Thursday, March 06, 2003

Both the new Target and the new Wal-Mart opened here this week, on the same day and it almost feels as if the soul has been sucked right out of Red Wing, population 16,000.  I felt sad for the proud, bustling town Red Wing used to be, when all the downtown shops were open until 9pm on Thursday nights, on shopping night.   I suppose I am romanticizing things, lamenting a retail reality that hasn’t existed for a good 25 years, but I can remember how it used to be, how my mother would shop for clothes in the ladies’ apparel shops downtown while I played hide & seek in the racks; how I would hoard every dollar I got so that when I had accumulated two of them, plus fifty cents, I could go into Koehler’s book shop and buy a new Nancy Drew Book and peer for a moment at the strange men in the back corner browsing the dirty magazine section.  Such sweet memories.    Those days haven’t existed in a long time.  In truth, the coming of Target and Wal-Mart really only deposed a K-Mart.  So I don’t know why I am so glum except that now I feel the town is doubly awash with junk and I shall have to be on my guard to stem the flow of junk trying to make its way into this house.    Bungalows are just not built for the sad Target/Wal-Mart double whammy.   comment []10:31:24 PM     Today is just a day to take care of things around the house.  Dean is in Florida, Bike Week, you know, so I really don’t have to cook.  Kipp and I go into pantry mode and just eat up whatever we can scratch together—not that we don’t deserve a nice salmon fillet.  It’s just that whatever I do cook has to be very, very simple, so that I can gear up for the next onslaught of new recipes.   This is why I haven’t been blogging about cooking much and have been free to think about Virginia Woolf, and about all the poor, malnourished women of the previous century.    I was one of them.   By looking at me you’d never have thought I was mal-nourished, (5’6” 135-145 lbs, certainly sturdier than Virginia Woolf) but thinking back on what I was raised on and on what I ate during my college years, (cheap carbohydrates) I must have been.   When I lived in Colombia for a year in 1993, I was suffering from mild depression.  I ate suppers of raw broccoli, dry popcorn, a slice of ham and a slice of cheese.  Who wouldn’t be depressed?  I’d look out the window of the strange 3-level house I lived in at this high-rise apartment building facing me.  It was like Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window x 100.  Hundreds of windows faced me, hundreds of people in their little cubicles, living their little lives.  It was like viewing an ant farm or something and for some reason depressed me immensely.  I hated leaving the house and navigating through Bogota’s smog-filled streets, always on my guard, as one must be in any big city, I think—with the added bonus that in Bogota a car bomb could explode at any moment.   I’m an infinitely happier creature now; is it change of lifestyle or change of diet?  Probably both.    Happiest moment of the day:  I awoke at 4am to the sound of soft breathing.  Kipp had launched himself into my bed at some point, unbeknownst to me,  and was slumbering peacefully.  But I was wide awake so I  went downstairs for water and started blogging, not noticing until I was finished, that I was shivering and my bare feet were freezing.  I ran back upstairs and slipped into bed, trying to mooch some of Kipp’s warmth, but it was no use.  His legs are too short.  My feet were frozen through.   I was tired enough to fall asleep anyway,  for two hours of cold, fitful rest (dreaming that people were piling blankets into my grocery cart).  At 6am I awoke with shoulders as frigid as my feet, so I drew a hot bath, and soaked in it until I was cooked through.  By that point, I was drowsy again and jumped back in bed for another warm, delicious hour and a half of sleep, snuggling next to Kipp, who, incidentally, had doused himself with a trial size bottle of Dolce & Gabbana's Light Blue cologne the day before and still smelled pretty darn good.   I don’t usually like to wait for him to be my alarm clock.  The day seems completely out of my hands when that happens, but today it just doesn’t matter what new things I accomplish.  I just have to take care of what is. comment []12:17:13 PM     Fat and Blood, and How to Make Them: After seeing the movie The Hours I became a bit more curious about Virginia Woolf’s diet.  It sounded as if I was being flippant when I said she needed to eat walnuts.  The truth is I’m never flippant about nutrition and mental well-being.  It seems so logical.  The brain is part of the body.  If the body isn’t fed well, the brain suffers too. There’s a fascinating and informative website on Virginia Woolf’s psychiatric history:  http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/malcolmi/VWFRAME.HTM. Here I found that early on Woolf  “became convinced that her body was in some way monstrous, the sordid mouth and sordid belly demanding food - repulsive matter which must then be , excreted in a disgusting fashion; the only course was to refuse to eat.” Her worst periods of manic depression occurred between the ages of 31-33, 1913-1915, when she was suicidal and depressed.  The prescribed treatment was  S. Weir Mitchell’s infamous Rest Cure, very popular in England at the time, consisting of:  sleep, massage, isolation,  rich food, forbiddance to do anything on one's own and strict limitation of intellectual activity.  Women, you see, just couldn’t hack the hectic pace of life in the railroad age, poor dears.  They lacked “rational endurance” and should never be overtasked.  Emotions were to be controlled as strictly as the bowels. (In an interesting side note, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote her short story The Yellow Wallpaper in protest of Weir Mitchell's cure.  She was happy that her story had some effect on him and he later altered his regime.) Woolf managed to put weight back on, and got better in her attitude towards food.  In 1922 she wrote to a friend:  'I'm glad you are fat; for then you are warm and mellow and generous and creative. I find that unless I weigh 9 stones (126 pounds) I hear voices and see visions and can neither write nor sleep.' But still, what was she eating?   Weight alone does not ensure the body is getting what it needs to thrive mentally and physically.   Weir Mitchell advocated a lot of milk and rich cream and odd things like extract of beef pancreas and raw beef soups, according to his bluntly-titled book:  Fat and Blood:  How to Make Them.  (Perhaps this accounts for Kidman / Woolf’s look of horror when she sees her cook hacking up a side of beef in the kitchen.)  It would be interesting to know: was Woolf’s physchiatric torment due, in greater part, to a lack of healthful fat in her diet, of essential fatty acids?  I suppose it's a mystery, or at least a subject for further investigation.  In the meantime, I intend to eat more walnuts myself, along with salmon & flax-seed bread--if I can find a good recipe, while I poke about in Virginia Woolf's diaries looking for clues. comment []5:23:53 AM

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