Mystery Solved!

Last night I solved the mystery of the rumbling: It’s the stereo of my downstairs neighbor or her roommate, on at a very low volume some 36 hours a day. She has demonstrated an incapacity for civil discourse in the past, so I’m not sure where to go from here. Now that I know it’s being perpetrated by a conscious being and not random misery sent by the universe (“Turds from Satan,” as Paul Trupin used to say), it’s a lot harder to feel friendly toward. I suppose I could talk to the building manager, but the uncivil neighbor is the building manager.

I decoded successfully a couple of times lately, most thrillingly. “Decoding” is the term Overcoming Overeating uses for figuring out what is really meant by one’s critical thought about one’s body or what one ate. When I started OO about six and a half years ago, I immediately got that thoughts about my body were really about something else; unfortunately, it took me until about two weeks ago to figure out that thoughts about what I ate or how much I ate also are not to be taken at face value. I’m positive now that when I overeat and think, “I wish I hadn’t done that,” even though I’m not berating myself, I’m really trying to say I wish I hadn’t done something else, or that I’m bad for having done something else. I have failed to live up to my own standard in some way. And while the answer might end up being to try harder to live up to my own standard, more often the need is for self-forgiveness or re-examining the standard.

Carol Munter demonstrated decoding at the OO workshop some months ago. She asked us to share critical thoughts we’d had about our bodies. I said that the evening before, looking in the hotel mirror, I’d thought, “My belly sticks out. Oh, well, at least it doesn’t come to a point.” Carol said, “I should really make Linda do this, but this one is so obvious that I’ll go ahead: ‘I really stuck out in the group yesterday. Thank goodness I didn’t come entirely to the point.’”

My two recent decodings were also thoughts about my body. I was bending over and observed that the line of my inner thigh was ripply. This was actually a thought about the fear of being seen and possibly giving offense—a fear of making ripples. The other thought was that my face was too red: fear of my writing being read!

I was writing about P.’s housemate Lourdes yesterday. Another person who lives at P.’s is Ed, an incredibly cheery soul of about 90 who is often to be found on the front porch enjoying the afternoon sun. One day he told P. and me about the house where he used to live decades ago, who had what bedroom. That house is near where I live now, so I offered to take him on an outing to see it. Amazingly, when he and P. and I got there, there was someone on the street who remembered Ed from decades ago. We took photographs of Ed sitting on his old front steps and then went to the tennis courts near Valencia and 20th, where he used to play in his youth. He was thrilled to see part of his history come to life again, and told us, “You know, I used to live near here! Boy, I’d sure like to see the old place one more time.” I said, as gently as possible, “Actually, we were just there.” “We were?” he asked. And so, with P. moaning and groaning, off we went to have one more look at Ed’s old house.

The pictures from that day show Ed smiling hugely, while P. looks absolutely distraught. He never seems to enjoy our time together much, but is very anxious to make sure he’s going to get more of it. I suppose that makes sense to any addict. I think he had asked me, at the beginning of the excursion, “What are we going to do next week?” And when I said I wasn’t sure, or that I was going to be doing something else, it sent him into a panic that destroyed his afternoon. It seems like a waste, but of course it’s fundamentally the same as my own worries: Things are fine right now, but what if …