Friday Randomness

Thanks everyone for your kind birthday wishes.  I had a lovely birthday, and a lovely time off from work.  One of Maya’s Christmas gifts was tickets to go see Wicked, which was a lot of fun.  I’m not a huge fan of the musical as a play, but this one was really fun and interesting and kept your attention the whole way through.  Excellent gift, Ted!  Btw, Ted wrote a great review of the show for Popdose, and he included a couple of YouTube clips that are pretty great.

Along the theme of gifts that are not things, we also received tickets for dinner on the Napa Valley Wine Train, movie tickets, and airline tickets to go visit family in Oregon this summer.  Yay for tickets as gifts!  They’re the best so far.  Though I am looking forward to receiving the knife sharpener for my fancy Asian knife that Ted ordered for me.

Still thinking of Christmas, my mom’s friend Kate sent me the link to this song the other day.  The picture of the comedian doesn’t change, so just ignore his silly face there.  It’s a lovely song, about how though he’s secular, not religious, he still loves Christmas, and is looking forward to taking his infant daughter with him to visit his family in Australia for the holidays.  He cuts to the chase with the lyrics, which speak to those of us who don’t think of Christmas as a religious holiday, but more of a celebration of family and friends.

I, I really like Christmas
Though I’m not expecting a visit from Jesus

I’ll be seeing my dad
My brother and sisters, my gran and my mum
They’ll be drinking white wine in the sun
I’ll be seeing my dad
My sisters and brother, my gran and my mum
They’ll be drinking white wine in the sun

I don’t go for ancient wisdom
I don’t believe just ‘cos ideas are tenacious it means they are worthy
I get freaked out by churches
Some of the hymns that they sing have nice chords but the lyrics are dodgy

And yes I have all of the usual objections to the mis-education
Of children forced into a cult institution and taught to externalize blame
And to feel ashamed and to judge things as plain right and wrong
But I quite like the songs

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0s68-GLGWY[/youtube]

Along the same lines, I was listening to This American Life on my beloved iPod, and the theme of the week was Christmas stories written by David Sedaris.  At the beginning of the podcast, they talk about how Charles Dickens popularized our modern, secular ideas of Christmas, writing more about the love of family and the importance of charity and having a good heart, than about the birth of Christ. I know for many, Christmas is a religious holiday, and for others, not so much. Either way, it’s a lovely holiday, one that I really enjoy a lot.

(picture found here)

For my birthday, I wanted to go to see some horse racing at Golden Gate Fields, our closest track. I have loved horses for most of my life, and have always enjoyed reading about horse racing, but I had never been to a race track before. Golden Gate Fields is in a beautiful location, with a lovely view of the GG Bridge from the parking lot. When you go inside, however, you sense all of the desperation that one would find in a crappy casino in Reno. Not even one of the good ones. Just people hoping against hope that they can make some quick, easy money, and thus be able to pay their bills, etc. Uck. So walk quickly through, and you find yourself outside where there is a lovely race track, and you can either pay extra to sit in a box seat with a view of the entire track, sit in the regular stands, where you can also see the entire track, or go down to track level, where you get the full excitement of seeing these beautiful horses and their jockeys up close.  We sat in the stands at first, wanting to get the lay of the land, and then we decided to make a bet, and go down to the track level and watch up close.  That was the most fun race by far, probably because we had money on it, but also because we were so close.  I bet practically, putting $5 on each of the top two favorites to win.  Ted bet on the favorite, and $5 on another horse because he liked its name.  Maya didn’t want to put any money down, but she picked a horse that she wanted to win by its name.  Guess what?  The second favorite won, then Maya’s pick, then the favorite, so all three of our picks came in the top three, but I was the only one who won money on it.  I won $26 on a $5 bet, which paid for my hotdog and soda, parking, and my bets.  Yay!  Totally fun.  I hope I can get Ted and Maya to go back someday, or at least Ted, since Maya was pretty bored.

After that, we came home, and Ted started cooking for my birthday party.  He made a delicious Lamb Curry, and we had Cherry and Eric, Liz and Issa, and Maya’s BFF and her family over, and most of them stayed until midnight.  Happy New Year!  It was a lovely way to end one year and start the next.

I just finished reading Hungry, A Mother and Daughter Fight Anorexia.  I heard their story on Forum, a local NPR show, and read about the book in the Chronicle as well.  I would say that I enjoyed the interviews on Forum and in the newspaper more than reading the book itself.  Sheila Himmel is an award winning writer, mostly of restaurant reviews for the San Jose Mercury News.  Lisa Himmel is her daughter, who has gone through several very painful and dangerous bouts with both anorexia and bulimia.   Reading Lisa’s story is very sad, as it’s always sad to read or hear about the self hatred that goes along with these very dangerous diseases.  Anorexia is the most dangerous mental disorder out there.  It claims the life of one out of five adult sufferers, one out of ten child sufferers.  It’s nothing to laugh at.  And Sheila and Lisa do not laugh at it.  They talk with honesty and openness about what their particular journey means for them, and for their family.  Lisa is currently recovering, but the relapse rate for anorexia and bulimia hovers around 50%.  My problems with the book were mostly in the first half.  I felt like Sheila spends too much time talking about her career as a food writer, and not enough about other aspects of their lives.  I suspect that she fears that the food obsessiveness of their family was a large contributor to her daughter’s disease, and so she’s trying to examine that aspect, and see if somehow her career is to blame.  The book improves in the second half, when Lisa’s story is brought more to the forefront.    My other problem with the book was that Sheila often jumps forward and back in time when discussing different phases of Lisa’s illness and the treatments.  So I sometimes had trouble knowing if she was talking about the Lisa who was a young adult at UC Santa Cruz, or the Lisa who was a Sophomore in High School.  Overall it was an interesting though sad read though I think you’re just as well off reading the newspaper article and/or listening to the interview on Forum.  One thing Sheila mentioned that I agreed with, is that we as a culture spend far too much time obsessing about weight, obesity epidemics, and super skinny celebrities.  I wonder if we tried looking at obesity as an eating disorder, rather than pushing disordered thinking upon those who are trying to lose weight, if we might actually start to help people.  There’s not one trick that anorexics use to lose weight that I haven’t seen as a diet tip in a magazine.  Not. One.  They just take them to the extreme.  Fidget.  Count calories.  Don’t eat after a certain time. Cleanse with cabbage soup.  Drink lots of water. Weigh yourself every day.  Write down every bite you eat.  Only have chocolate once a month, and then just a tiny bit.  On and on.  It’s exhausting, and it’s disordered, and teaching people to diet rather than finding other, better coping mechanisms is unlikely to help.  It’s why dieting doesn’t work.

Thursday is my day driving for Meals on Wheels.  Yesterday I stopped at one of the houses, to find a devastated woman inside.  Joan, one of the women on my route, was crushed because her son had died two days earlier.  Apparently, he had fallen down some stairs and broken his neck.  She has now lost all of her sons.  I was shaken by the sight of her, so sad, so lonely.  It brought me back to those first days after my mom died, and how difficult that was.  She has friends and family, people filling her fridge and showing her caring and love.  But without her son, she’s lonely for awhile.  I wish her peace in coming to terms with her loss.

What else is new?  Well, it’s back to work and school week, and I’ve felt more tired than usual.  Adjusting to getting up early is a bummer, no?  Tomorrow is my day at the hair salon.  Since I go to the Paul Mitchell beauty school, it’s inexpensive, but takes FOREVER.  Really, I’ll be there all day.

On the TV front, Big Love starts on Sunday.  I can’t wait.  Well, I can, but I wish I didn’t have to.

Lastly, I think I need to learn a rain dance.  We keep hearing about El Niño, and how we’re supposed to get more rain this year, how there might even be enough to end our drought.  But so far, nada.  A couple of times now, the news has promised storm after storm coming through, rain rain rain.  They’ll tell us we’re going to get a week’s worth of rain, but then we’ll only get one night of it.  Not enough to make much difference.  So join me in hoping that we have a wet January and February.  We sure need it.