Do you know where your adult children are and what they are doing?

Week 2

152 lbs

One of the things I promised myself when I started this project is to try to treat homeless people like real human beings. I know this sounds weird and maybe even patronizing. But it is the truth.

I used to be a fan of Cesar Milan’s show The Dog Whisperer. He always cautioned against looking a dog in the eye when you first meet it. By avoiding its eye, you signal that you are alpha or are in charge or some other form of dominance.

I began to wonder if people avoiding meeting the eye of a homeless person on the street was simply because they felt guilty about not helping the person, or if this was actually some sort of subconscious assertion of superiority. If it’s the latter, I am sure most homeless people don’t need to have their feelings trod any lower.

By and large, I am a reasonably kind person, and do smile at panhandlers and homeless people and return their greetings. I almost always apologize if I can’t (or won’t) give them money. But I promised myself, that I will make a greater conscious effort to always treat my fellow human beings, especially those down on their luck, as people deserving of respect and attention.  

Does this mean I will stop for every single homeless person I pass? Probably not. Will I give each one of them some money? Again, probably not. But I will not deliberately avoid eye contact, and if by chance our eyes meet, I will smile and treat them like any well-dressed stranger on the street.


I don’t see as many homeless people where we live as, say, in the City. But quite by chance on my very first week I am out during my lunch break and see a young man, in his mid-twenties, clearly homeless,  sitting in front of the grocery store with a huge black dog. Many of the homeless people near my work seem to have dogs.

He asks me if I can spare some change for breakfast. I hesitate.

He says – “Don’t worry about the dog. He won’t bother you.”

That’s not what is bothering me. I have never been bothered by a homeless person’s dog. They almost always seem to be perfectly well behaved and docile. 

I am just fascinated by the fact that the young man is reading! I can’t help staring.

I always surreptitiously try to see what people are reading. It’s how I size them up. I’m not judging them, but it’s just something I do.

I pull out $2 from my wallet and hand it to him. He thanks me, but is now clearly uncertain about whether to smile at me. 

“Talk to him,” I can hear myself saying. “Talk to him.”

So I ask him what he is reading.

“The Things They Carried,” he says and holds it out towards me. “It’s about the Vietnam war.”

I look at the title – it’s by Tim O’Brien.

“Cool,” I say and move on.

I want to say more, but am afraid of intruding. I want to ask him why he is homeless. Why is a good looking and intelligent-sounding young man who is reading a well reviewed book about the Vietnam War sitting on the ground with a backpack and a dog outside a grocery store in a small town?

My son is 25. He is an inveterate reader. I am moved beyond words.

I wonder what my son is doing at that moment and my eyes tear up. I quickly turn away and leave. Did the young man think I was avoiding his eyes?

When life hands you plums, you make fruit leather

Week 25
132 lbs

I often wonder how I survived my childhood. We had a lot of fun roaming around the neighborhood with our friends unsupervised, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that we ate any and every thing that looked like it was round and juicy and grew on a tree. And that we could reach.

I don’t remember anyone ever telling us that it was okay to eat the shiny blue-purple berries from the lantana bushes, but we picked them and ate them with impunity. (I later learned that the unripe lantana berries can be very poisonous and can even be fatal.) We routinely and blithely also ate the beautiful red banyan berries with their strange hollowed out seedy insides.

Sometimes we would pick random flat green beans and eat because no one else was harvesting them as food. That they weren’t being harvested should have been a clue, but no one said we were thinking. The Pride of Barbados shrubs were a favorite. We would painstakingly split open the pods and take out the smooth perfectly shaped seeds. Next we would peel the aril off and eat the flat, sweet centers. Beause it took so much work and took so long to get to the centers, we probably didn’t eat very much and hence were able to remain standing. I now am wise to the fact that the seeds of the Caesalpinia pulcherrim, that’s the botanical name for Pride of Barbados, are always poisonous once they reach maturity.

We did eat a lot of good fruit too. There were many varieties of mangoes (but these were better protected and harder to find lying around), guavas ( the sweetest and best ones were those that the parrots had started eating), and tamarind by the hundreds (which a neighbor couldn’t use but got really upset if she caught us eating them). But none of these were as exciting as those undiscovered fruit that we thought we were discovering while exploring the neighborhood.

Through great good fortune, reach my maturity I did. But I have never lost the habit of being unable to walk by a new fruit or vegetable without trying it.These days it is in the grocery store and hence usually the results are okay. Except for that first time I saw persimmons.

I was new to this country and excited about trying everything “American” – anything I had not seen before. These fruits were shiny, smooth and a bright color – everything that drew my magpie brain*.

“What a beautiful name,” I thought as I rolled the word persimmon around in my mouth, and as I rolled the fruits around in my hand. I gently pressed them and pushed the soft, mushy ones aside. I was mildly shocked that American grocers would put rotting fruit out, but then attributed it to a sloppy worker. I lovingly rubbed my fingers against the silky outsides of the fruit. I sniffed them – no unpleasant odors. I carefully selected two, took them home and placed them in the fridge to chill.

Two anxious hours later I took one out and cut the firm smooth flesh into even slices, setting the beautiful black seeds on their own plate to be admired, and possibly planted, later. I sat down at the dining table and carefully bit into a piece.

Halelujah! That was the fastest I had ever moved from the table to the sink. I spent the rest of the day trying to scrape my tongue clean. I genuinely thought I had poisoned myself and couldn’t get rid of the other persimmon fast enough. Our poor downstairs neighbor managed to duck just in time as a bright orange missile went whizzing past head. Even now, he may believe that he saw a true UFO that day.

The corollary to all this is that I can say, with all honesty and with no undue bragging, that I became an excellent cook. My fearless berry eating made me into a bold, creative chef, who is very good at blending flavors and smells. Of course, as an Indian, I think the ability to blend flavors is in my genes.

People, including my children, are constantly asking me for my recipes, but I rarely write them down. So I decided that as part of my good life project, I need to start writing down my recipes and saving them for my children, for myself, and to share with friends. I was also inspired by my niece who has an amazing food blog called Quinces and Lemons. She has actually published some of my recipes, and I admit, I often go to her blog to check how I made a specific item.

Fruit leather:
Good for adults. Loved by children.

This is a great way to use over-ripe fruit. I used the plums from my sister’s tree which was heavy with fruit this year. In fact I only used the plums that had fallen on the ground, most of which were smashed or misshapen.

This recipe is for plums, but you can use a variety of fruit, or even a blend of fruit. You will need to adjust the initial cooking time depending on how firm the fruit is.
Ingredients

4-5 pints ripe plums (8-10 cups of fruit)
1 cup sugar or to taste

Pre-heat the oven to 400˚F

Wash and pat dry the plums.
Seed and halve/quarter the plums and spread them out on a baking tray skin side down.
(Sorry, I forgot to take a picture of the plums before they were cooked.)

Bake for 20 minutes.
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Let the fruit cool and blend in a food processor with the sugar. A very smooth puree will result in a very professional looking end product, but I sometimes like to keep a few little bits of skin for texture and an interesting appearance. IMG_20150624_112504992

If you are making the leather in the oven, line the trays with parchment paper.IMG_20150624_115404310_HDR
(Tip: See how I use clothes pins to hold the parchment paper in place. Just remember to take the pins off before you put them in the oven!)

Spread the puree in the trays to a thickness/depth of about 1/6 to 1/8 of an inch and place in the oven or dehydrator at 140˚F.

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If you are using the oven, make sure you leave the door  propped slightly open  (a wooden spoon works really well).
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After 8 hours test for doneness. The leather should be set and should not stick to your fingers, but should still give a little when you press down. If not done, let it continue to dry and check every hour to reach a good fruit leather consistency that is not too dry and tough. (Of course, kids love the chewy stuff and it is a good way to slow down consumption of the fruit leather.)

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Take out the leather and slice into the desired width with a sharp knife. You may need to rub the knife with a mild vegetable oil like canola oil. If the leather is sticky, you can use a brush to rub a couple of drops of oil over the surface.

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Let the leather cool completely and then roll the strips or store them flat.

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If your fruit leather is less dry, I recommend storing it in the refrigerator. When in doubt – just refrigerate. However, these are so delicious, they’ll probably disappear before you need to refrigerate them.

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Notes:
* Yes. I know. Magpies don’t actually like shiny objects.

Putting my thoughts to words.

2 weeks after Week 1 minus several months
152 lbs – still

For a person who is unable to resist a good idea, and a person who can be very reactive and plan her life based on the events of the moment, I have learned to think things through before I start a project. Or so I thought until I tried to give away that Pendleton shirt.

So it’s time to step back and define this project a little better for myself.

When I say living the good life – I don’t mean an epicurean la dolce vita. Nor do I not mean that. I simply mean be a good person and enjoy life.

I like projects. I like a start and finish to projects. Actually, I really like to start projects. So clearly I could never transform myself forever. Instead, here is the goal I set myself. Discover the fine art of living well. Do this by spending 52 weeks living the good life — being happy and making people happy. If not all the time – at least on a regular basis.

So after a  week of serious thought, here’s my narrowed down list of goals for living the good life:

– Do at least one significant act of goodness/kindness every week. Being good to yourself and/or your family also counts

– Go to one play, show or performance at least once a month

– Lose 20 pounds. Go from 152 to 132 lbs

– Make donations to random charities

– Start writing regularly again

-Cook at home more often

-Eat out at nice restaurants (This does not contradict the previous goal. I need to limit how often we eat out and choose the restaurants carefully)

– Eat less red meat*. (The jury is still out on this one)

– Eat fish-2 times a week

– Eat vegetarian once a week for good health and as an exercise in self-discipline

-Write my blog

– Exercise/walk/yoga regularly – and push myself harder

– Be proud of my achievements

– Save money

-Clean-up house

– Recycle

– Write down my recipes

– Turn around the pre-diabetic high blood sugar diagnosis that the doctor had just given me through careful exercise and eating habits. We usually eat very well (in the sense of healthy eating) but I could do better

– Write all those fun short stories that I have in my head

-Swim

– Use whole wheat flour as much as possible**

– Hang my clothes out to dry

– Use less water

-Give doggy bags from restaurants to a homeless person – works better in San Francisco

– Care for myself

-Have fun

-Write fiction

-Keep in touch with friends

-Hmmm. Maybe make some friends

– Add to this list regularly

-Delete from this list regularly

And my first addition to this list : Find out and focus on what people want, not just what I want to give them, like Pendleton shirts.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Notes:
* I love meat. But more importantly, eating meat is what made us humans the superior creatures we are. It resulted in the enlargement of the human brain.
http://www.livescience.com/23671-eating-meat-made-us-human.html

** It is not so hard to mix whole wheat with regular in baking if you use the white finely ground whole wheat that we have traditionally used in India. As long as a high amount of gluten is not a requirement for the recipe, a combination of unbleached white and whole wheat flour is a healthy and fully viable option. Especially since nowadays the white unbleached whole wheat flour is also easily available in all grocery stores, not just Indian or specialty stores.

Random acts of kindness – Maybe not so kind always

1 Week after Week 1 minus several months
Still 152 lbs

Random acts of kindness – May not always be so kind 

I was wandering around the house trying to decide what to do and where to go with my living the good life idea. I browsed the piles and stacks of things that I have meant to go through and have been unable to throw away over the years.

Having grown up in India, it is almost unnecessary to ever throw anything away. You are always surrounded by poor relations, servants (yes, we do use the word “servants”), and many people who are happy to reuse or recycle any item we have to spare. But the deep set need to stretch resources goes a little deeper in my family.

My father had a fine civil service job while we were growing up. We were well dressed and to all appearances were a successful almost upper middle class family. And so it seemed, even to us children. But in reality we were teetering on the edge of the upper middle class precipice.

My parents’ responsibilities were many. More people than just our immediate family were relying on my father’s salary for day to day survival. Plus, my parents had very high standards and they really did live the good life by stretching resources. We had a car when few of our friends and neighbors had cars. We had a British built car because my father was very picky about his cars. We travelled extensively. We bought books. We ate really well, and were cooking Chinese, italian, and all kinds of foods at home, when it was almost unheard of in small town India. We were very well dressed children, usually in the latest fashion. We attended expensive schools, because my parents valued education. My parents were generous to a fault when anyone with a hard luck story showed up at our door. But we made every penny count and we got rid of nothing that hadn’t served us in every incarnation possible.

My mother was stylish, creative, and very adept at using the sewing machine and at cooking. She sewed our school uniforms when it was strictly against the rules to use any but the school tailor, and she did such a good job that the nuns never could tell the difference*.  At the end of every school year we went through our class notebooks and tore out the unused pages which were then taken to the local paper recycler who sewed them together to make our “rough books”. The used pages were sold to the recyclers. Clothes were handed down always ending up with me, since I was the youngest and the shortest. After that, they were cut up and matched up with with some new bits of cloth or other old dresses. A bit of lace here, a frill or a  button there, and they emerged as fashionable new outfits. When they could not be reused as clothes, they became cushion covers. Old cushion covers became dolls’ clothes, mops and dusters.

It is easy to comprehend why I find myself suffering from borderline anxiety when it comes time to throwing things away. Fortunately, my problem hasn’t yet made me a candidate for possible public shaming on a TV show, but I do always try to find possible reuses for any item that has outlived its original purpose.

So wandering around the house that day wondering how to begin living a good life, I decided to go through the many unused clothes I have and donate them, or throw them away if they were not donatable. I was sorting the clothes into neat piles when I came across an brand new blue plaid Pendleton shirt that I had bought for my son one Christmas, but which he refused to wear**. A brilliant idea struck me. Next time I saw a homeless person standing at the street corner with a sign saying “Anything helps”, I would give them this shirt.

I got goosebumps at my lovely idea. I neatly folded the shirt and put it in a nice tote bag. After all, which homeless person doesn’t want a good tote bag too? Five days of driving around with this bag sitting shotgun and I still had not had one opportunity to hand this shirt to anyone. My enthusiasm was waning. Then opportunity struck!

I was in a gas station filling up gas in my car when I saw a middle aged man with a small rolled up sleeping bag, with a very elderly woman also carrying a small rolled up sleeping bag. They were clearly homeless, though judging from the way they were dressed and their posture and skin tones, I jumped to the conclusion they probably hadn’t been homeless very long. They both looked upset and tired, the woman particularly so. The man was yelling at her trying to get her to buck up. They looked at me and I got goosebumps all over again thinking I finally had my chance to do a really good deed and hand someone this lovely shirt.

I looked over at the couple and smiled. Sure enough, the man started walking towards me after loudly admonishing his mother to stay right where she was. “Can you spare some money?” he asked me. My heart sank. I really had very little money in my purse. I had planned to stop at the ATM after getting gas. But I had my beautiful Pendleton shirt which he would be so cozy and toasty in.

“I’m sorry I don’t,” I said, “But I have a nice warm shirt I can give you.” I was all bright and perky.

“No thank you. We have enough clothes.”

I felt all the dismay of rejection. He began to turn away, and stopped. “You wouldn’t happen to know a place where my mother and I could get something to eat, would you?”

Being a  librarian, I had a pretty good idea of where many of the local shelters were and began rattling them off. The man kept shaking his head. “I’ve been to all of them and they only give you bags of beans and rice. How are we supposed to cook that?” It sank into my consciousness that he had not been trying to buck up his mother, but was actually trying to talk his mother out of being hungry and needing food.  I could feel my face heating up. I was mortified. By my stupid insensitivity and for a system that hands homeless people uncooked beans and rice.

I rushed back into my car shouting, “Hold on.” I was going to rip those seats out with my bare hands if I had to, but I was going to find some money in my car. I shook out my purse, shook out my jacket pockets and looked in the glove compartment. $4.00! I handed it to him and pointed at the McDonald’s across the street. “Maybe you can get a couple of Big Macs for you and your mother?” He thanked me, went back and handed his mother his sleeping bag saying, “I’ll be right back,’ and walked right past McDonald’s into Subway. Well. I had got that wrong too. I hope he at least got a healthy half sandwich for them both that day.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Notes:
*  I, however, spent the first week of each school year in terror expecting that I would be dragged out and publicly shamed, shaken and spanked during assembly. Those nuns could be downright mean and sadistic sometimes. But more about that another day.

** On a  side note: The Beach Boys originally called themselves The Pendletones, presumably in honor of the cool Pendleton shirts they wore.

Inspired by being called a herpetic whore

Week 1 minus several months
152 lbs

“You herpetic whore. Hope you ooze to death.”

This really wasn’t why I created a Google Alert around my my name.

I am an up and coming librarian, as far as librarians can up and come. I go to conferences regularly. I socially network. I write letters to the professional journals. I post to the listservs. In short. I am engaged. I am socially networked – not just online. So I have Google Alerts for many subjects. But I really do like to see when people are mentioning me or my library. It gives me kind of a buzz and helps me do my job better.

I mean, isn’t that why most of us are spending half our lives tapping out our opinions and making them “public” so that someone will read them and ooh and ah over our brilliance. Hopefully before they find some other version of the same concept. Because frankly thousands of people are having the exact same thought at the same time and are all posting and tweeting their thoughts as fast as they can think them.

We, or at least most of us, certainly aren’t getting paid to write this stuff. And we hopefully have a job that pays for the medical bills we are going to get for our carpal tunnel syndrome related to typing all day at work, and short sightedness related to staring at the screen, and obesity related to not moving from front of the computer, and back problems related to sitting hunched over the computer, and the vitamin D pills that will hopefully compensate for our never stepping out into the sunlight and…

Thus it was a shock to read an online tirade denouncing me in some exaggeratedly revolting terms and and suggesting that I was a herpetic whore putting out green slime from orifices I knew were not oozing anything. But it hurt. It did hurt terribly. What had I ever done to this person to deserve this? What could I do?

In retrospect I can laugh and feel pity for the man. But when everyone is talking to you about freedom of speech and glumly telling you that you have no recourse but to ignore it – the tears do flow. And the tears flowed so long and so hard that that my nose, which turns a shiny swollen red in response to any tide of emotion,  took on the look of a lighthouse beacon guiding boats into the harbor for several foggy days.

I tried to distract myself. I tried to console myself. Everyone I shared the post with, agreed that the writer must have been off his head when he wrote it. But no one seemed to think I could be hurt or suffering. None but one offered me a word of sympathy.

I was in a strange haze for many days. I was angry and bitter. I kept hoping I would hear that this person had been run over by a bus. I kept hoping that all the people who told me to suck it up/ignore it and move on with my life would be the brunt of this man’s crazy rants and then I would see how they took their own advice to ignore the rants. But the worst of all, I began to doubt myself. I must have done something to deserve this 5000 word diatribe.

Two weeks of moping around in the hope of sympathy and revenge is really not a very long time. But it was enough. Suddenly I shook myself off and the world of cliches began to fill my brain: Get a grip. Such is life. Life is too short. Geez, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Living well is the best revenge.

And all of a sudden I had a vision of this man’s family – his wife and kids and thought how much worse their lives must be than mine, if they had to live with him everyday. And I promised myself that I would never become that man. And I would never hurt anyone like that. I was going to delight in the world around me. I was going to focus on things that gave me and people around me pleasure and forget about the nasty.

And that is how began my adventures with the fine art of living the good life.

The Fine Art of Living the Good Life

I love writing. I have wanted to blog from the moment I heard about blogs. I realize also that I use my Facebook page as a blog of sorts.

This blog has had many starts in my mind, and on my computer. Each start was linked with some unfortunate moment in my life, most of which seemed to demonstrate how mean people could be.

But I lacked the courage to post the blog publicly. So I began to journal instead. I did that for a while and stopped. And once again things went wrong for me, as things are wont to do.

After each incident I would be inspired to focus on the good things in life. I tried to restart my blog so it would help me stay on track towards being a  good person and enjoying life. I also wanted to share all the simple things I was doing that were making me happy.

Each time, I would lack the courage to publish.

But courage is a part of being a good person. I am usually a  fearless person. Why the fear here?

No more.

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