Pancakes and Cultural Differences

I've been making crepes a lot lately, and it always reminds me of this story about my grandparents. My grandmother Anne, was Polish-Ukrainian American, and she would make pancakes the Polish way, which was thick and fluffy. My grandfather Cy, was French-Canadian American, and apparently he wanted thin pancakes like crepes. Once, he complained one too many times about my grandmother's pancakes, and she hit him on the head with the frying pan! (Now you're going to think my family is violent, but I think it's kind of a funny story about cultural differences in the form of pancakes!)

Anorexia Athletica

I love the sound of it. So incongruous. Like exercise addiction doesn't sound serious enough. And sometimes it is fun - like mania can be fun, like pure excess can be fun. Then it gets out of control.

So anorexia athletica  what does it mean? I'm eating, so I must be ok. And I'm exercising  - I'm healthy, really healthy. I could run forever. Or at least until I fall over.

I used to walk to the gym. It took 45 minutes. Then I got on the elliptical machines. For two hours. Then I lifted weights for 45 minutes. Then I stretched for an hour. Then I walked home! Every day! Except I made sure to do different weight lifting each day. Because I didn't want any injuries. I mean, what would happen if I missed a day at the gym??

I read in the newspaper that Brittney Spears would exercise four hours a day with a personal trainer. I did some addition: 45 minutes + 2 hours + 1 hour + 45 minutes = 4.5 hours. I started to wonder if I was exercising too much. But I was healthy! And I was eating. And I wasn't injured all the time like when I ran track.

I remember the precise moment when my fascination with exercise started. It was in junior high. I had just been to visit my cousins in New Zealand and I came back with a bunch of trendy magazines. One of them had an article about speed walking.

So I was hanging out in the living room with my mom and my brother. They were having one of their arguments. I somehow always ended up in the middle of, or at least involved in these arguments. I decided I did not need to be involved in this particular argument, and I went outside and went for a walk. I walked up and down the block for an hour. It felt great. I felt powerful.

And I kept walking. And then running. I stopped eating junk food. I joined the track team. I joined the cross country team. I took aerobics for P.E. class. I walked a mile and a half to school and back almost every day in high school.

I was in great shape through most of junior high and high school. I ate whatever I wanted. I became vegetarian and then vegan.

I hated how thin I was sometimes. I could feel my hip bones poking through my skin. But I couldn't stop exercising, or thinking about exercising. I had to have toe surgery twice because of running related injuries. And I still ran and walked six miles in the San Francisco Bay to Breakers, with my toe bleeding. I needed the exercise high. And I was afraid to gain weight. I never had time to enjoy being in good shape.

In the first years of college, I found myself too busy with other things to keep exercising the way I had been. I still walked everywhere, but I wasn't running or doing aerobics.

Then, in my last year of college, I decided to get back in shape. By spending all my time at the track. I would just keep running for hours. At first, I would run a mile or two. Then I started running six or seven miles. Then I started running ten miles. I would leave the house and go to the track for several hours to run ten miles. Every other day.

I started to get injured. My knees and my arms and my feet started to hurt. I decided to join a gym. The weight I had been carrying around started to decrease, first a little, then a lot.

I lost fifty pounds. And I kept it off for several years as I exercised my way to nowhere.

After a series of unfortunate events a few years after college, I stopped the exercise routine. But the obsession remained. It's not the kind of thing you lose. You just learn to live with it.

I still have trouble when people say things like:

- oh, exercise is so healthy

- why don't you exercise more

- I can eat this chocolate bar because I'm going to the gym later


I really have to be mindful when I exercise. I have to set time limits. I have to be very careful to notice if anything hurts or if I feel tired. Most of all, I have to remember to pay attention and enjoy exercise while I'm doing it.

And for me, exercise is not a way to balance what I eat. (Refer to the term anorexia athletica - anorexia by way of exercise). I have to do it for its own sake.

Pregnant Woman, Crossed Out

 The little pills came in heavily packaged sets of ten, each with a line drawing of a pregnant woman in black, with a red circle and an x through it.

No pregnant women were harmed in the manufacture of these pills? For allergy sufferers, these pills contain no traces of pregnant women?

But no, these were anti-acne medication pills known to cause birth defects.

I didn't really care about my acne in high school. Or most of college. It was bad, and it was a family tradition, lovingly passed down through my mother from her father and generations of people before him. My mom was prescribed the "go out in the sun" prescription, which ended up being the "skin cancer removal many years later" prescription. So I was fastidious about sunscreen.

But by the middle of college, I was getting really tired of constant acne. I wanted it off my face. And none of the usual prescriptions worked. So I ended up with the end of the line vitamin A derivative.

With all that entailed. The blood tests, the food issues, the humiliation. I had to avoid eating sweet potatoes, carrots and orange foods full of vitamin A. I had to sign all kinds of legal forms and participate in a survey.

And I had to sign a paper saying I would use two kinds of birth control.

And the humiliation: for two and a half sessions of anti - acne treatment, lasting several months each time, I had to take regular pregnancy tests.

I was a virgin the entire time. For reasons related to attachments I had at the time and to my religious community and beliefs, I did not have sex until much later in life.

So first, I had to argue with the first dermatologist that I did not need to be on birth control pills.

Then, every month or so, I had to get up early in the morning, take the subway to the hospital, and take a pregnancy test. While I was a virgin.

And every month - surprise! The test came back negative.

My mom said, "you know, there was once a Jewish virgin. She was named Mary."