You always think you’ll have more time. You woke up one morning ten years ago and made goals for your life; you’ll be a good student, you’ll ask all the right questions, you’ll get over your inexplicable shyness with your family. You’ll forget the fact that you didn’t grow up really close to everyone and pretend for a while that you actually are part of something wonderful. You forget how isolated you are.
There was another morning that I woke up and thought I would be able to ask my grandparents about their childhood. My grandmother has five sons and no daughters; I wanted to know what she would have named a girl. Our family is so keen on recycling names that I wonder if she wouldn’t have adopted a name from her lineage, or would she have brought in something completely new and beautiful? I wanted them to recount the story of how they met, when they got married, what my father was like when he was a child. When I woke up that morning, she was walking on her own, feeding herself and her family, and she may have answered my questions with gripping storylines and admirable character development.
They aren’t storytellers. I don’t know what makes me believe I have that blood in me; they can recall a memory with clarity, but they can’t convey the emotions or vividness of color. I kick myself sometimes, however, when I try to figure out why I didn’t ask her those questions that morning I woke up. Why hadn’t I asked those questions since then? All the opportunities I have had to say “thank you,” to hold her and tell her how much she means to her family are gone.
I was told that my cousins don’t visit her very much. It’s upsetting. They think that they have time, too. They’re waking up with goals they feel are more important than stopping by and saying hello to the matron of their family. They might wonder, too, what her oldest brother was like, but instead of breathing in the moment and asking her now, they’re going to wait until they’re old enough to realize their regrets.
Thanksgivings were wonderful and I don’t think I ever said “thank you” at the dinner table. I meant to. I thought it. But I also thought I would have time to say “thank you” later. The food was great, Grandma, and I’m sorry I missed out on it all those years I wasn’t eating meat.
My thoughts are scattered and I can’t seem to put them into place. It’s unlike a puzzle; using the word “puzzle” assumes that there is a correct and proper way to put the pieces together, that if it’s not complete it means there’s an appropriate piece missing somewhere. No, it’s not a puzzle. It’s more like the wind. Dandelion seeds. They all started somewhere, but who knows where they’ll end up or whether or not something will actually come of them.
When you go on a trip, sometimes it’s planned, sometimes you just go where life wants you to go. I wonder at people who plan their lives as if they could set in stone when and how events can take place. I can make reservations, but the events leading up to my 7:00 dinner at an expensive French restaurant may change the course of my life forever. The people who have passed through my life have been my companions on this trip. I like to think that my grandmother will have someone to hold her hand as she continues her journey. I wish, though, that I’d already asked who that person might be, that I hadn’t thought I had all the time in the world to ask her of her desires, her wishes, her past friends, and her beliefs.
I wish her book wouldn’t close so soon, just when I’m realizing how little time there actually is.
Around 6:30 or 7:00 PM on Sunday, January 13, 2008, I started having some awful pain in my lower right abdomen. It had happened before and I jokingly called it “My Appendicitis,” not seriously think that it was and thus disregarding it. That was in November, and before that, sometime mid-summer 2007. Monday, January 14, 2008, however, I woke up and it was worse than it ever possibly was. On a scale from 1 to 10, 10 being the worst pain I’d ever experienced in my life, I’d say it was about 9.5. I couldn’t breathe in some instances and I felt very dizzy.
However, I went to work anyway, being required to go in based on the fact that I was the “other” closer. Yes, just me and one other person, my manager Steve. Around 5:30 PM I ate two orange slices thinking that I could ease the pain, as I hadn’t eaten since 11:00 that morning (breakfast: Offbrand Honey Nut Cheerios), but instead doubled over grasping desparately for the bathroom key while having an otherwise interesting conversation about webcomics. I went back and called my mom and she suggested Urgent Care but didn’t seem too concerned, saying that I could go in the morning if I was worried about work. It eased my paranoia but not my pain, so I returned to the front desk and found Urgent Care centers in the Yellow Pages.
Steve, my first hero of the day, reminded me that there was an Urgent Care center, literally, two doors down from my workplace. I hopped over there and explained my symptoms, told them it was my first time there, and waited. For a very long time I was reminded of the characters in my stories. They were also always waiting, and sometimes also in emergency rooms. I already have two stories that end with a variation of the word “wait” and another one that implies a character is peacefully ready and waiting for death. I was going to ponder the reasons for this when my dad mysteriously showed up (it was “mysterious” because I had not told anyone where I was, only that I was at Urgent Care somewhere and thus couldn’t use the phone).
Thus, my father as my second hero of the day comforted me immensely and helped reduce my stress levels just by being there. I felt aglow and tingly inside thinking of the support system I had for myself; my dad was there already, my boyfriend was on the way, and my mother was just then leaving class and making her way back to join the club. It’s true, I was “just” in Urgent Care. As far as I could tell, they could do nothing but give me a possible diagnosis, charge me $110, and then claim that I “must” come back for follow-up after I’d visited the E.R. Yeah, right! Sure he probably knew what he was talking about, but he had me worried that if I swallowed my own saliva I’d DIE OF AMMONIA.
Shortly after Richard arrived I was sent to the hospital. I went back into work to grab my jacket and lunch and about 15 minutes later found myself sitting in the waiting room with a bucket for my spit (I hadded a bucket!).
08:21 PM January 14, 2008: In the emergency room now.
We spent a very long time there.
09:20 PM January 14, 2008: This is tiring and I’m hungry.
It is my mother’s habit as well as my inherited one to try to figure out what’s wrong with other people who have entered the E.R. When we were in Ohio waiting while my grandmother was in the E.R., we made all kinds of diagnoses, especially about a kid who had several men attack him “randomly” from behind, but you know what? He couldn’t figure out why because he had never, ever had an enemy in his life! How remarkable. Another girl looked exactly like Amanda except 10 years younger, and it really freaked me out.
This time, we watched a woman try to persuade her son to discontinue dropping a bag of Doritos onto the floor over and over again, presumably because he liked the noise it made and how much it annoyed his mother. He then commenced to doing all sorts of awfully disgusting things, like “swimming” on the floor (face in the ground), touching foreign objects with his mouth, and waiting for his mother to look at him before finding something else equally annoying to do. On the phone, she called him a “nightmare.” We otherwise spent our time watching a girl hold up her finger wrapped in some kind of towel and trying to figure out what had happened because there was no blood anywhere. We did conclude, however, that her husband must really have been in love with her since he scratched her foot inside her shoe. Cut probably for spoilers »
I first read Haruki Murakami in the summer of 2006. I’ll admit everything here: I read the book Kafka on the Shore because it was recommended by an attractive member of the opposite sex, plus I liked the cover. At the time I was working at a large bookstore with the job of merchandising features, endcaps, keeping up with new releases, etc. It was an exciting job for me which I felt required a creative side as well as an “orderly” side, as features had to be kept nice and tidy but still display illustrious and attention-grabbing colors. There was a certain summertime feature which required this book, so I saw it often.
I can’t recall the significance of the day I decided to purchase it, except that it was part of a 3 for 2 sale and thus I got it for free. I worked my way through it in a manner which allowed me to finish it in a number of days. For the first time in, yes, I’ll say “a long time,” I was reading a book which struck the back of my head and made fun of me for not having read more books like it. I couldn’t put it down, in other words, and I felt guilty that my reading habits had otherwise slipped into the one-book-a-month category, because I was clearly missing out on a lot.
I don’t usually read back covers. It was a habit I had as a child and found myself rejecting a lot of books which might have been very good based entirely on what the back cover noted. In some cases, back covers don’t even get the gist of the book and turn out to be very disappointing (I sometimes read them after I’ve finished a book and decide whether or not it was summarized well). Thus, after a while, I decided to stop reading back covers and instead judge books based on recommendations and covers. As much as you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, so far I haven’t read anything I’ve disliked except Jack Kerouac’s On the Road which had a nice cover but otherwise failed at everything. The Vintage-published Haruki Murakami books have been no exception.
I’d like to defend myself a bit here before I continue. I don’t buy books based on their covers, but it is what initially draws me in. If it were up to me, back covers would include only two things: A small 2-3 short paragraph exerpt detailing a very eye-catching moment in the book which still doesn’t give away anything that would “ruin the book,” and a short biography of the author. Usually you’ll see that summary on the first page, but I’d prefer it on the back cover. It gives me an idea of the writing style and a tiny glimpse into whether or not this book would be at all interesting to me. Of course, I purchase the book based on the writing style. If I can read it, whether or not it seems interesting, the language will make it interesting. Take for instance the book I had read previously to Kafka on the Shore - Salman Rushdie’s Fury. Having read the back cover, as I like to do when I finish the book, I can see that if I had judged the entire book based on that, I probably wouldn’t have bought it. I knew from previous readings that Rushdie’s style flows through my comprehension as smoothly as the way cream cheese always looks on bagels in commercials, so I picked it up. I don’t regret it - now it’s one my favorites.
I recently finished my second two Murakami books, After the Quake (a collection of short stories set at the time of the 1995 Kobe earthquake) and Sputnik Sweetheart (a love story and as the back cover notes, a “profound meditation on human longing”). I have a rule about picking favorites: I have to like at least three before I can call it one. It goes for anything - authors, directors, actors, artists, whatever and etc. Patrick Süskind quickly became my favorite author after I plowed through all of his books last year. Haruki Murakami, however, had to wait, and I don’t know why. I had a lot of reading ambitions last year, but I don’t know why I waited a year and a half (exactly) to continue my journey through Murakami’s books. Kafka on the Shore was just as compelling and amazing as Perfume (both of which were the first I read by each author), and yet Süskind grabbed me and took me along for the ride, not letting go even now while I obsess over the movie version of this tale of a murderer.
In any case, I enjoyed Kafka on the Shore. I described it as “one of the best books I’ve read in a while, in the sense that it is intellectually stimulating and yet still a very nice place to escape.” (The “escape,” as some of you may know, is one of the main reasons I read so much and so often.) “I suppose I do go for action, adventure, and mystery when it comes to reading. I’ve already purchased Tales of the Genji because of its use in this book. Kafka on the Shore is right up my alley - it includes folklore, mythology, philosophy and literary stimuli.” I later learned about “magic realism” and the ways that this book applied to the genre and became entranced, fixated on finding out more about it. I still haven’t read a lot of it; I’m shying away from Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende, but I’ve wanted to try Milan Kundera; I, obviously, already have Patrick Süskind undertow, but Yann Martel bored me. It’s a genre that fascinates me utterly but threatens my quick understanding of most literature. It’s a challenge that I’d love to experience head-on.
This is all beside the point. After the Quake lingers in my mind in the same way I imagine Sumire lingered in K’s mind at the end of Sputnik Sweetheart; and just the same, it isn’t Sumire’s disappearance and the mystery surrounding it (”like smoke”) that brings my thoughts back to the latter book. It’s the character “K” and the fact that he is the narrrator and insists the story is about Sumire, yet his name is only mentioned once, in passing, as “K.” I long to understand him and his passions and to talk with him along a beautifully peaceful beach, just as he longed to walk alongside Sumire after her disapperance. And it’s mixed with thoughts of an earthquake and the metaphor of life and fiction. Perhaps I read them too close together and should have paused to ponder After the Quake before jumping directly into Sputnik Sweetheart, but I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t want to stop. Murakami sits me down and demands my attention, and I have nothing to do but willingly comply.
I’m reading Mario Vargas Llosa now. He was interrupted by a months’ worth of literature, notably Kurt Vonnegut, John Dunning, and books about Christmas. It’s not that Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter hasn’t grabbed my attention; it’s more that the words are very tiny and sometimes the font hurts my eyes. That, and there are really great stopping points. At the end of a chapter, I can put the book down and forget about it; when I come back to read again, nothing is forgotten. It comes naturally, or seems to. His worlds are comparably different from Haruki Murakami’s and it is because of jumping back into this book that I’ve been able to see the difference in writing styles. Some themes are very similar, including that of “writers.” There are a lot of writers in these books which I’m reading, but they all have different views of their worlds. I tend to agree with Murakami’s writers more often, even though I don’t live in their worlds and don’t have their experiences.
It’s easy to pull out quotes from a book that you enjoy (especially if you’re reading Oscar Wilde) but it’s been difficult for me not to share entire paragraphs, pages, chapters from Haruki Murakami. It reminds me of the entire first half of Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park (another favorite author from whom I’ve read more than three books); I want to copy it into letters to everyone and let them know that yes! this is it! this is exactly how I feel! This is what it’s like to be a writer and to think of the world as a library, as Jorge Luis Borges illustrates, to think of each person as a book, and to consider life to be just another story. How can we make this one more interesting?
But Haruki Murakami, yes, I’ve come to tell you that I’ve read some of his books and he is an excellent writer.
This month I’m doing something different: I’m only eating fruit and yogurt, and limiting my drink to water. My reasons are many. This isn’t a defensive post; it’s more like an advertisement. I am sure that at the end of my month I will come back bragging about how wonderful I feel, so an introduction might be necessary.
1. Detoxification. This is not actually the #1 reason but I’ve been reading up about it a lot so it’s the first thing that came to mind when I made this entry. With all the crap I’ve put into my body (which you’ll hear about below), I really felt I needed to wash it out before I could comfortably start eating healthier. (This is a mental thing, I’m sure - the idea of a “clean slate” before starting a new, healthier lifestyle.) Sure, I could have drank prune juice for a week, but, um, ew. I’m obviously not doing a “strict” detox diet with only fruits, but since this is only one of the reasons I’m doing it I didn’t feel it necessary to take that extra step. I like yogurt.
2. Portions. The past few years have been spent eating. It’s true. I eat when I’m bored, when I’m lonely, when I’m tired, when I’m hungry, when I’ve just eaten enough anyway… It doesn’t matter. I like to be doing something with my hands, so I eat. Most of the time, what I ate was not healthy and unnecessary. Sometimes I’d eat myself sick. Towards the end of last year, my mom introduced me to NutriSystem foods. I hadn’t been following “the diet” or anything of that nature, but I began to realize how much I was eating in my free time. The meals provided by NutriSystem contain tons of protein, and even though I was only eating a few bites I would fill up.
It was wonderful! I loved it! I still do! However, there wasn’t a goal; I wasn’t restricting myself to NutriSystem only, and only at certain times of the day. Instead, I was eating NutriSystem with Wheat Thins and a peanut butter & jelly sandwich. Sure, I wasn’t hungry again for half the day and had no desire to eat even when my hands weren’t busy, but I didn’t feel I was learning portions.
This, I think, will be my own way of teaching myself to eat in smaller portions. It’s all or nothing for me; I can’t skirt by thinking that this 15-gram lasagna meal will be healthy enough while I’m still regularly consuming cookie dough and maraschino cherries on the side. I needed to just force myself to stop eating all the time. Fruit just made sense. It’s healthy, it has other benefits (those listed here, among others), and I can’t seem to stand too much of it at once.
3. Energy. I spent most of 2007 sitting around doing nothing. Sometimes I’d read, which was fine, and sometimes I’d be online, which was also fine, but I didn’t want to get up. Even if I had the urge to, there was probably a piece of chocolate or a bowl of ice cream waiting so close as the kitchen, so why go out for a walk? I was the laziest I’ve ever been and I think a large part of that was due to my eating habits.
Thus, right at the start of this year, I wanted to give myself a boost. I do want to be more conscious about the foods I’m putting into my body but instead of promising myself to eat fruits once or twice a day, I knew I had to go all-in. I don’t learn anything if I take it step-by-step.
4. Weight Loss. Though I know that my weight loss will be drastic at first because I’m significantly changing my eating habits, that is one of the benefits of an all-fruit diet. The goal extends only for a month, but I think once I see the effects of eating so much fruit and being so good to my body, I will find myself yearning to keep off the weight. I’m overweight based on calculations involving my age, gender, and height, but people are always surprised to find out how much I weigh. I carry it well (I’m tall and it proportions itself evenly). However, that doesn’t mean that the number shouldn’t worry me, and I’d like to start keeping it off early so as to prevent future health risks.
5. Being Generally Healthier. I’ve touched upon this point a bit in the above reasons for this diet. It will help me with my portions and my weight loss, but it will also leave me more conscious about eating healthier foods. One of the biggest indications of this for me right now is that I’m not craving pumpkin pie or cake frosting; I’m craving vegetables wrapped in pita bread, boiled eggs, colorful spinachy dishes without dressings. More than anything, I want grains and vegetables. How can only four days of eating fruit have left me with these desires? I don’t know, but I think it has something to do with the fact that I won’t feel like complete and utter crap after I consume them.
6. New Recipes! This I just realized yesterday. Ties in with the energy boost a bit, because instead of thinking “I’ll try it next time I have a day off,” I thought, “I have to go to the grocery store and get these ingredients right now! I’m so excited!” I was trying to think of ways to make this more fun and browsing websites with fruit-and-yogurt recipes, when I thought of a dish containing bananas, yogurt and coconut. I later came across the simplest thing: yogurt parfait with strawberries and blueberries. It’s so easy, so simple, and so delicious. I’m excited to try all these new fruit dishes and to hype myself up about future healthy recipes I can try. (And, of course, I will share the more yummy ones with you in my articles section.)
So there you have it. This is going to be my struggle through January but I’m really excited to come out of it successfully. I kept telling myself last year that I need to get off my butt and go out, exercise, do something, but then I would tell myself “the only thing there is to do around here involves spending money.” It’s not true! I hope that this year I’ll stay much more active and truly teach myself the way to start a healthier life.
Oh, and before you get concerned/worried about my health, I am still drinking protein smoothies. They’re fruit & yogurt blended with protein powder. There are natural proteins in fruits, of course, but I’m adding this extra to make up for the protein sourced from other foods.
Resources & Tips (in case you want to read about things):
The Fruit Pages
Fruitarian.com
Fruit Fast
7 Day Detox Plan
Fruit Diet
That said, I’d like you to help me with my #6 reason for this change. Do you have any fruit-and-yogurt only recipes to share? (Or just fruits are fine, of course.) Remember, I’m staying away from anything else including vegetables, meats, other dairy products, grains, etc.
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