Wednesday 20 June 2018

my cold, hungry, sleepless, fit, booted body




People at work keep giving me chocolate. Some of it is pity chocolate and some of it - like this monstrous, gleaming, deranged Caramello Koala, who is not facing his imminent death by decapitation with any attempt at dignity, and why should he, dignity is for fools - is gratitude chocolate. I've been trying to get all the outstanding invoices sorted and I happened to notice that the order for catering for 60 which we need for tomorrow had gone down as Thursday 21 July. So the person who ordered the catering acknowledged that I am a legend and CK was the token of her gratitude.


Gratitude chocolate must always be eaten and relished, but otherwise, I'm trying very hard not to eat the things my body keeps suggesting that I should eat, now that it is cold all day and painfully cold in the dark hours. I gained weight over winter last year and while that's all gone now plus more, it just doesn't need to happen. Comfort eating in winter is hard to avoid because I think my body actually does want to be warmed and nourished internally, so it's more than just the oral pleasures, which I understand well enough by now that I can generally leave them alone if I'm not actually needing to eat. But on days when I ride to work wearing jeans and a thick jumper and a coat and scarf, over the top of my pyjamas, and two pairs of gloves, and I am still icy and numb in several body parts, it takes a long time to properly thaw and to not want to eat. Chocolate isn't so bad; it's bread and cheese that I think about. I allow myself one toasted cheese and tomato sandwich a week, with my morning coffee on the day I go to the gym, because it is good to have something pleasant to look forward to that will mask thoughts of the gym itself. Jumping onto and off of boxes, yanking heavy things around, pushups etc, it's all completely terrible and afterwards I always feel like I'm high and also like I'm going to throw up. Nevertheless, I love the consequences of doing it (and also doing frequent yoga, and spending eight hours a week minimum on my bicycle) - living in a body that is fit, if a bit plump, and that can do so many amazing and fun things without feeling pain or running out of breath, and in particular I love the having of absolutely no physical problems that all of this brings. (Apart from the not sleeping thing, and the being sad and lonely, which just drags on, and on, and I know why, but gee it's time for it to be over.)

The gym, though, is much dreaded by the deeper layers of my mind, and rightly, because it hurts, and sometimes I don't sleep well the night before despite sleeping pills. I went to bed much too early last night and so I was completely and permanently awake many hours before dawn. If it wasn't that someone was picking me up I would definitely have bailed, and in the relief of bailing, probably slept. But I didn't and I felt haggard today. Worse than haggard; I felt old and ugly; frostbitten, creased, crazy-eyed and dull of complexion. It's the middle of winter all right. Fortunately I thought of Sir Walter Elliot before self-pity led me too far down that particular avenue:
Sir Walter thought much of Mrs Wallis; she was said to be an excessively pretty woman, beautiful. "He longed to see her. He hoped she might make some amends for the many very plain faces he was continually passing in the streets. The worst of Bath was the number of its plain women. He did not mean to say that there were no pretty women, but the number of the plain was out of all proportion. He had frequently observed, as he walked, that one handsome face would be followed by thirty, or five-and-thirty frights; and once, as he had stood in a shop on Bond Street, he had counted eighty-seven women go by, one after another, without there being a tolerable face among them. It had been a frosty morning, to be sure, a sharp frost, which hardly one woman in a thousand could stand the test of. But still, there certainly were a dreadful multitude of ugly women in Bath; and as for the men! they were infinitely worse. Such scarecrows as the streets were full of!




You might have to trust me on this one. It's a knitted glove that's been pulled off the hand and dropped while still half inside-out, and then it got run over and rained on - for ever


At about quarter past five the sky suddenly looked like this, so despite the fact that this week has been horrible in Melbourne, there is some reason to think that not everything is completely fucked. 

 

Haven't logged any footwear for months now, so, a bit of footwear logging of my new boots, which are made of what is now expensively called 'vegan leather' and used to be cheaply called 'vinyl'. I am quite pleased with how much of a good influence they were on today, not purely in terms of cutting down the wind-chill factor that is an ongoing problem at work in winter, but also in offsetting the feeling of being a frightbat, because, well, look at them. I am well aware that these boots are the kind of thing that elderly women such as myself misguidedly think is cool, and that the kids are continually demonstrating that what is actually cool is a specific kind of runners that I cannot identify, understand or procure, let alone wear at all correctly. But whatever. I had occasion to clamber up into the uppermost roof cavity of the building today, and on the way there I paused for a moment on the inaccessible top balcony, looking at Melbourne and the blazing winter blue sky, listening through my headphones to Roxy Music, in mah boots, and it was very much all right.





3 comments:

ernmalleyscat said...

what an excellent end

Fyodor said...

Roxy Music makes everything better. The boots I can't vouch for but, given the effect, I suspect that they may be imbued with Vegan Edge.

Nice stems, BTW.

JahTeh said...

Every winter I feel guilty about turning on the heater when I know people are living on the streets in the freezing cold but this morning I just said piss off guilt, my bones are aching. The Bear was asleep on his feather cushion and refused to wake up even for food, now that means cold, real cold.
Congrats on the 1000 posts, may you live long and prosper.