So, while we could have gone for a few more days no problem, there didn’t seem to be any point in doing it. The cleanse didn’t seem to really cleanse us dramatically, and in fact, I felt tired most of the time that I was doing the fast. I am ten pounds lighter but that’s to be expected when half-starving oneself for days. Are my systems detoxed and cleaner? No clue. I went back to read Stanley Burrough’s book and Peter Glickman’s book, and all of a sudden, I read them with different eyes– the information presented seemed pseudo-scientific, and was backed mostly with anecdotal evidence. I feel that perhaps it is dangerous to have these types of books out there that don’t take into account different body types and pre-existing health conditions or contraindications. I went into the fast wanting it to work, and have come out the other side doubting its validity. Which in itself is interesting. I will admit I was susceptible to the lure of a cure-all for the age’s ills. The seductiveness is the simplicity of these fast programs– they ask only for your diligence and stick-with-it-ness, but in the end, deliver up short on actual results. The truth is probably more that we have to make adjustments over a lifetime, not just in 10 days.

I didn’t tell my family that I was doing the fast. I have a father and a brother who are physicians and trained in traditional Western medicine. I knew what their reaction would be, which is (a) rolling of the eyes over this “hippie” nonsense, and (b) anxiousness over whether the fast was harmful. I think that today, if I heard their disbelief in the benefits (and belief in the harms) of the fast, I wouldn’t be bothered by it, and would agree that it was inconclusive whether there were benefits, but for different reasons. I actually did the fast, and that’s what I’m basing it upon, not upon an unwillingness to consider the evidence.

What I do know is that the fast made me feel less human and “on hold.” I was able to work and do all the normal things, except living just wasn’t that fun without being able to eat and socialize with others naturally around eating.

The benefits I think are mostly mental– a switch in the way one thinks, however subtle. I will be more aware of what I put into my gullet. That is just one brick in the wall of discipline that some of us constantly try to build. Are there other ways to build this awareness? Probably.

Anyway. I am looking forward to cooking and eating again. Nous avons faire la cuisine, mon cherie.

So much of our life is built around food, it’s such a revelation. I’ve realized that I really love eating, and that it’s one of the highlights of my days.

Only three more days until we break the fast, at which point we have to go two more days only drinking orange juice and vegetable broth and eating homemade veggie soup.

Here’s my list of things I really want to eat next week once we completely break the fast, prioritized by the importance of tasting these foods again:

1. Pho
2. shrimp and pork spring rolls
3. hot and sour soup
4. fruit
5. sushi
6. pasta with seafood
7. fried calamari
8. soba with ponzu
9. ma-po dofu
10. mushrooms
11. dim sum
12. vegetables (pea shoots, gai lan, spinach, broccoli, napa cabbage, green onions)

Mike said he read in Peter Glickman’s book that if you think about eating something really healthy (like an apple) and that makes you hungry, then you are truly hungry.

I am hungry.

Only five more days to real food…

But then in between, I got very busy with work and Mike and I started the Lemon Juice Master Cleanse fast in the interim.  I wanted to do the fast because I wanted to lose weight and detoxify.  Mike said he would do it with me out of curiosity– to see how it feels to go without solid food for 10 days.

So, I’m not writing about food until I get back into cooking and eating it again.  One of the things that happens when you’re on this fast is that you become slightly alien– because food, in all of its variety of textures, colors, tastes, temperatures, and forms, is so integral to being human, or feeling human.  In fact, Mike and I were talking about how the character Sonmi451 comes to mind (Cloud Atlas by D. Mitchell).  Sonmi451 could only imbibe “soap” and would get ill from eating regular human food (the irony was that she worked at a fast food cafeteria).  We’re only allowed to drink the lemon-maple syrup-cayenne solution, and then herbal teas and water.  It is very, very strange not to have any solid food.  The first few days, it actually feels impossible, a little of how you might feel if someone were to tell you that you were going to be exiled for ten days.  That’s what this fast is, an exile from the kingdom of food and all that goes with it (socializing, merriment, community).

It’s made me feel more acutely bound to Mike.  For the simple fact that we’re in it together.

Days 1 through 6 were okay.  We actually made chocolate tarantula cookies last Saturday (Day 2) and didn’t eat them, but instead exercised great will power and brought the plates of spiders to work for co-workers instead.   We were initially going to take them to Patrick and Eddie’s house for their Autumn Comfort Food party, but decided at the last minute that we were not improving our changes of sticking to the fast by going to a delicious food party.  Halloween night we didn’t feel like being around a lot of Halloween candy so we made the house dark and went to the movies instead.  We saw “Eastern Promise,” directed by David Cronenberg, which was actually really great.  Brutal, intense, involving, really good.

I’m surprised that I haven’t really been hungry.  I was so busy with working on a deal for work for very long days that I didn’t even have time to think about missing eating (other than the fact that my co-workers would go get lunch and bring it back to the conference room where we were working), so in a way, it made things easier.  I haven’t actually felt real hunger until tonight, but once I had my juice, the hunger went away. The salt water flushes are another thing.  We get up early in the morning to drink one quart of warm water with two teaspoons of salt in it.  It is getting easier to swallow, but feels a little like some prison ritual, or something an ascetic sect of monks would do each morning.  I may continue to use a salt-water flush in the future after especially heavy meals.  Everything just comes right out of you, tout suite.

It’s Day 6 of the fast, going on to 7.  Not sure if I feel any detox effects, other than being very tired and achy, but that could also be because I have been working crazy hours for most of October.  Mike and I are both dropping weight but not dramatically.  I no longer have my pot belly.  Bye bye pot belly.  Not sure if I’ll miss it!

I’ve read in Peter Glickman’s book that Day 7 is supposed to be the day that people gain “mental clarity” and extra energy, so we shall see.

small cakes made of deep chocolate mud, dotted with scarlet holly berries

leaf-tacos filled with white flowers and sprinkled with pine cone shakings

hollow acorns, stuffed with dandelion fluff

The caps (from the hollow acorns) floating in water scooped up with magnolia petal bowls (the finest china)

We had escargot too, but being too squeamish, we didn’t remove them from their shells but left them au natural. Our snails dishes were largely mobile and did not stay plated.

Once, we found the dried, blanched bones of a small bird, a few rusty tail feathers still attached, which was an excellent centerpiece, wreathed round with yellow dandelions, tiny buds of wild strawberries, and a toxic fricassee of puffballs and mushrooms. Cooking then was intensely satisfying, even though we made invisible fires of sourceless heat by rubbing sticks together as we’d seen stranded people do in the movies.

In high school, my junior year, I was among a group of two students from my French class to go live with a family in the small town of St.Brieuc in Bretagne for 7 weeks as part of the University of Indiana’s French language program for high schoolers. I stayed with a French version of the Brady Bunch (more on that in a future entry) in their drafty house on the Vielle Cote de Gouet, converted from an old stone farmhouse with a grassy courtyard. Unlike the traditional French maman that had been featured and fabled in our preparatory course materials for living in France, my host mother was a working mom who specialized in t.v. dinners and microwaveable products. She didn’t insist on making me lunch or breakfast, which I was grateful for. One of the best parts of staying in that old farmhouse-turned-busy-waystation-for-six-children-of-a-cobbled-together-family was my solo morning ritual. I got up before it was light, went down into the dark kitchen, turned on the light over the sink and the cupboards. I got out a white café bowl and poured in milk and measured spoonfuls of cocoa powder. While that heated in the microwave, I cut two slices of French bread. After they came out of the toaster oven, I spread butter and strawberry jam on them. I scooped plain yogurt into a cup and mixed brown sugar or jam into that. I sat down at the wooden trestle table to eat my breakfast in the sliding of darkest dawn into the pale morning. I loved the crunch of the sweet toast softening just slightly in the warm cocoa, and the sandy crystals of the brown sugar swathed in the tart and silky yogurt. Something about this ritual, beyond the physical warmth of the food itself, kept me warm on my half-mile walk in the half-light to the middle of town, where we spent our mornings in ecole learning French.

On one outing to the beach off of La Manche (English Channel), my host family sister Marie told me and her younger sister Josette to follow her down to the water and around some rough rocks. “Nous avon faire la cuisine,” she directed, and we followed her lead, clambering over colonies of sharp barnacles and stranded creatures in tidepools, plucking small, jet-black limpets off the rocks. Once we’d each gotten full wet handfuls of limpets, the three of us crouched around in a circle on a flat rock. Marie flipped one of the limpets over, its gray-green flesh flinching slightly, and she took a sharp pebble and scooped the flesh out and popped it into her mouth. Josette and I followed her example. The limpets were crisp, briny, and cold. They tasted like something between an abalone and a clam.

“Tu aime?” Marie asked, sucking on her pebble between limpets like a girl sucking on a thumbstick for eating out of ice cream cups.

“C’est delicieuse?” I said, not knowing whether the noun for limpets was feminine or masculine.

That summer day in St. Brieuc was brisk, gray, and salty. When we finished our limpets, we lined the conical shells up on the rock, as if they were pairs of tiny shoes for exploring the beach. Marie told us that her boyfriend Pierre (who happened also to be her step-brother) was an excellent cook. (I only saw Pierre once during my stay with this family—he came to visit on rare time off from his work. He had dark hair, sullen good looks, and a reserved way about him. He was training as part of the kitchen at a restaurant down in Marseille.) At which point, she wanted nothing more to do with us and wrapped her arms around her knees and stared out at the ocean, missing him. Marie’s meal was one of the best culinary experiences that I ever had.

I had completely forgotten about you until my dear old good friend John Borland meme-tagged me and reminded me that I don’t update it. If this blog were a garden, it would be an old bird fountain full of leaves and dead bugs and some crude cement. So, here is the meme: write 8 things about yourself. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to John for this fun task. In the middle of the day! While my brain has been hijacked by indemnification clauses and the task of slicing intellectual property licenses as thinly as pancetta (oh that they would be that tasty). Okey, je commence…

1. I wash my underthings in the shower. I’ve been doing this ever since I was a girl. I get in the shower, I wash the delicates, with shampoo. Hang dry. On the upside, I kill two birds with one clean stone. The downside is that some people that I have shared showers with don’t really like it decorated like a Venetian slum. On the upside, everyone I have ever shared showers with has been very understanding.

2. I also like to pee in the shower. What’s wrong with that??? I also like music. There is nothing wrong with that.

3. I am planning to go on the Lemon Juice Master Cleanse. Admittedly, I looked into at first because I wanted to lose weight and have a clean slate to start from, but the more I read about it, the more I became interested in the cleansing aspects of this fast. I have never fasted before because I grew up in a Chinese-American family where if you don’t eat more than what you already comfortably ate, Mama will wonder what’s wrong with you. (“You so skinny…you doing drugs?”) Anyway, I will not be putting up a play-by-day accounting of my fast, of which there are already plenty online (some with pictures of what comes out!! these pictures are worse than goatse!! there is no accounting for lack of taste, as well as bad taste, in this most democratic of forums). I have planned to do the fast with Mike in early November. You have to plan for these things! It’s 10 days at a minimum, during which you may not eat any foods and may only drink lemon juice, maple syrup, salt water, and teas. I had to stick it on the calendar for when there were no pre-planned dinner dates, traveling, parties, or family obligations.

4. I am a goldfish and will eat all of whatever is put in front of me, especially if it is a noodle, potato, or a sea creature– hence the reason for #3 above.

5. I’ve started a series of short stories for a compilation called “Silver City.” The idea is that the stories take place in a city that is in a time and place not too unlike the one I live in, but also different enough to make it seem at once futuristic/historic, but universal. I think Jim Crace and Jeanette Winters do this sort of setting for their worlds that continually surprise and delight while grounding the reader. I suppose it’s the same dynamic that I really like in certain sci-fi movies where antiquated details are melded with the futuristic and each transforms the other into something timeless. If humans ever got to figure out time travel and a common human could view life in the 4th dimension (Slaughterhouse Five), then in the same way well-traveled and adventuring humans have mixed and matched the constructs of different cultures to fit their present needs (with either novel or ridiculous results), the well-traveled and adventuring human in the 4th dimension might cherry pick all the wondrous things of the ages to form his or her own aesthetic. Klaxonator, for instance, would carry around a heavy Remington typewriter in the 22nd century, the thunking keys powered by plutonium. He’d probably be wearing a long Victorian duster along with his nifty night-vision spectacles (round-shaped, Lennon style). Very steam-punk, Diamond Age, Blade Runner, or Gattaca. Anyway, the story ideas are flowing more quickly than the writing, which is actually a relief. There was a period in my life where I knew that writing was a calling, but that I had nothing to say. Definitely all dressed up with nowhere to go.

6. Being an in-house transactional attorney actually turned out to be a pretty good job for me. I don’t think I’m rationalizing either, despite the fact that going to law school was a default. I get to help the product, technical, and business teams organize their goals and thoughts, negotiate with outside parties, and distill it down into a contract that is as clear a directive in the ever-changing flux of individual and organizational desires as it can be. This takes a lot of concentration on the trees, but also a view of the forest. It also takes a ceaseless positive attitude, butt-wiping, patience, and sometimes some kick ass moves. Kind of like being a mother! Having been on the production and operations side, I do kind of miss the hands-on-the-wheel aspects of those types of jobs, but I don’t miss the constant putting out of fires and soothing of egos that being an Operations Director required. Now, I get to advise, organize, and get the deal done. Everyone always overestimates their importance and legacy– I’ve learned that over and over, and I think it’s a good observation of the working life. The best part of my job? Flying sideways.

7. For someone who does nothing for a living that proudly saves the world, or nothing for a living if it’s not a daily exercise in finding common ground (others call it compromise), I DO like my fictional characters to be obstinate in their passions and reckless with their fate. Like the character Sonmi451 in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. How I loved her character! If I disappeared one day and bandied about an apocryphal alter ego, she would be like Sonmi451. The only time I even approach her level of existence is when I have a couple martinis on an empty stomach.

8. I am a sucker for photos and making them. It’s gotten worse as I get older, although this is probably the tendency of the culture as a whole as we thrash about in Web 2.0 user-generated, mass-regurgitated, plentiful, abundant, overwhelming “content.” But yes, I find that I shutterbug to an extreme– to the point where sometimes I just have to leave my camera at home if I know I want to actually engage in the event that we’re going to. On the one hand, I find this addictive tendency a distinguishing feature in my character (a so-called “good flaw”). Some days I find it depressing, as it may point up my inability to engage without the protections that my camera–an assault device (according to Susan Sontag)– affords me.

Done and done. See who I’ve tossed the meme to next and next.

Mike and I went to the Maker Faire in San Mateo yesterday and it was a ton of fun. We didn’t end up settling down at any of the booths to make anything, there was simply too much to see. There was a good bit of Burning Man element there, although a lot of it was also good clean nerdy fun. I love how in the main Expo pavilion, there was a “Make:” side and a “Craft:” side– gender isn’t a limiting factor to anyone who wants to make things, but in general, the electronics and technology-driven making was populated by boys, and handmade skills and arts were mostly populated by girls. The Lion brand yarn booth featured hyperbolic crocheting, which demonstrated the wonderful fact that mathematics is applied heavily in the knitting and crocheting crafts. I only wish I were a math maven, I would knit tesseracts and shapes described by analytical geometry.

One genius thing that I saw at the Maker Faire was at a booth describing digital photography hacks. They had set up a cooler– the kind you store your picnic beers and sandwiches in, and put a clip-on light (the kind you get from a hardware store) and voila! Instant, cheapo lightbox! I tried it out when we got home and took a photo of one of my favorite Jeanine Payer necklaces, the Mizu, in sterling silver. I used a flourescent bulb, daylight kind. The same one I use to expose my silkscreen photo emulsions. The very first try was not bad, although I had to Picasa it a bit.

Mike just made some very tart lemon drops from the Meyer lemon bush in the backyard, in cocktail glasses with a thin rim of superfine sugar. Tonight, a leisurely dinner with Battlestar Galactica (still on the first season). I’m moving in Memorial Day weekend. I’m thankful for everything I have right now. Life is really great.

loud purr, ginger and orange and white fur, gold mineral eyes, white paws like unnecessary (but perfect) gloves. A propensity to eat kibble with those same gloved paws, like a dainty monkey. She had her own distinctive smell– dusty, comforting, and wholesome. She was a licker, too. Would lick your hands and toes sandpaper-raw if you let her.

I like to think that while i held her in my lap this afternoon, her wee kitty spirit slipped out from between those pointed ears, sideways a little, skipping her heart, and then up over the clinic room, over the kennels outside full of funny hungry dogs, and into a pretty nice day full of birds, wind, sun. I just wish John and Aimee got to say good-bye.

bye bye, kitty (like I said to you every day before I left the apartment). i miss you much.

Frida (formerly Fatty Fat Fat) 1995-2006

all terms that mean “fear of pins/needles.” And then there is the medical term that means a true phobia of needles (causing people who have this phobia to avoid like the devil any kind of medical treatment involving inoculations, injections, etc.) and that is trypanophobia. I was beginning to think that I was getting this because I would get extremely nervous before I had to pierce, with a beveled needle attached to a bag of saline solution, the little triangle of furry hide that you can pull up right over a cat’s shoulder blades. Mostly I was nervous because a few times I had done this to Frida and she spurted out from under my hands. It was extremely hard to do with just my two hands and without pretty much sitting on top of her. And then she would wriggle and squirm anyway and the short needle would pop out and squirt us both with a fine but insistent spray.

Well, I had to do it last night and this morning again because Miss Frida has taken a turn for the worse. The vet had told me before, maybe 6 months, maybe two years, but I hadn’t counted on two months.

I figured out if I first insert the needle, hold it steady, and then lay her gently on her side, the drip doesn’t seem as uncomfortable for her and she feels more at ease. Also, I need to slow the drip down a little– it was too fast before and it was freaking her out. My human mind is hopeful that plying these small discoveries will somehow improve her chances.

But, still, today, she hovers over her glass of water longingly, dips her mouth, but only succeeds in getting water up her nose, and then she totters a little, crying out in a high wail. She only sniffs at her food. She threw up this morning. She goes into the litter box and crouches, but nothing comes out. She’s going through all her motions of living, as if holding onto habits and rituals would get her up that ladder back to health. Funny, how I sometimes merely go through my habits and rituals and call that living.

Last night, I squirted some watered down cat food and more water into her mouth with a syringe. She resisted, of course, my fingers prying open her jaws, my crooked arm sandwiching her against my own body while the back part of her kicked and twisted like a fish dragged up into the air on a fishing line. That turned out to be a messy, smelly endeavor in the bathtub, and for all that effort, seemed paltry little nutrition and liquid for her rapidly deteriorating form. I can still hear her purr, very softly, when she is laying down to rest, which seems like all the time now. Her eyes don’t open very wide anymore, they are the shape of long, thin seeds.
The question is, do I take her back to the vet? It’s not even the money, at this point, although frankly the last vet bill did set me back quite seriously. It’s more that her condition is ultimately fatal (more so than just the condition of living in general, which ultimately, i suppose, is fatal) and they would just pump her full of liquids with an intravenous, give her antibiotics, and she’d be alone in a steel cage with other sick animals making a gray noise around her.

We’ll see, maybe she will recover now that i’ve figured out how to do this needle thing. I will do it twice a day, like prayers. I read to her yesterday, too, she seemed to like that. A sweeping love story told in language that some might find overwrought. I kept with it because there were passages where I put the book down and said aloud, “Damn, that is something good.” Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire. I read the ending pages this morning and felt, strangely, this: although the characters in the novel suffered greatly (in the way that sensitive souls suffer) during a great historical conflagration (WWII), their new lease on life (through love) at the end did little to console me. It was as if I admired the writing, but not its substance. The characters seemed just that– in a book, not representative of my life, or my future, or even my past. Perhaps this is a reaction to depictions of passionate love when one is not exactly in passionate love anymore. Rather, one is recalling it, and wondering about its aftermath. After a fire, there is some destruction, and eventually growth. If one is lucky enough to get older, the multitudinous facets of love do reveal themselves, and some of them not at all what you expected, backed like an old silver and glass mirror with the thinnest sheen of reflection–of Patience, Comprehension, and Will.

Mike took me to their show at the Fillmore this past Monday, and we got front row, sweaty glory. Sergio was right in front of us in his black Sgt.Pepper duster with sparkly chrysanthemum brooches and that crazy guitar with effects built into it that his brother probably built back in the sixties. I can’t believe there wasn’t more of a write-up about them in the papers, it was in fact historical. And I also can’t believe I didn’t bring my damn camera. I now only have so so SO many kickass photos of Os Mutantes, but in MY MIND– vivid as hard candy, the musician’s faces full frame and smiling like they couldn’t stop smiling. If I had actually taken photos, I would have kicked some flickr ASS, but as it was, maybe it was better, because everytime I start taking photos, the camera becomes my way of experiencing the moments, and sometimes it’s nice to not have the crutch.

They didn’t sing my favorite song Desculpe Baby in Portugese despite the rather large contingent of Brazilian fans crying, “En Portugues! En Portugues!” At one point I looked behind me and people were wearing 3-D glasses and bathed in pickle-yellow floodlights, gettin’ down and sweaty. It was so freakin’ fun!

“Desculpe, babe
Arnaldo Dias Baptista – Rita Lee

Desculpe, babe
Não vou brincar com você
Desculpe, babe
Não vou mais ser joão-ninguém
Eu vou correndo
Buscar a glória, minha glória

Desculpe, babe
Mas eu já me decidi
Desculpe, babe
Eu vou viver mais pra mim
Eu vou correndo
Buscar a glória, minha glória”

En Ingles:

“I`m sorry baby (Desculpe baby)
Arnaldo Baptista – Rita Lee – versão: Os Mutantes

I`m sorry baby
I won`t be with you today
I`m sorry baby
This is my last time on earth

I`m gonna run now
To reach the glory of my mind
Baby goodbye

I`m sorry baby
But now I`ve made up my mind
I`m sorry baby
Do as I tell you, don`t cry

I`m gonna run now
To reach the glory of my mind
Baby goodbye”

listen to this song before you go good night

and now, good night

The After-Midnight Bird

One of them sings in the middleof the night, off the back roof of this apartment building somewhere, the only other wide-awake thing in the darkest part of morning when I happen to be up too, pondering work. It trills with a brightness that is almost domestic– recalls yellow kitchen curtains, green lawns, and the wry postman. Its call is the equivalent of turning on a lamp, out in the street, in the middle of the evening, and then turning it right back off again.

The BART Bird

This bird is camoflauged in the grey and trilobite shade of the train station, under the speckled glass eaves of the rain shelter, its call curling, then spattering, over the rows of needles tacked along the edges and walls (pigeon deterrents). This bird must be so abnormal from pigeons that it horrifies the pigeons, with feathers and temperament of such a different league as to have come from some deep, chaotic place. Its call is truly amazing, makes commuter heads turn, thinking vaguely, “jungle? Aphrodisia. No, an exotic purgatory.” Finally, the train comes whooshing out of the tunnel and blows a hooting, hollow call, as chilling as the jungle bird’s, if you only learn to hear it as a message out of context– incomprehensible, but thrilling.