this goes; I take off my monkey suit, pour myself a glass of wine and head out into the great and mighty jungle which calls itself my back yard.

Some of you might remember this little guy in a prior iteration when he was quite a bit smaller and I questioned Audrey's ability to keep him hanging off the deer mesh. Well, here he is and I suspect he'll hang here, slug free, for quite some time. This is food people. Through the garden walls and into the mini jungle, this is food. It's awfully hard sometimes to find a way back to something real and true in all the muck of soul suckage out there. And to reiterate an earlier point, I do actually love this thing they pay me money to do. I LOVE it. However, it is still corporate america, not my life and a bit of a soul sucker all the same. I need grounding, people, and here it is.

This is a little hard to see but it's one giant mutha of a sugar pumpkin (they are supposed to be TEENSY) resting in a bed of corn. I'm just going to wait and see what it does despite the fact that the slugs (that I thought I didn't have) have finally moved in and consumed the first of my ripening sugar babies (bastids).

When Little Girl shakes this pumpkin it sloshes.

Here is a butterfly stuck in the meshing. We freed him without contact and he flew away...

  To the tiny cupola on the roof top. You can see him, he's the little beige spec, on the peaked roof of the cupola.

  You can see the bottom of the new chicken coop behind Little Girl who is doing her own version of geeking the camera (does anybody out there besides me recall the origin of the word geek and it's relation to chickens specifically?).

  And then there's this seven nearly eight year old version of peace. Yeah, I do actually buy it.

In the light...

And finally, I know it's kind of hard to see, but this tobacco type plant I bought two of that got no more than 18 inches high at any point in time suddenly makes this gianormous offshoot that's nearly four feet tall (not that you can tell because those cone flowers are nearly eight feet tall now) and he stands up like some porn star out of the seventies and says, come 'er, babe. let me show you what I've got...

Have a great weekend. I'll be rolling about in the dirt and other such scandalous things.

Nantucket

I was on Nantucket once about fourteen or fifteen years ago to visit a client on Main Street. This is when I sold software to insurance agents and nobody, but nobody would go out to visit this agency with the exception of my major competitor who probably had the deal anyway and I'm thinking they may just have asked me to come out to see if I would. Well I did. I got in my little Rx-7 and drove like the demon I was up I-95 North through Connecticut and into Rhode Island where I picked up the 195 beltway around Providence to Route 25 and then 6 which I followed right onto the Cape and out to Hyannis which I'd heard about but couldn't place because my political and local history was still a bit sketchy at that point. I parked my car, hopped on the ferry and rode across sitting on a bench on the outside of the boat for two and a half hours because this was before the high speed and I was hot because of the navy blue wool suit with a skirt that came down below my knees and those standard issue navy blue pumps with two and a quarter inch heals and panty hose and a helmet head of sprayed hair and a notebook computer and full size monitor on a post WWII wheelie with two bungee cords to keep it from falling into the gutter and I step off this ferry onto Main Street which is cobblestones the size and shape of regulation footballs. The sidewalk isn't much better.

But I walked several blocks up that sidewalk dragging my wheelie over the cracked bricks staring in wonder at the houses and shop fronts and the cobbles in the streets and tripping over my own feet because of it until I reached the agency at the top of the hill where I could go up the stairs and look through the gallery window at a painting of the ocean that made me think I'd fallen right over the edge.

I remember the sunlight streaming through the windows and thinking, around the thought buckets and angles of my two hour demo that I might have reached some coastal version of nirvana and it about took my breath away. In the end they packed me back up and sent me on down to the wharf the very same afternoon and I boarded the ferry, got back in my car, drove like a demon, spilled hot McDonalds coffee between my legs which caused more damage than I care to discuss and did not at any point in time consider a law suit. I listened to Sting singing Fields of Gold and tried not to think about a) how much it hurt and b) how I was probably never going to get back on that island in a million years and it made me very sad but I was happy to have seen it. Once. Briefly.

As it turns out I was only locked out by my own imagination. I found the key to that particular lock about a month ago while vaguely surfing the net and trying to remember why on earth we never went out to those islands and thinking something about crowds, traffic, cold water and the cost of living and all that mixed up with that odd flashback of sunlight on a painting and cobblestones and a phone call, some more searching and we had tickets booked on the high speed ferry there and back over Labor Day weekend. Who goes anywhere over Labor Day weekend? Apparently we do. That's the side door, up there, of the Anchor Inn on Centre Street where we, New Nanny, NoMans, Cletus and I, stayed for three nights.

We rented bikes and rode over a small portion of the island, maybe we could have covered more ground, but the crazy German tourist (New Nanny) stopped every twelve feet to 'make a picture please' and forced us to stop and actually look at the small moments that make up a life.

This is what my garden would look like if I did everything right, including, but not limited to, living on an island in the North Atlantic.

The water is very, VERY, cold even in August. We refer to it as 'bracing' and don't bother until we're too hot to stand it one second longer and then if you just jump right in it really is kind of cool, pun intended. Miss Cletus of the extra sensitive skin didn't even pack a bathing suit but spent an entire day fully clothed under a rented umbrella reading her birthday Kindle (which she's loving, by the way, and is saving an entire forest of trees because that girl's never spent a penny on anything other than books).

This beach is crowded but reasonably well behaved and you can walk a ways (and it really is just a little ways) either up or down this beach and find plenty of empty space. We didn't bother.

I would like to rent a house with a sign like this on the side just so I can say the name to as many people as possible.

Or I could just have a room with a view like this. And the traffic, it was not too terrible.

Insert cool picture here that I didn't bother to take because I was in too much of a hurry

Here's where I wish, on a final note, that I could insert picture here of me making my way through Audrey's vines in the garden darkness coming back with an armload of ripe tomatoes and whipping up a marinara that couldn't be beat to feed four hungry road warriors something other than pizza in a box.