Wendy McClure

Author and Professional Obsessive.

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This thing I'm doing

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…is why I lost the seven pounds last month. I guess some of it is due to the swimming and the walking and this class I’m taking at the gym, all of which are technically part of This Thing in the broader sense of its thingness. But that’s all stuff I’ve done before, whereas This Thing I’m Doing is different, for me, at least. This Thing I’m Doing is a vegan diet.

Well, it’s vegan in the sense that there’s no meat and no dairy. I really should call it something else, though, since I’m not concerned with avoiding various animal-product ingredients like gelatin and honey (because I guess I don’t care enough about the poor horsies and the bumbly bees). I’ll also allow myself something with meat or dairy once in a while. So it’s a cheatin’ kind of vegan. It’s cheagan.

Mostly, though, it’s eating a ton of vegetables and limiting everything else, like bread and starchy stuff and nuts. It’s based on this book and this plan. And yes, I know exactly how dour and dull and totally unlubricated it seems. But somehow, it’s not really like that. Somehow, I like it.

And I like better than Weight Watchers. I know for an awful lot of you who read this site, WW works for you; it just wasn’t working for me anymore. The reasons probably have more to do with me than with the plan. For me, doing WW was like having a crazy mother; a well-intentioned but obsessive and inconsistent and maybe even drunk mother. (Yes, I know that watching Mommie Dearest the other night probably made me think up this analogy.) But really, some days I’d be all, “WW Mommy, may I have some cake?” And she’d be half-passed out on the couch and she’d go, “Sure, shweetie.” But then other days she’d freak out and make me do all these bizarre chores, and I’d be like, “But WW Mommy, I don’t want to count out and line up all the Cheerios in the box,” and she’d scream that if I didn’t do it I wouldn’t be a good little girl, and it was all my fault for eating that cake. You know? Well, maybe you don’t, and that’s okay. But with me and This Thing I’m Doing, every day is pretty much the same. And I know the kind of inner mom that comes with This Thing is sort of boring and you probably wouldn’t want to come over to my house after school, so to speak, but I’m a lot less nuts now. Right now This Thing feels better than pretending I can have it all, which is what I did in the past.

That said, it’s a LOT of work, like a shitload of cooking and planning and shopping. It would be even harder if there weren’t several really good produce stores nearby and on my way home from work. Chris and I are doing it together, which helps a lot, and our fridge and freezer and pantry are vast expanses of nutritional no-fun-at-all. And we love it, perversely.

The only thing I’ve been counting is days. Today is Day 24 of doing This Thing, which puts it in perspective a little, because after the first week it’s easy to delude myself into thinking that I’ve been doing it long enough to have completely rearranged my DNA. Uh, no. And I weigh myself again next week. I’ll tell you how it goes.

OhNoMoBlo

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Can I do NaBloPoMo without actually having to call it that? What if I pretend it actually stands for Narcoleptic Bloated Post-Modernism and just write lots of coy footnotes instead of blog posts? Or, better, what if I actually just post a little more often than I have in the past couple of weeks? Okay then!

I’m sorry that my Halloween costumes are getting more obscure every year. Last year I was a VC Andrews character, to the delight of approximately six people. This year Chris and I went as Raymond and Connie Marble, which I’m sure appealed only to the four people who have seen Pink Flamingos, or at least the two people who do not deeply resent us for reminding them that they have seen Pink Flamingos. Maybe next year I will dress up as a mumbled song lyric for a band nobody has heard of. (Well, nobody except Chris.)

We were thinking of going out again in costume last night, but we were waylaid by exhuastion and a surprise airing of Mommie Dearest on the Oxygen Network. Oh my God: I forgot about this freaking movie. I watched it constantly on HBO from the time I was about eleven to, I don’t know, the time my brain went soft and mushy just like the slab of rare prime rib little Christina defiantly refused to eat in that one scene REMEMBER THAT PART? REMEMBER? Ahh! And Chris had never seen it, so of course I had to usher him through the satin-upholstered luxe corridors of this fine, fine film. I hadn’t seen it for at least ten years and yet my memory is such that I can tell exactly which scenes are deleted or edited for TV broadcast and I am compelled to describe or even act out the missing dialogue. That’s right, I experience cinematic phantom limb pain for Mommie Dearest. How hideous is that?

Okay, I probably won’t post every day in November, since I have a column due soon and a trip next weekend. But I might have to tell you about how I lost seven pounds last month, and wow, that came out sounding like an informerical, didn’t it? I’ll tell you more later, hopefully not at all like an informercial and much more like the half-assed diet blog this site used to be.

Every day these days

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On Sunday Chris and I went to the zoo, like we’d been wanting to do all summer, and so what if it’s not summer any more? There are only two slight disadvantages to going to Brookfield Zoo in the fall, which is that the flamingos are in storage and Baboon Island is deserted. (You really need to see Baboon Island. It’s like the animal equivalent of MTV Spring Break. And do they even air that anymore? I have no idea.) There was a sign that said “The Baboons are having their annual medical check-up,” and I imagined all the baboons lining up to board a big school bus driven by a kindly nurse. Mentally I am still eight years old when I go to the zoo.

We saw the monkeys and the penguins, like probably everyone else does, and we saw a traumatic video of a giraffe being born. (It just falls out! In this bag! Like chips in a vending machine! Only freakier!) We saw this little African deer thingy, I don’t rememember what it’s called, standing practically sideways on a rock, chewing and chewing and chewing. We overheard all kinds of hastily made-up animal facts from parents of little kids. (“I think the rhino is getting ready to hibernate, Tyler, and that’s why it won’t come out.”) We followed around a peacock (aka Nature’s Bling). We stayed until just before dark, when the zoo grounds were getting deserted and spooky and lovely. I have so much to do, so very much to do, so many things every single freaking day these days, but I liked Sunday.

One of the many things is swimming. When I was at Ragdale last month I started going to a pool at a nearby college in the mornings (well, okay, so I went twice), and I liked it so much I started using the pool at my gym. I like it because all you need to remember to pack is your suit, and when you get to the pool there is no aimless wandering around like on the gym floor; there is no thing you have to get on, or wait for; no TVs or magazines that you feel you should look at while you’re waiting to get off whatever thing that you waited to get on. When you’re in a pool, the only thing you have to do is stay alive. And it turns out I’m pretty good at doing that.

The big fat picture

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Last Friday I dashed off that post about the fat Gaultier model and I kept meaning to come back and elaborate, and in the meantime plenty of you left comments. It’s last week’s news by now, but what the hell, here’s what I think, about both the model and the comments:

I think this fat model Velvet D’Amour is beautiful, but I think lots of people are beautiful. Like I think Paris Hilton is beautiful, except for her squinty left eye and her soul. And I think it’s nice that a famous high-fashion designer has decided that a fat woman is beautiful, but of course, famous high-fashion designers have also decided that junkies and dead people and Mischa Barton’s outfits are beautiful. So really, why should we care who thinks whoever else is beautiful?

But go on and talk all you want about whether Velvet’s hair was ugly, or her outfit was weird, or whatever. Because the only thing I love more than being too big for the largest pair of Gaultier Jeans is knowing that apparently it doesn’t matter whether the lady on the runway (or in the magazine, or the billboard) is skinny or fat, since either way, we’re going to pick her apart like an order of KFC. It’s not like any of you meant to be malicious—but still, what the fuck?

We’re entitled to our opinions and beauty is a state of mind, but maybe we need to get out of our own damn minds once in awhile. I’m getting tired of the whole world just standing around looking at little pictures muttering, she’s pretty, she’s ugly, she’s pretty but her hair is ugly, while the bigger picture looms behind us, and we’re all a part of it, and it’s full of plenty of things uglier than bad hair.

Randa linked to this interview with Velvet d’Amour, who can clearly see the big picture. Read it and see how the interviewer tries to bait her— all like, oh, don’t you hate these skinny models? Don’t they make you feel ugly? Don’t you think they’re ugly? And Velvet, bless her heart and her great big booty, doesn’t bite. Now that’s beautiful. But that’s just my opinion.

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On a related note, you know what else is beautiful? When designers go beyond the supposedly mind-blowing act of putting a fat chick on the runway and actually make clothes for her. Clothes that she can wear to work and to parties, because oddly enough, fat chicks do these things. Last year I bought a couple of tops from Igigi and liked them, and whenever I wear one of them I think idly, yeah, I should buy another one of these thingies. And one day recently, after I did just that I got an email from Ozlem, who works at Igigi, who offered to send me some stuff to try out. And then I bought them. On sale. Awesome.

Idi bitty tidbits of my week

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Oh my sticky stars, I’ve had so much catching up to do now since I’ve gotten back from the prairie. I’ve gone from whispering into my cell phone and having cicadas chirp me to sleep at Ragdale to going out almost every night to attend various reading/party thingys. Somehow we are lucky enough to know people like Alpana Singh, Andi Zeisler and Lisa Jervis from Bitch, and John Hodgman, all of whom had reading thingys here in Chicago this past week. Somehow we are lucky enough to not know people like Idi Amin, because last night we went to a preview screening of The Last King of Scotland, which had just about everything you could reasonably expect from a movie about Idi Amin. It was a good movie, though of course it had moments where I couldn’t cover my eyes enough, not even if I had three dozen hands, not even if Idi Amin himself provided three dozen hands in a handy wheelbarrow for my convenience. Those scenes were definitely more unpleasant than drinking Malort, and that is saying A LOT.

Speaking of disgusting things, I thought I had a pretty high threshold of tolerance when it comes to freaky reality show antics, but that was before I watched the new season of America’s Next Top Model and saw Monique sprinkle furniture and housemates with her alleged Moniqueness. (I am talking about both the time she “marked her territory” on one of the beds, which involved just water—but still, the idea was there—and the incident where she subjected Melrose to That Shower-Fresh Feeling. I do not know how to relate it any more delicately. If you don’t watch the show, I assure you that whatever foul thing you have imagined will likely suffice.) And while I have not watched Flavor of Love this season (I caught a little bit of the first season, and I’ll watch again only if Sister Souljah guest-stars and storms the house and punches Flav somewhere below his timepiece), I have heard that one of the contestants left an even more substantial mark on the stairs, just for you-know-whats and giggles. To all this I say: Dear Hostile, Bodily-Substance-Flinging Reality Show Contestant, if your excuse for acting like an crazed macaque is that it “gets attention” and makes for “interesting television,” then it ought to be okay for the camera crew to shoot tranquilzer darts at you whenever necessary, because that would make for interesting television, too.

Finally, the little radio segment I did for Writer’s Block Party last week can be found online here. It’s supposed to be sort of funny, though I think I sound oddly mournful on audio. Oh, well.

The prairie hasn't yet killed my need for self-promotion

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If you’re in Chicago (or want to listen in from elsewhere), you’ll be able to hear me on WBEZ Monday morning sometime around 9:45 am CST. It’ll be on this show, where they’ll be airing a short piece I recorded for Writer’s Block Party.

At some point, it’ll be archived online, in case you forget to listen in or have lined your hat with tinfoil to avoid radio waves.

It’s rainy today, which means I should be working, right? RIGHT? Okay then.

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