the weight

I pulled into Nazareth....

My body is my enemy. You could stand me up in front of a firing squad blindfolded and it wouldn't scare me as much as this ten pounds that is preventing me from buttoning my levis. If I had the power that I give this little bundle of unexpressed carbohydrates I could rule the world. And it isn't just ten. Let me be clear if not honest. It is ten on top of ten, which sits resistively atop the twenty I carry on a good day.

I will never be small. I want to disappear. It has been a long winter.

It is not the first time I have faced this demon, but it has been a long, long time. I knew peace for years, and now I am consumed with the desire to eat, to eat badly and in secret. I don't always succumb to my thoughts, but it is not so much the actual eating as it is the thinking thinking thinking. It seems the height of self centeredness, that I could live a blissful life and still find myself wallowing in the toilet of self-pity about am I pretty enough.

What is true:
I have been off work for two months.
I have been in pain for five months.
I can't ride my bike yet.
I eat when I'm bored.
I'm bored.

So, my little asian doctor says what she always says: Whatever you eat, eat less. Whatever you do, do more.

I'm sure she's right, but I am inclined to complicate things. Surprising, I know. I want a rigid diet to follow, something that I won't follow, that I can use like a baseball bat to beat the shit out of myself. It is a vicious and predictable cycle, common as ants. And I so hate to be common.

So, that's my happy thought today.

I am studying my Alzheimer's workbook. Its funny, (not Alzheimer's) each corporation designs a particular product (specialized dementia unit), with cutting edge thinking embedded into a physical setting, then markets it as the industry standard, all to care for people who do not and have not changed. We change. We worker bees. We caregivers. Over time (and I have been around the world of dementia care since I was a teenager) the provision of care has changed slowly. But they haven't --the little shell people, the vanishing, the subtle disappearing act that is Alzheimer's disease. They call it AD now, as though AD doesn't stand for anything else. And I suppose, politically, AD has been replaced by the acronym CE. PC, eh? I'm looking up acronyms for AD and medically, it is the term for the right ear. So, I think the Alzheimer's Association (AA) should keep on spelling it out or people are going to be mighty confused. Now, in relation to time, AD stands for what? Anno Domini? Something Gregorian like that. I don't find it on the list. I found After Death, and Agnus Dei, and a list a mile long that has nothing to do with the death of Christ, or the deliniation of time. What is it now? CE for current era? PD for present day? The lists are long. It gives me Alzheimer's to think about it.

I'm hungry.