sabato, giugno 04, 2011

Gardening by stages

I've stopped being cold all the time, I suspect because the weather got warmer. However I have been eating more animal too. Hard to say what's done it; I'm not a very controlled environment. Pretty damn pleased though. Yesterday I was in a sundress all day while normal people were wearing lots of clothes, which is the way I like it.

Just spent two hours fixing up the garden. I think two hours a day is going to have to be my maximum, more or less. Any more and I seem to get tired of it, and shirk the next day. Like running and eating I suppose - always stop just before you want to. We have some mustard greens and beets in - the beets for the greens as well - some tomatos, some red pepper, and some chives and strawberries out fron where it's less sunny. Herbs too. The coriander is doing well, although the F-word stepped on one of the plants today so I'm just hoping it bounces back. The other herbs I planted in a spot that's not sunny enough, so they're surviving, but grudgingly.

In the meantime, the citrus grove keeps freaking out - the clementine and mandarin tree fruiting faster than we can give them away, and certainly faster than we can eat them. We're keeping on top of the lemons, and the poor little lime tree out back that tomorrow I'm going to have to help out, in terms of getting her some sun. The oranges are about to overwhelm us, God willing. And then there's this fantastic tree that as far as I can tell is only grown in Australian and New Zealand - the 'lemonade' tree. It's a cross between a lemon and a clementine, and fuck me is it good. The fruits - abundant - taste like a sweetened lemon. Really beautiful.

giovedì, giugno 02, 2011

Beauté mâle

I loved you for your beauty; that doesn't make a fool of me
You were in it for your beauty too
I loved you for your body; there's a voice that sounds like God to me
Declaring that your body's really you

Obviously I didn't write that. If I was able to write something like that, I wouldn't be an industrial journalist. I'd be a Canadian treasure, or else a Hallmark writer specializing in anonymous cards to ex-boyfriends you don't actually want to see again but who you've had a nice dream about.

Actually the nice dream about Bluebird was awhile ago. Last night's nice dream was one of the stranger ones I've ever had. It was naked, yes, but very Leni Riefenstahl naked, not really Mistress La Spliffe naked, and not actually a sexual dream, certainly not in the sense of the old in out in out. More healthy than hot. It featured a man who I can only describe as a cross between Bo Duke and Shah Rukh Khan, except a giant. And me being aware over the course of the dream that I was looking at the most beautiful man I could possibly be looking at, and that by default made him the most beautiful thing ever. I mean, like, Reinaldo de Souza beautiful. Except a giant. And naked. And blond. Which usually I'm not into, actually, but it worked in the dream. I was worshipping him, basically, he was beautiful enough that my ego was subsumed, and I woke up quite sacral.

Anyways, it made me get to thinking about male beauty and female desire, probably sparked off by re-reading Jane Eyre yet again and realizing how pantingly in lust Jane was with Rochester. I mean, every description just oozes her appreciation of his athletic form and masculine essences and whatnot, and I had never really appreciated just how close the bit where she tells him she's leaving gets to literary rape fantasy. I always assumed he was threatening to kick the shit out of her, or kill her, or something. That whole section makes a lot more sense now, actually. But anyways. I was going to go on about something else altogether, but now I have to get back to work.

martedì, maggio 31, 2011

I wish I had kept all my old fat for a parka

I'm a little concerned that running has replaced blogging as my release activity. But there are only so many hours in the day, and once I've put on the clothes I run in and drag myself up and warm up and go for an hour and cool down and come back and stretch and shower, even someone with a work ethic as shoddy as mine knows it's basically time to settle down to work. And I don't think I can give up the running. It's ace. It feels so good. Even when I'm not in the mood to start, once I get going, suddenly an hour has whizzed by that I've spent thinking about what I'd yell at the prime minister if we were on television together, or how to foment rebellion, or striving to see things from the perspective of my enemies so I can hate them less, or any number of other things that usually I'd type here.

The drawback, besides no time for blogging, is that I've lost weight - rather a lot of weight. I'm not sure how much because I don't believe in scales, so have no idea how much I weigh now or how much I weighed before I started. But there is a visible lack of fat on my body relative to the amount of fat on my body a few months ago. At first that was sort of cool, and I spent a lot of time posing in front of bathroom mirrors and and feeling all sexy and shit, but then I realized that now I'm cold all the fucking time. I mean fucking freezing. I feel like a corpse on a slab of ice at the morgue.

Now, I don't know my women's mags, and I suspect I've been more successful at avoiding media brainwashing about how women need to lose weight all the time etc etc than most, mostly by virtue of spending so many years of my adult life in countries where I'm not totally comfortable with the local languages. But I am woman enough to know that nobody ever, EVER warned me that if I lost a lot of fat I was going to be so fucking cold all the fucking time. And yet each time I discuss how I have to wear five fucking layers of clothes all over the place because I think I'm going to break my bones shivering, all interlocutors concerned who've lost a lot of weight said that happened to them too, and for many it was the factor that made them stop dieting, if they'd lost the weight through dieting.

It pisses me off, it really does. So symptomatic of our culture. Just try to look good and damn the consequences, even if the consequences are going to make you change your mind later so your weight yo-yos, which is so bad for you. For fuck's sake. Anyways, I'm going to try to deal with it by drinking lots of hot water and eating more animal fat. In terms of sheer quantity, I don't think I can eat anymore than what I'm already fitting in my face.