Here’s Me Sitting on the Toilet Holding My Microwave

Sorry, you’ll have to imagine what this would look like for now.

In other art news, the other day I saw “The Art of Gaman” at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art (between Market and Mission and Third and Fourth streets), which features “arts and crafts—both decorative and essential—made by Japanese Americans incarcerated in U.S. internment camps during World War II.”

The exhibit was very moving, as was the presence of many elderly Japanese, some of whom or whose friends and relatives were very likely imprisoned in those camps. The internees carved things out of wood and stone, including walking sticks, brightly painted birds, and little boxes with drawers, and painted pictures, and made “flowers” out of sea shells.

Their only materials were those produced by nature and packaging materials—crates and the like.

This museum is quite small. It consists of an outer area with big windows featuring artwork for sale, while the museum as such is one interior room that usually costs five dollars to enter, but on the first Tuesday of the month, it’s free. It takes no more than 15 or 20 minutes to see the whole exhibit, though there was also a 30-minute video playing over and over, which I would have liked to see but didn’t have time for.

I’m making a bit of progress with eating attentively during the day at work—only eating and not looking at my PC—and with stopping when my stomach indicates I’ve had enough. This means when I return to finish whatever it is later, it’s room temperature, so then I pretend it’s a refreshing gazpacho-type cuisine, as I fear the twice-microwaved foodstuff.

Naturally, I do not have a microwave at home. For one thing, the only remaining storage option is my actual arms, so if I had one, I’d have to carry it from room to room with me: Here’s me sitting on the toilet holding my microwave. That’s Hammett on top of the microwave. Here’s me taking a nice nap with my microwave heaped on top of me like a weary mountain climber at the summit of Mt. Everest.

I’m finding it much more challenging to eat attentively at home after work, which endeavor had lately become rather diet-like: I’m good if I do it, bad if I don’t. And of course it would be neither here nor there if I didn’t perceive it as having some bearing on my shape or weight, and that would be neither here nor there if I didn’t have an opinion about how my shape or weight should be.

Right before I started following the Overcoming Overeating approach, I gained about 30 pounds. Ditto after I started the approach, so all in all, I gained approximately 60 pounds and embarked on a dedicated effort to accept myself as I was, which was quite successful.

But I find now that if it seems like I’ve gained a few pounds (and I can’t say for sure, because I don’t own a scale), I want them to go away: oh, if only I could weigh what I weighed last week, three pounds less. This leads to BBTs (Bad Body Thoughts) taking hold, and then to judgments about what and how much I’m eating.

Basically, it snowballs into a big heap of negative judgments. After a certain number of BBTs that go unchallenged, it starts to seem as if they are true, not just thoughts. But in fact they are just thoughts, and if I devote myself to challenging them for a time, and apologize to myself, and discover what anxiety caused the given thought to arise, they abate most miraculously, and I can go back to making choices without having it be about whether I am good or bad or lovable or not lovable. What a relief!

So here is the choice I have made about dinner, and, possibly more to the point, dessert: I am going to read while I’m eating it, and I’m going to thoroughly eat past full if I feel like it.

Speaking of taking a nice nap, with or without a microwave athwart me, I went to see my doctor’s medical assistant for a referral to physical therapy. She said nix on the referral and to buy a new mattress, so I guess I must do this. I have gathered some recommendations and will shop this weekend. I can think of few things I’d less rather do, but the pain is motivating.

I nearly succumbed to the temptation to be weighed at the doctor’s office but remembered in time that there is nothing important about myself that number can tell me, unless my doctor is actually prescribing medication.

I’m afraid the ivy that Tom’s mother, Ann, gave me for Christmas is, predictably, dead as a doornail, but the pot, which has birds on it, has looked very cheery on top of my refrigerator even as the plant has reproached me with its air of suffering, and I think the pot will be very nice with some stalwart dried flowers in it.