CAN THE SOUL GET FAT?

I lost ten pounds last spring while on sabbatical, partially because I could focus on the issue, and spend days thinking about not eating. When I am working very hard I can't remember what I am doing or how many calories I have downed, and some times get flustered and lose all sense of what's good for me, but gnosh something to regain contact with myself, that is, in order to recover from the alienation from self that work sometimes creates. Last night I went to see a movie with my kids called Guardians of Ghuoleua or something in which good owls fought Nazi owls and won.

I ate Sourpatch candies with the kids, and didn't even bother to check how many calories per slice. I think I ate all the yellow ones (there are four different colors as in the illustration above, but the boy didn't like yellow since it was a girls' color, and the girl didn't like them because she claimed the yellow ones were extra sour). So I ate them all and enjoyed them. I loved how they burned with sourness and then turned sweet, going from a powdery blaze to a jelly-like deliciousness that lasted for all of two minutes per piece. But how many calories were in each piece? What exactly were they made from? Who made them? They cost $3.50 for a box at the movie counter, and I did a cost analysis and decided they all had to be eaten and savored.

But did I need them?

No, I did not need them, but I never really thought about this, except with a brief twinge of guilt. It's just that the movie was very dark and scary as the owls flew out of the dark and bats went berserk, and blood flew all over the 3-D screen and I kept thinking oh my, I hope the good owls win, which was the sole reason I was able to endure this avian bloodbath. The kids were enjoying it, but I was frightened, and I thought I must not let them see this is easier for them than it is for me. The candies were distracting me from the screen, and reminding me I was in a movie and not in the middle of World War III.

Meanwhile, I have gained back five pounds of the ten I have lost from one little incident after another like the above. I think it's due at least in part because I feel alienated from myself. That's when I find I gnosh something. It's because I lose any sense of myself, and masticating something gives me back my own sense of inner warmth and identity that somehow gets lost when I am too rushed racing as I do from classes to kids' soccer games to kids' ballet classes while grading papers en route and trying to mollify my little passengers with the exact temperature they require in the backseat, fiddling with the controls, the CD player, and thinking how the day went, and how each student is doing, and whether anything can be done to enhance their educations before the semester is over and I no longer have the capacity to teach them argumentation, or about universal human rights, or aesthetics in Kant. Aboriginal Australians claim that when you travel by air you leave your soul behind because your soul can only move at the pace of walking. So that's how they explain the soullessness of western civilization. I don't know, they may be right, which would also explain what happens to politicians as they race about leaving their carbon footprints on the isolated population centers of their farflung gerrymandered districts.

Meanwhile, I find I pop things in my mouth and am barely aware of doing so and if a cookie is thrown in my general direction I leap up like a sea animal and give it a seal of approval, a bark, another bark, and gulp it down, and soon my gut looks like a seal's, too. I'm still slim enough to fit on the top end of the average part of the BMI (it's 174, and I am 172), but I am about to slip over unless I face this fact squarely and do something starting today.

People say that Michelle Obama is getting pudgy. Is she? Perhaps the hard work of squeaking about obesity from coast to coast is distracting her from her diet. As she flies to Spain for varous delectables perhaps she has lost her soul in the process. And with it, her sense of herself, and her very identity is wandering somewhere trying to reconnect with her. I think dieting should be a full-time job, and for the superrich, and models, it probably is. For the rest of us, it's very hard, but it definitely requires presence of mind. I just ate three handfuls of peanuts while writing this (borrowing from the future like Barack Obama borrowing from the future), enjoying the salt more than anything else, and wishing I could go down on all fours and bury my face in a dog bowl of peanuts and chocolate and wolf them until I am sick and just lie on my side, howling until the lights go dim, thinking about what I can do to get my diet going again, and how I'd really rather not.

Two things do reconnect me to myself fairly rapidly: hard exercise, and food. Of these, food is the easier to make time for. But right now I have about an hour, and will go down to the exercise room and see if I can get back on the right track. I had to grade fifty freshman comp papers over the last week, and that was an extra distraction. But I am through with that, and can begin to get back to normal, or even sub-normal. God, please help me get off my duff.