Fat Free!

Yes, I know there are few things more boring than other people’s “weight loss journeys” but, conversely, there is nothing quite as fascinating as your own! 


And I am now on Day Sixteen of my Diet!!!!!


I just returned from coffee (sans muffin, croissant, bagel, banana-nut bread) with a friend and fellow dieter who asked me how my writing was going.  In answering I realized I've been way too busy not eating anything I like --  to write.

I’m a one-obsession-at-a-time kind of gal and I accept that 
moderation isn't for everyone.

I came late to the diet game because between the ages of 14 and 45 I concentrated my efforts on smoking cigarettes rather than eating. Turns out there are many parallels between smoking, eating, and ... monogamy!

When you get married, if you happen to be me, you have guilty dreams about sex with men other than your husband. 


Then you quit smoking and dream of sneaking a KOOL.


And two nights ago I began dreaming of sinking my crooked little teeth into fresh, rich, slices of thick, grainy, bread heaped with blue cheese. Then slices of extra sharp cheddar. Then slathered with creamy brie ... sigh. 
Never mind.      

But this is not my first time.

Many years ago I abandoned 20 pounds on Weight Watchers. They tracked me down, of course, and brought an additional 10 pounds back with them to punish me for my treason. I’ve noted that risk but have re-uped none the less, with every intention of returning soon to my pre-pregnancy, pre-cigarette-quitting-poundage, pre-relentless gravity, body.

Last night, however, over lettuce and tepid water, another dieting pal suggested we promise to tell each other when we are getting too skinny. She doesn’t want to become one of those deflated, bitter looking, wizened old broads whose slack, fat-free faces wobble in the breeze. 

Ew. I have no intention of being one either. 

Not because I will have lifting, tucking, bloodletting, face/neck tailoring or injections, but because that is simply not what I am picturing as I shun the bakery and snub the cheese counter. No, I shall soon be slim and firm, a bit taller perhaps, with the slightest trace of a French accent, my memory intact including nouns, my hearing and eyesight keen, my posture... perfect! Young again!

I suspect you won't recognize me when next we meet.

xo
Amy

. 
 

P.S. Much as I loved hearing from you, I had to disable blog comments because some low-life bottom-feeding crack-pot was venting spleen here.


Note to low-life: This blog is MINE for venting MY skinny little spleen, not yours.   

Suspended In My Underpants

Today, March 3, 2012, Mitch & I strolled barefoot on the beach. As two native Michiganders, we still marvel at this miracle, even though we moved here almost 30 years ago.  

I know that many otherwise reasonable people choose to toboggan and snow ski and ice skate. My own brother and sister-in-law go traipsing about all rosy cheeked with their horses and dog of a Michigan winter day, like some thing right out of a Christmas card. 
But when I think of my snowy childhood winters I mostly recall trudging to elementary school and later, waiting for the junior high school bus in biting, icy, morning wind, wearing a dress.

Yes a dress.

Back then girls were not allowed to wear pants to school. 

That meant that while the boys were jumping around and rolling in the snow, girls walked carefully knowing that a slip on the ice meant landing with bare thighs in a snow drift. 
It also meant winter winds on chapped, raw knees up ineffectual skirts. It meant shivering and whimpering, and if you were me, it meant choking with resentment against the powers who made and enforced such cruel rules.  

   

On one unbearably cold, dark, winter morning when I was in eighth grade, I put jeans on under my dress and went to school. When I got there I was summoned by the school counselor. A fellow who for reasons mysterious to me, was beloved and chummy with many of my class mates. 

As I remember it, he told me I was a trouble maker and asked if I thought I was a women’s libber. 

I told him to try walking around without pants in freezing weather  with sub-zero wind chill.  

He said I had a bad attitude and if I didn't take off my pants he'd call my parents. 

I took off my jeans, put them in my locker, and seethed. 

The next day I wore my jeans again, but this time not under a skirt. When I was again sent to the counselor’s office and he told me to take off my pants, I did.

I was suspended in my underpants.

A few years later the dress code was changed, and a few years after that no one remembered there had ever been one.  By then I had fled northern winters and vowed never ever to be caught bare legged in the snow again. 

  

Thanks to global warming, they say the winters in Detroit aren’t what they were, and for the sake of all the dress wearers who remain in snowy climes, I hope that’s true. I however will always remember March as hell.

Take it Robert! (Frost)
        Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Heartbreak in the Garden

Yes, emotions are the meat of the human experience, but still,  so many of them are unpleasant! Sorrow and grief certainly suck. Jealousy, anger, fear, dread, shame... 

And as if sloshing through the mandatory emotional stew isn't enough, there are those days of extra helpings. It could be blood sugar level, PMS, jet lag, the result of a sleepless night... and BAM! Suddenly feelings are dialed up to super-hyper-excruciating. Everything seems unbearably poignant, unutterably sad, overwhelmingly touching.  

I’d been out of town for a week. (long story) So this morning, I took my coffee into the sunshine, to survey the empire, and see how all fared in my absence.  

Someone had shred toilet paper in the azaleas. It had to be either my husband or my dog since they were the only ones uncaged. And neither of them had watered.  But in spite of the abuse and neglect, my carrot patch had flourished.  In fact, it had grown so crowded it needed to be thinned.

I’ve never had luck transplanting carrots. Instead of re-rooting they'd always faint and wither.  Thinning therefore means putting some plants to death so the ones around them can grow.  

You see where this is going.

Luckily, I have a bunny and a Guinea pig who are happy to eat the delicate tops and tiny pale pre-carrots, so it isn’t exactly a waste. 


But still, how do I pick? Just reach in blindly and pull? Comb through looking for the smallest?


I choked up over the jumble of hopeful green -- the magic combo of water, sunlight, and dirt, growing exactly where I'd once cavalierly scattered their seeds.   

The arbitrariness of life and death was suddenly breath taking. 

The inequality of power between myself -- large, and mammalian and determined -- and the baby carrot plants --  innocent and entirely defenseless.  

Wally Dog watched me get weepy and offered to shred another roll of toilet paper to snap me back to the business at hand.

Thank goodness for dogness.   

xo

Amy

P.S. Dear Dears, Three months have passed & it is now time to harvesrt those un-thinned carrots. They are a bit motley, some knobby & misshapen, some teenie-tiny, but there are lts of them & they are all sweet. No regrets. 
xo
Amy

Amy's Believe it or Not!

Dearest Dears,

Starting tomorrow, Monday, February 6th, I, Amy Goldman Koss, am off for six days to grade THE NATION'S REPORT CARD! Yes, me and 59 other volunteers (read unpaid) shall be sequestered by the United States Department of Education to do whatever it is people like us do under the circumstances, for the NAEP, National Assessment of Educational Progress to evaluate the writing skills of American students. (Training on site.)

There is an unofficial pool afloat re. how long I will last before either being drummed out by the government project leaders when they discover that I am a high school drop out who cannot spell,  who harbors an intense hatred and distrust of authority, as well as a bone-deep skepticism regarding formulaic evaluation of creative skills.

OR I bolt for the airport in screaming boredom and/or horror.

Love and Kisses  

Your,

Amy

PS. I have indeed signed a confidentiality agreement, so will report back in full upon my return.
     In the interim, please feel free to weigh in with your feelings about The Nation's Report Card, our current system of evaluating student writing, or my likelihood of completing this six day, 8:30am -5:30 pm project, intact.

A Morbid Little Blog

Once Upon a Time I was pretty sure I’d live forever and have all the time and energy in the world to write whatever I wanted.

Then time sped up. Decades passed in a blur. The rate of death around me rose from the rare, hideously tragic, premature death, to the more mundane sad but not entirely unexpected. Now I find myself able to discuss the relative merits of various funeral/memorial styles with aplomb, and have opinions on how I'd like my own "celebration" managed.

Which makes a woman start asking herself this: If it takes a year or two to write a book, and a year or so to find the right home for it, then a year or two for that home to kill all the necessary trees or whatever it is they do that takes them so long to get the damn thing printed... Well, she begins to wonder how many more of those cycles of waiting, and rejection, and waiting, and hope, and waiting, does she have left in her? How many more can she stand?

And she asks herself this, too: Remember that guy* with locked-in-syndrome who had to blink out his exquisite little novel The Diving Bell and the Butterfly?  letter by letter with his one good eye? 

Shouldn’t we, (and by “we” I mean “I”) concentrate on writing only the stories that are so dear and important to us that if we had to, we’d blink them out?

That leads to the other question: Which of my books would I have written if I’d had to blink them?

Oy!

Laziness being as it is, I know I’d sooner eat whatever they served me in the home than blink even my menu selection. 

None the less, a new book must be started. Never mind that beginnings are not what they used to be. Never mind that if I swam, which I don't, I'd have to enter the pool from the ladder now, rather than the high board.

Never mind that I can no longer just jump in, tra-la-la, and start banging away at any old book. I can't pretend not to know how l-o-n-g and hard the process is. Can't trick myself into thinking it will be easy.


So, it has to be a book worthy of the countless future hours and months of straining to get it right, of the sore back and stiff fingers and furrowed brow, and eye strain. Worthy of self-inflicted misery, insecurity, pacing and re-writing and sleeplessness and self doubt. 

Because even if it’s not “blinking” it’s still blinking.  

And even if we're feeling fine, we never know which book will be our last.

xo

Amy  

*Jean-Dominique Bauby

Recycled Birthday!

(Dear Dears, can't write right now, so am running a b'day op-ed from the LA Times (with a few tiny edits) from last year. If you feel that's cheating, feel free to skip it and just send CASH!)

Every year about this time I start to squirm, watching my birthday lumber forth. I'm glad not to be dead. And even though my birthdays come way more often than they used to, and their numbers are surreal, I'm content to keep aging. That's not the problem.

The dilemma is what to do with the damn thing.

That is, after I've checked my newspaper horoscope, gleaning pertinent wisdom for the year ahead. Then, to my computer, where my b'day alert will have magically appeared on the screens of every one of my nine-hundred and forty-million close, personal Facebook friends. 

But the chore of pressing the refresh button and typing my heartfelt "Thanks!" over and over will only dispatch a fraction of the day. If I'd planned better, I might be able to eat my way across town gorging on free birthday meals, but I've neglected to sign up for any.

It's the puzzling birthday life cycle at work. 

As a little girl, when birthdays seemed eons apart, I'd recover from the disappointment of one less-than-magnificent birthday in time to get giddy in anticipation of the next. But I slowly learned that happiness didn't come in a box, no matter how promising the bow.

The next phase in my birthday evolution was wanting it to be an event. A big, crowded, noisy, inebriated celebration of my fabulousness by classmates, co-workers, strangers in bars…

After that, I just wanted my boyfriend/husband to do something romantic, which led to the next phase — kids.

During the chaos of planning and cleaning up, physically and emotionally, from my children's birthdays (the jumping houses, reptile sleepovers, chicken pox), my own birthday wishes ran from wanting a chance to shower alone in peace to fruitlessly begging the kids not to fight for the entire day, and maybe clean their rooms.

Years later, my wish was that I not have to bail them out or talk them down on my birthday.

My mom, in her 80s, keeps her birthdays quiet so the Evil Eye won't notice she's still alive. The only gift she requests each year is that my dad get rid of something from the basement.

My dad is pleased if the kids call, but I suspect his dearest birthday wishes are to see another birthday — and not to have to part with anything from the basement.

My mother-in-law still wants something sparkly for her birthday to make her friends jealous. My husband likes to hike to the top of things. My brother wants to smoke a cigar indoors. My kids just want money.

I turned 50 a few years back, right in the middle of my daughter's chemotherapy treatments for Hodgkin's lymphoma. Until her diagnosis, I'd been dithering about maybe having a party for myself, since 50 seemed like such a big deal. Ha! Life and its shifting expectations.

And that brings us to now. My babies have grown, survived and flown. I no longer have to feign interest in blowing out candles or hearing the birthday dirge. I don't need or want anything you can wrap; I can shower unmolested whenever I wish; and I already eat plenty of cake.

So, I shrug, and go back to sleep.
xo

Amy

New Years!

As I pack I tell myself, “At home I may pull on the same soggy jeans week after month, and shlump around in my ratty sneaks, but the woman I will be on vacation probably wears outfits and srappy sandals. This floral smock lurking  in the depths of my closet will be perfect!”

Actually, I‘ve slipped this particular dress into many backpacks and suitcases over the millennium, so why are the tags still on it?

That's because ever since some ancient shopping bout of delusion, it has been lying in state awaiting either my radical personality change, or its own Resurrection to the thrift store. Well traveled, never worn. 

Why? Because when ever I get where I’m going, I invariably find my lazy, comfort loving, ratty sneaks wearing self there waiting for me. 

And yet, there's something so sweet about the packing self. The self awash with unrealistic fantasies, flush with faith in the possibility of change, willing to suspend disbelief and imagine myself as someone who holds her stomach in.

The same part of my mind that allows me to re-pack that silly dress, allows me to make New Years Resolutions, although I know I’ll unpack them next December with the tags intact.  

As a fiction writer I certainly believe we are all entitled to the full range of human emotion and delusion. So -- Come the New Year I will write EVERY DAY! Fingers on the keys, mind on the plot, eyes on the screen. Perhaps cutting off one finger or toe any day I don't write -- allowing me 20 (very bloody) days off.


I will also diet and exercise like a woman who believes she is mortal -- or die trying.


And I'll either wear that damn dress -- or fly it as a symbol of fashion liberation.

And here’s The Who performing I WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zydAs5bRW1U

Happy New Year!

xo

Amy