Dreams

Just woke up from a nap and I have been having the most crazedy-assed dreams lately.

My DAD was alive in this one (I have never, not once since he died, been visited by him in a dream) and my sister was playing 12-bar blues in E on my guitar, and my younger brother couldn't untangle the 3-rope strap on my guitar, and one of my blogpals was there, visiting me but at the house where I grew up, and he had a voice like the face of El Capitan dropping into the Yosemite Valley. I wonder if he sounds like Sam Elliott in real life. I kept introducing him to my family, even though I had just introduced him a few minutes before. He shook hands politely every time.

Don't even get me started about the "Glee" dream I had the other night, which also took place in that house and also featured my entire family in prominent roles.

Both dreams, it was about the front door of that damned house, getting it opened and then struggling to close it.

Rushing for the dream dictionary...

Trimming the Fat

In the last month or so, I've lost a good amount of weight. I don't know how much, because I don't own a scale. More on that later.

All I know is that the new jeans that I bought in April and called "aspirational" are now all saggy in the ass and I'm wondering with a mixture of irritation and glee if I am going to have to get another pair in a smaller size.

People have asked me how I did it, and my answer is usually simplistic and frustrating to them: I ate less.

Recent studies have come out stating that eating less has more impact on weight loss than exercising. I'm sure next month another new study will come out showing exactly the opposite to be true, but eating less has worked for me so far.

This can be irritating to the "I get up at 5 am and get on the treadmill for an hour" and "I go to the gym religiously after work" crowd, who never seem to lose the poochy spots on their thighs or the basketball they carry in their shirtfronts. So sue me. Through some spin of the genetic roulette wheel, eating less works for me. If I decided to suddenly start working out fanatically, like I did in my 20's, I'd have that scary mountain range of muscles on my back once again and a pair of truly terrifying thighs like I got from doing squats on the Smith machine. I'd be able to do pullups with a 25-pound plate strapped around my waist like I did back then. But that's not me anymore. Maybe later.

Everyone wants to know the "how," but what no one ever asks me is the "why." Why did I start to lose weight?

It started out, frankly, as plain old heartbroken disordered eating. My heart was broken, and I lost my appetite. Simple as that. Some people get a hole in their heart and start assault-eating to try and fill it. Me? I got the hole in my heart and I just let stuff drain out.

But a funny thing happened along the way. I started listening to my body, and eating when it told me to eat, and not eating when it wasn't hungry. I would actually ask myself, "Am I hungry?" "Yeah, a little bit." "Okay." Anne Lamott writes about this much better than I ever will in her essay "Hunger," in "Traveling Mercies."

Doing this "eat when you're hungry, drink when you're thirsty" routine is nothing new to me. I learned it on the bike, when NOT paying attention to such bodily signals can result in the energy crash known as "bonking," which can leave you standing at the bottom of Closter Dock Road shoveling Gu down your gullet and washing it down with undiluted Gatorade just so you have enough juice to get up the hill and back to the GW Bridge, where a subway ride home awaits.

So I re-taught myself to eat when I was hungry and drink when I was thirsty.

I was also aware that in the midst of hating myself for not being pretty enough, smart enough, clever enough, sexy enough, *something* enough for the man I had fallen in love with to love me back -- see, it was all *my* fault, I thought, that I wasn't *enough* enough -- I needed to be very, very gentle and loving to my actual physical self.

So instead of indulging every thwarted child whim of my taste-buds, I was careful to put things into my body that were kind to it. I always ate breakfast anyway, so that wasn't an issue for me. I began stopping at the fruit cart every morning on my way into the office, so there was always fresh fruit and a bag of carrots on my desk. I would nosh on these throughout the day. I became less dependent on the big sandwich at lunch, and thus, less dependent on grazing at the bowl of M&M's that resides on every reception desk in the company at 3 in the afternoon. At first I would have to physically avert my eyes from that bowl of M&M's as I walked past it on my way to a meeting. Now I don't have to do that, and sometimes I'll even have a piece of candy or two. But I'm not standing there gossiping with the receptionist anymore while I pick out a dozen or more of the blue peanut ones. I just don't get that urge anymore.

None of this feels like denial, or deprivation. It feels like nourishment.

I realize that carrying a few extra pounds was my protection, a layer between me and the world. Not that I ever stopped looking at myself with cold germanic eyes, thinking, "GOD, you are disgusting and must be terminated," but I also never did anything that was nice to my body, like eat a piece of fruit or a vegetable more than every now and then. As long as I had that little layer of chub between me and the world, I was protected and safe.

Then, the Awful Thing happened to me, and something, some wise little voice, told me, "Stay naked. Get nakeder."

So I have tried to stay naked. Gotten nakeder, too. Remember Jane Doe? She died. She *had* to die.
See, someone who thought he was meeting Jane actually met Aileen, and Aileen is a real live woman, not some manipulatable sexbot avatar from the internet. I think having me turn out to be more real than some velveteen rabbit may have been a shock to his system. Wouldn't you turn tail and run if one of YOUR imaginary playthings suddenly came to life? "I want my Cherry 2000!" sez he.

So yeah, it's been a process of maybe learning to be loving towards myself, from the outside-in, which for most people is backwards, but I've never been one to do things the way everyone else does.

This morning as I was getting changed, I stood in front of the mirror and admired myself, naked. It's been ages since I've done that. I stood and looked at how my body has all the good inny-outy curves, and how my legs are well-muscled and powerful, and yes, I should probably do about a hundred thousand situps before I put on a bikini but I won't, since most of the 25-year-olds on the beach are fatter than I am, and my boobs are a little smaller than they were two months ago, but they are still more than handfuls and that's for a guy with big hands, and I liked what I was seeing there. A woman's body. A womanly body.

Oh, and why I don't own a scale? Because I have one of those bodies that carries a lot of density -- it looks smaller than it weighs. I think it has something to do with muscle weighing more than fat. Let's put it this way: when I was a gym rat and wearing size 2 and size 4 clothing, I weighed 135 pounds. The guess-yer-weight guy at Great Adventure guessed 110 and I won the prize. So I don't put any trust in the number on the scale.

My clothes fit, I look great, and my knees don't hurt anymore. That's enough for me.

Bill (part 1)

I didn't expect to be celebrating my birthday that year with the smell of death surrounding everything and a pall of gray dust coating the entire city.

I had moved to Breckenridge in March of 2001, giving the back of my hand to the city that had started to feel like an abusive boyfriend. I love you, come here, let me smack you, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it, I do it because I love you, why do you make me hit you? One December day, I decided I'd had enough and two and a half months later I was gone.

Breckenridge was good. I loved it there. The scenery was beyond beautiful, the people were nice, the men were all handsome and outdoorsy and had hands that looked as if they could actually do things -- callused and scarred, as if they could do more than dial a phone when something needed to be done.

I got a little part-time job in a clothing store, then found a full-time job doing something similar enough to what I had done in New York that it wasn't so much learning a new job as transferring my skills to a different vernacular.

I was starting to thrive there, and so I started looking to put down some real roots. I spent the summer driving around Summit County with Tony C, the nice real estate guy with East Coast roots who had been living there since Main Street (yes, it was called Main Street) was barely paved and you could stop and have a conversation out your truck window for minutes at a time and no one was behind you honking impatiently. I liked him because there were still traces of the East Coast in his speech.

Nothing I looked at seemed right until late one afternoon when Tony called me about a townhouse that had just been listed. After work, he drove me up Boreas Pass Road, then turned onto Baldy Road, and we continued up, up, up, and he swung his SUV onto a gravel road and we parked in a driveway with the sign "Silver King Lode." It had a good sound to it. It was a tiny row of townhouses, stepping down the side of the mountain, so you had to walk down about 50 steps to get to number 4.

We walked in, and as soon as we were past the mudroom (every house in the mountains has a mudroom; mountain people are like the Japanese about removing their shoes as soon as they walk into the house), I turned to Tony and said, "This is it."

I put it under contract immediately; it had been on the market for about an hour and a half.

Two weeks later, on August 28th, I was handed the key, and I was a homeowner. I moved in with the cats, Mambo and Zack (Dr. Zachary Smith, of the Boston Smiths!), and started moving my belongings "up the hill" from my storage unit in Denver.

One September morning, I came downstairs at 7 o'clock, as usual, and flipped on the "Today" show, as usual, and I was arrested by the sight of one of the towers of the World Trade Center with a gaping hole in the side and black smoke pouring out. It was 9 o'clock in New York.

In the hours that followed, I remember the dozens of phone calls.

To my sister, whose husband is a pilot for American Airlines.

"Is Mark flying today? Where? WHERE? What the fuck is happening to us?"

To my friend Kathy, who lived over the hill from me, as we watched the north tower collapse, and the long silence before she said, "Aileen, I'm so, so sorry," as I began sobbing.

To my friend Frank, who worked for the Federal Reserve and said, with wonder in his voice, "They were like little rag dolls, Aileen. Just like rag dolls, and I could see their clothes fluttering."

And to Bill, or rather, to Bill's answering machine, and it was more like a prayer than a message, "Please tell me you aren't down there. Please call me and tell me you are okay. Please. Please."

The next day, when I hadn't heard anything, sending a dread-filled email to my friend Pat, who owned a bar on 8th Avenue: "Please walk up the street to the firehouse and see if they have any information." and getting a terse email later that day: "14 men missing. No names yet."

I remember falling out of my chair in my office, keening, while my co-workers gathered around me, not knowing what to do.

My boss finally sent me home. I don't remember the drive up the mountain.

Breakfast -- The Big Lie

At some point in every Shadow Relationship, there comes a point where the guy will say, "I would love to make you breakfast."

In hindsight, I realize now, this is the point where every sane woman should hold up her hand like a traffic cop and say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa! Stop right there, buddy. There'll be none of THAT kind of talk!"

For some reason, men love to talk about making you breakfast. The implication is, of course, that they have spent the last eight hours fucking you silly and in every orifice of your body, and now they want to continue proving their manliness, their all-around what-a-guyness -- with a plate of eggs.

They will brag about their egg-making skills. They will interrogate you about what type of knivery and cookware you possess, to make sure it's all up to their world-class egg-making prowess. They will go into reveries and musings about what kind of spices and cheeses they will put into these ambrosial eggs.

I tell you, ladies, at the first mention of eggs, flee. Run as if all the hounds of hell are at your heels! Because breakfast is where it all turns into a lie.

When they start talking about eggs, or French toast, or pancakes, that's when they've gone *completely* over the edge from getting a little piece of tail on the side and into the world of full-blown fantasy, and I mean, "now I'm just makin' shit up to keep you on the line" stuff. To them, it's the most UNlikely thing that's ever going to happen, as much a flight of imagination as them having a threesome with you and your super-hot best friend. They *know* it ain't ever happening, and so it's safe for them to fantasize about it.

What these men don't understand is that "breakfast" is a code word to us. In this code, "breakfast" says to us, "I am looking forward to doing the everyday, the quotidian, with you. I am planning to be the person who wakes up next to you and kisses your warm, sleepy neck, and brings you coffee in bed, and shares the Sunday Times with you." We get the gooshies when we think of these things, and we hug ourselves secretly and whisper, "Oh, he's really *mine* if he's talking like that!"

Maybe I overstate myself. Maybe "breakfast" isn't a lie so much as it's a *huge* miscommunication. I dunno.
But I do know one thing.

Unless the man is standing in my kitchen in his boxer shorts wielding a spatula, calling into the bedroom where I am awakening from a sex coma with bite marks on my shoulders and thighs like overstretched rubberbands, I won't ever let him utter the word "breakfast" to me again.

Email Trail: 5/31/10, 9:40pm

Cleaning out emails, and here's one from the beginning of the end. He was trying to extricate himself, and "let me down easy," (meaning, he said he was going away, but then kept sniffing around, and wouldn't actually go away, which in hindsight makes me a little pissy) and I decided to give him reasons to get the fuck away from me.

I'll make it easy for you.

Herewith, the list of things that make me wrong:

I'm a woman of a certain age who has never been married. So that must mean there is *something* wrong with me, right? My intellect is self-acquired and shaky. On the other hand, I'm never afraid to say, "I don't know what that is." I am funny. (I don't think men actually like this quality, no matter what they say) I am extricating myself from money problems of my own making. I know a little bit about a lot of things. I have opinions. I have a hard time asking for help; I fall to pieces if I have to do it. I forget birthdays. I cry at those Sarah MacLachlan ASPCA comercials. I do the NYTimes Sunday puzzle on the subway, in pen. Not because I can get every answer right, but because I am secretly showing off. I have a bottomless appreciation for pop music. I don't like fights. If someone attacks me, I go into a fetal curl; if someone attacks my friends, I turn into a wild animal. I can't hold a grudge no matter how hard I try. I don't get mad when people cancel plans. I don't believe in god. I hate having too many plans. I am impolitic and blurty. I am so easygoing about some things that people think I don't care. I have abnormally large thumbs. I hate the first half hour of exercising so much that I rarely do it at all. I love hockey. I love being by myself. I don't like to speak for the first two hours I am awake. I drink the same cup of coffee all day long. I like to fix things. I sing when I'm walking down the street. I hate to shop. My favorite boots are as old as my cat. I talk to strangers wherever I go. I am painfully shy. I hate the way people here look at me when I tell them my brothers are auto mechanics. I laugh too loudly. I think fat people *can* help it. I don't care if people like me or not. I am always looking for the funny. I made jokes at my father's funeral. If you asked me what superpower I'd choose to have for one day, I'd answer "being beautiful." When someone hurts my feelings, I tell them they hurt my feelings. When I screw up I always admit it (this is un-American). In my secret heart, I wish I could inspire devotion in someone. I am unable to hide it when my bullshit detector needle hits red. I don't suffer fools -- at all. I have kept my heart on lockdown for so long that I don't have enough sense to snatch it back when someone jimmies their way in and starts to steal it.

Is that enough to make it easier for you to walk away?

Actually, now that I read through that, I realize that instead of making myself sound "wrong," I actually made myself sound kind of awesome. If someone used those words to describe a stranger to me, I'd ask for her phone number and try to date her.