Yesterday morning I went down to the Y, with Kipp in tow, for my monthly body fat calculation. As you may have gathered, I’m not one for dieting. I would much rather have extra energy to expend, physically and mentally, than not enough energy at all. The trick, of course, is to make sure I do expend it, sometimes easier said than done. Most days I exercise for an hour, but there are those times when I hate to “waste” those calories outside the home, days when I need to use them here, for 15 trips up and down the staircase and 20 laps around the main floor rooms. I’ve found that knowing my body fat percentage is the best way to be vigilant about the whole energy input/ouput situation.
So while I was standing there, having my various skinfolds pinched, much to the eternal fascination of Kipp, (“How much does that hurt? Does it poke your cells? Does it kill ‘em?”) I was looking at the motivational propaganda hanging on the wall of the fitness trainer’s office. One of the flyers read:
You can tell you are exhausted if fast food is an acceptable choice.
"Hmm. . .," I thought, thinking of an article I read last week, "then according to Newsweek magazine, we must be one exhausted nation." The article entitled "Take-Out Nation" was all about stressed out families and fancy kitchens in American homes that are rarely used. Newsweek is good at this sort of article—reporting judgementally on trends which they find alarming, though they never really come right out and say they find it alarming.
And then, I wonder too what America they are talking about. Is it really a trend if so many people are going in the opposite direction, whether out of necessity or by choice? I definitely do not live in Take-Out Nation. In fact, I laugh to think that I have pretty much cooked myself right into a corner; we almost never want to go out anymore because the food available in this town’s restaurants, fast food or otherwise, is simply not as good as what we can eat at home. Yes, it is work for me at the end of, or throughout, a busy day. Yes, the kitchen is in a near constant state of chaos, but I love having a “live relationship” with the food that we eat and feel fortunate not to be so exhausted by life that I can’t exhaust myself in the process of cooking. In the future I would like to inject even more liveliness into the relationship, by tending my own garden, much like Charlotte at Living Small. I have never, ever thought I would be a gardener—but now I see how and why I might find pleasure in it.
The problem with fast food is that it is just another dead relationship in a life that may be altogether too full of dead relationships as it is. Going back to Jean Zimmerman’s book about Reclaiming the Pleasures of the Hearth, I’ve figured out that the pleasure stems not from lazy self-indulgence, not from shopping and buying manufactured things for the home, not from showing off your pretty home to others; the pleasure stems from the joy of feeling truly alive. You can’t buy live relationships; you can only create them. Much like staking any sort of claim, if you’re going to reclaim the pleasure of the hearth, you’re going to have to do your own work and lots of it.
I need to be less judgemental about the sources people use for the inspiration to do their own work. Wherever it comes from, take it and run with it. I know I got a huge surge of inspiration just from Nigella Lawson's luscious vocabulary, so if yours comes from Martha Stewart's shriveled one, oh, who cares?
This has me thinking about other sources of inspiration--artistic, cinematic, or literary, that I have had for taking back my own life. Rayne wants to take back the country, and I applaud her, but I know I have to start much smaller.
10:44:17 AM 
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