Peanuts

I had this very strange and disturbing dream last night that I was sitting in my childhood bedroom with my college roommate instead of my sister in the other bed, trying to figure out the logistics of meeting up with an old friend I haven't seen or talked to in ages. We're going out somewhere fancy, my roommate, me, and our friend, so I'm getting dressed in a black fitted dress with a puffy short skirt (that was the disturbing part). I look in the mirror and it's fine, but then I realize I'm sucking in my stomach, and look again and see that I'm morbidly obese, not even pregnant sized, we're talking BMI above 30. Then it occurs to me that my friend has only been calling my roommate. I go back to check my cellphone, and sure enough there's nothing in its history. No one has called me.

It got me thinking on my way to the newborn nursery this morning about all the people that I miss that I've let slip out of sight (more than mind), some more intentionally than others. I got caught up thinking particularly about the ones that I made an effort to let slip by because I thought I'd be better off without them, the way I'm better off without a jar of skippy's in my fridge. You know how it is, you can't resist them, you can't seem to get enough of them, but then after the fact you feel like total shit about yourself. Why did I do that again? And you realize if you don't promise yourself you will never buy another jar of crunchy peanut butter again you may become the next participant in the exercise and dieting class taking place across the street for people who are about to get gastric bypass surgery. So you try giving up peanut butter for Lent, and weeks go by and you suddenly wonder, really, was it that bad? There's all that protein, and other people eat it and can still fit into their pants?

There was enough excitement today, among which was the first circumcision I've seen up close and personal and my first varicocele (which really does feel like a bag of worms) to keep me occupied from ruminating over lost friends and a strange dream.

But then, as luck would have it, I had an encounter in the gym, a phone call, and an email that all brought up names of people who have disappeared from my immediate history and it got me upset enough to send me into a tizzy of cooking and cleaning (yes, I turn into a housewife when I get upset) and ended in a spoon in my roommate's peanut butter jar before I realized that my feelings had gotten the best of me. On the third or fourth teaspoon in, I was revising my last breakup in my head. The gist is the same, but I'm making him much more eloquent. In my movie version he is ending it with I don't love you, but this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship and then swiftly disappearing into the Manhattan skyline. So I put the peanut butter away and sat down and decided I'd let myself spend some time trying to more constructively broach the issue. And that, my friends, is why I'm sitting here and writing this instead of reading Blueprints for Pediatrics. The other reason is because I may be the world's champion procrastinator.

So my question is, what exactly is healthy? There was a great article in the New York Times recently about nutrition. Not doing it justice at all, I will distill it to this lesson: there are no bad foods or good foods. But there is bad eating and good eating. So the question really becomes, do I trust myself enough, do I know myself enough to know how to handle the peanuts?