Theodora Goss's Blog, page 30

Strawberry Crisp

Today, I posted the following on Facebook:

“You can make strawberry crisp with frozen strawberries. That means I will be able to make strawberry crisp all winter. Believe what you wish, but for me, this is a sign that there is a divine force in the universe, wishing us well and working for our good. Of course, you have to thaw the strawberries first. Even a benevolent divine force wants us to work for our rewards. (Next, I’m going to try raspberry crisp. And then I might go wild with a fruit medley . . .)”

I was asked for the recipe, so I thought I should post it. I wasn’t going to write a blog post tonight, but what you’re getting is a recipe rather than an actual blog post. I’m not going to elaborate on my theories regarding a divine force that wishes us strawberry crisp when there is snow on the ground! But you know that I’m a believer . . .

Here is the recipe, which I am offering with a caveat.

Caveat: This is my recipe, which means that it’s the recipe of a 5’4″ woman who watches what she eats. If you are a 6’2″ man, the recipe below will leave you hungry. There are some additional instructions for what to do in that case, below the recipe.

Set the oven at around 350 degrees and preheat. If you’re a cook, you’ll know that ovens are all different, and you might have to experiment with yours for a while to find the temperature that gives you the best results.

Ingredients:

1 bag frozen strawberries (thawed)

1 tbsp sugar

1 tbsp flour

1 tsp vanilla

1/2 cup oats

1 tbsp sugar

1 tbsp flour

1 tbsp butter

I use what are marketed as traditional or rolled oats, meaning they look like oats. Not cut or mashed or anything else, just oats. I use organic sugar, which I think gives the recipe a better flavor, and I also use light butter. You may not want to. Real butter gives better results, but I’m going to the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, which takes place in March, in Orlando, Florida, and I’m planning on wearing a bathing suit. So light butter for me.

Recipe:

In one bowl, put the first four ingredients and stir thoroughly. In another, put the oats, sugar, and flour from the last four ingredients. Stir, and then add the butter and mash in well. Put the strawberries in a baking dish, and then sprinkle the oat mixture on top and spread relatively evenly. And then pop it all in the oven. It should take about 40 minutes, at which point the strawberries will be bubbling and the oats will be crisp.

You can make this recipe with fresh strawberries, in which case you will need to add water to the strawberry mixture. How much will depend on the strawberries, but I would say between 1/4 and 1/2 cup. You can of course make it with other sorts of fruit as well. I love apple crisp, but to make that you need to add 1/2 cup of water and bake for about an hour. And it’s best if you use apples that bake well. And you need to peel them and slice them thinly: unpeeled apples don’t bake well, no matter how thinly you slice them. If you make apple crisp, add 1 tsp cinnamon and 1/4 tsp nutmeg to the fruit mixture.

Now, what if you are that 6’2″ man? You know what to do. More fruit, and you can make twice as much topping if you want to, with a greater proportion of butter. It’s easy to make this recipe richer. You can also add ice cream on top.  The way I make it, this recipe is about 500 calories for the entire dish.

I took a picture of the strawberry crisp I made, but I should warn you that fruit crisp is not a particularly attractive food. It’s not meant to be. It’s meant to be warm and comforting, and eaten while you’re curled under a blanket, watching a movie. (Also, I took this out of the refrigerator, because it’s the half I’m saving for tomorrow. The other half was already eaten.)

So there you go. This is so easy, and such a healthy desert, that I think I’m going to be making it all winter, with all different sorts of berries . . .

Finding the Time

I’m so tired! It’s the middle of the semester, and I’ve spent all week meeting with my students about their papers. I have 48 students, and it takes at least half an hour to go through a paper and meet with a student (about fifteen minutes each). So I spend about 24 hours meeting with students, in addition to teaching and holding office hours. And then there are all the administrative meetings, which have been particularly numerous this week. Both of the classes I’m teaching this semester are new, and I’m trying to make them interesting and innovative, so there’s quite a bit of preparation involved. Because of all that, I’ve been feeling overwhelmed with work, and very tired.

So the question is, what happens to the writing? Well, the answer at the moment is that I haven’t written in several days. No, that’s not true: I wrote a couple of paragraphs yesterday, but not of the novel. I was waiting to vote, and I wrote several paragraphs of a short story while standing in line. (Voting took about an hour and a half, and it was the end of a long day of meeting with students.) If I had brought a book, I would have read — it would have been Jane Eyre, which I am currently teaching, so my reading would actually have been preparation for class. But I didn’t have a book, so I took out the Moleskine notebook I always have with me, and one of my Pilot pens, and started the story I want to write.

But I haven’t been working on the novel, and that really bothers me. The problem is that working on the novel takes a certain amount of energy: I can’t be exhausted. And I’ve been exhausted most of this week.

How does one find the time to write?

I wanted to find an icon for this blog post, and I found what I think is an appropriate one: a picture of a woman writing from a mural in Pompei.

I wonder if she had the same problems I do? It seems as though all of my time is needed simply to do the work that supports me. The advantage of teaching at the university level is that it does allow me to have a flexibility that many people don’t, and I do genuinely love it. And it gives me ideas that I would never have gotten otherwise: for example, I was reading the fairy tales that the students in my Fairy Tales and Literature class had written, and I thought, what I really want to do is write a series of stories about Sylvania, my imaginary Eastern European country. (My stories “Fair Ladies” and “Princess Lucinda and the Hound of the Moon” both take place there.) I want those stories to tell the history of Sylvania, and somehow I want to include the Sylvanian versions of the fairy tales we all know. I wonder what those versions would be like?

But the problem with teaching is that it takes the same kind of creative mental energy as writing. So by the end of the day, my brain is already tired, and of course that’s when I write. I know some people write in the morning, but I can’t do that. I can’t write knowing that I will need to stop in order to get dressed, or eat breakfast, or go off to teach. I have to sit down at my computer knowing that I have as much time as I need, that if I need to stay up later to finish something, I can. And writing is tiring: I can’t go and teach afterward.

So there’s my dilemma. Next semester may be a bit easier, I don’t know. And then I’ll have more time over the summer, although I’ll be teaching part of the summer as well. I envy people who have some sort of financial support, because for me, it’s all me. I have to support myself and do what I love to do in the time that’s left. On the other hand, I know people who have a lot more support than I do, a lot more time, and who talk about writing without necessarily writing. I suppose what you have to have, in the end, is determination. You have to find what time you have, and write then. I don’t know if I can tonight: I’m honestly worn out. But I have to find a way to plan better, take care of myself better, so I can do it. I’ll find a way. I always do.

Talent and Discipline

There’s a graphic that has been making its way around Facebook. It looks like this:

I’ve been thinking about it, even looking up the man who is credited with saying that talent is cheap: Andre Dubus. (His name doesn’t seem to be spelled with an accent anywhere but in the graphic, although that’s the French spelling. Having read that he’s a former marine who received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and passed up lucrative novel deals because he wanted to devote himself to the short story, and that he was a friend of Vonnegut and Updike, I rather doubt that he used an accent. He doesn’t seem the type.)

And I’ve been wondering if it’s right. I’m not so sure it is. I’m not so sure talent really is cheap. If it were, we could all be anything we wanted to. I could, with enough discipline, become a talented gymnast or musician, for example. But that’s not the way it works. If you’ve raised a child, you know that children are good at some things and not good at others. Intellectually, my daughter is ahead of her peers, particularly in terms of her verbal ability. She’s also physically uncoordinated, the way I was at her age. Neither of us is particularly good at sports. No, let me be more specific: there are certain sports I could be good at. I’m good at sports that require grace: downhill skiing, anything involving dance. I’m not good at sports that require spatial skills, anything involving a ball. Even gymnastics. I could get better at them, I’m sure. But do I have talent? No, I don’t.

Talent is what, initially, allows us to do things untaught or self-taught. Later, it allows us to make the most of the training we receive, to move more quickly and benefit more from a training regimen. I’ve seen people with talent. I’ve seen them sit down at a piano and play something after having heard it once. Or sit down at a table and draw something, knowing before they set pen to paper where each line is going to go. Talent is something we envy, because it makes the difficult seem easy. And talent is something that has gotten a bad rap lately, I think because it seems undemocratic. The idea that talent is cheap, and that discipline is what’s important, seems more American somehow. We want to believe that we could all become great at whatever we chose, if we dedicated ourselves sufficiently. But I don’t think that’s true.

I do think that we all have different talents. Perhaps that is my own egalitarianism: I think we all have something we are called to do. Some people answer the call, some don’t. I’ve seen people with significant musical talent go into the business world, where that talent went undeveloped and was used only to entertain during family gatherings. Is there anything wrong with that? Well, to be honest, I actually think there is. But whether or not we develop our talents is our individual choice. That is where discipline comes in. It takes a great deal of discipline to become truly good at anything. But I think in the end, to be truly good (much less to be great), you need the interplay of talent and discipline.

I wish I had a good definition of talent. I’m trying to think of what it is exactly, because I do think I have one (remember, so does everyone else: a talent or talents). Perhaps it’s a capacity to get inside something, to see it from the inside rather than the outside. For a musician, it’s an instinctive sense of how music works. For a writer, it’s an instinctive sense of how words fit together, how they make sense and the different kinds of sense they can make. It’s the way my eight-year-old daughter, told that a painting is Op Art, immediately asks if the word comes from “optics.” It’s the way I can feel dance moves in my body, as I can’t feel the moves in basketball — but I know there are people who can.

Don’t get me wrong: discipline is at least half the battle. But talent is not cheap. If only it were!

Becoming the Writer

I have a theory: anything that we do on the outside has to have happened first on the inside. Before I could go to graduate school, I had to become the sort of person who could go to graduate school. I’ve always found that the internal change precedes the external one. When I tried to go to graduate school before I was ready, it didn’t work.

I think the same thing happens with a novel: in order to write a particular novel, you have to become the sort of person who can write that novel. And of course the process of writing the novel changes you as well. But you have to become the writer. The novel comes out of the writer that you are, and if you’re not ready, the novel won’t work.

I’ve had such a ridiculously busy week, and I’m so ridiculously tired, that I don’t know if I’ll be able to express this in the way I want to. But first you have to become the writer who can write a novel — any novel. I’ve seen friends of mine try to write novels and fail, in part because they didn’t believe in their own capacity to do it. You have to believe in your ability to complete a significant process. You can’t psych yourself out. There’s a certain level of confidence you need to write anything of that length. I think what convinced me I could do it, more than anything else, was completing the doctoral dissertation. If I can do that, I’m pretty sure I can write a novel.

And then you have to become the person who can write that particular novel. For the novel I’m writing, that means in part being a person who has done her research, who knows that particular time period. I got that from my PhD: I studied late nineteenth-century England. I know what people were wearing, what they were discussing. But the process of research is ongoing. There is so much I need to know, in order to move my characters around in that world convincingly. And then, I need to become a person who can write about young women who are social outsiders, who have family problems, who have problems with self-image and self-esteem. There’s no way to research that. It’s all knowledge I have from growing up in a certain way, in a certain family. From having been the person I am. But also from having become the writer I am, which is a writer who is aware of those things, who has thought about them, who can translate them into characters.

Writing takes a strange combination of arrogance and humility. I’ve seen writes so humble that they don’t believe in their own abilities. Some of them are very good writers who have difficulty completing longer projects. I’ve also seen writers so arrogant that they are not able to see outside themselves, to truly understand other people. Some of them are very good at completing projects, but not actually very good writers. Both arrogance and humility can be learned, and I think becoming a writer means learning whichever one you’re missing. I know that, in order to write this novel, I need both.

I recently saw and reposted this photograph:

I think it’s an excellent image for what it feels like to write a novel. You have to trust that the birds will hold you up, even though there’s no ground under your feet.

Writing a Novel

Did you know that I’m writing a novel? Well, I am. I’m about 30,000 words into it, which is longer than anything else I’ve ever written. Even The Thorn and the Blossom, which was a book, was only a novella: it ended up being about 20,000 words long. So it’s as though I’ve swum further out than I’ve ever swum before, and there are some things I’m learning about writing a novel that I couldn’t have learned in any other way.

The first thing I’ve learned is that it’s hard! Much harder than writing novellas. As you probably know, if you’ve spend any time on this website, I write different sorts of things: novellas and short stories and articles and poetry. Each sort of thing I write has its own rhythm, its own way it wants to be written. Strangely enough, writing a novel resembles writing my doctoral dissertation more than anything else. Constructing a plot is like putting together a very long argument: things have to happen in the proper places. If they don’t, you need to reorganize. You can’t get by, as you can in a short story, on the poetry of the language.

One of my greatest difficulties, and I don’t know if other writers have a problem with this, is simply moving my characters through space. How does Mary get out of a carriage? How does she walk across a room? I have to see, precisely in my mind’s eye, how she’s moving. And I’m dealing with more characters than in a typical short story, so I have to keep them all in mind. I can’t forget that one is in a scene, I can’t let the scene go on too long without that character doing something. I have to say, wait, this important message is being communicated, but in the meantime, Diana would be bored. Where has she wandered off to?

Part of the difficulty is that my characters are moving around London in the 1890s, and so I have to understand how they’re traveling. I’m so glad I went to London last summer! I honestly don’t think I would be able to write this novel if I had not seen the buildings, the parks, for myself. And this is where sometimes I have to pause while writing, so I can click over to Google Maps or Wikipedia. Or both. Monday, for example, I had to figure out how to get my characters from Baker Street to Purfleet, which is (or at least was) on the outskirts of London. It took a ride in a hackney cab and then a train. Here is how Wikipedia helped:

This is Oxford Street in 1875, and it’s the street my characters would have driven down about twenty years later. But at least it gave me a sense of what they would be driving through. It allowed me to imagine the rest. That’s why writing a novel is more like writing my doctoral dissertation: it’s a matter of fitting puzzle pieces together, and it involves a lot of research.

Of course, it’s a lot more fun than the doctoral dissertation, and that’s another difficulty: that I want to work on it all the time. Of course I can’t: I have a job to do. But when I do work on it, which is at least every other day, it’s hard to come back out. For a little while, I’m living so intensely inside my head, and when I come out, sometimes I forget what day it is, what I was supposed to do. I just want to be back in London with my girl monsters . . .

Living Intensely

There’s a storm coming. I’ve seen it mentioned on social media, and there have been stories about it on the news. The university has written to tell me that I can cancel classes if I need to, and even the electricity company is telling me what to do in case of downed power lines.

I live in the city, and all the power lines are underground. Perhaps that’s part of the reason I haven’t really been paying attention. The other part is that this is Boston, and we’re told that we’re getting a storm of the century every autumn. I have a flashlight, I’ll probably go out later today to get extra water and food. And I’ll charge up the electronics. But I’m half a block away from my office, in a brand new building in one of the largest universities in the country, which has backup systems. And I live in a building that has been standing for the last hundred years.

So yeah, maybe I’m not taking it as seriously as I should . . .

I was thinking about the storm today because it seems to mirror something inside me. I’ve been asking myself why I haven’t been better about updating this blog. Even while I was writing my dissertation, I was quite good at updating on a regular basis. I think it’s because since I’ve moved into the city, into this apartment which seems so peaceful, so quiet, I’ve been living intensely.

You can’t see it on the outside. On the outside, I have a very normal life. But on the inside, so much has been happening. I’m not even sure I can describe what. It’s as though tectonic plates are shifting. I always think that you have to be prepared on the inside before something can happen on the outside. So what in the world am I preparing for? I have no idea. I sometimes think my body understands things better than I do. I also think that if you try to do things before the time is right, they don’t work out. I remember trying to apply to graduate school before I was mentally ready, even before my law school loans were paid off. It didn’t work. The next year, when the loans were paid off and I was ready, it worked so well that I had full support and a stipend. And I ended up at Boston University, which was the last place I thought I would go. I was sure I’d end up at one of the smaller Ivies, and I had that opportunity. But in the end, I chose to come here, and it turned out to be the perfect place, the place that allowed me to start becoming a writer.

Living intensely is actually quite difficult. I end up becoming impatient with ordinary life. I end up doing things that have a certain intensity to them: taking long walks by the river, writing. Those bring a kind of relief. And I think of adventures to have, even when they’re small ones.

I don’t know what this period is about, exactly. But I feel as though I need to go through it, because there’s something on the other side. When I figure out what it is, I’ll let you know!

Meanwhile, here’s what I’ve been listening to while waiting for the storm:

Being Alive

I’m so tired! It’s been an incredibly busy week, and in addition to all the busyness, I’m sick. Yesterday, I had no voice left.

I’ve been thinking about exactly what to do with this blog, because I don’t want to stop updating. But I’ve been so tired lately! I’m going to try to update very other day, and answer comments on the days I’m not blogging. That may or may not work, I’m not sure.

And this is a strange day to be writing the particular blog post I want to write, because I am so incredibly tired. But it’s on being fully alive.

It’s inspired by a blog post written by Marjorie Liu, who is another lawyer turned writer. Marjorie links to a blog post by a friend of hers, written I just realized exactly a year ago today. (What a strange coincidence! I didn’t realize, until I started writing this post, that it’s her post’s anniversary. That’s one of those Jungian synchronicity things, isn’t it?)

Her friend writes about dedicating the next year of her life to becoming unstuck. She says,

“I start this year of becoming unstuck with the premise that the sole purpose of my life is to be alive. Everything else is just a dance.

“Whether I work from a laptop in a café in Paris or from my home office, whether I could lose 30 pounds or whether I’m a size 6 . . . I am going to show up to life anyway. And while I’m here, I might as well do the best I can, for no other reason than it just feels better.

“Where I used to get overwhelmed by all that needed to happen in order to ‘get where I wanted to go,’ not even knowing where to start (so why not just put that off until tomorrow?), I am just showing up to my life. Not the one from my dreams, but the one I have. And turns out I like it far more than I ever realized. There can always be dreams of ‘more,’ but not at the expense of enjoying today. Over it.”

I spent the last year of my life becoming unstuck: from the PhD program, primarily. I changed so many things about my life, and I feel as though I’m in a place from which I can move forward. It’s a scary place, sometimes. It feels both free and sometimes as though I’m not entirely sure what I’m standing on. Maybe I’m not standing on anything, just sort of floating in space. Maybe I’m flying, I don’t know.

But I like what she says about being alive, about showing up to the life you have. Sometimes, when I’m anxious about the future, I try to just stop and be in that moment — see that it’s a beautiful day, with white clouds in the sky, the leaves lying red and yellow on the pavement.

She continues,

“Showing up for life is a different strategy than I’ve had for a very long time, and the results so far have been incredible. Funny thing is? By letting go of my dreams a little, and becoming more awake to life in this moment, I have begun the process of becoming ‘unstuck’ and I’m moving toward those dreams. They are now something I feel entirely confident I will achieve and I don’t put off the things I need to do to achieve them until tomorrow, I do what I can today. And if they don’t come true that’s okay too, because I’m still alive and that’s all I need to be.

“Who knows where I will be a year from now, maybe updating this blog from my macbook in a café in Paris, or maybe still right here in this chair — doesn’t really matter. Life will throw me curve balls and it will twist and turn and there will be suffering and unexpected joy along the way, but that’s part of life too and I’m going to show up for it either way. That way, I won’t ever become stuck again.

“I only have to be alive, the rest is just a dance.”

I checked her blog recently (remember that this was written a year ago), and she is indeed currently living in Paris. What a wonderful example of someone who came unstuck! So this year, since I’m unstuck already (and maybe floating or maybe flying), I’m going to focus on the being alive part. And maybe, just maybe, my life will take me in unexpected directions too. I hope so!

Our Inner Dialog

Since moving into the city, I’ve spent more time alone than I have for many years — in part because I’m just so busy and don’t have time to meet friends. But it’s created an interesting situation: I can hear my own inner dialog more clearly, and more often, than I’ve been able to in the past.

You probably know what I mean. I was wondering whether to call it an internal monologue, but I think there are two voices. One is the internalized voice of society, by which I mean everyone outside yourself. The voices of your parents figure in it prominently, but there are also the voices of friends, teachers and others in authority, and of course the media. That voice speaks as one, but it’s made up of all those different voices: it exists where they intersect. So if your mother told you that you are overweight, and that’s the message you received from your friends, and the images in magazines imply the same thing, guess what that voice is going to tell you? That you’re overweight, of course.

I’ll call it the Critical Voice, because what we internalize most often is criticism. The voice speaking in response is the Responsive Voice. It’s our inner self responding to that voice. It usually responds, rather than speaking on its own initiative, although I’m beginning to think it should.

I’ll tell you about a conversation I once had with my mother, which will indicate what sort of Critical Voice I have. The conversation took place about three years ago, in a train from Budapest to the town of Szántód, by Lake Balaton. It was a rickety old train, moving along old tracks through farmland. My mother was sitting on one side of the compartment, and I was sitting on the other. Ophelia was asleep, I think on my lap. My mother looked at her and said, “Ophelia looks like me.” She paused a minute and then added, “She’s a pretty girl. Sometimes these things skip a generation.”

I laughed and said to her, “Do you realize you just implied that I’m not pretty?” I laughed because that was of course the message I’d gotten most of my childhood. It was a deliberate message: my mother made clear to me, years later, that she had wanted to make sure I did not think being pretty was important, that I learned to rely on my brains and education. She did not believe in telling girls that they were pretty. It was bad for them. This, by the way, is something I find very Eastern European. There is a belief, among Eastern European parents, that praising children is bad for them. Notice that my mother only remarked on Ophelia’s prettiness while she was asleep.

Sitting in the train, she replied, “You’re pretty in a different way. You look like your father.” Which again made my laugh, since at that point she had not spoken to my father in twenty years. I took after that side of the family.

The things we hear, particularly from parents but also from society as a whole, forms the Critical Voice. Even when we don’t hear it, it’s there, telling us what it thinks of us, our plans, our ambitions. I can hear it more clearly now, and you know what? It’s wrong.

I think what I need to do is turn my Responsive Voice into something stronger. I need to let it speak first, let it indicate what my inner self needs and desires. Then the Critical Voice can respond, but the Responsive Voice (which I should perhaps call the Desiring Voice) can dismiss its criticism. It can say, you’re too late. I’ve already decided what I want to do. (Maybe it can become a Decisive Voice. Whatever I call it, I want it to speak — not just respond.)

Being able to hear that Critical Voice has made me so much more conscious of how much it’s there, and how much it says about what I am not and what I should not do. I want to start talking about what I am and what I should do instead. (Maybe I should call that inner voice the Affirming Voice.) It will continue to be a dialog: both voice will always be there. It’s just a matter of which one I listen to, which one I take more seriously.

Managing Depression

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that I went through a period of depression that lasted for about two years, although I wasn’t depressed the whole time. It came and went. It was no surprise: those two years were the years I was writing my PhD dissertation, and although I doubt much research has been done on this, I think working in such an intense way, for such high stakes, can and certainly does lead to depression — many of my friends who have done PhDs report similar experiences. Of course, I was also teaching full-time and I had a child. Those made finishing the PhD even more difficult.

The depression ended some time after I received my diploma, and it hasn’t come back since. But now that I’ve had it, I’m aware of it: sometimes I can see the shadow of its black wings. I can feel when they come near me. They never would have when I was younger, but this is what I believe: those of us who do difficult creative work can’t do it without making ourselves more vulnerable to things like depression. To do any creative work well, you have to open yourself up — to the world, to other people, to whatever is out there. And you have to make the barriers in yourself, the barriers that keep out your own fears and desires, thinner. Because in order to write well, you have to feel things, understand things, and that means the membranes between yourself and yourself, and yourself and others, have to be permeable. You become more vulnerable to all sorts of things. If you’re going to be sensitive, and you have to be as a writer, you can’t have a thick skin.

So I find myself managing my moods, living in a way that leaves me feeling balanced and healthy. Well, as much as I can. At least, I have a much better idea of how to do it now than I did when the depression first hit. (I did the right things, by the way: started going to a therapist, started working on recovering from what is not a mood, but an illness.) I’m going to write what I learned down, in case it helps anyone else. Here are the things I pay attention to now:

1. Sleep. You must get enough sleep, and not only sleep but also rest. I don’t get as much sleep as I should, but if I don’t, I know that I’m going to teeter on the edge of sadness, and I will feel as though there is something wrong with me, or with life, but no: it’s just a lack of sleep. It’s purely physiological, and I know that I will feel better once I get some rest. So I don’t push myself as hard as I used to. I know my health depends on it.

2. Food. When I told my therapist how I manage my food, she initially though it was strange, that there might be something compulsive about it. But I told her that I did it to manage how I felt throughout the day, so that my mood was always stable. I think everyone’s body is different, and everyone has to learn how to do this for themselves, based on how different foods make them feel. But I feel best when I eat whole grains, lean proteins, fruits and veggies, and healthy treats. Four meals a day, about 400 calories for the first three, about 600 for dinner. Each meal has to have whole grains, lean proteins, and fruit or veggies. Except the treats. So a typical day will be oatmeal with milk, orange juice, and a chai latte for breakfast; a cheese sandwich and an apple for lunch; something sweet for a snack (like the brownies I make); and beef stew with vegetables for dinner. I try never to get either full or hungry. I try to make sure that any grains I eat have whole grains in them, and while I eat plenty of sugar, I buy the organic kind — those brown crystals — because I’ve noticed that it doesn’t seem to affect my energy level as much. It’s pretty simple, really. I drink water, tea (herbal except for the chai in the morning), and sometimes juice. And I eat low-fat but not non-fat (cheese, mostly). I think non-fat foods just make you hungrier.

3. Exercise. I hate gyms. So I don’t go to gyms. It’s pretty easy getting plenty of exercise in the life I’m living now. Since I’ve moved into the city, I haven’t had a car, so I either walk everywhere or take the T. I can easily cover five miles just running errands. I walk every day, and when I have a chance to, I choose to walk rather than taking the T. But I find that yoga and pilates, morning and night, help me stay balanced and feel healthy. I haven’t been very good at doing them recently, but I feel so much better when I do! It’s something I definitely need to get back to. And I want to set a good example for my daughter: I want her to see that her mother is healthy, and cares about her health. But mostly, I want the feeling of calm that it gives me. If I can stretch and do yoga for half an hour in the morning, I know that I’ve done something good for myself that day.

4. Pleasure. I think you have to deliberately do things that give you pleasure. Every day. It may sound silly to say this, but being able to take a hot bubble bath at the end of the day changes my perspective significantly. Playing music. Walking by the river, which is so beautiful in autumn. Going to the art museum or a concert. Making sure that each day, you do something that pleases you, that if possible brings you joy. Even, for me, walking through a bookstore . . . You have to treat yourself as though you were someone you loved.

I have some more thoughts on this topic, but I have other work to do tonight — perhaps I’ll write more about this some other time. I’ll end this post with a picture of me by the beautiful river:

Miss Mary Mack

I’ve been teaching Ophelia “Miss Mary Mack.” Do you remember the rhyme? If you’re a woman about my age, and you grew up in an English-speaking country, I’m sure you do. It goes like this:

Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack,

All dressed in black, black, black,

Had silver buttons, buttons, buttons,

All down her back, back, back.

She asked her mother, mother, mother,

For fifteen cents, cents, cents,

To watch the elephants, elephants, elephants,

Jump over the fence, fence, fence.

They jumped so high, high, high,

They reached the sky, sky, sky,

And they never came back, back, back,

Till the fourth of July, July, July!

There are variations: the version in Wikipedia (yes, there’s a whole entry for this rhyme) is a little different. Wikipedia says it’s the most common clapping game in the English-speaking world, and I’m sure that’s true. When I started teaching Ophelia clapping games, it was the first one I remembered, although “Miss Lucy Had a Baby” also came back to me pretty quickly. I started teaching her clapping games because she would get bored on the subway, and I didn’t want her playing games on my cell phone. I needed a way to keep her amused, and clapping games required only hands.

Once I started teaching her, I was surprised by the realization that she didn’t already know them. After all, she’s eight. Didn’t I already know clapping games by the time I was eight? Perhaps it’s because she plays primarily with boys, but I think it’s more than that. I think that the culture of childhood is disappearing.

If you’re my age, you probably remember having your parents tell you to get out of the house, particularly during summer vacation. We would get out of the house and just go — a group of kids, usually all the kids from the neighborhood. We would go down to the creek, wherever that was (there always seemed to be one), and play all sorts of games. Older kids taught younger kids games like Cat’s Cradle, and Slap Jack, and all sorts of jump rope rhymes. Songs like “Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg . . .” (I bet you remember the rest.) Ophelia goes to one of the best schools in Lexington, which is one of the best school districts in the state, probably the country. Kids from the high school go on to Ivy League universities. The parents come from all over the world to work in Boston, primarily in medical and technological fields, and they live in Lexington for the schools. After school, their children go to chess club and robotics team and violin lessons, to karate and riding. They play together only at school or on playdates. And on those playdates, they play Pokémon or on their Wiis. Even Ophelia has an iTouch, given to her by her grandmother, so she can play Angry Birds and whatever else is on there. They don’t play clapping games.

Think about what we’re losing. Our children will be ready for a technological world, but we’ll have lost games and rhymes that have been handed down, child to child, sometimes for centuries. I think that’s terribly sad.

(On the other hand, I just realized that Miss Mary Mack would be an excellent Halloween costume. All you need is a black dress, silver buttons to sew down the back, fifteen cents (unless you’re doing the more expensive fifty-cent version — evidently, ticket prices have gone up) and a stuffed elephant. I think that would be a brilliant costume!