Pharmaceuticals

Way back at the beginning of this blog (wow, June 2009, how are you?), I made a pretentiously intelligent-sounding post titled "Food vs. Ph00d," wherein I more or less lay blame on chemically processed crap masquerading as food for making (and keeping) me fat.

I still believe that's the case, sure, but now there's supporting evidence regarding the whole mess.

Still, it hadn't occurred to me that my pithy respelling of the word food would one day strike me with another meaning.

Food as pharmaceutical. Phood.

See, there's a lot of stress involved in living in a foreign country. Even when one has lived in said foreign country for damn near six years. Regardless of how homey you make your home, it is not home. In fact, foreign-country-home and home-country-home have their own idioms when one is using English and living in a foreign country. When you go back to your foreign-country-home from work everyday, you "go home." When you go back to your home-country-home for the holidays, you "go home home."

Ex.

A: "Are you going home for the summer holiday?"

B: "Home home?"

A: "Yeah."

B: "Nah, I'm just going to relax at home here. I need some down time."

Ya dig?

To deal with the stress of being "home" (vs. home home!) takes a certain level of finesse and some fine tuned coping skills that many people have in various forms. These include, but are not limited to:

• creative outlets (crafting, art, writing, etc.)
• exercise
• pharmaceuticals (Paxil! Xanax! Prozac! oh, my!)
• eating

Guess which one is my default? I wish it were any of the other three, but it's really not. It's food.

Food is my witch doctor, my shaman, my general practitioner, my babysitter, my therapist... hell, most of the time, it's my best. damn. friend.

Until it takes up residency in my ass. And thighs. And, more recently, stomach.

I need to oust the FDA in my brain (that's Food-as-Drug Administration). It's hard, though, since I already know all of the prescriptions so well. I guess it's kind of like changing careers in your 50s. It can be done, it has been done, but not without a butt-load of time, effort, and probably more than a few tantrums.

Problem 1: Get excited over scale success! Try on goal clothes "just to see." Goal clothes make me look like a stack of old tires forced into polyester tubing.

Solution: Take a therapeutic walk in awesome clothes that do fit, determined to keep going until the even awesomer goal clothes fit. Wind up at the grocery store buying everything that's on sale in the snack aisle, whether I like it or not, and pray that there's fried chicken on sale. Eat until I'm sick, though I don't really know why or consciously understand what happened. Wake up for school, determined to make it a better day.

New Solution: ??????

Problem 2: Students decide today is a good day to compare my arm circumference to their thighs. Or, God forbid, my thigh (that's singular - one thigh) to their waists. (Japan was a much nicer place when I didn't understand the language.)

Solution: Take 4 slabs of pizza toast and a box of chocolate chip cookies and call them all bastards in the morning, when I wake up with a sugar hangover of epic proportions.

New Solution: ??????

Problem 3: Wake up in the morning, decide I look 6-inches shorter and 3-feet wider than usual (thanks, kids!), even though the scale shows absolutely no change.

Solution: Prescribe "Why bother? It makes no difference..." dinner of 1 bag of granola (not 1 bowl, 1 bag) and pass out in carb-sugar stupor, oversleeping tomorrow's alarm(s).

New Solution: ??????

Ok, so, clearly we have a pattern here. I am aware of it.

I am working to find new ways to expend this stressful energy when it builds up. I have an exercise bike in my room that I have used maybe a dozen times since I came to Japan (in 2004), which is abominable. There is no reason for me NOT to be on that thing five days a week, if not everyday.

For now, my solution is to clean. It may be snowing like a bitch outside at the moment, but spring is coming, and I am clinging to that fact with claws digging in and knuckles white.

So, I clean. In anticipation of spring, of warmer weather, of sunny days where I can hang my laundry outside and open my windows.

F-U, mid-March snowstorm. You ain't getting Debu-chan down.