insomnia haiku

The price of salt

 A little over a week ago, I went to my doctor's office to get a prescription refilled. She looked at my chart and told me she was going to take my blood pressure, since the last time I'd been in, it had been on the high side.

I had no memory of that, but sure. The doctor's office is such foreign territory for me. I generally do what I'm told.

She soon informed me, with slightly furrowed brow, that my blood pressure was even higher now, and that this was a cause for concern. She told me that before putting me on medication, she would have to "prove" that my blood pressure was high, and therefore I would have to buy a blood pressure monitor and take my blood pressure twice a day for two weeks.

What was all this? Medication? Twice a day what now?

Buried in confusion, I asked her what causes high blood pressure. It can be any number of things, she said. Sometimes it's genetics, she said, sometimes alcohol, sometimes stress.

Well, I've been incredibly stressed for the past seven months, I said. No reaction. Instead she handed me a sheet instructing me how to monitor my blood pressure, and then another one about adopting a low-sodium diet, saying that I needed to cut down on salt.

I still seemed to be in some kind of denial. "Oh, I don't eat that much salt," I said. 

"Well, everyone can do better. And you're the type of person who has just a little and it affects you a lot." (How would she know that?) "Now, it's going to be painful at first, but eventually you won't even miss the salt and in fact everything else will taste salty."

I sort of went, "mm-hmm," but barely registered what she said, as I was thinking, "This cannot apply to me; I don't eat that much salt." After all, I'm not one of those people who adds salt to everything the minute it's served, or even particularly likes salty foods. I looked at the sheet. The first thing I read was, "When cooking: Put away the salt shaker and reduce or eliminate salt in cooking." 

Um, what?

I'm going to admit something I hadn't realized about myself before: I am not all that good with doctors. I haven't had many health problems in my life, and I don't tend to go to the doctor's office when I get sick -- probably because my dad is a doctor, and as a child of a physician you're used to being told, "It's nothing." (Which it usually is. People who insist on getting antibiotics when they have a stuffy nose and a cough are ridiculous.) (Side note: I worry I'm going to die like Jim Henson someday.)

Therefore, when confronted with an actual health concern, I didn't react well. I got defensive. I was, in fact, downright rude.

"Don't cook with salt? At all?" I said. "I can't do that."

"Like I said, it'll be painful at first," she said, "but after a while you won't even notice the difference."

OK, hold it right there. I'm sorry, but I love food, and even though I don't use salt liberally, it still brings out the flavor in food, and don't tell me I wouldn't notice. I WOULD NOTICE. Could I stand to cut down? Sure. Is it important to be aware of the salt content in food? Absolutely. But "put away the salt shaker"? (Note: I don't actually use a salt shaker. I keep kosher salt in a tiny dish, and sprinkle it with my fingers.) 

Cooking without salt was something I simply could not fathom. I tried envisioning making steak without salt. Roast chicken. Stews. How am I supposed to make Chinese food if I can't use soy sauce? I imagined "Top Chef" judge Tom Coliccho looking at me with scorn. No salt? It's not an exaggeration to say I saw everything I stood for slowly slipping away. 

In the doctor's office, I was sputtering. "Do you cook?" I asked her. (This is the "I was rude" part.)

"I ... sure, I cook," she said. (My silent reaction: She probably doesn't cook. See, I was even rude on the inside.)

Mouth agape, I turned back to the sheet. The second thing I read: "When eating out at a restaurant: Request the food be prepared without salt...."

Whoa. I recoiled as if I'd touched something nasty. I would never sit down at Momofuku Ssam or Maialino and ask, "And could you please prepare my food without salt?" Oh, the humiliation. It wasn't going to happen. Therefore, I guess I ... gasp ... can't eat out.

Somewhere in all of this I pointed out to her that I was out of shape and knew it. I said it more than once. Let me see if I can break this down for you: I, who hates to work out, was eagerly, almost desperately offering to exercise rather than eliminate salt from my diet. (Her response: I wasn't overweight, so it didn't matter.) This surprised me. I would have thought that I'd have a harder time cutting fat from my diet than salt, but when faced with what cutting salt from my diet would entail -- becoming an old lady overnight, essentially -- I melted down.

Since then, I have not only been monitoring my blood pressure twice a day (with varying results), but I've also been thinking a lot about salt. It's true, I'd been ordering more takeout and buying more Trader Joe's prepared foods lately, since I haven't fully set up my Incredibly Shrinking Kitchen yet. Obviously that's a huge source of sodium. Bye-bye, Trader Joe's, I barely knew ye. 

But after my initial defensive reaction, now I see salt everywhere. I went out for lunch, and though I prudently requested salad dressing on the side, we also got a burger, fries and onion rings. Blood pressure FAIL. That same night, I had dinner out, and there was not a single thing on the menu that I could have ordered without a lot of salt in it. I asked the bartender several questions about the salt content of menu items, and he seemed unconcerned about my dilemma. In fact, I could tell he was now looking at me as a problem diner. That's what I am now. I'm Sally, from "When Harry Met Sally," except instead of asking for everything on the side, I'm yammering on about salt.

Yesterday I went to see "Breaking Dawn," and my sister-in-law ordered a big bag of popcorn, with the requisite butter and salt on it. I love movie popcorn. Mo' butter, mo' better. She asked me to hold the bag for a second, and I cradled it, staring at the kernels as I forced myself to resist. Meanwhile, on-screen, Rosalie was gazing hungrily at Bella covered in blood, and she had to be forcibly dragged away. I sympathized.

"You need to stop obsessing," my mother told me. Well, this is what I do. I obsess. And that, I guess, is what my doctor doesn't know about me: Tell me matter-of-factly that something's wrong with me, and that my only recourse is to cut down on salt, then by God, I'm going to start obsessing about being the best salt-cutter-outer in the world. It's the A student in me. Of course now I'm also obsessing, and stressing, about how high my blood pressure is, and about wanting to improve on the results, which -- of course -- has only been driving my blood pressure steadily upward.

In the end I'll have to learn to balance my health concerns with an obsession that's driving me batty and probably decreasing my quality of life. If I eliminate salt from my diet, then maybe I'll be less likely to have a stroke, but how happy will I be eating nothing but bland foods? I tried cooking zucchini the other day with no salt and plenty of thyme. I took a bite. It tasted like baby food.

It looks like even my obsession may have an expiration date, though. Last night, after a week of asking "Is there salt in this?" about every dish mentioned or placed in front of me, I was at my brother's house (re)watching "Bridesmaids." My brother handed me a bowl of freshly popped popcorn. "Is there salt in this?" I asked. Yes, he said, there's some salt. I paused and stared down at the bowl, then popped a kernel in my mouth. It was delicious.

Granted, the bar was set kind of low

The super just came over, finally, to replace the lock on my door and look at some of the other things wrong with my apartment. (He was tall enough to change the light bulbs for me -- hallelujah, I have light!) He looked around at the apartment, filled with half-unpacked boxes and random, strewn-about crap, and said, "Well, you already have this place looking better than the last guy did."

SUCCESS.

Next up: installing shelves in my kitchen. In which I will attempt to learn about stud-finding, though alas, not the human kind.

My college notebooks are not the treasure trove of brilliance I thought they might be

I've never tried to hide that I'm a pack rat. The summer after high school when I went to Europe, the chaperones presented me, at the end-of-summer awards dinner, with a squashed bun, meant to represent all the stuff I'd saved to put in my scrapbooks. I even saved sugar packets, emptying out the contents and placing the empty packets carefully on a page next to ticket stubs, postcards and theater programs.

It's a habit I've carried around with me most of my life. But when you move into a place half the size of your old one, you have to make some hard choices. Some of them turn out not to be as hard as you thought. For example, I had two yolk separators. When was the last time I used a yolk separator? (I kept one. I figured maybe it was a sign. Hey, baby steps.)

Today, I pulled a pile of notebooks out of a box, and they turned out to be some of the notes I'd saved from college, along with some papers I'd written. I don't exactly know why I'd saved these notes. Did I think I'd need the knowledge I'd gleaned from those classes someday? I'd think, what did Daniel Defoe mean in that one section of Robinson Crusoe? Oh, I know! I can just look it up!

Maybe I thought that one day they'd have historical value. I'd become famous, and my college notebooks would sell at auction for big bucks to one of my adoring acolytes. Well, I don't see that happening anytime soon, and I haven't touched these notebooks in more than a decade, so it's trash they will become. (Or recycling, that is. I am taking a break from tearing all the pages, a few at a time, out of the wire rings. And now the couch, the floor and my legs are covered in little bits of paper. Being environmentally responsible is a real drag sometimse.)

I did take one last look through the notebooks before I have to consign them to the curb, and just as I suspected -- or should have suspected when I saved them in the first place -- I found them boring and incomprehensible. Couldn't get through a few words without my eyes glazing over. Did Nabokov's notes provoke such disinterest? Surely not. Ergo, I am no Nabokov. I'm glad I could finally clear that up.

Perhaps another reason I could barely read my notes is that they were written in cursive. Yes, when I was in college, I took notes in cursive. I insisted I could write in cursive faster than I could print, which in fact was true; at some point shortly after college, I switched to print as my default writing out of embarrassment. (There are many ways in which I was uncool. Writing in cursive was the easiest of these to fix.) Seeing as how I now only use cursive -- or "cursive," I should say -- to sign my name, I'm fascinated to picture myself in my jeans and flannel (it was the '90s), casually and quickly scribbling away in such a neat, proper and, dare I say it, classy manner.

A sample:

I also found little messages written to other people who would have been sitting next to me. If college students today don't take notes with pen and paper (do they?), then this is an art of communication that has sadly been lost. They probably just text each other.

Also, doodles. I seem to have drawn a lot of flowers.

One day, I had bacon on my mind. It's nice that some things never change. 

And so, the last perusal complete, out these notebooks go. What daring insights am I tossing away, never to be plumbed again? Sorry, history.

As an aside, I am, however, keeping the papers I wrote that were in that same pile. I was a much better -- though not as disciplined -- writer when I was 21 than I am now. I blame the Internet. Though it did make me tear up a little to read my Mass Communications 10 TA's enthusiastic comments saying, "You have a lot to offer the world; I hope you find your calling -- the world needs it!" All this time later, I still haven't found my calling. But it's heartwarming to know that he so wanted me to find it.

Apartment Before & After: The Bathroom

As I've mentioned, my new apartment is much smaller than my last one. I've got a lot to do in order to make it work for me. I've decided to pretend I'm on an episode of "Extreme Home Makeover: Small Apartments Edition." With a budget of, like $200.

But at the very, very least, my personal challenge is to make it look better than it did when the previous tenants lived here. It's one of those places that, as the realtors say, has "potential" -- and you had to squint to see that potential when the broker's listing showed a bathroom with a moldy shower curtain. But really, I looked at the sad photos in the listing and felt something like relief. I'm no decorator, but it can't be that hard to make this place nicer when the old tenants didn't even bother making their bed for the pictures.

I spent the first week living here cleaning out the previous tenants' detritus, and last week sick. And this week I'm inundated with freelance work (which is good, but doesn't leave me with much free time.) So I'm still surrounded by half-unpacked boxes -- I feel like I'm living in the warehouse at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark." Except messier.

Still, one thing at a time, right? The kitchen desperately needs shelves, the bedroom could use some pictures, and the living room is a horror show. But I think I've finally finished making one room look nice. Ladies and gentlemen, I present the first part in my Before & After series: The Bathroom. Better, right?

Bathroom: before (top) and after (bottom)

The things that happen after the other things

I used to tell people, "Everything happens for a reason." But I don't know if I believe that anymore. 

I'm not saying that to be cynical. Lots of times, things do seem to happen for a reason: a bad thing happens, and then something better comes along in its wake. You get your heart broken, you meet the love of your life. You miss out on a sale, you find cuter shoes (cheaper!) the next day. Your car breaks down, and while you're waiting for the tow truck you encounter a little lost girl whom you return to her teacher who invites you to a lecture that convinces you to go back to school and become a doctor ... and then one day you cure cancer.

Whenever a friend had an obstacle thrown up in their life, I would tell them, "Things happen for a reason," and they would tend to agree. And things would always turn around. See? The universe was telling them something, and that was that life wasn't random, and that events in their life had a purpose.

But this year's been a rough year, and not just for me. And at some point I wondered, do things happen for a reason? What reason was that supposed to be, anyway? And did I mean it when I used to say it, or was it just a way to provide comfort at times when there was nothing else to say?

Things happen for a reason if you believe that there's a deity or a force making sense of our lives, guiding us on a path toward our better selves. It's nice to think that that exists. Some people believe it, and I envy them that -- I wanted to believe, every time I said the phrase. It was, perhaps, my last hopeful grab at agnosticism. But if your faith in a universal power is less certain, then you start to wonder ... a bad outcome isn't always followed by a good one. Death isn't always followed by birth. That winning lottery ticket you accidentally destroyed in the washing machine isn't always replaced by one for an even bigger jackpot. (Man, how I wish that were true.) (Note: I have never put a winning lottery ticket in the washing machine. I just wish I would win the lottery.)

Each bad thing that's happened this year hasn't then been followed by something better that's corrected the course of my life and explained everything. And in one of my darker moments, I thought with startling clarity, everything doesn't happen for a reason. It just happens.

But -- and you knew there was a "but," didn't you? C'mon, I'm not that depressing -- even if things don't happen for a Reason, they still lead you to places you wouldn't otherwise have gone. If I hadn't lost my job, I might still be stuck in a bad situation. I wouldn't have taken an extended West Coast trip and traveled to Portland for the first time. (And I wouldn't have found nirvana at Powell's, or bought Geek Love there, and dug it for all its twisted glory.) I flirted with upending my life and moving to Chicago, which is an impulse I never would have had normally.

If I hadn't been temporarily homeless, I wouldn't have spent quality time being an aunt to Annah's two kids. Moving to a smaller place is forcing me to downsize, which is ... well, if not a good thing, then an intriguing challenge. I now have a funny story to tell about a dead mouse and a fistful of hair and a refrigerator full of McDonald's McNuggets sauce. I'm learning how to hustle, how to network, how to ask people for help. I'm learning how to cope. And I've received an extraordinary amount of support this year, which continues to touch and amaze me.

Do all those things counterbalance the bad in a way that makes sense of my life? Not exactly. But they're still interesting things, different things that shape my world in some way, large or small. And someday when I look back on this year, they will count, too.

So do things happen for a reason? Somewhere along the line I may have lost my shaky faith that the universe is looking out for us, that A follows B on a soothing, course-correcting path. Maybe it's all random after all. But that doesn't make it pointless. Everything happens, and it leads to something else, and then something else. It turns and turns again, and you'll look back and you'll say, that was my life, that was all of it: the high and the middle and the low, the thing that happened after the other thing, the time I was down and the time I got back up again. Things happen for a reason, and that reason is life.