My Words Trickle Down

UK packaged food labelling has recently started to have these little "traffic light" guides on it, where foods will be categorized as 'green', 'amber', or 'red' based on healthiness. Sometimes these are subdivided into different categories -- as on my box of cereal, which says it is 'green' for fat content but 'red' for sugar content (heh).

...And then it says it is 'green' for 'calories'. What?? Since when is 'energy contained in this food' something that is healthy or not? I mean, I had understood the colour-labelling of the other categories (fat, sugar, fibre, etc.) to be proportional measures -- i.e. this is a sugary food because it has a lot of sugar per serving. But calories -- I would have thought -- are the base agaisnt which some of the others might be measured. Right? Or maybe it means 'calories per volume', where cereal has very few and something like cake or meat has quite a lot.

In any case, foods with a lot of calories per volume are not (necessarily) any less healthy than foods with a low calorie::volume count. And it makes me angry. Angry and ranty.

Because, you see, I spent a long time in my overweight early-teens "counting calories" as a weight-loss strategy. It didn't work. It just made me hyper-aware of my food, and even though I lost a little weight, it didn't make any long-term difference, and my diet ended up being a lot less healthy than it might have been otherwise, because I would do things like forego the meatier parts of my meals in order to "spend" my allotted calories on ice cream later.

Worse, it set up in my mind this idea of 'calories (=food energy!) = BAD!' Or, okay, I probably got the idea to count calories in the first place because that idea had already been culturally implanted. My mom and aunt were in Weight Watcher's at the time, and the idea of calories and the counting of them seemed to be ever-present in the pages of women's magazines -- which still managed to worm their way into my head, even though I never properly read them; but they were always there in doctors' and dentists' and other waiting rooms (and indeed in the lobby of the Weight Watcher's, whenever my mom had to bring me along and leave me waiting during her dietary group-therapy).

Nowadays I have an utterly different perspective. I eat to fill my belly, and there is no chance that I would consider 'calories' (=food energy!) to be any kind of inherently bad thing. If anything, they are an inherently good thing! I still struggle to maintain a healthy diet, even though I have long since dropped out of the 'overweight' category. But now that means "a diet that will give me enough energy and vitamins to go about my life" rather than "a diet that will make me thin". There was a time this winter when I was buying these little pre-mixed chocolate milk things instead of lunch (like I said, I struggle) because they were cheaper than food and required no prep, while having just as many calories as a meal, and filling me up as much. And I would often go for the higher-calorie "chocolate brownie" flavour above the plain chocolate flavour, purely because the former had more calories for the same price. Which is, like, utterly unhealthy -- but only because I was drinking them to replace a meal, not because 'calories' are somehow 'bad for you'.

Yesterday was one of those very frustrating days where absolutely every attempt to accomplish anything fails, flat-out. I completed a few half-errands, forgot a few more, and inadvertantly ruined a few things. So it goes. It came on top of a more generally irritating day, previously, and a whole summer of mounting consternation and disappointment. Not with anything in particular, but with a directionless and helpless, hopeless sort of ecumenical life-frustration. Or, self-frustration, as I of course am the subject of most of it, constantly disappointing myself with my self-defeating attitudes and habits.

Recently I've been feeling inexplicably agitated. It's almost physical, like an itch or irritation deep in my chest, behind the solar plexis, churning and twitching with no hope for relief. It could just be too much coffee, I suppose, but I am so tired all the time. And anyway, it feels more like I just ought to be doing something, anything, all the time, but I've no idea what I should do -- and I am so tired, all the time. And so I itch, and burn, and snap at people.

Last night, making dinner, this inner burning found an outward manifestation. Not wanting to take the responsibility for cooking, I made it my job to help out by doing the chopping and dicing. This was all well enough for the pineapples, apples, and kiwis, but when it came to chopping chillis for Daniel's Thai banana soup, it presented more of a problem. The spicy oils seeped into my already chafed and perforated fingertips and would not wash away. They clung on and burned, through prolonged and vigorous soapings, butterings, lotionings and icings. My hands were contaminated with fire, and I could not so much as lick a finger without pain. Wiping an eye was agony; I decided to do my best to simply not touch anything until time and sweat had worn the oils away.

When it comes down to it, that's really all you can do. I've been noticing the same with onions. Sometimes I'll chop as many as a dozen or so in a day, when I'm working, covering my fingers and palms in sticky, stinging fluid. The stickiness washes away easily enough, but the smell lingers on, seeping into the very fabric of the skin. In my mind, the onion juice is animated and bullyish, jostling its way over and in between the cells of the epidermis. Then it settles in and stays, forgotten, until I brush my fingers past my mouth or nose, and the odour blooms up, stark and pungeant. Smell, they say, is the sense closest to memory, and the whiff of red onions on my fingertips brings instant recall of the constant stress and drudgery that is the kitchen.

It isn't the onions themselves, of course. On my lover's hands, with his skin behind it, the scent of that same plant recalls a simple stir-fry, rice, and laughing dinner conversation. It isn't cause-and-effect; it's simply perception.

A recent article I read, about the inherent fallibility of memory, described how many people will fill in the gaps of their memories with little details, both physical and emotional, remarking that, contrary to popular belief, being full of gaps is the hallmark of an accurate memory. This is why many people remember their childhoods as being happier than they actually were. The article praised this nostalgia, asking, as though it were a rhetorical question, who wouldn't mind a bit of fiction for peace of mind?

Me, for one. The article did mention that the one group of people who typically don't display a tendency to form false memories are depressives. I find this weirdly reassuring, almost hopeful. Score one for the losing team. It's more than just a consolation prize, though, as it allows me to view depression in a whole new light. 'I have this disorder whereby I see and remember the world as it really is, and that makes me sad sometimes.' It is not so much a disease as a deep-seated teperament, and I've always been like this. A primary school teacher once asked me, with some exhasperation, if I'd rather be right or happy. Like the article, she meant it to be a rhetorical question, but to me the answer was obviously 'right'. I am imbued with a pervasive and abiding curiosity in everything, and I have a deep need to find out about the world around me, which of course requires accurate perception.

The more I study (and reject) analytic philosophy, the more I am certain that searching for objective truth is like chasing a rainbow, but still I can't quite give it up. And I wouldn't trade all the misery in the world for a pair of rose-coloured glasses.

I've just eaten an orange. It was a seedless orange, sweet and convenient. That may sound unremarkable, but its very unremarkableness is what struck me about it.

I remember the first time I heard about seedless oranges, maybe 12 or 15 years ago. At the time they sounded strange and marvelous, a great triumph of agriculture and breeding. These days, they're so common that I'm a little surprised when I do find seeds in oranges.

It seems odd, when you think about it, that we've managed to breed a fruit with such a seemingly unadaptive trait as seedlessness. How are oranges grown, anyway? Seeing as my second year of biology in school was basically just botany, soil science, and general agricultural studies, you'd think they'd have taught me this, but no. Are oranges grafted, like apples or peaches? Or are they grown from seeds? The latter seems wholly incompatible with breeding seedless varieties. If it's grafted, then guess it can be kept up as long as enough trees are kept alive, spreading its genes laterally rather than through generations.

Even so, I wonder if they still need to be pollinated every year. Because if so, they're fucked, just like the rest of agriculture. Yes, most crops are royally fucked. Why? Because the honeybees are dying. THE BEES ARE DYING. If they can't be saved, it is the end of civilisation as we know it.

I feel like I've been complaining a lot lately. I don't like myself when I'm like that. But rather than complain about complaining, I thought I should document some good things. Occasionally when I've had really bad days, I've written entries consisting of just lists of the good things that happened on those days, and when I've read back over them months later, I've found I can't actually remember whatever it was I was so upset about at the time.

Today was not a bad day. It was a pretty average day, in terms of the balance of good/bad things. I'm still ill, but I'm getting better, and Kirsty (angel!) took my short loan back to the library for me this morning. But for the most part it's the little things that make a day good or bad, and they're the ones that so often go undocumented.

Like this evening, walking home just a bit after sunset, the sky all purple and still hazy over the sea, a cresent moon in brilliant counterpoint. I was listening to Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan as I walked (or just Dylan, if you like, since the Hendrix song was 'All Along the Watchtower'), and I was eating olives.

I love olives. I don't eat them often, mostly because they are so expensive, but this only makes them more special. I think I probably have the same attitude towards green olives as many girls have towards fine chocolates. They are delicious, rich, savory luxury. From the first pungeant whiff of them until long after you've finished eating, olives are pure pleasure. The blissful bite into their firm and supple flesh, ever so slightly different on each fruit, releases rich and pervasive juices, tasted on all parts of the mouth and continuing until swallowed. The strong, soft and oddly delicate oil is pervasive, too, coating fingertips and refusing to be fully licked away. I can still taste and feel it, warm, on my lips.

Thoreau said that all the sensual desires are essentially the same; that the lust for food is no different from the lust for sex. Given the inherent strangeness of that claim--and the fact that Thoreau himself lived a mostly celibate lifestyle--I found it more than a little dubious. But when you think about it, the exact same senses are involved in both, albeit in different proportions. Smell, touch, taste: good food or good sex needs all three.

...on Friday the 13th!

18 seems like such a strange and arbitrary age to assign legal adult status. Whatever. I don't have time to go into pondering that.

So, yesterday was awesome. My defense went wonderfully, and I got a card from my grandparents, and ate round 2 of the ice cream my mom sent. (She sent a cooler full of ice cream, which arrived on wednesday, and the dorm ate a bit of it on Wednesday and last night.)

Today's gone pretty well, too. It was foggy this morning, really pretty. Lots of people have wished me a happy birthday, and Dana made me fondue! Tonight she and I are going out to see Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Yay.

And now 'tis time for archery.