cow urine & fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt

Months ago, I mentioned a "cow urine" diet...

By the age of 14, I'd already been thoroughly through the diet wringer. Why I was put on so many diets so young is pretty much of a mystery to me, since I wasn't fat. Round, yes...but never so round that you'd even call me chubby. My parents are fine people, but they were pretty much nuts during much of our coming up years, and I guess, like, one of their hobbies was to try to make me thin or something.

By 1970, they'd tried the following in their fearless quest for a Twiggy daughter:

• 1961 - Changing the big meal of the day to noon, during which time I was at kindergarten.
• 1965 - Paying me a dollar for every pound I lost. I was 8 at the time. A dollar bought 20 candy bars in 1962, or two movie tickets. A dollar was sweet incentive...
• 1969 - Stillman's Diet. What every junior high kid wants to eat in front of her friends at school every day - broiled hamburger and a boiled egg. Oh yeah. THAT was fun...

Apparently none of these diets did much good. I do remember quickly losing weight on the Stillman's Diet...then gaining it all back in something like 3 and a half minutes.

So there was a fourth (but hardly the last) attempt. This one, the cow urine diet, involved Mom driving me to the local medical clinic every day for a shot of treated cow urine. It was supposed to help me shed pounds quickly. Hmmm...... Oh....and....well...just in case the pee shot didn't work, I was also simultaneously put on a rather restrictive diet. How restrictive? This restrictive: I was supposed to eat two cartons of yogurt a day. And that's it. Two cartons of yogurt! 500 calories.

Mind you, I was walking a mile to school every day and a mile back. I was 14 and a cheerleader and we practiced cheer for a couple hours every night after school, and when I wasn't walking or cheering I was playing badminton or kick ball in the church parking lot, or on my bike roaming the neighborhoods. Two cartons of yogurt a day. Ahhh....the enlightened 70's....

After 2 or 3 days of near starvation, I invented various and vital reasons to go down to the basement many, many times a day. Our basement was our pantry, and it was loaded with 10 lb. coffee cans loaded with Mom's reeeeally yummy homemade cookies. Peanut butter cookies, gingersnap cookies, chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal raisin cookies, snickerdoodles and shortbread and probably more that I've forgotten. No lie. There were never fewer than 6 giant coffee cans full of cookies downstairs. If the measure of a great mom is whether or not she stays home and bakes cookies, then my mom gets a perfect 10!

So, the cow urine diet was a bust. Two cartons of yogurt a day plus the crusts off Kim Harmon's tuna fish sandwiches at school lunch every day plus a couple dozen cookies every day pretty much negated whatever magical powers lurked inside that syringe. After a couple of weeks with no results, I remember the doctor's furrowed, accusatory brow as he actually asked me if I was cheating on the diet. If?? He had to ask if??????? I steadfastly denied it of course, probably while turning a furious red, as I was wont to do back then.

So there you go. That's my cow urine story. Not just everyone has a cow urine story. I'm rather fond of mine...

the buddy system

You know how when you scuba dive, you always dive with a buddy?

I'm beginning to think I need a buddy for every-day life! I'm in Keizer, Oregon doing a 4-day workshop. Last night, I got off the elevator and walked down my hotel hallway, stopping in front of my door to insert the key card. My card wouldn't unlock the door. That's because I wasn't at the right door, even though this was the third night I was in the same hotel room! Not only was I standing in front of the wrong door, it turned out my room was across the hall! Sheeeeesh....

So then last night, I had dinner with 2 of the women attending my workshop. We went to a Thai restaurant nearby, and I drove. We had a nice, long, relaxing dinner over delicious plates of curries and stir-frys. When it was time to go, I dug into my purse to get my keys ready. No keys. No keys in my coat pocket either, or under the table or anywhere in sight. So out we went to the car....and you guessed it. Keys are in the ignition, the doors are locked tight and the car is running! The car was running the entire 2 hours we were inside enjoying dinner.

Good grief.

I shudder to think of the quality of my life in another dozen years or so....

:-)

remind me again why I do art?

I've been working on my self-portrait the last couple of days.

Working on is the right term. It is such hard work, creating art, isn't it? Like pulling teeth at times. I miss cigarettes when I draw. I haven't smoked in over 2 years, and I won't again...but they sure did seem to help.

You draw a little and think it's all going well...and then you sit back and take a longer view of your work and see that something's wrong...(here's where you light up your menthol extra light 100) and you don't know what's wrong and so you look back and forth and back and forth between your art and photo and then you can't stand it that you can't see what's wrong so you get up for another cup of coffee/diet coke and then you come back and you think maybe you know what's wrong. So you draw a little and think it's going well...and then you sit back...and it all starts all over again.

What is fun about this? What about this process makes us so eager to do it as often as possible? We're all a crazy bunch of loony folks, I say!!!!

On the other hand, sometimes when I look at a few of my finished portraits, I can't quite believe my hands and eyes created such a wonder from colored pencils.

I guess in the end the agony is occasionally worth it. Maybe.

Back to work....

he was home...

On a happier note than that last post...

Yesterday I went to see Kevin. We went to our usual haunt. On the way, we got stuck in a traffic jam and I had my camera, so I took a whole series of pictures of him in the back seat. He was in a great mood, and seemed to like it that I was taking his picture.

We met my daughter and beau at McDonald's and Kevin had a great time watching all the kids bounce around the play area and a great time looking at all the pictures on the camera that I'd just taken of him. He especially loved the ones that his stuffed Barney had made it into.

After a couple hours, we headed back to his group home. We pulled into the parking lot of his apartment complex and I parked the car and turned off the Disney Children's Songs CD we were listening to.

Kevin took off his seat belt without being asked, and he opened his door without prompting. He got out of the car and stood waiting for me to get out and close my door. We started to walk together back to his apartment....and that's when I knew something had changed.

Kevin was home.

I don't know how I knew...but I did. Kevin was home! Kevin was home and he wasn't unhappy that he was home! Kevin has his own home!

I walked him in, and we ended the visit as we always do...His bedroom is on the bottom floor, so after I kiss him goodbye in his room and leave the apartment, I always walk around the outside and knock on his window and tell him again that I love him. He sometimes smiles, but usually he just hangs out in his room until he sees me at the window, and then he walks back to the living room, and I walk away to my car feeling a little sad and guilty. Nothing different last night. Except that everything was different. Kevin was really home and he knew he was home and I knew he was home, and we were both completely okay with that.

I walked back to my car smiling.

Thought you'd all like to know that....

protect me from security

So two days after our dreamy Workshop Cruise, I was back on the road headed to a workshop in Decatur, Illinois. On the way there, I learned an ugly little lesson...

It began with a tardy taxi to the airport, leaving me a bit frazzled...a feeling that intensified as I began the airport security frenzied routine. Off goes the coat. Off go the shoes. Out goes the laptop. Into bins go all, plus my purse, plus my laptop case. Compliantly, I wait for my turn to go forward.

"Take your jacket off," I hear from the TSA agent as I get ready to step through the magic arch. I am wearing a rather heavy fleece button down shirt because I often get cold when flying. Beneath my shirt is a little camisole so tight and unflattering I wouldn't bare it in front of my own mirror, let alone the public at large. Foolishly, (but very politely) I decide to enlighten the agent that my "jacket" is a shirt.

"My jacket is in that bin. This is my shirt."

"Take your jacket off."

"But I hardly have anything on underneath," I say, rather feebly, sensing I'm about to lose this one.

"Take your jacket off or get checked."

Sigh. "Okay....I guess I'll get checked then..."

Isn't that something? How is it I'm so vain? My father warned my sister and me about vanity. In the throes of our pre-teen angst we naturally spent years in front of the mirror trying to make utterly recalcitrant hair behave. Meanwhile my father was absolutely convinced we were dangerously close to strangling in our own vile vanity and never missed a chance to warn us of said danger.

How silly, really, to care if a few dozen people see my well-filled camisole...

I walk through the metal detector to stand by his side, waiting for the female agents who will take me to a little "room", where we will together discover that I am no security risk. Just then, my purse went through the machine. Suddenly and without a hint of warning, another agent is yelling at me. Yelling. Yelling with a red face. Yelling with something way too akin to rage. Yelling with frustration and disgust and fury.

"IS THIS YOURS?!!"

He is 4 feet from me and is holding up above his head my fewer-than-3-ounces perfume bottle, safely encased in its own ziplock bag.

I reply in a confused daze, "Yes."

And then he erupted all over me - something about how I'd left it in my purse instead of taking it out of my purse and now I'd have to relinquish my perfume or check it. But he sort of went on and on and on about it all, yelling the whole time.

I'm telling you, I was stunned. I'm not even sure I understood half what he was saying. I remember just trying to figure out what he was actually telling me. I mean, what was going to happen to me, now that I'd sinned?

In trying to make sense of all this, I mumbled something like, "It's in a ziplock bag..." And that was the wrong thing to say. He exploded with renewed fury, starting the whole diatribe all over again.

Slowly, I came to realize that he really meant it. Perfume in ziplog bag outside purse? Cool. Perfume in ziplog bag inside purse? Very, very, very uncool. As the shock wore off and I began to realize I was about to lose my favorite, expensive, fraught-with-memories-and-sentiment perfume, I very quietly and steadily said, "I will not relinquish it."

His eyes bugged and he started to go from Crimson Red to Henna. "You're not going to relinquish it???!!!! You're going to check it???!!! You're not...you're going to...you're not..."

I swear he started to sputter. I just stood there, quietly.

He half threw it to the women who'd meantime arrived to take me to that private room where next I would succumb to a partial disrobing. Still mostly in a daze of shock, I followed them for the procedure, trying to figure out how I was going to save what was mine. In the end, exhausted but determined, I fell back on tears and sympathy and a good lie.

"I need to keep my perfume. My husband gave it to me and he was killed in a car accident a year ago, and I can't give it up."

They let me keep it.

I'd stood my ground. But what sad ground. How helpless I felt, knowing they had me. I needed to fly and needing to fly meant needing to succumb. I've since learned that I could have asked to see his supervisor. In the future, I will. But this isn't isolated. When we came back from Belize, my daughter put her new cell phone in her checked bag. When she got home, she had a TSA note inside her suitcase, letting her know it had been opened by them. Cell phone was no where to be found. Another friend traveled within the US in January, only to arrive missing a wrapped gift from her suitcase...a gift intended for her sister suffering from breast cancer.

What does it mean when we need security to protect us from security?