I don't look in the mirror much. I think I've said that before. I do it when I shave. I do it occasionally when I brush my hair after a shower, though when my hair is shorter like it is now, I don't always need to look in the mirror. Sometimes I look up when I wash my face. That's about it.
I avoid the mirror because I don't want to see my body. So of course it only makes sense that I have no idea how big it is, or how much bigger it has become.
It's almost too obvious to call this denial. It's willful denial.
So I think I told you, about six weeks ago I was diagnosed with Type II Diabetes. As I understand it, this can mean a lot of things. I don't think it means that I now have diabetes, like people who were born with diabetes. On the other hand, I just found out that a guy I know who also has it, takes drugs for it. I thought I had the kind where you don't need drugs but if this guy, who's lost 40 pounds, is still taking drugs, I may have to reassess.
My doctor didn't prescribe drugs. Not at first anyway. I thought it was a non-issue. But last time I was there, about four weeks after the diagnosis, she took some blood and said she'd see if I needed drugs. She hasn't called yet but I'm not sure she would. Maybe I need to call her.
I don't know why drugs would be so depressing. I guess I just thought it was a matter of "lifestyle change" and this was just a kind of warning, rather than an actual condition.
Anyway that's neither here nor there. If I have to take drugs, I guess I will. In fact, I'm about to start taking another drug so I don't know what the big deal is. As long as it works.
The other drug is Zyban, by the way. The anti-smoking anti-depressant. I took it the last two times I quit smoking. I'm not sure how much it helps but I figure I'll take all the help I can get. The last time I quit I know it helped me get over my girlfriend leaving me, which happened just before I quit, so I know it has some effect. This time my girlfriend is not going to leave me. On the contrary, she'll like me more. But I am a little depressed for other reasons lately so I think I'm going to welcome a little crutch.
Anyway, a couple of weeks after I started my new diet, I bought a scale and Miss Music and I weighed ourselves. Or more accurately, she weighed us. I didn't want to know the number. I thought it would be discouraging.
In the subsequent weeks, I tried to trick her into giving me some indication but she wouldn't budge. But at the last weigh-in, a few days ago, I mentioned a number that I thought might be in the ballpark and she laughed. Not a cruel laugh, just an involuntary one.
"That wasn't it?", I asked her. She shook her head.
"Nowhere close?". "No, nowhere close".
Fuck!!!!!!!!!!
Now I'm going to tell you the number but suffice it to say that if this had been the number, it would have meant that I needed to lose fifty to sixty pounds. That would have been bad but somehow it felt manageable. But by saying "nowhere close", she's giving me the impression that I needed to lose more like 100 pounds.
Of course, on one hand, it doesn't matter how much I have to lose. As long as I change my diet and lifestyle and do it as a permanent life change, then I'll get healthier and even if I never reach some target weight, I'll be doing better than I was when I got the diagnosis.
And that will be good.
For instance, I will tell you that in the three weeks or so since she weighed me, according to her I've lost five pounds.
And that's without much exercise, since my knee is still fucked up and I can't take those daily walks that I intend to begin someday.
Five pounds. And that doesn't include how much I might have lost in the first couple of weeks before we bought the scale. And I'm only saying that because in the last few days, I've found it marginally but noticeably easier to do up my belt and it doesn't seem like five pounds alone would do that.
Trouble is, I'm still back on the fact that my estimate was nowhere close. If I was nowhere close, that means I'm really really fat and that's a lot different to me than merely being fat.
Now of course, on some level, I know that the number is unimportant and that, if my girlfriend loved me at that weight and people didn't run away covering their eyes when I hobbled down the street, then on some level I was.... presentable.
And of course, I know it doesn't matter so much what I WAS, but what I'm now determined to become.
And it's not even so much about what I might become but what I'm becoming. Five pounds is better than no pounds and it's a lot better than gaining weight. And if I lose twenty or thirty or fifty and I'm still fat, it'll still be better than where I was when I started out.
I KNOW ALL THAT.
But there's this lingering, haunting feeling. It's completely illogical but it's like maybe when I didn't know how fat I was, I would have gone to some party but now that I kind of have a more accurate picture of how fat I am, I don't want to go to that party.
Not that there is a party.
But today the film festival - TIFF - begins and even though I always sort of want to avoid it, I think I want to avoid it now even more.
Let me get to my real point here.
And I know I just talked about this in my last post. But that just shows how little (else) I have to think about these days.
I'm changing my diet. I'm quitting smoking in less than two and a half weeks. I have a girlfriend.
The diet thing is the easiest one on that list. It's a one-day-at-a-time thing but on most days, it's not that difficult to avoid things that are bad for me. Which is different than actually eating the things that are good for me but some days I manage that too.
I still can't quite imagine quitting smoking even though I've done it twice before. It's not so much that I can't imagine quitting but more that I can't imagine NEVER again having a cigarette.
Or more accurately, becoming a person who doesn't smoke. EVER. Doesn't go outside and smoke with the smokers at a party. Doesn't worry whether he has enough smokes to last the night. Doesn't have anything to look forward to, in the sense of "After I get out of the dentist, I'll have a smoke". And I know it sounds strange to say it in those terms but smoking is a way of sort of divvying up the day.
It's something to do.
Something to do especially when you have nothing to do.
The idea of spending the day at home, as I have for the last couple of months, puttering about on the computer and avoiding bill-paying (as I am right now), just feels so much more empty if I eliminate cigarettes from the picture.
It feels way more like nothing.
I know I'm not alone in this feeling. The other night my friend Randall and I were talking about our mutual friend Brian, who we were drinking and smoking with.
(Actually it was a pretty glorious night. Brian was in from South Africa and the last time we all got together like that was probably a decade ago.)
Anyway, curiously Brian had started smoking quite late in life. Around 37, I think. So when Randall and I first met him, he didn't smoke.
And we both agreed that we kind of resented him for it.
"It's like we'd be out drinking and we'd be with him and he was apparently having as much fun as we were and he was able to do that without smoking".
Yeah.
The prick.
Randall said he was quitting again. He'd quit a few years ago and while I admired him for it, when I saw that he had started again, I was sort of relieved. Even happy.
I know that's terrible but when you smoke, you have a strange relation to your smoking friends. It's like a club you don't want them quitting unless you quit too. You feel strange around them when they're out of the club and you aren't. And for sure, you feel a lot better when and if they rejoin the club.
It's like you can't stand your friend being a better person than you.
Now that I'm determined to quit, I hope Randall succeeds too.
I don't know where to place the "having a girlfriend thing" in this new equation. But I guess the strange thing is that as much as I want to lose weight, as much as my body has brought me down, depressed me, haunted me, as many times as I've wanted to quit smoking, as often that I've thought I'd had enough of being alone... there was obviously something... satisfying (?) about being that guy and I'm wondering who I'm going to be if all those things change.
Or not so much who I'm going to be as HOW am I going to stand being this other person?
Will I feel pressure to return to my former self?
Even if it means getting fat and unhealthy and alone.
I know that all sounds a bit ridiculous. As I wrote in my last post, Miss Music has theorized that my fat was a way of keeping people away and as much as I'd like to scoff at the over-simplification, there's a part of me that has a hard time disputing it.
It's not that I wanted to keep my friends away.
And as I think I told you, when I got confirmation that this woman I'd been attracted to - and who acted like she was attracted to me - had to reject me in the end because of my weight, I was kind of crushed.
Obviously I wasn't consciously trying to keep people away.
But there's no doubt I'm self-destructive.
I think that's what it comes down to. I like being self-destructive. That's what I know. It gives me pleasure. It obviously isn't good for me but not being good to myself makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.
I'm not going to say that I'm happiest when I'm destroying myself.
If that were so, one would have to wonder about all the self-destructive things I never got into. Never got addicted to heroin. Not an alcoholic. And I've often been tactful in the presence of people who could help my career.
Anyone who saw my last film, is probably thinking right now of my piece which we call "Fucked Up Lite".
Of the three areas here, the wagon I don't think I'm going to fall of of, is the diet wagon. As fucked up as I may be, I don't think I'll ever willfully try to pack on the pounds.
But even as I write that, I can't be sure.
I've been watching a lot of TV shows about diet and obesity. I don't know if there are more of them on these days or I'm just more aware of them. The other day I watched a real hard-to-watch one about super obese folks called "I Eat 33000 Calories a Day". These were those can't-get-out-of-bed folks.
Worse than I've ever been or likely ever will be.
This woman was talking about this big plate of cookies that was artfully out of focus in the foreground of the shot. She said that the very presence of the cookies gave her a warm feeling of anticipation.
I could relate to that.
But lately I've been practicing moderation. The other night our neighbors took Miss Music and I out for dinner. It was Indian food and I avoided the rice and the nans and went for the whole wheat chapatis.
(Can someone confirm for me the idea that whole wheat is so much better than white flour that I have no need to feel guilty or is it more accurate, as someone wrote me today, that "starch is starch"?)
Anyway after dinner, the four of us went a few doors away for gelato (at the gelato store I talked about in an earlier post.) At first I was determined not to have any. But they encouraged me to go for it. They were having large sizes, heaped high with delicious sugary coldness. I asked for a small one and then asked the server to sheer it off flat. So it was like half a small one. When I was finished I felt guilty. "I didn't need that". But on another level, I felt like "I'm really doing this".
So when the woman on TV talked about the big plate of cookies, I imagined myself having just one. I imagined myself taking that first bite and really appreciating it. And then slowly eating it, savoring every bite.
That's more or less what a normal person would do.
You eat one. You say "that was good" and then you stop.
But I've never ever been that person. Never. And like almost everything else I'm talking about here, as much as I enjoy imagining myself being that person, I'm just not sure I can do it.
It's unnatural.
For me and for that woman obviously, what's natural is to hoover down the whole plate. You can really enjoy the first one and you can probably really enjoy the second one and even maybe the third. But after that, it's not about enjoyment. It's about reaching for another one, knowing you shouldn't and then doing it anyway.
And repeating that for every cookie till the plate or the bag or the container or the box is finished.
It's obviously self-destructive. And clearly there's self-loathing there also, hating yourself every time you shove one down your throat after telling yourself you should stop. Hating yourself and loving it at the same time.
I still do that sometimes but these days I do it with blueberries or peanuts. It's probably still not good but hey... I've lost five pounds, right?
Anyway I know that I sound really silly talking about about the impulse to stay fat, keep smoking and somehow crawl back to my state of solitude but when I saw that plate of cookies and realized how easy it would be for me still, to just wolf them down, that it's still in me, that it takes no imagination to see myself doing it and that on some level, it feels like the "real me", I guess I started to understand where my head's been at lately.
I don't know why the impulse to self-destruction (of the mild or extreme type) is so seductive. I do know that the idea of a "healthy person" has always filled me with contempt but that's just the immature side of me. Or maybe it's just me.
Sometimes I think that though I obviously indulge in self-loathing, I don't hate myself enough. Or more accurately, I like myself too much.
I like who I am. I think I'm a cool guy. Others appear to agree with me.
If I got there by being self-destructive, maybe there's nothing wrong with being self-destructive. So why should I change?
Then again, I think I'm cool enough that I can retain some of it even without cigarettes, sugar and solitude.
Or maybe not.
Anyway that's what I'm thinking about lately. To be or not to be... me.
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