Hallow Won't

 

Move Hallowe'en?? Horrors!

There’s an underground rumbling that suggests the scariest night of the year be moved from the last day of October to the last Saturday of October.

WTF?

Granted, the rumbling comes from disgruntled parents and teachers who are inconvenienced by managing children jacked on sugar the day after Hallowe’en, but it also indicates a lack of understanding about the day itself and why it exists in the first place.

“Hallowe’en” is the contracted form of “All Hallow’s Eve”, “All Hallows” being November 1, otherwise known as “All Saints Day” on the religious calendar.

Did I say “religious”? Yes, and I meant to say it. And I’m not apologizing, either. I may not be conventionally religious, but I do enjoy the holidays and observances associated with (and some say stolen from) annual celebrations of spring, fall, and winter.

I wonder why no one bothered to Christianize the summer solstice.

I digress.

Hallowe’en happens on October 31 for a reason. It’s not about the candy. Okay, maybe now it is, but originally, it was the last chance day in the year for evil spirits to work their nefarious magic on innocent souls before the saints came marching in on November 1. The dead rose to walk again, witches cast wicked spells and Satan roamed free. Folks dressed up to fool said evil spirits – and their earthbound minions – on the premise that they wouldn’t be recognized and the spirits would bypass them. That’s where the tradition of Hallowe’en costumes come from. In truth, I’m unsure where the trick-or-treat thing started, though it’s likely rooted in the same occasion, and candy was not the anticipated outcome. Successfully dodging the demons was.

The Easter argument doesn’t support moving October 31, either. Easter happens in coincidence with Passover, an event dependent on the lunar cycle, which is not attached to a static date. Candy wasn’t the anticipated outcome at Easter or Passover, either, by the way. I’m not at all sure where chocolate fits into history though, being a fool for Cadbury Creme eggs, I do appreciate its presence in the modern era.

If it hasn’t become obvious by now, I’m all for keeping Hallowe’en where it is. If anything needs to change, perhaps getting rid of trick-or-treat is the answer. After all, I’m not the only one who’s been buzzed on Hallowe’en candy since August!

Soul Food?

 

Quitting sugar is a bit like quitting booze. It can be awkward in a social situation. My office tea buddy is a treat freak who can rationalize herself into committing any form of dietary misdemeanour. “I’ve earned it” or “I deserve it” are two of her favourites, and she is notorious – or was, in the before times – for enticing co-workers with bowls of chips, boxes of cookies, and plates of gourmet doughnuts cut into bite-sized pieces (aka “quarters”). She’d often IM me with alluring details of a new chocolate bar she discovered at lunch, ending with a coy “Want some?” that I rarely resisted.

In truth, my powers of resistance are stronger than everything except my desire to please, so when the offer of some new sugary discovery was extended, I accepted to be polite. I do hate to disappoint people.

Still, when I recently told her that I’m off sugar for health reasons, she made all the right supportive noises before she said, “Well, the time will come when you have to surrender—just once—for the sake of your soul.”

Treats are comfort food, and comfort food is comforting for a reason. It’s emotionally gratifying. Soul food, as it were, being good for your soul because it feels good, period.

Oh, but wait a minute. As I understand it, my soul resides in but is not part of the compostable container. Being the spark of divinity that binds me to the Universe and all living things, it’s the one thing I will take with me when I leave. My soul needs attention, sure, but not in the form of food. It needs no physical nourishment. It certainly isn’t prone to sugar cravings that will wreck my mind and my body for hours after a treat is consumed in seconds. It just isn’t.

What is, however, is the sneaky little part of my brain that resides just out of sight behind my ears. Known to neurologists as the amygdale, it’s been described by one expert as “the toddler in the room” where demands, tantrums, addictions, and primal emotions like fear and anger reside. It’s the part of my makeup that claims comfort from food and will say anything to get it. Including “I’ve earned this”, “I deserve this”, or “My soul needs this”.

Clever, eh? How it uses first-person logic to negotiate and get its way? It actually tries to trick me into believing that a brownie will make me feel better when in truth that brownie will a) not taste as good as I remember and b) make me sluggish and crabby for the rest of the day. Why would my soul want to feel like crap? Well, it doesn’t. My soul knows what’s good for me and my body, and my prefrontal cortex (aka “the parent in the room”) concurs. It’s the voice that says,

“Away with you, Princess Amygdale. You’re busted.”

Food Porn XIII

"Chovocado Pudding"

The pursuit of drug-free pain management continues. I stopped taking Aleve every other night after a scary bout of what might have been food poisoning but also checked every box for overuse of non-prescription meds. I don’t even take it occasionally, anymore. Once bitten, you know.

But once bitten, what was the alternative to my little blue pill? Once again, I looked to my diet. COVID restrictions have helped in one area: “take out” means more than a bacon cheeseburger for pickup. Now it means “prepare to be taken out for a day after eating take out”. It’s amazing how quickly my body responds to inflammatory foods, and tasty as that burger may be, it’s also loaded with salt, fat, dairy, and whatever the steer was fed before it became a beef patty. I’m basically shrink-wrapped for twenty-four hours after consuming one.

I also live with a food narc. Ter is a strong believer in food as medicine; she has a ton of books on the subject and has made it her personal mission to feed me all the right stuff. But she can’t control what I choose to consume on my own watch.

So on the morning when I announced I was giving up sugar, she almost wept with relief. The preceding few weeks had been fraught with pain, frustration, and desperation as my symptoms worsened and I stubbornly continued to ignore my inner voice. In fact, I had almost defiantly begun hoarding treats: muffins, cookies, granola bars, candy, chocolate – if sugar was the primary ingredient, I bought it. Finally, after a particularly rough weekend, I surrendered. Consulting one of Ter’s anti-inflammatory books, I determined that honey and maple syrup could stay on the list, but everything else had to go. No sugar? No problem.

And so to the “food porn” part of this post. I would never in a million years have imagined that a phenomenal chocolate pudding could result from five ingredients that exclude milk, cream, melted chocolate, sugar, or any of the other items on my verboten foods list. But it can, and it does:

One ripe avocado

3 tablespoons cocoa powder

2.5 to 3 tablespoons maple syrup

Pinch of salt

¼ to 1/3 cup almond or coconut milk (your preference)

Put everything into a food processor and blitz until smooth and creamy. (Note: the amount of almond milk depends on the size of the avocado and how creamy you like your pud.) Refrigerate for a couple of hours – it’s really good cold – and enjoy within a few days. Word is that it spoils fairly quickly, but mine has never lasted that long.

I dare yours to do the same.

Halloween Hangover

It’s November first and the world is choked. Mother Nature is throwing fits worthy of a screaming toddler: heavy wind, pounding surf, sporadic bouts of pouring rain—and then a rainbow appears as if to apologize for the tantrum.

Ter comes home from the grocery store. “Boy, is everyone out there cra-bee!” She’s been a little grouchy herself, on the heels of bolting a Bucky’s “Frappula” yesterday. It tastes like a Viva Puff mallow cookie and drops you like a drained corpse when the sugar high wears off. I suspect that a few folks have indulged in the seasonal specialty this weekend, and if they haven’t, the honking horns and crashing carts at the store today must be the result of those “one for you, two for me” trips to the candy bowl last night.

Then there’s the time change. Spring forward, fall back. I got the saying right, this time, but it hasn’t stopped me from feeling disoriented and easily annoyed … though the latter may be attributed to the bowl of caramel/cheese popcorn I devoured with my chocolate tea yesterday afternoon.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

Because it’s fun, silly.

Last week, the office held a cake walk that turned into a charity bake sale when no one else in the building turned up to play. I looked at a table piled high with cake, cookies, muffins and more, and was truly grateful that the only gluten-free item was the pineapple upside down cake I’d contributed and had no desire to reclaim. Oops, but there were the mountainous meringues donated by someone who had promised to bake but ran out of time—I’m not a huge meringue fan, but these babies came with blueberry whipped cream and one of my evil office fairies coerced me into splitting one with her (for a good cause), hence the buzz in my ears that began last Thursday.

As Nic would say, Blerg.

Tomorrow, everyone at work will be sick of candy and bakery treats. This will not stop me from refilling the Vader bucket with the last of the Rockets, treacle kisses, lollipops, jelly beans, tiny Mars and Snickers bars that I bought to get us into the Halloween spirit. Neither will it stop me from indulging if I get too stressed—it is the workplace, after all.

I am advised that the Red Cups are back at Starbucks, launched at opening time this morning to get us all into the holiday spirit and onto insulin drips after New Year.

Buckle up, folks. ’Tis the season!

Mindfulness

Whenever you become anxious or stressed, outer purpose has taken over and you have lost sight of your inner purpose. You have forgotten that your state of consciousness is primary, all else secondary. – Eckhart Tolle

This happened to me on Monday. Back at work after a three day weekend and I was a wreck by dinnertime. Admittedly, the cat-herding part of my job has lately been nuttier than usual, but in trying to stay ahead of the nuttery, I lost my mind.

By that I mean I lost my state of awareness, falling prey to the Demon of Mindless Munching and consuming enough sugar to cause a combustible crash at the checkered flag. By sundown, my inner purpose had been trumped by outer purpose and my world felt dark, cold and hollow. Pointles. Joyless. Never hopeless, but certainly less hopeful.

Yes, my diet that day was a factor, but I let the frenzied pace of the office drive me off track. Anxious to stay ahead of the stress (and failing, I may add), I paid no attention to what sort of fuel I put into my coping mechanism. When I start a day fully intending to focus on each moment and that day ends in a smoking pile of rubble, I know I’ve lost consciousness along the way.

The trick is how to get it back.

My good fortune lies in Ter, who, even in her bleakest moments, has the smarts to identify what’s happening. When she is unavailable, however, I have to do the work myself.

Breathe in (calm)

Breathe out (smile)

Breathe in (present moment)

Breathe out (wonderful moment).

Rinse and repeat.

My little voice has also begun asking me what the Sam Hill is going on, whereupon I sit back and go, “Yeah, what is going on?” Since learning the difference between mind and spirit, ego and heart, it’s becoming easier for me to look objectively at my reaction to a situation and figure out where said response originates. If I’m stressed and spooked, then “outer purpose” has invariably out-muscled “inner”. Managing the monster will be a significant challenge until being mindful becomes a habit and so far it’s taken conscious, ongoing effort.

It’s also been worth it.

Pour No Sugar on Me

I wrote not a word on the weekend. I slept a lot, though. Sugar fuzz. I indulged in such dietary naughtiness the day before my writing day that the best I could do on Sunday morning was lie on the sofa and listen to David Usher. I fell asleep to Bryan Ferry in the afternoon.

The day wasn’t a total waste, however. I learned something that I’ve always known but consistently deny in the face of immediate gratification: sugar is bad for creativity. I proved it to myself yet again because I started to pull out of the fog at lunchtime, then I downed a whole can of San Pellegrino grapefruit soda and promptly had to take a long nap. The pop wasn’t even that good – it tasted like I was drinking marmalade. Worse, it started me second-guessing about my writing. Stuck in a chemical funk, my will to create actually dissolved, so I let it go for the day in hope of a sunnier outlook when I finally emerged from the mire.

It took a full 24 hours. The socked-in sense lingered well into my Monday; it began to lift yesterday evening and this morning I woke up clear-headed and hopeful again. Feeling more like writer than a fraud and thank the gods for that turn of mind. I brought the Gatsby soundtrack to work, which is proving to be a horrible distraction but I will persist because I need the infusion to get me through the worst day of my week. I’m off on Friday, with no commitments beyond cramming three episodes of The Newsroom before season 2 premieres on Sunday, so I’ll be brewing more Gold Rush and seeing if I can make something of a story that, on the weekend, I feared was beyond my capability to write.

My mission until then is to steer clear of the white stuff.