#and a pretty significant time was spent roasting her behavior

[wickedhawtwexler]

currently re-living one of my weirdest childhood "traumas" (person on a power trip self-destructing an online community i'm a part of)

[mizumelona]

set me up | atsumu x reader

SYNOPSIS: You’re an ambitious career woman, who’s got everything…except a significant other. Your mom, sick of you showing up to family functions alone, sets you up on a series of (terrible) blind dates. You make these dates meet you at your favorite restaurant, Onigiri Miya, but for some reason the owner’s jerk of a twin brother always happens to be there exactly when things crash and burn.

MASTERLIST

PREV | DATE 1 - THE CLUELESS ASSHOLE | NEXT

TAGLIST: @awkwardali6106 @kasandrafaye @veggytaled @svtbitch @stinkyobeymerat@hollypastl @differentballooncollection @o51oc @sunboikyo00 @justxanotherxshipper @kaisemieita

~

Your date stepped into the restaurant with a smile. Glasses. Neat hair. Handsome enough to avoid any major roasts from your family. Perfect.

“Hi, it’s great to finally meet you! I’m y/n”, you tried to make your voice sound demure. Stay cool y/n. Stay cool. Don’t even think about what the lemon head jerk said.

“Hi. I’m Hanate. You look…great” Another snicker from the direction of the bar.

“Thanks for coming all the way here to meet me. So, let’s go sit over there”, You threw a warning look at Atsumu and guided Hanate towards a table as far away from the bar as possible, making sure Atsumu was out of his line of sight. Osamu soon followed, placing two glasses of water on the table.

He pulled out a little notepad. “What’ll you be havin’ today?”

Hanate looked at you. “What’s good at this place?”

“I love the minced tuna and spring onion rice ball.” You thought you saw Atsumu’s head perk up in your direction.

“Cool.” He turned to Osamu, I’ll get one of those too.”

“Two minced tuna and spring onion rice balls comin’ right up”, Osamu repeated the order and went back to the prep station. You turned to your date.

“So, how’s your day going?”

“I’m so glad it’s the weekend.”

“Yeah! Totally!”, you picked up your glass of water to take a sip.

“I’ll never understand those try hard workaholics. It’s like, who do they think they are acting all high and mighty”. Cough. Some water went down the wrong pipe. Okay, that was unexpected, but it’s fine he doesn’t have to know about your work habits right away. You could always warm him up to it later. First you’d get him to fall for you and everything could fall into place later.

“Uh…yeah…”, you tried your best to make your response sound enthusiastic.

“But it is nice to be making good money. You know, my uncle hooked me up with this sweet job. I barely do anything, and I’m still making stacks.”  He gave you little side eye that he probably thought made him look cool. It didn’t. “You never know, if things work between us maybe he can work something out for you too”

You started to scoff but remembered that you were supposed to be getting this guy to like you, so you played it off as clearing your throat.

“Well…I don’t know about that”, You tried changing the topic. “So, what kinds of things are you interested in?”

“Ah my hobbies are pretty spread out. I don’t like to spend too much time on one thing. I can’t be tied down y’know. What about you?”

“I’m pretty interested in technology, especially applications that make education more accessible”

“Oh have you heard of the app GO”

“Ah, yeah I actually know a lot about it-”

“Well, did you know that the app won at the design awards last year. The creators must’ve spent ages coming up with it”

“Actually, It was a fairly simple concept rooted in values of co-creation”

“Uh…I’m pretty sure it was a minimal design where people work together toward the final result.”

Your eyebrow twitched. Isn’t that exactly what you just said but using different words?

“Well”, You started with a sly smile. “I think I would know the app I designed”

That shut him up. Haha.

But the satisfying moment was quickly interrupted by some loud guffaws coming from the blondie at the bar. Somehow you knew it wasn’t because he stumbled upon a funny meme. Sure, it felt great to flex on your clueless date, but that was none of his business. You made a sly glance in Atsumu’s direction. He was looking directly at you with a shit eating grin.

“Uh…Well…”, Hanate still looked like he was struggling coming up something to say after your little roast. He frowned turning to look in Atsumu’s direction “Wow that guy is really loud. Wait is he looking this way-“

“Oh!”, you exclaimed.

Oh hell no. You were not about to let some rando dye job jerk get in the way of your plans to conquer romance. You needed him to shut up. Now. But you weren’t going to be able to do that while trying to look like a lady for you date. Quickly, you formulated a plan. You lifted your arm as if you were going to pick up your glass of water, but made a sweeping motion knocking your phone off Hanate’s side of the table. Bingo.

“Oh I’m so sorry about that. My hand slipped. Could you grab it for me?”

“Uh sure no problem”

The moment his head dipped below the table, you made eye contact with Atsumu and made a quick motion dragging your thumb across your neck. Keep that up and you’re dead. He smirked and shrugged. Like I care. Bastard.

“Two minced tuna and spring onion rice balls”, Osamu was back at the table with your onigiri. Steam was billowing off the rice and the smell of the tuna wafted in the air.

“Wow it looks great! Thank you!”

The rice balls were delicious as always, but once you two started eating the conversation died. No matter what you asked Hanate’s responses were short. “Do you like the food?”, “Yeah…”, “Did you see that new movie?”, “Yeah…”. You took another bite resisting the urge to roll your eyes. Did getting roasted hurt his ego that much?

Once you finished eating you two split the bill and prepared to go your separate ways.

You turned to Hanate. “Well, I’m going to run to the bathroom before I head out, but today was nice.” It actually sucked but in case a second date was still an option you kept the thought to yourself. Even if this guy was clueless you could always dump him after you brought him to a family brunch.

“Yeah…”

~

Atsumu took another satisfying bite out of his onigiri. He’d been having a pretty shitty day, but watching y/n’s date crash and burn was the best thing he’d seen all week. Atsumu had no respect for useless, clueless people, so watching y/n roast this guy had been fucking hilarious. He did wonder why it seemed like she was trying to make this guy like her when she obviously didn’t like him. She was definitely out of this lame guy’s league, not that it was any of his business.

Atsumu watched as the guy in question picked up his phone, taking a call.

“Yeah…the date finished…yeah…not gonna lie though, she was kind of a stuck up bitch”

Atsumu scoffed and turned to tell the guy off, but before he could say anything the bathroom door swung open.

“At least I’m not a lazy asshole”, Y/n stepped out, looked at her date, and rolled her eyes. She flipped the guy off and walked right out the door.

Atsumu burst out laughing as the door slammed shut.

“She beat ya to it ‘Tsumu”, Osamu piped in from the cashier.

“Shut up ‘Samu”

~

Ugh what a waste of time. You were currently trying to forget about the stupid date by having a self care night. The candles were lit. Face mask was on. Wine glass was filled. You were about to turn on that new rom com movie that came out when your phone buzzed.

Mom:

I heard from Haru. You called him an asshole?? Y/n I can’t believe this

Lovely Daughter:

he called me a bitch first

Mom:

Okay fine we’ll just think of it as a test run but please try and be on your best behavior next week.

Lovely Daughter:

Next week?

Mom:

I ran into Rika at the farmers market and she told me her son is single. I already sent him the address to Onigiri Miya. You’ll meet him there next Sunday at 11.

Lovely Daughter:

!!!

You put your phone down. That was faster than you’d expected, but actually this worked in your favor. So the first date didn’t go so well, but that’s okay. This guy had just been especially bad, not to mention the banana head jerk who kept interfering. You sipped your drink with a sly smile. Next week you’d conquer romance for sure.

[popculturebuffet]

Star Vs: Lava Lake Beach or Happy Birthday, Marco Diaz

Tomtrospective is back baby! It’s been almost two months, which is better than last time but still not great. As you can probably tell if you check this space i’ve been busy with comissions (5 dollars an episode if you were curious and had another star vs episode you wanted me to check out or any animated series really), which now includes a sizeable project, regular coverage of ducktales every monday, loud house whenever it comes around becuase nick’s scheduling is a nightmare, and because I apparently didn’t have enough going on The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. Part 2 coming before the end of the month hopefully. So this project, which sadly dosen’t get a lot of eyeballs on it, kinda just slid on back. Thankfully though I have a second before I get back to my rather sizeable and mostly self inflicted to do list, so with that in mind, let’s take a trip to the beach in the dead of winter. This is Lava Lake Beach. 

PREVIOUSLY ON STAR VS:

Yeah I skipped over Lint Catcher.. which is ironic given I just decided to cover the meteora and eclipsa centric episodes post monster bash.. but I have good reason for that. And it’s not just “This is my blog and unless i’m getting paid for it I can do what I want”. That’s a valid reason but it’s not THE reason. No it’s because Tom has a sizeable roll in the finale episodes for season 3, and thus the climax to Season 3′s arc overall, and honestly Divide and Conquer are just TOO good to simply skip over Star’s parts of them. I choose to switch to covering full episodes for this retrospective which means i’m doing it right. It means more work for me, but frankly this stuff’s too good to not to cover properly. So i’ll be mixing the meteora arc in with tom, like a finely blended cocktail, after this review and the next one.. which aired after monster party but takes place before so i’m doing it in time for christmas. 

And I WILL be covering the two episodes I skipped over eventually, I just feel the first goes into another possible arc down the line, and the other is just really terrible. Not the worst episode of the series, that would be Marco Jr, but a close second or third for sure. But I will have to summarize them to get to this point so: When last we left off Tom and Star were getting close again, but you might of noticed someone was conspciously absent. Marco went back to earth after his two weeks on Mewni, and as to what he was up to we found out LITERALLY the episode after “Demonicism”: Sophmore Slump. Marco basically spent the rest of his summer not shutting up about Mewni like an obnoxious jackass. Yeah Sophmore Slumb begins the character’s downward spiral and basically coming off like two diffrent characters: He’ll either be.. exactly what he was in the first two seasons, an awkard but well meaning voice of reason or a needy jackass pining after someone elses girlfriend and not caring about anyone else but himself and star. There.. there isn’t an inbetween. So yeah it’s just 11 minutes of Marco being insufferable, and only snapping out of it in realizing he’s neglected his girlfriend Jackie. We do get a GENUINELy great scene when she breaks up with him, realizing that while Marco’s willing to try for her.. his heart’s just not in it and his head’s.. with someone else. He’s not even malicious about it: While he wore his cape, he had a cape, under his clothes he genuinely tried to make things work and go out with her. Conciously he genuinely loves her, subconciously he has feeling sfor someone else and it’s showring. While this isn’t hte best episode it’s not a TERRIBLE one on the grounds that this one end sequence makes it work. Marco then decides to go to mewni and become a knight, and everyone sees him off in a good moment. It’s an annoying episode, but not a bad one the more I think about it.  Lint Catcher is. Basically everyone’s a jackass but Tom and Eclipsa, which really sums up the last few seasons nicely. Not basically Marco dind’t you know, call star to vet any of this, and just expects to be welcomed back. Star, rather than you know admit her feelings for marco while she’s now dating tom, more on that in a moment, tries to shove him off on whoever. And it turns out River wasn’t serious with his offer of knighthood that marco came to take him up on, despite sounding serious and just gave marco a meat blanket because again, everyone’s a jackass.. except maybe moon who tries to make it work. It’s just an aggrivating 11 minutes and unlike the above none of it’s intentoinal. But how does this relate to tom? and wait star’s dating tom? Well Tom shows up early on as Star is singing a burrito song, only for him to burst out of the bathroom and then warmly greet Marco before the guards show up. Star also later admits to Marco yup she and Tom are dating since last episode. Which i’m fine with: we don’t need to see everything and it was pretty obvious that’s where it was headed. At the time I was aggrivated because “another blockadef or starco reallY” but i’ve warmed up with time. So yeah I really didn’t need to bang my head into the door for 11 minutes and whatever hours it took to write this to tell you tom and marco have upgraded from kinda friends to best bros who want to make out with each other and Star and Tom are dating. I will probably cover both episodes eventually, but for now, I have enough to cover especially with my realizing I needded to cover the eclipsa and meteora stuff, without getting a head injury from stupdiity. As for Marco’s knight status, he can’t start there, and Star eventualy realized that awkard sexual tension or not, he’s her best friend and made him her squire. So Marco’s now on mewni, Tom and star are together. 

Let’s get at er. We open with tom summoning the flames of the dammned.. FOR MARSHMELLLOWWWWSSS. Star, Tom, Marco and Kelly are at the titular Lava Lake Beach roasting marshmellows and getting ready for the annual soulrise. Star likes the beach because it’s so spooky with Marco rightly pointing out.. insn’t that the underworld’s thing? Tom just casually shrugs it off as “Yeah i’ts pretty metal”. Which is both accurate and is part of why we’re here. This is our first, and really only, good look at the underworld. With Blood Moon Ball we just saw a bubble of it and it was entirely controlled by tom, if helping explain his control issues as he probably spent his whole life getting everything and never realizing being a possesive creep isn’t ag ood thing and people aren’t things you can own, but well.. people with their own wants and wills. When everyone around you does what you want, including your sweet well meaning parents, why would you understand someone saying no? And his parents aren’t bad people, they clearly have boundries, they just spoiled him a bit much. We’re not in Doofus Drake terriotiry where Tom’s a terrifying sociopath, he just had some very bad behaviors and when called on them by Marco, genuinely changed for the better and has been working on that since.  But this episode gives us a good reason of why the other toxic part of tom, his rage, was never reigned in. Here.. it’s just normal. One scene illustrates this well: A couple casually if rudely challenges marco to a fight when he just wants to find kelly, more on that in a minute. But when he walks away, they just say “he seemed nice. And not EVERYONE is like that.. but most of the demons seen this ep are agressive, competitive and combtiive but not without reason. 

We get a great example of this after Smores, where Marco’s fell off, tom and star are cute, and kelly licked all of hers. And after Marco realizes Tom’s outfit is just one of his hoodies but customized.. which for tom means ripping off the sleeves because that’s how he rolls and offering to do the same for marco. Also Star is in an adorable sailor outfit. what i’m saying is I like their outfits this episode and Marco has a lot of copies of that hoodie so in terms of Star’s invasions of his privacy, this is low on the list. 

Back on point, a couple challenges the group over their spot and mocks star for not having a third eye.... but the resolution is beach volleball, witht he scoring demon from “Mr Candle Cares’ making an apperance. This shows Underworld culture: their volatile, they can get overly agressive.. but their polite outside of it. It’s why Tom’s anger wasn’t really adressed: Here everyone’ds polite the rest of the time, why does it matter? But it idd because even by these standards his anger was a problem and one he’s .. genuinely dealing with. While he gets devensive of his girlfriend, notice how he jsut gets regular angry and not.. murdery angry. We see his anger wasn’t normal even by underworld standards.. but he’s genuinely trying and has changed almost complelely from the last time we visted this realm. 

This is also.. about what we get for tom this episode. Yeah while this is part of the tomtrospective for the above, and for other reasons that we’ll get to, this is a Marco episode. And a Kelly episode, so Kelly, now the food to fill the void inside has run out, I can relate, is suddenly depressed and just.. walks off mid game. And given Star and Tom aren’t the most empathetic people, they really fail to notice with Tom only noticing how it effects him. Tom has grown.. but as we’ll see after “stump Day” with his next two episodes after that, he still has room to grow. But it is nice we get signs of that episodes before it happens. Excellent work. 

So yeah I guess for those who forgot, and if so how dare, or those who never got this far int he series who Kelly is. Kelly was introduced in season 2 as a friend of star and ponyheads who, at the end of her episode, after not talking was revealed to not be a giant bush, but a bispeceled teenager who just has a lot of hammerspace when her hair is down, as her hair is massive and whose species has a symbiotic relation ship with their significant others, as her boyfriend tad was in her hair merged with her the whole time. They breifly showed up again in another episode but otherwise haven’t been all that fleshed out till this episode. 

And what brings it about.. is their breakup. And they have before only to get back together but this time it’s for real, as Marco finds out when comforting her. He genuinely offers her to talk, but we’re interuppted by her good pal JORBY!. I freaking love Jorby and every second of his screentime here is magic. Sadly he’s only used like.. twice after this. He’s a giant talking wolf guy from Kelly’s dimension, only revealed by the finale, who thinks Marco is her new fighting partner and claims to have killed their mutual aquantince greg. Kelly just responds with an amazingly annoyed and sarcastic “You didn’t kill greg” which he didn’t, and when Marco tries to explain she’s falling apart, Jorby responds with “WE ALL ARE ALL THE TIME, EXESNTIAL WARCRY!”... the amount of great minor characters this series wasted I swear. 

But Kelly can’t deal with this and runs off and Jorby.. genuinely apologizes. He didn’t realize his friend was that banged up emotionally, and only dosen’t help because his goose girlfriend needs him. Marco is fine with this though and goes to offer his help after a breif search and two Skelly’s who fall in love over having the same name. Awww. 

Kelly and Marco finally talk and Kelly sobs into his arms in a genuinely moving bit, admitting after being with Tad so long she dosen’t know who she is anymore. It’s REALLY great stuff, and really helps us feel for a character we honestly barely knew: Sure we barely saw their relationship.. but it was good... and when a relationship ends that wound dosen’t close easily> Trust me.. I know. 

Though the other issue is that Tad.. hasn’t moved out of her head. Literally, he’s still in there and won’t take a hint it’s really really over and he needs to move on. So Marco, being a gentleman.. at least for this episode, agrees to help. IT’s why I like marco when he’s acutally written well: he can be awkward and sometimes a bit too full of himself when it comes to knowing stuff, but he’s a good kid who just wants to help people and I genuinely missed that version most of this season. So marco climbs in and finds Tad munching on vega pizza and refusing to leave, clearly subscribing to the duck method of swallowing your sadness. 

Marco tells him he needs to leave, and while Tad is in denial.. Marco gets it to sink in.. that putting himself around someone unavaliable is just going to keep hurting him agains and again and not help him move on. Tad.. .ends up agreeing.. and it’s then the episode has it’s best scene.... Tad says “marco is the expert on that”. Marco of course denies this.. until Tad eventually makes him see the truth: he’s hanging around star the same way tad’s clung to kelly and will sadly continue too as while he agrees to move out.. it takes a bit for it to stick as we’ll see next time. Tad gets him to think about it: He has dimensional sciessors. Anywhere in time and space.. and where doe she want to start? With his unavaliable crush, following her to what he thought would be a couples event with her boyfriend. I mean he didn’t KNOW Tad and Kelly were broken up, so far all he knew he was the fifth wheel. No one would willingly do that for no reason. He’s so obessed with her, he wants to be around her even though it’s never going to happen.. i’ve been there WAY too many times to call and had to eventually learn to let got for their sake and mine. You can still be around them, you just have to let go of romance for everyone’s sake and move on. And Marco hasn’t because he didn’t even realize it. It’s why I tolerate “Sophmore Slump” now.. because with this episode it goes from bad writing to his subconcious scremaing at him to go be with star, and him not listening because conciously he still wants his current girlfriend.. and really he loves both, he just didn’t deal with that or move past either, so he lost both. 

Marco.. has a panic attack over it justifably and breaks down gradually, seeing all the happy couples and finally star and tom, sinking in that .. Tad was right. He’s in love with Star.. and it hurts. It hurts a LOTTTTTT. And he has NO idea how to deal with it. And as we’ll see how he tries to.. is pretty damn bad. But that’s for other episodes. Let’s get to the climax of this one. 

Kelly finds Marco, like her earlier depressed and lost, and upon realizing this, and thanking him as Tad agreed to finally move out, says “kelly’s driving” and drags him. It’s in these last moments we get to see more of kelly’s personality: we’ve seen her be ssarcastic but now we get to see her be a bit off kilter and adorable, which is her standard mode and what makes me like the character so much and wish she got treated better. But we’ll get to that later in the retrospective as it happens to perfectly zig zag into Tom’s life. Point is we see more of her and find out why she came to see the Soulrise as she and Marco prepare to watch: she and tad used to see it every year.. and even if their broken up.. she dosen’t want that taken away from her. Even if their relationsihp is over.. pieces of it can still be hers to treasure and keep from now on. This can still be hers... and in this case Marcos as marco puts his jacket over her, and Kelly cuddles him. Awwww. If you were wondering, yup I do ship Markelly and Yup how it ends is really bad and we’ll get to it and there will be blood. But for now their just two lonely souls sharing a moment, with Kelly rebuffing getting Tom and Star “They don’t need this’ which is accurate and they have each other and some alone time. Their fine. Plus they you know, didn’t notice either of them are missing so ...

Thank you Jake. Rest in Peace my good friend who shares a name. So we get a nice romantic moment as they watch a bunch of eldtirch skeletial angels with wings rise from the depths of the black and white, and it’s also marco’s birthday! “Happy Birthday Marco Diaz”. And with that we’re out. 

Final Thoughts: This is one of my faviorite Star Vs episodes, even with later bullshit, and for good reason. It frames Marco’s previous actions in a better light, has some REALLy stellar acting from Adam McArthur, and is in general just a really soulful ep that really touches on some good stuff and fleshes out Kelly from a background character to a fan faviorite and sets up a new romance for Marco that I genuinely love. IT’s one of the series best moments even if later episodes would tarnish it slightly..but on it’s own.. it’s fantstic.  Next time on tom:It’s the...

Christmas Special! Until then there’s always another rainbow and happy thanksgiving!

[rilenerocks]

I’ve been thinking along several seemingly disparate pathways the past couple of days. I’ve always been like that. The other day, I met a friend to help her sort through a harsh diagnosis her partner had recently received. After a lifetime of dealing with medical issues, starting with my mom’s lifetime health problems which frightened me when I was just a little girl, to the ones that appeared throughout the decades in other family and friends, and eventually the five year cancer trip with Michael, I’ve gotten pretty good at wading into the morass of illness. My mom always said, “I’m sorry you were exposed to all my physical troubles, but look how smart you got?” Thanks, mom.

This friend of mine I met with is a fellow swimmer. Perversely, we met outside our empty pool where we’d swim next to each other for years while swapping life stories. Outside of the summer months, we’d rarely get together. Up until last Tuesday, aside from our summer swimming, we’d had lunch together exactly twice in three years. She is an artist and photographer. I’ve purchased a few of her pieces which are unique and especially marvelous because she repurposes a lot of throwaway stuff that would otherwise be landfilled. Last year she came to my house to take pictures of me and my yard, which were to be featured in a show about women and their gardens. That show was cancelled because of the virus quarantine. Maybe someday? Who knows?

Anyway, what frequently  comes up in our conversations is how I always go off on tangents in what appear to be significant digressions from the topic at hand. But in my circuitous way,  I always wind up back on the subject. That’s what this blog is going to be like on this mild, sunny day, as I sit in my backyard with my feet kicking away in my kiddie pool. I’m watching butterflies feed while looking at and listening to birds. I’m learning a lot out here. I’m trying not to worry about Pumpkin, the female cardinal I foolishly attached myself to, despite knowing that’s a bad move with any wild animal. I haven’t seen her in two days. Carmine, her male partner has been omnipresent. And I believe I spotted one of their babies at my bird feeder yesterday, identified by a splotch of that beautiful cream color of its mom.

I can’t hear a damn thing out here except for the birds. My headphones are turned up loud. I’m in my own universe with just the natural world, music, and the always palpable sense of Michael that emanates from this space. Sometimes I catch myself staring at what I can only describe as hologram of him, weeding away in his incredibly meticulous vegetable beds. I can actually see the tendons moving in his legs which were pretty scrawny compared to his muscled upper body. It kind of reminds me of what popped out of R2D2 when Obi-Wan Kenobi retrieved Princess Leia’s message in the first Star Wars film.

The other morning, I was hurrying through kitchen chores when my son showed up in the dining room. He’s staying with me for awhile he works on a postdoc at our local university. I was chattering away at him when he looked at me through bleary eyes and asked, “ what’s up with this intense energy level so early in the day?” Despite my 70th birthday being my next, I still have almost the same high energy that I did when I was young. Apparently that’s  hardwired into me. Sometimes I think it’s dissipated over time, but only on a relative scale, I move at a faster pace than most of my family of origin. My mom, despite her ailments, was clearly the progenitor for this trait. My dad spent his time off work lolling on the couch. Everyone in my immediate family also slept more than me. The same was true for the family Michael and I made together. I was always the first one awake, back in the days we were still living as a unit. In addition to the excess energy and the need for less sleep, I have an essentially sunny disposition. I can be sad, go to dark interior places and certainly recognize them, but in me, they don’t last long. After a sad day, I’m always surprised to feel my humor and energy bubble up from somewhere in me. Even in the worst of times, that’s been consistent. Once, a very long time ago, my brother, eight years older than me, told me that the first time he felt real joy was when I was born. I marveled at that statement. My parents also told me that I was such an easy, good baby that they were worried about me. I fell asleep easily with no complaints, which made them put a mirror under my nose to make sure I was still alive. I wasn’t a fussy eater and wasn’t ever colicky. I burbled happily through my days, primarily content and effortlessly pleased.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m certainly not that sweet saccharine type that you might want to punch in the face. I’m just relentlessly not difficult on a daily basis. Michael always said I was a cheap date, easily pleased and satisfied without a lot of effort. In other words, I’m not high maintenance. There’s just a lightness in me, sometimes despite all my efforts to the contrary. I’d like a maudlin wallow that lasted longer than an afternoon. My recovery time is so fast, I always feel like no one ever feels sorry enough for me. Maybe a more dramatic show of angst would get me more attention. Oh well. I think it’s mostly biology that’s running my show, modified by life and experience, but fundamentally locked in. I was twenty when I moved in with Michael and he often told me during our 45 years, that I was the singularly most unchanged person he ever knew. I took that as a compliment. He didn’t mean that I hadn’t evolved during our life together, but rather that my fundamental self was consistent. Since his death, I find that taken together, these essential traits of mine are both beneficial and problematic. My behavior indicates to the outside world that I’ve adapted fairly well to losing my partner. I do a lot of different activities. My brain is still active and I’m perpetually curious. I can have conversations about virtually anything. But inside of me where my intangible substance lives, I feel like I’m just fabricating a life to occupy my time. After all, I’m still alive.  My instincts tell me I have to do something. But in my depths, I often think this is all filler, placeholders for what my real life should be, a real life which still feels like my old life with Michael. I don’t know if or what a person is supposed to be in this world. You hear all these quotidian lines – “she’s a born mother,” “he’s a born grandfather,” all these “born” descriptors which seem to define some essential bent that we’re all expected to have. I suppose if that’s true, I’m a born life partner. Except I’m still here being that while my partner is gone. I don’t want another one. I can’t find a shred of evidence in me that would indicate I want to team up with anyone else. So basically, I’m using my essential traits and making up the current me on a daily basis. I don’t much like this. I simply don’t see another choice.

I guess that focusing on transience is the best coping mechanism I can employ to deal with this piece of time. Like the 18th century Dutch painter Rachel Ruysch, whose still lifes show the influence of the Vanitas movement, which display the inevitability of death and the loss of earthly things, I know that ultimately everything and everyone will disappear, if not completely, then certainly by changing form at the very least. Her painting above shows flowers reaching the end of their prime. I can relate to that.

  I’ve now lived in my town for almost 52 years. First I was a student with my life centered mostly around campus. After a time, I moved into the community at large. The places I spent time in over these decades, vary in terms of their continued consistent  physical presence, a modified presence or their complete disappearance. I rarely go through the university campus any more.

But the other day, I drove through the heart of what is known as Campustown, very near the main quadrangle where I attended classes in beautiful old buildings, many of which were constructed in the late 19th century and the early 20th century. Of course there have been many renovations and updates to those over the years. They are still recognizable. But Campustown is completely changed. High rise buildings dominate the landscape, mostly businesses on the first floors and apartments above. Green space is noticeably absent. Many of the places I frequented have vanished. I have vivid memories of them.

The Record Service where both Michael and I worked, he for 27 years, had several locations in the heart of that place. No trace of it exists. The corner drugstore which sold sundries and the like, but also had a few booths and a kitchen where for a modest price, you could get a hot roast beef or turkey sandwich with gravy and mashed potatoes. My friend Fern and I went there a lot. There was the Spudnuts doughnut shop and Follett’s bookstore. The Co-Ed movie theater and McBride’s plus the Art Mart which now exists in a new location far from campus.

There was Mabel’s, the music venue on the second floor of a building on the main drag, with an impossibly steep staircase even when my knees were good. The Deluxe, home of the best fish sandwich I’ve ever eaten. The Cellar, a basement “head” shop, Thimble and Threads, an alternative clothing store, The Leather Shop and Marrakech Clothing Imports. The Campus Florist, The Art Coop and the camera store way before digital cameras existed. Bailey and Himes sporting goods store. Chin’s restaurant and The Brown Jug. All these places and more exist in my mind. I can feel myself in them, feel what I’m doing as I jiggle my favorite pinball machine, Drop-a-Card, a little tipsy from beer which I never liked. I see my view of the stage from the good tables at Mabel’s where you could listen without getting too squished and sweaty and still get up to dance if you were so inclined. I can see my friends and remember conversations there. And of course there is Michael with me. As I drove down that strange but familiar street, I realize that when I’m gone, along with others in my peer group, all that energy from that time will spiral out into the universe somewhere, vanished from sight but yet alive in a context I can’t fathom. I believe that science will one day bear out my feelings about those mystical ideas.

A year or so ago, I had the presence of mind to drive around town to take pictures of every place I lived in before Michael and I bought the house I still currently occupy. Two places were demolished but I found photos of one of them. The other I hope to describe before that memory disappears. In my head, I can still walk through all those houses, turning into the kitchens, the bedrooms, the bathrooms. I can feel the  doorknobs in my hands. I navigate the past, parallel to the present. So much has happened in my life already. With the grinding repetitive routine that the coronavirus has required of me, these filler assignments that I concoct to occupy the present vacant time, aren’t as much fun as what’s already behind me, or next to me, or floating around somewhere in these difficult-to-comprehend wavelengths that are the stuff of physics and string theory and other befuddling concepts. I’ll take these scientists at their word while wishing for concepts easier for me to understand.

The other day, my son told me that my daughter didn’t want to sell our house after I die. Actually, she’d already told me that. He doesn’t really want to sell it either. I think I get it. Our home is like their ancestral shrine. People tend to move a lot in this country. When I came here in 1968 I was a 17 year old college freshman. Ten years later, after living with Michael and bumping around for six years, we bought this house, never dreaming we’d live here forever. But that’s how things worked out. I am anchored here, where so much of my adult life happened. My kids were conceived here and stayed until they went off to college. But they came back and brought their friends. We hosted 35 Thanksgiving dinners here with a wide assortment of family and stragglers. People who needed a place to stay intermittently shared our space. My mother lived here in a room that still smells like her. Michael and I did every conceivable activity that passes between friends and lovers here, up to and including his death. I am never uncomfortable or unhappy with our memories in this space. I wondered if I would be but instead it’s my gift and comfort to be here. If I’m lucky, I’d like to die in this place, just like Michael, although no one can predict what awaits us. If I could choose it, though, this is where I’d be.

When we moved in here, there was major reclamation to be done on this structure built in 1893. Daunting work and still it never ends. But the house emitted these wonderful feelings immediately, and we often wondered what good things must’ve happened that lingered in the walls and drifted out, enveloping us in the warmth of home. I imagine we’ve added to that deep resonance of succor which is palpable to me. I’m not surprised that my kids intuitively understand that their history still resides here. Not  something they’re likely to quickly cast aside once I’m gone, to hopefully commingle with whatever is Michael, who is out there afloat, still pulling on me daily, while I make up my current daily existence. All these changes I’ve experienced, internally and externally. My, my. I muddle along, creating a space around me that seems to pass for a full life. Maybe filler is too negative a connotation for what I’m doing now. Some days are better than others. I am confident that I still have value in this world and my intellect is fully operative which helps immeasurably. But the draw of my partner still dominates me after three years and change. If that alters, maybe I’ll redefine my current perceptions of this iteration of me.

Filler I’ve been thinking along several seemingly disparate pathways the past couple of days. I’ve always been like that.

[ashley-incharge]

Info Sheet on Ashley

Archetype — The Joker 

Birthday — June 5th

Zodiac Sign — Gemini

MBTI — ENTJ - the Commander

Enneagram — Type 8 - the Challenger

Temperament — Choleric

Hogwarts House — Slytherclaw

Moral Alignment — Chaotic Evil according to the test lmao

Primary Vice — Vain

Primary Virtue — Fortitude

Element — Fire

Overview:

Mother — Emily Armbruster

Father — Richard Armbruster

Mother’s Occupation — Actress

Father’s Occupation — Doctor, recently fired

Family Finances — upper class, wealthy. probs Bonfamille level

Birth Order — oldest

Brothers —  Tyler Armbruster

Sisters — Brittany Armbruster

Other Close Family — 

Best Friend — Ashley Q., Ashley T., Ashley B.

Other Friends — tbd

Enemies — Ashley Spinelli, Peach Clearwater

Pets — horse named Garnet, Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Poppy

Home Life During Childhood — fine. Raised by the nanny in wealth. 

Town or City Name(s) — Swynlake

What Did His or Her Bedroom Look Like — Glamorous, spacious. the room is colored a tasteful shade of pink, big windows, a walk-in closet of course. A private bathroom is attached to that including large jacuzzi tub. Her bedroom itself has a four poster bed piled with a ton of pillows. A white dresser is on the right side of the room. The left has a bookshelf featuring a row with only diaries from each year with a glass door to it and a lock, only to be opened by Ashley.

Any Sports or Clubs — Drama Club.

Favorite Toy or Game — MASH

Schooling — Secondary

Favorite Subject — English and History

Popular or Loner — Popular

Important Experiences or Events — getting the nanny hired, getting her first pony at 10, birth of her siblings, daddy getting fired

Nationality — British

Culture — English? idk posh English

Religion and beliefs — Anglican Christian

Physical Appearance

Face Claim —  Lili Reinhart

Complexion — pale white

Hair Colour — blonde

Eye Colour — blue-green

Height — 5′ 6″

Build — slim

Tattoos — none...yet

Piercings — ears pierced once

Common Hairstyle — hair down naturally. Sometimes ponytail, but really Ashley tries to style herself differently every day.

Clothing Style — High end posh fashion, unattainable glamour. With necklaces and bracelets and shiny earrings.

Mannerisms — putting her hands on her hips, pinching the bridge of her nose

Usual Expression — a smug little smile on her face

Health

Overall (do they get sick easily)? — No, she’s pretty healthy

Physical Ailments — None

Neurological Conditions — a little case of OCD probably.

Allergies —  shellfish

Grooming Habits — Showers properly every day, spends a good hour doing her hair, her make up, everything to get ready for the day.

Sleeping Habits — Typically goes to bed around midnight every night.

Eating Habits — Health food nut. Sometimes over the top with the healthy foods and dieting.

Exercise Habits —  dog walks every weekend, horseback riding through the week,

Emotional Stability — not too stable

Body Temperature — warm

Sociability — Very social

Addictions — shopping

Drug Use — None

Alcohol Use — Occasional

Your Character’s Character:

Bad Habits — gossiping, besmirching people’s names, bullying

Good Habits — keeping to a schedule, donating money to the less fortunate from time to time, practicing piano

Best Characteristic — confident as hell

Worst Characteristic — aggressive/mean. bully.

Worst Memory — The day daddy got fired

Best Memory — Winning an award for a piano composition

Proud of — her music, herself. Her friends.

Embarrassed by — losers

Driving Style — Assertive

Strong Points — confident, charming, independent

Temperament — Choleric

Attitude — sometimes positive attitude

Weakness — scandal in the family, impatient, blunt, overly critical

Fears — her father’s scandal ruining everything, losing the money, ending up a pauper, spiders, werewolves

Phobias — arachnophobia, lycanthrophobia, astraphobia, cacophobia

Secrets — hasn’t told the other Ashleys about her dad. She’s afraid they’ll think she’s terrible by association.

Regrets — not being able to convince her mom to return home and handle daddy

Feels Vulnerable When — anyone sees past the glam and the facade she puts on for the world. She’s an attention starved girl. She doesn’t want anyone to notice that.

Pet Peeves — people taking a decade to get a thought out, attention hogs, people who try to make conversation when you are reading

Conflicts — man against man (Ashley vs. Richard) and man against self (Ashley’s own terrible behavior)

Motivation — to keep her family together. To stay in the place she feels is home.

Short Term Goals and Hopes — to get daddy to stay in Swynlake and find a new job.

Long Term Goals and Hopes — Graduate with merit and go to Pride Uni with her best friends. One day become a musical star.

Sexuality — Bisexual?

Exercise Routine  — every afternoon horseback riding

Day or Night Person — Day/Night but never morning

Introvert or Extrovert — Extrovert

Optimist or Pessimist — Optimist

Likes and Styles:

Music — Pop. Kelly Clarkson, Katy Perry, Britney Spears, Madonna, Miley Cyrus etc.

Books — Tuck Everlasting, Ella Enchanted, Anne of Green Gables, Gallagher Girls, all Sarah Dessen novels, The Princess Diaries, The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants

Magazines — Vogue, GQ, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair

Foods — yogurt, vegan chilli, cauliflower steaks with roasted red pepper & olive salsa

Drinks — iced tea

Animals — horses, dogs, killer whales

Sports — volleyball, horseback riding

Social Issues — animal rights issues, women’s rights

Favorite Saying — “Scandalous”

Color — Pink

Clothing — high end fashion

Jewelry — glamorous necklaces, earrings, a tiara for her birthday.

Games — MASH, truth or dare

Websites — twitter, facebook, instagram

TV Shows — Gossip Girl, The Flash, Pretty Little Liars, Glee, Switched at Birth, that 70s show

Movies — To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, Easy A, The Princess Diaries, Angus Thongs and Perfect Snogging, Pretty in Pink

Greatest Want — To be the most popular girl in Swynlake

Greatest Need — for daddy to be hugely successful once again

Where and How Does Your Character Live Now:

Home — small mansion

Household furnishings — to be shared later, in detail. 

Favorite Possession — the jacuzzi tub

Most Cherished Possession — Poppy, her dog

Neighborhood — The Woods

Town or City Name — Swynlake

Details of Town or City — you guys already know. It’s small. She’s a native.

Married Before — lol no

Significant Other Before — no

Children — As if. She’s still a teen

Relationship with Family — it’s alright. aloof.

Car — a pink Nissan Figaro

Career — Student

Dream Career — World renowned pop star/musician

Dream Life — Famous and rich and one of the most admired people in the world.

Love Life — she’s figuring it out

Talents or Skills — can play piano, sing, skilled rider

Intelligence Level — High but not Nerd level high

Finances — A lot of money

Your Character’s Life Before Your Story:

Past Careers — None. Student

Past Lovers — Richie Anderson (a boy who spent time on her mom’s set as well), Natalie Green (smooched once)

Biggest Mistakes — didn’t wear purple on purple day, didn’t catch dad drinking around the house

Biggest Achievements — horseback riding awards, prizes for her music

[oovitus]

Weekend Reading, 11.11.18

For dietitians, the DI year is supposed to be a pre-professional experience, supervised work that prepares us for the realities of practice. One of these realities, I’m starting to realize, is the exercise of judgment.

When I started the DI, I assumed that I’d be trained in guidelines and standards that would neatly inform all of my interventions and decisions. I’ve gotten plenty of exposure to evidence-based guidelines and best practices, but what I didn’t understand before the DI—and what I’m coming to understand now—is that the rules only go so far.

In a clinical or practice setting, a lot of the cases we see end up falling into gray areas. A patient presents with multiple complaints or diagnoses, all of which are significant, but some of which are more high priority than others. It’s the dietitian’s job to decide which nutrition problems are the most urgent and in need of addressing; in some cases, interventions for various problems might actually conflict.

Weighing treatments against each other, learning to prioritize nutrition problems, understanding the difference between medical nutrition therapy as it was taught to me in a classroom vs. real-world application: this isn’t something that I learned in school. It’s something I’m learning now, from my preceptors and my patients. The most daunting part of it all is the fact that preceptors can only guide me so far.

The other day, my preceptor pointed out to me that the calorie need estimate that I’d made for a patient was in keeping with clinical recommendations, but the actual energy intake looked, on paper, a little too low. I agreed, but I hadn’t been able to reconcile the discrepancy because I was so hung up on following calorie per kilogram guidelines for the disease state in question. “Use your clinical judgment,” my preceptor told me. “If the estimate looks low to you, then it probably is.”

It’s hard for me to do this when I show up to work each day. It feels less risky to memorize a set of rules and apply them diligently than to take a step back and ask myself whether what I’m seeing or recommending looks right, feels right, sounds right. Part of what I’m getting hung up on, I realize, is the idea that judgment and guesswork and intuition have no place in a clinical setting. I want to believe that everything in a hospital can work according to evidence and procedure.

I’m off—way off, really—in this kind of thinking. Everything I’ve ever learned working in healthcare environments has suggested to me that the most able practitioners are the ones who have developed clinical instincts. The physician I worked for in DC was exceptional precisely because she’d take risks and leaps of faith with her intuition as a diagnostician: even when a diagnosis wasn’t obvious, she’d have have a sneaking suspicion that it was right, and she’d investigate accordingly. Her instincts were usually confirmed, and even when they weren’t, she gained valuable information in pursuing them.

Intuition and judgment intimidate me right now because I can’t memorize them or develop them by sitting at home with a stack of flash cards. I have to build toward them through practice and exposure, which will involve some errors, and that’s what last week’s post was all about.

In the last few days, though, I’ve had some heartening reminders that I have better judgment than I give myself credit for. A few of them have happened on the job: I allowed myself to trust an instinct and then had it affirmed by evidence or validation from my preceptor.

But what’s helped me the most is actually thinking back to the nutrition counseling work I’ve done in the past, with far less clinical training than I have now, and realizing it has already given me much of the intuition that I need. If nothing else, it’s taught me to listen carefully to people, to pay attention, and paying attention is where clinical judgment springs from.

I’ve also been thinking about judgment, discernment, and decision making as they pertain to my broader responsibilities and identity as a practitioner. In the past few days I’ve been struck by how often I feel as though I don’t fit nearly into many of the communities or schools of thought that I work alongside in the nutrition space. I celebrate vegan nutrition, but I don’t always communicate or message the lifestyle the way other plant-based practitioners do. I’m evidence-based, but I’m also interested in the spiritual dimensions of well-being, the ways in which human beings give meaning to their own healing narratives. I’m inspired by the ideals of intuitive eating, but I stop short of thinking that it’s the only approach for all people; I always let my clients guide me in determining a philosophical framework for eating. I move through lots of different nutrition/food spaces, but rarely with a sense of full belonging.

Case in point: on Thursday night, in our DI class, we had our eating disorder lecture. I felt the same thing I felt when I spoke at the Balance panel last spring, which was that I’m deeply admiring of the work being done in the ED treatment space, and I’m also not at home there. The way I’ve come to understand, define, and experience recovery is at odds with a lot of the prevailing thinking about what “full recovery” means. The importance I’ve allowed food to have in my life would defy many practitioners’ conception of what a healthy relationship with food looks like. And my veganism is certainly at odds with the common assumption in treatment circles that food selectivity is always “smoke and mirrors.”

I’m at peace with this. When I left that lecture, I actually felt more solid in recovery than I have in a while, given how challenging my body dysmorphia has been (still is, honestly) this fall. And I felt reminded of what I’ve always believed, which is that all of us who have had tangled relationships with food will ultimately come to understand recovery in our own way. I understand not acting on destructive impulses, engaging in healthful behaviors, and cultivating self-compassionate thoughts as a firm, ED recovery bottom line. I’d stop short of telling any person what the meaning of recovery is, or what it looks like. I know what mine looks like, and that’s all I know.

These musings look scattered when I glance over them, but for me, it all feels connected. This has been a week of learning to trust in my instincts, of having the courage to acknowledge that I have my own perspective on things. Nothing makes me feel safer or better or more accomplished than doing a stellar job of being what other people (or institutions, or programs) want me to be: meeting and exceeding expectations, hitting goals, scoring well. Even now, at thirty-six years of age, I’m a hopeless teacher’s pet. But the whole point of this education is to head out into the world and do my own work, even and especially when it means sticking to my guns.

I wish you a week of feeling tuned into your own intuition. Thanks for reading, as always, and here are the recipes and reads that caught my eye this week.

Recipes

This and next week’s recipe picks will be all about things I’d love to have on my theoretical Thanksgiving table! First up: Kristen’s autumn roasted pumpkin curry.

A great looking (and easy!) quinoa stuffing from my friend Sophia.

Loving Sarah’s perfectly seasonal, garlicky roasted green beans.

Dessert #1: Kristina’s awesome, cozy cinnamon baked apples.

Dessert #2: Will someone please give me a big slice of Emilie’s scrumptious vegan pumpkin cheesecake with chocolate crust?!

Reads

1. If you’re as excited as I am about holiday baking, this quick flour primer from the folks at The Kitchn may come in handy.

2. I love the idea of toy libraries, which have the potential to build upon “the social foundation that people already understand from traditional book-lending libraries . . . a kind of infrastructure for sharing and disseminating knowledge.” Not to mention an important place for kids to play, to explore, to savor unstructured time.

3. So much I agree with in Shayla Love’s frank, gutsy take on food intolerance testing. There is a growing body of tests being marketed as valid, reliable means of diagnosing food intolerances. The problem is that food intolerances are more incompletely understood than food allergies, for which there is a long-established, known mechanism. And the presence of IgG antibodies, contrary to what intolerance test marketers claim, isn’t necessarily indicative of an intolerance. It can simply mean that you’re eating a certain food pretty often, which has the particularly insidious result of forcing unsuspecting consumers to eliminate foods they love and rely upon.

More importantly, at least from a mental health perspective, these tests tend to capitalize upon the idea that, if you have GI distress, you’re being quietly sickened or poisoned by food. Love writes,

The problem with these tests isn’t that the truth is being hidden from consumers, it’s that: if you are struggling with any kind of disordered eating or thinking patterns, you will latch onto them despite what the evidence says . . . Because of my OCD, I also love rules, and once I implement a rule, it’s extremely difficult for me to break it, as it becomes a ritual. As last year went on, and I got my anxiety under control again, I still couldn’t manage to eat those foods.

Love also interviews gastroenterologist Emeran Mayer, who notes that the anxiety associated with identify certain foods as potential triggers or intolerances can actually create—via the nocebo effect, which I spent a lot of time studying as a master’s student—the very cascade of symptoms that folks are hoping to get relief from:

He thinks everyone is vulnerable to the underlying mental booby traps these tests put out there: The idea that there are foods, healthy foods, that are secretly making you sick. The anxiety such a thing creates is not benign, he says . . .

. . .  [w]hen people have extreme anxiety, the brain generates stress signals that travel to the gastrointestinal tract through the autonomic nervous system and the vagus nerve. This stress can change a lot of aspects of the gut and digestion. It can alter transit time of food through the digestive system, it can change blood flow or immune responses, it can change secretion of mucus, and all of those changes can then affect the bacteria that live in your gut, or your microbiome.

‘If you’re walking around being stressed around your food and being constantly worried, that is becoming kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy from the nocebo effect,’ he says . . . ‘But also it changes your gut-environment context in a way that can compromise the proper digestion of food. There’s a really close link between anxieties, food-related stress, and gut dysfunction.’

Of course certain food can serve as very real triggers for digestive distress: this can be true of high FODMAP foods for those who are sensitive to them, and more broadly, some of us just have a hard time digesting certain things (onions, crucifers, raw veggies, spicy food—you name it).

But it has been my overwhelming experience that the dialog about intolerances in the wellness space is often scientifically misleading, and that the anxiety it creates can actually compound and worsen GI distress. I think it’s so important for practitioners who work with digestive health to remain vigilant of food-related anxiety and disordered eating, addressing intolerances only in a way that’s evidence-based and sensitive to the health and well-being of patients.

4. I’m grateful to Carrian for introducing me to the phrase, “if you’re on the right path it will always be uphill.” Not sure I agree with the “always” bit, but I need a lot of reminders that struggle and pain are a natural, important part of life experience. Or, to quote from one of my wise readers, “it’s not easy and it isn’t supposed to be.”

5. Finally, and while we’re on my favorite topic of the placebo/nocebo effect, the New York Times shares new insights into how the placebo effect really works.

Happy Sunday, everyone. I’m back this week with a new, tasty, low-maintenance Thanksgiving recipe!

xo

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[3one3]

The Sequel - 810

How Long

André Schürrle, Juan Mata, other Chelsea/BVB players, and random awesome OC’s (okay they’re less random now but they’re still pretty awesome)

original epic tale

all chapters of The Sequel

“What’s that delicious smell?”

“A whole salmon with honey, lemon, and garlic. I hope you’re hungry.”

“I’m hungry, but I don’t know if I’m eat-a-whole-salmon hungry. How much salmon are we talking about?”

“Like...this much...maybe?”

André smiled at Christina’s “diligent face” while she tried to demonstrate the dimensions of the large piece of fish she found in the fresh market. Stefanie and Kyle were trying to work on their cooking skills, so after everyone did their riding on Saturday morning they convinced their coach to go shopping with them for ingredients to make “something good that we can eat for a few days”. They spent a lot of cash on dressing up their apartment and were spending quite a bit on eating out too. They wanted to eat healthier and cheaper, and not have to drive so much. Their place was not close to the barn at all. Extra driving on top of the commute was not appreciated. Stefanie was used to oatmeal, salads, and really basic dinners. Kyle was used to buying out the ready-made section at the grocery store, being taken out by his parents, and having their in-house cook prepare things for him to take home from family dinner. Christina detected some collaborative motivation going on, as if the two young riders were inspired to do better in the kitchen because it could be a team effort and maybe that was better than judging each other for their regular eating and cooking habits.

Their motivation worked out to her benefit, because they found out about a great fresh foods market in the city. They bought three nice looking Pink salmon, which were “whole” but not “wholly intact”, meaning they were ready to cook, no trimming necessary, a 6lb chuck roast, and tons of produce. Their riding trainer walked Stefanie and Kyle through two meals right in her own kitchen while everyone watched Dortmund lose by two goals to one at Hertha Berlin. She showed them how to make a hearty beef stew with onions, carrots, potatoes, turnips, and green beans, and graciously allowed them to take it home in one of her Dutch oven pots, then they made two of the fish, the same way the third one was cooking when André got home from the airport. It was baked in foil first with a liberal helping of the sauce made from coconut oil, raw honey, lemon juice, and garlic, and then caramelized quickly under the broiler. The explanation he got for the quantity of fish was the same as they got.

“You eat it hot tonight and then you can have it cold in a salad tomorrow, or even in an omelette, and Lukas loves it cold with anything. I can even mix it with some plain yogurt and onion and celery and give it to him like tuna salad for a sandwich,” Christina told him. As Stefanie and Kyle came to understand, there are tons of ways to eat leftover salmon for a few days. Christina had no intention of eating any of it, but she also got a bunch of other food at the colorful, bountiful, and reasonably priced market, so she had plenty to eat before she even got started on the footballer’s fish.

“Okay,” he laughed. It was quite novel for him to see his girl back in “I want to do nice things for you” mode. He liked it when she tried to be the perfect housewife, not because he valued housewife behavior but because she was always cute about it, and she wanted to take care of her people for her own satisfaction rather than some obligation. He was also just glad that she wasn’t bursting at the seams to deliver a lecture about his team’s performance, which was lethargic, inefficient, and careless. Tuchel committed the same crime as many others before him. He tried to rotate, but instead of changing one or two players and still preserving the balance, system, and shape of his team, he made three changes and changed everything. The system they started with was dysfunctional and made no use of anyone’s talents or strengths, Matze Ginter made a typical Matze Ginter mistake and gave up a goal, they got their act together with a major tactical overhaul at half time, Auba got an equalizer, things were finally coming good, Tuchel used substitutions to overload in attack, his defenders were exposed on the break and gave up many free kicks, and Hertha scored a winner from one of them. André missed a chance in the first two minutes because he was overeager and desperate to prove himself. Auba missed a clear chance set up from some great team play. Other opportunities were not capitalized on. André wasn’t happy with himself, with the teammates who missed his better runs or couldn’t make something of the chances he created for them, and the manager, for not figuring out sooner than the way he set his team out was useless and duly changing the system to get his two forwards more involved. He knew Christina must have wanted to break the TV throughout that game, and he was mostly right. She paid as much attention as she could while tutoring her riders in the basics of stews.

“Go change if you want. It’s done in two minutes,” she advised in the spacious foyer. It had its own wood-burning fireplace.

“Mausi isn’t still up, is he?” The BVB man leaned to the left for a more complete view of the living room behind her.

“He had the last of the pot pies and pot-pie-passed out. In the highchair. With his cup in his hand.” His wife imitated their son’s posture when he couldn’t wait for her to finish making the sauce for the fish on the stove, and just got a head start on bedtime. She then shoved him by the waist toward the stairs and told him to hurry up. He took two steps and then paused to watch her literally prance through the living room in her furry slippers. Christina was just in a hurry to get to the broiler and make sure she didn’t overcook her fish, but André read it as excitement. He thought she was that happy to have him home again.

He’d been involved in a repair campaign since she made it clear to him on Thursday that she was lonely and bored because he was hardly home, and not just because she missed London, had no close friends around to do things with, and had little on her work schedule beyond regular riding and teaching. They went out for dinner that night, and he talked her into saving her riding for the afternoon on Friday so that they could hang out with Lukas at home until he had to go to Brackel and the team hotel. Some small courtesies were part of his effort to make his wife feel more at home. For example, he programmed an easy to navigate to set of favorites on the TV with all the pertinent UK-originated channels so that she could find all her regular shows without having to browse through all the domestic channels. He texted more too while he was away. Significant football match or no significant football match, he wanted to make Christina want to be home more than she wanted to go back to London. There was still no sex, but she was at least a little warmer to him while he was there. Her eyes weren’t so empty or sad.

There was a plate on the counter for him with a big section of the delicate but meaty pink fish, dark orange and almost crisp on top, moist and tender inside. It was garnished with the remnants of two lemon slices from the packet it cooked in, fresh parsley, and coarse ground pepper. There was also brown rice and a pile of greens dressed in the sweet and lightly acidic honey, lemon, and garlic sauce. It smelled even better than when it was in the broiler, and much to André’s delight, there were two glasses of white wine at the tall stools.

“You ate already, Prinzessin?”

“I had the same with but with broiled chicken breast. Sit. Eat,” Christina ordered. She was refilling the dogs’ water bowl.

“Sit with me.”

“I’m going to.”

“This looks very nice. Did you try it? Salmon is a fish you pretend to tolerate when other people feed it to you.”

“No, but I made it earlier with Kyle and Stef too and they had it for dinner and loved it. I don’t know how hungry you are, but there’s more rice and more salad.”

“I just ate after the match a few hours ago, so this is plenty. Cheers, pretty girl.” André clinked his glass of chilled Viognier with hers when she climbed into the tall wooden stool beside his. The new ones had backs to them, and were more comfortable than the more humble and basic round ones of their old place. They were also a greater ask to sit in since the eating part of the vast island was raised a few inches above the work surface part and they were tall to compensate. She took a big gulp of her favorite wine and then watched on with anticipation as the player sampled the salmon.

His attempts to improve the current state of their relationship were not unnoticed. Christina appreciated them even though they didn’t do much for her core problems. Missing Juan was still difficult. Believing things would get markedly better with her partner was still difficult. Accepting that different isn’t automatically worse was still difficult. And it still felt like the life she wanted to live was the one that happened when she was with the Spaniard, no matter which country that happened in. Those times were “good” life, and all the travel and back and forth with André was the “bad” life. Settled in Dortmund wasn’t as good as the “good” yet. It was closer to the “bad”. The Londoner was trying to open herself up to feeling good about those things- to remain ready to receive a positive feeling instead of constantly expecting only negative. And it was killing her that André was hurting because of her. He wasn’t just annoyed, or frustrated, or hurrying past that which he didn’t want to acknowledge in favor of getting closer to that which he did. He was actively upset about the state of their relationship too. It was painful for him too despite his questions about it surely being different from Christina’s.

And then there was football. Whether he was or wasn’t putting enough person pressure on himself, she saw him unhappy about his performances and contributions much more often than he was happy. Making dinner for him was supposed to provide an avenue to celebrate a great appearance. The ginger bearded forward was supposed to justify his inclusion and shut up all the doubters. Instead he blew that early chance and set the wrong tone for the whole match. The commentators said he should have done better. His wife thought they didn’t look that closely. He had to rush the shot. A defender almost got a toe on it. He didn’t have all day. It was probably his second touch of the match, after the first one to take it into space to get the shot off. They harped on it through the whole game. At one point he was in a good spot in the box and literally slipped and fell down while trying to get on the end of a cross. It was unlikely he’d get to it anyway, but it still looked bad and no doubt had critics facepalming. Blaming André for club problems was becoming quite popular among a subset of the fans and many of the established bloggers. He did the post-match interviews and said they lost due to small details, and that he wasn’t blaming anyone. He said it was a frustrating afternoon. His wife didn’t see or hear frustration coming from him. All she saw was sadness and disappointment. During the game, that frustration was real. It bubbled over into a late challenge at one point. During the brief periods when everyone had some rhythm going, and interplay was quick and purposeful, André looked pretty strong and capable. Christina was sure he thought he was going to get a chance to make up for the early miss. He even had a good shot just before being subbed late on, missing only by inches. His girl knew that sadness and dejection and disappointment. Her fancy salmon became a consolation dinner.

“I know I say this every time you make something new, but you are the best wife,” the target of her culinary therapy nodded while he chewed. “This is fantastic. I’m gonna want this all the time now.” I have like half of the wife perks back now, he added to himself. Tonight, I want the sex part back. She is so ugh, nom when she prances around in the boyshorts and her slippers. I’ve hardly seen her legs since she moved in.

“Well it’s very easy to make and it takes 20 minutes total so you can have it whenever you like. I got tons of berries and fruit today too.”

“So you had a good day, yeah? You said the horses were all happy to work outside?”

“Mhm. How about you, boyfriend?” Christina took a smaller sip from her glass and then turned her lip over in a sympathetic pout. “Do you want to talk about the game?”

“Not really. I could have been better, everyone else could have been better, and Tuchel could have been better. I bet you already know how I feel about it,” André shrugged, eyes on his food. Getting the rice, the fish, and the bitter leaves all together made for a really nice bite. I would rather discuss the food. When I say I know she knows how I feel already what I really mean is I hope she does, because she used to be good at that, and because I don’t want to have to spell it out. I can tell she’s not in the mood to do “I told you so”, or she just knows I don’t want to hear it, he thought as he felt a small hand arrive near the middle of his back. So maybe she knows what’s up with me better than I know what’s up with her lately.

“I don’t understand why he chooses to play Matze when Papa is out. Like, don’t take out the best defender you have and put in the worst. If you need to give Matze playing time, put him next to Julian, or if it has to be at center back then do it when Papa is playing and he’s protected.”

“I don’t know. Where you going?” the player asked unhappily when he realized the comforting hand lifted from his back and its owner was sliding off her seat.

“To put the rest of the fish away. I need to get in the shower so my hair has time to dry before bed. Excessive vegetable peeling, chopping, and juicing makes my arms tired. I can’t hold a dryer.” Christina shot her “poor me” face over her shoulder at him at the same time as her phone vibrated where she left it on the counter.

“What about your wine?” What about sitting with me while I eat, André complained in silence, reaching for the device.

“Cute picture. Didn’t you say you slept all the time as a baby and your mum couldn’t wake you up to eat?” he read from the message preview while she assured him she’d finish her drink later. Did she take a picture of Mausi passed out in his chair and send it to him and not me? That’s not nice. He tapped in her passcode so that he could look at the context in which the message was sent, and sure enough his wife had sent his old teammate a photo of their little boy looking a bit like a drunk, hugging his drink to his chest but completely out. There was a picture before that of two big pieces of fish just like the one the German was eating. He glanced guiltily up at Christina’s back, checking to see how close she was to being done trying to cut the salmon into pieces she could stack in a large plastic container. Spying on her text conversations always felt a little intrusive to him, whether there was anything to hide in them or not. It made him feel like an overly protective parent checking up on a child, firstly, which was disrespectful to his grown up wife, and then he felt like a controlling husband, which made him ask himself if he had doubts about her truthfulness. He didn’t. He trusted her. He had to. So checking up on that trust didn’t feel right. He closed the messaging app and opened her photos instead, because he could justify that in a less distrusting way. He could argue, to himself mostly, that he just wanted to see what else he’d missed the photo-documentation of that perhaps the Spaniard hadn’t.

What he saw created a shuddering pain in his chest. There were tons of recent photos she never shared with him. Some weren’t meaningful to him anyway, like shots of her horses in their new home, Spencer and Lucky sleeping together in one of their cubby beds in the tack room, and disorganized mountains of moving boxes. Then there were pictures that did matter- tons of landscape shots of Mallorcan scenery, sleepy selfies his girl took while leaning on a chest that wasn’t his, “outfit of the day” type shots he knew she never posted on social media or anything, cute Lukas things like him sitting in a saddle on a saddle rack or leading one of the horses in the barn, and most concerning, selfies with more than just Juan’s headless torso. There were a handful of photos of them making silly faces together, or Christina kissing him. There were photos of just the other player by himself. None of it was limited to just one trip to see him or anything like that, and they weren’t even all photos she took herself. She’d collected photos from Sweden from the professional photographers, including her champagne spraying but also her hugging Juan outside the ring, and Juan in some kind of standoff with Dirk. The Spanish midfielder was wearing her horse show backpack and holding her show coat over one arm with a plastic cup of something in his hand, and Dirk clearly wanted whatever was in the cup. He had his bridle and ear net on, and his ears were back. He didn’t get as far as the mirror picture of Juan holding and kissing his naked wife. He didn’t need to. Everything after that was bad enough. The hurt in his heart mixed with sickness and he didn’t want to eat anymore.

“Can you put the lids on these containers when you’re done eating?” she asked without turning around. “I don’t want to cover them while the fish is still warm. I used two separate containers so that they would finish cooling faster.”

“How long have you been in love with Juan again?” André asked back plainly. He heard something fall in the sink next to her. She takes selfies when she feels good about herself, or her thinks her makeup is really good. She only saves horse show pictures when the show meant something to her. She used to send me tons of Mausi photos- even uninteresting ones of him doing nothing- and I’ve never seen any of these. Who is she taking pictures of herself in the mirror for if not me and if not to post for her sponsors or whatever? They’re for him, he concluded for the second time since browsing her album. The rider briefly panicked, and dropped the pie server she’d been using to pick up the fish, assuming the noise made by her phone was Juan texting her something that wasn’t meant for André’s eyes. Her heart beat loud enough to hear it in her ears for a few seconds, and then the sound and the sensation quickly evaporated, replaced by something like relief.

“I’m not really sure,” she admitted, her back still to her partner. She was sure being rid of a sort of secret made her feel lighter on her feet. Each time she tried to talk to André about the core problems she believed had taken root in their relationship, she left out the fact that there was an outside influence at play too. She never framed any of her complaints or explanations in the context of the alternative she had going on- in context of the relationship that was highlighting all the ways her marriage was damaged and unsatisfying in that moment. The rider never really felt guilty about not giving André 100% of the details of the time she spent with Juan. She never felt guilty for not saying “You’re doing this, that, and the other thing all wrong and he does it right”, because she didn’t want it to be a contest. But she did feel like she was keeping something from everybody, and her partner had just nailed it. At some point, she went from loving her best friend to being in love with him again, despite her constant reassurances to herself that she wasn’t doing that, and wasn’t crossing a line, or giving to the Spaniard that which was supposed to be reserved for the other one- that thing that was supposed to demarcate the difference between her relationships with the two. She promised André that Juan wouldn’t become her partner. He wanted something reserved for him. Her hold on that gave out at some point.

“You told me a long time ago that you were trying to keep yourself away from him when things got too intense because you want to be with me, and didn’t want to put yourself in a situation that could lead to hurting us. So if you’re not doing that anymore, and you’re going on trips with him and having him at your horse shows, and being with him enough that you fall for him again, should I take that to mean you don’t want us to be together anymore?” he asked, tone still plain and steady. Christina squeezed her eyes shut for a second and then blinked a bunch of times, preparing herself to be completely honest. She was too chicken to personally shoot out the thread she believed her marriage was hanging on, but she wasn’t too chicken to load the gun and hand it to André. She’d tell him the truth and if it upset him enough, then it was he who would put an end to everything and not her.

“I don’t know. I don’t know if I want us to be together no matter what anymore because I don’t know if either of us even likes being together anymore. I know that it’s so hard with you right now and it shouldn’t be. We’re finally in one place and everything should be great, and it’s not. It’s so easy with him. I feel good when I’m with him, and...I miss him when I’m not. I’m happy with him. You and I haven’t been happy together for more than a week at a time since last June, and even that was kind of an anomaly. Honestly, it’s not even a comparison situation anymore. It’s not like “which one is better?” It’s more like...I feel so good with him that it’s hard to ignore it. I used to just hang out with him all the time because I needed to get away from us fighting all the time. Now I want to be around him because...it’s just nice. Even when you and I aren’t actively involved in a war. It has nothing to do with you and me anymore. I go to him for him now, instead of going there for not-you, if you get what I mean. I don’t know. I can’t stop talking and I know it’s hurting you so can you say something so I can shut up? I don’t know. I guess the actual answer to your question is that I do still want us to be together, because I am here, and I am trying to give us a chance still, the way you asked me to.”

“But you’re not committed enough to giving it a chance that you keep yourself away from something that hurts that chance. Can you turn around? You can’t say these things to my face?” The BVB man put her phone down and took a sip of his wine and his girl did an about-face across the counter with a towel in her hands and a sorry, sad look on her face.

“I was hating it here when he asked me to go back for the match,” she explained, steady rather than protesting, or defensive. “It was before we talked the other day. I wanted to go back and be somewhere I’m happy for a day so that I wouldn’t just keep getting more frustrated and bored and lonely here. I had no plans to go anywhere until Omaha, because I know just leaving isn’t giving us a chance.”

“I don’t know why you can’t just tell me that something is wrong and give me a chance to help improve it. I don’t know why you have to just keep it to yourself and wait for me to figure it out while you run off and hide from it.”

“I did tell you. I told you on Thursday, and you have made it better. He asked me to come to the game an hour before we talked.”

“Yes, because you decided to tell him about it first. You called him when you were unhappy instead of me.”

“You were at training.”

“There was a time when you would have decided to wait and speak to me first, is all I’m saying. Protecting us used to be your priority.”

“And all that got me was 7 months of unhappiness and terrible riding. Sometimes I have to protect myself first, babe. Once in a while I have to put myself first instead of us, otherwise it actually gets harder for us.”

“Fine.” André picked up his fork and went back to his dinner. If the temperature of his fish were any indication, he wouldn’t have to wait very long to cover the leftovers. Christina even heated his plate first before putting the food on it, so the stuff in the containers was probably even colder. He had things to consider, and he didn’t want to hear any additional input from her. He wasn’t going to conclude that it was his fault that his girl was falling for someone else, but he wasn’t going to blame her for it either. For one thing, he gave her his blessing to have almost any kind of relationship with Juan that she wanted. For another, it wasn’t like things between them were great and she was still looking for something else. Christina was trying to tell him that it almost was like that, actually, because she really did believe she just loved being with the Spaniard and it had nothing to do with her husband, but he refused to believe that. Things were not good for them, and she was like pressure. She always sought to equalize herself. She’d always reach out for something good to counteract that which made her feel bad. Her husband knew his decisions and behavior over the previous year were responsible for the bad. Even before they decided to leave London, he stopped really engaging with her career and her passion, and that started the fights that existed in the background when it was time to start figuring out their future and the future of his career. He saw that when they began their horse show holiday. And he wasn’t like Juan. He didn’t believe that the strength of a relationship should lie in how it adapts to tough times. He believed it wasn’t fair to judge anything when their lives were so abnormal. For 7 months he’d been telling himself and his wife that they would be fine once they were together, and he needed that to happen for more than a week before he was willing to accept that their relationship couldn’t work anymore. Christina’s growing closer to his old friend did hurt him, a lot. He hated hearing everything she said. He’d fought through worse to hang onto her though, and he still wanted to hang on.

“Fine?”

“Chris, you haven’t been in love with me the way your phone pictures show you’re in love with him for like a year. Maybe until recently you just weren’t in love with anybody that way, and now it’s him. Or last spring you were in love with your career, and then no one, and now him. Whatever. I can’t really expect anything else when we haven’t been together enough in that time to be in love like we used to be. You have to do things together to be in love, and we don’t. Maybe I haven’t been in love with you for a long time either. I’ve always had to share you with the horses and with him. It’s fine. We start a new chapter now and as long as we treat each other like we want to be in love again, and we make decisions that go with that, then we’ll be good together again. That’s what I want. Like we said last week. The alternative is to separate, and then I don’t get what I want. So even though it’s hard, there is only one choice to take to possibly get what I want,” he finished up levelly, almost detached.

[oovitus]

Weekend Reading, 11.11.18

For dietitians, the DI year is supposed to be a pre-professional experience, supervised work that prepares us for the realities of practice. One of these realities, I’m starting to realize, is the exercise of judgment.

When I started the DI, I assumed that I’d be trained in guidelines and standards that would neatly inform all of my interventions and decisions. I’ve gotten plenty of exposure to evidence-based guidelines and best practices, but what I didn’t understand before the DI—and what I’m coming to understand now—is that the rules only go so far.

In a clinical or practice setting, a lot of the cases we see end up falling into gray areas. A patient presents with multiple complaints or diagnoses, all of which are significant, but some of which are more high priority than others. It’s the dietitian’s job to decide which nutrition problems are the most urgent and in need of addressing; in some cases, interventions for various problems might actually conflict.

Weighing treatments against each other, learning to prioritize nutrition problems, understanding the difference between medical nutrition therapy as it was taught to me in a classroom vs. real-world application: this isn’t something that I learned in school. It’s something I’m learning now, from my preceptors and my patients. The most daunting part of it all is the fact that preceptors can only guide me so far.

The other day, my preceptor pointed out to me that the calorie need estimate that I’d made for a patient was in keeping with clinical recommendations, but the actual energy intake looked, on paper, a little too low. I agreed, but I hadn’t been able to reconcile the discrepancy because I was so hung up on following calorie per kilogram guidelines for the disease state in question. “Use your clinical judgment,” my preceptor told me. “If the estimate looks low to you, then it probably is.”

It’s hard for me to do this when I show up to work each day. It feels less risky to memorize a set of rules and apply them diligently than to take a step back and ask myself whether what I’m seeing or recommending looks right, feels right, sounds right. Part of what I’m getting hung up on, I realize, is the idea that judgment and guesswork and intuition have no place in a clinical setting. I want to believe that everything in a hospital can work according to evidence and procedure.

I’m off—way off, really—in this kind of thinking. Everything I’ve ever learned working in healthcare environments has suggested to me that the most able practitioners are the ones who have developed clinical instincts. The physician I worked for in DC was exceptional precisely because she’d take risks and leaps of faith with her intuition as a diagnostician: even when a diagnosis wasn’t obvious, she’d have have a sneaking suspicion that it was right, and she’d investigate accordingly. Her instincts were usually confirmed, and even when they weren’t, she gained valuable information in pursuing them.

Intuition and judgment intimidate me right now because I can’t memorize them or develop them by sitting at home with a stack of flash cards. I have to build toward them through practice and exposure, which will involve some errors, and that’s what last week’s post was all about.

In the last few days, though, I’ve had some heartening reminders that I have better judgment than I give myself credit for. A few of them have happened on the job: I allowed myself to trust an instinct and then had it affirmed by evidence or validation from my preceptor.

But what’s helped me the most is actually thinking back to the nutrition counseling work I’ve done in the past, with far less clinical training than I have now, and realizing it has already given me much of the intuition that I need. If nothing else, it’s taught me to listen carefully to people, to pay attention, and paying attention is where clinical judgment springs from.

I’ve also been thinking about judgment, discernment, and decision making as they pertain to my broader responsibilities and identity as a practitioner. In the past few days I’ve been struck by how often I feel as though I don’t fit nearly into many of the communities or schools of thought that I work alongside in the nutrition space. I celebrate vegan nutrition, but I don’t always communicate or message the lifestyle the way other plant-based practitioners do. I’m evidence-based, but I’m also interested in the spiritual dimensions of well-being, the ways in which human beings give meaning to their own healing narratives. I’m inspired by the ideals of intuitive eating, but I stop short of thinking that it’s the only approach for all people; I always let my clients guide me in determining a philosophical framework for eating. I move through lots of different nutrition/food spaces, but rarely with a sense of full belonging.

Case in point: on Thursday night, in our DI class, we had our eating disorder lecture. I felt the same thing I felt when I spoke at the Balance panel last spring, which was that I’m deeply admiring of the work being done in the ED treatment space, and I’m also not at home there. The way I’ve come to understand, define, and experience recovery is at odds with a lot of the prevailing thinking about what “full recovery” means. The importance I’ve allowed food to have in my life would defy many practitioners’ conception of what a healthy relationship with food looks like. And my veganism is certainly at odds with the common assumption in treatment circles that food selectivity is always “smoke and mirrors.”

I’m at peace with this. When I left that lecture, I actually felt more solid in recovery than I have in a while, given how challenging my body dysmorphia has been (still is, honestly) this fall. And I felt reminded of what I’ve always believed, which is that all of us who have had tangled relationships with food will ultimately come to understand recovery in our own way. I understand not acting on destructive impulses and engaging in healthful, self-caring behaviors and thoughts as a firm, ED recovery bottom line. I’d stop short of telling any person what the meaning of recovery is, or what it looks like. I know what mine looks like, and that’s all I know.

These musings look scattered when I glance over them, but for me, it all feels connected. This has been a week of learning to trust in my instincts, of having the courage to acknowledge that I have my own perspective on things. Nothing makes me feel safer or better or more accomplished than doing a stellar job of being what other people (or institutions, or programs) want me to be: meeting and exceeding expectations, hitting goals, scoring well. Even now, at thirty-six years of age, I’m a hopeless teacher’s pet. But the whole point of this education is to head out into the world and do my own work, even and especially when it means sticking to my guns.

I wish you a week of feeling tuned into your own intuition. Thanks for reading, as always, and here are the recipes and reads that caught my eye this week.

Recipes

This and next week’s recipe picks will be all about things I’d love to have on my theoretical Thanksgiving table! First up: Kristen’s autumn roasted pumpkin curry.

A great looking (and easy!) quinoa stuffing from my friend Sophia.

Loving Sarah’s perfectly seasonal, garlicky roasted green beans.

Dessert #1: Kristina’s awesome, cozy cinnamon baked apples.

Dessert #2: Will someone please give me a big slice of Emilie’s scrumptious vegan pumpkin cheesecake with chocolate crust?!

Reads

1. If you’re as excited as I am about holiday baking, this quick flour primer from the folks at The Kitchn may come in handy.

2. I love the idea of toy libraries, which have the potential to build upon “the social foundation that people already understand from traditional book-lending libraries . . . a kind of infrastructure for sharing and disseminating knowledge.” Not to mention an important place for kids to play, to explore, to savor unstructured time.

3. So much I agree with in Shayla Love’s frank, gutsy take on food intolerance testing. There is a growing body of tests being marketed as valid, reliable means of diagnosing food intolerances. The problem is that food intolerances are more incompletely understood than food allergies, for which there is a long-established, known mechanism. And the presence of IgG antibodies, contrary to what intolerance test marketers claim, isn’t necessarily indicative of an intolerance. It can simply mean that you’re eating a certain food pretty often, which has the particularly insidious result of forcing unsuspecting consumers to eliminate foods they love and rely upon.

More importantly, at least from a mental health perspective, these tests tend to capitalize upon the idea that, if you have GI distress, you’re being quietly sickened or poisoned by food. Love writes,

The problem with these tests isn’t that the truth is being hidden from consumers, it’s that: if you are struggling with any kind of disordered eating or thinking patterns, you will latch onto them despite what the evidence says . . . Because of my OCD, I also love rules, and once I implement a rule, it’s extremely difficult for me to break it, as it becomes a ritual. As last year went on, and I got my anxiety under control again, I still couldn’t manage to eat those foods.

Love also interviews gastroenterologist Emeran Mayer, who notes that the anxiety associated with identify certain foods as potential triggers or intolerances can actually create—via the nocebo effect, which I spent a lot of time studying as a master’s student—the very cascade of symptoms that folks are hoping to get relief from:

He thinks everyone is vulnerable to the underlying mental booby traps these tests put out there: The idea that there are foods, healthy foods, that are secretly making you sick. The anxiety such a thing creates is not benign, he says . . .

. . .  [w]hen people have extreme anxiety, the brain generates stress signals that travel to the gastrointestinal tract through the autonomic nervous system and the vagus nerve. This stress can change a lot of aspects of the gut and digestion. It can alter transit time of food through the digestive system, it can change blood flow or immune responses, it can change secretion of mucus, and all of those changes can then affect the bacteria that live in your gut, or your microbiome.

‘If you’re walking around being stressed around your food and being constantly worried, that is becoming kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy from the nocebo effect,’ he says . . . ‘But also it changes your gut-environment context in a way that can compromise the proper digestion of food. There’s a really close link between anxieties, food-related stress, and gut dysfunction.’

Of course certain food can serve as very real triggers for digestive distress: this can be true of high FODMAP foods for those who are sensitive to them, and more broadly, some of us just have a hard time digesting certain things (onions, crucifers, raw veggies, spicy food—you name it).

But it has been my overwhelming experience that the dialog about intolerances in the wellness space is often scientifically misleading, and that the anxiety it creates can actually compound and worsen GI distress. I think it’s so important for practitioners who work with digestive health to remain vigilant of food-related anxiety and disordered eating, addressing intolerances only in a way that’s evidence-based and sensitive to the health and well-being of patients.

4. I’m grateful to Carrian for introducing me to the phrase, “if you’re on the right path it will always be uphill.” Not sure I agree with the “always” bit, but I need a lot of reminders that struggle and pain are a natural, important part of life experience. Or, to quote from one of my wise readers, “it’s not easy and it isn’t supposed to be.”

5. Finally, and while we’re on my favorite topic of the placebo/nocebo effect, the New York Times shares new insights into how the placebo effect really works.

Happy Sunday, everyone. I’m back this week with a new, tasty, low-maintenance Thanksgiving recipe!

xo

The post Weekend Reading, 11.11.18 appeared first on The Full Helping.

Weekend Reading, 11.11.18 published first on

[oovitus]

Weekend Reading, 11.11.18

For dietitians, the DI year is supposed to be a pre-professional experience, supervised work that prepares us for the realities of practice. One of these realities, I’m starting to realize, is the exercise of judgment.

When I started the DI, I assumed that I’d be trained in guidelines and standards that would neatly inform all of my interventions and decisions. I’ve gotten plenty of exposure to evidence-based guidelines and best practices, but what I didn’t understand before the DI—and what I’m coming to understand now—is that the rules only go so far.

In a clinical or practice setting, a lot of the cases we see end up falling into gray areas. A patient presents with multiple complaints or diagnoses, all of which are significant, but some of which are more high priority than others. It’s the dietitian’s job to decide which nutrition problems are the most urgent and in need of addressing; in some cases, interventions for various problems might actually conflict.

Weighing treatments against each other, learning to prioritize nutrition problems, understanding the difference between medical nutrition therapy as it was taught to me in a classroom vs. real-world application: this isn’t something that I learned in school. It’s something I’m learning now, from my preceptors and my patients. The most daunting part of it all is the fact that preceptors can only guide me so far.

The other day, my preceptor pointed out to me that the calorie need estimate that I’d made for a patient was in keeping with clinical recommendations, but the actual energy intake looked, on paper, a little too low. I agreed, but I hadn’t been able to reconcile the discrepancy because I was so hung up on following calorie per kilogram guidelines for the disease state in question. “Use your clinical judgment,” my preceptor told me. “If the estimate looks low to you, then it probably is.”

It’s hard for me to do this when I show up to work each day. It feels less risky to memorize a set of rules and apply them diligently than to take a step back and ask myself whether what I’m seeing or recommending looks right, feels right, sounds right. Part of what I’m getting hung up on, I realize, is the idea that judgment and guesswork and intuition have no place in a clinical setting. I want to believe that everything in a hospital can work according to evidence and procedure.

I’m off—way off, really—in this kind of thinking. Everything I’ve ever learned working in healthcare environments has suggested to me that the most able practitioners are the ones who have developed clinical instincts. The physician I worked for in DC was exceptional precisely because she’d take risks and leaps of faith with her intuition as a diagnostician: even when a diagnosis wasn’t obvious, she’d have have a sneaking suspicion that it was right, and she’d investigate accordingly. Her instincts were usually confirmed, and even when they weren’t, she gained valuable information in pursuing them.

Intuition and judgment intimidate me right now because I can’t memorize them or develop them by sitting at home with a stack of flash cards. I have to build toward them through practice and exposure, which will involve some errors, and that’s what last week’s post was all about.

In the last few days, though, I’ve had some heartening reminders that I have better judgment than I give myself credit for. A few of them have happened on the job: I allowed myself to trust an instinct and then had it affirmed by evidence or validation from my preceptor.

But what’s helped me the most is actually thinking back to the nutrition counseling work I’ve done in the past, with far less clinical training than I have now, and realizing it has already given me much of the intuition that I need. If nothing else, it’s taught me to listen carefully to people, to pay attention, and paying attention is where clinical judgment springs from.

I’ve also been thinking about judgment, discernment, and decision making as they pertain to my broader responsibilities and identity as a practitioner. In the past few days I’ve been struck by how often I feel as though I don’t fit nearly into many of the communities or schools of thought that I work alongside in the nutrition space. I celebrate vegan nutrition, but I don’t always communicate or message the lifestyle the way other plant-based practitioners do. I’m evidence-based, but I’m also interested in the spiritual dimensions of well-being, the ways in which human beings give meaning to their own healing narratives. I’m inspired by the ideals of intuitive eating, but I stop short of thinking that it’s the only approach for all people; I always let my clients guide me in determining a philosophical framework for eating. I move through lots of different nutrition/food spaces, but rarely with a sense of full belonging.

Case in point: on Thursday night, in our DI class, we had our eating disorder lecture. I felt the same thing I felt when I spoke at the Balance panel last spring, which was that I’m deeply admiring of the work being done in the ED treatment space, and I’m also not at home there. The way I’ve come to understand, define, and experience recovery is at odds with a lot of the prevailing thinking about what “full recovery” means. The importance I’ve allowed food to have in my life would defy many practitioners’ conception of what a healthy relationship with food looks like. And my veganism is certainly at odds with the common assumption in treatment circles that food selectivity is always “smoke and mirrors.”

I’m at peace with this. When I left that lecture, I actually felt more solid in recovery than I have in a while, given how challenging my body dysmorphia has been (still is, honestly) this fall. And I felt reminded of what I’ve always believed, which is that all of us who have had tangled relationships with food will ultimately come to understand recovery in our own way. I understand not acting on destructive impulses and engaging in healthful, self-caring behaviors and thoughts as a firm, ED recovery bottom line. I’d stop short of telling any person what the meaning of recovery is, or what it looks like. I know what mine looks like, and that’s all I know.

These musings look scattered when I glance over them, but for me, it all feels connected. This has been a week of learning to trust in my instincts, of having the courage to acknowledge that I have my own perspective on things. Nothing makes me feel safer or better or more accomplished than doing a stellar job of being what other people (or institutions, or programs) want me to be: meeting and exceeding expectations, hitting goals, scoring well. Even now, at thirty-six years of age, I’m a hopeless teacher’s pet. But the whole point of this education is to head out into the world and do my own work, even and especially when it means sticking to my guns.

I wish you a week of feeling tuned into your own intuition. Thanks for reading, as always, and here are the recipes and reads that caught my eye this week.

Recipes

This and next week’s recipe picks will be all about things I’d love to have on my theoretical Thanksgiving table! First up: Kristen’s autumn roasted pumpkin curry.

A great looking (and easy!) quinoa stuffing from my friend Sophia.

Loving Sarah’s perfectly seasonal, garlicky roasted green beans.

Dessert #1: Kristina’s awesome, cozy cinnamon baked apples.

Dessert #2: Will someone please give me a big slice of Emilie’s scrumptious vegan pumpkin cheesecake with chocolate crust?!

Reads

1. If you’re as excited as I am about holiday baking, this quick flour primer from the folks at The Kitchn may come in handy.

2. I love the idea of toy libraries, which have the potential to build upon “the social foundation that people already understand from traditional book-lending libraries . . . a kind of infrastructure for sharing and disseminating knowledge.” Not to mention an important place for kids to play, to explore, to savor unstructured time.

3. So much I agree with in Shayla Love’s frank, gutsy take on food intolerance testing. There is a growing body of tests being marketed as valid, reliable means of diagnosing food intolerances. The problem is that food intolerances are more incompletely understood than food allergies, for which there is a long-established, known mechanism. And the presence of IgG antibodies, contrary to what intolerance test marketers claim, isn’t necessarily indicative of an intolerance. It can simply mean that you’re eating a certain food pretty often, which has the particularly insidious result of forcing unsuspecting consumers to eliminate foods they love and rely upon.

More importantly, at least from a mental health perspective, these tests tend to capitalize upon the idea that, if you have GI distress, you’re being quietly sickened or poisoned by food. Love writes,

The problem with these tests isn’t that the truth is being hidden from consumers, it’s that: if you are struggling with any kind of disordered eating or thinking patterns, you will latch onto them despite what the evidence says . . . Because of my OCD, I also love rules, and once I implement a rule, it’s extremely difficult for me to break it, as it becomes a ritual. As last year went on, and I got my anxiety under control again, I still couldn’t manage to eat those foods.

Love also interviews gastroenterologist Emeran Mayer, who notes that the anxiety associated with identify certain foods as potential triggers or intolerances can actually create—via the nocebo effect, which I spent a lot of time studying as a master’s student—the very cascade of symptoms that folks are hoping to get relief from:

He thinks everyone is vulnerable to the underlying mental booby traps these tests put out there: The idea that there are foods, healthy foods, that are secretly making you sick. The anxiety such a thing creates is not benign, he says . . .

. . .  [w]hen people have extreme anxiety, the brain generates stress signals that travel to the gastrointestinal tract through the autonomic nervous system and the vagus nerve. This stress can change a lot of aspects of the gut and digestion. It can alter transit time of food through the digestive system, it can change blood flow or immune responses, it can change secretion of mucus, and all of those changes can then affect the bacteria that live in your gut, or your microbiome.

‘If you’re walking around being stressed around your food and being constantly worried, that is becoming kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy from the nocebo effect,’ he says . . . ‘But also it changes your gut-environment context in a way that can compromise the proper digestion of food. There’s a really close link between anxieties, food-related stress, and gut dysfunction.’

Of course certain food can serve as very real triggers for digestive distress: this can be true of high FODMAP foods for those who are sensitive to them, and more broadly, some of us just have a hard time digesting certain things (onions, crucifers, raw veggies, spicy food—you name it).

But it has been my overwhelming experience that the dialog about intolerances in the wellness space is often scientifically misleading, and that the anxiety it creates can actually compound and worsen GI distress. I think it’s so important for practitioners who work with digestive health to remain vigilant of food-related anxiety and disordered eating, addressing intolerances only in a way that’s evidence-based and sensitive to the health and well-being of patients.

4. I’m grateful to Carrian for introducing me to the phrase, “if you’re on the right path it will always be uphill.” Not sure I agree with the “always” bit, but I need a lot of reminders that struggle and pain are a natural, important part of life experience. Or, to quote from one of my wise readers, “it’s not easy and it isn’t supposed to be.”

5. Finally, and while we’re on my favorite topic of the placebo/nocebo effect, the New York Times shares new insights into how the placebo effect really works.

Happy Sunday, everyone. I’m back this week with a new, tasty, low-maintenance Thanksgiving recipe!

xo

The post Weekend Reading, 11.11.18 appeared first on The Full Helping.

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