10.05.08
Posted in Belovedary, food, good things, health, non-casein, non-dairy, vegan at 7:20 pm by Hanne Blank
For tedious reasons that do not bear a dissertation at this point, my Belovedary’s doctor has directed him to pursue a course of primarily vegan eating for the next six months. Dairy and eggs are strictly verboten, and while fish is permitted, meats of all other sorts are meant to be a “major holidays only, if you can’t avoid it” sort of thing.
The Belovedary’s co-workers, it seems, have had a skeptical field day with this, teasing that he’ll never be able to maintain such a regime, and proclaiming with a metaphorical wrist-to-forehead swoon that they would starve to death if they had to go vegan.
This is, of course, all very silly. But it’s likewise true that many people seem to be terrified of the idea, let alone the reality, of vegan eating and cooking. My reaction, on the other hand, was “oh, okay, but how do you feel about continuing to use oyster sauce in cooking?” ( We have decided that, as oysters are considered permissible in Chinese Buddhist vegetarian cooking, and as fish is permitted by the sawbones in question, the oyster sauce can stay. But if it couldn’t, there are vegan alternatives for it to be had.)
You see, my take on it is that human beings are omnivores, and “omnivore,” by definition, means that you’ll eat anything that is edible. Therefore the prospect of an entirely-vegetable meal, or even several months or years of entirely-vegetable meals, really shouldn’t bother anyone too much. Besides, as I have mentioned previously in this blog, you still get to eat French fries (made in vegetable oil) and pie (made with vegetable shortening), to say nothing of things like Fish-Fragrant Eggplant, ratatouille, hummus, mushroom-pecan pate, channa masala, and red beans and rice, so really, I am not so convinced that veganism is a prison sentence. (Unlike, say, being the captive audience of a militant animal-welfare-wingnut vegan who won’t shut the hell up about it, which is.)
Probably it helps that I was a vegetarian for 11 years of my life, and vegan for two of those, so this is not unfamiliar territory to me. Probably it also helps that with an allergy to dairy protein, I eat vegan by default any time I don’t eat a meal containing meat or eggs. But mostly, I think the way to stop being scared and feeling deprived when faced with veganism — or with any dietary regime that is limited in some way — is to get into the kitchen and start experimenting. Its hard to feel like you’re missing out if you’re eating really well within the boundaries of what is available to you.
I bring all this up because, given what we’ve been handed as a household, the content here for at least the next six months or so is likely to be 99.6% vegan. If you find that offensive, there are about seventy billion other food blogs out there, not a few of them fully and vigorously omnivorous, so don’t let the door hit ya where the good lord split ya.
As for me, I’m looking at it as an opportunity to blog about more dairy-free recipes — that will also, for the time being, be meat- and egg-free, or at least exist in versions that don’t use animal products. The astute among you will have already realized that just as you can often take a dish that contains animal products and vegetarianize or veganize it by removing and/or replacing the things you don’t want to eat, you can also take vegan recipes and add things to them. (I myself am partial to a hard-cooked egg or two in my channa masala.)
So what have we been eating since the whitecoated declaration was made? Noodle soup with tofu and chiles. Roasted cauliflower, eggplant, and Brussels sprouts. Homemade bread with cashew butter and apricot jam. Red beans slow-cooked with four kinds of sweet and hot peppers. Black bean soup enhanced with liberal handfuls of smallage (bunching celery) and poblano chiles. Aloo ghobi, the Indian potato-and-cauliflower dish. Oatmeal cookies with dried tart cherries. Cantonese-style pickled cauliflower. Hummus sprinkled with diced smoked black and green olives. Honeycrisp apples, “Shinko” Asian pears, Macoun apples, the last of the year’s peaches.
Tomorrow I will be making an apple pie in the morning. While it bakes, I’ll prep several pounds of plum tomatoes for gradual caramelizing in a slow oven all day long. We’ll eat them tossed with pasta, perhaps, or made into an out-of-this-world pesto and smeared on homemade pain de campagne. Or maybe I’ll marinate some portobello mushroom caps in sherry and soy sauce and olive oil and garlic and grill them on my panini grill, and put caramelized tomatoes on top of each one.
Yeah, I don’t know what I’d eat if I had to go vegan, either. It’s just so hard to choose.
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07.17.08
Posted in allergy, cooking, food, food allergies, health, ingredients, non-casein, non-dairy at 4:54 pm by Hanne Blank
A handful of years ago now, I realized that something was amiss with my gastrointestinal tract. Namely, it had stopped being willing to deal with dairy products. I assumed that the commonplace thing had happened and that I had somehow managed, despite a lifelong adoration of all things cheesey and ice-creamy, to become intolerant of lactose, the sugar found in milk.
Realizing that preaching tolerance is about as effective in regard to one’s internal organs as it is in regard to Klansmen, I stocked up on lactase enzyme tablets. Surely they would allow me to resume my regularly scheduled program of manchego, St. Marcellin, Maytag blue, mozzarella di bufala, halloumi, and all their friends and relatives. Alas, this was not to be. I tried, I really did. I tried hard. Even in light of ample, even vomitous evidence that the damn lactase tablets weren’t doing a damned thing, I kept trying, so loath was I to lose my ability to enjoy all the milk products I had always loved.
For about a year, I experimented as much as I could stand to with continuing to eat dairy products. It was, in hindsight, pretty miserable. But I did it for two reasons. First, I was trying to figure out what it was to which I was reacting, which was pretty clearly not lactose, since I had the same reactions when eating low-lactose dairy foods like aged cheeses as I did when eating high-lactose ones like custard, and in either case the lactase enzyme pills didn’t help. Second, I was culinarily desperate. Dairy products occupy such a whopping niche in Western cookery, from the handful of grated parmesan sprinkled over pasta or the few tablespoons of milk used to get proper consistency in a buttercream frosting all the way to the yogurts, sauces, puddings, custards, quiches, and grilled cheese sandwiches which, without dairy, simply would not exist. I wanted not to be allergic to dairy because I liked to eat it, sure. But I also wanted not to be allergic to dairy because frankly, from the perspective of negotiating the kinds of dishes that form the center of most people’s (and most restaurants’!) culinary repertoires, not being able to use dairy products was a little bit like being asked to hang wallpaper with one hand tied behind your back.
I had had some experience with non-dairy cooking, as it happened. During my vegetarian years, I spent a portion of that time either partially or wholly vegan, mostly out of a misbegotten assumption that veganism would make me ascetically thin. (This theory, I must note, was straight out of a diet book my parents had when I was growing up, the rather whackadoo Did You Ever See A Fat Squirrel? by one Ruth Adams. It had yet to dawn on me that unless they’re fried in animal fat, French fries are completely vegan, ditto every fruit pie known to womankind if the crust is made with vegetable shortening rather than butter… etc. It had also yet to dawn on me that not only had I seen no shortage of fat squirrels, especially ’round about Octoberish, but that there was actually no very good reason that a whole foods diet would necessarily make anyone thinner in any case. But I digress.) I was not precisely terrified of the prospect of dairy-free cooking, since I knew full well I could do it and enjoy it, but I was afraid of losing so many options.
In particular I was afraid that if I couldn’t eat any dairy products at all, I would be virtually unable to eat in restaurants, or eat any prepared foods. Dairy products are used in a lot of foods where you wouldn’t expect to find them, after all, or where they haven’t got a starring role and so one doesn’t always think to recall that they’re there: the butter used in the pan to saute the mushrooms for an omelette, for instance, or the whey protein used to improve the texture of a sausage, or the tiny quantity of grated cheese in an Italian-style vinaigrette salad dressing. If I were truly allergic to all dairy, I’d have to at the very least be suspicious of virtually every prepared food that crossed my path, read labels obsessively, and eschew lots of things I would otherwise enjoy.
As it turns out, that’s what I have to do. As my intrepid experimentation, done at the cost of not a few days and nights spent deepening my appreciation of that modern miracle known as the flush toilet, ultimately proved out, the allergy that I had developed was not to lactose at all, but to casein, the protein found in milk. Furthermore, it rapidly became apparent that not only was I allergic to the form of the casein molecule found in cow’s milk, but also, if somewhat less so, to its analogues in sheep’s milk and goat’s milk and, hélas! even water buffalo’s milk. Even a small quantity of the stuff introduced to my system impels my body to propel it right back out again posthaste via whatever portal seems quickest.
Addio, mozzarella di bufala! Khairete, halloumi! Adiós, manchego! Auf wiedersehen, Emmenthaler! Hang loose, Ben & Jerry! Ou sont les fromages d’antan?
Interestingly, this doesn’t mean that all dairy products are out of the picture for me. Just almost all of them. Clarified butter, also known to the world of Indian cooking as ghee, doesn’t bother me because it has had its milk solids (proteins) removed. Butterfat on its own poses me no problem. Similarly, I can tolerate small quantities of heavy cream or high-quality butter, as long as I don’t try to eat too much or too often. They’re mostly butterfat, with very little protein, so it’s something I can negotiate within certain parameters.
But that’s it. For about four years now, that’s been the extent of my dairy-eating capability. For those of you who eat dairy, think about this seriously: it changes your entire cooking and eating life.
No dairy means, among other things, no pizza, unless you make a cheeseless one yourself, or are lucky enough to find a pizzeria that offers vegan “cheese,” which by the way does not so much melt as simply give up hope, and which in any event is impossible to confuse with actual cheese. It means virtually never being able to order so much as a salad in a restaurant without interrogating your server as to the presence or absence of cheesey comestibles hiding amongst the verdure, and rarely having restaurant salad dressing options beyond oil and vinegar because there are too many “vinaigrettes” that hide a stealthy payload of cheese. You can’t even order a hamburger without worry, because while the burger itself may not be problematic, you never know whether the bun it’s served on contains some form of the Evil Cowjuice (and many do). You give up most Italian food unless you cook it at home, and all Italian restaurants. Ditto for Indian (all that yogurt and paneer). And French (butter, cream, cream, cream, cream, and cheese). And Eastern European or Russian (cheese and sour cream). And Tex-Mex (see above). And Mexican (again). And even good old-fashioned American diners are off the list, because good old-fashioned American food is pretty much a juggernaut of dairy products from start to finish. With care and a sympathetic server, admittedly, you can work around the menus in many places, but your risks of poisoning by stealth dairy are still high. The allure of east Asian restaurants becomes magnified out of all proportion, simply because when you are eating in a cuisine that has no tradition of using dairy products, you can order a meal — anything you want! off the whole entire menu! unthinkable! — without having to wonder whether you’re going to spend all night breaking the land speed record for the 20-yard dash to the loo.
And that’s not all. Luncheon meats and sausages must be carefully label-checked if you cannot consult directly with the person(s) who made them, since whey protein and sodium or calcium caseinate are both popular additives to these products, so forget about ordering that deli sandwich even if you’re sure the bread won’t bite back. While you’re at the deli, you can also forget about ordering any of those salads with the creamy mayonnaisey dressings, since in some cases they also toss in a bit of sour cream. Commercial bakeries are generally no longer places you can patronize, either, although I have discovered that some of the really old-school working class bakeries are reasonably safe because they can’t afford to use butter and so use the cheaper vegetable shortening. Kosher pareve bakeries are an even better bet, since kosher law mandates that pareve foods contain neither meat nor dairy.
While we’re at it, bear in mind that you can now forget about sharing the goodies your co-workers bring in to the office at the holidays, or enjoying a piece of cake at your niece’s birthday party (even without the ice cream it is likely to contain milk and/or butter), or noshing on wine and cheese… or even chips and dip for the most part… at a party. To make socializing even more awkward, every dinner party invitation you accept must now be accepted with an accompanying demand on your host or hostess that the meal be prepared not according to the whims of the cook, but to the dictates of your despotic digestive system. You should also bear in mind that not everyone will believe you that you’re really allergic to what you say you’re allergic to, and that some self-anointed experts will, in addition to supplying you with a more than ample supply of dubious advice about how their sister’s brother-in-law’s wife’s manicurist’s daughter’s pediatrician said such-and-so would cure food sensitivities “and she did it and it worked just like that,” also encourage, nay, insist, that you “just have a little bit” because clearly, this “food allergy” of yours is something you have invented in order to be a Delicate And Unique Snowflake™ and is not a real condition at all.
But I digress.
The point is, it is difficult not to be able to eat things that the vast majority of people in your culture can happily eat. Not impossible, surely, but difficult. Which means that learning how to adapt my cooking and eating to my inability to eat dairy products has been a highly educational process. (It also accounts, in part, for my enthusiasm for Chinese cookery.)
In future weeks, I’m planning to talk more about this here, and to share some of the better recipes that I have come up with for dairy-free foods that fill niches I once thought unfillable without the use of some kind of dairy product: a creamy salad dressing, a pasta dish with a richly creamy sauce, a “buttermilk” dark chocolate cake, even a popcorn topping that tastes (no lie) like it has Parmesan cheese in it, and so on. These aren’t necessarily vegan recipes (some use eggs, meat broths, etc.) but they can all be made vegan if needed or desired. What they are, not to put too fine a point on it, are recipes that help people like me who are passionate cooks and enthusiastic diners cope with a humdinger of a dietary limitation.
They are also delicious.
And maybe, just maybe, they’ll help some other folks out there who, like me, have found that they can no longer eat dairy foods. Or the host/esses who suddenly find themselves confronted with needing to cook for us.
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03.01.07
Posted in cooking, culture, food, health, politics at 10:34 am by Hanne Blank
I’ve been reading, here and there, about various efforts to force restaurants — primarily of the quasi-fast-food inexpensive chain eatery sort, like Pizzeria Uno or TGIFriday’s or The Cheesecake Factory — to identify the calorie counts and other nutritional information of their menu items in their menus. Citing items which contain whopping numbers of calories per restaurant serving, and enough fat to make the ghost of my gallbladder scream like a banshee just reading about it, these dietary watchdogs seem convinced that if only the nutritional information were more readily available, Americans would “make better nutritional choices,” for which we are meant to read “choose not to eat these things.”
The dual bogeymen of obesity and heart disease, natch, are the poster children for these campaigns. Clearly, just as all lung disease is caused by smoking cigarettes (and has nothing to do with, say, industrial or automotive air pollution, toxic chemicals used in household furnishings and surfaces, or even genetic predisposition), all obesity and heart disease are due to crappy, greasy, oversalted, oversugared, deepfried platefuls of Generic USAian Processed Food Substances. And not, say, to some combination of what people eat, how people incorporate their eating lives into the rest of their lives, what sorts of physical activities they engage in and how much, the tastes and other eating sensations they’ve been enculturated to find pleasing, their particular genetics, and simple luck of the draw.
I’m not saying this to defend the TGIRubyAppleUnoCheesecakeTuccis of the world, or dump on the folks who happily eat their food. I’m not even saying this to criticize the aims of the people — many of them with medical affiliations to the billion-dollar bariatrics (obesity) market — who want to improve the availability of nutritional information in these places. I’m all for people knowing what they’re eating, and I am all for people eating whatever the hell they want.
The reason I raise the issue at all is because it strikes me that everyone concerned, restaurant chains, chain-restaurant diners, dietary activists, and all, are both suffering from, and failing to take into account the potency of, sheer willful American-style denial.
You know what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about the denial that lets restaurant chain management claim that because they offer salads, they’re in the clear as far as offering “healthy” eating options, even though your average restaurant-chain salad, laden with cheese and/or meat and/or the heavy creamy dressings so beloved of such places, is about as “healthy,” by the standards typically used to assess what constitutes a “healthy” dish, as a Snickers bar and some shredded carrots wrapped in a lettuce leaf.
Yes, this denial is partly willful failure to perceive the distance between genuinely healthy eating and the stuff these restaurants exist to sell. It’s also calculated marketing of things that these restaurants know will sell, the “but we’re only selling the stuff our customers want!” cliche. Handwaving, and the careful use of words like “fresh” on menus and images of crisp, dewy vegetables and fruits on advertisements, go a long way, marketing-wise, to making sure that the people at the customer end, as well as the customers themselves, buy into the corporate management’s assertions that their products are “healthy.”
And as far as the corporate folks are concerned, that’s just fine. The customer ultimately chooses what to eat, or not. They’re just trying to offer choices. It’s not their fault if what the customer seems to enjoy is stuff that isn’t very good for you if you eat too much of it too often.
Which is, of course, the next level of denial. Most Americans — myself sometimes included, although for reasons having partly to do with health issues like allergies and partly to do with economics and partly to do with food snobbery, I have become a lot more aware and careful about this — eat less well than they could.
By “eating well” here I don’t mean being a crazy food Nazi and monitoring your every mouthful for maximal nutrition or minimal calories or carbs or fat grams or whatever the hell it is this week that you’re not supposed to eat. I mean eating good, nutritious, wholesome, tasty food that gives your body all the things it needs and not too much of the stuff it doesn’t, and while that’s different for everyone, for the human animal generally it seems to mean a fairly large amount of vegetable matter and grain food, with some high-protein food in there on a regular basis, and some sweet things now and then for the fun that’s in them. (Now-obligatory shout-out to Michael Pollan’s recent “Unhappy Meals” piece in the NYT Magazine, which if you haven’t read, you should.)
However. We tell ourselves, assisted ably by our national mythos of America as Land of Plenty, by “eat your dinner, children are starving in Bangladesh,” by the reassuring presence of fortified foods on the shelves and governmentally-mandated nutritional information boxes on packages and innumerable articles and books and TV shows about things most of us haven’t got the training to understand like amino acids and vitamins and antioxidants and phytoestrogens, that of course we eat well… we’re Americans. And indeed, we are fortunate that we have the luxury to have this mythos be so operational in our lives. Worrying about whether you have enough of the right kind of antioxidants in your food is a pretty darn cushy problem compared to worrying about whether or not you’ve got enough food so that you don’t starve to death.
Speaking of starving, too, there is that portion of our makeup to contend with. Because we are animals, on some level our brains believe that as long as we have a plentiful supply of food, we are eating well. This is particularly true with high-fat food: if you look at the foods traditionally eaten by peoples living north of the Arctic Circle, you will find that above all, high-fat foods are prized, for the simple reason that calories equal body heat and body heat equals survival. Our lives are, for the most part, nowhere near so physically demanding as those of, say, seal hunters or reindeer herders. Or, indeed, of even our fairly recent ancestors, who did not have nifty modern conveniences like cars, central heating, and household appliances, all of which substantially reduce the caloric burden we require to survive. Thing is, you can’t simply rewire an organism that has for millennia regarded high-fat, high-calorie food as a desirable advantage. Neither my DNA nor yours, neither my backbrain nor yours, give a sweet goddamn that they don’t really have to worry about keeping themselves warm through the body’s own thermogenetic capabilities all winter long. It doesn’t matter to that part of us that thanks to the wonders of the technologies our big sexy monkey brains have come up with, the job of keeping us alive until suppertime can be accomplished quite nicely on a handful of granola and a banana. They’d like a nice juicy cheeseburger, thanks just the same.
And of course, we have also evolved this distinctively American (or so it seems to me) tendency toward buy-now-pay-later eating: we have made eating, in our minds, into a sort of economic activity. If we “overspend” our budget of calories now we can “work it off” later on at the gym, or through some bout of insane (and thus almost inevitably short-lived) crash dieting. Or so we tell ourselves. Whether we do it or not is another matter entirely, and whether it actually works that way, in terms of our biology, is yet one more.
To put it another, shorter way, there are a lot of different forces — biological promptings, social cues, and psychological urges — that tend to make it very easy for many of us to eat less well than we might, and to eat meals that are very imbalanced in the direction of things that are not, in excess, all that good for us. (I’m not even going to get into the economic issues, or the history of the corporate food culture, or why and how things have gotten to the stage where eating well (as I define it) on a regular basis is now beyond the economic reach of many people. Another rant for another time.)
At the same time, we’re not stupid. We know full well, if we stop to think about it, that no, most of these meals are not healthy. You don’t need a professional nutritionist to know that a meal of, let’s say (looking idly at the T.G.I. Friday’s menus available online) Crispy Green Bean Fries, a bacon cheeseburger, fries, and a (full-sugar, full-caffeine, why not get your money’s worth if you’re paying for uppers?) Coke is probably not something you really want to think about in terms of its number of fat grams or calories.
Which is it, right there: people know this kind of food is high-calorie and high-fat. That’s not news. But they don’t want to have that be the deciding, or limiting, factor in whether they eat it. So it isn’t. It simply isn’t. It’s called denial.
There are excellent compelling reasons that it happens, and not too many that are nearly so compelling as to regularly cause people to override the denial. Clearly the fear of becoming fat isn’t enough to do it. Nor is the fear of heart disease. Hell, even the fear of feeling bloated, gassy, queasy, or getting diarrhea — all extremely common reactions to eating too much high-fat food — isn’t enough to keep people from doing it, and those sensations set in a whole heck of a lot quicker, relative to the moment of eating, than weight gain or a heart attack.
Sure, it’s counterintuitive. But human beings are perverse creatures and what we do is often that way. In all seriousness, I know a number of people with substantial allergies to cow’s milk who will, knowing full well that it will make them feel ill if they do it, eat ice cream with gay abandon right up until the moment that they have to run to the bathroom. I used to be one of them, before my dairy allergies got worse. Only when things got to the point that the negative repercussions created such misery that I wasn’t willing to put up with them any more to get to that sweet, sweet butterfat did I finally manage to break off what had been a lifelong love affair with ice cream.
This is where the other kind of denial comes in: the denial, on the part of the researchers and campaigners who are pushing for transparency in the menus of these table-service chains, that frankly, It’s Always More Complicated. Putting calorie and fat-gram counts in menus isn’t going to slow that many people down. They’re on packaged foods everywhere already. I honestly don’t see it putting a big dent in potato chip sales. The forces at play are a lot more complex, multivalent, and quirky than that.
Me, I wouldn’t mind seeing restaurants selling unitized, corporatized, pre-quantified meals having to list their ingredients and their nutritional information, if only because it might — and I emphasize might — make some of them come a little cleaner about what they’re feeding people, and be a little more honest about the quality of their ingredients and their emphasis on using ingredients that are actually food, and not the sometimes dubious products of food science on which such restaurants lean so heavily. I do think that some people would appreciate having the information. I know that I would, because finding out the hard way that I just ate something that contained a dairy product when I didn’t expect it to is really not so much fun. But in all honesty, I rather doubt, all other things being equal, that knowing how many calories are in that club sandwich is going to make me skinny or reprieve me from whatever heart disease may conceivably lurk in my future. Nor is it going to do so for anyone else.
On the other hand, not being in denial about the ways that what I indiviually eat might affect my individual biology and my own personal health? That’s done me quite a lot of good, thanks. Giving up dairy products for good was not easy for me, but without question it has produced an enormous improvement in my overall health. Learning to cook and eat a lot of Chinese and Middle Eastern dishes, with small amounts of meat and large amounts of vegetables, has similarly made me feel better and improved various aspects of my overall clinical health. These are things that I discovered, through trial and error and over time, were what this particular human animal requires in order to be the most efficient and happy troublemaker it can.
But, I hasten to note that I think that’s not a process that any amount of white-coated finger-waggling or posting calorie counts in recipes is ever going to produce. For me, or anyone.
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11.29.06
Posted in Virgin book, art, good things, health, making book, publishing at 11:11 am by Hanne Blank
It would seem that I am well overdue for a State of the Hanne Address. I’ve alluded several times here to having been under the weather a lot lately, and a handful of folks, concerned, have written to ask me if I’m okay.
Short answer? Yes.
Slightly longer answer? Yes, for certain values of “okay,” and am getting okayer.
Longer still, but more informative answer: The best I can figure it, my system waited until I had finally gotten done with the last stages of getting Virgin into production, until the page proofs were out the door, and promptly collapsed like a souffle in the front row of a road production of Riverdance. Almost four years of mostly solitary work on very difficult, often emotionally and conceptually toxic, intellectually tricky material that mired me in the misogyny mines pretty much from Day 1 took their toll… along with various other things, familial and professional, that’ve gone on in my life during that time that I didn’t really have a chance to deal with, grieve, recuperate from, etc. because I was already over deadline with the book.
So in the time-honored manner of college students finishing finals only to catch the most revolting flu available, I crashed. Hard. Not “post-book depression” particularly. I know from depression and this wasn’t the same thing. Exhaustion. Awful flareups of all the repetitive stress injuries I’ve ever dealt with, plus some new ones just for fun. Exciting new stress-related health issues I’d never experienced before in my life, like temporomandibular joint pain, frequent nausea and other GI misbehavior, cluster headaches… huh? Who, me? I’d never had these things happen to me. And then the array of symptoms that came along for the ride with the exhaustion, like the inability to focus, the shakes, the muscle and joint aches, the incapacity to think well. Writing was laborious and unpleasant, which it generally is nowhere near. Reading anything too complex was right out, because I couldn’t follow what was going on. I could just make it through Terry Pratchett’s new YA, Wintersmith, but I think that was mostly because I already knew the characters.
I’m not about to get into some tedious recital of all the ways in which this was a gargantuan pain in the ass, let alone how un-fun it was to endure. I’m sure you can do the math. Point is, I had never before understood those bits, typically in Victorian novels, where someone undertakes some massive task and does it and it “ruins [his/her] health.” I never imagined that was literal. I always figured that was code for “after doing such-and-so, s/he was feeling a bit run down and tired and in need of a vacation.” It wasn’t. At least not necessarily.
Fortunately, having something ruin your health can be a temporary condition. For the past six weeks or so, my day job has been getting better. Figuring out what I can and can’t do. Figuring out how to get the stuff I can’t do done anyway. Lots and lots of acupuncture, which has been helping me enormously… truly amazing, and my acupuncturist is worth her weight in something really really good. (Like maybe Michael Recchiuti fleur de sel caramels, or something equally outrageous.) Sleeping a lot. Eating plenty of fruits and veggies. Trying to get a judicious quantity of gentle exercise. Trying not to beat myself up too much about all the stuff I couldn’t do, or the stuff I still can’t. Waiting. Praying. Trying to be patient, because this kind of incapacity is tooth-grindingly frustrating.
The good news is that I’m doing a lot better. It’s a perplexing thing, this recovery process. There are some things I still can’t really do a whole lot of — driving the car remains inordinately taxing for some reason, for instance, so there’s a really firm limit as to how much of it I can do in a day — and other things that are getting more or less back to normal. But the ability to get through a whole day without needing to sleep for a couple of hours was a milestone. Getting to the point where I could go swimming was another, but first I had to get to the point where I wasn’t likely go shaky and dizzy and disoriented in the pool, or at least if I did, that I was well enough that I could depend on a few minutes’ rest being able to set me back to rights.
That was two days ago. And after two days where I was well enough to trust myself to be able to go swimming for a little while, I’m now having a day where I can tell it wouldn’t be such a hot idea. I’ll probably feel up to it again tomorrow, but today I’m apparently running on fumes. So, ya know, still a work in progress.
I’m hopeful that I’ll be back to normal by my birthday, which is at the end of February. Virgin comes out in March, so it’d be awfully nice not to feel like I had to husband my energies quite so carefully by the time that happens.
And speaking of Virgin, I’m happy to say that the Japanese rights have just sold, to Sakuhinsha. Other foreign sales are in the works, but nothing to announce yet. This will be my second book to be released in Japanese, which is very exciting for me. Not that I can read them. I always have a secret fear that they’ve taken my name and put it on the cover of a book about, oh, I don’t know, growing enokitake or something.
Also, blurbs have been coming in from various people, and I’m truly thrilled by some of them — validation is paradise, as a certain very wise and wily friend of mine notes, but validation from people whom you admire personally as well as professionally is a special sort of joy.
Oh, and y’all do know that the Virgin book has its own blog, right? I update it pretty frequently with discussions of virginity-related news items, and will be adding book events/book tour information, speaking gigs, and so on when the information becomes available.
Anyhow, that’s all the news from the little purple house in Baltimore. Over ‘n’ out.
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