My Brother-in-law’s Body

He’s my age.  And its nice.

I went on vacation with him and his family.  It was a beach vacation and, well, there it was, for all to see – a mostly exfoliated hard torso, crowned by a full head of hair.  I was envious.

The thing is, I’m not exactly sure why I’m much flabbier than he is.  His eating is not much better or less than mine (although he drinks alcohol only rarely and in small quantities).  His lifestyle is no healthier.  He stretches daily for his back and gets 30 minutes of aerobic workout three times a week, but otherwise doesn’t work out.

Two primary reasons thus present themselves.  Genetics – I simply can’t do anything about that.  The other, less generous, thought, is that those two faint scars on his abdomen look like they are from incisions.  Could he have had liposuction or some kind of cosmetic procedure?

Regardless, I’m back from vacation and have renewed  my trips to the gym with increased vigor.  My goal is an hour of exercise (combination of aerobic and weights) five times a week.  I’m watching what I eat, and drink.  My wife has commented that the rogaine like product is visibly doing something that she likes.  I know that I will have to wait a while to see any movement in my weight, and my goal is to stick with the regimen long enough to stick it out.

I saw my brother-in-law’s body.  It’s a new ballgame.

One Drink, Two Drink, Three Drinks More

I have always enjoyed alcohol. Fortunate to have gone to college before the drinking age went up to 21, I had the pleasure not only of simply drinking too much at raucous, adolescent parties during the weekends, but also learning to sip cocktails as I blithely (and unsuccessfully, I should add) attempted to impress the cultural elite that would regularly visit the school. In so many ways, alcohol served as a social lubricant, one that in the mix (mostly) feels good.

Over the past few years something has begun to change. I’ll come home from work around 5 PM and have a drink with my wife. One drink almost always turns into two before dinner. Then I might (but usually don’t) have some wine with dinner. After dinner, though, is when it gets going. Tired from the day, my first two drinks, and the dinner, I have little mind to so much else on my to do list. My kids more or less take care of themselves as well as the clean-up tasks. So it’s around 7:30, and I might pour myself a scotch.

As the chaos of the evening dies down and the kids are in bed, I might pour another as I read or watch some TV. Just as often, though, my wife will bring up some lingering issue that upsets me. Maybe it’s some trivial decision that she does not want to make herself. Maybe it makes me anxious about money. Maybe it is simply that she gets tired early and wants to go to bed without having sex with me. In such cases, another drink or two might be in the waiting.

I am fully functional. Once in a rare while (only on weekends) I will wake up with a hangover, but otherwise I am ready to start each day fully. I never drive when I am drunk, and I never get angry or aggressive. I have never missed a day of work because of drink. The stupid things that I do at night alone as a result of drink (to be blogged about at some future point) ultimately are inconsequential.

But I don’t like it. The drink feels good and dulls some of my anxieties, but I am fully aware that it does not add to the quality of my life. Additionally, it might be the culprit for why I cannot seem to lose weight. I should cut back.

This week I have begun. Two or three drinks a night should be plenty, and I’ve basically kept to that. It is not terribly difficult, but I need to make an effort. It is not my body the craves it now, but a force of habit. I struggle to find ways to keep myself busy when I’m bored and tired at night, and to face whatever anxieties rise during vulnerable times.

What I really struggle with is the evening drink with my wife. I really enjoy it (as does she), but I know it sets me up for problems later. What I feel I should do is use that time not to touch base with her, but to play with my kids. Then we can move from there to dinner, and then touch base over a nightcap. Habits are difficult to break, but that’s the plan.

Money as Lifestyle

Recently I’ve been reading The Simple Dollar. It’s fun, well-written, and makes a great deal of sense. At the same time, it is part of a genre of what I might call “money as lifestyle.” I would like to see money as a tool; I need enough of it to live the kind of life I want to, with the full knowledge that I’m going to have to make trade-offs. Sometimes these trade-offs favor expenses which lead to stress; sometimes they involve deprivation. Money, though, never becomes the primary object.

The Simple Dollar and blogs like it, though, read like evangelical tracts. They preach a lifestyle in which the goal is frugality and saving. Again, I am all for frugality and saving, and I know I can take some lessons from this kind of writing. But this intensive focus on money is surely counterproductive. The point, IMHO, is not to “make the switch” to a new way of thinking about money in a way that privileges (saving) it, but to develop habits that allow you to live a viable, fun, life without worrying about money.

Eat Our Veggies

Penny Thoughts provides eleven tips for eating more and better vegetables.  Every one of them makes sense, but I remain skeptical.

Let me start with a sincere compliment:  We love good fresh vegetables and always are looking to eat more.  So I very much appreciate the impulse behind this post.

Yet while these suggestions makes sense in an abstract way, and may even work for a childless couple of a certain income range and living with access to good veggies, they break down somewhat in my life.  There are two major barriers to eating more good vegetables, and they are predictable: time and money.

1.  The bulk of these suggestions take time that we simply do not have.  With three children and two working parents – even when one blogs instead of doing more productive things – who has time (or space in the kitchen) to keep a dry board?  Menu planning?  Sounds like a great idea, but how much time does it take to do?

2.  Vegetable preparation is time consuming.  There is simply no way to get around this.  After a day at work the last thing I want to do is wash, peel, and chop enough great vegetables to feed five people.  Given that possibility or the option of opening a bag of frozen vegetables, guess which is often going to win.

3.  I’ve always been attracted to the idea of picking up great vegetables on the way home from work that I could then whip up that night – the European model.  But where?  I could keep track of which farmer’s market is where within striking distance locally on each day and precisely when (i.e., they are typically there only for a few hours), but that would require building my day’s schedule around vegetables.  Plus I would have to bring the car to work, which strikes me as a perverse way to live -  the cost for good organic vegetables is taking a car rather than a bike?

4.  That leaves Whole Foods, which is convenient although it does not solve the car problem.  The vegetables are reasonably good, but expensive!  It is one thing to buy enough designer greens for a salad for me and my wife, but to regularly feed our ravenous children at such a level would require further excursions into our sinking home equity.

5.  So now I’m at the fallback option, weekly trips to the supermarket.  Its convenient and relatively inexpensive.  The vegetables often largely suck, and carry a whiff of all the bad things that taint modern agriculture.  And yes, every week I throw out rotten produce.

I am not giving up.  I do stop at farmers’ markets when I can, and I try to minimize waste.  I would love to eat a fresh, local, ripe tomato everyday rather than that thing I get at the supermarket.  What I need, though, are real solutions for real people.

Little League, Pride, and Shame

Baseball season just ended. Thank God.

For 6-8 weeks each year, little league consumes us. With two children in different leagues, we often shuttle from one game to the next (they are on different fields in different parts of town), trying to show our support for both kids. For several weeks we need to abandon completely the very idea of family dinners, as we find ourselves at games or shuttling to and from practices every day of the week.

I am not knocking little league, although I approach and sit through the season with a degree of dread. The truth is that my kids love playing; it gets them outdoors and active (in a baseball kind of way); develops skills; and reinforces all the right values. The coaches in our league are dedicated and great with the kids, and I will not hesitate to send one back next year.

One, though, just finished his little league career. He managed to do so without a single hit over the past two years. He made plays (including some spectacular catches), walked on balls with some frequency, had a good positive attitude, and was generally an asset to his team. But he couldn’t hit. Maybe he made contact three or four times over two years.

I am proud of this son in so many ways, but whenever he got up to bat, and struck out, I felt a swell of emotions that I recognize as not particularly healthy or useful. Not to put too fine a point on it, I was ashamed. My son’s inability to hit shamed me. And sometimes after games I vented that shame on him with comments sharp enough that I would regret them later.

Nobody needs to tell me that I shouldn’t feel ashamed. I know, and I am ashamed of my own response. It is not that I am afraid of looking bad in front of all the other parents and the dads of kids who can hit, although there is a small degree of that – of course I want my son to excel so that I can stand a little taller in their eyes. Rather, his lack of ability here recalls for me for my own short experience playing organized baseball as a child.

I couldn’t hit either. Athletically, in fact, I was probably a good deal less gifted than my hitless son. And I suffered dearly for it. My teammates and coaches were not at all supportive, and the combination of failing at something (which rarely happened, except in sports) and being mocked and taunted for it, verged on traumatic for me. Part of me still hurts and seethes over that, and part of me wants my children to succeed in order to redeem my own failure. When my son strikes out, I do too. And although his teammates and coaches encourage him afterwards, I feel the blood rise as somewhere very deep in me I am being taunted.

My son ended his season feeling great. I, though, was ashamed, primarily at my own shame. And I look forward – with dread again – to his younger sibling’s games next year.

Middle-Aged Sex

The other night my wife and I had amazing sex.  “Treat me like your slut,” she cooed as she turned over and looked at me. “Put it in my ass.” I did, and few minutes later we both exploded.

Maybe the meds are working.

Almost ten years ago my wife went on anti-depressants  Since then, our sexual life has been challenging.  It turns out that there are few discussions, in the medical literature or in popular discourse. on the side-effects of these drugs on female sexuality.  For those of you without intimate experience with such matters, some classes of anti-depressants (the largest ones, in which drugs like Prozac are included), cause in many women decreased sexual interest (libido), decreased sensitivity, and increasing difficulty in achieving orgasm.

This was not a set of side-effects that my wife would take lying down.  Yet her consultations with doctors were almost always unsatisfying.  By and large, they treated this as a minor side-effect; the benefits of the drug far outweighed this slight decrease in quality of life.  Some took it slightly more seriously, and experimented with lower doses, different classes of drugs, and drugs thought to offset some effects (e.g., Buspar).  Sometimes we would see some improvements, but they were usually short-lived.  Mostly the new drugs exacerbated the existing underlying problems that led her to the drugs to begin with.

It is true that the sexual costs of the drugs were minor compared to their benefits.  These medicines have dramatically lifted my wife’s mood, which has also dramatically improved the quality of our life together.   One of the ironies of taking these drugs is that while she has missed sex and the emotional connection that it causes, her decreased libido also blunts the effects of this loss.  There is some emotional fallout for her, but not physiological urgency.  I do not mean to minimize my wife’s own feelings about this, but she would be better equipped to discuss these than I am.

I am the collateral damage.  I don’t mean to suggest that over the past decade we have not had a sex life.  By statistical standards, we seem to have done fine.  We regularly have had sex 2-3 times each week, occasionally supplemented by other sexual activities.  Our sex came in the usual range of flavors: sometimes passionate, romantic, angry, etc.  We role play some of our fantasies; she’s willing to try new things that I suggest.  Mostly, though, it was predictable, dull, and filled some very basic needs.

Part of the problem for me has, of course, been physiological.  Frankly, I’m horny a lot.  Somewhat regular release keeps me somewhat sane, but it has often done little more than take the edge off.

The greater damage has been emotional and psychological.  Again put frankly, not being able to sexually satisfy my wife for extended periods of time and having her exhibit little sexual interest in me has and continues to take a toll.  For better or worse, part of my self-esteem is based in my attractiveness and my sexual prowess.  Feeling unattractive and unable to make my wife cum is, well, a real downer.  Abstractly, I recognize the low relative cost.  But even low relative costs can be a high absolute one.

Recently my wife has experimented with lowering her dosage (the summer, with its lower stress and increased sunlight, helps) and at one doctor’s recommendation (for some information, see here) using an herbal supplement, ginkgo biloba. So far, so good: increased libido, increased sensitivity, increased ability to orgasm.  Once again, I can drive my wife wild, at least far more often than in our recent memory.

A few days of great sex does not repair a decade of emotional damage.  But it’s a good start.

Dressing the Part

Those ads from Mohan’s Custom Tailor never fail to get my attention. They are always the same, and always have been from the time I began noticing them many years ago. Run in the Times, they promise three custom suits (which can be defined as a sports jacket and slacks) and some extras for a bit under $2000.

Every time I see this ad I regret that I do not and never did own a single piece of custom made clothing. I bought my wedding suit off the rack at a discount store, and to this day think that the $200 Barney’s suit was one of the better deals I’ve ever found. But all the magazines that I turn to for fashion advice – GQ, Esquire, Men’s Health – tell me that a man my age should own a custom suit. Am I in some way inadequate because I don’t own one, or can’t justify the cost?

I never really learned how to dress right. I was never wildly inappropriate – my clothes were always clean and free of obvious holes. But my color palette hovered in the gray zone (a result of never having the energy to separate my lights and darks in the laundry). I did not know or think about matching my clothes. Fraying and small, less obvious holes did not bother me. I wore sneakers whenever I could.

Over the years, I have become my wife’s reclamation project. She taught me what colors look good on my and the basics of identifying clashing patterns. She points out to me unacceptable fraying. She encourages me to prefer shoes over sneakers. Whenever I wear an article of clothing that she has bought for me, almost inevitably – and this really is uncanny – someone will compliment me on it.

From a very early age my wife learned something that took me some four decades to realize: looking good invariably comes down to dressing well. Genetics and physical shape play a role, of course, but what people notice first and foremost is how you dress. That is where the battle is to be fought.

Reading the men’s magazines is fun, but their fashion tips to a man like me, struggling to figure it out and with a limited clothing budget, they are worse than useless. They are downright counterproductive. How, in the photo-shoots, can I possibly learn anything from a black and white photo of a man in a $6000 suit? What exactly do these chiseled models whose hair has not yet begun to thin and who do not pay for their own clothes have to do with me?

This is where I would like to offer my own 12 point plan for good dressing. But, of course, I don’t have one. Most of the time, I make an effort to match, and I know what colors work best on me. Like my European friends, I sometimes go through phases of wearing a sports jacket wherever I go.   Often, though, I regress. Lately I wear my jeans with sneakers more than I know I should, but it’s easy, comfortable, and cheap to do so. My periods of regression inevitably come after several months of dressing better, but without any discernible results. Is anyone noticing that I’m wearing shoes and not sneakers? Does anyone really care?

I will not be buying a suit from Mohan’s, or the custom shoes that I want.  In the meantime, I do my best with the conflicted hope that somebody really does notice.

The Paradox of Children

My children were on vacation last week.  In order to economize on babysitting, my wife and I each took off some time to watch them.  I had two days, and on one of them we went to the zoo.

I love the zoo, not least because I loved it as a kid and my children still love it.  I like watching the wonder and joy in their eyes as they  watch the  animals.   Aside from the bathroom trips and the incessant requests for popcorn, they are engaged.

I also enjoy zoos, though, because they help me to reflect on our own lives.  Zoos bring home to me the basics of life.  We are born; we nourish ourselves; we breed; and we die.  The the enormous bulk of life on earth the fundamental goal is simply to produce more life.  Children are the point.

There are many things that we strive for, whether it is knowledge, fame, or the accumulation of stuff.  But in the end, of course, none of it really matters – only the lives we create and personally touch.  I cannot articulate the love that I feel for my children, and I am grateful for those moments that remind me that this, in fact, is what it is all about.  For humans, though, it goes beyond mere procreation; it is not enough just to create life.  We also nurture and shape it.

And here is the paradox.  I know that I am not an ideal father, but I do my best to at least do no evil.  I also realize that if I am privileged to reach a ripe old age, I will never regret having spent more time with my children, even if it means that I would have written less.  I know this.  But for much of the time that I do spend with my children I feel anxious, guilty, and a little resentful that I am not working.
They being to annoy me; I crave time alone.  I do spend a lot of time with my kids, but it is not all quality time.  Much of it is conflicted.

It is usually at about this point in my reflections that we come to the lions.  On occasion we’ve been lucky enough to find them with cubs.  Watching the interaction between cubs and parents is little different qualitatively from watching household cats and kittens, but with lions the entire charge is certainly dialed up a notch.  The cubs grab and play with their parents, who are generally gracious.  Until they aren’t.  Then they take the cub in their mouths and throw it several yards.  The cub yelps a bit, but is back soon enough doing the same thing.

What do lions have to teach human parents?  Maybe that it’s fine to look after oneself, not only our kids.  That we, at base, are animals too, and that we too can draw strong boundaries between us and our children with no guilt.  That we can love and protect our children fiercely and recognize that they are in fact the very purpose of our own existence, while at the same time carving out a space for our own lives.

It was not a particularly light day at the zoo, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

I Will Never Have a Six-Pack

I work out. In an ideal week – which admittedly I have not had for a while – five to six times a week. More typically I’m at the gym 3-4 times each week. I alternate between classes (spinning, body sculpting), running on the treadmill, using the crosstrainer, and lifting weights. I tend to go through phases of gym attendance, usually about 3 months of regular use followed by a lengthy hiatus. I am now at about the 3 month mark of this phase.

My numbers have improved during this phase. I can now make it through the classes without too much trouble (although I ache the next day). On the treadmill I run about 3.25 miles at a 1% incline and a 9 minutes/mile pace. I bench press 80 lbs (plus the bar) and squat 180 lbs (plus the bar). I try for 450 sit-ups (combined, of different kinds) each time. Once upon a time I used to be able to run 5 8-minute-miles outside, but I’m not unhappy with my progress. And, as I have noted before, I walk or bike to and from work (1.5 miles each way) most days.

I also eat right. I eat little junk, lots of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and little meat. No soda. I might have eggs for breakfast; a bowl of soup for lunch; and then a regular dinner (at which I do often take seconds). If I snack, it is almost always fruit and nuts. I have a few drinks at night, but otherwise avoid nighttime snacks.

Yet my belly does not budge.  I look good at 180, great at 170-175, but I do not go below 190.  I am not really fat, but my belly is discernible.  I never remember trying as hard as I do (which, admittedly, is not extremely hard) to slim down a little with so little to show for it.

There are a gazillion “10 point plans” for getting rid of your belly and thinning down generally.  They all pretty much boil down to platitudes and, frankly, bullshit.  We all know that if you burn more calories than you consume you lose weight.  Period.  No matter how many “ab fat burner super crunches” you do, it won’t change that simple fact.  The more sophisticated of these plans, which combine exercise with diet, are simply impossible for middle-aged family men like me.  They require more time in the gym than even a professor on leave has, or taking over the family-dinner menu to the point where the children revolt, or eating dinner alone or with a “skinless chicken breast” the size of a pack of cards while your family eats  from the large pasta bowl on the table.

But the real question is how much I really want to lose weight.  I assume that if I was willing to give up time to exercise more, or my family dinners, or the pleasure of having a glass of wine with my wife, I really could lose weight.  And I want to – I want to look good!  The cost, though, seems high.  If I’m healthy, why sacrifice some basic pleasures for the sake of vanity?

Maybe, instead, I should finally take the trip to the tailors, let out my pants, and just live with it.

Looking Good

We all know, of course, that we live in a world obsessed by image and appearance. There is no getting away from the media barrage; magazines, TV, movies all reinforce the message that we need to look good. They appear to be effective. The statistics are staggering: In 2005, Americans spent $12.4 billion on cosmetic and plastic surgery, but that is a small part of the more than $160 billion-a-year world beauty business. “Americans spend more each year on beauty than they do on education,” the Economist reported in 2003.

We know that this obsession with beauty is a little bit about health and a lot about money. A lot of people have a lot of money at stake in making sure that we continue to want to look good.

Although it is easy to be cynical about our cultural emphasis on appearances (and looking young), it is not easy to escape it. And I am no exception. Over the past four or five years, I’ve increased my desire to look good.

Why?

This is not a particularly easy question to answer. It is not to attract woman for any practical reason; I’m not looking for an affair. It is not to get ahead at work; it really makes no difference in my line of work. I don’t think it’s out of some sense of my lost youth. It’s also not as if everybody around me, in life and work, are beautiful and I simply want to keep up. They aren’t.

But there you have it. Although I recognize the artificial cultural expectations and I am unable to articulate a good reason, I want to look better.

Let me put a finer point on this. I want to be noticed, just a little.  I want my friends and colleagues to say to me, “You’re looking good!”  I want the women I know to think of me, just a little, when they make love to their husbands. I want the co-eds I teach to think I’m hot and to become the object of their fantasies.

(Important note to parents: I have never, ever, touched a student, graduate or undergraduate, whether of mine or simply at the universities I’ve taught at. Nor would I; it is well beyond the line. This, though, does not mean that I don’t fantasize.)

Now, it seems to me that there are four factors at work in looking good: genetics, physical shape, clothing (and other aspects of putting oneself together), and attitude.  Over the next few posts I want to explore each of these in more depth.

First, genetics.  I did not hit the genetic jackpot.  I don’t think that I am in any way “ugly”: I am decently proportioned, 6′, strong chin, dimples, hazel eyes.  But nor do I conform to any cultural stereotype of handsome.  I am not the “dark and handsome” type (unfortunately, the type my wife prefers).  I have light hair, but don’t have the whole “blond bad boy” thing going on.  My shoulders are not broad, and my butt does not tend toward “tight.”  And my hair, as I previously mentioned, is thinning.

These are things I can’t do anything about.  I’m in the ballpark, and I know that that leaves my “hotness” pretty much up to me.