Rhubarb Pie

Condolences

Hey hon,

I was so sorry to hear that the marriage equality bill failed in Maine.  That sucks.  It sucked here, too, on what otherwise was such a good night.  It felt crappy, the realization that your people, half of the people who make up your (Californian, Mainer) identity would do that to your other closer people.  The next day, when I had lunch with Margie, like I always do, I couldn't stop apologizing.  I'm sorry, Margie.  I'm so sorry that small, uncompassionate people voted that your marriage isn't a real marriage.  I am even more sorry that we are in this ridiculous situation where people get to vote on someone else's marriage at all.  How can we possibly be in this situation, where I get to vote on someone else's marriage?  It is a preposterous thought.  How would it feel to have someone else vote on my marriage, my partnership, my family?  Some realms are entirely incongruent with other realms, like buying humans, or voting on families.

I have bad news, from a year ahead of you guys.  You might want to be prepared for this, because I didn't expect it.  What you're feeling, the outrage and sorrow and shocked realization that you were this close to living in a humane and equal state and once you hoped for it, that is what you really, really want, those feelings don't go away.  My sister and I were driving somewhere and with no context, in the silent car, she said "Prop 8 just gets more insulting every day."  It does.  We're both straight, so we're not even the direct recipients.  But I look at my friends, at my own family members, and I cannot fucking believe that we got to vote on their intimate lives and worse, that we voted wrong.  The first day after, I was shocked and disappointed.  A year later, I'm more disappointed, and angrier.

I don't know what to tell you, because it sucks and it is wrong.  There's next time.  I did some small campaigning last time and it is the only thing that keeps me from shriveling up in shame.  I honestly thought Prop 8 would fail.  I couldn't see how people could be cruel enough to choose to make some of us second-place citizens.  Now that I'm that much more motivated, and that much more discouraged by half my state, I'll do a lot more.  But that's next time.  In the meantime, it feels bad.  I'm sorry, hon.  It is going to feel bad up until everyone knows that my state respects and protects their lives and loves and families the same.

How To Ask Me For A Favor

Recently two former law school classmates reached out to me for a favor.  One of them did it right, and one of them did it wrong.  I'm really glad about it, because it helps me do my job better.  

My job is to help college kids get comfortable with "networking" -- a word I hate, but that stands for a concept we all have to learn.  You'll need help some day, and learning how to ask for it well, from people who are mildly favorably disposed toward you, is a skill that will pay really big dividends in your life. 

There are some counter-intuitive things that come with asking for help.  You get better at learning to ask for help by practicing giving help and doing favors.  The more you do that, the better you understand, intuitively, what kind of favors people are glad to do and what kind they aren't.  You understand what the "payoff" is for the favor-doer.  Because that's another counter-intuitive thing.  When you need a favor, you can be blinded by what YOU are getting out of it, and you feel ashamed and encumbered and sorry that you aren't the one in the powerful position of offering help, rather than being in the humbling position of asking for it.  But you shouldn't be blinded! By asking for help, you are GIVING the OTHER PERSON a small gift: you are flattering them, you are putting them in the powerful position, and, especially if the help you ask for is easy for them, you are letting them feel generous and valuable and proud without having to do much work.  

That's why people like you more after they have done you a favor than they do before you asked them for one.  Strange, but true.  (At least, I seem to remember believing it is true after reading Influence.)  When someone has done you a favor they feel better about themselves (because they are a generous person who is sought after for valuable advice and powerful help) and they feel better about you, because they have invested some time in you, and they must have done so for a good reason, and also they now have a stake in you, and when you succeed, they look better, and also, you now owe them a favor, so they would like it very much if you get to a place where you can return the favor someday.  

Anyway, so I was favorably inclined to both of my old classmates, each of whom I hadn't heard from in a while.  They both buttered me up in a good way with their approach -- I have this interesting problem, and you seemed like the right kind of person to help me get unstuck with it.  I know you have a lot of good ideas, and you're well-connected, so I wonder if you'd be able to help me.  

If you want me to help you that's a really good way to ask.  It taps into something that I am proud of about myself, and it lets me know that my natural tendencies will probably be enough to assist you -- so the investment of work on my part isn't likely to be so cumbersome, which is important because I am busy.  That's important if you are not someone whose prior relationship with me makes me ready to move the earth on your behalf -- if I have a mild interest in your success, but it doesn't keep me up at night.  Meanwhile both of the requests tapped into my natural curiosity -- what kind of intriguing problem is this, I wondered?  Probably narcissism helped, too.  It's nice to have smart, successful people seeking me out, and I wanted to learn a little bit more about what kind of problem they see me as particularly suited to help.  

And then one of them botched it, and the other one didn't.  Maybe part of it was in the delivery, but I don't think so.  One of them was on the phone, and made the introductory pitch by voice -- I was thinking about you, and this seemed like a problem you could solve.  I said, yeah, go on, and he went into it.  We were on the phone for about two hours on a weeknight -- a lot of time for me to work on a stranger's problem.  I didn't mind, though, because my friend was right about the kind of problem, it was right up my alley, and he was there with me, listening to me think it through, so I got to feel smart and helpful and appreciated for those two hours, and he asked good questions and gave me feedback and now and then said, ooh, that's really helpful, I hadn't thought of that, I'm so glad I called.  Tiny rewards, but they helped me through. 

The other one approached me by email, same proposition, intriguing problem, thought you might have a good viewpoint on it.  I said, hmm, intriguing, would be glad to help if I can, I'm available for coffee or a beer in the next few weeks.  And he botched it, and thinking about why has taught me some helpful stuff.  He ignored my suggestion of coffee or a beer and instead sent me the problem by email.  There was homework -- go follow this link, learn this background information, and then help me find a solution to it.  It became an assignment without a payoff.  I immediately didn't want to help anymore, because I'm too busy to go follow the link and watch the videos.  I'm not too busy to have a beer with an old classmate, or to listen to him talk about a problem, or even to spend 2 hours on the phone on a weeknight if something turns out to fascinate me, but I don't want to get given a homework assignment about something that I haven't chosen to be interested in, to work on alone.  I expect doing the homework assignment wouldn't take anywhere close to the 2 hours I spent on the phone with my other classmate, so why am I resistant?  Because he jumped too far with the ask.  If my first classmate had said, hey, do you have two hours right now to talk about someone else's problem, I probably would have said no.  But I had a few minutes to be intrigued, and then I got caught up in the problem, and rewarded by the small but affirming bits of feedback I was getting from interacting with my friend, asking questions and hearing him respond to my thoughts.  In contrast, an equally compelling project, delivered by email from someone who doesn't want to make time to talk to me about it, just made me feel lousy. 

I am mildly put out by the second guy now, and I like the first guy a tiny bit better, even though the first guy made more of an imposition on my time and the second guy, theoretically, was more conscientious, by outlining the whole problem and inviting me to solve it at my convenience.  The problem is, people who do favors get a reward by doing it.  Part of that reward is in the interaction itself, the feeling that you are strengthening a relationship by helping.  The second guy focused on the problem and forgot about the relationship.       

Plus, I got to eat pancakes for two hours straight.

I may have hit on the best form of hosting people ever.  Pancake breakfasts, man.  Worked like a charm.  I'm going to do this regularly.  It was so easy.

Invited lots of friends over for pancakes anytime on Sunday morning.
Made up two kinds of pancake batter last night.
Made a tofu scramble this morning.
Friends came through, ate pancakes, chatted and left.  The table was always full and I actually got to talk to people.

Man, I think this is a winner.  It would be super expandable, and it was easy.  I'm thinking Second Sundays, or at least the Sunday after Second Saturday every month (because Second Saturday is a huge monthly street fair here).  I'm pretty jazzed for pancakes right now: oatmeal, buckwheat, corn-blueberry, sweet potato or squash...  I'll always make a protein, too, so that I don't interrupt the meal by gnawing someone's arm off.  My friends are gracious and polite, but I still don't want to be tacky.

Anyway, if I have ever done or said anything that gives me any credibility with you, if you trust me at all, you must make these Oatmeal Pancakes.  They will make you happy.

I did the first unassisted pull-up of my life at age 37. From a still hang.

Sugar, I just wrote a post about weightlifting, but I didn't say the part I've been meaning to say to your post on falling apart.  I guess I think two things.

Thing the first:

I fervently believe that your body loves you and wants to carry you strongly and comfortably.  I believe that it is never too late, that it will always respond to you.  It will forgive any amount of neglect or abuse, and it will always, always respond favorably and predictably to doing the things it needs.  It needs good fuel.  It needs to be used, along the whole range of intensities.  It needs sleep.  It needs daylight.  It needs touch and (for many people) sex.

Your poor body.  It is mute and it is trapped there with you.  It can't say what it means.  It can only send you signals, sensations that your bossy, dominant mind can ignore.  Your mind wants other things, like information to chew on or distractions.  It will find them while your body tries to get attention.  It sends lethargy or a pounding heart to tell you you didn't eat what it needs.  It sends an ache to ask you to please twist and bend and lengthen it in more directions.  It sends joint pain to say that you've gotten out of alignment, please come back to your spine and work from there.  It gets weak when it wants you to know that you should fight your limits.  As soon as you do, it will rejoice by pushing those limits away and teaming with you to charge down the new limits.

As soon as you are moving in the right direction, you have no greater cheerleader than your body.  It LOVES you.  It is SO EXCITED to do things with you.  Your body wants to go on walks with you.  Your mind is seeing things and whirring through the details of the day.  But your body will send you rhythm between your legs and your breath.  Your body will give you pink cheeks, or that delicious sweatbreak.  Your body will thank you for sufficient nutritious food within a day, with a steady grateful energy that makes the Diet Cokes unnecessary.  Your body CANNOT WAIT to pick that up, and here your mind should urge it to go a little slower, focus on technique.  Because your body is JAZZED!  It loves hefting things!  It floods you with euphoria after!  It begs you to throw that heavy thing around afterwards!  Then jump over it!  Maybe roll on it!  It all feels good!  Do more!  Your body is sort of a golden retriever puppy.  It has no sense.  But it loves you and it wants to bound.

Thing the second:

Neglecting your body is sad, because it is a mute creature that is at your command.  We should tend our bodies as we would tend any creature under our control.  It is sad because it the feedback is so immediate; the signals come as soon as we move in a direction, healthy or neglectful.  It is a shame to pass up that source of gratification.  That said, I know it is hard to fit it in and the world is full of distractions from the pleas of your body.  I fully think that working out as much as I do is a selfish treat.  I'm lucky to be able to do that because I don't have other strong demands on my time.  I don't know how I'll balance it when I have a family with equally good claims.

If you can make time, I think you should.  If you are basically healthy, you can repair your body and bring it to whatever state you want it to be in.  After a lifetime of rolling my ankles in sports, they are now fixed, by strengthening and a lot of painful massage that realigned my legs.  You can make your body stronger than you dream, or fast or bendy or springy.  The ways to do this are known; your body will react in predictable ways.  You just have to make that What You Do for a while.  It takes a pretty wholehearted focus (which is fun, when it is fun).  It is never too late.  I see people at my gym make drastic turnarounds, to become glowing and pink and proud of themselves for doing things they dreamed they could.  Your body is on your side.  If you do this, it will give you every help and encouragement it can.  It will send you good sleep; it will crave dark green foods; it will breathe deep and full; it will grow strong; it will be euphoric; it will wake and feel alive.  It loves you, and you will feel it.

This is why change is bad.

Wednesday is bench press night, as you know, of course.  My lifting is unremarkable these days.  I don't have my heart set on a goal and it shows.  Let's not talk about my lifts.  Let's talk about spotting.

A new guy, big dude, joined our group last night.  Also, Mike wasn't there.  I've told you about Mike, right?  How he's my lifting partner and he's so perfect?  We've been lifting together for more than a year now; he totally knows my form and the cues I need and he is completely, completely focused when he spots me.  I trust him absolutely, which makes my lifts that much easier.  I spot him, and I think the trust goes both ways.  But this new guy!  He doesn't trust my spots!

I suppose it isn't his fault.  He's big.  He lifts heavy weights.  He doesn't want them to fall on him.  He doesn't know what I can lift.  But dude.  If I'm standing on the bench to spot you, I can deadlift what you are benching.  Besides, the thing I figured out about spotting someone's bench is that you don't have to catch the whole weight.  The bencher can lift all but the last few pounds.  If you can give any kind of assist, the bencher can get the rest of it.  I wouldn't do that, of course.  If I'm helping lift a failed press, I'll help with what I've got.  But the spotter only needs to be able to give enough help to get the increment, not the whole weight.

This new dude!  He didn't know me, and I saw him pull our trainer aside to suggest side spots.  Of course the lifter should have whatever spots make him trust the lift.  He shouldn't have the faintest hesitation distracting him.  If he wants side spots, he should have them.  BUT I HAD THE SPOT.  It was safe.  Perfect Mike already knows that.  Perfect Mike would never doubt me.  (For that matter, I would ask for side spots before I let myself do a spot I wasn't certain of.)

For that matter, the new dude didn't spot me right.  By "right", I mean, exactly like Perfect Mike does.  He handed me the bar more abruptly.  He didn't coo and murmur and shout at me exactly the same.  He took the weight off too fast.  I trusted him; he's a giant and I got the feeling he could twirl my loaded bar like a baton.  I didn't ever think it would fall.  But you know.  He's not Mike. 

I shouldn't let myself get as dependent on Mike as I am.  I think there's a strong tendency for lifters to get into OCD rituals, down to tiny details.  I know lifters who like the bar to line up with the ceiling tiles when they bench press.  TheAre's a lot to having every lift be as close to the same as you can make it.  But (and this is tragic), Perfect Mike has an independent life and can't always be there to spot me.  I suppose I should be able to be spotted by other people who aren't perfect.

Whatever.  The new dude is going to join our group for a while, so he'll get to know me.  Next week he'll watch me and Mike, and see that another man trusts my girl spotting.  (Unless he has Mike spot him, in which case he's lucky, because Mike is a great, focused spotter.  I may have mentioned that.)  I'll get over myself.  I'm sure the new dude will become one of us soon enough.

How To Structure A Successful Book Group

Got an email from an old friend who's decided to start a book group in her new city.  Do you have any suggestions, she asked?

Oh yes I do.  

I am in a book group that I really, really like.  I came into the group late -- maybe five or six years into the group's existence.  I've been in the group for about 8 years (after the group had read 72 books together) and we've read about 70 more since then.  I like my book group because it makes me read things that I would not read on my own, and because talking about what I've read with other smart readers helps me understand, remember, and enjoy the reading better.  The women in my book group are very smart, and are serious readers, and are not afraid to disagree, which contributes to my enjoyment of our discussions.  I think being smart and not afraid to disagree are the most important components.  "Serious readers" is actually kind of hard to define, and perhaps not necessary.  

We have rules that save us, even though we need to renegotiate these rules from time to time.  Having them makes things more efficient.  Establishing these things first will make it easier when, inevitably, people want different things from the group.  Here's the thing. You're hopefully going to like and respect the people who join this group, and when people you like and respect start to stray by showing up regularly and confessing they haven't read the book and wanting to gab about their marriage or rant about politics, you'll need to fall back on the rules or your book group will stop being a book group.  Someone who should know better will talk too much or go way off topic, and you need to have a person whose job it is to govern the discussion and keep it on track, because in the moment nobody will want to hurt anyone else's feelings.  

First, some principles: 1) we are a book group that intends to read and discuss books as literature.  We are not a therapy group or even primarily a group of friends.  There are friendships within the book group,of course, and I feel warm fondness for everyone in the book group, but the friendships are separate and distinct from the reason we gather each month.  We are also not a political group or a self-help group; the discussion of the books should be about the text, primarily, not about our own experiences or the state of the world today.  When the book group meeting is over, it's okay to leave without lingering and talking about everything else in your life.  2) No competitive cooking.  We have tea or wine or cookies or date bars or coffee, but that's not the point.  Hostess duties rotate, but it's not meant to be a source of stress, and it's okay if you haven't cleaned your house or spent the day in the kitchen, as long as there are enough places to sit where we can talk for a couple of hours.  

Second, some procedural rules: We meet on the 3rd Sunday of the month, from 3 to 5.  We used to set the next month's meeting date each time, swapping conflicts and trying to make it work for everyone, but that gets tedious and personal, because invariably one person can't make it one weekend and someone different can't make it the next, and then when you vote it feels like you are choosing one person over the other.  Take away that negotiation and you save time and nobody feels resentful.  Also, people know to set aside that afternoon.  

We have a geographic center.  This is something we haven't done so well -- over the years, book group members have moved out of town, but stayed in the book group.  That makes it harder for them to attend meetings and harder still for them to host meetings that everyone else can attend conveniently.  Establishing some kind of geography ahead of time will avoid awkwardness when one book group member, who everyone loves dearly, moves 50 minutes away but still wants to host meetings.  It's a drag to drive 50 minutes away to attend book group, but you won't want to kick anyone out once you've got the group going, so a rule would make this a little easier.    

We rotate hostessing duties and book selection duties.  Hostess leads the book discussion, in whatever way she chooses -- but generally there's a scheduling bit at the beginning, where we decide the next month's book and the hostess, talk about other books we've read or that people might find interesting, and then get down to the book discussion.  The book selector's decision is absolute -- it is not a negotiation or a vote, unless the selector decides she wants to do that.  Before we instituted that rule we wasted a lot of time proposing books and then trying to avoid hurt feelings while arriving at a consensus.  Since our best discussions tend to spring from books about which we disagree, there's no reason for all of us to be excited about reading a particular book.  BUT: someone in the group must have read a selection in order for us to read it.  We've been burned reading selections that were favorably reviewed but which nobody had read.  I suppose classics and Booker/Pulitzer winners are safe even if nobody has read them, but generally someone in our group has.  

We have a secretary of sorts, who sends out a reminder email about the next meeting's time and place, and after a meeting about what the next month's book is.  She also keeps track of the books we've read, which is pretty cool. 

A few suggestions: rotate between old books and contemporary ones.  Pick flawed books -- discussions where everyone shows up and gushes "I loved this book," are boring.  Pick hard books, so you'll benefit from the conversation, and so you are motivated by the fact of the upcoming meeting to work a little harder than you would on your own.  Read a couple of books by the same author, or read books by sisters, or pick a topic and look at it a couple of different ways.  Read longer, darker books in winter.  Remind people that it's okay to disagree, and model that kind of respectful disagreement in your own behavior, and you'll get much better discussion.  Read plays and short stories and childrens' books, too, from time to time.  

I Need to Stretch

Dear friend.  

I have been wondering some things, lately.  First, I've been noticing my body, in some kind of yucky ways.  There is the part about how I have gained weight and how I rarely move around outside the way I used to, and the way I long to.  There is the part about how I am not as strong as I once was.  There is the part about how I have Crohn's disease, which means a fundamental part of my body isn't working right for reasons that are still mysterious to me and to others who are smarter than me.  There is a new, recent part, a flare of tendonitis or carpal tunnel, that has me going to the occupational therapist and jiggering around with the ergonomics of my workstation and tossing a tennis ball to myself.  And my teeth hurt lately, and because I get spooked easily by dentists I haven't been in too long.  I'm falling apart, friend, and I don't like noticing my body this way.  I'd rather notice what I can do than what I can't do, and so I've been wondering about the shift, how I got like this. 

I've gotten accustomed to saying, this is what I was born to do, when people ask me about my job.  But people ask me if I miss coaching, and what I say is I miss being outside as much as I used to be.  I miss the physicality of my old life -- how a significant part of my job had to do with observing reality, and objects, and wind and water. Bodies and boats, decisions and mistakes, movements you could practice and perfect.  There are a lot of things I don't miss about it. I knew other coaches who would lie awake at night thinking about a particular physical mistake a sailor had made and worrying it over and over in their head, and I never did that.  I love sailing and when I was serious about competing I got pretty good, but I wasn't ever really obsessed the way you have to be to get great at something.  I do daydream and fixate about how people make the decisions over how to spend their time, how they define themselves and frame or respond to opportunities.  It does seem to be what I have been thinking about all of my life.  So the subject matter of my work now interests me in a livelier way than anything else I've ever done.  In this way I was born to do this.  But I was also born to go outside, and to walk daily, and to see the water, and I miss those parts of my life. 

The occupational therapist has made me notice my body again and it is a bittersweet feeling.  I miss being strong and flexible and loose.  I miss training and the feeling of physical progress.  What I notice now is tension and stress.  Mostly it's from sitting wrong, and we're fixing my chair and the placement of my keyboard.  Some of it is from the way my days are chopped up, and the pace at which I meet with students.  It's extra busy right now and fitting my attention into the half-hour student appointment slices is kind of like my chair and my keyboard setup -- it's not quite how I'm built, and I can do it but there is a small mental strain from keeping it up, from bending my mind into the patterns of an appointment-filled day when it would rather roam a little, or spend longer on certain puzzles than on others.  Some small modifications in the way I work will probably help, but I don't know quite what they are. 

Even more help.

So Karen moved in, looked around, and said, "Why don't you use your backyard?"  I said, I dunno.  Because I love my front porch and always choose that?  Because I have to walk through two doors to get to the backyard?  Because I never see it?

This, incidentally, is a sore spot.  My house has two back porches, the outermost along the entire back of my house.  Which means that when I stand at my kitchen sink, I look into the back wall of a back porch, like so.

Those are my treasures, on the ledge.  Tiles from a trip to Spain with Anand.  A jar with garlic in it. Little rocks from a trip to the Marin Headlands with my family.  My stripe-y rocks, because a girl can't have enough stripe-y things.  Anyway, I don't want to get too heavily into gender roles, but I will say that the person who chose to put additional closed storage that covered a kitchen window is not the same person who generally cooks or does the dishes.  Considering how much of my time I spend at that sink, the fact that the window looks into a dark wall detracts pretty heavily from my quality of life.

I had talked about taking down part of the exterior siding, but Chris said he would help me, and that was five years ago and it was never a good time and I didn't have the motivation to do it myself, despite resenting my kitchen sink view.  So anyway, late yesterday afternoon, Karen was all, "OK, let's get started!"  I was all, huh, wha?  And she was all, "Let's do it!  Siding comes down from the back porch?"  So I said, um, OK.  Less than an hour later, it was done.  Five years after contemplating this task, it was easily done and fun.  Now I have boards I can use to frame my front yard, turning pointless untended grass into beds that I will garden.  Now I look out my kitchen window at a plain back yard.

The plain backyard isn't great.  But now that I see it many times a day, I'm sure I'll solve that.  Planting under redwoods is a real problem; they make the soil so acidic that even the ferns don't take.  I don't love rhododendrons, but I think I like them better than the stucco wall of an apartment building.  So I might go with those.  Except they want a lot of water, which is not the direction I want to take my yard. I kindof want to hang window frames inside the open space, because I've seen that before and loved it.

Anyway, the lesson is: task done!  Task done easily, even though I was too intimidated to do it by myself and it makes my life much better.  I love, love, love having motivated people around me.  I love living with people who think that projects are fun.  Next, Karen wants us to re-upholsher the rocking chair.

I Am Beginning To Think I Will Not Find A Cure

The other day I was sitting at my gastroenterologist's, talking about poop, and she asked me a question about mine.  "I'm not completely sure," I said.  Maybe twice a day, maybe three times, maybe a little more?  

It's good you're not obsessed, she said, and I wondered whether she was right.  I won't find The Definitive Cure if I am not obsessed, and I feel a little guilty about that.  On the other hand, becoming obsessed with poop takes a lot of time and attention, and there is a great big beautiful world full of interesting people who need my attention, too.  Still, I am not satisfied with the amount I have learned, and the amount I still don't understand, about Crohn's disease.  

Last night I went to a presentation about Crohn's in a hotel conference room.  It was sponsored by the makers of Cimzia (TM), and it will perhaps not surprise you to hear that one of the speakers was a patient who struggled with the disease until at last a doctor prescribed her Cimzia, and now she's doing great.  The other speaker was a Mt. Sinai gastroenterologist named Tom Ullman, and it was he I was there to hear.  He's friendly to Cimzia and the other anti TMF drugs, but didn't seem to be beholden to them in a way that ruined his credibility.  Not too far into the  presentation, after he'd encouraged us to ask questions, I asked him what the mechanism of action of this disease is.  That's the most frustrating part.  Nobody knows what causes it, or why it shows up in some people when and where it does, why it manifests differently in different kinds of patients, what might trigger it.  This is the part that makes me want to start taking organic chemistry and immunology, because that is such an unsatisfying answer.  

I wrote some stuff down on my index card for further research -- some doctors trying different kinds of treatments, some molecules and proteins I want to learn more about, etc.  But there were two big things about last night's presentation that stayed with me. 

Dr. Ullman's philosophy, he said, was that people with Crohn's disease should get to a point where they think about it as much as they think about cavities.  Sure, daily care and attention, and a couple of doctor's visits a year, but otherwise, having this condition shouldn't take up too much of your life.  Hearing this settled part of me down.  I have been phrasing this in my head as a binary decision: either I am cured, and I don't need to worry any more about Crohn's disease, or I have it, and I am failing myself and the world if I do not obsess about it.  Maybe that's a false choice.  Maybe it can be more like tooth decay or gum disease.  

The second thing was how really bad Crohn's disease can be.  I've read about this on the internet, of course, but being in a roomful of people, some of whom have had huge hunks of their colon removed, or been on Prednizone for long amounts of time, or who can't go out of their homes because they must stay near a bathroom at all times, holy cow.  This is not how it is for me, and it is my solemn intention to do whatever I can never to get there.  I'm basically very close to the tooth decay stage right now -- a mild medicine is working pretty well for me and there's the promise and the realistic hope that it will work perfectly.  This can be so very bad.  I hate that there's no clear answer available, that for all that is known the variation in individual responses to the disease and to the various treatments is vast and inexplicable and unfair.  That part, too, makes me feel like I am too lucky and too smart to give up trying to figure this out. 

Getting caught up.

Ah darlin'.  If I really believed this were an epistolary blog, I would just write to you about the regular doings of my life.  I'd say, and then, I got Korean food with Anand and it was so nice to see him and the next day I got stung by a bee and I guess I'm not allergic after all even though I've thought I was my whole life.  If it were really just a letter to you, I would tell you the things that are only made interesting by knowing the person, the things that belong on Facebook (which I still don't have). 

I would say, my sister and I are on an English novel theme.  We LOVED the Mitfords, the Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate.  I just re-read Vanity Fair, which is 600 pages of pure catty gossip.  She's reading Pride and Prejudice, which I only read for the first time a couple years ago.  We'll definitely be watching the 1995 Pride and Prejudice soon, although I watch the good parts over again by myself.  When we've seen watched Pride and Prejudice and sighed our way through it, we'll watch Bride and Prejudice just for fun.  Which is a good transition, because the other book I gave her was A Suitable Boy, which is the best thing I read all summer.  Just like Vanity Fair, such a good trashy read, so full of gossip.

Besides the English novels, my summer has felt saturated with people making my life better.  Tamar put her foot down at the gym.  She decided and took me shopping that night.  No more shapeless boxy shirts and boy's track pants.  She brought me yoga pants to try on and stood back and looked and wagged her finger.  Sometimes she walked around me and nodded. Now I have cling-y workout clothes.  She prepped everyone else at the gym, so when I go in, all my ladies gather round and hm-hmmm and approve.  Ali came back and stayed with me, so I had her with me all the minutes of my weekend.  People came by to see her and we painted my door.  The next weekend was all my college friends at the beach.  That was loud and fun and I was reminded how great it can be to play games in a living room.  Oh, and Karen moved in.  I have many Karens, including a fantastic Karen who moved to town with her family.  But the one who moved in is Math and Ice Cream Karen.  She teaches math and makes ice cream.  Both useful, but I expect to try making ice cream before I go back to learning math.  (Which I should totally do while I've got her, because I want to take the PE (a big engineering exam) next spring.)    So I come home to lights and dinner some nights.

So there's lots, and even lots more I'm not getting done.  I have got to get my winter garden planted, or I will have to... horrors! buy chard.  I need to catch up with the friends that I ruthlessly refused to eat lunch with during the swim season.  So long as the pool is open, swimming is more important than friends.  Except that now the pool is closed and I miss them.  I'm not working out particularly diligently and would like to add in yoga or dance.  I'm going to take Judaism class, did I tell you?  I'm not religious; atheist, in fact.  But if I were religious, I'd be Jewish and I figure I should know more about the religion I'm not practicing.  So that will take up my last free evening of the week.  Like I said, I feel saturated, mostly in a good way.  That's what my summer was like.  I'm sorry I haven't written more, but I haven't had time to craft blog entries, with two interweaving themes that build to an unexpected moral.  That's what I aim for, and as you can see, instead I've got plain recounting, which is not as good.  But better to fill you in and get back in here.

Miss you, hon.  When are you coming to visit?