My life has gone through a reboot, and I’m finding that changes and challenges continue to unfold, often unpredictably.

I’ve said before that one part of my unresolved identity stems from my glaring lack of style. I don’t mean that I always look stupid or unkempt or ugly or what have you. I just don’t really have a certain cohesive way that I like to dress. For the most part, I’ve woken up every morning of the last 26 years (minus the ones pre-motor-skills when Mom was in charge) and thrown on anything that was at the top of my drawer.

I looked fine. Put-together, respectable, generic. Not bad. But I also never really felt good or comfortable, either.

Over the years I’ve made some half-hearted attempts to add pieces to my wardrobe that I actively enjoy wearing, but they’re interspersed with the usual boring stuff, some of which I’ve had since middle school. I just never had the energy or will to seek and replace over time.

And I always had the FatGirl mentality that if it fits and minimizes your hips, hold onto it for dear life and never let it go.

I’ve noticed a substantial shift since I moved into my new apartment. About a week ago I carefully stacked my shirts into the old oak dresser I found on Craigslist, happy for a sense of order. However, every day since then I’ve opened the drawers and thought: “I do not want to wear ANY of these things.”

Nothing. None of it feels right. I want to wear clothes that make me feel good and young and smart and sexy and powerful and I have no idea what kinds of clothing will do this, but I know that I have a whole chest of drawers full of clothes that do the opposite, and I am actively refusing to wear any of it, with about two exceptions.

Thank goodness the weather here has already started to turn colder. I think my fall clothes might hold up to scrutiny.

The other day I finally got the cartilage piercing in my right ear that I’d wanted for years, that I was originally waiting to get as a reward for reaching a certain weight milestone. For over a year I held off because I hadn’t “earned” it. That milestone came and went months ago — without my active participation in any sort of weight loss effort — and I’ve stopped marking progress by weight; and so the piercing happened not as a reward, but as a simple marker for holistic progress, a physical notation of life in September 2009.

It marks where I am now, here, in time and space, with a changed body, a changed mind, a changed spirit. I have rebooted. Now I need to grow into my new skin.

I just don’t know when or how to get started. But this time I’m not going to let that be an excuse to let mediocrity reign as status quo for yet another year.

I’ve been trying to teach myself not to dwell on milestones. It’s a tough habit to break, since I’ve done it all my life. Of course, I chose one of the biggest events upon which to quit cold turkey, and of course, I cheat regularly.

Tonight seems significant, though. Tonight marks 9 months since the dividing moment.

By some quirk of mechanics and fate, I am alone right now. I am starting a new chapter of life, but not with a new life.

Of all the confusing things that came of the last nine months, the fact that this realization is in any way bittersweet wins the prize for totally confusing as hell. I felt the same way, even as relief flooded every cranny of my soul, eight and a half months ago when I discovered that the decision I might have to face was not mine to make. I have no idea what chemicals go to work in a person to make her wonder about something so morbid with anything more than complete and utter gratitude and disgust.

My laptop is on my lap, and that is all. I know I have been blessed. And yet I am alone. I feel bittersweet, and because of the strangeness of it I am completely at a loss for what else to feel.

There are three mirrors in my new apartment. One is in the bathroom, over the sink; when I look in it, I see round shapes, sagging skin, the fear of aging and fear of largeness. One is behind my bedroom door; it is full length, and I never have to look at it unless I choose to do so, so I keep the door open and the mirror hidden. The third is above my dresser; it only shows me from midchest and up, and at the very least seems to reflect a healthy reality.

So far, that mirror and I just give each other passing glances on our way to other things.

Part of what I like about having a blog, and why I don’t give it up in spite of my inability to keep it current and/or attract actual readers is the simultaneous anonymity and publicity of it all. Nobody who stumbles across this blog knows who I am in real life, with one or two exceptions, and I really like it that way. There are times when I have something I simply need to say, but nobody to say it to. My last post was like shouting into a canyon; some passing hikers might have heard it, but mostly the words just echoed back to me, and I felt like I wasn’t alone somehow.

The return to normal following my grand adventure has not progressed in a linear fashion. There are days that seem like any other day, and there are days when I ache to be back on the road, and days when I miss someone that I will never see again. The whole year for me has been made up of isolated days of euphoria followed by jarring revelations and months of recovery. It’s not as severe as bipolarity, but I do feel as if I’ve spent the last nine months stumbling through alternate universes where things that are not supposed to happen to me happen anyway.

Losing my job was one. Breaking up with the man I thought I was going to be with for life was another. Getting mono at age 25 when I hadn’t so much as shared a glass with anyone, getting into graduate programs when I didn’t (and don’t) have an inkling what I want to do with my life, living at home again. Traveling by myself for a whole month. Getting the hot guy.

But it all started with an alternate universe I stumbled into at around midnight between January 2nd and 3rd, when, in a dark walkway on a boat traveling between Santa Cruz and Espanola, I chose to turn right instead of left, and my previously stable and linear life shattered into pieces in the moments following that single wrong decision.

I have wanted to shout this into the canyon for months now, because it’s not something that I can easily say in quiet tones in civil conversation. I even have a hard time talking about it with family and close friends, though I have the goal of someday turning my personal horror into prevention for others. I think this is a good place to shout it, finally, because it necessarily informs everything I do now — it especially informs how I think about and treat my body, a body that was horribly abused and has yet to recover fully, both physically and emotionally. A lifetime of disrespect confirmed by outside disrespect…I was not asking for it by any means, but among everything else forced upon me that night, mandatory self-reflection was one imperative I couldn’t push away.

One day in late December, my family and I were wandering through an open air market near Quito. I stopped to buy a mango, and when I looked up my family was gone. I stayed put and craned my neck to see if they were nearby. I walked a few meters, looked again. Walked to the edge of the street, waited. No luck. So I put on my sunglasses to hide my light eyes (they attracted attention) and used my sense of direction to get back to the rendezvous point we’d set. When my family showed up ten minutes later, my mom and brother were frantic. They thought I’d been dragged into a dark alley somewhere. But my oldest brother gave me a kiss, and whispered in my ear: “I knew you were fine.”

Israel was more to me than a chance to see the place that, as a Jew, I am meant to identify as ancestrally and culturally significant. It was more to me than a chance to see, up close, the land in conflict. I chose to stay for an extra three weeks because I needed to see if it could be done; if I was capable of overcoming the fear and timidity that were forced upon me by violence. I needed to get back my agency, which was ripped away from me by force. I didn’t know what to look for, but I knew where to start looking. I chose to travel alone because I wanted to believe that I was capable of assessing situations and making the right decisions without relying on somebody else to do it for me. I chose to stay for an extra three weeks on my own because I had to prove to myself that I could do it; that I was the woman in the market at Quito, not the woman in the dark walkway on the boat between Santa Cruz and Espanola.

Now that I’ve done it, I think I can say that I’m a little bit of both. I stayed safe, I removed myself from questionable situations. I found my way around a place I did not know, a place where I did not know the language (even though many Israelis speak English). But I also made some mistakes that, while they did not lead to the same catastrophic outcome, did lead me backwards a few steps.

I trusted a man who set off the alarms in my brain — some entirely not his fault, like his speaking in accented English. I trusted him because I was so shocked that I was capable of loving, when I thought that muscle had atrophied into nothing in the months of dulled existence, that I poured everything into that love even though deep down I knew it could never be what I needed it to be. If I had taken ten minutes to step out of the warmth of euphoria into cold logic, I would have known to stop before the addiction took hold, before I had to fall down once again.

I’ve fallen a lot this year. I keep forming new scar tissue each time something breaks. But I hope the scars are not like the one on my right knee, newly formed when I wasn’t looking where I was going and went flying over a low stone barrier in Beersheva. I don’t want to wear them where everyone can see them. But I hope every now and again they will serve to make me stronger, to prevent my falling in the exact same way twice.

July 6, 2009: I am feeling very FatGirled, and this time I have a sneaking suspicion that it is entirely my fault.
…
I suppose I somehow want a totally harmless, 14-year-old crush to put a little bit of flutter in my stomach and spark into my days. I would settle for a crush on the place; though I don’t know which would be worse for me in the long run.

The next day was a 22-hour day. We spent the night in an open tent at the Bedouin Experience, an incredibly touristy attraction that involved riding camels and donkeys and idealizing an incarnation of a culture that is all but extinct these days. The Bedouins accidentally woke us up at 3:30 instead of 4:30, and I brushed my teeth in the dark to the sound of an owl calling “hoo, hoo-hoo” in the palm trees above.

We ascended Masada via the Roman Ramp by sunrise, climbed down the snake trail by 9AM, hiked the Ein Bokek river trail by noon. At the head of the trail, one of my new friends was very upset. I stayed with her to talk her down, and he stayed with us, as it was his job to bring up the rear. He may have been there for our safety, but I still felt a profound discomfort being alone with a man carrying a gun. He said later that it was then that he became interested in me, but I did not believe him. I could not believe him.

Relaxing on the kibbutz after swimming in the Dead Sea, he came out to hang up some shirts to dry that he’d washed, including the shirt he’d been wearing. Married Cindy and I commented on the scenery. It was harmless enough, shirtlessness appreciation. Watching all the pretty young men.

At dinner, he started to sit down next to me, and I told him that I thought someone was already sitting there. It was his glass, it was him that was already sitting there. I apologized. He sat down. We started talking. I asked him questions. Suddenly, the dining room was empty except for us, and Janice told me to finish up my orange, that we could keep talking outside.

Two hot girls from our group in tiny shorts and tank tops walked past us as we strolled in the twilight. “I really like your gun,” stroking his arm. “Thank you,” he said. I’m embarrassed for America. And I’m embarrassed for myself. What am I doing here? Why are we walking together? I don’t want to be the asexual big sister while the bikini girls flirt with the sexy Israeli medic.

And then, under the tree where two peacocks perched, so dark that I could barely see his outline, he asked if I had a boyfriend. What? Are we really doing this? Where is this going? It’s all alarmingly familiar — the accented question, the perceived interest, the flattering attention. It can’t be real. It can’t be happening to me, again. And yet, here he is, asking if I might be interested in seeing him — not during the trip, because he’d get fired, but after, during my solo travels, maybe we could have something. I say maybe, but in my head I call bull. And I wonder if I should have lied, said I have a boyfriend, headed for the hills. But he is so compelling that I can’t bring myself to lie. I have no idea why I trust him so immediately.

After the others go back to their rooms, we continue to wander the lanes of the kibbutz, talking about the army and school and international affairs and the differences between our countries and cultures. Before we know it, hours have passed and we are incurably lost. I do not care. Suddenly he has gone from the scary young man with a rifle to one of the most fascinating people I have ever met — who also happens to be one of the best-looking people I have ever met. I ask him why me, when there are bikinigirls around who are all interested him.

“I want a girl with a mind,” he says.

Eventually, he asks directions from a kibbutznik passing by. The words that come out of his mouth have no direct meaning to me, and yet they strike me somewhere deep in my soul. Before now, Hebrew only existed to me in the synagogue, in the Torah, in blessings over bread, wine, candles. He may have been asking how to get to the main road, but all I hear coming from this beautiful man’s mouth are words spoken in the language of my prayers.

We move into the shadows and kiss for the first time. The rifle creaks on its strap as he pushes it behind his back to take me into his arms. His kiss is aggressive. It is familiar and novel at the same time. Red flags raise, and yet I ignore them because I don’t want the feeling to stop.

That night I cannot sleep, knowing that he is a few meters away in a different room, and wondering how I will feel the next morning. All I can feel right now is a flutter in my stomach and a spark where before there was nothing but a dark tunnel all the way down.

Our romance is secret, furtive, temporary. He is my shadow in sunlight hours, and my lover in the shadows. Nobody knows what we are doing; few suspect. We hold hands when nobody is looking. He gives me a foot rub under the table. He cares for me when I become sick, and tends my wounds when I foolishly fall in Beersheva. I lean into his arms as we stand on a pier overlooking the Mediterranean Sea one night in Tel Aviv. He is kind, gentle, and romantic, but incredibly demanding when we are alone. He never tries to make me jealous with the bikinigirls, and for once I feel truly valued for something deeper than my body, the body he insists is amazing, even if I don’t believe him.

I think people do not suspect, because why would they? He is the most gorgeous, fascinating man in our group, with the added pull of the exotic due to his nationality, his accent, his mannerisms, his dangerousness. He could have his pick of a crowded field. With this many skinny girls, why would he choose the FatGirl with messy hair and nonexistent fashion sense? My first instinct is to go with the usual FatGirl trope: we’re easier, because we think we have to take whatever we can get. But these are all American girls. We are all easy pickings for the exotic man. And yet, when we are all relaxing by the pool on Shabbat, and he is sitting there, shirtless, smoking a hookah and looking like a dragon, and he is swarmed by bikinigirls in full regalia, I see that he is still looking at me — sitting off to the side, fully clothed and convalescing, the least sexy I could possibly be, and his eyes are still locked on me as he breathes a cloud of smoke and smiles in a way that only I can see.

Time would prove this to be a limited heaven. He swears he cares about me, that I am very important to him, but I know that what we had only existed for nine days out of a lifetime. I saw him again, but only once, only for three hours, walking through Akko alarmingly naked-looking without his rifle, and all I could do was pine for a feeling I’d never had before but found myself addicted to — that I was just as good as the skinny girls; in fact, somehow, better, in all my physical extraneousness.

On the last day of the mirage, we sit on the outskirts of the southern wall of the Temple Mount, resting on the ruins as our guide talks about the poetry and songs and art that have been created about this place. Suddenly, I am overwhelmed by a feeling I cannot identify, and I look up across a sea of faces and Jerusalem stones and lock eyes with him. We stare, wordlessly, hungrily, and for once we are not hiding anything, and I feel drunk with the intensity of that one sustained glance, with the holiness of that moment.

It is the most erotic moment of my life. And even if it never grew any further from there, if I can remember that one moment when I am seventy, I hope that it will bring me some kind of grace.

I’ve been gone over a month, and have so much to say that I wish the words would type themselves.

It’s strange to be back in the United States after traveling through the land of Israel. It’s not just culture shock – though I did say “סליחה” instead of “excuse me” twice on Friday, and was initially surprised when an employee at the supermarket came up to me and immediately spoke to me in English (first reaction: do I really look that American? Oh. Oh wait.). I’m also experiencing a bit of culinary shock, too.

About halfway through my trip I noticed that something was changing in my body. During the first week or so, I had all the horrid problems I always do when I travel. Once, the group of Americans I traveled with for the first 10 days abandoned me when I was the last one in the bathroom and I thought I would scream if my body would not shift gears. Luckily I have a good sense of direction, which served me well throughout the trip, or else I’m sure I would have been that American who cluelessly wanders into the West Bank looking for an ATM.

I’ve had GI problems for the last two and a half years, to varying degrees of intensity. One of these problems got so bad in recent months, aggravated by physical trauma, that I was facing surgery when I returned from my trip. But somehow, halfway into my second week in Israel, things seamlessly started to click. For the first time in years, my digestive system seemed to be working like a normal person’s. I didn’t have pain. I didn’t have stretches where my gears seemed to be jammed for days or weeks at a time. I was able to forgo the medicine that I’d relied upon for the last three months, which was a good thing since it melted not that long into the trip in the intense heat of a Middle Eastern summer.

In the final days of the month, I started to wonder what it was that caused the shift. Much as I’d like to believe in some mystical force at work, a cure brought on purely by the fact of my being in the ancestral homeland, I know that that’s a whole lotta שטויות*. I tried to recall what I’d eaten over the course of the month, hating myself for not keeping a food diary. From what I can reconstruct, my diet consisted mainly of the following:

• Israeli breakfasts: Fruit, eggs, cheese, SALADS. Israelis eat salads at every single meal, and they think it’s odd that we think that’s odd.
• Smoked eggplant salad whenever I could get it, because it was that delicious.
• Felafel pita whenever I could get it, which also always included tons of salad tucked into the pocket with fresh hummus and tehina.
• Bedouin pita (big, thin, fire-cooked, fresh) smeared with labane, olive oil, spices.
• Olives. Lots of olives.
• Fresh fruit grown in the country, including my favorites: watermelon, mango, passionfruit, melon, oranges
• Iced drinks, because it was so hot. I always either got passionfruit, which included the crunchy black seeds, or limonana, which is lemon mint.
• Granola bars while in diving in Eilat.
• Highly elaborate cereal concoctions, sometimes involving bran flakes topped with such delicacies as carob powder, tehina, dried fruit, and nuts.
• Occasional carb fests, like when I visited my friend’s mom in Petach Tikva and she made us a meal of potatoes, rice, and pasta.

So besides the constant salad consumption, I really wasn’t sure what was so different from my usual diet, aside from the fact that I ate a lot more fried and sugary stuff than I usually do—which you think would have aggravated my problems, or at least not lead me to shed 5 pounds during my trip, which I did. I imagine that plenty of the cheeses had preservatives in them (though no rennet like in America due to kashrut!), and I still ate plenty of bread, and dessert whenever I felt like it, which was less often because the heat made me want fresh, juicy foods and not as much chocolate**.

On my last night in the country, after eating a meal in Tel Aviv with two new friends, it suddenly struck me what the difference was. Of all the things I’d been eating all month, the one conspicuous absence was: soy.

In America, I eat soy in quantity every day. Soy milk in my morning All Bran, soy veggie burgers, soy products in the dinners that I make, ranging from tofu to tempeh to meat substitutes. I went from having soy in at least two meals per day to no soy at all. It seems a likely culprit, made more likely when my mother came to the same conclusion separately after I ran down my Israeli diet.

As much as I’d love to make Aliyah based purely on a desire for digestive harmony, for now I’m going to have to see what I can do here, in the physical homeland. I don’t know how possible it will be for me to avoid soy products entirely. Some of my favorite foods are soy-based, and I know that I benefit from the protein that soy provides. But I think I will have to treat it like some people treat meat – reduce, moderate, integrate. I will need to keep eating*** like an Israeli to see if the changes endure, which may also mean considering reintegrating the occasional fish into my diet.

For now, I’m starting a new challenge for the next few months, to add to the challenge of moving to a new city and starting graduate school. For the months of August and September, I will reduce the amount of soy I eat. I will only have soy-based meals once, twice at most, per week. For the rest of the time, I’m going to have to build my protein around legumes, grains, nuts, dairy. I will also try to keep salads in as many meals as possible. Man, I loved that.

It may not be as drastic-sounding as going vegan or gluten-free, but for as big a soy-eater as I have become since going vegetarian 6 years ago, this will certainly be a challenge.

So, as they say back east: יאלה!

* Loosely translated: Bullshit.
** I made an exception for pop rocks chocolate. Mmmm. Though it melted instantaneously every time I bought it, so I stopped buying it eventually.
*** And showering like an Israeli. It shouldn’t take a water crisis for Americans to take a tip from the Israelis and turn off the water while sudsing.

“You’re not fat.”

An unprecedented revelation following a brief silence in which he relit the joint we’d been sharing on the beach at 1 AM, when both of us were pining for other people, and neither of us wanted to go to sleep.

“So…okay? I’m not fat?”

A ragged exhale, followed by: “When I first saw you, I thought ’she’s fat.’ But I was wrong. You’re just a big person.”

“Thanks? I guess?”

“No problem.”

“I guess the new dress isn’t doing so much for me, then, huh?”

Another silence, another exhale, as we stared at the snaking lights on the coast of Jordan, just across the Red Sea from where we sat, pining for other people, neither of us wanting to go to sleep. The next day I was gone, and he was just another person I’ve known along the way.

One of the things I miss most about New York City is that you can always count on a good old-fashioned vigil when you need it most. When George Harrison died, I spent the night in Strawberry Fields, shoulder to shoulder with others who needed to acknowledge the moment in some meaningful way.

Leave it to Sweet Machine at Shapely Prose to sum up concisely what I’ve always thought about MJ.

I often get very woman-centric in the ways I think about eating and image disorders. It makes sense to take a step back and explicitly acknowledge the fact that these problems truly know no gender, ethnic, national, socioeconomic, sexual, etc. etc. bounds. Poor body image does not discriminate like the humans it antagonizes do. Nothing to really expand on that right now, but it feels important to note briefly anyway.

In so many ways, more than I can count, this looks to be our generation’s Day that Elvis Died. And it feels strange not to be in the streets with the rest of human culture, but sitting alone in bed with my laptop, a night like any other old night.

I’m back from a week of blissful communion with mountains and wildlife in two of our country’s oldest national parks. I’d been to both Yellowstone and Grand Teton when I was six — needless to say, my memories were foggy at best, and I was excited to get out there and see them through an adult’s eyes.

There’s something strangely, wonderfully alarming about traipsing around atop a giant, smoldering volcanic caldera, and that’s just what I did all week. I’ve been to Hawaii and witnessed the drama of a lava eruption, but I don’t think that watching a fifty-minute eruption of Castle Geyser in the upper geyser basin was any less dramatic for lack of pyroclastic flow.

I was in charge of the camera all week, and I honestly love the responsibility. I get to take artsy shots of my family, try to frame the mountains just so, focus in on interesting textures and patterns. Sometimes I like to take little series — for instance, I noticed one day that I kept coming across different pieces of dead wood that had been twisted into what looked to me like yoga poses.

Downward Dog

Warrior

Eagle

There’s another reason why I like being in charge of the camera, though, and it’s one that I’m a bit ashamed to admit, especially given how far I feel I’ve come over the past few months. The photographer, by virtue of being behind the camera, is less often the subject. The few photographs I am in, out of all 700+ photos taken this week, I would view on the LCD screen and think the same thing each time: Fat and ugly. Fat and ugly. Fat and ugly.

I don’t know why I’m still caught up on the imperative to hate my body. I don’t know why I still look at skinny girls with envy, even when I’m in an environment where my body, in all its fullness, is demonstrably capable of doing things that bring me happiness, e.g. carrying me up a mountain. I don’t know why I still hate having photographic evidence of the thing I find repulsive.

Maybe part of this return to business-as-usual physical self-critique stems from the constant back-and-forth in physical sensations. I very much enjoyed engaging in physical activity until I was very hungry — it felt like a natural way to fuel. Several times I ate until I was uncomfortably stuffed, for the first time since I got sick in February. This I obviously didn’t enjoy so much. And I felt like I was over that kind of behavior. So in addition to self-imposed mental anguish, I felt physical pain. Where does one draw the line between not beating oneself up over “overindulgence” (a loaded, vague, not particularly useful word) and acknowledging that a line actually does exist, that eating too much can actually be harmful? On the surface, this seems to conflict with the movement to steer away from viewing food as an enemy, the driving force behind our grand nemesis Rotunda. I don’t agree with the idea of socially forced limitation, but I also cannot deny that I ate myself literally to sickness twice this week, and that’s really not okay.

I wonder if it’s some combination of the above conflict of feeling powerful and powerless at the same time and perhaps seeing myself next to my brother, who, though a scrawny child and teenager, had put on some weight in college and beyond, but as of now has returned to certifiably Skinny. When both my brothers were in their pudgier phases in their mid-twenties, I felt less alone. Now that they’re both thin as usual, I feel more like the Other. As usual.

I guess the important thing to remember is that pictures are just pictures. Hopefully in the future I will look at these the same way I now regard the photos from our family vacation from when I was 16, and say: “What was I thinking?”

Last night I uploaded the whole shebang onto my computer. And you know what? When viewed on a big screen, I guess I don’t look half bad in most of them. Maybe self-image really does rely on the lens you use to frame yourself. Using a tiny viewpoint doesn’t take into account any sort of nuance. And neither does expecting an overnight change in a damaging practice 26 years in the making.

Is there anything more infuriating than the “One Size Fits All” label? I know, these have mostly been rebranded as “One Size Fits Most” (slightly less infuriating), and, most recently — and most vaguely — simply “One Size.” At first, it was “If this doesn’t fit you, you don’t exist.” Then it was “if this doesn’t fit you, you’re not normal.” Now it’s just “if this doesn’t fit you, then the designer saw something shiny and forgot to make other sizes after finishing just the one.”

But right now I’m not talking about annoying labels for stuff that never fits me*.

Over the course of an overweight childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, I think I’ve picked up on a wide range of “healthy habits” from all different sources, ranging from popular advertising and product ad copy to word-of-mouth, weight loss programs, and medical advice. As Americans we are oversaturated with instructions on how best to feed our body-machines, which fuels will keep the gears and pistons in their best working order, and working for longer.

I think I’ve worked myself pretty close to the standard prescription for Healthy Eating: lots of fiber; moderation in oils, sugars, and fats; mostly plant-based foods; whole grains when possible.

And yet, I keep getting caveats whenever something in the clockwork goes wrong, in spite of my healthy lifestyle. Over the past few months, I’ve heard enough maddeningly conflicting medical advice to compile a litany of dietary caveats, including:

• Eat a high-fiber diet. But don’t eat too much fiber, or it could mess up your system.
• Use fats and oils sparingly. Unless you’ve got digestive issues, then you’ve gotta start downing more oil. But we won’t tell you how much.
• Cut back on bread. But if you cut it all out, you could, once again, screw up your system.

The only seemingly uncontestable piece of instruction: Drink plenty of water.

Though of course, I did have a coworker once who warningly told me about a friend of hers who destroyed her kidneys by drinking too much water at once (while eying my jumbo water mug at the cooler).

To be 100% clear, none of this advice was intended as a prescription for weight loss — for once in my life, the doctors I’ve seen don’t seem to be rushing to place blame for all ailments on my being on the high end of Archduke BMI’s naughty list. But it did make me think about what, if anything, we can treat as absolutes in a quest for the ever-elusive, capital-H Health. Is there such a thing as one-size fits all, unflinchingly agreed-upon healthy practice? This is nothing new, of course, but I’m just surprised at the number of commonly-held health truisms don’t really hold up as fully universal.

The main thing is, when it comes to what our bodies need, there really isn’t a standard prescription. And I’m sure we’ve all got our own litanies of strange nutrition advice of all stripes. That’s not even counting vintage health trends — MAN I’m glad castor oil isn’t in vogue anymore.

So I guess this week: Eat less All-Bran, chug olive oil, have more sandwiches? I don’t plan on bringing a bottle of EVOO with me when I hit the trails out in Yellowstone (SO EXCITED). At the very least, I guess I’ll make sure to drink water. Not passing out from dehydration does seem like a pretty universally useful goal.

Here’s to mountains, geysers, getting out, and staying conscious. Yee. Haw.

Also, the creme brulee that spent the night in the fridge had a normal, crackly top when we broke into it after dinner. I just think that had to be noted. Good things come to those who wait [for sugar reduction to set].

* I’m not just talking leggings and tights (I’M LOOKING AT YOU, FOREVER 21) — why must haberdashers assume that cute hats are only for those with heads that are not abnormally large? Does a noggin like mine qualify as cranially obese? And is a hatmaker in a sweatshop in Vietnam still called a “haberdasher”?

Tonight was my parents’ anniversary. They insisted that they didn’t have enough time to go on a date, so I set up a surprise dinner for two at home.

I was very proud of the summer risotto with mushrooms, sweet corn, and ruby swiss chard (not pictured: lowfat chocolate creme brulee in which the top, instead of being light and crackly, ended up like a disk of semitransparent, amber rubber — next time I’ll leave it off and call it a souffle). And get a load of that presentation! If academia doesn’t work out for me, I think I should start a lo-fi catering company for the new economy. Call it something like “Enchanted Moments by Status Quoman.” You know, with a crappy font and some silhouettes on the logo. Irony is so hot right now.

To add to the sense of accomplishment, I applied for an apartment today! I’m very excited, because it really appears to have everything I want — good light, separate bike storage, onsite laundry, a backyard where the landlord said I could plant stuff (!), and, most importantly, a good kitchen. I’m also excited because I did not expect this to fall into place like it did (fingers crossed). Which, of course, leads to a life lesson.

If I hadn’t hated or felt eh about all the apartments I saw in my first two days in Philly, I would not have come back a day early. If I had not had a complete waste-of-time appointment with a realtor that couldn’t find the keys to any of the apartments he dragged me to see except for one that was in a state of Grey Gardensesque squalor, I wouldn’t have ended up walking down a certain street where I happened to see a sign outside a nice-looking building. If the phone number on the sign hadn’t happened to have the same first three numbers as my mom’s phone, I might not have been able to easily memorize it and call as soon as I ditched the waste-of-time realtor. I had to leave Philly before the landlord called back, but a friend viewed it for me today, and between her enthusiasm, the landlord’s clear investment/involvement, and the floor plan, I found my (hopefully) next home.

Moral of the story: Nothing you do is ever wasted.

(I said there was a lesson here. I didn’t say it was original.)

So, so happy to have some idea of a future home. Off to dream of an herb garden in my kitchen window and chili peppers in the backyard. And a more bikeable lifestyle. Optimism in a can, right when I needed it.