for updates & short takes

Stupid Food Adventures: the verdict

Well, it was amusing for a couple of days. The food was sometimes not bad at all but by about Friday of last week, though, I'd had a pretty horrifying epiphany about Seattle Sutton. Consider these two trays:

Mystery Meal #1   Mystery Meal #2

One of those was my very last Seattle Sutton meal. The other is an image I swiped from mealsonwheels.com. I'm not even going to tell you which is which.

The saddest thing about all this is that my meals weren't even ON WHEELS. They were inert meals and they came in on wheels that I had to provide myself. I actually paid money and took time and effort to procure virtually the same kind of food that will surely be brought to me for free when I am 82 and living alone in a tiny bungalow filled with yarn and stacks of magazines and dead houseplants. Great.
pounded out by Wendy at 8:05 AM

| #

Things I have learned so far:

The book in your head is not quite the same as the book you actually write. If they had colors, one would be in RGB mode and the other in CMYK, and if you tried to make one match the other exactly you'd go fucking insane. They are like Norway and Sweden or Minnie Driver and Toni Collette. You can compare them all you want but you will foam at the mouth if you keep it up for too long.

Also, every one of your friends who gets to take a peek at the rough cover concept will pick on a very specific thing and it will never be the same thing that anyone else picks on.

Also, for weeks you will have this manuscript sitting around on your kitchen table with dozens of little Post-Its sticking out designating things your editor wants you to change, things you want to change, things you hate but don't know how to fix, things you don't want to mess with but need work anyway, things that just plan look up at you from the page cross-eyed, and typos. All you have to do is go page by page and get rid of all the Post-Its. Seriously, that's it. But what you don't realize is that the longer you leave Post-Its in a manuscript, the heavier they get. It's true. The molecular structure changes in the glue and everything.

And then once you take the Post-Its out of the manuscript, you will not be able to crumple them up and throw them away. Even though they're completely blank, they've been activated. They might be needed. All this time your sweet beloved manuscript has been addicted to you and is about to experience withdrawal from your intoxicating talent, and therefore those Post-Its are like its nicotine patches. So hang on to them for a few days in case you just need a little fix. Or, I mean, your book needs a fix. Whatever. It's okay.
pounded out by Wendy at 1:18 PM

| #

It was bound to happen

Someone came up with a pretty funny online "Which One Are You?" quiz for my nasty recipe card collection at Candyboots.

Yes, it's Which Weight Watchers recipe card from 1974 are you?.

If you must know, I am Fluffy Mackerel Pudding. And that feels about right...
pounded out by Wendy at 3:15 PM

| #

Day 4: it continues

Last night's dinner: turkey, in meatloaf form, and potato, mashed. I WISH I WAS MAKING THIS UP.

Also, I wrote a real review of a fake boutique for Gapers Block today.

pounded out by Wendy at 10:14 AM

| #

Well, it's not sausage-making, but still: you'd just rather not know

Behold: the meals that I am eating today were prepared in this very room.

Upon further discussion of Seattle Sutton's name, a friend agrees that while "Seattle Sutton" would be a very suitable porn star name, he feels that it would be an even better name for a Penthouse columnist.

As in: "Dear Seattle Sutton, I never thought I'd be writing you but the most incredible thing happened to me last week. I was at home relaxing in my hot tub when the doorbell rang..."

You mean you can't imagine an alternate reality where Seattle Sutton does this for a living? No?
pounded out by Wendy at 10:39 AM

| #

Day 2 continued

The hot potato for lunch came with turkey chili and a half slice of cheese. It wasn't all that bad, though it's worth noting that Tuesday's lunch was also a potato and turkey. And Tuesday there were raw peppers and tomatoes on the side; Wednesday had cooked peppers and tomatoes in the chili. I know I'm not supposed to think about this as much as I am right now.

Dinner: TURKEY tetrazzini and sweet POTATO.

Okay, this is starting to freak me out.
pounded out by Wendy at 7:19 PM

| #

Stupid Food, Day 2

Dinner last night, courtesy of Ms. Seattle: A sort of minimalist lasagna where the filling was rolled up in two big noodles. They were sort of like spring rolls made with pasta. Also, brussels sprouts, for no good reason. And a canned pear half that Seattle suggested I heat up but I did not.

Breakfast this morning: Half a bagel, though I'll grant that it's the nicer top half. Everyone on Seattle Sutton follows a very specific menu schedule and while eating my breakfast I couldn't shake the spooky feeling that some stranger within about a five mile-radius was like eating the other half of my bagel at practically the same time. There was pineapple cream cheese, too, and fruit juice in a squat little plastic cup like a lab sample.

Lunch: Has yet to be eaten. Today it will be a hot potato, which feels like progress of some kind.
pounded out by Wendy at 11:14 AM

| #

Stupid Food Adventures, Day 1

I've been debating whether or not I should tell you people that I'm trying Seattle Sutton's Half-Assed Eating Kind Of Thing this week. As a once (arguably) and (maybe) future and currently (ha) very occasionally weight-loss journaller person I feel that buying into a prefab-meal program is a slightly dubious undertaking, because I can't shake this idea that I'm supposed to lovingly prepare my own bitsy meals, and take charge of my life, and become wiser in ways of skinny food by being intimately involved with the whole process.

(You people all know who Seattle Sutton is, right? Because I don't want to link to her. Then again, if you don't know who Seattle Sutton is, you might think, just from a name like "Seattle Sutton," that she's a porn star. However, she is not.)

But I'm trying to finish up the last gasps of work on the book, and I'd rather not 1.) fall back into the kind of feral eating habits that I developed while writing the first draft this summer or 2.) cook. And I don't know about you, but sometimes I think fondly about airline food and wish that I could have it at home.

I picked up the stuff last night. It helps to start with very low expectations. They did not decline with last night's Chicken Alfredo dinner, although Seattle neglected to tell me that those little plastic sauce cups do not microwave well at all.

This morning at breakfast Seattle let me have a muffin that was pretty okay. She tried to make me eat a very hard nectarine, too, but I refused. I got a riper one at the farmer's market and ate it at work, so there.

Lunch was strange: "Chilled potato, turkey fillet, and fresh veggies." It consists mostly of a cooked potato that you're supposed to eat cold, with dip. And then the "turkey fillet" is a round, dense puck of reconstituted turkey. I believe there is a certain genius to this meal, because there really is no fucking way to delude yourself that your lunch is anything but a cold potato and a turkey cookie. And once you come to accept that, you're pretty much ready for anything.
pounded out by Wendy at 7:53 PM

| #

Is it wrong to admit that I sort of wish I'd been outside yesterday when this happened? I might have been close enough to see it from my office. What did I tell you about the geese around here?
pounded out by Wendy at 11:27 AM

| #

Craftastic!!!

If you didn't get a chance to stalk me last night at the Hideout, this weekend I plan on hitting the Renegade Craft Fair in Wicker Park. I went last year with Michael and bought a handmade checkbook cover with a retro fabric pattern that is not only unspeakably cute but oddly inspirational as well, because if rosy-cheeked children and duckies and kittens can fare so well in outer space, then surely I ought to be able to endure writing checks for painfully stupid things like parking tickets.

I feel a little goofy for wanting to take a moment here to be all "Go, DIY Movement!" and shake yarn pompoms around over this fair (as well as the upcoming DIY Trunk Show in November), but seriously--if you're not at least a little blown away by how many women (and, yeah--guys, too) are making and selling stuff and helping to support great independent magazines with their ads and creating art all at the same time then, then maybe you need to be gently knocked upside the head with a handmade purse. Because really, there's other things you can do with your time and energy besides knock yourself out trying to do the damn Core Plan. Just think of all the shit we could get done.

(Edited to add a link to this article.)
pounded out by Wendy at 4:20 PM

| #

Tomorrow night (September 15th) Ms. Claire Zulkey is hosting a night of funny stuff read aloud by some esteemed writerly and/or bloggery types at the Hideout. You should go. I will go. See you there. See me fat!

Oh, and you can now pre-order the book The M Word, which includes a piece I wrote, though I know deep down you'll be buying it because staggeringly cool people like George Saunders and Dan Savage and Wendy Brenner are in it. And I'm okay with that.
pounded out by Wendy at 1:37 PM

| #

This is a really nice obituary for Aaron.
pounded out by Wendy at 11:04 PM

| #

Eyes too open

My eyes were dilated last week. On purpose, I mean. I went to the eye doctor for the first time in years just to humor my internet-assisted hypochondria, which had been pretty eyeball-obsessed ever since my trippy visual migraine experience this spring. After that, I began to pay more attention to the little floaty things in my vision and decided, thanks to some conscientous web research, that it all had to mean that my retinas were slowly withering away like grapes in the fridge, and I had to call this to some noble doctor's attention ASAP so that he could perform laser surgery on me. Not like I wanted surgery, of course, but when your eyes are turning into rotten cocktail onions you do what you gotta do, right? And figured I could use some new glasses, too.

Everyone I knew kept warning me about the eye dilation part; how I was supposed to wear sunglasses, avoid driving, and sit in dark rooms for hours and hours. It sounded terrible to me. I imagined the second I had the drops put in my eyes I would surely clutch my head screaming while the world turned day-glo colors! I'd be knocked down by the glare and I'd have to go live underground! I would have to cancel my plans, seeing as how I was sentenced to at least half a day in some kind of gloomy Goth exile. I was late to my appointment on purpose.

But it wasn't that bad. I didn't even know what was happening until the nurse led me to a dim room and left me alone for awhile. They hadn't explained why I was there: I thought the appointment was over and now they were allowing me to just sit in this nice room for a spell to calm down from the mild trauma of having my eyeballs touched. It wasn't until I noticed that my knitting was blurry that I realized they'd done something, and when I went back in the exam room I looked in the mirror and straight into my soul. I looked like I was tweaking on meth. But then according to this article, I was hot, so go figure.

I was given a clean bill of eyeball health and then I wound up wearing sunglasses for a little while, maybe an hour. Mostly, though, the world appeared to have slightly harder edges. Something was different about the perspective; objects were where they were supposed to be but I couldn't shake the feeling that everything had been taken away and then put back a little wrong.

It all looked like how I've been feeling recently. I spent months curled in my own head and only recently have I had the chance to crawl out; now everything is different.
pounded out by Wendy at 11:35 PM

| #

All I can say

I knew Aaron only briefly. We knew each other from a couple of Gaper's Block events and then hung out at Simon's one night in early June. Later he sent me a postcard at Ragdale, an occasional nice email; he struck me as extremely bright even as I sensed that he was a little adrift. I'd hoped he would find his way, and it wasn't until I'd heard he was missing that I began to understand how far out he was. All I can say is I wish he'd made it back.
pounded out by Wendy at 10:58 AM

| #

Because it's good to have perspective

Ten Ways In Which Writing This Damn Book Was Just Like Having a Baby:
It took months and months to produce.
People kept asking me when it was due.
It gave me a taste for foods I'd never really cared about before, like clementines and buffalo wings.
It made me gain a distressing amount of weight.
It filled me with flutteringly happy anticipation occasionally mingled with sheer keening terror.
It made me inexplicably cry at things on the radio.
It made me miss work, and more of it than I'd planned on missing.
It screwed up my sleep patterns.
And my social life.
And all sense of normal existence.

Ten Ways In Which Writing This Damn Book Was Nothing At All Like Having a Baby:
Did not have to push book out of body.
Did not need to have book surgically removed from body.
Did not, and it bears repeating, have a physical entity of any kind pass through any sort of portal in my body, by which I mean neither a pre-existing opening nor one specially created for the occasion.
Book makes noise only when dropped, and then still works okay afterwards.
Book not even in the remotest danger of being abducted by a religious cult or carried off by dingoes.
Book did not wind up five pages shorter for every cigarette I smoked.
Book will not, in a few short years' time, develop the ability to dance ballet just the way I'm sure I would have had I only been given the proper encouragment and a pretty pretty tutu, alas.
Book does not have that sweet baby smell.
Book, on the other hand, will not vomit on me or anything else.
Book will not pee itself, anywhere, ever, and especially not spectactularly into the air.
pounded out by Wendy at 1:52 PM

| #

What is with me

My phone rang today at work.
"This is Wendy," I answered.
"This is your mother," my mom said.
I wondered what she wanted.
"Well, you haven't updated your site since Thursday the 26th," she said. What is with you, young lady? her tone said.

I am fine. There just hasn't been anything going on in my life that I felt like sharing with several hundred people. I know that's usually never stopped me before, but then again, while working on the book this summer I went through a couple of bad spells when I was trying to write for several thousand imaginary people I'd conjured up out of Amazon.com customer reviews of other people's books, so that every time I finished writing a paragraph I could hear comments (okay, see them, I guess, or mentally experience them in a synaesthetic fashion in which the voices of my hypothetical Amazon bad reviewers all wind up sounding like Juliette Lewis on I Love The 80s, the way she rambles on) like, "It wasn't THAT bad... but I didn't get the part with the road trip, like how she never really DESCRIBED what kind of car she was driving and stuff... like, she did not paint a vivid picture with her words like you're supposed to," and in my mind I'm nodding along thinking, oh crap, she's right; I suck. I didn't have that in my head all the time, but just enough at times to make me a little crazy, so after I turned in the first draft I became a bit too fond of the mental quiet that comes with not having to cough up written accounts of your own life.

So if it's one thing I've learned: don't read Amazon reviews when you're trying to write a book. Don't read other reviews either. They're other people's problems.

I've also learned: just because you are writing a book about body image will not prevent you from losing your shit when you gain at least ten pounds in the process. You can call it the Method Approach to writing, but still, YOU WILL BE PISSED.
pounded out by Wendy at 11:32 PM

| #

Poundyblog archives



<< chicago blogs >>