november 30: emotional poise

so this one's for ashley! in my last post, i guess i came across as being unhappy with my life. i'm NOT. i've got an amazing life. what i was doing in my last post was looking, very clearly, at what it takes to throw me into an emotional tailspin significant enough to drive me to self-medication, and marvelling at just how little it actually requires.

what i was thinking about a lot last week, when i wrote that, was a sense of "what's wrong with me that a little emotional upheaval will send me to cooked food?" as in, why doesn't "everybody else" get thrown off as well. but hey - look at "everybody else!" in our culture - WOW! a little emotional turmoil, and everybody's hitting "happy hour!" woo-hoo! a chance to drink away our immediate experience of the day behind and the day ahead. and most people do this rather regularly. most people are also eating really poorly, taking pharmeceuticals and recreationals, and loading themselves up with artificial activities in a vain effort to take themselves out of themselves, to get to a place where they cannot feel a thing. in our culture, drug use is ubiquitous, and i don't mean just narcotics. all of these things, all of these behaviors, are drugs that numb us out to our emotional state.

so how did i get there? what happened? with the striking clarity of hindsight, here's what happened: i had a burrito. it didn't kill me. a few weeks later, i had an ethiopian meal. it didn't kill me either, although the salt and the oil and the grain made me feel really awful. those 3 main ingredients set up a deficiency, especially the salt. deficiency becomes craving, craving becomes addiction. a coupld weeks later, i had my dental work done. i was scared about the procedure, and especially about taking the valium that was required. my emotional poise was shattered, and i sought to soothe myself with cooked food. i made lots of excuses, but in the end, that was what it was. the cooked food didn't kill me, and it reinforced the deficiency that was set up previously.

in MY body, a physical deficiency translates very quickly to an emotional deficiency. whereas before i was very happy going to dinner anywhere and having a salad, suddenly, i felt sorry for myself. i didn't want a salad! i wanted to eat whatever i wanted like "everybody else!" this emotional deficiency is part of my makeup. it's not very far below the surface of my emotional life. when i keep my body healthy and fed with raw food, my emotional body is healthy and does not seek ANY food for its survival. when i feed my body cooked food, the emotional breakdown happens very quickly, with very predictable results. it's not "real" emotion. i may say this badly. real emotion - love and happiness and anger and all those good things - have really nothing to do with the emotional deficiency that leads to emotional eating, just like real nutritional needs have nothing to do with seeking out cooked and deficient and degraded foods. it's a coping behavior, not a survival behavior or even an instinctive behavior. just a coping mechanism.

because i had set up "permission" to have cooked food at thanksgiving, and that holiday was rapidly approaching, it seemed senseless to withdraw that permission before the holiday! this was the rationalization of my deficient emotional mind and my deficient physical body. "why stop now?" eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die! i think that only the recovering addict can truly understand that thought process that dances between the options of abstinence and indulgence. it's a war that wages - the repulsion about the desire, and the longing and regret of denying it. "i'll hate myself if i do this thing i hate, and yet i can't stand not doing it!" that's where i was. for weeks. full of longing to get back to my clean life, and also full of this terrible, horrible desire to feed my senses and "be normal."

what i know now, on the other side of thanksgiving, is just how much this particular holiday was weighing on me. i didn't realize it until it was done. i was putting HUGE emphasis on what would happen when i met my boyfriend's mom. i was feeling so very sorry for myself, regarding myself in the harsh and judgmental light i was certain that she would be using, and wanting to pass cleanly under her radar, unnoticed except to gain her unswerving approval. i wanted that so badly that i was willing to eat my way to her approval, even when she was nowhere around. i ate for her approval for 4 weeks or more. i ate to give MYSELF the approval i was certain she would not. and i suffered terribly for it.

i think only the addict really knows what this means. what it means to hide from view to indulge in behaviors that you personally dislike, in order to gain approval of people who can't see you, and if they could, wouldn't care. it's the most bizarre feeling in the world.

and what i did, over the course of the past 4 weeks, was to really "turn on" a lot of the dormant switches of my addictions. they had been blissfully quiet, and i turned them on. opened the floodgates. i think that i was actually on the brink of an amazing breakthrough right before this all happened - i've always been good at self-sabotage - and now i've got a lot of ground to regain. i'm not worried, i know i can. and i've learned A LOT in the process. mostly, i've learned that eating 80-10-10 does NOT make me immune to my addictions. if anything,it makes me more sensitive to them. and i've also learned that despite their curiosity and questioning, 99% of the people out there in the world really don't give a happy damn about what anybody else eats. really. so now i know that i can face any and all holidays with a clear head and a clear heart, and a plate full of the beautiful fresh raw food i like best. i can face all boyfriends' mothers! (she was lovely, by the way) and i can face my own lack of emotional poise with a little more backbone now. i've seen how well my old coping mechanisms work (not at all!), so now i can see how pointless it is to thwart myself. it doesn't work, and the only person who is affected is me.

i have already decided to have a very merry, very raw christmas. i've decided that other people's holidays are no reason to mess with my own body. i think a gorgeous salad and a big plate of some fantastic fruit would be the perfect way to join in on the feast. and what everyone else eats becomes no concern of mine. to go back to the steak dinner: i wanted them to take my food into consideration, so i considered their food to be my business! it's not! neither way! i feed myself, and i have no issue with how anyone else feeds themselves. this is HUGE. this is the only way my relationship is going to survive. i realize now that the only way for it to survive is for me to be raw. not because he wants it that way, but because it's the only way for me to be truly happy. and if i had to go through what i did over the past 4 weeks in order to gain this truth, then i am ECSTATIC to have done it. nothing could be better than this.

so that's enough for today. i hope ashley understands where i'm coming from now!

november 23: addictive elements

1. salt. evil fucking rocks that get buried in our food. hate them.

everyone bitches and moans about their "sweet tooth" as if the sweet tooth was bad or wrong or evil. and in my experience - this particular experience i'm enduring now of being off the wagon and feeling lost and lonely - it's not the sweet that is my undoing. sweet is EASY. sweet is happy and wonderful. my sweet tooth is my best friend. my sweet tooth says "EAT BANANAS!!!' and makes me so happy. it's that fucking SALT TOOTH. the craving for salty/savory. that is truly our cultural problem. that's my problem.

the salt tooth interferes with the sweet tooth and demands satiation. it makes sweet seem weak and faulty and uninteresting. it's got this insatiable demand for flavors that are dirty and too complex to be healing or beneficial. god, oh my god, how i detest salty food.

and yet how i am drawn to eat it right now.

i hate it. it's just

AWFUL.

and what it all comes down to:

2. emotional turmoil. that's the 2nd biggest addictive element.

i hit an emo speedbump, and because i didn't learn emotional poise at my mother's knee, but rather i learned how to be rather frantic and histrionic and cranky and i learned also how to shut those feelings down down down with food - and alcohol and drugs. and it doesn't take a big bump at all to trigger a food response. or any addictive response. just ask the smoker how much it takes to make them hurry out for a smoke break. not much. so - the combination of my job being very overwhelming-but-exciting plus very chaotic, plus my guy not coming to see me this weekend, and then him having enough plans to keep him from calling me for our usual bedtime chat 2 nights in a row, plus bunny missing out on my "breakfast with bunny" interview this morning, plus my own anger and frustration at myself for my "failures..." all of these things together - not to mention the economy, bills, my house a mess, being lonely, having loads of work to do, all that good stuff - conspire to knock me off my wagon. from there, all it takes is the most minor of triggers - let's say the bananas aren't ripe and someone offers to take me to lunch, and BOOM. that's all it takes.

and that's where i am.

i'm just looking at it right now. just looking. and looking with SUCH GREAT LONGING at the place where i used to be. oh how i miss it. i want NOTHING more than to get back to it. NOW.

and i will. my heart is so there. big fucking sigh.

november 22: thanks

so, pixylisa wants to know if i want to go down that thanksgiving rabbit hole. the answer:

HELL NO!!! i really really don't want to. so why even contemplate it? why even attempt it?

1) the menu has already been set. this was done while i was thinking that i could handle it, while i was thinking i could live with 3 days a year eating cooked: thanksgiving, christmas and my birthday. i still think that maybe i can handle that. what happened in the meantime was a huge stretch of that position.

2) i'll be dining with folks who have no idea about a raw food diet.

3) if the choice is some cooked food versus a bunch of high-fat gourmet raw, which i would have to prepare, i would rather have the cooked food.

4) the big whammy: on friday, i will be having thanksgiving dinner with doug's family, meeting them for the very first time. i'm sure they are lovely people, as he is a lovely person. however... his mother is a conservative, southern baptist, texas woman. not only that, she is also a SAD dietician. she writes SAD textbooks, for the love of all!!! she is also the head dietician for texas WIC. this is sure to be a very highly SAD thanksgiving. what's more, i'm the first woman doug is introducing to his mother since his divorce 2 1/2 years ago. she knows i'm vegan, she doesn't know about the RAW bit. so... for the sake of politics and sweetness and light, i'm going to eat cooked food. i'll be bringing my own - recognizable stuff, beans and cornbread and baked sweet potatoes - but i'm not going to use this particular forum to explain my raw food lifestyle. i'll be glad if i can avoid too much discussion about my vegan lifestyle. or about my politics. or about my lack of religion. or about yoga. or about the fact that yes, i'm having sex with her son out of wedlock. really, i think the only thing i'm missing for her to disapprove of is that doug and i are boringly mono-racial. (at the big steak dinner party last weekend, we were actually the ONLY mono-racial couple there. i made up for it by being the vegan bitch.)

ugh, life is complicated from this side of the table. back in the day, before i had any mindfulness about what i put in my mouth, i too had the impression that those who did were complicated and high-maintenance and rather unpleasant. now i know better. now i know the incredible mental and emotional gymnastics required to live in integrity that goes against the grain. it's not easy to make the choice between being pleasantly social and feeding yourself properly. it's downright damn difficult. my biggest worry about this week is that when i'm at odds with myself, as i will be, i can be a little unpleasant. i hope that doesn't happen.

november 21: addendum

i want to thank the well-meaning commenters who keep admonishing me to "take it easy" and "not be so hard on myself" and all that. i really appreciate the sentiment, and i also want to reassure you. i've been on this raw food path for almost 6 years. i've been up and down, on and off, and i've tried and struggled with just about every variation on a raw food diet there is. i was a cousens/wolfe disciple. when i discovered 811, i knew to my bones that this was the path for me, forever! and i still know that. falling off the 811 wagon is NOT my first fall off, but it was the most calculated, and by far the most regretted. there is a big difference, to me, between being "hard on myself," which involves a great deal of self-punishment and unrealistic expectation of fixing things right away, and being fully awake and aware and clear on just how painful the fall off the wagon IS. this sucks. it really does. it's painful. and it was hubris that made me think that even though every time i'd tried cooked food in my raw food lifestyle over the past 6 years, it has always led to misery and regret, i thought this time i could handle it. the blindness of sobriety. and the insanity of expecting different results from identical actions. the truth is that cooked food is poison, and eating it puts me in a position of needing to recover from food poisoning. and i'm going to have some more of that poison in a few days, at thanksgiving, and have to recover again.

when the drinker quits drinking, they wake up to their hangover and swear that they are never going to do that again. well, i'm a raw foodist with a cooked food hangover. i know, for a fact, that i will have this hangover again in my lifetime. i'm not going to blind myself. but it's also so important to remember and work from this place - i'm not in denial, i'm not in punishment, i'm in deep, tough, hard-core self-love. somehow, i have to learn. so i am learning now. that's what this is about. and that's what the blog is about. it's not so much about "inspiring" people, although i hope to do so again sometime. it's about getting honest, getting real, and getting sober. and you can't take that too easy.

november 21: recovery

dr doug says "the solution to pollution is dilution." and i'm feeling pretty polluted. i can't even begin to express how awful this is. i was feeling so good. hubris. i really did think i was invincible with this whole cooked food thing. i really thought it would never even appeal to me again. instead, i've been entertaining cravings and indulging in them. god, it's been awful.

so, today i am taking it easy. i'm at home. i'm in bed. i feel vaguely sick or hungover or similar. i'm drinking a banana-tangerine juice smoothie. i'm going to have lots of water. i'm re-reading the 80-10-10 book. taking a day of rest and recovery. i hope i will feel better soon, and will step out of the grasp of the addiction.

and, honestly, i think the primary addictive ingredient is salt. salt in gourmet raw, salt in cooked food. it's in everything. when you eat 811, it's in nothing. and man, just a taste is all it takes. every cell in my body is bloated and painful.

boyfriend was supposed to come visit me this weekend, but got a last minute photo shoot. it's just as well. i need a few days to rest and recover and take care of myself before the thanksgiving chaos ensues.

november 20: integrity

i'm out of it. i'm so far out of my integrity... and i feel horribly sick as a result. i know the truth. i can see it. and i can feel the suffering that is caused by removing oneself from the proximity of truth.

this all started with one burrito. on september 25th. that's where it came from. i survived that burrito, which then led to more and more experimentation. in alcohol recovery, you are taught that it's the first drink that gets you drunk. in cooked food recovery, its the first meal. the first bite. the first wink and nod.

i can't soften my control. when i do, this is what happens. i must, somehow, climb back up onto my path. i feel as out of control, miserable, ashamed, and just really sick, as i have ever felt. i must get back on, and i must know and remember that this cooked food addiction is not one i can control, it is not one i can wink and nod at, it is not something i can dabble in. it is heroin, it is junk, and there is nothing i can do to control it except to stay away from it. i know this. i have known it. i thought that maybe i had mastered it, that i had somehow developed physiological mastery. i have nothing of the sort. if anything, i have less mastery now, having fewer defenses. these words, this agony, has to be my motivator for whenever, in future, i am tempted to stray. to remember how it got away from me in october and november of 2008, how it snowballed and escalated in the middle of the greatest triumph i'd ever had, how my hubris laid me low.

my name is rebecca and i am a cooked food addict. cooked food has a power over me which requires a much greater power than i am to overcome. i surrender myself. there is no choice but to start over again. again. i will succeed.

november 18: my point, and i do have one...

is that it's not as easy as it used to be. god, how easy it was to be 811 with the mangos and the watermelons!!! oh!

or is that just an excuse??? so many excuses, so many stories, all of them lies. right now, i'm enjoying the lie about the mangos and the watermelons. i'm enjoying the lie about wanting the social aspect. i'm enjoying the lie about the holidays.

the TRUTH is that my body wants nothing more to do with cooked food. EVER. i'm just going stream of consciousness here, because that's what a blog is for. i've been writing about control and this dinner party and all this bullshit, and what it comes down to is that my body fucking hates eating cooked food. it's my fucking EGO that wants to sit at a dinner party and laugh and enjoy myself without feeling like a freak. i'm not a freak. but because i judge myself harshly, i assume others will as well, and so i then turn and judge them. it's pretty fucking simple, honestly. my body absolutely adores eating 811, and i've been playing pretend that somehow i need to eat cooked food - because the bananas aren't ripe, or because i want to have dinner with my boyfriend...

my boyfriend doesn't give one happy goddamn about what i eat. he could NOT CARE LESS. he's paying attention - he admitted to that last night - he's paying attention to what i'm doing, and who knows, in 10 years, or more, or less, he might actually start to explore what i'm doing on his own, but honestly, he has NO JUDGMENT, NO CRITICISM, and ABSOLUTELY NO CONCERN about what i eat. all he cares about is that my ass looks good in a pair of jeans. or, more to the point, that my ass looks good OUT of a pair of jeans. and if eating an all-fruit diet is what's going to keep it that way, then more power to me. so i'm LYING TO MYSELF if i say i'm doing it to enjoy his company. that's ABSOLUTE BULLSHIT.

so this whole cooked food crap is coming from a place of lies. and it came from offering myself permission. first i started with permission to eat cooked food at the holidays - thanksgiving, christmas and my birthday. then i started obsessing about what i was going to have on my birthday, what i was going to have for christmas and thanksgiving. then i decided to have a cooked meal to celebrate 90 days raw. then i decided to have a cooked meal every month. then i decided to have a cooked meal to celebrate a weekend getaway. then i decided to have a cooked meal each week. then it degraded, completely, to this shitty, horrible, lost weekend of ridiculousness. little by little, it has gotten worse and worse, and it all came from smiling at it. i'm a fucking junkie. junkies crave junk, and will do anything to get it. i was on the verge of a fucking BREAKTHROUGH!!! and i scrapped it for garbage.

hell, i'm even thinking about scuttling my relationship - "it's my diet or me!" how's that for absolutely fucked up??? ridiculous. too totally ridiculous. the Saboteur.

so - what's to do now? not a fucking clue. i don't want to make anymore declarations of what i'm going to do. i'm waging war within myself, and all i want to find is grace. there is nothing in the world less attractive than a person out of integrity. and that's where i am right now. i look so ugly to myself. it's appalling. i'm having a hard time with that girl in the mirror. so, i guess the only thing to do is to stay in integrity.

i'll keep me posted.

november 17: disappointment

i was at a steak dinner party last night. i got cranky. i got pissy. i was feeling super-sorry for myself. i didn't want to sit around and watch people eat steak and drink wine. and when i met 2 of doug's friends, they asked if i was having steak, and i said, rather loudly, "hell no! that's disgusting!" to which they laughed and said, "and that's why we love it!"

so talking to doug just now, i said, "i hope i wasn't too rude or bitchy," and he brought up that incident. so now i feel rather ashamed and disappointed in myself for not being more open, and gracious.

i so don't know what to do now. it is, truly, disgusting for me to be at a party of people eating meat, and people eating meat don't understand that. doug thinks i'm judging them. i'm not. but it is disgusting. and obviously it's rude of me to express myself in this manner. and this coming week i'm going to have 2 meals, back to back, in which i'm going to be, again, the only vegan in the room.

so how do i handle this? this is going to be a major issue in my relationship if i don't get a handle on it, and that right soon. we joke about bacon all the time, but i know that doug doesn't realize how big an issue it is for me. i don't want him to feel judged. and, at the same time, i want to feel respected. i want... i don't know. i'm having a really hard time putting this all into words. but i've got to come to peace with it.

eating cooked makes it harder. it deadens my sensitivity. it makes me feel more entitled and it makes me want more flavors and to be more normal. i know that if i had been eating 100% clean all weekend, it wouldn't've bothered me that there was a dinner party. i would have eaten bananas.

so how do i love myself enough to eat clean, and love everyone else enough to not care, to really, truly, not care what they are eating?

this is so super-tough...

november 11: poo-poo

i got my hair cut today. it looks great. and, after almost 3 months of no-poo, she shampoo'ed the living HELL out of my hair! at first, she was massaging my scalp with 2 different kinds of aveda oils, which felt good and smelled good and i was happy about that. and then, we hit the sink, and she had to get those heavy oils out and so she shampooed my hair like 3 times, and then conditioned it and then put something else in it, and then after she cut it, put some mousse in it and hit the blow dryer. it looks great, and i love lisa - she understands how to cut this big crazy mess o' hair - but man. my hair now feels like plastic. it feels totally stripped, nekkid, slippery, weird. and it doesn't smell right either. last night i washed my hair with a wonderful concoction of lemon juice, honey, jasmine oil and dr. bronner's. that was lovely. now it smells like... product. it's all aveda product, but it's product just the same. i hope this doesn't start me over from square one with my no-poo regime.

on the food thing today - i went to central market and actually found food i wanted to eat! i found a big beautiful seeded watermelon from mexico, and dates, persimmons, and bananas. i'm happy. i had watermelon for dinner and it was wonderful, so i'm going back tomorrow for more.

and interestingly enough - as soon as i ate that watermelon, it was like putting a massive purgative down my system. i haven't been pooing as much as i've wanted to lately, and man! one meal of watermelon, and all hell breaks loose! kapow! i think this is a good thing.

eleven-eleven

eleven is one of my numbers. i love 11/11. nothing to do with veterans day.

so, blog silence for a few days. i fell off the wagon, hard, this weekend, but i'm back on it again. it was a last gasp after the whole dental thing. one week of transgressions. not bad. i've been through worse. and i was mostly-good while having a few cooked things here and there. i know that high-raw is not the lifestyle for me, i can only do that upon occasion and it needs to be for a pretty damn good reason. i feel better without it. i feel better without the temptations. i've been trying to live 100% raw for a really long time, and yes, it's a struggle to be 100% 100% of the time, but i am getting better at it. 811 helps enormously. more than anything else.

why? so many reasons. the big one, i think, is that on 811 you're getting enough calories from a "real food source." no empty calories, plenty of calories, and there's that total satisfaction it provides. and then there's the fact that it just simplifies everything down. is it a fresh, ripe, whole, raw fruit or vegetable? no? then it's not on my plan. pretty simple. takes all the guesswork out. and when you take out the guesswork, you also take out the trigger foods, and when you take out the trigger foods, you eliminate and alleviate almost all of the temptations. and that's a nice place to be. i'm looking forward to getting fully back there.

the plan right now is to banana-feast for a few days until the Peas on Earth challenge starts on saturday. to kind of wipe the slate clean and start over again. i need to accept that it's going to be bananas for awhile. i miss my mangos and watermelon, and i just need to get over that. it's neither here nor there. it's banana season now, and that's a good thing.

november 6: beans

i want beans. i honed down my "vegetarian burrito" craving - after the other night, i don't want the white flour tortilla, or the pico de gallo, or even the guacamole anymore. i suppose this is progress. but the black beans and rice - that i want! or, even more so, i want the vegan refried beans and corn tortillas at mr natural up the street. i'm having black bean soup and cornbread for thanksgiving dinner, and hummus and pita bread for christmas dinner, but right now i'm wanting this beans-and-grains combo-abombo daily. i want it now. it's 7.30 in the morning, and it sounds good to me.

there's something in me that doesn't want to be raw anymore. it wants to be an "anything as long as its vegan" cooked food vegan. what is this little part, and why is it here now? i've played with it before - i've given it what it wants. it's never pretty. i know that experimenting with it now would be like getting off the train and the wrong station - it would move me no closer to my goals, and it would keep me stuck while waiting for the next train to arrive.

what's more, i've given myself a very clear challenge to stay 100% raw, 100% 811, 100% no overts until thanksgiving day. obviously, eating beans and tortillas would kinda go against that! why is this plaguing me now? i've been so good for so long! why now? it's very frustrating, and i'm not really enjoying the experience of it.

some would say, "just eat it. your body wants it." but i can feel that my body doesn't want it. my body wants... to go live under a mango tree!

i listened to a dr doug interview last night, in hopes that it would inspire this craving out of me. it was inspirational, for sure, but ugh! still here. one thing that i liked that he said was "you haven't earned the right, with your cooked food body, to just 'go natural' overnight!!!" he spoke in favor of dental care, and bathing, which was good, specifically in the dental care aspect. and what i took from that as well is that we have to keep processing our raw food. we have to keep blending it, until our bodies have earned the right to chew and digest on our own. that's what i have to keep doing, and keep moving forward, stay on this train. not get derailed.

november 4: celebrations

the poll results are coming in. fireworks are being set off. i love living in a liberal town. of course, i'm home, tucked in to bed, not partying on one of the most historically significant nights in our country's history. is it really true? have we actually elected a black man to be president? pretty cool, my friends. pretty cool.

yes, i did say the other night that politics make me want to puke. that's my story and i'm still sticking to it. but even so, the thought that enough people can come together and either get color-blind, or rally around color-consciousness, in order to make this happen, is really pretty damn cool. i'm pleased. i'm really pleased. i'm sure the aftermath is going to be hellacious, but at least so far, we're not looking at anything like the 2000 results, or the 2004 results - the 2 "stolen" elections. now we just have to keep the man alive and see how well he can do the job.

back to what's really important: i vote with my dollars, i vote with my lifestyle, and this blog is supposed to be about my lifestyle, so here we go. tonight i finished up the last of the almonds i bought the other night. here's what i'm finding: when i get home, first thing, i have this massive salty-savory craving. if i eat to satisfy that craving, #1, it doesn't get satisfied, and #2, as soon as i've eaten enough of that to make me feel a little ill, all i want is some fruit. which is, of course, lousy food combining to eat fruit after fat. so i have to simply conquer the craving and not give in to it when i get home at night. i think it's habit more than anything. back in the summer, all i wanted for dinner was watermelon, and now that it's dark, i think i want "something else..." i had all that crap the other night, and it all sucked. i know i don't really want any of the things i think i want. it's just a bad habit i've let myself get into.

my first brushing

so i just brushed my "new" teeth for the first time! what a thrilling experience. my teeth have been cold-sensitive for so long... to rinse my mouth after brushing, i always have to hold the water in my mouth for a few seconds to warm it up. i started to do that tonight, and then thought - "hey, let's give this a swirl and see what happens!" wouldn't ya know! no cold sensitivity!!! HURRAH!!!

more small miracles to come, i'm sure. thank god the mercury is gone.

november 3: post-filling update

well, it wasn't as horrible as i had feared. it's almost 7pm, and i've been awake now for about 2 hours. slept for about 5. i'm still groggy, and not the most comfortable i've ever been - my cycle started yesterday, so i've got cramps to go along with the mild digestive upset, headache and muscle pain in my shoulders and jaw, and sensitive teeth. my teeth are sensitive in a weird way. not so much to cold anymore, as just feeling kind of bruised. they feel a little numb, due to this new resin compound that i'm not used to. i have wonderful dentists who treated me like a queen, but even still, it's a physically traumatic procedure. i'm wiped out.

november 2: on second thought...

i spent a lot of money on food tonight. a lot. and it was all disgusting to me.

i bought the pad thai at whole foods, which has been tasty the other 2 times i've had it. tonight, it was broccoli and cabbage with very wet zucchini noodles and no flavor. i also got the crackling cauliflower, which tasted wonderful when i sampled it. once i got it home, however, it had this horrible bitterness that i couldn't get around.

and so i went and i bought the overwhelming temptation that i've had this whole time - for a black bean and guacamole burrito. i couldn't go to my usual place, so i went to a local favorite. and it was just beyond disgusting. i couldn't even eat half of it, though i tried. again, the horrible bitterness that i identified there as being raw jalepeno. in the other dishes, it was onion. they all had raw onion in them. disgusting.

so i've eaten all this food in order to try and weigh me down, make tomorrow a little less painful. and all i feel is disgusting. i had to drink some orange juice to get the taste of REAL FOOD back in my mouth.

so now i feel really disgusting. and i have to get up very early in the morning. tomorrow's going to be a fun, fun day!

november 2: temperance

as in - to temper something, to make it mellower.

i have to take valium tomorrow morning. i'm pretty nervous about this. i don't want to do it. so i decided to eat fat tonight. i went to whole foods and got their pad thai and some "crackling cauliflower," which is raw curry cauliflower, and a packet of dehydrated almonds with yeast and bragg's and crap. i did this absolutely on purpose. i did it to thicken my blood and make me less clean and sweet and vulnerable to the valium. i did it to temper the valium.

and i feel disgusting. i thought, too late, about eating some cooked food instead. i think that might have been better. you know, a vegetarian burrito, beans and rice and guacamole. i think that would have been far easier on my system, while still clogging it up nicely. i may still do it. i just don't want to walk in there just all fruity and throw some narcotics down my throat and have a really horrible reaction! that would basically suck. i feel like if i'm going to do cooked meds, i should have cooked food to temper it out. maybe that doesn't make sense - extra work for my digestive system, extra work for my immune system. these drugs are designed to be used by sick people, not by well people. i'm very well, thank you very much. so that's where i am now.

november 1: tolerance

that's the word of the day. tolerance. yes, eating a raw food diet makes me a happier, healthier, calmer, more joyous person with an overall positive outlook on life. but it doesn't change my total interface with the world, and there is still so much out there that tickles my nerves and makes me feel upset, frustrated, angry, and intolerant.

i'm so sick of politics i could just puke. politics has got to be the most lifeless, soul-sucking force known to mankind. it has NO life-force. when people start to talk about it, i feel ill. everyone is convinced that if the other side wins, the whole world is going to hell in a handbasket. i'm so frustrated by my choices, i'm almost tempted not to vote. it's like i'm being forced to choose between burger king and mcdonalds. i don't want to choose between burger king and mcdonalds. i think they're both poisonous. i want to go sit under a mango tree and have my lunch there. will either burger king or mcdonalds give me that choice? no. so why should i have to choose between them? my candidate was ousted from the "system" a long time ago, for being too smart, too outspoken, and too on-target. i don't really want to vote for any of these other guys. before anyone gets frantic on me, i'm sure i will vote. big sigh. but honestly, i don't think it matters. the evil electoral college - in which i have no say - is making the decision anyway. i vote with my dollars. i don't eat at fast food joints.

i had a long day at work today. i adore my work, i have the best job in the world, and it's also hard work, physically. it can wear you down and burn you out, so its important to revitalize. so after my long day - teaching 2 classes and a private lesson - i went for a walk in the park around the lake. gorgeous 80 degree day, perfect calm breeze, lots of people out and about. as i'm turning around to head home, i notice these boys down on the lake in kayaks. they're goofing around, being 20-year-olds (no offense to my lovely 20-something friends. you know how your peers can be.), and i hear one of them say, "hey - go get the swan!" something made me turn around to see these 4 boys in kayaks surround this gorgeous, majestic swan, basically trapping him under a tree near the bank, and one of them raise his oar and bat it at the swan's head! he looked like he was either going to splash it, or make it flinch, or maybe even hit it. the poor bird was cornered, it's neck was arched, and it was looking around frantically. so me, i stop in my tracks and holler "HEY!!!!!! DON'T BE AN ASSHOLE!!! LEAVE THAT BIRD ALONE! you little SHIT!" the kid looked up at me, a bit surprised, but he did stop. i turned around and stomped off, my bliss totally interrupted.

last night i had a dream that my guy left me. that he left the country due to the election results. that he had to, had to flee the country, and did so without any forwarding information, without saying goodbye, and he was able to take his phone number out of my phone, so his name wasn't even in there anymore. completely eradicated out of my life. i was in a panic, sobbing, trying to make it make sense. that was my dream last night. it's been 2 weeks since we've seen each other, and it will be another 2 weeks until we see each other again. we've only been dating since august 15. that's a long time to be apart. luckily, we have plans already for thanksgiving and christmas, and he's moving from dallas to austin in january - i don't think either of us has any intention of letting this relationship end; we're both old enough to know a good thing when we find it. but i've been so grumpy lately, just having so much intense crap going on - he called me about 5 minutes after the incident with the swan - and he's been working crazy overtime putting his house on the market. we've had an intense few weeks, and we didn't talk yesterday. hence my stressed out dream. i've gone 8 years without a boyfriend. one month away from him is just too close to my old life for comfort. i like having him in my life.

last week i had to take 2 teachers off the schedule. that was a painful and stressful decision, one that took many, many months of conversation between myself and wayne. these 2 teachers were both our most troublesome teachers, and the time had come to make the decision - i've got new teachers coming in from training hungry to teach, i've got fantastic experienced teachers moving to town, and i've got incredible teachers already on staff - how do i justify keeping on 2 teachers who don't show me commitment, dedication and respect? they're both good teachers, but not good enough to warrant the kind of behavior and disrespect i've been getting from them. and even though i told them both that they are off the schedule for now, that they can both get back on it later when they have more time and energy to commit to our studio, and i even offered one of them a special project that i'm working on and asked her to help me with it, all i'm getting from that one is sneering and attitude, and the other one blasted wayne out for not "firing" her himself, and put all of her problems back onto him, as though it were his fault for all of her financial troubles, his fault for all of her decisions. ugh. the decision to let them go wasn't easy, but man, the way they're both reacting makes me know it was the right choice to make! my offer to bring them back on when/if they're ready is officially rescinded. i have no need for that kind of bitterness and disrespect in my life.

and then larry posted a very interesting thread on raw fu, full of lots of thought provoking stuff. larry has been eating a fully cooked version of 80-10-10, low-fat vegan, and reporting back what he's been doing with it. fair enough. the rest of us are trying to eat raw, but whatever. i love larry. and it is very interesting to get his perspective. so one of the questions he posted is "why would eating miso make your stomach hurt? the japanese eat it to soothe your stomach? there's something wrong when you can't eat miso soup without it causing a reaction." fair enough. and only fair to point out that i also ate that miso soup with red pepper paste and peanut sauce, so it wasn't just the miso soup that made my stomach hurt, but i had had the other sauces without the miso and didn't have the same reaction. so my response to that was that - you know, we can be sensitized to anything with enough exposure. i used to be able to eat meat and cheese and bread and wine and all kinds of abominable combinations, all at the same meal, and thought my body could handle it all really well. over the years of cleaning my system out, man, it can't handle anything anymore. is it the fault of my system, or the fault of the toxins? it's like, now that my house is cleaner, i notice when something is out of place. is that a problem? or am i just tempted to keep it clean instead?

so the connecting thread through all of these thoughts is TOLERANCE. what is my tolerance level? am i just very very sensitive now and so therefore just cannot tolerate ANY bullshit anymore? have i become an incredibly sensitive bullshit-and-toxin sensor? our bodies, our minds, our psyches, can become callous and desensitized and we can create tolerances that will protect us against anything, until we allow too much, and then the tolerances overflow and we get sick - mentally, emotionally, physically sick. i feel like i have no ability to tolerate the bullshit, the cruelty, the animosity, the toxicity, and the isolation, anymore. my whole being cries out for balance - between work and play, light and dark, activity and rest, alone and together. i want to find real tolerance - not callous indifference masquerading as tolerance. how could i walk by those boys tormenting that bird? yet so many others did. the "tolerant" way is to say, "let boys be boys," or "it's not my place..." but i felt a total sense of something else. i could not tolerate those boys doing that, exhibiting cruelty against another living being, be it man, woman, child, dog, cat or bird (or any one of our planet's creatures), not even for one second. my body cannot tolerate even the slightest insult to its integrity without responding by making me feel ill.

tolerance, like compassion, is an active force. it is not passive, sitting around, allowing for evils to be perpetrated. nor does it allow itself to be used against the Self. i can't sit passively by, nor can i allow myself to be coerced into anything i don't beleive in. i will not tolerate manipulation. i will not develop tolerances that allow me not to feel. i don't ever want to get used to bad things again.

a long blog. an intense week. at least my house is kinda clean.