Trip

I’ve been on another trip with students, and I’ve come back much more settled, and looking forward to my move to new accomodation. I’ve been jokey with M____ again, playing around, and she has sensed that I am looking forward to the move. This could perhaps be taken as proof conclusive of how I am sensitive to changes in my routine.

By and large I was ok there. I took a lot of food with me and for the first time really anticipated the difficulties I would have with food and compliance to my diet. After all, I am away a lot, and came to feel that I was using trips and birthdays and celebrations and the like as excuses for non-compliance. Especially a problem, I am coming to see, was that I was using non-compliance in one often less avoidable sense as an excuse for non-compliance elsewhere, particularly with smoking and caffeine: I am tired from not sleeping from eating cheese and drinking beer, so I need nicotine or caffeine to perk myself up. This despite having proved this logic flawed again and again.

I did have a little caffeine over there, but not as much as I have elsewhere. I had batter with fish, and black pudding which contained oats and wheat flour. And I had flapjacks most days. But otherwise I did better than I often do, and didn’t feel myself drifting off quite so much as I have in the past.

I have been back a couple of days now and I have fallen into the old rationalisations. Yesterday I had a decaf coffee, telling myself I fancied the taste. I had it with sugar, because I had sugar a couple of times in Wales and didn’t feel any real ill-effects (before I have noticed that the effects of sugar are cumulative). I then had another, unconsciously (as I admitted to myself once or twice before repressing it) wanting the caffeine.  This morning I woke very tired, as I tend to do once this caffeine vicious spiral has taken off, and eventualy succumbed to a full-strength coffee with sugar. Soon after (and no less tired) I began to feel that I was drifting while reading Bleak House, I can’t recall the reveries, but they were there.

I have wondered whether I should ditch the idea of full food diaries and simply record days of compliance. Ie. caffeine - 3 days, gluten 4, dairy, 7, beer 3, spirits 5, nicotine 24. This would then simplify the record and all slips would be regarded as such with neither decaf coffee nor flapjacks regarded as somehow borderline cases. It would also help me in interpreting the evidence since I rarely/never look over old diaries and am only able, therefore, to interpret a single day’s reactions. I am sure there could be a good calculation too to record the resultant mood and concentration, perhaps involving the day’s results plus some fraction of the preceeding days. Some months ago I became possessed with the idea of trying to input into Microsoft [reveries of playing guitar for everyone at work, triggered by Blind Melon’s No Rain, but continuing from regular soundchecking reverie] Excel. I couldn’t manage it, and it became just one of the many hundreds of structures I have attempted to impose on my life that have fallen by the wayside, along with the transparencies I was hoping to draw graphs and pictagrams on and all the rest of it. This blog is the most successful so far!

One thing I noticed from Wales was that the sores in the corners of my mouth completely cleared up.

But I’m still rather out of it. I’ve just been reading an interesting article on M.E. and food intolerance http://www.ldmeg.org.uk/jb/food.htm which I found after looking up caffeine intolerance, wondering how much of my problems may stem from this. I intend to follow the writer’s advice regarding sprouted seeds, indeed I’ve just ordered a book she suggests, The Sprouters Handbook by Edward Cairney from E-Bay and I may go and buy a couple of things in a health food shop later when I’ll be dragged to Mardy Hell by M____. Now though, I think I should go and write an article in my other blog that I’ve been meaning o write for a while.

Oh, one piece of news: I have decided to go for a position at work which I’m led to believe would involve cooking with students.

Decaf? You’re having a laugh!

I’ve been sleeping much better of late but today I’m “spiked,” my word for being unable to switch off. And having been very careful today, it looks like decaf coffee is again to blame. Now, I didn’t have any of the reveries I was subject to the other day following my half nescafe, half decaf mix, but still I cannot sleep, and I’m just lying there cuddling up to my life size doggie having sexual fantasies of secretaries in publishing houses and cellists (which I must, incidentally, write up one day).

The rationalisation? That it was something I enjoyed. Fair enough, except that this rationalisation came at the exact time that I was tired, meaning that it related not to the taste at all but to the effects of the little caffeine that remains in decaf coffee (if you have two or three cups it is the same as one ordinary strength coffee, making decaf, in effect, far stronger relatively, than non-alcoholic beer is to the ordinary stuff, and for this reason in many ways quite misleading). I admitted this to myself briefly before repressing the fact. And besides, even though it is important for me to enjoy my food, in and of itself, and because this aids conformity to the diet, which as I have proved again and again is very important for my health and wellbeing, I know that  caffeine, whether it is decaf or not is bad for me and so, should avoid it.

Just as with the struggle to give up smoking, I find that conforming to this diet is as much an intellectual struggle as a battle of will power. Only in anticipating, catching and arguing against these rationalisations can we make it. And of course, with problems such as ADD, this struggle is made much more difficult because of the tendency to impulsivity and obsession; but the more you conform, the more easy it is to conform, not only because you gain habits and knowledge, but because this impulsivity starts to recede.

Still, there will be slips, and through them we learn. Important too, though, not to punish ourselves for them.

No coffee, ctd.

My head is feeling pretty clear today so far, and I should note that with all the negativity of the last few posts, because I have had no coffee for a couple of days, and I think I am feeling the effects of that. The upheavals of the last few weeks may have been having their effect but perhaps there is room for a lot of positivity over this diet when followed correctly; it is just that I haven’t been doing much of that, and one of the rationalisations that keeps coming up, and I must learn to contend with, is that if I am unable to follow the diet in one respect, I can let it go in others and treat it as a way of documenting reactions. Really, this is nothing more than defeatism.

08:30 breakfast of GF toast and peanut butter, water and Vit B6/Zinc

Nothing since so far. Clear head. Able to talk. Not restless or angry and no reveries that I can recall.

Deja Vu

I’m getting more angry about my relationship to food. I seem to be doing so much but getting nowhere with it. I picked M____ up and was going through the whole squinting when someone speaks at me thing, which is never attractive or likely to endear you to anyone. Apparently I had left my phone in my coat or something and she had rang twice. Plus. I hadn’t written, and I hadn’t bid on a jumper she wants on e-bay for. So, altogether, not in her good books. She didn’t much talk to me on the way back. Our relationship is breaking down rapidly. I hardly see her and do a lot to avoid  spending time with her. I am very aspergic!

Of course she says well, I should never have had any sugar. I say I need to write down some evidence for this dietician when I see him, but of course I should have picked that up as a rationalisation when I was grabbing two flapjacks and a snickers at Tesco! I had to go for a brisk walk, listening to my MP3.

I feel terrible. There’s no way I will be able to sleep.

We were talking about some of the people at work earlier, me and Jaffa, and the mad diets they have. I didn’t want to be associated with the flakey types and didn’t say no to much of anything, not bread, not coffee, not shandy, later, when Jaffa said he normally doesn’t but that he fancied a Coke, and offered to buy me something. I felt I had got on ok down with him in the woodlands and didn’t want to lose any of that. And it’s so easy to. It sounds so pathetic but it is so true. It’s not peer pressure. Pressure I can stand up to, but it is true that people are not fair or rational or consistent in their judgements  about people and you have to cater for that. You want to come over as a normal person sometimes. I find it hard to explain.

Anyway, I feel terrible, I’m in the doghouse, and there’s no sympathy for me. Quite the opposite. And tomorrow I will want nothing else but to write.

Oh, yes, and when she accused me today of not writing - texting - I heartily agreed and began to talk at cross purposes about how I  have no time to write. That’s the only thing on my mind, ever. I am very aspergic. And she hears it all the time. She’s finding it hard here, and she’s telling me, and all I say is…

I’m not good for her.

And here’s me, visiting the house today after work and trying to be enthusiastic. Dad’s made an amazing effort on the house. And I don’t want it. I don’t know what I would rather have, but…

I’m impossible. But what can I do? I remember at uni, and perhaps before and after, thinking about suicide, and thinking how all the hurt I am causing people, with my behaviour, with my being so brittle, being so lacking in social skills, so stubborn, so lost, so intelligent but so incapable, so depressed, so out of control, is all awful, but worse than that is knowing that it is what I can achieve when I strain day after day at the height of my powers. Knowing that I have to put my shoulder to the wheel to acheive solecisms that burned themselves into my soul, embarrassment that ached through me and had a half life so much longer than the time between such fuck ups as most can achieve only once in their lives. I hurt others by trying so hard and to them it looks like I’m not trying at all, that I’m not thinking of others at all. But the only alternative would be suicide. They don’t know that, but its true. Because this is the best I can do.

And that’s why I’m fucked off with it all at the moment. Food. Struggling and being employed and not writing and moving forward towards family, almost, when I’m not sure I want it. To home owning, when I never wanted it at all, but just ignored things as they went on around me, were organised for me.

I can do my fire act and forget about things for a while. Forget about the world. I can even teach it and enjoy that contact with people but I ca’t deal with my life right now. I’m constantly trying as hard as i can, and constantly on the edge. It’s not the food, it’s the fact it has to be the number one priority every single day, and I can’t do that, because I need my writing, and because I can’t be that consistent in anything. I need to take some time off.

Complacency and idleness - Tuesday 29th May, 2007

I had started to think that I had started this food diary at the wrong time, there being little or nothing to report since I am starting to get it right. I thought I might end up writing more articles and occasional pieces, and that this might indeed be a good thing, to free up my time to other pursuits. I figured I would need to write up a few of the old food diaries I had kept on computer and in my A5 notebook so that I might have more to report.

The last couple of days though, I have been so keen to write that cooking has slipped down the priorities list. I have been eating cereals and slipping up here and there.

I started the day today with the oatiflakes I had bought for Badger, the kitten I had borrowed last week. Someone had to eat then, and they were oats, after all, which as I have written, I rationalise to myself as being relatively harmless. I have been tucking into then now and again, and have finished the pack now. There’s a mental block which more or less keeps me off the corn flakes and certainly the crunchy nut variety, but which doesn’t stop me having these.

I couldn’t settle down to anything after work today. I got up in a good mood because it was quiet. Nobody was about except Badger and a few of the usual holiday folk. A couple of students with nothing much to do back home, or no homes to go to. But the site as a whole - and this is one of the ones I have been warming to - was peaceful and lent itself to barefoot wanders through the dew. I had been working all day on a bit of research into nutrition, a presentation in fact, for the management, and I had been enjoying it, because this one involved a little bit of maths and things I don’t normally get into, Excel and Powerpoint, stuff like that. But back home, when I drove back after a night away, was the usual frustration. M____ needed attention and I couldn’t get away to write. I have been feeling over the last few days that I’m not cut out for a relationship. That I need my space. That I need to make it clear that I don’t want children. I can’t have children. I would never be happy and would only pass on my bitterness to my kids. I have been feeling trapped. And I would only feel more trapped living in a house - I love so much sometimes to be somewhere constantly moving, even with, or maybe even because of, all the hassle we get from the police and the authorities despite our government funding, but then also going back home to live with my folks and be cared for while I carry on with my work - and the idea of living in a house and doing all the cooking, and the cleaning and the shopping that entails disturbs me. I am almost certain I won’t be able to cope with that and keep up the relationship.

I tried several times to  get away and write but the real world kept on coming to intervene, whether it be M____ or cooking or Dad telling me I would have to renew my car insurance! I couldn’t get anything done.

Finally, at around ten M____ went up to bed. I made a hot water bottle for her and took it up, taking my magnesium before coming down to clutch at my A4 notebook with the newspaper column I have been writing as part of my novel. Only I couldn’t focus. I had ideas but I could only watch a documentary on an attempted  reunion of East 17.

The documentary to be fair was interesting, part Spinal Tap and part fascinating study on these working class lads thrown into this world and then dropped again, but normally I am not tempted by such things. I wasn’t tired. Normally I would work. I started, ironically, trying to remember the word, refering to a place in Ancient Greece, that Tolstoy used to describe periods of his life he considered to be characterised by torpidity and insidious ease. And then I saw these lads in backstreet clubs landing parking tickets and thought of how I could not live with mediocrity. I have to make my mark, and for that I cannot afford such moments of indecision and laziness. I have to be bold, take the time of work, not forever drift on into a settled life I could never escape from.

Then I felt the familiar tingle. The pins and needles of the head I feel sometimes. It used to be so familiar.

And I realise that there really is little option. The diet has done wonders for me, and I have to stick to it.

Morning: green tea x 3/4, oatiflakes and rice milk

lunch: beef chasseur, doubtless with wheaty gravy

snack: pear

dinner: salmon, broccoli, corn on the cob, carrots, onion and leek

Sunday 27th May, 2007

08:30 1 green tea

09:00 pear, banana and peanut butter buckwheat pancake

12:00 yoghurt oat flapjack!

13:00 green tea, home-made quinoa salad with red pepper, red onion, chopped broccoli, olive oil and lemon juice

17:00 salad, as above, with decaf coffee

I’ve felt fine all day, despite shopping and the horrible weather. I have been eating a fair bit of oats recently. Lots of flapjacks - some at work which are quite sugary, and others not so bad. I have felt no real ill-effects so far, and I am consistently telling myself that it is not too bad, since oats contain a lower amount of gluten than wheat, and indeed some people say that it contains a different form of the substance. Indeed, though I have not caught myself in this particular rationalisation I had a revealing reverie, a conversation in my head in Eat., the place we ate today at lunch, and where I asked if I could tuck into a home-made salad since I could not have anything they were selling. Before I asked this, I practised the question in my mind, as I do sometimes, and had a variety of responses from the imaginary employees of this chain. “We’ve got flapjacks,” “yeah, but that’s gluten,” “no it isn’t,” he denied the fact, and then stuck to this assertion. Still, I’ve as yet had no noticeable reaction to it. Which is good. Perhaps it can be an occasional treat.

I haven’t been consistent in applying the category “slips” to food diaries in which I have had caffeine, like today. This is due to the fact I find it hard to completely ween myself off, despite the repeated observation that it doesn’t do me any real favours - yesterday for example I had quite a few coffees, or, a green tea and a couple of coffees, and felt a little shaky. It is inconsistent but I suppose that if the category is to mean anything at all, I will have to exclude this most consistent of my failures for now and perhaps add it if I make any progress later.

Improvised quinoa salad:

quinoa, boiled in water until water absorbed.

red pepper, finely chopped

red onion, finely chopped } these three in a ratio of, say 2:1:1

broccoli, finely chopped

olive oil, liberal dribble

lemon juice, pepper to taste (I used the juice of one whole lemon for what would make three or four normal servings).