Archive for October, 2010
21 items.
Sorry for the delay! I was super busy last night, what with trying out a new video game and watching the Walking Dead premier. :)
So, I think I want to spend this week talking about body dysmorphic disorder. It’s kind of an overly dramatic way to describe what’s been going on in my head, what goes on in so many of our heads, but I’m having a hard time finding anything more accurate. I mean, in my case, my faulty self-perception hasn’t kept me from having a job and friends and a social life, but it certainly ended a few romantic relationships, and kept me from attending a party or two in the past. Check this out:
“People with BDD say that they wish that they could change or improve some aspect of their physical appearance even though they are generally of normal or even highly attractive appearance.”
“BDD is often misunderstood as a vanity-driven obsession, whereas it is quite the opposite; people with BDD do not believe themselves to be better looking than others, but instead feel that their perceived “defect” is irrevocably ugly or not good enough.”
Sounds about right, yeah? So stay tuned, it’s body dysmorphia week at Sauceome! :D
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I made risotto and ate it and drank wine with a friend instead of drawing you a comic. Forgive me? :)
Actually, you know what’s interesting – whenever I am too tired to scan and upload the comic at night at my house, I do it in the office, where it automatically scans to a folder called “ZAFTIG.” In the early days, that’s what I was going to call this project, Zaftig. It’s a testament to where my brain is these days that I now think that name is terribly inappropriate and kind of embarrassing. I went with Sauceome, well, because I already had the domain name. :D So there you have it, laziness ended up being the wiser choice in the long run!
Since I kind of cheesed out on the comic last night, I leave you with two presents. Firstly, Niles made a food diary for you, to highlight the contrasting nature of our diets. This isn’t his food from yesterday (he ate the same risotto I did) but it is (in his words) an aggregate, a generic sample of what he consumes. That entire BBQ chicken pizza doesn’t usually happen until, say, 10pm.
Your other present is from Lucy Knisley, do you know her work, she is exceedingly talented. :) If you go here, and scroll down to 10.22, you can see her extremely flattering picture of me and our cats!
The skirt in question hugs the hips and then flares out, so for three days I kept trying it on and seeing nothing but huge hips. I don’t know what made me keep trying it, but I’m glad I did, because this morning I put it on and just felt cute. Nothing much had changed between Saturday and today. I certainly didn’t lose 10 pounds in that amount of time. So the change has to be mental, but honestly I just don’t feel like staring at it too closely. If I’m feeling pretty good about myself today, I’m just going to leave it alone. No point in analyzing it to death; it’s much more fun just to swish around town in a nice autumny grey skirt. :)
So I’d like to take a moment and point you guys at this thing Maura Kelly wrote. Maybe you saw something about it in the last few days, it’s been floating around the internet for a while. The writer says some pretty horrible things in it, like this:
“I think I’d be grossed out if I had to watch two characters with rolls and rolls of fat kissing each other … because I’d be grossed out if I had to watch them doing anything. To be brutally honest, even in real life, I find it aesthetically displeasing to watch a very, very fat person simply walk across a room — just like I’d find it distressing if I saw a very drunk person stumbling across a bar or a heroine [sic] addict slumping in a chair.”
She ends the article with “Do you think I’m being an insensitive jerk?”, and judging from the comments, YES, everyone pretty much thinks she’s being an insensitive jerk. I read her blog entry, I read a bunch of the comments, I’ve read the commentary, and I’ve read her reply to everything, and I have to say, I give her credit for leaving the post up, and for writing a sufficiently contrite response. It was a blog entry, she wasn’t writing out a researched and reasoned article, a lot of people just poop out the first thing that comes to their minds without really filtering it.
The thing is, if you read her apology, there’s a quick, almost throwaway sentence: “a few commenters and one of my friends mentioned that my extreme reaction might have grown out of my own body issues, my history as an anorexic, and my life-long obsession with being thin.”
That’s where my heart kind of broke for the girl. I know exactly where her blog post came from, that dark part of the lizard brain that’s judging herself and everyone else on a sliding scale based on what size they are. That internal meter that tells you that fat=shameful, embarrassing, bad. That no one wants to look at that, that your size is offending people. Maura Kelly might be skinny, but it sounds to me as if she’s just as tightly wound around these body issues as I am – maybe more so.
I know I’ve said this a lot lately, but being thin and feeling better about yourself, these are TWO SEPARATE ISSUES. There’s no reason to wait until you’ve “lost the weight” to start liking yourself better. Her black smoky monster sounds meaner and bigger and louder than my little guy, and I bet you she’s at least 50 pounds lighter than me.
We had a long conversation over lunch (at Sher a Punjab’s lunch buffet) about how “buffet” doesn’t have to mean “challenge”. I know that personally my instinct is to try to get the most out of my dollar at things like this, and just keep going back for more, but really, $7.99 for a full plate of Indian food is still a great deal. $7.99 for three plates of Indian food, also a great deal, but it only hurts you in the long run.
The trick, obviously, is moderation, is taking your time, is knowing when you are full and stopping there. But we’re not trained well in moderation. Very few aspects of American culture encourage moderation. Certainly, all-you-can-eat lunch buffets do not encourage moderation. But there has to be a way to eat sensibly and responsibly while still enjoying Sher a Punjab’s lunch buffet once in a while, right?
Dinner party! Man, do I love drawing food. It’s almost as awesome as eating it. This is just a small portion of the awesome spread we had on Friday. Is there anything more wonderful than sharing a great meal with some of your favorite people? If there is, I sure haven’t found it.
Speaking of how great food is, we went to Pho 888 for lunch today, and I had a very tasty bowl full of barbecue beef, vermicelli rice noodles, sprouts, carrots, cucumber, lettuce, peanuts, and all manner of wonderful things. And then I came home and made myself a tasty salad with giant mushrooms and onions and some grilled beef from our meat CSA. And then of course I ate the last piece of Jeremy’s pumpkin ice cream cheesecake. Well, at least it was the last piece, it can’t tempt me anymore. I’m telling you, availability is the key. If there is cake in the house I will eventually eat it. If there’s not, well, I’m just too lazy to go outside looking for cake.
Once again I waited until Sunday night to draw the entire weekend’s food. I really need to stop doing that.
Dinner party Friday night! It was great. It will probably be tomorrow’s cartoon. Jeremy brought a pumpkin ice cream cheesecake – and left it in our freezer – that I apparently can’t stop eating. That part’s not good. It tastes AMAZING, but it leaves me feeling heavy and also thirsty. Why do I keep going back for it? Well, it’s almost gone, maybe Niles will do me a favor and finish it off tonight.
I made a loaf of bread a few weekends ago that was just horrible. I really suck at bread. Anyway, the brick was sitting in the fridge because I couldn’t bear to throw it away, and this morning I decided to turn it into a bread pudding. It’s edible now! Hooray.
Anyway. Once again I find myself on a Sunday night, thinking, I sure didn’t eat as well as I hoped to this weekend, time to step up our efforts for the week.
I’m trying not to let myself really dwell on the three pounds, since every time I’ve lost a little weight I manage to feel crappy about my body somehow. Makes no sense at all. The brain, she is a mystery.
Anyway, so don’t let the little smoke monster know, because he’ll only ruin it.
But seriously! Right before we left, I was down to 193. Which will be amazing if it lasts. Every time I’ve tried to lose weight, I’ve ended up plateauing right around 15 pounds before rebounding. If this is my pattern, that I lose a little, plateau for a while, and then lose some more, that’s good information to have. And if I’ve managed to break my 15 pounds barrier, well, so much the better.
And like the comic says, I only managed to gain one pound back in San Francisco, mostly due to the fact that we walked everywhere. Lots of big hills there, I don’t know how the cyclists there do it! And while it made my feet hurt to walk so much, it was really nice to get some exercise that wasn’t on the bike, move some other muscles around. I love my bike, but I could certainly use some more variety every now and then.
Ugh, whose suggestion was it to put Lush bath bombs in the fridge and pantry? You are a genius, and I could have used that tonight. We’re back from San Francisco, and it’s always hard to come back to work after a trip, but especially when you’re diving right back into a huge stressful project. Fortunately I was able to get away to my yoga class tonight, but I had to battle some nasty winds on the bike to get there. And then my yoga teacher noticed that my breathing wasn’t as full as it usually is, which just made me focus MORE on being stressed out.
And, ok, the marble rye is from La Boulangerie, and it’s delicious. And yes, I had a pretty healthy lunch, so at least I’m not feeling TOO horrible about it.
But you know what I think the secret is? EASY ACCESS. Right now, there are no greens in the fridge. (full disclosure: there is chard. I do not like chard. At all.) If there were some fresh leafy greens in there, I would have summoned the energy to make a salad. And by the time I pulled the bag out of the fridge, I would have convinced myself to grill up some mushrooms or defrost the shrimp in the freezer or hell, even poach an egg to put on top. I would have spent 30 minutes to an hour constructing that salad, and I would have felt good about it. But there weren’t any greens, and the easiest thing to grab was bread and peanut butter. I suppose I should be glad there aren’t any cookies in the house tonight, or I’d have eaten those.
Ok, last one, I promise. Saturday, after the con closed and before Isotope’s party, we walked up to Haight street to seek out Rosamunde Sausage Grill. It kills me a little that we left Chicago and found a sausage joint in San Francisco, but it was worth it. The duck and fig sausages were the standout for me. I didn’t get to try the pheasant, but Niles also got a chicken sausage smoked with tequila and habanero peppers which he really loved. You can get them piled high with grilled onions, peppers, or sauerkraut, and they come wrapped in delicious french rolls that are cooked on the grill right next to the dogs. It was a small storefront with only a few seats (I thought Hot Doug’s was small!) but you could also take your meal next door to the Toronado for a beer. Unfortunately for us, Toronado was packed as well. Stupid Saturday night! But we still had a good meal and a good beer.
And thus ends my paean to all the tasty food I ate in San Francisco. Fortunately for my adventures on the scale, we also walked everywhere while we were there. :) Back to business as usual tomorrow, guys!
No trip to San Francisco is complete without a trip to Tommaso’s! One of the owners is a dear friend to Niles’s family from way back, so we always stop in to say hello. She was out of town this time, but that didn’t stop us. We ended up getting the #11 pizza, with thick sliced Italian sausage and copious amounts of mushrooms on it, which incidentally was the pizza Niles’s dad used to regularly order when he lived in the Bay area. The pizza, of course, was delicious as always, but this was the first time we got their “coo-coo clams”. They’re baked in the same wood-fired brick oven as everything else there, and they come in a very simple sauce of garlic, peppers, herbs, oil and balsamic. I wanted to drink it, it was so good, but instead I just dunked my pizza crusts in it.
Tommaso’s is a wait every time, but it’s always worth it. It’s small, warm, welcoming like family. It was a pity we couldn’t get to see Carmen this time, but those coo-coo clams are lingering in my memory…
