Slow Read: Swann's Way, Week 4

In Search of Lost Time: Volume 1, Swann's Way (Modern Library Classics) (v. 1)
by Marcel Proust, translated by Scott Moncrieff

Combray, continued

That year my family fixed the day of their return to Paris rather earlier than usual. On the morning of our departure I had had my hair curled, to be ready to face the photographer, had had a new hat carefully set upon my head, and had been buttoned into a velvet jacket; a little later my mother, after searching everywhere for me, found me standing in tears on that steep little hillside close to Tansonville, bidding a long farewell to my hawthorns, clasping their sharp branches to my bosom, and (like a princess in a tragedy, oppressed by the weight of all her senseless jewellery) with no gratitude towards the officious hand which had, in curling those ringlets, been at pains to collect all my hair upon my forehead; trampling underfoot the curl-papers which I had torn from my head, and my new hat with them.

It's not clear how old he is, and he has jumped around in time. I assume he's a teenager when he's reading those books in the garden, but here he remembers a younger self. I wonder how old a child is who's hair is curled for the photos. Did he look like one of these boys, I wonder? I wonder how much fashions differed internationally, and whether I've found the right time period. Perhaps he looked like the children on the cover of this book.

People said: "That poor M. Vinteuil must be blinded by love not to see what everyone is talking about, and to let his daughter—a man who is horrified if you use a word in the wrong sense—bring a woman like that to live under his roof. He says that she is a most superior woman, with a heart of gold, and that she would have shewn extraordinary musical talent if she had only been trained. He may be sure it is not music that she is teaching his daughter."

People know each other's business. Who is better off, the suspicious gossips, or the blinded sweet old man? If the narrator's unintended peeping tom episode is true, those gossips were uncannily correct.

During the long fortnight of my aunt's last illness Francoise never went out of her room for an instant, never took off her clothes, allowed no one else to do anything for my aunt, and did not leave her body until it was actually in its grave. Then, at last, we understood that the sort of terror in which Francoise had lived of my aunt's harsh words, her suspicions and her anger, had developed in her a sentiment which we had mistaken for hatred, and which was really veneration and love.

They distance themselves from emotions, and don't understand them in others, so much so they mistake love for hatred, concern for terror...interesting. Could this explain why so far, for all the description, I am still feeling distant from the book? Or am I reading too slowly?

But to wander thus among the woods of Roussainville without a peasant-girl to embrace was to see those woods and yet know nothing of their secret treasure, their deep-hidden beauty. That girl whom I never saw save dappled with the shadows of their leaves, was to me herself a plant of local growth, only taller than the rest, and one whose structure would enable me to approach more closely than in them to the intimate savour of the land from which she had sprung.

I had the same feeling at the amusement park when I was a budding teenager. I would see other couples embracing, making out on the rides together, and I so wanted to be with someone, doing that. (Marriott's Great America.)

After leaving this park the Vivonne began to flow again more swiftly. How often have I watched, and longed to imitate, when I should be free to live as I chose, a rower who had shipped his oars and lay stretched out on his back, his head down, in the bottom of his boat, letting it drift with the current, seeing nothing but the sky which slipped quietly above him, shewing upon his features a foretaste of happiness and peace.

This romantic view of the rower is all in his mind I would suspect. How the rower must wish he had the leisurely time just to take a stroll along the banks.

So the 'Meseglise way' and the 'Guermantes way' remain for me linked with many of the little incidents of that one of all the divers lives along whose parallel lines we are moved, which is the most abundant in sudden reverses of fortune, the richest in episodes; I mean the life of the mind. Doubtless it makes in us an imperceptible progress, and the truths which have changed for us its meaning and its aspect, which have opened new paths before our feet, we had for long been preparing for their discovery; but that preparation was unconscious; and for us those truths date only from the day, from the minute when they became apparent.

So, I believe he's saying certain understandings he came to, such as awakening to his subjective experience being subjective, are intimately connected to the memory of these physical paths. They cannot be separated for him, in a way. The memory of one invokes the other. I suppose this is what happens for some things. I think it remains to be seen exactly what it is that Swann's Way invokes.

Whether it be that the faith which creates has ceased to exist in me, or that reality will take shape in the memory alone, the flowers that people shew me nowadays for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers. The 'Meseglise way' with its lilacs, its hawthorns, its cornflowers, its poppies, its apple-trees, the 'Guermantes way' with its river full of tadpoles, its water-lilies, and its buttercups have constituted for me for all time the picture of the land in which I fain would pass my life, in which my only requirements are that I may go out fishing, drift idly in a boat, see the ruins of a gothic fortress in the grass, and find hidden among the cornfields—as Saint-Andre-des-Champs lay hidden—an old church, monumental, rustic, and yellow like a mill-stone; and the cornflowers, the hawthorns, the apple-trees which I may happen, when I go walking, to encounter in the fields, because they are situated at the same depth, on the level of my past life, at once establish contact with my heart.

Those paths, and their flowers, encountered at the height of his passionate absorption of understanding I suppose, can never be replaced as the quintessential flowers. Nothing after is as vivid as the first awakening to that understanding.

All these memories, following one after another, were condensed into a single substance, but had not so far coalesced that I could not discern between the three strata, between my oldest, my instinctive memories, those others, inspired more recently by a taste or 'perfume,' and those which were actually the memories of another, from whom I had acquired them at second hand—no fissures, indeed, no geological faults, but at least those veins, those streaks of colour which in certain rocks, in certain marbles, point to differences of origin, age, and formation.

Don't these striations always sift into distinction if one allows enough awareness to settle on them? Or do they end up blurring, becoming more difficult to differentiate between memories, memories of memories, and memories of others? I don't believe I have taken on memories of others as my own, or taken memories of memories as the original, as the "condensed into a single substance" seems to imply happens. I know memory is malleable, but I try to be aware when it feels hazy, and when if feels sharp. I wonder if these strata, these fissures, will be relevant.

Previous posts:
Schedule
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3

Fat Karma: Morbidity and Weight

Invariably, if you try to say we should stop talking about weight, someone responds as if you are saying you can do whatever the hell you want, as if you are saying we shouldn't care about our health. It is difficult to get folks to understand that weight does not necessarily correspond to good or bad health habits.

I've been thinking of doing this series for a while. I'm sure the seed began several years ago when I read Paul Campos' The Obesity Myth. I finally took the plunge when I got into a series of disagreements with someone on facebook regarding the Moral Panic I'd been witnessing in the whole Health Care Reform debate. Just as an aside, I am not hopeful about the thing called a health care reform that just passed the House. It guarantees insurers that every citizen must buy insurance. What a corporate windfall. And while it says they cannot refuse to insure people, and cannot raise the premiums of sick people, it does not say anything, at least that I have heard, that those who are in a supposed high risk category and mythically can choose not to be, cannot be punished with higher premiums. That is, if you're fat, you'll pay, and if you can't afford the premiums, you'll pay fines. So, back to the disagreements. This person dismissed this quote from Campos from the Moral Panic article, "After twenty years of studying this complicated issue, I cannot offer any meaningful public policy suggestions, but I do know that we should all stop talking about this issue." He took a whole book to prove that point, and she can dismiss it from a quote from an article.

What Paul Campos found in the studies was that only the underweight and the extremely overweight are at greater risk of earlier mortality, and in fact if over 65, to be what is considered "overweight" is actually a health benefit. Yet there is a common belief that simply to be overweight is deadly, and to be morbidly obese, as I am considered to be, is beyond the pale. A couple of eye-popping statements in the online comment-troll world keep surfacing on such articles. 1. You don't see any fat old people. and 2. I'm not sure which is worse, obesity or smoking. These are such extreme versions of the age-old fears of simply being fat, with health having nothing to do with it. I thought, huh, so people still do choose smoking over gaining weight. What Campos also found was that most people who do worry about their weight have no reason to...their weight level has no effect, or has a positive effect, on their health. What he found is that people do attach a moral component to a person's weight. People attach a measure of self-worth, and with that as your measure of health, you can never win the fat fight.

For a while I thought about reading boards about weight loss, what people say about how they feel so much better. How now they can go dancing, now they can do this or that with their kids. How much happier they are. How they can let themselves be seen in public. How they can date again. I suspected a good 80% of the comments would have nothing to do with their physical capabilities. People measure the negative health impact of their supposed excess weight by how they feel, when how they feel is measured by their feelings of self-worth, not their actual physical health. The only thing holding people back from active participation in the world is their own negative feelings about their bodies, and nothing else. I could say the same about those commercials for the evil bariatric surgeries.

You know what, I can't run fast, but I can run, even though I am bearing a weight load. If I am climbing or descending stairs, I must be aware of the load I am carrying, with my head and shoulders and knees aligned appropriately with my center of gravity, just as a weight-training athlete would. I can still dance. I can still date. I can still be seen in the world. I can still eat in public, even though I'm fat. What others think of me doesn't and shouldn't matter, yet that is part of the reason why some people feel they need to lose weight. My allergies limit my participation in worldly activities more than my weight does.

If I wish to be healthy, I do need to be concerned about my cholesterol levels, my blood sugar levels, my blood workup indicating vitamin D and iron and other minerals. The Framingham Heart Study does not list obesity as a predictor of coronary heart disease. Number one predictor? Age. Pure and simple, we get old, we're gonna die. All this worry about weight's gonna make us die young, the doctor actually telling me, without studies proving this, that it will shorten my life, this is all about getting old, dying. Well, we're all gonna die. Chances are I will have little say as to when. Next predictors: diabetes, smoking, blood pressure, cholesterol. Guess what folks? In two years, I have gained a little weight, what, maybe 10, 20 pounds. And my cholesterol and my blood sugar levels have gone down. Weight has nothing to do with it. Indeed, how I feel about it has a lot more to do with it, maybe as much as that balanced diet thing. More on that in an upcoming post. My blood pressure went up slightly, which with the help of the lowest level of bp meds, is now lower than it's ever been in my adult life. It and high cholesterol run in my family, no surprise there, whatever I weigh. Funny thing though, when I run my numbers, whether I use my pre-med high systolic blood pressure of 160, or my med-induced number of 110, my 10 year risk of heart attack is still less than 1%.

By the way, without even starting on the ill-advised voodoo nature of wishing negative outcomes on someone, what useful meaning does that have, to tell someone, "This will shorten your life." ? You may think you have a statistic, but you can't apply that to an individual. You have no idea how long I would live in a perfect world, so how can you subtract days, months, or years from that?

I don't like the word "obese," much less, of course, "morbidly obese." These words hold a judgment in the view of many as a death sentence, and at least severely sickly. I'm pretty sure most fat people prefer the descriptive word "fat." If I am sickly at any point, it is more to do with my allergies than anything else. I haven't had the flu in over 20 years, and I've had a cold maybe once in the last 10 years. I have mild asthma, but I don't need to take regular medications for it, and I use a rescue inhaler so rarely that my prescription keeps expiring. My health indicators are all good, and even better since I have been able to act on the information from that blood workup.

Funny thing is, I was blaming my weak knees on my weight, thinking, well gee, they have to work hard, maybe they're wearing out. The erstwhile Facebook friend tossed that out as a bugaboo one time when she couldn't slap down heart disease as the bugaboo, and I would have agreed with her. Actually, it was a Vitamin D deficiency. Many of us in the Pacific Northwest have a Vit. D issue. I wonder how many people suffer from failing knees who could have used a massive Vitamin D boost? When I was getting my new CPAP machine I met a woman in the waiting room in a wheel chair because she needed knee surgery. They won't give her the knee surgery until she loses weight. I found myself wondering, how can they expect her to lose weight if she can't move? She said it had to do with being able to bear the weight to recover. My thought is, what, can't they develop alternative recoveries? People have amazing artificial legs available these days...if these can be developed, why can't there be as amazing a solution to easing the weight-bearing load on a recovering knee? The thing is, my erstwhile Facebook friend had tossed this karma out there as blameworthy. It is our own damn fault if we wreck our knees because we allowed our weight to get so bad as to wreck them, so we deserve to live with it if we don't lose the weight.

Another funny thing, I was blaming my occasional shortness of breath on my fat too. Makes sense, wouldn't we all? But that turned out to be due to an iron deficiency. Regular imbibing of iron, then wow, no shortness of breath. Turns out this is a symptom of anemia. Once diagnosed, I thought, duh, I should have known, I'm a vegetarian. But this hadn't been an issue, though I've been a vegetarian for 20 years. Only in the past few years, my monthly blood flow has gotten heavier, thus, anemia. These are ways in which doctors hurt us, if they don't seek out other possible causes, and we hurt ourselves too, when we blame only the fat.

I'm trying to use the obesity word a little bit, though. Perhaps I can be an example. See? I'm what they call morbidly obese, yet my indicators show that I am in no danger of diabetes or heart disease, even though the fat-fear-mongers would fling these at me like sticks and mud and stones. See? My favorite place to shop is the farmer's market, and my favorite meal is probably Tom Kah soup with lots of veggies. See? When I am given identifiable tasks that will improve my health, I take them and my health improves, without a diet having to enter into the equation, though it can mean a change in diet.

Coming soon: Voodoo Hex of Fat Fear, Breaking the Diet Habit, Confessions, and more.

Earlier posts in this series:
Introduction
It Starts Young
Health Care Bigotry

Slow Read: Swann's Way, Week 3

In Search of Lost Time: Volume 1, Swann's Way (Modern Library Classics) (v. 1)
by Marcel Proust, translated by Scott Moncrieff

Combray, continued

Aha! So the end of last week I left off wondering why Bloch was banned...it was because he

had gone on to assure me that he had heard it said on unimpeachable authority that my great-aunt herself had led a 'gay' life in her younger days, and had been notoriously 'kept.' I could not refrain from passing on so important a piece of information to my parents; the next time Bloch called he was not admitted, and afterwards, when I met him in the street, he greeted me with extreme coldness.

...so I'm left wondering, why can't this kid keep these things to himself?

I was wondering about St. Hilaire/St. Hilarius. Interesting that he shares a name with a naturalist with similar ideas to Darwin.

Very well, that is Saint Hilaire, who is also known, you will remember, in certain parts of the country as Saint Illiers, Saint Helier, and even, in the Jura, Saint Ylie. But these various corruptions of Sanctus Hilarius are by no means the most curious that have occurred in the names of the blessed Saints.

The boy witnesses his aunt waking from a bad dream in which her dead husband is alive and he makes her go for a walk. It's an interesting little glimpse that the narrator keeps to himself. I wonder if she is agoraphobic, and if it came about because of her husband's death.

The boy especially sees women in flowers...

It was in these 'Month of Mary' services that I can remember having first fallen in love with hawthorn-blossom. The hawthorn was not merely in the church, for there, holy ground as it was, we had all of us a right of entry; but, arranged upon the altar itself, inseparable from the mysteries in whose celebration it was playing a part, it thrust in among the tapers and the sacred vessels its rows of branches, tied to one another horizontally in a stiff, festal scheme of decoration...
...its bunch of stamens, slender as gossamer, which clouded the flower itself in a white mist, that in following these with my eyes, in trying to imitate, somewhere inside myself, the action of their blossoming, I imagined it as a swift and thoughtless movement of the head with an enticing glance from her contracted pupils, by a young girl in white, careless and alive.

At first I think M. Legrandin is having an affair, and thus wouldn't acknowledge the family, but it turns out to be a class thing, in spite of M. Legrandin trying to act all proletariat.

M. Legrandin had barely acknowledged the courtesy, and then with an air of surprise, as though he had not recognised us, and with that distant look characteristic of people who do not wish to be agreeable, and who from the suddenly receding depths of their eyes seem to have caught sight of you at the far end of an interminably straight road, and at so great a distance that they content themselves with directing towards you an almost imperceptible movement of the head, in proportion to your doll-like dimensions. Now, the lady who was walking with Legrandin was a model of virtue, known and highly respected; there could be no question of his being out for amorous adventure, and annoyed at being detected; and my father asked himself how he could possibly have displeased our friend.

Their suspicion is confirmed when M. Legrandin does not tell them (again) of his sister's nearness to Balbec, where the boy will stay with his grandmother. The man is a secret snob. He blathers on about knowing many people in many places. Here's a good hint --> if someone blathers on without quite answering a question directly, he's hiding something.

Oh! Swann's way is a walk. They either go the Guermantes way, or Swann's way, also known as Meseglise.

Since my father used always to speak of the 'Meseglise way' as comprising the finest view of a plain that he knew anywhere, and of the 'Guermantes way' as typical of river scenery, I had invested each of them, by conceiving them in this way as two distinct entities, with that cohesion, that unity which belongs only to the figments of the mind; the smallest detail of either of them appeared to me as a precious thing, which exhibited the special excellence of the whole, while, immediately beside them, in the first stages of our walk, before we had reached the sacred soil of one or the other, the purely material roads, at definite points on which they were set down as the ideal view over a plain and the ideal scenery of a river, were no more worth the trouble of looking at them than, to a keen playgoer and lover of dramatic art, are the little streets which may happen to run past the walls of a theatre. But, above all, I set between them, far more distinctly than the mere distance in miles and yards and inches which separated one from the other, the distance that there was between the two parts of my brain in which I used to think of them, one of those distances of the mind which time serves only to lengthen, which separate things irremediably from one another, keeping them for ever upon different planes.

He's very sensitive and sensual, this boy. Of lilacs along the walk:

Despite my desire to throw my arms about their pliant forms and to draw down towards me the starry locks that crowned their fragrant heads, we would pass them by without stopping...

He's always been very interested in Swann's little girl, because of her author friend Bergotte, so when they walk by, the narrator hopes to see her.

I should have liked to see their reckoning proved false, to see, by a miracle, Mlle. Swann appear, with her father, so close to us that we should not have time to escape, and should therefore be obliged to make her acquaintance. And so, when I suddenly noticed a straw basket lying forgotten on the grass by the side of a line whose float was bobbing in the water, I made a great effort to keep my father and grandfather looking in another direction, away from this sign that she might, after all, be in residence.

I know from the hawthorn on my street, they can have a stunning presence, and I don't have the boy's association with the ceremonies he loves.

...my grandfather called me to him, and, pointing to the hedge of Tansonville, said: "You are fond of hawthorns; just look at this pink one; isn't it pretty?" ...that it was Nature herself who had spontaneously expressed it (with the simplicity of a woman from a village shop, labouring at the decoration of a street altar for some procession) by burying the bush in these little rosettes, almost too ravishing in colour, this rustic 'pompadour.'

Such a significant moment. Taking in his beloved hawthorns, coming upon the unique pompadour hawthorn, then seeing the girl at Swann's.

Suddenly I stood still, unable to move, as happens when something appears that requires not only our eyes to take it in, but involves a deeper kind of perception and takes possession of the whole of our being. A little girl, with fair, reddish hair, who appeared to be returning from a walk, and held a trowel in her hand, was looking at us, raising towards us a face powdered with pinkish freckles. Her black eyes gleamed, and as I did not at that time know, and indeed have never since learned how to reduce to its objective elements any strong impression, since I had not, as they say, enough 'power of observation' to isolate the sense of their colour, for a long time afterwards, whenever I thought of her, the memory of those bright eyes would at once present itself to me as a vivid azure, since her complexion was fair; so much so that, perhaps, if her eyes had not been quite so black—which was what struck one most forcibly on first meeting her—I should not have been, as I was, especially enamoured of their imagined blue.

And this girl holds hints of ways of being that this obedient boy has not known before.

...she allowed her eyes to wander, over the space that lay between us, in my direction, without any particular expression, without appearing to have seen me, but with an intensity, a half-hidden smile which I was unable to interpret, according to the instruction I had received in the ways of good breeding, save as a mark of infinite disgust; and her hand, at the same time, sketched in the air an indelicate gesture, for which, when it was addressed in public to a person whom one did not know, the little dictionary of manners which I carried in my mind supplied only one meaning, namely, a deliberate insult. "Gilberte, come along; what are you doing?" called out in a piercing tone of authority a lady in white, whom I had not seen until that moment, while, a little way beyond her, a gentleman in a suit of linen 'ducks,' whom I did not know either, stared at me with eyes which seemed to be starting from his head; the little girl's smile abruptly faded, and, seizing her trowel, she made off without turning to look again hi my direction, with an air of obedience, inscrutable and sly.

Again, I happened to pick a stopping point that leaves me eager for the next installment. This is purely accidental, as there are many long-winded spots that would not have yielded such an introduction to an intriguing character, so obviously significant to the narrator.

Previous posts:
Schedule
Week 1
Week 2

Fat Karma: Health Care Bigotry

I got my first glimpse that I would be treated differently by the insurance industry and health care providers when I was turned down for insurance over 15 years ago. At 5'6", they wanted me to be under 200 lbs, and I weighed 205 lbs. I sent Blue Cross Blue Shield a letter asking them to reconsider, that I was a vegetarian, I was a meditator, I exercised regularly, that my blood pressure and cholesterol levels were quite normal. They relented, and agreed to give me insurance, but would not cover any health care having to do with weight loss, heart disease, blood pressure, or diabetes. This despite my normal indicators and healthy behaviors.

Years later, my indicators are still normal, but for a slightly elevated blood pressure, which is easily controlled. Fortunately, my work-provided insurance has improved for part-time employees, and I no longer need the gutted cheap insurance. Fortunately also I like my job, because I could not get insurance otherwise, and some jobs actually weed potential employees out according to these same health factors.

My own experiences of fat bigotry from health care providers has been subtle, but I have heard some horror stories from others. A few years ago I met a woman who was forced to walk around with a broken tailbone, in constant pain. The surgeon she spoke to would not do the surgery because he said she was too fat. He would, however, recommend bariatric surgery. That, well that is a horror story in itself. Don't believe the soft-light commercials in which they say,"It's time." At least 1 in 100 people die from bariatric surgery and its complications, and it's hard to pin down the actual rate because deaths further in time from the surgery are not included.

Think about this procedure that has been touted lately as the life-saver for obese people. Because you know they tell us we're going to die if we don't lose weight. Our life will be shortened. What they don't say about that is people with diabetes experience a shortened life, sometimes. People with heart disease experience a shortened life, sometimes. People with obesity don't always have diabetes or heart disease. And what is it supposed to shorten my life by? 3 years? 5 years? So that means I'll live to be 85 barring accidents, because my family lives into the upper 80s? Meanwhile, people who undergo this surgery lose weight because they must necessarily starve themselves or experience severe consequences. This is a surgery that deliberately cripples the natural functions of a person's body for the rest of their life. It's an induced health dysfunction, and doctors recommend it.

A doctor told a good friend of mine that her 17 year old daughter "is a good candidate for bariatric surgery." My eyes about popped out of my head. I was sure this not only had to do with fat bigotry, but with class. Did this doctor think because this family was poor, they wouldn't know any better? Fortunately she mentioned it to me so I could tell her the horror stories of people dying from intestinal blockages, or from beriberi disease. Complications from this surgery last the rest of your life, and for the rest of your life, you must take steps not to be vitamin-deficient because of the tiny amounts of food you have to eat. Complications also cause the need for follow-up surgeries.

Oh, but it cures diabetes, you say? Well, duh! The patients aren't eating the calories, so their fat is being consumed. Of course there is a reversal. I once read the blog of a woman who was happy she'd done the surgery because she believed it saved her life, this in spite of the fact she had severe complications which almost took her life, and necessitated further surgery. Oh, and when they say it cures diabetes, this is from studies that only looked at short term followup, not long enough to determine a cure, really.

Whew, enough about that evil surgery disguised as good.

As I mentioned, the difference in treatment I've experienced from health care providers has been more subtle. It ranges from a doctor taking one look at me and saying, "I want you to take a cholesterol test," to doctors/nurse practitioners saying, "You need to exercise more." When I say I do, they've said, "Well you need to walk faster." I think part of this is not just fat bigotry and their assumptions that I don't do these things, but the way an HMO is set up and the way doctors think. As I learned from How Doctors Think, they will latch onto a diagnosis and stick with it, disregarding other possible illnesses. In this case, they go with the most obvious defect, and hammer the protocols. They don't ask me questions.

Most recently, I suspect my new physician's assistant thinks I am non-compliant and/or stupid and/or lying. With my newly diagnosed high blood pressure (now that the defining numbers have been lowered), I wanted to be sure it wasn't Sudafed that was sending my numbers up, so I delayed the bp medication for 3 weeks while I stopped taking Sudafed, and we worked out that I could try Benadryl at night instead. That worked fairly well, and I could sleep, but my blood pressure didn't lower, so I started on the blood pressure meds. (Initially I was never told Sudafed could raise a person's blood pressure.) I told her I wanted to go back to Sudafed, as it hadn't made a difference. She reluctantly agreed, and refused to give me a stronger dose, writing on my record, "Lay off the Sudafed, it raises your blood pressure!" Seriously, did she think I was lying when I said I tested my blood pressure before and after taking it? Or did she even pay attention to me? If she thinks I'm being non-compliant, does she even realize she may be allowing bias to affect her judgment? At least she ordered a full blood workup for me, as that unearthed anemia and vitamin D deficiency. I believe I've been suffering from anemia for almost 3 years, but my previous nurse practitioner termed my worsening monthly conditions as normal. I'm not sure why, but I think she ordered the tests in part because I complained about doctors always telling me to exercise without asking questions about my health habits. Am I making this up, that her views of me have to do with my fat? Probably not.

Well here, watch this. It pretty much covers the kinds of bias a fat person experiences from health care providers. I noticed though, even this video fell a little bit short in its advice to doctors: nowhere do they mention the need to recognize the good health habits a fat person already has. It seems they didn't root out the common assumption that we haven't any good health habits.

Earlier posts in this series:
Introduction
It Starts Young

Slow Read: Swann's Way, Week 2

In Search of Lost Time: Volume 1, Swann's Way (Modern Library Classics) (v. 1)
by Marcel Proust, translated by Scott Moncrieff

Combray, Section 2

It strikes me that many of the memories of the narrator are from his imagination. Also, any time he gets close to some real life drama, his parents remove the responsible actors from his life, thus necessitating more of his memories be of future fantasies.

M Legrandin --> poser?

Besides, she thought it in not very good taste that M. Legrandin, whose sister was married to a country gentleman of Lower Normandy near Balbec, should deliver himself of such violent attacks upon the nobles, going so far as to blame the Revolution for not having guillotined them all. ...

"Oh, I admit," he went on, with his own peculiar smile, gently ironical, disillusioned and vague, "I have every useless thing in the world in my house there. The only thing wanting is the necessary thing, a great patch of open sky like this. Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life, little boy," he added, turning to me. "You have a soul in you of rare quality, an artist's nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs."

This reminds me of some I know who had ideas about how things would be when they grew up, but when they got there it wasn't like that. (And how I did not have these fantasies about how it would be, just that I had to get out.)

At this date I was a lover of the theatre: a Platonic lover, of necessity, since my parents had not yet allowed me to enter one, and so incorrect was the picture I drew for myself of the pleasures to be enjoyed there that I almost believed that each of the spectators looked, as into a stereoscope, upon a stage and scenery which existed for himself alone, though closely resembling the thousand other spectacles presented to the rest of the audience individually.

I find it interesting that he terms his inexperience in how things actually were as Platonic.

My heart beat loud while I counted out to myself "Shall I do it, shall I not?" and then I ceased to ask myself what I ought to do so as at least to do something. Blindly, hotly, madly, flinging aside all the reasons I had just found to support such action, I seized and raised to my lips the hand she held out to me. "Isn't he delicious! Quite a ladies' man already; he takes after his uncle. He'll be a perfect 'gentleman,'"

So then he goes and blurts it all out to his parents and they and his uncle is estranged.

He is quite an astute boy, recognizing the way books make emotional truths larger than life, more obvious, whereas in real life, changes come more slowly. Or I would say, dramatic changes happen less often than fictional narratives. Hmmm, could be why I myself latch on to drama so quickly...I read constantly just like this boy.

It is the same in life; the heart changes, and that is our worst misfortune; but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination; for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.

Hmmm the conquest of truth, rather expensive, or a life based on internal fictions? Interesting passage, I want to revisit this perhaps:

Had my parents allowed me, when I read a book, to pay a visit to the country it described, I should have felt that I was making an enormous advance towards the ultimate conquest of truth. For even if we have the sensation of being always enveloped in, surrounded by our own soul, still it does not seem a fixed and immovable prison; rather do we seem to be borne away with it, and perpetually struggling to pass beyond it, to break out into the world, with a perpetual discouragement as we hear endlessly, all around us, that unvarying sound which is no echo from without, but the resonance of a vibration from within. We try to discover in things, endeared to us on that account, the spiritual glamour which we ourselves have cast upon them; we are disillusioned, and learn that they are in themselves barren and devoid of the charm which they owed, in our minds, to the association of certain ideas; sometimes we mobilise all our spiritual forces in a glittering array so as to influence and subjugate other human beings who, as we very well know, are situated outside ourselves, where we can never reach them.

Bloch, another man destined for banishment. The 'rents just don't answer the door when these ne'er-do-wells come calling to steal their baby's innocence.

Unfortunately I was not able to set at rest, by further talks with Bloch, in which I might have insisted upon an explanation, the doubts he had engendered in me when he told me that fine lines of poetry (from which I, if you please, expected nothing less than the revelation of truth itself) were all the finer if they meant absolutely nothing. For, as it happened, Bloch was not invited to the house again.

Okay, have I just missed the narrator's name or has it not been mentioned? It's like trying to find the pineapple in Psych...I keep forgetting to watch for it, but I don't want to backtrack just to look for the pineapple because by the time I've watched it I'm too late to try for the prize anyway.

Previous posts:
Schedule
Week 1

Fat Karma: It Starts Young

It's pretty clear we humans are meant to come in different shapes, colors, and sizes, as we are different sizes even before we enter school. I was a chunky little girl. I was told I was barrel-chested. I could see I was bigger than the other elfin-sized kids. Sadly, it's nothing new that this is treated with alarm by many adults. Even if it isn't, children pick up pretty quickly that they are not good enough when it comes to weight. It happened to me in the 70s, it happened to girls in the 80s, and it is happening even now. Girls at the age of 11 are dieting, and this can only fuck them up for the rest of their lives when it comes to food.

Sometimes it can't be avoided. I know a girl who was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. I've seen her growing up, and I've seen her develop a very needy personality surrounding food. In her case food must be measured precisely, regulated, and negotiated with insulin shots. I feel so sad for her, as this will be a life-long push and pull. But if a girl is simply a little larger than her average peer, without such illnesses, such restrictions should not occur.

I've been in the hospital one time in my life. I was sick with the flu, and got so dehydrated they put me there to get re-hydrated. They wouldn't let me eat because they were giving me all the nutrients I needed in the drip. That's what they told me anyway. They couldn't find my blood vessels in my arms, so they put them in my legs. My mom fainted. When they removed the drip they finally said I could eat, but what they brought me was broth. I wanted real food. The nurse told me the doctor put me on a diet. I cried and cried at that, thinking even the doctor was saying I weighed too much. I was 6 years old. I said I didn't like it. They brought me something else just as thin. I didn't like that. Finally they brought an orange jello that tasted like cardboard. They said they didn't have anything else in the kitchen. I think at some point someone told me the diet wasn't meant for me to lose weight, but just because I'd been sick. Already at this age 'diet' to me meant the need to lose weight.

I have heard that the best way to give little ones a good diet and a good start to eating right is to allow them to graze, and to make healthy food easily available for them to graze on. Making a small child limit what she eats, restricting access, and making her think she's too fat at the age of 6 has to be just the opposite. I don't blame anybody for this, as this is and has been the accepted fear in our society. Little kids can't be allowed to weigh too much. Geez, could it get any worse than an insurance company refusing to insure a breast-fed baby?

The other very young memory I have is from around the age of 5, going to the annual family reunion, and being told I could only choose a diet soda. This was just the way things were. This is just the way things are now...I can't stand the taste of regular soda...I only drink diet.

I'm sure I knew the calories of various regularly eaten foods by the age of 16. I still have a ballpark idea, though I have refrained from counting calories for almost 20 years. Of course I knew the best things for me are broccoli, celery, and green beans...they have the least calories! Oh, and iceberg lettuce...it practically has negative calories. I'm pretty sure I was dieting by the age of 12. It was a continual thing, this restriction of food, this neediness brought about through the restriction of food. I never did have a healthy grasp on satiety because of dieting, so it understandably took me many years of finding that balance when I began listening to my body's true needs when I was in my 20s.

It turns out I am not alone. Chances are if you diet before 14, you will grow up to be obese. I'm sure I would be much worse off if I had continued to try to ignore my body's natural needs.

Besides corrupting my ability to know when sated or not, I think the larger damage from learning I was not the right size at such a young age was the beginnings of the notion that because I was fat, I could not be fit. In just a few short years I would be the last one picked for t-ball or kickball on the playground. I believed, all the children believed, that the thinner we were, the better we could be at sports. It was a cultural-fulfilling prophecy from 1st grade on up.

They say our personality is fully developed by age 5. What that says to me is that the conditions that go into making the personality of the self seem to be so immutable not only because of genetics, but because of the circumstances that arise before memories stick. How much of our view of our capabilities come from the views of others from before we can even remember? A child might not remember adults clucking over her chunkiness at the age of 2, but it still has an effect on her in later years. If food was withheld at age 2 except at certain times and in certain amounts, would that not have an effect on her hunger at age 7? When adults in a society that obsesses over weight carry that karma over to their children, there's little to no chance the children can escape that karma.

Earlier posts in this series:
Introduction