Holly Via Gorski

Last week I did this thing – this big thing, which I was anxious about, and had to psych myself up for – and it was hard. I hated it. When it was over, I felt a sense of accomplishment and relief. A few people congratulated me, or said they were proud or impressed. A friend asked me to write about it.

I didn’t do anything important or impressive.

I went without food or water for 15 hours. I participated in a one-day fast with other non-Muslim folks in order to experience what our Muslim friends do every day during the month of Ramadan. That part was cool. Joining others in a new experience, learning about Ramadan, taking another step towards human understanding (regardless of religion or culture) – those things are important, and it was a valuable experience for me.

But my one-day, voluntary fast? I can’t be proud of such a meager feat. I chose to go through my day without food or water, but I was surrounded by it. I could have poured myself a glass of filtered water in my air-conditioned office building at any time. My huge accomplishment boils down to skipping a few meals and resisting snacks from the staff table, for one day. During Ramadan, Muslims do this for 30 days. In a row. In some countries women do it wearing burkas in 100+ degree heat.

I’m not saying it was easy for me. The hardest part going without water; I have never been so thirsty. Physically, the biggest lesson I learned that day was I need water. I don’t need snacks, or the second breakfast I typically eat at my desk, or even (though I hate to say it) coffee, but I need water. By the afternoon I found it very difficult to concentrate. If I couldn’t drink or eat, then all I wanted to do was sleep. It was a hierarchy-of-needs experience. My husband called to see how I was doing and at the end of our conversation, he said, “I’m guessing Ramadan is not a real productive time.” (If my one-day experience is any indication, no, it’s not. However, I’ve heard that once your body adapts to fasting things go more smoothly.)

Intellectually and emotionally, the biggest lesson I learned that day was what real hunger and thirst feel like. When I say, “I have never been so thirsty” it’s not a figure of speech; it’s literal truth. Before last week, I had never, not once in 38 years, gone 15 waking hours without a beverage. Before last week I had never gone 15 waking hours without eating. On and off throughout the day I thought, “There are people who live like this every day.” At 2:00 PM when my brain was foggy, I thought about kids in school too hungry to learn and I almost cried. Now I have an inkling, just an inkling, of what that must be like. This is why schools in poor areas have free breakfast programs – or did, the last time I paid attention. Maybe they’ve been cut from the budget.

I’ve never been against school breakfast or free lunch programs, but I’ve never been actively for them, either. Suddenly now I want to make sure my taxes go to these programs. Please, take a little bit of my money and use it to feed children so that they can pay attention to math and reading.

For 15 hours last week my empathy muscles got a workout while my stomach took a break. At the end of the day, a good friend who had also fasted and I broke our fast in an Italian restaurant. We talked and laughed, drank and ate together until past closing time. She kindly drove me to my car so I wouldn’t have to walk five blocks alone in the dark.

On Twitter I’ll sometimes see the hashtag “#firstworldproblems.” It’s a joke; a self-deprecating nod to how good one has it tacked on to the end of a tweet complaining about the barista messing up one’s coffee order. That’s what having to walk five blocks alone in the dark after a restaurant meal with a friend is: a first-world problem. That’s what a self-imposed 15-hour fast is, too.

Katherine is a teenager in Texas who has been my Twitter friend for almost three years. She is in the final stretch of her Senior year and wrote a fantastic “day in the life” blog post today that you should read if you, like me, are not a teenager. Especially if you (like me) peeled out from the driveway of your own teen years as quickly as possible.

There is a writers’ maxim that writing about the specific makes one’s story universal. I’m 20 years older than Katherine; when I graduated high school in 1991 a different (much shorter) war was ending (and if I had to see one more yellow ribbon anywhere I was sure I was going to puke). I was in Utah, not Texas, and the details of my life were different. The details don’t matter here, because it felt the same: suspended, waiting for this farce to end and “real life” to begin.

That last stretch of school took for – ev – er . . . until it was suddenly over.

Hang in the air with Katherine from tinytowntexas for a moment, and remember your own stagnant Spring:

A day in the life.
The substitute in my first period class reads aloud a Bible verse in an attempt to make sense of recent news. She apologizes afterward. The bell that marks the passing of class periods has been turned off for the sake of AP testing and the weather dips into the fifties, which would leave the student population off-kilter on any normal day. This isn’t any normal day . . . .

We’re at our son’s indoor soccer game, watching him wander around the court as if in search of flowers to pick. So far it’s been a mediocre game: two teams of 2^nd & 3^rd grade boys and girls, some running after the ball, others standing around or wandering like our son. Occasionally someone kicks the ball towards a goal. I think each team has scored once, though they don’t post the score, so it’s easy to lose track.

Suddenly this kid sweeps towards our team’s goal from the far side of the court. He’s one of the larger kids: not fat, but solidly built; his dark hair is trimmed close on the sides and sticks up bushily on top. In one gilding pass he sinks a goal and arcs away from it, towards his side of the court, back towards the bleachers where we sit. Now that he’s facing us I can see the look on his face: he’s mouthing a primal scream of victory worthy of professional sports. Wearing that look, his haircut becomes defiant instead of bushy and he seems at least three years older than his teammates. This kid is cool.

I laugh and turn to look at my husband.

“Did you see that look?” I ask.

He nods, grinning. He shakes his head and says, “That’s the kind of killer instinct I wish our son had.”

I look back towards the game. After a moment he adds, “Do you know who had that look as a kid? Your brother.”

I laugh. “My brother was born with that look!” This may actually be true; they didn’t videotape deliveries in 1976, so we’ll never know for sure.

“I had that look.”

I’m skeptical. “You had that look at age 7?”

“I did.”

“My mother probably has ten pictures of my brother with that look. No, more than ten.”

He points at me. “You never had that look.”

He blames my genes for our son’s lack of sports interest and instinct. The year I played high school basketball, my entire team stood up and cheered on the single occasion I fought another girl for the ball. Standing 5’10” at age 14, I had only joined the team so that my dad would pay for ballet lessons. I had no interest, no killer instinct.

I shrug. He can blame me, but it’s got to be a recessive trait because my family is full of jocks and sports fanatics. When I was a year old my mother broke her leg in a highly competitive game of backyard volleyball. That would never happen to me, because having a one-year-old is a perfect excuse to sit any game out.

“I wonder if our three-year-old will have that look,” I say.

“He’d better! Otherwise this baby is our only hope.” He holds up the baby and smiles at him. “Yes! You would be our only hope. Are you going to have that look?”

I have a hard time imagining it. I think he’d better pin his hopes on the three-year-old.

I’m seven months pregnant and digging deeper into the storage bin of maternity clothes each week. Today I pulled out “the $12 pants” and thought of this story, written about a week before my second child was born (originally posted on my MySpace blog).

Monday, April 16, 2007

My mass and/or girth reached some sort of critical point on Friday and suddenly I could not pull on my maternity pants.  Fearing this might happen, I had purchased a pair of larger pants from the JC Penny catalog earlier in the week.  I wore them on Friday and Saturday.  Happily, they allowed blood flow to my legs while seated (a nice change).  Unhappily, they were huge, off-white and ugly.  I needed to go shopping.

I live a few miles from the shopping Mecca of East Pierce County.  This street has everything, including a sex toy shop, but for some baffling reason does not have a maternity clothing store.  I haven’t been able to find a metaphysical store either, although a co-worker says she saw one near the Best Buy.  I’m not sure she knows the difference between a metaphysical shop (where one can buy candles and tarot cards) and a head shop (where one can buy Grateful Dead stickers and things “to put your weed in, man”).  To be fair, they both sell incense and bumper stickers railing against the President.  But I digress.

Last night I traveled to the Motherhood Maternity outlet in the SuperMall.  I told the young clerk who greeted me (I later learned she was the new store manager) that I had about three weeks left (wishful thinking), had outgrown all my pants, and needed the cheapest pants and/or skirts they had.  “Cheap” is what Motherhood Maternity does best and I was at their outlet store, for Pete’s sake, but apparently my choice of words offended her.  She wrinkled her nose and said, “If it’s cheap you want, I can’t help you.  Try the clearance and “as-is” racks over there.  See what you can find.”  She waved her hand at the corner of the store and left me alone.

Luckily another clerk, a tough-looking older woman, had overheard us and wanted to help.  “What size are you, Dear?” she asked.

“Lar . . . um, extra large, now.  I had a thigh explosion,” I over-explained.

There was a beat where neither of us spoke and I almost saw the words, “The baby’s not in your thighs, Dear,” flit across her face, but she just shrugged and said, “That happens.”

She helped me find a $5 skirt and two pair of pants ($12 and $13 each).  She also suggested some other items –ah, upselling, I know you well—and in the end I left happy if a little poorer than planned.  I’m wearing the $12 pants now.  It’s so nice to have blood in my legs without feeling like a complete fashion catastrophe.

In the car on the way to work this morning, while I was freaking out my lifelong tendency to take on too much (there are new, shiny things I’d like to do), I said, “. . . and I’ll never accomplish anything and we’ll die in abject poverty and shame.”

Smoothly and without blinking, my husband said, “Technically it won’t be abject poverty. We are above the poverty line.”

That’s my guy.

Someone on TV mentioned “brunch” and my husband and I started reminiscing about the last time we went to brunch, a million years ago when we were newly engaged. His parents were visiting from Chicago and treated us to Sunday brunch at Salty’s on Alki. It was fabulous.

“The best part was the mimosas,” I said, remembering the illicit thrill of being tipsy at 10 in the morning in a fancy restaurant with my future in-laws.

“We were young,” I went on, “childless . . . thinner. Ah, our brunch days.”

“Like our salad days, only tastier,” my husband said. “Our salad days, with eggs. And bacon.”

At work I team-teach a course called Prepare Training.* It’s a great course, I truly enjoy teaching it, and yes, I think you should have it at your workplace.** One of the messages of the course is when bad stuff happens around you, don’t let it inside. If it does get in, then you need to get rid of it appropriately. The phrase from the materials is something like, “Find positive ways to release stored negative energy.” Stress relief, baby.

When I teach this I mean every word I say. I’ve just been terrible – awful – about living it. I release stored negative energy through food: I stuff my face, I bake, or both. (One does naturally lead to the other.) I gained 20 pounds the first year I was at my job.

I’ve been saying for years that I need to find a better way to deal with stress. (Medication comes to mind, but really, that shouldn’t be necessary. The day I medicate myself in order to deal with my job should be the day I start looking for a new job.) I used to jog, I took a class in Shamanic journeying, and all my pre-parenthood life I could count on escaping with a good book, but those haven’t been realistic options for me for a while.

I’m blogging about this not to whine, but to say that I think I’ve finally found it. I started vegetable gardening a month ago and I love it. I can do it with my kids (with collateral seedling damage, but that’s OK); I can do it after work and on weekends, as much or as little as I like. Gardening is interesting, I don’t have to be in great shape, and I get positive feedback when my plants grow. I get to be outside and I’m not staring at a screen of any kind. I even like weeding. Just writing about it makes me feel good.

So it’s early, I realize that, and my garden is very much an experiment. Here’s a picture of it taken on May 9th. (The fence is old and sad-looking.) I’ll post more pictures as the summer progresses. If I don’t grow anything my family can eat I will be disappointed, but right now I think that’s OK. The stress relief alone is worth the effort.

As of today I’m growing: corn, peas, strawberries, cucumbers, jalapeno peppers, Cayenne peppers, sage, spearmint, rosemary, cilantro, basil, tomatoes (3 kinds), green bell peppers, beans, lettuce, Walla-Walla onions, carrots, cauliflower, and a sunflower my son brought home from school.

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*The official name of the course is the “Crisis Prevention Institute’s Prepare Training Foundation Course” and I’m officially a “Certified Instructor.”

**I’m only certified to teach for my employer, so this is in no way an attempt to get work. If you’d like the course at your workplace (and you totally need it), then contact CPI and grow your own Certified Instructor. (Like Sea Monkeys, only a lot more expensive.)

This morning amid the lingering #amazonfail discussion on Twitter came the question of whether or not one should boycott Amazon.com. I responded that the only company I can be bothered to boycott is Wal-Mart, which I’ve been doing for about eight years. (One boycott is enough, right? How socially responsible do you expect me to be?)

I know that Wal-Mart doesn’t miss my former bi-weekly Dr. Pepper and Benadryl purchases, but that’s not the point. The point is that I have one less thing to feel guilty about. I’ve got unpaid bills, a never-opened box of baby gift thank-you cards, broken vows, overdue library books, white privilege, and 42 other things in the knapsack on my back. I don’t need Wal-Mart in there too.

A Twitter friend said (as people often do when the subject comes up) that she couldn’t boycott them because they had such great prices. I understand that. I also know it’s a fun store. I shopped there for years because my friend and I had a hell of a good time frolicking in the aisles while we saved money. (One trip we wasted an entire disposable camera taking pictures of each other.) Sure, I’d heard bad things about Wal-Mart; that they drove small businesses under, and forced record labels to censor CDs, but I could buy my CDs somewhere else and they had Benadryl for $3.97 a box. C’mon!

Then I got my first job as a Human Resources Manager. As a newly-minted professional, I subscribed to several HR email newsletters. Not a week went by, not a week! –excuse me for a moment while I channel Brodie– when I didn’t read about another lawsuit by Wal-Mart employees against the company. Sure, any employer can get sued, whether they deserve it or not, and sure, an employer the size of Wal-Mart is going to have a proportionately larger number of suits, but after a while I thought, “These people can’t all be wrong. There has to be something here.”

I eventually decided that I could not in good conscience give my money to a company that treated its employees that poorly. This CampusProgress article, even though it was written in 2005 and I started my boycott in 2001, gives a good feel for Wal-Mart’s legal issues at the time.

My boycott by now is a comforting habit. I did shop there once about a year and a half ago as an experiment to lower our grocery bill, but it just felt wrong being in the store. (And wouldn’t you know it, someone from work called my cell while I was there, asking to meet me where I was.) I’ve been thinking about it off and on today: what can I say about why I boycott Wal-Mart? How are things there in 2009?

A quick Google search tonight found three interesting things: an October ’08 article in the Montreal Gazette accusing Wal-Mart of closing a store (again) because the employees there organized, a January Bloomberg Politics Law podcast about 63 class-action wage & hour lawsuits entitled, “Wal-Mart Employee Settlements May Cost $640 Million,” and a February Boing Boing post by Charles Platt about his experience working there. (His summary: “Not so bad!” Summary of the comments: “You’re an idiot, Mr. Platt.”)

Then there’s always this map, which disturbs me no matter how many times I see it and looks like it should belong to the CDC. Yeah. I think I’ll keep my comforting habit for a little while longer.

I’ve had this belt for 7 or 8 years. It occurred to me today that a picture of it would say more than a long line of whiny blog posts. (Infer whining – or not – as you wish.)

I mentioned this on Twitter when I discovered it a few weeks ago: Clocky, the alarm clock that runs away from you. I can't stop thinking about it.

For several weeks it seemed that no matter how early I set the time on my alarm, I would not get out of bed until 7:00 AM. This past week I've nudged up to 6:45. Waking up is painful.

I think I need Clocky, but I don't want it. First of all, if I were willing to pay more than $25 for an alarm clock I would have bought one of these long ago. Secondly, I think Clocky would annoy me to the point of criminal activity. I'd wake up wanting to kill something every day. Finally, the floor around my bed is usually covered with clean clothes waiting to be folded. Clocky would be trapped by my socks and underwear. Actually that last one might make it a little easier to take.

I'm not going to drop $50 on the World's Most Irritating Alarm Clock, but I need to do something to make mornings easier. Go to bed earlier? Bah! So pedestrian. Maybe I could move the coffee maker to the top of my dresser and program it for 6:00 AM. Anyone tried that?