Thanksgiving at the Compound

Can't believe I haven't told you about the Family Compound yet! It's apropos now, since we had our first Thanksgiving there yesterday. Here's the deal: the vast majority of my immediate family has moved into a condo complex together in the thriving pseudo-metropolis of Campbell, California, home of, among other things great and small, the Pruneyard Shopping Center.

It's not like a kibbutz or like Jonestown; it's actually five discrete condos in an upscaley complex, initial purchase made possible by some shifting around of real estate and assets by my sister C. & brother-in-law Sid. The population of the compound includes both my sisters, my brother-in-law, my nephew Joey and his wife D., my niece Halina and her husband M., and my niece Ursula and nephew Zach. And five cats. The family thus far makes up approximately 25% of the sold units in the building, which means my brood will utterly dominate the HoA. The family-bearing units in the Compound are distributed thusly:

Unit 1 - C. & Sid's place: three-bedrooms, and the likely hub of many future family gatherings.


Unit 2 - My sister J.'s place: two bedrooms, one filled floor-to-ceiling with skeins of yarn (I should know; I helped her unpack it). Locus of crocheting and creative fiction writing frenzies to come. Also home to two kitties.



Unit 3 - My niece Halina & hubby M.'s place: three bedrooms, a laundry room, and likely site of much newlywed bliss. One cat.


Unit 4 - My niece Ursula & nephew Zach's place: two bedrooms, a sweet loft, and likely home of many poker games and Buffy re-viewings. Urse and Zach are cousins, and had been sharing a place together before the Compound was hatched up. Zach has a new kitty named after a maneuver in a popular video game.

Unit 5 - My nephew Joey & wife D.'s place: two bedrooms, an enormous veranda, and likely scene of many future Rock Band games. Hopefully also a hot tub, when the family rules the HoA and does away with the hot tub ban. Oh, yeah, and they've got a cat, too.

The married young couples are taking over paying the mortgages; the others, pretty much renting from C & Sid. It's more complex than that, but that is the pertinent gist. The only close family members not living in the Compound are Mom, happy in her own place for now, and Astrid and I, who are still attempting to eek out a living in San Francisco. I guess if we'd wanted to live in the South Bay, a glistening new unit may have been ours as well. I tried to convince the above players to pack up and move to the City, but it was a no-go.

What's fantastic about this whole thing is that all the twenty-somethings seem to be completely on board: everyone actually wants to live in such close proximity to their parental-types. I dig my family. But yes, they're weird. Present company included.

* Yes, I'm using the highly-gendered bathroom icons knowingly.

Dorrie

Wow. Astrid's coming home from her parents' house with a dog! Her name is Dorrie, and she's about eight months old, a mix of some sort, maybe pit and terrier. Cute, right? She reminds me of my dog when I was a kid, Biskit, who was also a black and white terrier mutt. Looks as if Dorrie is a bit smaller, and she's got shorter hair. I'm really excited, more so than I thought I'd be - the whole thing is completely unexpected. I didn't even know Astrid's family had a dog they wanted to give away. Seems Dorrie is a real city pooch: she tries to dig her way out of the huge yards she's been given to roam in the high desert, and longs to be with the two-legged creatures on the inside. It's a good deal: she's already housebroken, spayed, has her shots, and reportedly she's a real sweetheart.I've always been really ambivalent about owning pets, and to stretch the metaphor, about having kids. They seem like similar inconveniences to me, kids obviously the more labor-intensive of the two. I could easily live with never owning a pet, and therefore not having to deal with scooping poop, veterinary and care costs, the smell of dog in my carpet, the extra responsibility, the unknowns of their behavior--from potentially whiny bleats to the eventuality of all my shit getting chewed into pulpy sog. But my biggest fear is having to pay another being attention when I want my time to be my own. I live a somewhat solitary and often self-gratifying life. I'm glued to the internet. I contemplate about adult, human concepts. I write. I play with friends, adult, human kind of play. I come and go as I please. Will my self-indulgent life be altered irrevocably? Will I feel guilty if I ignore the dog while I'm doing my thing? Will I resent her for her neediness and be forever frustrated by her lack of sentience? (A crucial distinction if it were kids we were talking about and not dogs.)
I think there will be some benefits to having a lil pooch. It'll get me out for walks every day, which will no doubt be good for exercise, invigoration, anxiety reduction, and for accessing more outward social energy, and it'll be nice one-on-one-on-dog time for Astrid and I. And I think it'll also get us visiting with our friends-with-dogs more. So I think it might be a good way to get me out of my self-imposed shell more frequently. So I'm excited, if cautiously. I wonder how Dorrie will impact my sense of space and home. I wonder how co-parenting a dog will fit for Astrid and I. And I wonder about my threshold for dog slobber.

Bathroom

The office building where I bookkeep on Wednesdays isn't in a glamorous location. It's south of Market, next door to a detox shelter, down the street from the only food vendor in the neighborhood: a donut shop that also makes sandwiches. Still, I love the view from the bathroom, and I often gaze outside after peeing just to give myself a little repose during the work day.

This is facing north toward downtown. If I had a better camera, it would capture more depth, the tall buildings in the background would look crisper. I enjoy the corrugated metal roofs of the offices in the foreground. The view puts me in touch with the collective consciousness of cubicle workers everywhere who have nothing but carpeted grey walls to stare at all day.

Every time I use the bathroom in this building, I have to laugh at the idea of gender. As if it's not enough that the universal symbol for "ladies' room" is a silhouette of a skirt-wearing person, the actual key I use to get into the bathroom is printed with a floral pattern. I don't work for a particularly conservative company; it's just the way it is, no questions asked. Never mind that I haven't worn a skirt since approximately 2002 (at a dead celebrity party for which I was dressed as Dorothy Parker, martini in hand) and before that probably during George H.W. Bush's administration.

Inappropriate Therapy Dream

Dreamt that I was in a therapy session, which was also a performance review, with my client and my supervisor. My client was my ex-girlfriend N. She reported to us that the therapy had been enjoyable and productive so far, to her surprise. Relieved at this news, I then proceeded to tell my client/ex that it was time for us to start talking about termination, since it's clear that I should no longer be her therapist. I was nervous about "breaking up" with her in this way, and she was a little upset, but nothing unmanageable.

After she left the office, my supervisor and I chatted lightly and she revealed that she had previously done therapy with N.'s current partner. She then showed me cards she'd received for her birthday, a card from my friend Mag with pressed, dried sunflowers in it, and a card from my friend B. with pressed, dried tulips in it. As many of you no doubt are aware, Mag and B. themselves are a long-ago broken up ex-couple. And, as you can imagine, neither of them know my supervisor in "real life."

Venture some interpretations, dear readers?

I've had a productive couple weeks, attending to a long list of to-dos I'd been avoiding for ages. I applied for deferments, forbearances, and other sorts of formal pleading with my lenders to get my student loan debt dealt with, at least for the time-being. I wrote ad copy for my listing on the Psychology Today website. I went through a huge stack of paperwork, billing statements, and receipts that had been sitting around for months waiting to be processed, paid, recycled, or otherwise dealt with. In fact, I went through about four such stacks. I cleared out from my files any financial records more than seven years old.(Fascinating, the kinds of relics you find when you clear out old files. I happened upon the above bank statement from when I was a member of the Santa Cruz Community Credit Union a decade ago, announcing the local area code change from 408 to 831, devastating to me, a lifelong denizen of the 408 until then.)

Hmm, what else did I manage to do? Ooh, I thoroughly dusted Astrid's bedroom, since she's been sneezy lately, and cleared out a junk drawer to help make more room for her voluminous t-shirt collection. Next major project will be counting up my therapy hours for the BBS, a chore I will continue to dread periodically for the next two or four years.

I have no idea where this sudden spurt of organizational energy has come from. Maybe it's related to eating healthier? It feels really great to get all that shit taken care of though, putting things in order that have been chaotic for months, years. I like paring down the details, and therefore the amount of worrying I do about said details. Makes life a little more peaceful.

Food, Glorious Food!

It's been three months since my last update claiming I was going to commit to a new eating regimen, the regimen I've been thinking about for years. But I've actually been doing it for a week now, and it's starting to feel really good. I've cut way down on meat and the use of oils for cooking, I've totally eliminated dairy, refined sugar,* and alcohol, and seriously increased the amount of fiber and complex carbs in my diet. So I've basically been eating legumes, nuts, brown rice, fresh veggies, fresh fruit, multigrain breads and cereals. Tonight I had my first meat in about six days, some chicken breast that I poached instead of adding oil for pan-frying. I don't want to be this acetic all the time, but I'm trying to do two weeks of this sort of cleanse, and then introduce some cheese back in, and some weekend-only alcohol. I've been having digestive icks with some kinds of dairy, and I'm trying to be sparing with it. But it seems like cheese is way less the culprit than ice cream.

I've noticed a couple cool things over the last week: eating less, but healthier, food seems to be satisfying my appetite more than my usual food, without making me feel uncomfortably full. Specifically, I gather that the higher-fiber, less calorie-dense foods are filling me up and keeping me pretty happy about not eating as much as I normally do. This is the first time, maybe ever, that I've noticed this.

The other totally cool thing I realized today is that, even though it was an emotionally hard day for me (money stress and an intense supervision session that completely wrecked me for most of the afternoon) I retained the distinct feeling of not wanting to put unhealthy things in my body. Normally I would've dove into a burger on a day like today, or gotten Chinese food, heavy on the traife meats, but I stuck with my snack of almonds, walnuts, and raw cauliflower and I was fine. Don't know how long this'll last, but it's feeling good.

I will say, though, that whole wheat tortillas can suck it.

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*Had one lapse: my tea at a fancy tea place was sweetened with natch evaporated cane sugar. But it sure was yummy. Thanks Mag!

Viva Ambivalence!

The blog formerly known as Ambivalent Fat Girl is in process of a friendly merger with Toothpick Labeling. Apologies to all who follow me on RSS feeds or aggregators or whatever the heck those are, because you're probably about to see that I've updated the blog about thirty times. I'm actually incorporating all the AFG entries here at T-Lab for two reasons I'm rather satisfied with:

1. I feel weird about compartmentalizing my blog topics, as if health, food, and fatness issues shouldn't be mentioned in the primary blog where I'm sharing my personal narrative.

2. I've got too fricking many blogs, and I need to downsize. Since AFG & T-Lab are published under the same blognonymous moniker, it's easy enough to merge them. And I haven't been posting much at AFG anyway.

If you'd like to read any archived Ambivalent Fat Girl entries, just click on AFG in the label cloud to your right. I should have all the backdated posts up and running here pretty soon.

Enjoy!
Bree