general update
Oct. 15th, 2016 03:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitSorry I haven't posted for ages. At first I felt there was nothing interesting to say, then there were too many things to say and yet I still wasn't sure any of them were interesting. So I'm just going to post, regardless.
1) I keep reading everybody's Yuletide posts with envy and ruefulness. I'm not doing Yuletide this year, because I defaulted last year and I haven't managed to finish a story in a painfully long time. I'm looking forward to reading a bunch of new stories come Christmas, though.
2) Still notking feeling very fannish about anything. I continue to love most of my more recent fandoms (e.g. Hannibal, all the world wars-related stuff), but it's not an excited, "I want to write and read all the fic" sort of love. I guess this is just a fallow period for me. I'm trying not to worry about it.
3) The Great British Bake Off has got me baking again (the onset of autumn and cooler weather has also helped) but I don't feel the same intensity of interest in the competition as I did last year. Those who've made it to the semifinals all deserve to be there, but I'm not as impressed by their baking as I was by last year's semifinalists, and I don't feel the same attachment to any of them as I did to Ian, Nadiya, and Tamal last year. Still, it's fun to watch.
4) What have I been baking, you ask? In recent weeks I've made a (semi-successful) Victoria sandwich filled with strawberry jam and lemon curd; a rather good apple, walnut, and raisin cake; a savoury sweet potato pie; some very nice pumpkin cream cheese muffins (brought to work for potluck--I want to make another batch to keep for myself); some anadama bread made with cornmeal and molasses (horrible--I ended up throwing half of it away); and some proper cornbread with bacon, cheese, chipotle chiles, and no fucking molasses, which was delicious. Today I've got the dough for a four-grain pot boule resting in the fridge, since I want to start baking my own bread again instead of buying it like I did over the summer.
5) Much to my surprise, I've continued wanting to eat raw vegetables/salads, and now it's extended to fruit. I've been buying different kinds of apples as they appear in the market and taste-testing them; before this, I only knew that I liked Honeycrisp and hated Red Delicious. I still like Honeycrisp, though it's maybe a little too sweet for me now and the apples are ridiculously huge. I haven't loved most of the fancy expensive new varieties (e.g. Envy, Jazz), but I do like Jonagold and Pink Lady aka Cripps Pink.
And now I need to go and get an apple and some cheese. (Have now returned with a Braeburn. I like the flavor--there's an almost citrusy top note I think is great--but the texture is mealy and I can't stand that. I'm afraid I've given up on the Braeburn and switched it for a Comice pear I bought, despite the ridiculous price, because I'd heard they're fantastic. And it is fantastic. Yes, pears have a sort of mealy texture too, but for some reason that's entirely different, to me, from the mealiness of apples.)
What I find funny about all this apple-eating is that, some years ago when I still occasionally tried weight-loss dieting, I remember reading something to the effect that if you wouldn't be willing to eat an apple, then you weren't really hungry and shouldn't eat whatever it was you were actually wanting to eat. I couldn't think of any circumstance short of impending starvation when I would be willing to eat an apple. Partly this came from growing up when the horrible Red Delicious was the only apple readily available, and so there was always one nasty, bruised, bitter specimen in the toe of my Christmas stocking that I felt guilty for not eating. Partly it was that I didn't grow up eating many fresh fruits or vegetables anyway, because my family was poor and rural and we lived in a gardening-unfriendly region of clay soils and long, cold winters. But mostly it was because years of pressure to diet (peer pressure and cultural pressure, mostly, not pressure from within my family, for which I am thankful) tainted my relationship with food in ways I'm only now recognizing, as things begin to come right. My relationship with "healthy" foods was penal.
Apples weren't food, not really. Apples were shame and self-punishment and failure, they were the admission that I was a fat and therefore bad person who didn't deserve to eat cake. Salads were all that, plus they were the thing adolescent!me tried to live on for two weeks before the beginning of every school year and the ordeal of the communal weigh-in, in which everyone's weight was announced loudly enough for the kids behind in line to hear. This ceremony was also, in my case, at least once followed up by a letter I had to take home to my parents announcing that I was overweight and they must immediately take steps to make me lose weight. Incidentally, the salads in question were not so much salads as they were leaves of iceberg lettuce rolled up around tiny amounts of cheese in an attempt to make them palatable. (See above re: why my family not keeping much in the way of fresh produce around.)
I stopped restricting my eating maybe five or six years ago, despite moments of shame-induced temptation to try just one more diet. It's made me calmer and less prone to obsession (I still think a lot about food, but mostly in a fun way) or to the kind of disordered eating where I half-starved myself all week only to gorge on my "day off" from the diet, trying to eat all the yummy forbidden things I could cram into my mouth in 24 hours before I had to go back to hunger prison. And in the last year or so, I feel like it's actually freed something up in me. I'd never realized, before, how many foods I was rejecting because I'd come to associate them with dieting, being "good," feeling all that shame and deprivation.
It's weirdly amazing to feel, instead, that I can eat an apple or I can eat cake, and that both of those are okay choices. I can eat a salad or I can eat a hamburger, and either's fine. Or maybe I can eat salad and a hamburger, like people who don't have thirty-plus years of Food Issues often do. I can eat an apple or a salad for pleasure, not for punishment.
I should note that the moral of this story is not, "And now I have learned to love Eating Healthily and I have lost weight!!!". There are all too many stories like that floating around, stories that purport to be anti-dieting but are ultimately still all about weight loss as the goal. I have not lost any weight, nor do I expect to. I'm just enjoying eating apples and pears and concord grapes and romaine lettuce (with blue cheese dressing on it if I want some, because this is not about losing weight!) and radishes and cucumbers and even, amazingly, my old enemy the carrot stick. I feel freer, and I like that.
6) I've been reading Mark Billingham's series of mysteries featuring Detective Inspector Tom Thorne, and just finished the most recent one today. It's a series I like a lot despite often wanting to give the protagonist a very hard slap. The early books are fairly standard serial-killer stories, but they have enough character development that they kept me interested anyway. The later books are much more driven by the characters and by an interest in the social and personal aftereffects of violent crime. My favorite, The Bones Beneath, features no detective work at all. Don't start with that one, though, because it refers heavily to things that happened in earlier novels.
There's a recurring queer character who gets good development, and a number of interesting women (though I'd note that the two women Thorne has romantic relationships with during the series are much more compelling when the relationship stuff is backgrounded and they're doing their own things).
7) I acquired the first two series of Penny Dreadful for very cheap ($6 for both) and will probably start watching today.
Comments are welcome, unless they're concern trolling about weight/food issues, in which case I will delete them with extreme prejudice. I'd love to hear what you've been cooking/eating/watching/reading or whatever--we almost all seem to post less these days, and I miss you!
1) I keep reading everybody's Yuletide posts with envy and ruefulness. I'm not doing Yuletide this year, because I defaulted last year and I haven't managed to finish a story in a painfully long time. I'm looking forward to reading a bunch of new stories come Christmas, though.
2) Still not
3) The Great British Bake Off has got me baking again (the onset of autumn and cooler weather has also helped) but I don't feel the same intensity of interest in the competition as I did last year. Those who've made it to the semifinals all deserve to be there, but I'm not as impressed by their baking as I was by last year's semifinalists, and I don't feel the same attachment to any of them as I did to Ian, Nadiya, and Tamal last year. Still, it's fun to watch.
4) What have I been baking, you ask? In recent weeks I've made a (semi-successful) Victoria sandwich filled with strawberry jam and lemon curd; a rather good apple, walnut, and raisin cake; a savoury sweet potato pie; some very nice pumpkin cream cheese muffins (brought to work for potluck--I want to make another batch to keep for myself); some anadama bread made with cornmeal and molasses (horrible--I ended up throwing half of it away); and some proper cornbread with bacon, cheese, chipotle chiles, and no fucking molasses, which was delicious. Today I've got the dough for a four-grain pot boule resting in the fridge, since I want to start baking my own bread again instead of buying it like I did over the summer.
5) Much to my surprise, I've continued wanting to eat raw vegetables/salads, and now it's extended to fruit. I've been buying different kinds of apples as they appear in the market and taste-testing them; before this, I only knew that I liked Honeycrisp and hated Red Delicious. I still like Honeycrisp, though it's maybe a little too sweet for me now and the apples are ridiculously huge. I haven't loved most of the fancy expensive new varieties (e.g. Envy, Jazz), but I do like Jonagold and Pink Lady aka Cripps Pink.
And now I need to go and get an apple and some cheese. (Have now returned with a Braeburn. I like the flavor--there's an almost citrusy top note I think is great--but the texture is mealy and I can't stand that. I'm afraid I've given up on the Braeburn and switched it for a Comice pear I bought, despite the ridiculous price, because I'd heard they're fantastic. And it is fantastic. Yes, pears have a sort of mealy texture too, but for some reason that's entirely different, to me, from the mealiness of apples.)
What I find funny about all this apple-eating is that, some years ago when I still occasionally tried weight-loss dieting, I remember reading something to the effect that if you wouldn't be willing to eat an apple, then you weren't really hungry and shouldn't eat whatever it was you were actually wanting to eat. I couldn't think of any circumstance short of impending starvation when I would be willing to eat an apple. Partly this came from growing up when the horrible Red Delicious was the only apple readily available, and so there was always one nasty, bruised, bitter specimen in the toe of my Christmas stocking that I felt guilty for not eating. Partly it was that I didn't grow up eating many fresh fruits or vegetables anyway, because my family was poor and rural and we lived in a gardening-unfriendly region of clay soils and long, cold winters. But mostly it was because years of pressure to diet (peer pressure and cultural pressure, mostly, not pressure from within my family, for which I am thankful) tainted my relationship with food in ways I'm only now recognizing, as things begin to come right. My relationship with "healthy" foods was penal.
Apples weren't food, not really. Apples were shame and self-punishment and failure, they were the admission that I was a fat and therefore bad person who didn't deserve to eat cake. Salads were all that, plus they were the thing adolescent!me tried to live on for two weeks before the beginning of every school year and the ordeal of the communal weigh-in, in which everyone's weight was announced loudly enough for the kids behind in line to hear. This ceremony was also, in my case, at least once followed up by a letter I had to take home to my parents announcing that I was overweight and they must immediately take steps to make me lose weight. Incidentally, the salads in question were not so much salads as they were leaves of iceberg lettuce rolled up around tiny amounts of cheese in an attempt to make them palatable. (See above re: why my family not keeping much in the way of fresh produce around.)
I stopped restricting my eating maybe five or six years ago, despite moments of shame-induced temptation to try just one more diet. It's made me calmer and less prone to obsession (I still think a lot about food, but mostly in a fun way) or to the kind of disordered eating where I half-starved myself all week only to gorge on my "day off" from the diet, trying to eat all the yummy forbidden things I could cram into my mouth in 24 hours before I had to go back to hunger prison. And in the last year or so, I feel like it's actually freed something up in me. I'd never realized, before, how many foods I was rejecting because I'd come to associate them with dieting, being "good," feeling all that shame and deprivation.
It's weirdly amazing to feel, instead, that I can eat an apple or I can eat cake, and that both of those are okay choices. I can eat a salad or I can eat a hamburger, and either's fine. Or maybe I can eat salad and a hamburger, like people who don't have thirty-plus years of Food Issues often do. I can eat an apple or a salad for pleasure, not for punishment.
I should note that the moral of this story is not, "And now I have learned to love Eating Healthily and I have lost weight!!!". There are all too many stories like that floating around, stories that purport to be anti-dieting but are ultimately still all about weight loss as the goal. I have not lost any weight, nor do I expect to. I'm just enjoying eating apples and pears and concord grapes and romaine lettuce (with blue cheese dressing on it if I want some, because this is not about losing weight!) and radishes and cucumbers and even, amazingly, my old enemy the carrot stick. I feel freer, and I like that.
6) I've been reading Mark Billingham's series of mysteries featuring Detective Inspector Tom Thorne, and just finished the most recent one today. It's a series I like a lot despite often wanting to give the protagonist a very hard slap. The early books are fairly standard serial-killer stories, but they have enough character development that they kept me interested anyway. The later books are much more driven by the characters and by an interest in the social and personal aftereffects of violent crime. My favorite, The Bones Beneath, features no detective work at all. Don't start with that one, though, because it refers heavily to things that happened in earlier novels.
There's a recurring queer character who gets good development, and a number of interesting women (though I'd note that the two women Thorne has romantic relationships with during the series are much more compelling when the relationship stuff is backgrounded and they're doing their own things).
7) I acquired the first two series of Penny Dreadful for very cheap ($6 for both) and will probably start watching today.
Comments are welcome, unless they're concern trolling about weight/food issues, in which case I will delete them with extreme prejudice. I'd love to hear what you've been cooking/eating/watching/reading or whatever--we almost all seem to post less these days, and I miss you!
no subject
Date: 2016-10-16 12:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-16 12:40 am (UTC)Apple, raisin and walnut are great flavours for a cake (okay, to be honest, I would put walnuts in nearly everything!) so I'm glad to hear that the weather is allowing you to bake again! We're having a cool and extremely wet Spring, so baking is on right now, but that won't last.
no subject
Date: 2016-10-16 01:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-16 01:47 am (UTC)I'll definitely make that apple, raisin, and walnut cake again. It's the first cake I've had real success with in ages (I got the recipe from a book specifically designed for high-altitude baking) and homey cakes like that seem to work better for me than cakes that have to be layered, filled, iced, etc. Certainly the effort-to-results ratio is better!
. . . and yet I remain tempted by the prospect of three-layer tangerine mousse cake, which is also from the high-altitude cookbook and therefore might work, if my dubious skills are up to it.
no subject
Date: 2016-10-16 10:21 am (UTC)I hate diet discourse with a vengeful passion (and I've never even suffered from it that badly myself) so I'm glad you're escaping it and enjoying food. And urgh, nasty Red Delicious: they are the Barmecide feast of apples: how is it that their juice seems to dry your mouth out?
no subject
Date: 2016-10-16 01:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-16 11:10 pm (UTC)I think I've suffered a lot less from diet discourse than many people do, but it's amazing how deep the roots of something can go into one's behavior and reactions, even after consciously rejecting it. (Ideology is great like that.)
no subject
Date: 2016-10-16 11:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-16 11:19 pm (UTC)* Green apple - why an apple, and why always green?
* Tape measure - held loosely and stupidly round a thin woman's waist so that it's not measuring at all
* Both - tape measure draped in similar style round an apple - WTF?
I loathe, loathe, loathe being told what to eat. In fact I late any article that has the words "you should" whatever it's about.
While I'm on the subject of stupid advertising conventions, others I hate and despise are:
* Diet ads showing woman laughing and eating salad
* Pedicure ads showing feet surrounded by flowers. Every blood time.
* Fashion ads showing woman holding a hand up to their (always long) hair and smiling bashfully down at their clothes. Seriously, UGH!
no subject
Date: 2016-10-17 12:05 am (UTC)I loathe, loathe, loathe being told what to eat.
Yes. And I find it darkly amusing how the advice changes: low fat! no, paleo and gluten-free! coffee is bad for you! coffee is good for you! eat margarine instead of butter! omg no, don't eat margarine!!!
There was actually a "nutrition and health" books that came out in the US called How Not to Die. Sometimes I think people really believe that if they just work out enough and never eat cake, they'll live forever. (Obviously, it's true that good health greatly improves people's quality of life, especially as they get older. But a lot of good health seems to be down to good genes.)
no subject
Date: 2016-10-17 12:30 am (UTC)A major reason I don't listen to all that badly researched or even unresearched crap.
Sometimes I think people really believe that if they just work out enough and never eat cake, they'll live forever.
Or it'll feel like it!
But a lot of good health seems to be down to good genes.
Yeah, sadly. An LJ friend has a mother who's in her 90s, looking good - and still smoking. Oy. With both my parents dying young, I can only do so much anyway. I'll eat healthy food like salads very happily if they taste good, and anyway I'm sure enjoying one's food and life in general helps somewhat too.
no subject
Date: 2016-10-17 11:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-17 07:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-18 07:49 pm (UTC)How are you watching this season's GBBO, if you don't mind me asking? My partner and I watched all three available on our PBS site this summer and loved the show (and the season with Nadiya and Tamal especially--I was beside myself with happiness to read that Tamal later came out). My partner's the baker in the family, and she's been inspired--a happy side effect.
Not much to say on the food/healthy eating front except that I'm glad you're enjoying your food. Good food (of many types) improves life, generally. :) M.