2006-01-30 - 2:13 a.m.
At this point I have quietly lost 40 pounds since the beginning of the holidays (starting a little before Hallowe�en). Well, not so quiet if you take into account all the gushing comments I receive every time I go out in public�and in reporting that I do not believe that I am being �too egotistical,� as one �friend� accused me of being (the kind of friend who supports you when you are down and out, but when you achieve success, attempts to deflate or sabotage it�and is there any other kind, really, except for the opposite pole, the friend who ONLY loves you when you are successful, but keeps away when you are down and out?), I am only reporting the fact, not applying a judgment on it. And it�s hard to apply much judgment on it, as the truth is that I am still a long way from being through. When I actually reach my goal, talk to me then. Still, I am enjoying the attention and it helps to keep me going. For some reason, this first portion has had a major impact, almost as if I HAD reached my goal. But I wonder what I will hear when I actually DO achieve that goal (besides apparently having a whole new group of friends)? Ask me around next Christmas if I don�t already volunteer the information!
But �looking good� is certainly a worthwhile goal, don�t you think? Other than health or perhaps a feeling of being in control (usually not powerful enough incentives to engender sustained action), what else is there that will lead to someone essentially sacrificing what used to be the pleasure of mindless eating and drinking? Frankly, I no longer (temporarily, I hope) know how to celebrate, exactly, just wondering what a party actually is without fully imbibing in all the oral abundance? I guess these days, a party for me is simply standing there in fashionably beautiful (textured, touchable, body-enhancing) clothes that I haven�t allowed myself to wear for a decade while people flock by me and tell me how incredible I look.
I know this is a challenge that I am going to have to master, or work on mastering, very soon. My birthday is coming up in little over a week, and one of my so-far still loyal friends is reminding me that the time is coming up for her to take me out to dinner on my birthday, I only need to chose the place. Well, I remember how great it was LAST year�she took me to all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch at what used to be my favorite restaurant in L.A., but no longer can be, Ports O� Call restaurant on the water of the main shipping channel of the Port of L.A., where we guzzled several bottles of the champagne that continued to flow, and went back to fill our plates for thirds, fourths, fifths�basically, we ate and drank for half an afternoon.
That cannot happen this time, or ever again.
Just this past Friday night I decided to gently dip my big toe into those raging waters of �party redefinition�. I had gone to the second play of this year�s season of Reprise, my favorite theatrical offerings in L.A. Every single show I have seen there has nearly made me explode with joy, they are so well done and so exciting, I should make it a standing order to buy their season ticket every year. The series I buy is called �Friday Nite Out,� and if you know anything about the modern lexicon, anything with the words �Nite� and �Out� together means �gay�. So what this is is a special �night out� for, as they say, �our friends in the gay and lesbian community of Los Angeles,� although since this series is one of a revival of Broadway shows, I wonder what �nite� ISN�T �out�, but that�s another conversation entirely.
Anyway, just because this series is called �Friday Nite Out� doesn�t mean that the audience is filled with gay people. In fact, based on who I see (and who in the audience has been sitting next to me on both sides in the seasons I have attended), the series is more properly devoted to �our friends in the retired, elderly Jewish community,� and believe me, this isn�t meant negatively, as the people at this series I enjoy are the retired, elderly Jewish people who are loads of fun, brilliant, very knowledgeable about the L.A. arts scene, dress to the nines, and they ALL know everybody!
I�m still trying to run into the man whose seat was next to me two seasons ago, a man named Ira who was a retired computer professional who also pilots his own plane. He was so impressed when for play number two he sat down and I asked him, �So, have you flown to Sacramento recently to visit your son?�, something he mentioned doing regularly when I had met him at play number one. He was impressed that I would remember that little detail about someone who really was little more than a stranger sitting next to me in a theater audience, but how could I forget a detail like that? But for this season, I have an entirely different seat, as does Ira, but I sure would like to run into him again.
To contrast with that, the gay people are insufferable.
I had had the na�ve hope that I might meet some attractive, nice �fellow musicals lover� at one of these soirees, but no such luck, the only attractive gay man who has ever been there is one of the ushers, whom, I presume is gay, but who is also in his late twenties and not apt to be the least bit interested in the likes of me�besides, he is WORKING at the party, not partying, and also, during the reception among gay guys, is in a position to be fly paper in a barn full of flies, kind of like a bartender in a gay bar--in other words, a person is generally a fool if he thinks he can move to the head of THAT line.
However, he DOES remember me from play to play, which is pretty good, as these plays are each several months apart from each other and I imagine that he doesn�t just usher for Friday Nite Out, so several thousand audience members must file by him every evening. But I presume he remembers me because I bother to talk to him a little bit each time I see him (actually, I make him laugh whenever I see him), so I assume he remembers me because I am NICE. Unfortunately, NICE in the gay world doesn�t count for much (in the straight world too, for that matter.)
But the �more available� guys�yuck. (�How can you be sure it isn�t YOU, you are putting up a block or turning people off?� says my sabotaging friend, mentioned earlier. Well, I probably AM, but so what? I mean, who ISN�T, when you really analyze it? What somebody has to do, if they are really interested, is push THROUGH that. Why do I have to always be the one who chips people's walls down, isn't anybody else going to bother to do it on mine? Besides, whatever wall I may or may not happen to have, I don't think is very solidly mortared. One quick tap is all it would take to make it crumble.) Here�s a good example�one of the best productions they had there was Stephen Sondheim�s Company, which I had never seen performed before, but whose music I had long adored. Well, this production was out of this world (by the way, Judith Light was in it, played the part created by Elaine Stritch�she did it differently, uniquely, but marvelously) and it was impossible for me to find enough traction so that I could walk out of the theater afterwards as my feet kept floating up off the ground. The best I could do was wax enthusiastic with the hot usher as we all filed past, �That was the best show YET, and you know from my comments before, that�s really saying something!� (No one else while leaving the theater thinks to talk to the usher how good the plays are, but duh!, he�s doing this because he�s into it! And hell, I�ll talk with the kids sweeping the popcorn off the floor at the movie theater how great a particular movie was that had just shown; they�re people alive in the world, they�re into this, so why not talk to them?) For his part, the usher flashed me his dimples and bobbed his head up and down like a rear window Bobble, as pleased by this production as I was. �I�ve never seen this done so well,� he commiserated; �I�m glad you liked it so much.� (Yeah, see I�ve got good taste, which is one reason I am talking to you!)
But out in the courtyard where the Friday Nite Out reception was being held after that outstanding production of Company, the first comment I overhear was from a couple of queens who spat, �ooh, the set was so claustrophobic, the way they had that orchestra up on top like that!� (spoken by a bottom, I guess). As for me, I thought it was very clever how the designer had peopled all the balconies and rooftop gardens with members of the orchestra in this Manhattan set. I guess the traditional pattern is to hide the orchestra down in the orchestra pit, but Reprise always most properly showcases the musicians. These are musicals for heaven�s sake, and all the key emotional moments of the play are performed by singers and accompanying instruments�the musicians BELONG on display as much as the leading players do. But understanding this must be too much for someone whose emotional growth stopped the minute he understood that he liked boys instead of girls, and thus wasn�t going to find himself a welcome member of society, but was only going to be an outsider sneering from the sidelines. Gee whiz, at least here is a kind of world where he would be welcome, if only he�d step down from his arrogant projections and open his heart to genuinely love what is good achievement instead of resenting everything.
But they�re all like that out there and what remains as the only reasons to go to the reception is a chance to meet some of the performers (and the orchestra leader, whom I always look forward to lavishing with praise) and eat the FOOD.
FOOD! Okay, so how do you handle that when the food is �forbidden� and you�re left with nothing but standing all alone with your hands in your pocket, surrounded by nasty queens, and waiting like a stage-door johnny for a performer or two to step out among us?
My eyes scanned the food and drink offerings�wine, champagne, empty calories, there, I can do without. Various vegetables and dip�not worth the bother, really, I can munch on a salad at home and only one tablespoon of that dip would kill me (fats are worse than the carbs on the Weight Watchers eating plan). Some cakes, some brownies�ah, here are one of my favorites, chocolate-chip cookies except with white chocolate. That�s something worth taking a chance on, one wouldn�t hurt.
So I had one.
Well, then I had two more.
Nothing else was happening out there, even the performers, as they came out, looked like duds in person. Only the orchestra leader was worth talking to. Other than that, it was just standing there in a freezing cold courtyard. Not much of a party.
I should interject here that nothing is really unallowed on the Weight Watchers plan, you just have to account for it (although there are less-wise choices). You are allowed so many �points� per day--based on my current body weight, I get 28--(points are calculated on a slide rule that takes into account the relationship among calories, fiber, and fat grams), with an optional 35 points to allot throughout the whole week. You can also add points to your allowed total by exercising (and exercising doesn�t have to be just aerobics�weight lifting and stretching also can give you extra points). So it really is very workable. For example, you could actually enjoy, say, a 62-point Thanksgiving Dinner, if you so desire, by having only two meals that day, such as a light breakfast of five points and then using all the rest of your day�s points, plus every single of your week�s optional 35, and earning four points for exercise (it is hoped BEFORE you ate your meal!) on say, walking briskly for an hour. I, in fact, ate a 42-point Thanksgiving Dinner, and ended up losing 4 pounds that week. You don�t eat like that every day, or even every week, but when special occasions come up, you CAN work it.
Also, not everything counts points, some foods count zero points so you can eat all of them you want. Whenever I happen to feel ravenous (which will always be emotional, not a real physical need), my secret life-saving ravenous meal is an entire boiled cauliflower dressed with salsa. For some reason, that satisfies my cravings and it is no points at all, so it is as if I hadn�t eaten anything. If I wish, I can then go from that to a regular dinner of, say, a broiled skinless chicken breast with some stir-fry vegetables and maybe some rice or mashed potatoes, if I so desire. The real meal like that will cost points, but not too many.
I rarely choose a dessert. I�m kind of afraid to, but mostly, I just don�t need it. A good �dessert� to me is a peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich! With whole wheat bread, Laura Scudder�s All-Natural �Nutty� peanut butter, and Spucker�s No-Sugar Raspberry Jam, I have what is actually a nutritious meal that costs me only six points (three for the two slices of bread and three for the carefully-measured tablespoon of peanut butter; the sugarless jam is �free�) and feels like a real treat of sweets.
Okay, so did I break my diet or did I not break my diet by having three marzipan-chip cookies at Friday Nite Out?
Well, at first I really wasn�t quite sure how to count them, I was going to come up with some kind of estimate (and if so, I would have estimated WRONG), but then I realized that these cookies are exactly like the ones that they sell at Subway, so I agreed that however they were counted in the Dining Out book, that was how I was going to account for them. I admit to being rather shocked when I got home and looked them up�they are FIVE POINTS EACH! So I had blithely swallowed at that party in virtually no time at all fifteen points worth of food in the form of three cookies�this would be more than half of my entire day�s allotment of food. Fortunately, I had plenty of optional points left, so I really did NOT break my diet. However, if I had fully known how many points those cookies actually were, I would not have chosen to have three of them�I probably wouldn�t have chosen to have any.
So that�s why I am still leery of parties. And why I say that basically I am going to have to learn how to party without the eating and drinking. To substitute for that, there damned well better be a gorgeous atmosphere, fascinating people, and maybe some awesome music that allows for dancing�something else to do that brings enjoyment. Otherwise, I�ll just stay at home and read.
The interesting thing this diet is doing is moving me back in time. I am able to wear clothes that I used to wear, but couldn�t fit into recently. Wearing those clothes again puts me back into the time when I was able to wear them, like riding backwards in a time machine. I am now reliving the time before I worked where I work, and wearing clothes that nobody there had ever seen (which means that I am also looking better than they have ever seen me look). I am back in the painful time before I got this current job, but which was a transition between the �extra work� I had been doing in Hollywood and getting a �real� job, when I realized that I probably wasn�t going to be able to financially �make it� in Hollywood�that I just couldn�t afford all the auditions and rejections and waiting it out until I got decent-paying speaking parts. It was, in a way, a time when a dream was being put back on ice due to financial constraints.
I can do without particularly making it in Hollywood. There is a lot that is shallow and unsatisfactory about that life, although it was so glamorous and exciting the time I was involved in it, even though what I was doing was at the bottom of the creative totem pole. But despite being at the bottom of the creative totem pole, it was, nevertheless ON the creative totem pole, and there, currently, I am not, and THAT is something I can�t live without.
Here�s another thing that is happening�as I am being cleansed of layers of fat, what had been masked by the soporific that is emotional eating is now coming up exposed (because unless it is solved, it never really goes away) and this time, I am not allowing anything to mask it any more. So I am starting to face up to these issues, which in a way is overwhelming and unsettling, but in another, is very thrilling and liberating. I feel that it is making me closer to realizing the complete �WHO� of who I really am, and lying within that is the spark of a promise of real true joy. I think we are going to be seeing a whole lot more changes than weight loss (which is probably why some of those sabotaging friends are afraid of it�like the ego that gets afraid for its survival when the true Self starts taking back control). I am going to have to be stepping back into a creative life and just where that will take me is so far anybody�s guess.
I can chart so much of this back to a dream that I had at my parents� house during one of the holidays (could have been Thanksgiving, or Christmas). It was, really, one of those �typical� dreams that so many people have, and yet my subconscious had put my own particular spin on it. It fit into one of those �I-have-an-exam-tomorrow-except-that-I-haven�t-studied� dreams, except in my case the exam was going to be some kind of oral presentation in a legal setting (such as in law school), whereby I would be severely questioned orally in a football stadium filled with an audience of tens of thousands of people. It wasn�t so much that I hadn�t studied, but that I had no idea what the TEST was even about. Still, I would gamely present myself to that setting and let the questions come as they may and I would ad-lib or �improv� what maybe had a chance of being outstanding answers. But still, that this major personal test was coming up was very disturbing and when I woke up, I expected to have the typical sense of relief that, hey, I am OUT of school, this is real life, and I DON�T have such an examination coming up. But instead of relief, I wondered just WHY I would have such a dream in the first place? What was my subconscious trying to tell me? There was nothing apparently realistic about the dream�I not only wasn�t in any position whereby I had any impending exam coming up, I never was in that situation even when I was in school, so why would those particular symbols display themselves to me across my dream-screen?
I suddenly began to worry that the �exam� I was failing was the exam of my whole life. That, of course, is the big question of the typical �mid-life crisis.�
I hate that term, not only because it seems so clich�, but also because to me it fails to correctly communicate. I think of a �crisis� as a sudden impactful thing, like an intersection that, once crossed, changes everything. Having your house burn down, that is a crisis. Your child being seriously injured in an automobile accident, or you receiving a cancer diagnosis, those are crises. But a mid-life �crisis� is no one-pointed, sudden thing (although the realization of it, like my dream, itself, may be), but it exists more like an underground lake, broad and deep, radiating its cold clamminess all over you for decades at a time. The commonly-seen out of humor, frustrated middle-aged man is such a typical example, and I would say that such a one is suffering from some kind of mid-life angst, but I wouldn�t be able to point to any particular �crisis� in such a one�s life that caused it, just �life� itself, or, more properly, that failure of life itself.
As is told in an adult fairy tale, if the king sent you to another town on a mission and you did every other successful thing but THAT one mission, then despite all your other achievements, you really did fail in your mission and the king would be very unhappy with you�might even order your execution. The �king� in this case is your own higher Self, and the �mission� is the very reason you were born. And yet how many people fail in that mission�how many don�t even KNOW what it is?
I thought the dream imagery of the football stadium and the fact of this being some kind of public �oral, legal� exam was giving me some valuable personal clues. When I think of �football stadium� in a college setting, I am reminded of the promise that I had shown as a child when I was the one boy selected (along with one girl) from our elementary school to have the privilege of traveling to Berkeley to see President Kennedy speak at the University of California graduation, which was taking place in the football stadium. This was really being invited as an eighth-grader to sit among the �big boys� and see �the King� (while we have and have had several tyrants, we have never had a president who more represented the image of a benevolent King than President Kennedy, who, along with his Queen, Jackie, ruled over �Camelot�), and I very much felt like some kind of a �Prince in training�, destined for great things. However, when I actually was a student who ultimately graduated from that very University, our whole graduating class was punished by a cancellation of the graduation ceremony due to the campus-wide student unrest that occurred that quarter. But I think now that even if I HAD had the graduation, it wouldn�t have felt like an achievement of that earlier personal promise, as my degree was in Business Administration, something ill-chosen and ill-fitting, something to be so-called �practical� but was an early example of my selling myself short and out due to a fear or lack of vision. I often say now, in retrospect, that if I had really gotten a degree in what I WANTED (if I had dared admit to myself it WAS what I wanted), it would have been some kind of combination creative writing/drama degree, but it wouldn�t have been at Berkeley and my parents wouldn�t have paid for it (in fact, they would have disowned me). Following my true desire was virtually (if not actually) impossible.
Then came law school, leading to a profession that seemed somewhat closer to the mark than �business administration�, but still a sell-out and something within me was going to assert itself to demonstrate that it WAS a sell-out. That moment came near the end of my second year at law school (in which I amazingly had managed to come that far), moot court orals, which are a student�s mock appellate procedure in which they have presumably lost their case on initial trial, but misapplied principles of law allow for an appeal. There was both a written brief and then oral arguments before a panel of three judges. As this law school was in political-minded Sacramento (the capital of California), and the school was famous for having the state�s largest percentage of graduates passing the Bar, these oral arguments were open to the public and were very popular in the community. Also they were videotaped (the first time I had ever been videotaped.)
For the panel of judges, we had one professor from the school and two real judges, one of whom was on the state Supreme Court (and the other was, I guess, from the Superior Court). The case was some kind of technically dull water rights issue (selected at random and imposed on me, certainly not something I would have chosen for myself) and if THIS represented the kind of stuff I was going to deal with in practice, let me quit right now! But I did my best with it and felt that I understood the issues pretty well, considering.
The panel of judges sat up there on their bench all high and mighty in their black robes and peered down at me like I was a despicable worm, and that was how they tried to treat me. Their tack was not to seriously vivisect the fine points of this area of law and its application in order to discern a fair and reasonable conclusion to the case, but to attempt, instead, to character assassinate me and to make a fool of me, but they miscalculated, because I was neither afraid of them nor uncomfortable in the setting; in fact, there was an audience, I was on stage, I was in command of my material, this was my forte. So while these judges tried to make me look like an asshole, I could see that it was all bullshit and something took over me and I found myself throwing their words back at them and twisted their arguments with enough wit that soon enough, I had the whole audience LAUGHING uproariously AT the judges, and the more they tried to ruin me, the more they became a laughing stock, instead. I couldn�t say that I enjoyed this or did not enjoy it, it really just naturally flowed out of me like there was no other choice, and all I was conscious of was that while this may be very bad law, it had to be very great entertainment. And, in fact, when it was over, hordes of people from the audience streamed around me to shout �bravo� and shake my hand and tell me that while they had watched several years of moot court orals at this place, never before had they witnessed such an entertaining moot court orals as mine. I realized right then that the score was �the law, 0, entertainment, 100�.
I didn�t fail it exactly�what I got was a �non-pass,� which is essentially the same thing, but it really meant more that �you didn�t complete the assignment� rather than �you completed it, but flunked it.� I guess getting an audience laughing hysterically at the judges is not completing the assignment! But in order to complete it, this meant that I would have to do it all over again next year, something I really didn�t feel all that motivated to do. And by the time that school year and the summer (when I actually worked as a lawyer, doing everything but being able to speak before a judge, as I knew the law, but hadn�t yet been �admitted to the Bar�), I realized that none of this was worth all the huge amounts of debt I was getting myself into. So I left it behind.
Now THAT�S not the failure alluded to in the dream�I don�t think. That was my true self at work up there in the courtroom. And if my dream had been allowed to continue, I�m pretty sure that I would have bravely put myself into that football stadium and probably would have passed the exam without even knowing what it was going to be about, because I am very comfortable speaking extemporaneously before a large audience and have, at this point, a lifetime of adventure and experience to draw on. The failure, I think, is that I am NOT speaking before large audiences, as my moot court orals was just one experience demonstrating that I could do in even the least likely of situations. Instead, I am doing administrative paper work in an all-but-hidden back office with almost no public speaking at all (and certainly very little creativity), Don't get me wrong, this job is wonderful as far as it goes and provides many satisfactions, but there are still crucial holes in my life that need to be satisfied.
Still, there ever-remains the problem of paying rent and putting food on the table, the very kinds of things that moved me out of the film industry right as I was on the brink of success (that is to say, I had at least gotten some speaking parts), but it was too little, too late and it would have been irresponsible of me to throw away the more solid income that was coming my way. Or would it have been?
But all that is what a mid-life crisis is all about�dealing with issues of Self that few in earlier generations had the time or opportunity to even worry about, as the majority never even LIVED into so-called middle age (in those days, it was �old age�!) So what we are doing is blazing new trails through dark and mysterious forests, essentially being pioneers. Which means that there is LOTS of fascinating stuff to write about and talk about and dramatize and make people laugh with.
If only, this time, I will DO it.
Well, at least I am getting more presentable. First things first, right? Baby steps. Every journey begins with the first step, and continues with each successive step. And isn�t that what weight loss is all about, the extremely valuable practical lesson of how to achieve a goal in very steady, very tiny increments? Each pound, each step, each pump of the dumbbell, each dollar invested and compounded, each page written, each joke told, each personal contact made, each never giving up but each keep on going.
If you only know where you want to go.
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