Countdown to Ecstasy

No, that headline isn’t just the title of an old Steely Dan album. It’s my idea of when I can stop worrying about the way I look. How much longer? I think it’d be a great thing to know, a handy mental countdown to have in place.

For instance, say I decide that my cut-off age for giving a crap is 70. I could comfort myself with the thought that in 22 short years, French fries and I will no longer have to be strangers. Come on red meat and milkshakes! No more worrying about trans-fat or calories! Ahhhh, sweet relief.
Because I will say this right now, and without apology: I’m tired of not being able to remember the last time I had a cheeseburger.
And it’s not just what I eat or don’t eat. I’d love to just throw away all my make-up, too. And a hairstyle like Demi Moore’s character in “G.I. Jane” sure would be easier to take care of.
This plan may not work for you, though. You’d have to be OK being categorized as a “crazy old fat lady.” No problem there!
But say you have a spouse. You don’t want to let yourself go to pot if your other half might decide you’re not good enough anymore and that they could do better elsewhere. Or you may want to preserve the classy picture you and your mate present as a couple. If you’ve set yourself up to be the local Victoria and David Beckham, you better not let the team down, at least not without some warning.
Maybe the two of you could make a pact to look fabulous together for a while, and then coordinate your “give a crap cut-off date” so that you’ll both poof out at the same time. Make it like an anniversary! Then ride off into the sunset together.

You might scoff at this scenario for health reasons. By all means, if you actually like jogging, well, you’re one of the lucky ones. No cut-off date for you!
I’m just saying that if I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do for 70 years or so, led a fairly good life and have no immediate family or friends who would miss me so badly when I’m gone that they’d begrudge me a little happiness in my golden years, why the heck shouldn’t I loosen up a little?
Look, if it’s my conscious decision to become a big lump on the face of society, then so be it. This is America! I don’t really have to keep on checking the mirror until the day they lay me down in the cold, cold ground, do I? Because I’m definitely hearing a distinct ticking sound. ...

Playlist:
1. Sweet Surrender – Sarah McLachlan
2. Give In – Amy Ray
3. Got to Give It Up – Marvin Gaye
4. I Don't Care Anymore – Phil Collins
5. Why I Try to Look So Bad – Comet Gain
6. If I Didn't Care – The Ink Spots
7. Let Me Let Go – Faith Hill
8. Someday Soon – The Doors
9. Why Should I Care? – Diana Krall
10. Surrender – Cheap Trick

Who's The Boss?

We don’t have any kids, unless you count the four-legged kind. Pets are supposed to make you live longer and be happier, but sometimes I wonder who’s really in charge! I may pay the mortgage, but the pets actually own the place.
We’ve got a dog and three cats. Annie, our 13-year-old malamute/German shepherd mix, is still feisty and spry. Every night right after her supper, Annie requires a walk. And I mean rain or shine, sleet or snow, it doesn’t matter. Skipping her walk is not an option. She’s got us trained! One time we tried to calculate how many miles we’d walked with Annie over the past decade or more, and we figured it comes out to about 4,000. That’s a whole lotta sniffing and … so forth!

Every night, she marks her territory, leaving her scent at strategic points in our neighborhood like we humans check our e-mail. Approaching a bush of particular significance, it’s like Annie’s saying to us, “Hey! Max came by! Good ol’ Max. Let me just leave a message for him right quick. …”
For a year or so now, the only thing that will pre-empt Annie’s walk is an electrical storm. We finally broke down and got her some “doggie angst” pills to calm her jitters, but not before one stormy night that she actually crawled up onto the bed and tried to wedge her whole body between two pillows. This is a 70-pound dog, folks! It was an interesting night, but we all survived.

Annie will eat whenever and whatever possible. Doesn’t matter how gross it is – she’ll be tugging along at her leash, snarf up some horrible rotten thing and worry about its digestibility later (fun evenings). One time, she even got into some ant traps we had set in (we thought) hard-to-reach places. She turned out OK.
In the kitchen, it’s understood that anything that hits the floor is fair game. Although we don’t give her table scraps, let’s just say she “pre-rinses” the dirty dishes. It’s gotten so that she feels hurt if we don’t put a plate down for her to lick clean when we’re done (like if the food was spicy). But all it takes is a motherly scratch behind the ears and all is well.
Some might say that this dog is spoiled. We don’t think so – just because she has six beds (three that are exclusively hers), a temperature-controlled “day room,” and all-day access to a fenced pen. OK, I guess she found herself a couple of suckers!
Three felines round out our furry household complement: one older tortoise-shell sweetie, and two 6-year-old siblings whom we’ll forever refer to as “the kittens.”
The female, Ellie, is half her brother’s size but has at least twice his brain-power. She’s a little black scamp who gets her way by meowing as though she were criminally deprived – works every time. We call Ellie our own little Visa card – she’s “everywhere you want to be!”

Ellie’s gray, obese brother, Ernest T., is the poster-boy for the phrase “scaredy cat” and will run squeaking at the slightest sound. We’ve had pet-sitters to whom he literally did not show himself for a week. When we enter a room, he skitters off, and we imagine him saying if he could talk, “Help! That jacket you’re wearing scares me,” or “Aaack! The sound of your stocking feet is terrifying!”

Foibles aside, all our critters are endlessly entertaining and precious. Pick my favorite? How could a mother possibly do that? With all their faults, they’re my babies, and I wouldn’t trade them for the world.
Well, maybe the fat, stupid one I could live without, but somebody’s gotta love him, right?

Playlist:
1. Pads, Paws and Claws – Elvis Costello
2. Walking the Dog – Rufus Thomas
3. That Smell – Lynyrd Skynyrd
4. Day In - Day Out – Frank Sinatra
5. Treat Her Right – Otis Redding
6. I Was Made to Love Her – Stevie Wonder
7. Martha My Dear – The Beatles
8. All Night Thing – Temple of the Dog
9. Cat People (Putting Out Fire) – David Bowie
10. Spoiled – Joss Stone

Sidelined

I didn’t think it could happen to me. I thought, “I won’t be one of those cold-catching wimps. I don’t get sick! I am super-woman!”
I can hear you laughing, and you’re right. I spent my Christmas vacation sick as a dog. In fact, I’m still not quite over it.

Actually, it was a viral infection. I know because the lady at the clinic told me. It’s not very difficult to get one; I’m amazed that it took me this long. Because here’s all you have to do to catch a viral infection: be somewhere that anybody else has been. Say perhaps the U-Scan screen at Kroger.
That little virus is just biding its time for a chance to jump onto your hand. And when it does, you just touch your eyes, nose or mouth, and voilà! The virus gets inside you, sets up shop and gets to work doing what it does best – multiplying.
Anyway, the only reason I went to the nurse at the clinic was to obtain a drug that would make this thing go away. After telling me she couldn’t give me anything that would make it go away, that was all I wanted to do myself. Go away.
Leave the clinic and go crawl into bed.
Just my luck I got one of those nurse practitioners right out of school who are still fresh and proud of her knowledge of the healing arts. Bless her heart, it took this talking medical encyclopedia another 10 minutes to explain why she couldn’t give me an antibiotic to banish the little varmint that had invaded my body.
She explained how people have been abusing antibiotics for years, in effect helping “super bugs” evolve into monsters that, if we’re not careful, won’t be stopped by any drug. Turns out a nation of sniffly people have been taking antibiotics at the least hint of sickness when they should have just “let it run its course.” And it didn’t matter if I was a good citizen and didn’t take the antibiotics myself. The over-medicating people were ruining things for everyone else, speeding up the mutation of the little monsters regardless of whether I popped any Penicillin myself or not.
It reminded me of an apartment building where I used to live.
The utilities were not included in the rent, but there were no individual meters installed for any of the units. This meant that KUB had to take the total kilowatt usage of the entire building every month and divide it evenly by the number of apartments. Ergo, even though I was a responsible person who didn’t run her radiator at full blast with the windows open all day, I had to pay part of the bill of the schmuck(s) who did. So, like my sky-rocketing heat bill, the inexorable strengthening of this virus was not my fault, and yet here I was bearing the brunt of the recklessness of others. Chalk it up to another one of those things about life that just isn’t fair.
Anyway, clinic lady was going on and on about staph, strep, sulfa, MRSA – apparently her lecture would cover the entire history of Western medicine – which would all be fascinating if I weren’t so sick that my knees were beginning to buckle. I just stood there wobbling and smiling wanly as she nattered on about germs and cures and “producing” (her word for when you cough up a bunch of crud). I’m sure she had no idea that my sinuses were about to burst out through my face (a bit messy, but an improvement from them throbbing like tiny knives of fire).

I finally got her to let me go home, where I commenced to alternately (a) sweat like an NBA star at the halftime buzzer, and (b) shiver under mounds of flannel, fleece and down. Sounds like a law firm, doesn’t it?
“Good morning, Flannel Fleece and Down, how may I help you?”
“Yes, I’d like to sue that guy who was ahead of me at the Kroger U-Scan!”
Playlist:
1. Take The Pain Away – The Ramones
2. It Only Hurts When I'm Breathing – Shania Twain
3. Tossin' and Turnin' All Night – Bobby Lewis
4. Callin' In Sick – Weird Al Yankovic
5. I Want a New Drug – Huey Lewis and the News
6. You Got to Take Sick and Die Some of These Days – Muddy Waters
7. Tear Off Your Own Head – The Bangles
8. The Hurt – Cat Stevens
9. You Take My Breath Away – Eva Cassidy
10. Night Fever – Bee Gees

Beep! Beep! Back 'er on up!

How many of you women out there are like me? You’re 40-something and you never really had to worry about gaining weight before. But you’re starting to see more “junk in the trunk” if you will, a noticeable increase in the square footage of your hind-ways real estate. Boy can I relate! If I had my own bluegrass group, I’d call us “The Saggy Bottom Girls."

I’ve always been a little “hippy” (to put it nicely), but in the last year or so, well, I’d say that the pudge factor is now officially out of control.
Of course that coincides with the time I’ve been working at the Shopper-News.
Coincidence? I think not. I don’t want to point fingers, but maybe it has something to do with how every Thursday a certain co-worker in the graphics department takes it upon herself to purvey the most dastardly delicious sweets I’ve ever sucked down. No, let’s face it, “Ms. X” is not tying me down and forcing her baked goods down my throat; I know I could say “no,” but I choose not to. And she’s certainly not responsible for all the carbs I foist upon myself all the rest of the time.

No, I’d rather blame my decelerating metabolism. I don’t eat any more brownies than I ever did. It’s just that now the same amount of calories turns directly into little fat cells. They don’t pass go, they don’t collect $200. That, and the fact that more often than not, I can be found sitting on the very derriere that I complain about.
Since I have a tendency to feel better if I can give a name to whatever self-involved situation I’m in, I felt compelled to research whether I might actually have a valid excuse for getting more plump. Of course, if you look hard enough, you can explain away just about any human failing.
Turns out that in the parlance of those who study these things, I’m a cross between an endomorph (pear-shaped and soft), and a mesomorph (average-built and well-muscled). Just in case you’re wondering, the third body type is ectomorph (small-boned and skinny) – a group to which I’ve never belonged.
At any rate, us endomorphs find it harder to lose weight, even when we diet and exercise. Apparently that’s just a fact. We’re tallish and our bones are large, but we tend towards the fat as opposed to the muscular. We generally have a tougher time getting ripped at the gym, and we’ll have a tougher time recovering from all that holiday over-indulgence.
To make matters worse, my being a woman “of a certain age” means that I need fewer calories because I’m burning less of them. So it’s a one-two punch that simply means this: if I don’t watch out, my butt could soon require its own zip code.

What cruel hand of fate ramps up my craving for things like peanut butter fudge brownies while simultaneously slowing down my metabolism to the point that it seems as if all I have to do to gain weight is to simply look at one of them? My current theme song: “I Am Woman, Hear Me Whine.”
I like to think of myself as an efficiency expert, always looking for the best and easiest way to do things, the most logical fix for a problem or challenge. If I can do something in six steps, I’m not going to take 12. But what if that’s just a convenient excuse to stay lazy? What if solving this problem actually means expending more energy (or maybe eating only one serving of chicken and dumplings at a time)? Could my present plight actually call for a sea change in my way of thinking? Have I hit bottom yet (no pun intended) with this expanding posterior of mine?
Big fat “Duh”: being overweight can only be “fixed” by eating less and exercising more – regardless of one’s body type.
That may be stating the obvious, but here’s the rub: I have to decide that it’s worth the trouble. I have to start eating less like I’m prepping for some improbable worldwide famine and, instead, ponder what my good friend who is much more in shape says: “Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.”
Well, that’s one woman’s opinion, and I know she means well. I’m just not quite convinced.
Playlist:
1. So Round, So Firm, So Fully Packed – Merle Travis
2. Bell Bottom Blues – Derek & The Dominos
3. Flight of the Cosmic Hippo – Bela Fleck & The Flecktones
4. Miles Behind – Medeski Scofield Martin & Wood
5. Bigger Situation – Leo Kottke
6. Hippy Hippy Shake - Swinging Blue Jeans
7. (She's Got A Butt) Bigger Than the Beatles – Cletus T. Judd
8. Funky Butt – Mississippi John Hurt
9. Behind Reality– Oriental Jazz
10. The End – The Doors