Sunday Morning Prayers

The New York Times is full of joy today:

• Africa’s World of Forced Labor, in a 6-Year-Old’s Eyes
  
• Islam, Terror and the Second Nuclear Age

And then there's the breaking news: Strong Typhoon Rips Northern Philippines (11 minutes ago), Gunmen Fire on Sunni Pilgrims in Iraq (24 minutes ago), Jet With 104 Aboard Crashes in Nigeria (33 minutes ago).

Nothing like a reality check with your morning coffee. At least, for once, the Sunday paper seems to be relatively devoid of the snobbish pandering to their local wealthy demographic, which drives me nuts (aka the Style and Real Estate sections).

Leaving Caffiene Nation

I love coffee. I love everything about it. The taste, the smell, the way it warms me up in the morning, the way it kick starts my brain. But I can't handle the caffiene any more, at least not on a regular basis. It makes me tense and irritable. It gets my nervous system firing so quickly that I can't even focus sometimes. And a lot of the time it actually makes me eat more, because I'm trying to soak up the ill effects. I've tried kicking the coffee habit before, but it's only lasted a couple of days. Why? Because while tea is great, and I drink plenty of it this time of year, it simply won't cut it in the morning with me.

For a long time I thought it was the lack of caffiene jolt that made me return to my beloved coffee. But recently I decided to start trying decaf coffee instead. And suprise, surprise, it seems to have done the trick. Apparently the smell and taste of coffee is enough to trick my brain and body into waking up, and I don't feel deprived at all. And if I want a second cup — well, what the heck, it's not going to send me over the edge. I'm still looking for a brand that actually tastes as good as my favorite high-test coffees, but what I'm brewing is still better than bad or even everyday mediocre coffee.

I still slip up sometimes when I go out, but I don't have the stuff in my house any more, and that is a HUGE step.

Dreading the darkness

The end of Daylight Savings Time looms ahead of me and I am dreading it, as I do every year. Every fall as the darkness creeps in faster and faster, casting the beginnings of my days into shadow and ending them before I am ready, I have to struggle against giving into the deep sense of despair that lies there waiting for me. It can be nice sometimes — to enjoy the light and warmth of my home, to snuggle up with my family, to warm myself with hot cider or tea, to pick up a good book and lose myself in the pages, to bake breads and muffins and cookies and comfort myself with soups and roasted meals — but how I long for the light. When we set the clocks back, the sudden onslaught of darkness is shocking. This year I am particularly unsettled for a variety of reasons, and I am wondering if I can handle this ever extending night.

Just read the book

I have a really hard time imagining Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love as a movie. Starring Julia Roberts. Throughout the book there is this very real search for spirituality that I don't see making it to the big screen, and that's too bad. Losing that aspect of the book cuts the heart out of the whole thing, reducing it to a comedic "recovery from divorce" story (How Stella Got Her Groove Back except with a funny white chick in Bali). It's also a very personal story for Gilbert, a life story - is the movie going to be biography or fiction? While I'm happy for Gilbert's success, I wish that Hollywood would just write their own darn stories already and stop messing with the ones I already love.

Is there aluminum in your deodorant?

Seriously, go look. All of the major brands have it. And maybe I'm the last one to hear about this, but yikes! I don't think I want to go spreading aluminum all over my body. There's been no conclusive evidence that it causes breast cancer or even Alzheimer's, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea.

I also had no idea that detergent manufacturers used petroleum (aka oil) to make laundry detergent until I read it on the back of a Seventh Generation detergent bottle. Here I am, worried about how much I drive my car and how much our heating bills were last year, when all the while the culprit was hiding in my basement! And the infinite amount of plastic packaging that we can't seem to live without. I know I'm guilty of water bottle waste; it's an amazingly hard habit to break.

And most automatic dishwashing detergents have phosphates in them. While they were taken out of laudry detergents back in the 70s, they live on in dishwashers. These are the chemicals which were tied to alage blooms and dead lakes. Lovely.

It's amazing what kind of things are in the products we use every day and take for granted. I go back and forth on buying organic/natural products... I believe in it, but the price difference can be overwhelming. But maybe I need to get a little more angry and a little more scared.

Just wondering...

Why does it seem colder when it's cold and rainy than when it's cold and sunny?

Real Beauty

This video is amazing. Every time I read an article like this one about how girls are starving themselves to fit into skinny jeans with midriff-baring tops I shake my head and wonder... I feel like we should have gotten beyond this obsession with thin and beautiful years ago. It will soon be two decades since I was in high school and it seems like nothing's changed.

I remember the first time I thought about my weight. I was in elementary school. I'm not sure which grade, but I remember the classroom, I remember sitting against the wall with my friends, all of us in our (not yet designer) jeans. One of my best friends, the one I adored and looked up to, said that she was fat. I don't think that she was ever fat, ever in her life, but I looked at her and thought, wow, if she's fat then what am I? And that was the beginning. Years of ballet classes, scrutinizing myself in the mirror, agonizing over every bump and curve, took their toll. My first teacher, who chastized us for being too big to fit into her old dance costumes. My second one, who – the first time my friends and I went to her studio – immediately told us we needed to lose weight and offered us a diet plan. I don't know exactly how old we were, but we were under sixteen. I can't imagine ever talking to my child – or any child – like that.

I was borderline anorexic at one point in my life. I didn't ever get to the point where my weight was unhealthy, but my attitude and lifestyle certainly were. I would exercise two or three times a day, doing aerobics before and after school and usually following that with a dance class around dinner time. I didn't eat much, and started drinking two huge glasses of water in the morning (and throughout the day) to feel full, a diet tip I learned from a women's magazine. I had to leave first and second period every day to use the bathroom I drank so much water. But perhaps the worst thing was the self-hatred, a feeling I didn't really recognize until years later when I read Jennifer Shute's Life Size and recognized myself in the twisted mind of the main character. That book spoke to that sick part of me so directly that eventually I had to give it away, because I couldn't handle reliving those feelings.

That self-hatred lingers on, even though I have left most of these image issues behind. It's left a permanent wound on my self esteem. Do we really want to do this to our daughters? How do we break this cycle? We all seem to have more questions and concerns than actual answers. The voice of society, of mass-marketing and advertising, this image-centered world that we live in, is just too damn loud.

There Was A Little Girl

There was a little girl
Who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead
And when she was good she was very, very good
And when she was bad she was horrid.