"I don't believe in inner children. I do believe that there are frozen places in ourselves - undigested pockets of pain - that need to be recognized and welcomed, so that we can contact that which has never been hurt or wounded or hungry." ~Geneen Roth, Women Food and God

You know what's awesome?

Not knowing what to get a friend for her birthday, I picked up this book and have come to believe not only is it the perfect birthday gift, it's something everyone should have in their home.

Not only is it hilarious, it highlights all the sweet things in life that we all know but have never put together IN ONE BOOK, like.

It's a quick and easy read. It's a skimmer. Enjoyable.

Even better, it has gotten me thinking of all the awesome things in my life and cataloguing them. Here's my humble contribution:

AWESOME THING #277: FROSTY BEER MUGS. You know when you get back from the liquor store with unrefrigerated beer? Whatarya gonna do? FROSTY MUG.

Awesome!

I Think I'm Ready

"We don't want to eat hot fudge sundaes as much as we want our lives to BE hot fudge sundaes."

~Geneen Roth

It has been a month since I took a business course called the Entrepreneur Bootcamp. My life has completely changed since then. Completely. I have never felt more free; I had a major breakthrough with my relationship with money and how I have always used it to get my needs met around love. I attracted 6 new clients and made $17,000 in sales, allowing me to address most of my pressing, scary, edge-of-the-cliff money and debt concerns. I got clarity and insight on how to effectively run my business and I organized a six-day retreat in the mountains to help my clients get started on their dream of becoming published authors.

I wrote an e-book and started my third book, one on dating which I have realized will be therapy for me more than help for anyone else.

I spent 3 weeks with my dad, a prince among men, learning what true giving and unconditional love is all about.

It's a beautiful thing.

Best, this past month has opened up the craggy hole in my heart and let light burst through. I have been able to let go of my death grip on money, share the wealth, help others and gladly, happily, joyfully share my love.

It's a beautiful thing.

I have been doing lots of work around my beliefs surrounding money, so I can make sure to stay in gratitude and flow. "I have plenty to spare and to share" has become my mantra of late, whereas before I was taking a more Gollum approach 'It's mine, mine, mine. There is not enough to go around.' And there never was.

All this is leading me to a place I thought I had long abandoned. I feel like I am finally ready to address and release my weight. Once and for all. I have taken a long, LONG break from it, feeling it better instead to nurture and comfort myself. I thought if I ever take another run at the weight loss game that it would be from a place of love, forgiveness and acceptance. I knew that in order for me to be successful, I would need a radical, new, different approach.

And along came this book by Geneen Roth called 'Women Food and God.' Now, as most of you know, I'm not a big fan of God. The semantics, anyway. I really prefer to call it The Universe, although I realize that whatever name you give it, it's all the same power. So I substitute God for the Universe and try and put away all of my misgivings surrounding The Big Guy.

Roth's angle is basically the following: The way you eat is inseparable from your core beliefs about being alive.

Uh-oh.

Your relationship with food is an exact mirror of your feelings about love, fear, anger, meaning, transformation and, yes, even [the Universe.]

Here is an exceprt:

"Pay attention to the way you eat. You will quickly discover if you believe the world is a hostile place and that you need to be in control of the immediate universe for things to go smoothly. You will discover if you believe there is not enough to go around and that taking more than you need is necessary for survival. You will find out if you believe that being quiet is unbearable, and that being alone means being lonely. If feeling your feelings means being destroyed. If being vulnerable is for sissies or if opening to love is a big mistake. And you will discover how you use food to express each one of these core beliefs."

I'm only on page 17, so I'll let you know how it goes. So far, I can only stomach (haha!) about 2 pages at a time. But I can tell already that she's going to help me.

I can feel the shift already.

Periods Are Overrated

Wow. So something pretty spectacular happened to me this week. Word is spreading amongst modern women everywhere. Kind of like an underground railway, except with cocktails and better clothes. I’m going to tell you a secret. Lean in a little closer. Here it is: Ladies, we don’t have to have our period any more if we don’t want to.

I know, right?

This is up there with the He's-Just-Not-That-Into-You Revelation of 2004. Ground-breaking.

I have had my period for 21 years. That is approximately 252 periods. And this whole entire time I have lived in resignation to the fact that this is our lot in life as women. We bleed every month. Nothing we can do about it. That’s the way it is.

Of course, I’ve heard the stories about women who piggyback their Pills; I’ve heard about the IUDs which basically obliterate the period. Oh, I've heard all about it.

But I genuinely believed those women were playing with fire, so smug was I in my knowledge and assurance that ‘I’ was doing it the right way.

Those women are going to Hell.

‘It’s natural. Best not fuck around with Mother Nature. You don't want to piss that Bitch off.’

Since having complications with my Pill in the late 90s, I have been a free-wheelin’, hormone-free, Pill-hating, PMS-ing woman. I used to pride myself on the fact that I could set a clock by my period. That sucker came every 26 days on the nose. I believed that to mean that my body was in SYNC. It was doin’ it’s thang.

I had completely surrendered myself to the mind-numbing cramps and painful, almost crippling symptoms of My Period for 2 days every month. That’s the way the cookie crumbles, I thought.

Then one day last week my roommate came home with shocking news. And an excerpt from a book I had to read. We as women were never meant to have a period every month.

What!?

That’s.crazy.talk.

Get outta here with alla that CRAZY-TALKIN'!

Here’s the thing: In Malcolm Gladwell’s Book 'What the Dog Saw' there is a life-changing, core-shaking, belief-system rocking essay called "John Rock’s Error” about the man who invented the birth control pill. Did you know he was a devout Catholic? And when he invented the birth control pill, the only reason he had it replicate a woman’s natural cycle was to a) make women feel more comfortable and b) to convince the Catholic church to sanction it?

Yes. There is absolutely no other reason to have a period if you are not trying to get pregnant.

Boff! I scoffed. I squirmed. I objected. You know, I fancy myself a pretty smart, independent forward-thinker, but this is crazy talk. This can’t be right.

Except. Well…

Have I been blindly following along with the status quo? Have I—God forbid-- been letting the Catholic Church into my bedroom? And worse, have I been letting it dictate my reproductive choices?

Well, yeah, I have been. And not even realizing it.

Here’s the thing: Women in traditional cultures have spent most of their 20s and early thirties pregnant or breast-feeding. A study of modern-day aboriginal tribes in Africa also shows that women in these cultures even today average 1 period a year between the ages of 20-34 and 4 between the ages of 34-50. This gives them, on average, a life total of approximately 100 periods. A hundred periods. Western women’s lifetime total? Somewhere between 350 and 400.

And here’s the clincher: Having a period and releasing an egg is not this soft, gentle “natural” process on your body. Nope. It sends your body into what is equivalent to a type of stress and shock. It makes the body regenerate cells EVERY MONTH. As Gladwell puts it,

This shift from a hundred to four hundred life-time periods means that women’s bodies are being subjected to changes and stresses that they were not necessarily designed by evolution to handle!

Cancer occurs because as cells divide and reproduce they sometimes make mistakes that cripple the cells’ defenses against runaway growth. So ANY change promoting cell division (like our periods, hello!) has the potential to increase cancer risk.

Whenever we ovulate, the egg literally bursts (bursts!) through the walls of the ovaries. To heal the puncture, the cells of the ovary wall have to divide and reproduce.

Every time a woman gets pregnant and has a child, her lifetime risk of ovarian cancer drops 10 percent. Why? Well possibly because between the pregnancy and breast-feeding, she stops ovulating for 12 months and saves her ovarian walls from 12 bouts of cell division.

A woman who takes the Pill for ten years cuts her ovarian-cancer risk by around 70 percent and her endometrial cancer risk by around 60 percent.

So. It’s certainly been the most convincing argument I’ve ever heard to stop just "leaving it up to Nature."

Personally, I am choosing to free myself from the pain in the ass that is my monthly period and getting a Mirena IUD.

Crazy talk it may be, but I couldn’t feel happier, healthier or more bloody liberated.

No pun intended.

Full Frontal Fiction

When I'm writing a book, I also need to be reading a book. I enjoy the inspiration lent to me by other authors; I like the reassurance of someone else's completed manuscript in my hot little hands; the proof, the reminder that: See? It can be done.

So short stories are where it's at when I'm knees-deep into writing; I don't get so attached and involved in the story and if I do, the outcome is quickly revealed and I can get some sleep without being preoccupied with the state of my characters' lives.

And now if you'll let me set-up the post here, you'll need to follow me on a little side-journey. Bear with:

I have taken it upon myself to become the Go-to Gal with my friends in the sexuality and sensuality department. Clearly, I would rather be the go-to-gal for women's empowerment than the go-to gal for brownie-making or...or...floor-mopping. So it is not uncommon to hear me professing "So-and-so needs to get in touch with her sexuality." And then proceed quite unabashedly--and often without being asked-- to give tasks, homework, projects and sex-toy parties to these poor unsuspecting women who have had the great misfortune of telling me about one or another of their hang-ups. Comfort zones, in my opinion, are meant to be broken.

I recently came across a book that I have had for 8 or 9 years, given to me by friends when the tables were turned, 'lo those many years ago...I pulled it out to lend to aforementioned victim-friend, and realized that I had never read past the first story, so traumatized had I been by it. I won't get into the story of the Siamese twins which will forever remain SEARED ON MY BRAIN, but the other stories aren't so bad. So before I pass it on, I have been having it for dinner with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.

It is erotica literature at its best, even after all this time. It is dirty, appalling, touching, happy, sad, morbid and festooned with bumping, grinding, licking, panting and moaning in all the right kinds of ways.

And a note from the editor:

"Few writers make the attempt [to write about sex.] Those that do find themselves at the end of language's tether, seeking to find words and phrases to circumvent the pat clichés of erotica and pornography. You are unlikely to think that English is short on adjectives until you start trying to describe what sweat on skin tastes like, or what is seen in the flash of emotions as you enter someone or someone enters you. A million components of sex are taken for granted; when you try to recover them in language, their immediacy becomes distant, their familiarity strange. The pen falters.'

Well, I daresay that they have done a (pardon me) bang-up job at finding a happy medium and it is with great joy and delight that I have rediscovered this book on my bookshelf, waiting, it would seem until I was better positioned (sorry, I just can't help myself) to appreciate and receive it as it was meant to be.

Figs & Ass

I discovered to MY HORROR last year that I hadn’t read a book in its entirety since A Million Little Pieces more than a year previous. For me, this is just not acceptable. Afraid that I would someday find myself relegated to Archie comics and People magazine, one of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2008 was to read more.

I never thought I would become the non-fiction type of gal, but I cannot get enough of the memoir these days. Maybe it’s because I have always associated non-fiction writing with droning World War II epics or because I read Gorillas in the Mist in high school as part of our ‘Non-Fiction Unit’ and found the subject and the narrative so boring that it was as dry as reading a calculus textbook. Snore! (Mind you, my aversion for non-fiction may have nothing at all to do with its genre and more to do with the traumatic memory associated with Gorillas in the Mist, which someday , fair readers, I may share with you.)

No matter the origin, I now really find that nothing is more interesting than the true story of people’s lives. And if those lives involve sex or travelling or food in some way, shape or form (and let's face it, how could they not?) then I am all over it like a Congressman on a hooker. These days, I have more or less set up camp in the biography section of the bookstore.

So is it any surprise that the story of a chef-turned-dominatrix be of the utmost intrigue to me? Don’t know what to get that hard-to-buy for person on your list? Well then, fair reader, let me introduce Concertina: The life and loves of a dominatrix.

The biggest surprise about this book is how literary it is. It is a smart account by first-time author Susan Winemaker of a life that took some unusual twists and turns. I have been munching and licking my way through this book for about six weeks now. On the back burner, a slow simmer, it came (ahem) to boil on a number of occasions. But banish the thought that this book is all about tits and ass. Well, it is. And it is also multi-faceted and layered and touching.

Anyone looking for easy jokes and cheap laughs won't get them here. Though it does go into some pretty gruesome details of life as a dominatrix—horrifying and titillating beyond even my own imagination—it is also a love story and a book about a woman finding her way in the world.

I have this habit of dog-earing pages with passages or words I love. There are some books where no pages are dog-eared and others where almost every page is folded over for future indulgence.

Here are some of the fabulous words that jumped out at me from my dog-eared pages:

supine
truncated
effete
inscrutable
bellicosity
hirsute
akimbo
timorous
lissome
alacrity
serpentine
lascivious
doleful
elegiac
maudlin
dastardly
laconic
flummoxed
askance
fey
abjured
oblique
loquacious

Yep, that's her book in a nutshell. She describes beauty in a way that resonates with me: “My beauty was not structurally perfect; it was contingent upon the angle, the lighting, my attitude, my state of mind” because that's more or less how I have always characterized my own looks.

Sentences such as : “His delicacy was in risible contrast to his leviathan physique” and the characterizations give Margaret Atwood a run for her money. Meet Adam the Masochist, Enema Larry, Electrics Bob, TV Mike, Plastic Man and Trousers Dan. Men begging to be dominated and humiliated walk among us like normal, functioning human beings masking their lacy thong underwear, their scrotal bruises and their flaking nipples.

This is just as much a book about food as it is about sex, but with sentences like: “All theses savoury, salacious visions: orgies of food, outlandish contortions, vegetable perversions, exploding juices” it’s sometimes hard to distinguish between the two.

An Eater’s Manifesto

Generally, the less I talk or think about my weight the happier I am. But for me, I need to be careful not to fall in the trap of eating mindlessly and have for years created a pretty healthy eating environment at home. You will very rarely find chips, pop or junk food in my cupboards. Since the book, I have given myself permission to have dark chocolate in the home and am happily able to keep it in there, sometimes for days at a time, instead of gobbling it up like a greedy, starving, deprived child.

But here's what I have accepted about myself: I am an eater, a lover of food, a passionate pursuer of gastronomical pleasures and I am done feeling guilty about it. I eat with gusto and enthusiasm and think that's fucking fabulous.

Indeed, the last six months or so, I have been on a rather scary experiment with my body. One where I do nothing except work towards accepting it the way it is. It has been tough sometimes because I have to watch not to fall into the trap of self-loathing and negative self-talk that comes along with that. The truth is, I actually eat really very well. I take quite good care of myself and it taken me years to actually recognize and commend that fact.

Which has left me believing for quite some time that my weight is a byproduct of my fear and insecurity. I really can’t help but believe that my weight has nothing at all to do with my caloric intake and expenditure. I’ve been sitting with the possibility that maybe until I accept my whole self and really embrace it all and nurture and love myself, that the weight will always stick to me like burnt rice to a pot.

So it has come like a breath of fresh air to read Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food. Which is just really a way to set me up for success. Diets don’t work for me. The minute, the very minute, I start to think about counting calories and setting up exercise regimes that would exhaust a professional athlete, I swear that my body goes into starvation mode and starts conserving every calorie in preparation for the impending drought. And I gain five pounds. And history has proven that trying to beat my body into submission has really done nothing to help me love myself. This does not, however mean that I wake up and eat cake for breakfast or have Big Macs and pizza every night of the week. So this book really appeals to me. It is not crazy, processed food that is actually unhealthier than anything you’d find at the grocery store (ahem, Jenny Craig) and it is not so regimented in caloric intake that I spend my days with pork chops bouncing around in the thought bubble around my head.

So what does Micheal Pollan recommend? He thinks we should “Eat Food. Not Too much. Mostly Plants.”

That’s it.

Isn’t that fabulous?! Could it be more freeing or liberating?

Well yes, it can actually.

Here’s what else he has to say:

• Avoid Food Products That Make Health Claims
• Avoid Food Products containing Ingredients that are a) Unfamiliar, b) Unpronounceable, c) more than five in number, or that include d) high-fructose corn syrup
• You Are What You Eat Eats Too (in other words, find out what your animals are eating)
• Eat Well-Grown Food From Healthy Soils
• Eat Like An Omnivore
• Regard Non-traditional Foods with Skepticism
• Don’t Look for the Magic Bullet in the traditional Diet
• Have a glass of wine with dinner
• Pay more, eat less
• Eat Meals (ie: Less snacking, less grazing)
• Do all your eating at a dinner table
• Don’t get fuel from the same place your car does
• Try Not to eat Alone
• Consult Your Gut (ie: stop eating when you are full)
• Eat Slowly


Pollan reminds me a lot of my old friend, Dr. Andrew Weil, whom I have been reading and revering since the late nineties. He also reminds me of Paul McKenna, the I-Can-Make-You-Thin guru.

What he’s saying isn’t new, but it also isn’t crazy, ridiculous or drastic. It also comes from a place of abundance rather than one of deprivation. I think the key to a happy life involves dessert and it has taken me years to come to that realization. I used to hate myself for it and wished that I was one of those people that could get by eating millet and arugula. But you know what? I’m not and I don’t want to be anymore. From now on, I’m choosing abundance and happiness and chocolate. I'm choosing good conversation, good laughs, fun times and chocolate souffle. I'm choosing red wine and beer and gin an tonic. And I’m willing to bet that the pounds will melt away. But if they don’t, that’s cool too.

.

I Heart James Frey

So I never usually buck up the cash to buy books in hardcover. I’m too cheap or too oblivious most of the time to even be aware when an author has a new book out. And actually, it’s usually out in paperback by the time I even realize it.

I have only ever bought two hardcover books in my life, being absolutely unable to wait the 6 months until the paperback version came out. They were both James Frey books. One was ‘My Friend Leonard’ and the other is the book I am currently reading, ‘Bright Shiny Morning.’

I love James Frey. I have to regularly stop myself from getting in my car and driving to New York, knocking on his door, shooing his wife and kid out the door and saying, ‘I’m the gal for you.’

A Million Little Pieces was life-changing for me. I loved this book. I loved James Frey before Oprah loved him and continued to love him after she started hating him. I don’t care if he made the book up; it is still a masterpiece of writing to which I can only hope to someday aspire. And actually, I think way too big a deal was made out of that whole absurd fiasco. And as someone who knows a thing or two about professional scandal and going down in a blaze of glory, it endears me to James Frey all the more. I like him for standing up to the Oprah zeitgeist and standing his ground. I love him even more for writing at the beginning of Bright Shiny Morning: “Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable.” Can I steal that and put it in my book? 'Cause that would really take the pressure off.

So summer is over, and I am finished reading my summer candy. It was great, but as the leaves turn, so do my interests in books. This fat little number has been sitting on my bed-side table blinking up at me since the end of May. And it is probably the worst time for me to be starting a really good book. I need to write and I need to sleep and that’s all right now. What I don’t need is to get roped into an absolutely genius book. I was hooked on Page 5 and actually have to train myself not to pick it up until before bed when all my work is done. My back hurts from hunching, my eyes are sore from twelve hours of computer glare, my wrists and knuckles are irritated from writing...yet there I am, reading, staying up late, devouring.

His characterizations are brilliance incarnate. Joe, the homeless alcoholic? I care what happens to him. Amberton Parker, the closeted homosexual movie star(who incidentally I think is a parody of Tom Cruise...?)I care what happens to him. Lashawn and Anika, Dylan and Maddie,Esperanza,winners, losers, assholes, dreamers. I care what happens to them.


I heard it described as a kindle that gets you hooked right away. And that’s it. This book is like starting a fire with one match. Luminous writing that shines throught the pages. I love his writing style, his sense of humour, his compassion, his irreverence and his realism.

Yes, James Frey. You 'da man.

And you can shine my morning any time you like.

.

Lazy Summer Reading

So, I have been having some issues with goal setting lately. Namely, that I am making all sorts of ambitious plans and never following through with any of them. This seems to be permeating into other areas of my life. Example: when was the last time I finished reading a book? I think it was Christmas, when I found out why ‘he just wasn’t that into me.’

This is simply unacceptable.

Part of the problem has been in my choice of books. As the weather gets warmer, my brain gets mushier. Who wants to read about Love in the Time of Cholera when it’s 30 degrees out? Ondaatje is just too cerebral to compete with the hot sun and pina coladas. And the Pillars of the Earth will still be there in the Fall.

Still, my inattention and inability to finish a book is troublesome to me. It may not be too big a deal now, but before you know it, I'll consider the stack of 'Archie' comics by my bed challenging.

So I renewed my Chapter’s discount card (and P.S. If you tell them you’re a teacher, the renewal costs less) picked some campy fun books, turned off my TV and dove on in.

First off, Smile When You’re Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer.

Everyone knows that you absolutely *can* judge a book by its cover, so already, this one gets five stars from yours truly.




I found this book *highly* entertaining. It is well-written, funny and irreverent. Right up my alley. If you’re not all that interested in the Travel Industry then just read the first section of the book where he finally gets the chance to tell all of his greatest travel stories in print. I haven't laughed that long, hard and loud in a really long time. Hilarious! One thumb up!

Coincidentally, I stmbled upon a sister book called Do Travel Writers Go To Hell: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics & Professional Hedonism.



Not as well written, but by virtue of its great title alone--who doesn't want to be a professional hedonist?--this book is fitting the bill of easy summer reading.

P.S. July 22/08: So, this book has proven to be somewhat disappointing, and I am having a hard time finishing it. Not even enough to flatter my short attention span. However, I have decided that I am permanently stealing the phrase "professional hedonist" and claiming it as my very own. Let's all just pretend that I coined it.

Lastly, prompted by a friend’s recommendation and an upcoming trip to Vegas where hot sun, alcohol and poolside reading can only be good for one type of book, I picked up:
Working Stiff: The Misadventures of an Accidental Sexpert.



Yep, that’s sounds like Vegas alright.

At twenty-one, the author came to the United States in pursuit of true love. After eighteen months of couch-surfing and heartbreak, he stumbled into a job as New York's most intrepid sex columnist, despite having little experience in either sex or writing.

I mean, c'mon. How is that even fair?