This Sunday I will run my first marathon. I’m in bed by 10pm every night; I rise at 4:30am. I take a multi-vitamin rich in antioxidants, drink at least two mugs of gunpowder green tea and eat a bowl of oatmeal with blueberries every morning. I have three slices of Piggies harvest toast with freshly ground peanut butter and blueberry jam for lunch. I eat a bowl of pasta bolognese every night. I snack on Fage fat-free plain yogurt with honey and strawberries.
All this anal-retentive living is making me just feel fat and pasta-blocked.
Filed under: Life in general
There’s an article in today’s New York Times, One for the Ages: A Prescription that May Extend Life, bringing to the foreground evolving animal research suggesting that calorie restricted diets may prolong life. Already, there are thousands of Americans participating in such diets, determined to delay the inevitable as long as they can. So what if you have to eat Metamucil muffins for breakfast, eat iceberg lettuce for lunch, skip dinner and have no energy to have sex– the point is, you get to outlive everyone. And when you are finally on your deathbed, you may have a great-great-great-grandchild around to poke at your flab, but your best friends, your wife, your husband, your brothers and sisters have all been long gone leaving you to deal with this snot-nosed kid all alone.
My family lived in the Bronx until I was ten. We lived in an apartment building on Bainbridge Avenue just kitty-corner to Montefiore Hospital where my mother worked as a nurse anesthetist. My sister and I went to P.S. 94. My best friends were Angie Bonilla and Dimple Patel. I remember loving Angie, Dimple– not so much. I ran for class president in the third grade. According to my mother, I came home crying on election day. Apparently, bribing my peers with candy wasn’t enough inducement to vote for me; I discovered later that my parents were secretly relieved that after all these years, I had finally demonstrated some inclination toward disingenuity.
My grandmother lived with us back then. She arrived some time around my own arrival into this world in 1972. My father was in school at NYU studying political science and my mother was working two eight-hour shifts at two hospitals. My grandfather had just passed away from liver cirrhosis the year before– it was a good time for grandma to come for an extended visit. She was a beautiful woman. I remember her oval face, her high cheekbones. She even had the coveted nose-bridge. She didn’t go anywhere without make-up; eyebrows plucked and shaded, lip liner, foundation. She chain-smoked Kents. My father prepared our breakfast, but she packed our lunches, picked us up from school, made our after-school snacks and fed us dinner. Most importantly, she was the barrier between me and ba-naa-naa.
Ba-naa-naa was a ‘game’ my sister and I played. Really, it wasn’t so much a game, but a way for an older sister to terrorize her easily terrorizable little sister. She would get down on all fours and fixate her eyes on me and chant, ‘ba…naa…naa.” And then chase me around until I cried. That’s all. Hard to believe, but to this day, I still remember how relieved I was that there was such a thing as grandmas.
Filed under: Food
I found a recipe in last month’s Food & Wine magazine– it was taken from a vegetarian cookbook authored by Celia Brooks Brown. (I write the name only to remind myself to think twice before buying her book.) The dish was a whole wheat pasta with a ‘cream’ sauce made from lowfat yogurt, garlic, thai chile, lemon zest and spinach. It was clear that this was either going to be a disaster or become the ultimate food find. I had to try it.
I ended up with wonderfully moist, lemon-flavored, slightly piquant cardboard. I shared my meal with a friend who kindly deferred judgement. Another friend asked me if the sub-optimal result was a fault of the recipe or perhaps in its execution– in all fairness, probably a little of both, though I would like point out: God did not intend yogurt to be heated and then mixed with lemon no matter how much flour you use to prevent curdling.
That said, I’ll probably try again. The attainment of a low-fat yogurt ‘cream’ sauce seems like a challenge worth pursuing. Advance apologies to my future guinea pigs.
Filed under: Life in general
“If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always gotten. It’s called the Mystery Method because I’m Mystery and it’s my method.”
Filed under: Growing up
I have an Oreck XL vacuum cleaner. My parents discovered it about 5 years ago– it’s only one piece, relatively light and will suck up just about anything. Except for some reason, a plastic twist tie. Thinking that such a machine might be exactly what my sister and I need but would never purchase of our own free will, our parents went ahead and bought us each one for Christmas that year. Despite the dismay I felt opening up this huge box, only to find… a vacuum, it’s turned out to be just about the best Christmas present I’ve ever received. Ranks right up there with the gumball machine I pined for as a young child and finally received when I was in junior high school– the only reason I left it on the Christmas list was sheer principle.
I was just vacuuming and remembering how my father would never let me vacuum our house because he didn’t think I could do as good a job as he could. Which is actually true, since he would swipe through the same spot at least three times, lift sofas and move chairs, and re-vacuum an area if foot imprints appeared on the carpet too quickly– it wasn’t hard to take a less OCD approach. The labor involved in vacuuming was compounded by this three piece heavy-duty vacuum (this one could suck up a plastic twist tie) that my father thought was the zeus of vacuums. Even after they moved into a home that had the pan-house vacuuming system, he’d drag out his trusty, heavily bandaged, squeaky-wheeled Electolux. My parents liked to have their friends around and my mother was a fantastic cook so growing up, we had people over nearly every weekend. He’d drag it out to clean the house before the guests arrived for dinner; he’d drag it out again after everyone left– even if it was 2am in the morning and he was wobbly from too many Budweisers. It was a shared family ritual that I hated at the time; now looking back, I almost miss it.
This is not a compulsion that was passed on to me. I live in perennial clutter. My home represents the absolute antithesis of feng-shui. But on days like today– with everything clean and in order, I almost feel like it’s home.
For four years– starting in my junior year in college through my 2nd year in medical school, I had my life down pat. I was so methodical, I could tell you down to the minute where I would be, what I would be doing and how long it would take. Friends knew to schedule time in. There would be no more last-minute cramming for tests or papers started on the day they were due– I finally had enough of the all-nighters that barely pulled me through my first two years. The Dean’s request to see me was a wake up call– I wasn’t a legacy, I wasn’t an athlete, I eschewed extra-curricular activities– in short, I was there for what was in my mind alone, which by that point apparently wasn’t even making a double-bogey. I’m a slow cogitator and studying in staccato spurts in between long periods of mental inactivity clearly wasn’t working.
Over the years, I’m still a compulsive list-maker and still get enormous pleasure from the physical act of scratching the words out with a blunt pencil tip, but somewhere along the way, my obsessive need to scatch everything off by the end of the day is long out of gas. Every Sunday, I look at my weekend’s list to find it curiously devoid of pencil marks and the day becomes a mad race to pare the list down.
Where’s life’s dean when you need one?
Some might consider such a title an oxymoron, but today, even I was impressed by the troves of people that descended upon our quiet hamlet. The Head of the Charles brought in the usual gaggle of underclassmen and newly minted alumni eager to return to the warm underbelly of collegiate life. Life is Good held their annual pumpkin carving festival– the plan was to carve and light 30,000 pumpkins across the Boston Commons and break the world record set in 2003 by Keene, N.H. at 28,952. At last count, Boston did it– patches of 30,128 glowing jack o’lanterns decorated the Boston Commons by 8pm. While I am happy for Boston, that the prior world record (off by a relative hair) was set by a town with a population of 23,000 (compared to Boston’s 560,000), makes this newest designation seem, well… wrong.
All in all however, all this activity made for a festive day. Personally, I happen to like traffic jams (only when I’m not in them, which as a non-driver is often the case). Today was one big traffic jam in Boston. Occasionally, days like this are helpful to remind you either that you live in a city, or to remind you why you left.
Today’s a special day. I get to write TWO posts. I think this is only my way of avoiding sleep. Usually I’m bounding into bed, but lately, I’ve noticed, I try to stay up as late as I can. I usually don’t last very long because right around 10pm my eyes start feeling gritty and the deterioration in my mental and motor skills is such that I can’t do much except lie still– this is a genetically pre-determined trait that drove my father crazy when I was growing up. He was certain that I could never by a true intellectual superstar unless I stayed up well past midnight studying. Nothing made him happier than to see my nose buried in a book. And though he tried very, very hard– buying used math and history textbooks from the Barnes & Nobles, assigning my sister and me his own personal homework, taking us to the local public library every Saturday with a shopping cart (those gigantic, aluminum, old-lady ones) to fill with books– I personally could not get past Judy Bloom. I loved her. When I entered the fifth grade and was routinely going to bed at 10, he finally realized that his hopes of rearing an Einstein were hopelessly lost.
I suspect however, that he had his suspicions when he discovered much earlier that I sucked at long division.
Filed under: Living in Boston
Well, yesterday anyway. Peanut butter and apples. Wow. Granted this is not novel information for most people, but there I was, just having eaten dinner, but still needing something to… cleanse the palate. My buds weren’t sure if they wanted sweet or salty, crunchy or soft– in short, I was still hungry. I scanned the contents of my refridgerator– there wasn’t much in there except for a jug of Gatorade, a tub of Greek yogurt, a few apples and some freshly ground honey roasted peanut butter from Whole Foods. What I really wanted was an Eggo waffle with melted I can’t believe it’s not butter and Food Emporium syrup. My sister introduced me to this delectable treat this past weekend– who knew toasted frozen waffles, fake butter and artificial sweetener could be such a taste sensation? Instead, I settled for an apple and the peanut butter. In truth, I really just wanted the peanut butter, but like ketchup, peanut butter needs a home. I had heard of apples being employed for this purpose before, so I decided to try it. Well, I must say I was pleasantly surprised.
Current events: Condoleeza Rice is looking particularly manly these days.
