Negative Space Kind of Day

In bed at 1:30 a.m. Up at 5:30 a.m. Had a cup of coffee and a great slice of raspberry cheesecake for breakfast. I'm lactose intolerant but I didn't care because that's the kind of morning it was. Watched two episodes of TNT's Will. Watched parts of movies I'd missed and deleted them from the DVR. Felt tired and bloated. Answered some emails. (I'm about 1,000 behind.) Felt groggy by noon. Decided to nap for half an hour at 12:30. Awoke at 4ish. Needed another cup of coffee, very rare for me. Started doing the day in force at 4:30 pm. Will eat dinner and watch ballgame or movies with my better half and go to bed. Tired because I've definitely overexerted myself today. And I am not ashamed.

Foods Good for Kidney, Gut, Colon and Anti-Inflammatory Health

FOODS THAT ARE GOOD FOR KIDNEY, GUT AND COLON HEALTH, AND ARE ANTI-INFLAMMATORY

I spent a few hours today researching healthy foods for kidney, gut, colon and inflammation health, for reasons that you'd rather me not tell you about, believe me. Suffice it to say that I've had it, and there will be major changes in my food intake around here. (I'm a pretty decent eater to begin with, and weigh between 145-150 pounds, and am about 5'6".) I've had too much bread (especially bagels) and not enough water and, well, the other things listed here. I've drastically cut my chocolate and coffee intake because of the caffeine and acid, and I've never been a huge consumer of alcohol (outside of the once-a-week drink, or a beer or two at ballgames), so that's good. But even after just one or two beers, my digestive system lets me know I've been bad. Wine does that, too. Overall, my digestive system sucks, my immune system sucks, my sinuses suck, and I've had really bad inflammation for the last few months, especially in my sinuses, even after my drastic (and I do mean drastic) coffee reduction. (I'm allergic to other things, like my dog, and probably my work building, that I can't do much about.)

Some of these things, like nuts and seeds, I'll still have to stay away from. I'm allergic to nuts, and when seeds get into my intestinal tract, very bad things happen. I also didn't list any dairy, breads or grains because I'm intolerant of those (and a great many other daily) things. I should also point out that water and meditation are good anti-inflammatories as well. We should all have more.

So if you suffer from the same problems, I offer you my hours' worth of research, for free. Items followed by a (?) are things I'm not at all familiar with, so please comment if you are familiar with these things. And, yes, I know it's the holiday food season, but you do what you can. 

Incidentally, I tried to make 2 or 3 columns out of this, and couldn't do it for this blog (though I did for my own personal printouts). So if you can tell me how to do that, please drop me a comment. Please and thank you.

• ALL BEANS, NUTS AND SEEDS

• RASPBERRIES

• PEARS

• SMOOTHIES (?) Can anyone supply me with ideas for a lactose-free smoothie?

• AIR-POPPED POPCORN

• APRICOTS

• OATMEAL

• DATES

• RHUBARB

• FIGS

• RAISINS

• GRAPES

• SWEET POTATOES

• BLACKBERRIES

• PLUMS

• STRAWBERRIES

• APPLES

• PICKLES (Not olives, too?)

• BAKED POTATOES

• KIWIS

• ORANGES

• BROWN RICE

• ALOE VERA (?) This isn't just a hand lotion?

• COFFEE

• KOMBUCHA (?) I thought liquids ending with -bucha meant "alcohol."

• GARLIC

• MUSHROOMS

• MISO SOUP

• BANANAS

• ONIONS

• SOURDOUGH BREAD

• TEMPEH (?) Never saw this word before in my life.

• MISO PASTE

• NON-SUGARY OATMEAL (?) Can anyone advise me about, well, non-oat oatmeal?

• HONEY

• CULTURED NON-DAIRY MILK

• FISH SAUCE

• CARROTS

• KALE

• BLUEBERRIES

• GREEN TEA

• CELERY

• OLIVE OIL

• EGGS

• CHICKEN

• TURKEY

• AMARANTH BISCUITS (?)

Signs You're Gettin' Old

--You read an article about seven necessary exercises for men and you read this, "Functional exercises train the muscles that are used for everyday activities like mowing the lawn..." and you think, Damn it, mowing the lawn IS my exercise.

--Followed immediately by: Now it's an everyday activity I need to exercise for?

--You put two bricks into the ground to complete a planting barrier, and then surround a plant with six more bricks that you basically just stomped into the ground, and you think that's a good day's work in the sun.

--And it's just in the high 40s. And it took just half an hour.

--You wake up the next morning and your body is a tad sore from this "rigorous work."

--You appreciate sitting in the sun--in a room in your house that gets a lot of sun.

--And you appreciate this room, like you never knew it got so much good sun.

--Because you didn't know, though you've lived in the house for almost five years.

--You realize you're as old as your father was when you thought he was old.

--Your doctor says, "We need to think about your prostate."

--And, "When was the last time you had your cholesterol tested?"

--After hearing this, you feel your blood pressure spiking and you're grateful they've already done that test.

--You monitor how much coffee and water you're drinking, so you don't have to do #1 when you know you'll be in the middle of something important.

--Like, going to see a movie. Or "working" outside.

--You're seriously considering fiber bars and cranberry juice.

--You find yourself typing articles about what gettin' old feels like.

Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel

Photo: from the author's webpage and bio section.  It's on her latest books, too.  And in Entertainment Weekly, which says that her newest, Station Eleven, is "the must-read of the fall."  I don't doubt that it is.  I love her writing, from her first book, reviewed here, to her online essays.  Good writing is good writing, no matter the form or the genre.

An exquisitely-written, stays-with-you little gem of a book, more about the people who are left behind than about the people who leave.

Very short, at 220 pages, but very deep about obsession, depression, leaving and staying behind.  The characters are all representatives, of course, more than they are flesh-and-blood, exactly, which made me hate Lilia a little less at the end, when we learn in the last few sentences of the book that she lived happily-ever-after (mostly) after all, despite all the (mostly unintentional, but c'mon) heartbreak she left in her wake.

But she has been thrown through a window, seen a man driven off the road, seen a woman pulverized by a subway train, and she never had a lasting friendship or relationship until she married in her late-20s after finally staying somewhere--in this case, Italy.  Some reviews hated on her character, and I could see their point, especially how this waif with tight dark hair just so easily grabbed relationships with men and women (bisexuality is hinted at in the book)--and all she has to do to get them is to read in cultured little coffeeshops...  Yet, I don't doubt that there are a lot of Lilias out there, and that there are indeed affected women who sit in coffeeshops all the time, and bookish male intellectuals trip over themselves to be with them.  Plus, looking at the author's picture, I think it might be a bit of a self-description.  Maybe a little Freudian analysis is necessary here.  But I digress...

Lilia is representative of a type, and not full-blooded, so I ultimately gave her a pass.  After awhile of thinking about it.  Plus, I'd sit down next to her in a coffeeshop...

But all the characters are this way.  They're representative, and many of them come off far worse than she.  There's the aforementioned mother who threw her young child out the window...which was closed, by the way.  And she left the child in the winter snow to freeze, too.  Luckily that didn't happen--the freezing, I mean. 

Then there's the detective father who is the real obsessive of the book.  He leaves his wife and daughter for weeks, months and, yes, years at a time, to track down Lilia and her father, long after her abduction ceased to be worth tracking down.  (She's in her 20s, and plus she was better off away from the free-throwing mother.)  This guy's wife leaves him, then he leaves his 15-year old daughter alone as he again obsessively tracks Lilia down.  Ultimately he ends up returning to his young daughter for a short time, but then he leaves again and disappears forever from her life.  It's possible he commits suicide somewhere. 

This girl, his daughter, quits school, which he doesn't notice, and eventually befriends Lilia, and then her ex- (who Lilia leaves at the beginning and who tracks her down in Montreal, in a fashion, but he actually latches on to this guy's grown-up daughter, kinda gets obsessed with her for two weeks and never really seems that intent to find Lilia...) and then she becomes a stripper, learns something even more unsettling about her father, and then kills herself.

She's the real victim here.

The above paragraph may make the book sound like a soap opera, but it's really not.  In lesser, untalented hands, this would have been a real mess, and worthy of mockery and lampooning--but it's in great hands, and really stylishly and compactly written.  It's not my kind of book, normally, but there's huge buzz right now about Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, so I wanted to read her early stuff first.  I also read a couple of her online articles--one about NYC's reaction to Ebola before the doctor got sick there--and those were very well-written as well.

You've got to read this one.  For the writing.  For the interweaving structure.  For what it says about those who leave.  And for what it shows about those who are left.

It's well-constructed, a bit haunting and lyrical, and it'll stay with you.  It'll resonate.

And, oh yeah--Don't go to Montreal in the winter.