It's Hot.

It's the height of the summer, and as a dweller of a third floor apartment, I have had to resort to air conditioning the past two days. I wonder, how much cooler would it be up here if there weren't a black roof throbbing with heat overhead? Here's an article about white roofs that was published a few weeks ago in The Times.

White Roofs Catch on as Energy Cutters

published July 29, 2009
by FELICITY BARRINGER

SAN FRANCISCO — Returning to their ranch-style house in Sacramento after a long summer workday, Jon and Kim Waldrep were routinely met by a wall of heat.

“We’d come home in the summer, and the house would be 115 degrees, stifling,” said Mr. Waldrep, a regional manager for a national company.

He or his wife would race to the thermostat and turn on the air-conditioning as their four small children, just picked up from day care, awaited relief.


Jim Wilson/The New York Times
A white roof has helped cool Jon Waldrep's Sacramento home.

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An article by Geneen Roth, "Cherish the Crooked Stitches..."

Found this article in a Kripalu newsletter in my inbox this morning. It is too pertinent to what I've been writing about to not repost!


cherish the crooked stitches: learning to love your body
and your life

by Geneen Roth

A groundbreaking author and workshop leader, Geneen Roth was one of the first to explore the pivotal links between emotions, eating, and spirituality. Her seven books include the New York Times best-seller When Food Is Love and her latest, The Craggy Hole in My Heart and the Cat Who Fixed It. Geneen believes your relationship to food, money, and love is a perfect reflection of your relationship to life itself, and that the way to transform those relationships is to be open, curious, and kind to yourself.


My friend Catherine recently told me about a 50-year-old friend of hers who’d been a member of a sewing circle for 10 years and was now dying of brain cancer. “I labored and sweated over my crooked stitches,” the friend said. “And I always felt ashamed for not making the right-sized or -shaped stitches. As if making straight stitches actually meant something about me or my life. Now, the doctors say I have six months to live and when I think about the time I wasted worrying about those crooked stitches…” Most of the people I see spend most of their lives worrying about their own versions of crooked stitches—the size of their thighs, their hips, their abdomens. As if those things mean something true or real about their lives. As if when we get to the end of our lives, a number on a scale will mean anything at all.

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Dreaming

AH, the strange, beautiful, terrifying and personal wonder that is dreaming. The key word here is personal–dreams read like your own novel; they are thoughts and emotions and experiences expressed with your own individual metaphors. Dream dictionaries are not necessary. The answers, ideas and release that are present in our dreams need only a bit of reflection to be understood.

A few years back I had had a dream in which my car kept breaking down and eventually fell into a body of water through a break in the road. At the time I was dreaming vividly and recorded my dreams adamantly. It wasn't until a few days after the dream that I realized the car was a representation of my body and my psyche was asking me to take better care of it. I had been thinking about the various things a body does prior to having that dream, and, among other aspects, came up with the words "My body gets me where I need to go." The faulty car in my dream was a warning, a request for respect and honor towards my physical being.

Love's Executioner by Irvin D. Yalom is an excellent book showcasing the healing power of dreams. It is a collection of ten case studies, and each of Yalom's patients undergo vast changes and delve deep into their own hearts and minds. One of the patients in his book, Dave, is terminally ill and shares this dream:

"Death is all around me. I can smell death. I have a packet with an envelope stuffed inside of it, and the envelope contains something that is immune to death or decay or deterioration. I'm keeping it secret. I go to pick it up and feel it, and suddenly I seee that the envelope is empty. I feel very distressed about that and notice that it's been slit open. Later I find what I assume was in the envelope on the street, and it is a dirty old shoe with the sole coming off."

After discussing the dream with Yalom and his group members, Dave comes to see the shoe as himself: "'My God! A dirty old man whose soul is about to leave him! That's me all right!' He chuckled at his own creation. A lover of words (he spoke several languages), he marveled at the transposition of soul and sole."

Yalom states in the prologue that there is no singular meaning to a dream. Dave's dream could have pointed him in any number of directions, but that moment of epiphany gave him the understanding he needed at the moment. One could spend days peeling away the layers of meaning in a dream and still have much to explore.

Another interesting dream perspective someone shared with me is to take on the role of every character in your dream. I told her about a dream in which someone wouldn't make eye contact with me, and she parleyed with, "Maybe you're not making eye contact with yourself."

There's much to explore when you wake up from a vivid dream. Next time it happens take the time to write it down and see what you're trying to tell yourself.

More on the Food and Diet Industry

A few good articles by Mandy Katz about food, body image, diets, etc. in The Times yesterday. It's interesting to note that these articles are located in "Styles". It makes sense; body types have their own "fashion eras" so to speak. Venus had her day,
The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli

as did Twiggy.
Image via Match Game

One article is about the new-old "fat acceptance" trend, which on one side of the spectrum embraces realistic bodies and on the other encourages a complacency in obesity. Overall, the movement is about focusing on aspects of life other than weight: "The aim is to behave as if you have reached your 'goal weight' and to act on ambitions postponed while trying to become thin, everything from buying new clothes to changing careers."

It is too true that many people feel everything will fall into place once they lose a certain amount of weight. Often times when that goal weight is attained the obsession with food, exercise or diet still remains and the person is no closer to their actual goals.

Katz mentions the adversary of this new trend–the weight loss industry itself, a staggering $30-billion dollar monstrosity.

Katz also wrote a review of Lessons From the Fat-O-Sphere by Kate Harding, a book about Harding's own experience with ditching dieting and learning to eat intuitively.

Harding has a photo set on Flickr titled "Illustrated BMI Categories". It's interesting to look at pictures of these women, many of whom are attractive. They all are seemingly oblivious to the words "underweight", "normal" or "obese" hovering above their images.

The Body Mass Index Calculator is not an accurate tool for determining a healthy weight. It takes no account of bone or muscle mass, and unfortunately is used as a standard in many health practices, including eating disorder treatment centers.

Men don't have it easy either, not to say that struggles with weight and food is a gender-specific problem. According to Men's Health, a truly fit male can bench press 1.5 times his body weight, swim 700 yards in 12 minutes and leap to the basketball rim. Those sound more like the standards of a professional athlete rather than a man who's merely in shape.

We need to redefine our notions of beauty and health. Be it a string bean or a great pumpkin, the human body is an amazing and beautiful entity.

Wildwood

An Analog Past

The VHS selection at the Danbury Public Library has dwindled to about 30 titles. VHS players have been out of production for almost a year. Kodak's infamous Kodachrome has been retired. The news is free domain.

We are walking into a digital future, and we're doing it a few pounds lighter. Clunky tapes have been replaced by sleek discs and tiny flash drives, darkrooms by laptops and desktop printers. The air around us is vibrating with wireless connections and cell phone signals. Instant connectivity is our reality.

Songs can be summoned from the air! The actual structure for the presentation of music has changed. We listen to playlists as much as we do albums, perhaps more. Albums can be broken up and bought piecemeal. It seems the process of appreciation has sped up, and while in the past we looked to preserve that which we held dear, now we are looking to share it with everyone.

My 35mm camera hasn't seen the light of day since sometime last fall. Though I love the physicality, science and integrity of film, it's easier and timelier to adjust for color and contrast on a computer, and, ultimately, I want to share the pictures via the internet.

Yet a photograph is simple; all you need is some viewing light and it can be enjoyed. An unprinted digital photograph is specks of information on a hard drive or a server; it is something almost intangible. I look at my computer, full of pictures and music and essays, and imagine the hopelessness of knowing all the things it holds and not being able to turn it on. There is something to be said for a physical object, no matter how heavy or cumbersome. Be it a book, photograph, or vinyl recording, it's just there. It will always be accessible because it dwells in our dimension.

We are more connected than ever, but what exactly is connecting us?

Food, Industry and Us

The New York Times published an article last week about a New York mother on a junk food crusade. MeMe Roth had her children stash anything given to them aside from their school lunch in Tupperware so she could inspect it when they came home, that is until the day her daughter tried to save a juice pop and the teacher told her to "eat it or lose it". Roth is pushing for an overhaul of the school's food service, and apparently without much tact. Her aim is true–she is concerned for the health of her children and the ever-increasing obesity epidemic–but her words are fierce and her actions somewhat outlandish. Roth's children probably feel alienated, and they probably have a secret stash of chocolate in their closets.

Yesterday the Times printed a review on Dr. David A. Kessler's new book, The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite. Kessler, who himself has struggled with overeating, investigates how the food industry makes its way into the consumer brain via marketing and perfect chemical concoctions. While Roth is trying to pry junk food out of the people's hands, big name corporations are setting us up to desire it.

Food is a complicated thing for many people. There is a huge abundance of food in our country. It's everywhere, it's fast and it's cheap. There is also a huge amount of founded and unfounded information about how one should and should not eat–certain times and certain foods and certain amounts. It's enough to make anyone's head spin, expecially if they are looking to lose weight or get healthier.

The truth is that there is no such thing as a good or bad food. Food is good. Food is fuel; it is not a harbinger of fat. Fettuccini alfredo is not a "fattening" food. Lifestyle choices can be fattening, but food provides energy and sustenance.

Surely there are better ways to eat; fresh and local produce is incredibly good for you and a balanced diet is hailed by all health professionals. But the best way to eat is to eat what you want and to eat it with relish, and, if possible, with your family and friends. Depending on one's mindset, a fresh green salad can be just as nutritious as an unshared pint of ice cream. It's like going to the gym–exercising is good for you, but so is taking a day or two to relax or get something else done.

The food industry can be a war zone. We are encouraged to consume, and the more we consume the better for the industry. Individual health and peace of mind is not a corporate goal. Another notable in the Times from a few months back explained the new ad campaign of Lay's baked potato chips. The spokesperson for Lay's essentially stated that the ads preyed on women's natural feelings of guilt. Women feel guilty more often than men, especially about their food choices. Women also are more prone to snacking than men. Yes, human psychology is the basis for a solid ad campaign. Did anyone notice the change in TV commercials when the economy tanked? All of a sudden everything was sunshine and feel good and ridiculous humor.

Pair a dishonest food industry with impossible standards of beauty and you've got a population rife with disordered eating. Our food is manipulated, our information about food is manipulated and we constantly strive to be physically who we are not. The result is a huge disconnect between mind, body and soul.

The cure for disordered eating is feeding–feeding the mind, body and soul everything they need. Understanding the food industry and good nutrition, getting to know and love one's body and basking in the fields of joy, movement and creativity are all imperative foodstuffs.

We are a population out of balance with the world we live in, therefore many aspects of our daily lives tip the scales. There are too many of us, we work too much, we eat strangely, and, at the end of the day, many of us are full yet unfulfilled.

Anything can be improved upon with enough awareness and persistence. People like Michael Pollan and Dr. Kessler show that we are on our way to a food revolution, one that involves getting back to basics–growing our own food, visiting the market, indulging without guilt, having fun in the kitchen and most of all, appreciating and enjoying both the food we eat and ourselves.

Enjoy the food you eat today and take part in the revolution.

So I thought, Maybe I'll start a blog.