This Is Oceans of Fun!

Hammett was very good about taking his medication, after the first day, when he caused the syringe I left on the kitchen counter to disappear. Fortunately, what with one sick cat and the other, I have several.

On a couple of occasions, when he saw the yellow towel I wrap him in and the plate with the syringe full of medication on it, he even lay down in the medication-administering area to wait. “I’d like Tropical Pink on my toenails, please. What, you’re going to squirt it down my throat? Well, OK, whatever.”

I always start by saying, “This is going to be easy and fun.”

We have an appointment next week with Dr. Press, in case Hammett’s diarrhea comes back, which it probably will.

Over the weekend, which was a three-day weekend for me because I took Monday off, Tom and I saw Shut Up & Sing, the Dixie Chicks documentary. I liked it even more the second time, and Tom liked it, too. I asked him afterwards who is cuter, Natalie Maines or Jennifer Garner, and it was a toss-up.

I bought Hammett some more of the balls that he likes, and constructed cardboard barriers to keep them from ending up under the refrigerator and stove, because I’m getting tired of getting down on my aching old knees and fishing them out with a yardstick. I brought home 200 pounds of cat litter in a cab (25-pound bags of unscented Scamp, which is the best—no dust, no weird smell, no weird color, no clumps, no this, no that).

I went to the new Bloomingdale’s and walked through the mall, pursuant to a clothes-shopping chore I have been putting off for three or four years. Every weekend for at least 156 weekends in a row, there has been a good reason I can’t do it, such as that it’s November, or December, or summer, or it’s raining, or I have something else to do, or it’s already 11 a.m.

I did a whole day of baggy-pants sewing, ending up with four new pairs, including the ones with golden koi on them. I’m going to wear those on Friday. I think my acupuncturist will appreciate them. While I sewed, I listened to all of my Ratt albums, per tradition.

I saw the Asian guy who has my favorite hairdo, very short but with two beetling little antennas sticking straight up. For the first time, he was close enough for me to tell him so. He seemed a bit distracted and asked the way to a certain shop, which I realized later was one of the shops belonging to James Kim and his wife. I was thinking about James Kim’s final moments, how maybe he knew he was dying and that he would never see his wife and little girls again. It’s so sad.

The SpongeBob doll I inherited from Frank when he moved back to Dublin said a new thing, which he does every now and then, which always tickles me. Some things he says often: “This is oceans of fun!” “You’re my best friend!” “Are you ready to sing?!”

There has been a good deal of eating from MH (mouth hunger, as opposed to SH, stomach hunger) lately, which had started to distress me. I can usually catch those thoughts that say, “My stomach is too big,” and apologize to myself and ask “Who says?”, but thoughts such as “All this eating from MH is not good” had snuck up on me and taken root.

Of course, the more I think I shouldn’t eat from MH, the more I want to do it.

I was also gaining weight (or else some of my existing weight had suddenly decided to migrate to the portion of the anatomy known as the spare tire) and had formed the opinion that I was possibly going to gain a hundred pounds and that that would not be OK.

I made an increased effort to eat mindfully, but that backfired, as some part of my psyche interpreted it as The Mindfulness Diet and, understandably, rebelled.

Finally, I appealed to my OO friends (Overcoming Overeating; see the books of Jane Hirschmann and Carol Munter), who reminded me that if I was eating from MH, it was because I needed to, and if I gained a hundred pounds, it was also because I needed to. Most of all, they reminded me to treat myself well in every possible way.

This brought an immediate sigh of relief. I gave myself permission to eat from MH and to gain a hundred pounds if need be, and assured myself that I would accept myself at any size. The very next day, I found myself eating without distractions, really experiencing at least a bite here and there, and stopping when my body had had enough, which is always the hardest part: saying goodbye.

I have been visualizing doing this the past few days, just to get a mental picture of what it might look like, since it is a vanishingly rare phenomenon in real life.