Happiness

Everyone has a burkini story. Sort of…

Everyone has a burkini story. Sort of…

Hijab

As a family we love to travel and experience new and different cultures. By that same token, we have also hosted several high school students from several different countries, and are active volunteers in supporting the local chapter of one of the larger high school student exchange programs. So when I was invited to participate in a retreat for some college students from Pakistan, I took the opportunity happily.

Now the organization that was organizing this retreat was a different one from the one we volunteer at, but I knew that it was a non-profit with State Department affiliation and I felt pretty confident that I knew what to expect.

So my first surprise at the event was when I heard a local staff member remark very disapprovingly about one of our local university student volunteers: “Can you believe how she is dressed? We told them not to wear spaghetti straps.”

Well! Here we are in California, in a hall full of some 200 people sweltering in the heat, and you are complaining about a young woman who is tearing around helping people, because she is dressed for the weather and really not immodestly by local standards?

“Oh well,” I thought to myself. “If they had given the volunteers a dress code in advance, I suppose it’s  okay to complain. But certainly no one had sent me any such guidelines. And, incidentally, I don’t see anyone complaining about all the young male volunteers running around in shorts.”

I soon began to feel really hot in that hall myself and took off the light sweater I had been wearing. About 5 minutes later an officious sounding woman bustled over to me and said: “We are requesting that all women keep their shoulders covered,” and tried to hand me a shawl.

I was dumbfounded! I’m a slightly overweight middle-aged woman with a prominent birthmark on the back on my shoulder. I never wear spaghetti straps!

True. I was wearing a sleeveless blouse, but the armholes were cut magyar style so,they actually covered the tops of my shoulders. Of course, I was not about to make a scene there. I politely refused the shawl and just put my sweater back on.

“But what about the young men wandering around in shorts?” I wanted to ask. “What about the lone young Pakistani woman, who is wearing a tank top and whom you are publicly shaming by making all the invitees and volunteers cover up? (This girl later talked with me passionately about her desire to create a nonprofit back in Pakistan that would support women who want to be different and would encourage them to express themselves as they wish, so they would not have to always conform to repressive standards. Shouldn’t we have been setting a better example for her?)

“What is wrong with us dressing to American standards at a simple non-religious event for students who are here to learn about American culture?” I wanted to ask.  “Oh, and by the way, if you have a dress code, maybe you should have told me about it when you were inviting me to participate.” But of course, I wasn’t about to make a scene. Which is precisely why people get away with being jerks and imposing their false moral standards on others.

But this was just par for the course at that event.

Earlier in the day while having lunch someone began to tell a story about one of the hijab wearing students. This young  woman was placed at a university in the South and one weekend her dorm roommate invited her to go home and stay overnight with her family. On reaching the house, the girls were greeted by the American girl’s mother who was surprised to see a hijab clad person on her doorstep. She immediately balked at letting her enter the house.

How could she know if this was a girl or a boy under the hijab, the mother demanded to know. So while the two girls stood there in absolute shock and humiliation, the mother insisted on inspecting the visitor’s passport. On being satisfied at the gender she then insisted on checking the girl’s suitcase for bombs. Only on satisfying herself that there were no bombs in the bag would she agree to let the visitor stay at their house.

While all of us listening to this story were about to express our horror at this treatment, the lady who was telling the story continued on, describing how traumatized this young lady was and how she had been crying and sharing this story with her group. “But I told her,” she said, “Not to feel bad. Everyone has to put up with treatment like this some time or other. I told her how when I was younger I used to be quite overweight and people were always making remarks about it. Then I lost weight, and now people make remarks about how I am such a  high maintenance person because I always like to be nicely dressed and like to do my nails.”

This lady’s words may not have been exactly these, but that was the gist of the story.

I was so appalled at her response to the experience of the young hijab wearer that my ears and face were buzzing with the blood that rushed to my head. I couldn’t believe that this woman who was, incidentally, absolutely gorgeous to look at, that this woman would equate her weight issues, would trivialize the trauma of having your gender challenged and your luggage checked in a friend’s house, with a “Me too” story of this sort.

I looked around the table and everyone was looking completely aghast or acutely uncomfortable (I’m  guessing the uncomfortable ones avoiding everyone’s eyes had already heard this story before) that this was the level of support and empathy we were offering a visitor to our country.

I finally broke the silence by saying quite mildly, “I don’t think the two things are the same,” and left.

I was a visitor too at that event, and had to behave as, I have no doubt, the poor hijab wearing girl had to also. Did she stay the weekend, I wondered. Would she have had the means of leaving on her own if she did not want to stay? Was her overall experience in the US a good one or did she leave with that experience imprinted forever in her mind? And the poor daughter of that mother! What kind of relationship would she ever have with her mother again? And, though civil discourse must always be the norm, I really must remember never let an opportunity to protest unfair treatment pass me by.

Efficiency is the enemy of weight loss

Week 47
135.5

Efficiency is the enemy of weight loss
or
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree

Though Thanksgiving is a holiday that is built almost entirely around food, and though I love to eat, somehow Thanksgiving food has always been less than thrilling for me.
Turkey? I’ll pass, thank you.
Dressing/stuffing? What’s the point?
Pumpkin pie? Just the filling please.
Mushy sweet potatoes? Okay. I’ll concede that’s pretty good.
Green bean casserole? Don’t ever feed an Indian blandly cooked vegetables.

Actually food flavors are always taken up a notch in our family (and that includes my in-laws), so I can’t really complain. We always have fun pushing ourselves to make the food taste more interesting.  My mother-in-law makes a great dressing, but we hadn’t had it in a couple years, so this year I decided I would try my hand at it.

One of the ingredients of dressing is dry (but not stale!) bread. So on the assumption that lightly toasted bread would be a good option, off to work I went using the toaster-oven to dry out some bread.

I was getting the next batch of bread ready for the oven, when I heard my daughter ask incredulously, “Do you have the bread on top of the oven?”

“Well it’s really hot on the top and I thought it would save time” I mumbled. (And more importantly, “Why waste the heat?” I said in my head.)

“We do have a toaster also, you know,” pointed out my ever practical daughter.

Very true. I moved across the kitchen and tried to fit three slices of toast into the one (large) slice toaster slot.

And suddenly, the realization. I am turning into my father!

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Breakfast in our house while growing up almost always included toast. And my father was always in charge of the toast. My father, who never met a broken toaster he couldn’t fix with a bit of wire or piece of scrap metal. No neighbor or relative was ever allowed to throw away a broken toaster. Give him a few hours and my father would have it working like new. And at breakfast time my father would have our toaster humming and popping out toast at a rate worthy of a Guinness Record.

At breakfast time my mother was in charge of the porridge, the half-boiled eggs, the sliced fruit and cheese, and buttering the toast. My father made the toast. He cut up the slices of bread so the slot that was supposed to accommodate one (large) slice of bread would be filled with one and a half slices next to each other, and additional half slices balanced on top so no heat was wasted and so that the largest number of pieces of toast were delivered warm to the table at the same time. A pretty good system actually.

When I was in the 5th grade my father went out of town for a work study course. “Work study” nowadays refers to a semester of practical work related to your college major. In those days, it was the expression used for efficiency.

Back in the sixties, India was still recovering from colonial rule and there was much effort to prove Indians could do just as well as, or better than, the British. All kinds of innovative programs were being tried out. The training program my father was attending was a military program, and being the military, they didn’t do anything in half measures. It was a three-month course! Who on earth does a three-month course in efficiency?

Maybe it was just an opportunity for a wonderful holiday getaway for the bright stars of the Indian civil service. Or, more likely, for the organizers, since the class was held in the beautiful Himalayan foothills in a town called Mussourie. (Only near the Himalayas would you say that a place at an altitude of over 6,000 feet is in the “foothills”. But I digress.)

The Indian government was working hard to improve standards all around and my father left my mom in charge of the household, the four girls, the dog, the cows, the chickens, the garden, and the household help, and went off for this work study/efficiency class. The course was followed by a practicum at a munitions factory in Dehradun, another gorgeous resort town in the foothills. He came home three months later with three beautiful traditional dancing dolls for my sisters, and a cute wooden bobble headed doll for me that I immediately named Little Eva. He also brought home a whole set of newfangled ideas.

Suddenly, my father,  who in the past had spent almost every minute at home with his nose in a book (he rereads Moby Dick about once every other year), was keeping a close eye on what we were doing at home with the exacting fastidiousness of the nuns in my school.

Clearing the table after dinner? Make sure you pile as much as you can together so you don’t have to make three trips. Waiting for the water to boil for a cup of tea? Do something while you are waiting. Always use the shortest route and most productive path! Minimize the effort required to do a job.  Park as close as you can to your destination. Don’t ever go from one spot to the next empty handed. And so it went. To this day, almost 50 years later, my father will catch one of us doing something inefficiently and say, “Work study, my dear. Work study.”

Perhaps these exhortations struck a chord with me more than anyone else at home, but I took them to heart. This efficiency goal got pretty well ingrained into me. Maybe it appealed to my innate laziness, or my ADD which my daughter often points out, but I became an expert at minimizing the energy used for any job. I am completely adept at picking things up with my toes so I don’t have to bend. A pencil, a book, dirty laundry.  I can slip my shoes off, pick them both up and place them on the top shelf of the shoe rack in one fluid motion using just my toes with monkey-like grace.

I also find it almost impossible to sit still and wait. Waiting for food to warm up in the microwave, even for a minute or two can be agony. At work, I always time my coffee cup refills with the need to go to the bathroom so I don’t have to wait and watch the water drip into my mug. Before a party, I will pop something under the broiler to brown, and rather than just stand there for just the 3 minutes it takes, I feel obliged to run and check my e-mail, or start unloading the dishwasher. Often with very bad results.

 

As a new immigrant early in the 1980s, I was struck by how devoid the streets and roads in the US were of people walking. Every once in a while, I would see someone running, seemingly aimlessly. I asked my more seasoned immigrant husband why they were running. “They’re jogging,” he said. “”Where to?” I asked in all my irritating innocence.

I soon came to understand that jogging was a form of exercise. I understood, but didn’t quite understand it. In India, sometimes you ran on the playing field. But generally when you ran, you were trying to catch a bus or escaped poultry. When you ran, you were running from an angry dog or a charging bull.  When you ran, you were trying to escape a sudden cloudburst of pouring rain. Why would anyone need to just run for exercise, and then jump in the car to go 5 blocks to go to the store to pick up some eggs?

But I when in Rome….

Soon, I was walking nowhere if I could drive. I took the elevator when there were perfectly good stairs around. While I can’t normally stand still, I would get on an escalator and just stand there instead of continuing to climb them while moving. This worked well for the first 25 years. But suddenly menopause and cellulite began to creep into my life. I watched the needle climb on the bathroom scale. I had been a steady 100 lbs. from my teenage years through my children’s teenage years, with a couple of swings upwards during my two pregnancies.

Now suddenly my weight was no longer my weight, but that of some chubby visitor to my house. But I still am not about to take up some aimless jogging. I have decided to use the opportunities that daily life presents; with the exception of vacuuming — because I am culturally unable to vacuum. Feminist or no, in our house vacuuming is a man’s job. Or rather, the job of the person who grew up with vacuum cleaners around him from his childhood.

But truly. As someone serious about losing weight, I have missed some great opportunities to keep moving and exercising in the house.

At some point, I had become 150% of my earlier weight. I was a woman and a half! Expressed like that, it gave me some real incentive to try to improve.

With a little conscious effort, I can walk 2-3 miles a day just doing my everyday work So here are some tips to myself:

– Stop trying to park in the spot closest to the store. The problem is, I can hardly help myself. If I park far away from the entrance at the grocery store, I find myself strategically parking the car near the cart return. But that’s okay I suppose – because I always make a point of returning carts to the cart corral. No free range carts in parking lots because of me, ever.

– Use the networked printer at work, so I have to walk to retrieve my printouts.

– At home, I remind myself that it is a good thing to bring the fresh laundry up the stairs in two or three trips, instead of piling the clean clothes and linen so high that I can’t see where I am going.

– And stop berating myself for somethings I will never be able to change. It will always be hard to sit still and watch TV or a movie at home. I feel obliged to be doing something while I watch – ironing, cutting vegetables, cooking, sorting through junk mail. Anything. But that’s okay. It fits neatly with my health-without-too-much-effort plan.

– And best of all, I make a point of always bending down to pick up my shoes when putting them away. This may mean distancing myself from my simian ancestors and a certain loss of prehensile skills with my toes, but it is helping with the weight loss goal.

So.  Sorry, dad. There are some times, when I am going to occasionally be inefficient and ignore that childhood mantra that pops up in my head every so often, “Work study, my dear. Work study.”

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

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.

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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