Monday, January 14, 2008
Diarrhea, Diarrhea Every Morning...Plus "The Nine" by Jeffrey Toobin
As of Cleanse Day 11, I am almost certainly underslept but I don't feel it. The laxative tea makes me get up with what feels like a sine curve of nausea pulsing through my abdomen, so around 5-7 am I am roused each morning to go to the bathroom. Since I live next door to a foundry, as well as down the block and across the street from two separate concrete plants, the clamorous din of industry keeps me wide awake until just before it's time to get up, which is when I usually fall back asleep. I woke up at 5:30 this morning and have been up ever since. It's 4:00, the time of day when I am usually so tired that I just make tea and read blogs until it's time to go home, but I have lots of energy. No caffeine or alcohol in thirteen days! And it will be another five at least before I breach my Mormon lifestyle.
Also, my sense of smell has improved tremendously. This is something of a mixed blessing, because while it's novel to get a whiff of someone's reheated lunch and be able to identify its composition by olfactorily detecting the various ingredients, it sucks to be confronted with someone's chicken tikka masala and then go back to my desk sucking yet more lemonade out of my Nalgene bottle. It's not so much that I'm starving as that I'm tired of the monotony.
For, you see, this cleanse is a totalitarian dictator bent on making me a skinny unperson if I commit the thoughtcrime of fantasizing about mopping up burger fat with a curly-cut french fry. I can't really socialize, and climbing stairs is strangely difficult. But I've been crossing things off my to-do lists like never before.
Considering that Elliott and I spent the entire weekend together--waking, sleeping, all--I don't even have cabin fever or stress of any kind. My sex drive has been decimated, for sure, but I had an enormously productive weekend watching films, taking Dudley to the park, seizing my jackets from an inept tailor, going to the MoMA, etc. I even read Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine from cover to cover, and have since started Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great.
Toobin's book is pretty excellent. He examines the evolution of the Supreme Court from about 1990 through the present, with his central thesis being how the mere weight of precedent, the involuntary international renown of the various justices and their travels, and the excesses of the Bush Administration have generated an irresistible force of cosmopolitanization, and, with it, a leftward drift. Sandra Day O'Connor in particular is depicted from having morphed from a Goldwater Republican to something like an Olympia Snowe. Toobin can rely too heavily on the conclusions of a single telling anecdote to brand an entire justice's temperament and judicial philosophy (in particular, Anthony Kennedy's "vanity"), but the glimpses behind the most powerful and mysterious branch of the federal government are fascinating--and occasionally, titillating. Souter writes with a fountain pen! The Ginsburgs and the Scalias celebrate New Year's together.
Toobin makes much of the relative isolation in which each justice labors; their clerks mingle and interact, but aside from regular meetings, the actual jurists allegedly work in monastic seclusion. And indeed, they are capable of bickering by proxy, through their opinions. On the other hand, he writes of the extracurricular connections among them: Rehnquist and O'Connor had barbecues together, O'Connor and Breyer were close, Ginsburg mothers Souter, Thomas is well-liked by everyone, etc. He also reveals his CNN/Beltway/Establishment position by peppering the text with the occasional revealing distaste for bloggers or hoi polloi. But it's an outstanding look at the Court and the political figures whose careers are affected by its composition.
That said, back to the cleanse. Day 11 is easier than Day 10, where I was constantly aware of what I'm not eating. I've lost just under ten pounds, which means that if I lose another five in the remaining five days, I will probably gain them back and stick with my weight as of today: 158 pounds. Now my goal is to weigh 150 by my birthday in March.
I haven't eaten solid food (except tiny slivers of lemon rind) in 260 hours. I will not eat for 121 more.
Also, my sense of smell has improved tremendously. This is something of a mixed blessing, because while it's novel to get a whiff of someone's reheated lunch and be able to identify its composition by olfactorily detecting the various ingredients, it sucks to be confronted with someone's chicken tikka masala and then go back to my desk sucking yet more lemonade out of my Nalgene bottle. It's not so much that I'm starving as that I'm tired of the monotony.
For, you see, this cleanse is a totalitarian dictator bent on making me a skinny unperson if I commit the thoughtcrime of fantasizing about mopping up burger fat with a curly-cut french fry. I can't really socialize, and climbing stairs is strangely difficult. But I've been crossing things off my to-do lists like never before.
Considering that Elliott and I spent the entire weekend together--waking, sleeping, all--I don't even have cabin fever or stress of any kind. My sex drive has been decimated, for sure, but I had an enormously productive weekend watching films, taking Dudley to the park, seizing my jackets from an inept tailor, going to the MoMA, etc. I even read Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine from cover to cover, and have since started Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great.
Toobin's book is pretty excellent. He examines the evolution of the Supreme Court from about 1990 through the present, with his central thesis being how the mere weight of precedent, the involuntary international renown of the various justices and their travels, and the excesses of the Bush Administration have generated an irresistible force of cosmopolitanization, and, with it, a leftward drift. Sandra Day O'Connor in particular is depicted from having morphed from a Goldwater Republican to something like an Olympia Snowe. Toobin can rely too heavily on the conclusions of a single telling anecdote to brand an entire justice's temperament and judicial philosophy (in particular, Anthony Kennedy's "vanity"), but the glimpses behind the most powerful and mysterious branch of the federal government are fascinating--and occasionally, titillating. Souter writes with a fountain pen! The Ginsburgs and the Scalias celebrate New Year's together.
Toobin makes much of the relative isolation in which each justice labors; their clerks mingle and interact, but aside from regular meetings, the actual jurists allegedly work in monastic seclusion. And indeed, they are capable of bickering by proxy, through their opinions. On the other hand, he writes of the extracurricular connections among them: Rehnquist and O'Connor had barbecues together, O'Connor and Breyer were close, Ginsburg mothers Souter, Thomas is well-liked by everyone, etc. He also reveals his CNN/Beltway/Establishment position by peppering the text with the occasional revealing distaste for bloggers or hoi polloi. But it's an outstanding look at the Court and the political figures whose careers are affected by its composition.
That said, back to the cleanse. Day 11 is easier than Day 10, where I was constantly aware of what I'm not eating. I've lost just under ten pounds, which means that if I lose another five in the remaining five days, I will probably gain them back and stick with my weight as of today: 158 pounds. Now my goal is to weigh 150 by my birthday in March.
I haven't eaten solid food (except tiny slivers of lemon rind) in 260 hours. I will not eat for 121 more.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Cleanse: Day VII
It's like a hunger strike for Darfur, only it's really so I can fit into all my pants.
When people casually ask me what I'm doing for lunch or see me come into the kitchen while they're heating up fragrant Indian food, they apologize profusely as if I were a mosque and they just entered me with shoes on, eating a pork rib hero.
I can tolerate the sight of food! To prove it, I will attend our weekly brown bag tomorrow, where there will be free kettle chips, Les Petits Ecoliers and cheese and crackers.
It's amazing how a single day of sub-par weight loss (in today's case, straight up zero) dampens your mood. I lost 2.8 lbs in the two prior days, which made me think I'd mastered the rhythm (eight glasses of lemonade, with some pulp and rind in there, seemed ideal) but apparently the body does what it wants. Fuck you too, body.
I'm exhausted every night because a) I'm not eating and b) the laxative tea makes me wake up at 5:00-7:30 in the morning, and by the time I've sat in the bathroom with the light on for a few minutes, I'm wide awake and it's not entirely pointful to try to get another half hour of sleep, over the din of the concrete factory's magic.
If anyone who doesn't know what they're talking about wants to vocalize their suspicions that the cleanse is either a hoax or deleterious for you, please shut the fuck up. Don't bother me; I'm on a cleanse.
When people casually ask me what I'm doing for lunch or see me come into the kitchen while they're heating up fragrant Indian food, they apologize profusely as if I were a mosque and they just entered me with shoes on, eating a pork rib hero.
I can tolerate the sight of food! To prove it, I will attend our weekly brown bag tomorrow, where there will be free kettle chips, Les Petits Ecoliers and cheese and crackers.
It's amazing how a single day of sub-par weight loss (in today's case, straight up zero) dampens your mood. I lost 2.8 lbs in the two prior days, which made me think I'd mastered the rhythm (eight glasses of lemonade, with some pulp and rind in there, seemed ideal) but apparently the body does what it wants. Fuck you too, body.
I'm exhausted every night because a) I'm not eating and b) the laxative tea makes me wake up at 5:00-7:30 in the morning, and by the time I've sat in the bathroom with the light on for a few minutes, I'm wide awake and it's not entirely pointful to try to get another half hour of sleep, over the din of the concrete factory's magic.
If anyone who doesn't know what they're talking about wants to vocalize their suspicions that the cleanse is either a hoax or deleterious for you, please shut the fuck up. Don't bother me; I'm on a cleanse.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Cleanse: Day 5
I've lost 4.2 pounds.
Day 2 was pretty bad, because I couldn't warm up.
Day 3 was better and day four was the best, but today I've been starving and exhausted all day. None of the supposed superpowers (such as an enhanced sense of smell to the point where you can tell if someone next to you has a cold because you can detect the mucus in their head) have kicked in yet, nor do I have a coated tongue or weird body odor.
I forgot my cayenne at home, so I'm cold again (it warms your body and keeps your metabolism from slowing down). It's 65 degrees outside in January, and I can't really appreciate it. I went to the tailors and passed by a Popeye's and a McDonald's on Delancey--neither of which I would ever eat at--and practically stopped short when I saw posters for chicken wings and 2 McMuffins for $3, as if they were naked mannequins, either of the Kim Cattrall variety or the kind you might have seen in Gimbel's or Wannamaker's in 1948. Supposedly when you get cravings, it's for the things your liver is finally free to detoxify in the absence of new shit entering your body through your pie-hole, but I can't remember the last burger I ate. The last bad thing that entered me was ten pieces of bacon at a New Year's brunch, which might explain the craving for Mickey-D's.
The downside to this cleanse is that you can't really hang out with people unless it's at a movie, because everything else involves eating and drinking. Although Elliott and I cleaned the house pretty thoroughly on Sunday, as a nice balance to what was going on inside of us. We always abide strictly by zen principles.
It has been 118 hours since I chewed. I don't imagine eating solid food (and even then, soup) until the evening of Saturday the 19th, so 264 hours to go.
With ten days to go, I should lose about 12 more pounds if the trend holds steady. That would be a shade under the 10% of my body weight that I hoped for.
Day 2 was pretty bad, because I couldn't warm up.
Day 3 was better and day four was the best, but today I've been starving and exhausted all day. None of the supposed superpowers (such as an enhanced sense of smell to the point where you can tell if someone next to you has a cold because you can detect the mucus in their head) have kicked in yet, nor do I have a coated tongue or weird body odor.
I forgot my cayenne at home, so I'm cold again (it warms your body and keeps your metabolism from slowing down). It's 65 degrees outside in January, and I can't really appreciate it. I went to the tailors and passed by a Popeye's and a McDonald's on Delancey--neither of which I would ever eat at--and practically stopped short when I saw posters for chicken wings and 2 McMuffins for $3, as if they were naked mannequins, either of the Kim Cattrall variety or the kind you might have seen in Gimbel's or Wannamaker's in 1948. Supposedly when you get cravings, it's for the things your liver is finally free to detoxify in the absence of new shit entering your body through your pie-hole, but I can't remember the last burger I ate. The last bad thing that entered me was ten pieces of bacon at a New Year's brunch, which might explain the craving for Mickey-D's.
The downside to this cleanse is that you can't really hang out with people unless it's at a movie, because everything else involves eating and drinking. Although Elliott and I cleaned the house pretty thoroughly on Sunday, as a nice balance to what was going on inside of us. We always abide strictly by zen principles.
It has been 118 hours since I chewed. I don't imagine eating solid food (and even then, soup) until the evening of Saturday the 19th, so 264 hours to go.
With ten days to go, I should lose about 12 more pounds if the trend holds steady. That would be a shade under the 10% of my body weight that I hoped for.
