Day 01 - Introduce Yourself

Hi. I'm Bree. Only, I'm not actually Bree; Bree is a pseudonym I've been using since I started blogging about eight years ago. Actually, it's a pseudonym I created around 2000ish when I had a brief and fairly dull foray into cyber chatting in those lonely little virtual chat rooms when people were still on IRC channels or some such shit that I didn't understand then and don't understand now. So I've gone by Bree in some circles for 'bout a decade, plus/minus.

I grew up in San Jose and Los Gatos, California, suburban sprawl about fifty miles south of San Francisco. Most of you reading this blog probably already know that. Maybe I should introduce myself in a more enticing way. Let's see now...well, I'm pushing 40, I'm a big ol' dyke (who makes infrequent exceptions for an occasional boy as long as he's fey, geeky, and submissive enough), I took the Meyers-Briggs personality type test when I was 17 at Jewish youth group camp, and was revealed to be an ENFP, and I think it's still pretty accurate.

What else? I wear two career hats, well, really one job hat and one career hat: my money-earning work is bookkeeping, basically paying other peoples' bills and balancing their checkbooks (something I've pretty much never managed to do for myself) and my career path work, which hasn't quite made me money yet, is as a psychotherapist. I'm an intern working in private practice in Berkeley, and I mainly work with queer and trans folks, and individuals and relationship partners who are in polyamorous relationships or who are identified with alternative sexualities in some form.

I think a lot about death and grief and loss.

I really enjoy the minutia of consciousness and perception and exploring the endless mental and emotional crevices of experience and memory and fantasy and nostalgia and here-and-nowness.

I enjoy documenting things. One day a year, I try to document every single thing I do from waking until slumber on my Facebook page. Hundreds of Facebook friends seem to be fascinated by this myopic, indulgent navel-gazing exercise, or at least are polite enough to make comments every now and then. For seven years running, I blogged about every movie I viewed, every book I read, and every noteworthy experience I had in a series of annual year-end wraps. You can read the last one right here.

I have several friends in the world who I cherish and who I feel deeply emotionally tied to. I really adore my family. My nieces and nephews are some of the smartest, kindest people I know. I live with my girlfriend Astrid and our dog Dorrie, a pit bull-border collie mutt, who I'm totally in love with. Astrid and I have had a really tough year together, and I've scarcely blogged about it. Maybe I'll share more of this process later. Maybe I won't.

My mom died about a year ago, of lung cancer. She was 73. My dad died 37 years ago of a heart attack, when he was just 43. I'm an orphan, I guess. I miss my mom, and I also feel just a shred of a bit more freedom to move about the world as myself since she's been gone. I feel lighter, but also somewhat guilty about this. I can't imagine my life without my sisters.

I'm slutty. Usually more in my imagination than in actuality, but I do get around some. I really enjoy riding my bicycle. I eat a lot of meat. I listen to quirky emotional indie rock. I like excruciatingly cheesy pop culture. I can talk a blue streak, and I often get bored of the stories I tell over and over, but also I often remain freshly amused by myself.

That's some of me.

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!

The Week in Food: The good, the not so good, the awful

After re-committing to the Regimen, I had an excellent week. I ate steel-cut oats and flaxmeal most mornings, ate lots of fresh fruit and veggies, big healthy salads, didn't overeat at all clear through Friday. I walked a lot during the week, too, and felt my gait pick up pace.

Then the family dinner for my birthday in San Jose happened. And I'm a sucker for corned beef, as we all know. But even though I piled on too much of the fatty, ridiculously tender meat on Friday night, I didn't eat myself to the point of belly-aching overkill. I ate til I was satisfied, and then had one more piece of corned beef beyond that. Dear readers: a year or two ago, I'd have eaten three or four pieces beyond that, so we're making progress here, okay?

But unfortunately, Friday night's dinner turned into the gateway drug for a major backslide on the Regimen. When Saturday rolled around, I intended to eat sensibly again, but I had class all day in Alameda starting at 9:00am, and couldn't pry myself out of bed early enough to prepare for the day before meeting my carpool at 8:30. So instead of the oatmeal I would've normally made for breakfast, I ended up eating a chocolate croissant supplied by a well-meaning classmate. Then for lunch, I did okay, ordering a grilled chicken and rice salad bowl from a nearby burrito/wraps kinda strip mall food outlet.

But then happy hour arrived. When the carpool got back into the City, I got the mischievous yen for bloody marys, dragging E-dog and EDG to have cocktails with me at the Orbit Room (scroll way down to the March, 2008, reviews, and see my very own), and getting Astrid to meet up with us. The evening devolved from there into a gluttonous adventure of too many drinks of too many varieties of alcohol, and ordering in Chinese food, which is always pretty much the death knell on reasonable portions for me.

Which led me right into Sunday, a day supposed to be devoted to my thesis, which started on the doubly-wrong foot of leftover chou mein and pancakes made by the lovely Astrid (they were multi-grain, at least), followed by leftover hot and sour soup, then a thesis-related stress craving for a chocolate milkshake, fulfilled down the street at Burgermeister (mmmm...Mitchell's ice cream!), then DJ came over for Bad Movie Night and we ordered in from a pizza place that, god bless/damn them, also makes chicken strips. Sigh.

This morning: oats and flax. Yum.

Comfort Food

Some folks eat mac'n'cheese, others prefer pork chops and apple sauce, and then there's me. When I'm stressed out, I crave Chinese food. The subject deserves several entries, but suffice it for right now, I'm an American Jew, just one generation removed from the Lower East Side, where the Jewish neighborhood rubbed up against Chinatown and Jews began eating Chinese food as early as the late 1800s. It's essentially in the makeup of my cultural genetics. If you're interested in the subject, check out the article Safe Treyf by Gaye Tuchman and Harry G. Levine.

It's a fascinating account of the socio-cultural phenomenon of intergenerational Jewish appreciation of Chinese food, and it addresses the history of the phenomenon, as well as the complexities of the race/ethnicity, economic, and religious dynamics at play.

Duck sauce and gefilte fish, like ebony and ivory, they live together on the shelf at Safeway.

So Friday night, Astrid and I ate at Red Jade on Church Street, the only Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood. It's decent, inexpensive, and more "American-Chinese" fare than authentic, like many of the restaurants I've frequented in the City. It's not on my list of all-time favorites, but in a pinch, it's fine. The food is fresh, it's not too oily, and the dishes have some flavor. But the key factor this weekend was the stress and the relief of said stress through food. I've gone my two weeks of eating sensibly, and this weekend was the bounce-back binge, starting with Friday night's excursion to the Red Jade. We really enjoyed the spinach tofu soup with button mushrooms, a clear broth soup with a delicate flavor. Their prawns with Jade greens, which ended up being an uninspired glut of conventional broccoli, were just okay. I was hoping for bok choy or gai-lan (Chinese broccoli), which would have made the dish more distinctive and tasty. We also ordered their mango ostrich, which had a really nice, savory brown sauce that contrasted well with the sweet, firm mango slices. The ostrich meat itself was kind of beef-like and a little on the chewy side. Overall, I'd give the meal almost 3 stars, but despite the moderately enjoyable mediocrity, I continued to eat and eat until I was completely gorged.

The other major indulgence of the weekend was a Saturday night wee-hours trip to Mel's Diner for my ultimate indulgence: chicken strips. Many out there may know that chicken strips (embarrassingly enough, the Denny's version of the diner classic) were the first meat I ate after three years of vegetarianism in college. They have become a huge part of what Astrid lovingly calls "the lore of Bree."

So now you know that Chinese food and chicken strips are my total fat-girl kryptonite. What's nice about beginning the week after the weekend's indulgences is this: I'm not tripping out about it.

Back to the regimen!

Half a Corned Beef Sandwich

I could count the times I've eaten just half a sandwich on one hand. As a rule, I'm not good at leaving food on the plate. If there ever were a Jack Sprat's wife, she'd be me. Except for the being someone's wife thing. And the having no name except my husband's thing. And the being in a nursery rhyme thing.

You know what I mean; I can eat no lean.

So tonight, I ate at an old favorite in Berkeley, Saul's, a Jewish-style deli on Shattuck Avenue. It's a place N. and I used to go frequently, and I don't even remember whether I've been there since we broke up over three years ago. I went there after work at the clinic with my co-worker Devra. I ordered a cup of matzo ball soup and a "6-ounce" corned beef sandwich on rye. The sandwich came with a choice of cole slaw (yuck!), potato salad (meh), french fries (danger! danger!) or salad. I went with the salad. So the soup, salad, and half a sandwich were exactly enough food for me. I knew I didn't need to eat the second half, so I didn't.

I will make a minor complaint about the corned beef at Saul's: while I love that they use Niman Ranch sustainably raised, hormone-free beef, lending a very Berkeley feel to the New York style food, the truth is, and this is the kicker, it's too lean. Even Jack Sprat knows that corned beef should be juicy and fatty and lip-smackingly rich.

(*okay, so I am someone's wife. Sheesh, don't be such a stickler!)