Yesterday, I found myself in the gastro doc's office for two and a half hours. We went through in detail my history of eating disorders, veganism, vegetarianism, surgeries, childhood afflictions and allergies, family history. The nurse practioner who spent so much time with me reviewed the results from my last colonoscopy. She told me all the things that could be causing my distress. She told me that the last gastro doc eyeballed my gut but didn't actually do a biopsy for celiac disease. She told me sometimes part of my stomach gets stuck in my esophogus. (!) She said they needed to start over. I began trying to hide my anxiety attack.

She ordered labs to look at my kidneys, thyroid, liver. She ordered an upper scope and colonoscopy for next week. She asked for all sorts of things too gross to list. She gave me a sheet on colitis. She told me a list of other drugs that might help, one of which was steroids. 

I started to cry.

I told her one of the ways I manage my eating disorder history is to try very hard to stay in a ten-pound window that is healthy and realistic. I told her I knew it's possible my mother is right and my ED contributed to my current suffering, but that talking about it like that makes me feel like I somehow did this to myself on purpose, which brings back memories of people thinking I did anorexia to myself on purpose, that I am to blame for everything bad that happens to my health. I told her I'm scared of steroids.

She dropped her papers and rolled herself over and touched my arm. She told me she understood and that would be a last resort.

I understand how stupid it sounds to be so afraid of weight gain. Welcome to the wonderful world of ED recovery. I write this here not because I want to scare my family into thinking I'll relapse, but because I work so very hard not to relapse, and I'm always actively managing what I put in my body with that in mind. It's important my doctors understand that if they have choices about which medication to give me, they should not give me the one with a side effect of weight gain. I've been shocked at how willy nilly doctors can be about not telling their patients this pill or that pill could make you gain forty pounds, by the way. It's true that everyone's body responds to things differently -- something I am learning more and more as I get older -- but still. If I were a doctor, I would tell people things like that.

And she said since I'm getting a colonoscopy next week, it won't make too much a difference to eat gluten. She suspects it's not gluten because the situation is so severe, but only a biopsy can tell for sure.

I went a week without eating any gluten at all. It was actually not as hard as I thought it would be. Eating at home was a snap. Eating out was a giant pain in the ass, but we only ate out one meal in that week I was off gluten. More and more, that's the case for us, especially in the summer. It's so expensive. I didn't realize how expensive eating out was until my husband lost his job last fall and we drastically cut our food budget. However, sometimes it's really fun and necessary and being gluten-free while eating out sucks eggs. 

She also bumped up my Welchol to three giant horse pills in the morning and evening to see if that would have any effect. She said at this point, it's just a process of elimination until we figure out what is causing my problems. As I stared at the chart listing all the things that can be wrong with my digestive system, I was pretty overwhelmed. And I felt pretty old. 

She asked me, though, to please let her keep trying to find the problem, since I admitted I'd only gone to two gastro docs once each because what they gave me didn't help. I asked her if she thought that was weird because clearly I had a problem, and she said, "You'd be surprised what people will tolerate until it becomes their normal."

Isn't that an interesting sentence? I am so stealing it.

So now that I have absolute, positive verification that no, what's happening with me is clinically significant, otherwise known as ZOMG YOU ARE A FREAK OF NATURE, I'm promising myself I'm going to figure out, at least, what is causing these issues and see what I can do to bring it down to a low roar. Even though the doctor's office called me in a panic this morning because my insurance is changing again and I don't know the new number and won't until July 1. And my colonoscopy is on July 3. 

Last night I ate a huge plate of broccoli and mac & cheese. Hello, gluten, my long-lost love.

My sister loaned me her boxed set of Battlestar Gallactica DVDs a while back, and I burned through all the seasons in record time. I just binged that show, I loved it so much. So many fascinating questions about humanity. While stumbling around the Internet, I discovered there is another series, although a much shorter one, called Caprica, which is set on Earth and shows how Cylons came to look like people. (There is a lot of other stuff that is not explained, unfortunately, but whatever.)

In the show, a guy played by Eric Stoltz invents a game called V-World. You get into V-World by putting on some whack glasses that remind me of the banana clip in Star Trek only these have lights. It's completely virtual there, and you can't die. If you get shot or stabbed, you de-res and you can't ever go back to V-World. You only get one life.

It's extremely dangerous in V-World, though. People play games of Russian roulette and carry machetes and guns and drive spaceships into buildings. Several characters ask how to win the game, and nobody seems to know. Most disturbing -- most people don't seem to care. They're just excited to fuck with as many people as possible while they're there. Maybe it's because they know they're not really killing someone. Maybe it's because the culture of the game is so violent. But these people shoot guns without even looking at what they're trying to hit.

At one point, one of the main characters asks another what the point of the game is. He doesn't know, either. The man who created the game didn't even give himself an extra life, and he doesn't really seem to understand any of it, either. I don't want to ruin the series for you if you want to watch it, so I won't go on any longer about the game or what happens there, but it occurred to me that I didn't like the scenes in V-World at all, because nobody seemed to care what happened there, if people got hurt, if people were sad. 

One of the things I struggle with most in modern America is accountability and the dissociative imagination at times brought out in certain people by the Internet. If V-World is to the Internet as Caprica is to the U.S. (it seems particularly the U.S., but that could be because I live here), then the people in V-World are physically acting out the racist tweets, ragey comments and hacking that goes on in real life on the Internet. 

While thinking about this yesterday, I had a flashback to ordering a sweater from the J. Crew catalog when I was in college and when I did not have access to The World Wide Web. I did not even have a cell phone, egads. I used the phone attached to the wall in my dorm room and called the 800 number and described the sweater and page number of the catalog to the woman who answered the phone. She was really nice, and we chatted for a while about what a cute sweater it was and whether I should get it a size too big as was the fashion at the time. I told her my credit card number (which was brand new, whee) and hung up. I had to be nice to her -- she was a person, after all, and we were having a conversation with our mouth-holes and everything. That level of personal interaction was pretty much everywhere. When ATMs came about, we were all overjoyed that we could get our money in $5 increments late at night to go to the bars, but also a little freaked out that something might go wrong and there was no person to help us sort it out.

Now we have to do almost everything ourselves. Book travel. Handle our banking. Shop without the aid of a salesperson. Scan and bag our groceries. (Although I think in the small town where I grew up, high school boys will still sack your groceries and carry them to your car for you. That is pretty rare outside of small towns, though.)

Somewhere in between convenience and alienation lies V-World. At some point in the loss of face-to-face or at least voice-to-voice interaction, some individuals morph into douchebags with no moral compass, no personal sense of accountability and pride that would stop them from hurting someone's feelings or even -- virtually -- their bodies, just for fun. Where on the continuum is the turning point? How do we insulate ourselves against the fuck-it point? How do we teach our kids to go on being accountable in a situation where accountability becomes counter-intuitive to the game?

What, indeed, is the point of the game? When did we stop saying "please" and "thank you"? Was it when we went from talking to the J. Crew person to chatting with her on the website? The whole Caprica thing freaked me out sufficiently that I'm going to be monitoring my behavior very closely. I'm very polite and welcoming in my neighborhood. I'm a nice neighbor. I watch people's cats when they go out of town and tell them when their garage door is open and keep an eye on their kids when they're in the cul-de-sac. I send thank you notes, paper ones, when people give me presents. I'm not a total douchebag online, but I could be nicer. Sometimes I think I will say "thank you" and then realize I'm talking to an autoresponder, and maybe that's a piece of it, too. Sometimes I don't even know if who I'm talking to is real or virtual. Does it make sense to be polite to Siri? Does taking her for granted translate directly into walking away from a gas station cashier without saying thanks for giving me directions? 

Where is the line in V-World? 

What is the point of the game?

Last week while my mom was visiting, she, my girl and I went to Panera for dinner before Ma sweetly took my girl home so I could have a few hours to work on PARKER CLEAVES. As we ate, I found myself completely overtaken with the conversation of the two women behind me, who were filling out some sort of Bible-related workbooks. 

Their conversation was HILARIOUS and not intentionally at all. I sat there, nodding and smiling at my mom and daughter because they thought they were talking to me, but they were not. They were talking at me while I listened with all my might to the women as they discussed their answers to the workbook questions. 

When we were done eating, we walked out into the parking lot and I told my mom and daughter what they'd been saying. My mom laughed out loud. 

Me: "I'm totally blogging this."

My Conscience My Daughter: "Mommy, what if they saw it?"

Me: "How would they see it? They don't know me. Plus, I don't know their names." (fully aware of how completely wrong and backward this conversation is)

My Conscience My Daughter: "MOMMY."

Me: "Twitter?"

My Conscience My Daughter: "MOOOOMMMMY."

Me: "Okay, fine."

So I told the story in my editorial meeting to my co-workers, and we laughed and laughed. And see, I found a way to blog it without violating the spirit of my daughter's wise words. The best part about this story: Right before I started eavesdropping, I was telling my daughter she can't have her own blog until she's 25. 

I'll just find a way to work that conversation into dialogue in PARKER CLEAVES.

I am so sick of my gut.

I have already been diagnosed with bile acid malabsorption and take medicine for it, two huge pills twice a day. However, those pills can't be taken within four hours of any other medicine or it won't be absorbed properly, either. Since I value my mental health more than my bowel health, I put the priority on taking my antidepressants at the same time every day, but whether I remember to take the other pills twice a day within four hours is another question. Some days, I am great. Other days, particularly at certain times in my cycle, I'm a train wreck. 

I asked my doctor whether I should eliminate gluten, both the regular doctor and the gastroentologist. I don't remember exactly what either one said, but I know neither of them instructed me to give up gluten, or I would've tried it. Without being directed by a doctor to do it, I've been totally dragging my feet, because the thought of someone saying, "Is there something here you can eat?" and worrying about making special meals so I can eat or worrying every time I go to a restaurant about what I will eat -- well, that feels a lot like the years I spent as a vegan and vegetarian to disguise my disordered eating. 

I really, really don't want have "bad" foods again.

But I'm so, so sick of feeling sick. 

I've asked people about it before, maybe even written about it here, I don't remember. I've heard you have to go for a month before you can even tell and you have to replace your toaster and there might be gluten in your medicine and your lotion and HOLY FUCKING SHIT YOU ARE JUST SCREWED SO EMBRACE GOOD TOILET PAPER.

I could cry. Seriously. This is how much I hate thinking about regulating my diet like this. It's not that I'm so in love with bread. It's that I really despise thinking about food that much. It's a very short path for me from reading labels to counting calories and all the rest of it. 

Of course, I decided to try this experiment of eliminating gluten for at least two weeks right after eating a whole wheat tortilla for breakfast. I am going to try it anyway, as best as I can, then go back to see my doctor and discuss the situation with her again. She's moved to a new practice and my insurance is changing in July and hopefully that will all synch up so as not to cause weird insurance nightmares.

I HATE THIS. But I guess I have to try. I've been tested for celiac disease and Crohn's and lactose intolerance, and I don't have any of those. At one point in my life, I was told I had IBS, but ha ha! That was actually endometriosis. I know I'm getting older and having your body go all whack is just part of that, but I am having a big, fat pity party today, anyway. 

WHINE WHINE WHINE WHINE WHINE

(sob)

It's been unnaturally cool here right up until this week -- so much so that last weekend the two afternoons we spent at the pool involved a little shivering, and none of us had the gumption to try the lake. I remember visiting San Diego a few times and thinking how nice the weather always is there, day after day after day. And then Kansas City randomly had day after day after day of seventy degrees. Surely, we thought, they would stop after Memorial Day. Nope. Still seventy degrees, beautiful.

Surely, we thought, not into June? 

SEVENTY SEVENTY SEVENTY SEVENTY

I realized I am too hot-blooded for seventy degrees in summer. I adore you, seventy degrees, in any other season of the year, but I like summer weather to be eight-five or above on the weekends so I can get in the water without shivering, lie on my towel and feel the water evaporating off me in the sunshine, walk inside a movie theater and catch my breath at the temperature drop. These things mean summer to me.

I was really starting to worry until this week. My husband is out of town for work and my mom came down for a visit. She took my daughter after dinner on Tuesday and gave me a pass to go write. I took my printed-out draft and my notebook down to a local pub and sat out on the deck for two hours, and the people I saw were wearing clothes I expect to see in June: tank tops, shorts, sundresses. The air still held the days' heat even after the sun set. When I walked into my house, I felt the air conditioning hit my arms. 

Thank God it's back to normal.

The contractor was in my house fewer than five minutes measuring for a new door to go between the garage and the kitchen. He's the last contractor we'll need to finish up the remodel of Chateau Travolta's kitchen -- other than him, it's stuff we can do ourselves -- install the range hood, finish the baseboard, replace the hardware on the pantry shelves that don't actually work the way they're supposed to, install the pulls. Just this one last guy after we had to fire the cabinet installation people after the third time they failed to show up without warning and replace them with some poor guy who was told the job would take three hours and was at my house from 9 am to 6:45 pm on Friday.

I showed him to the door wearing my usual pre-workout uniform of yoga pants, t-shirt, hat and flip-flops. He looked at me and smiled. "Don't work too hard," he said.

I actually did a double-take and found myself gesturing toward my desk, my laptop, the innards of the Internet -- where I do indeed  work a full-time job with a salary and health insurance and a 401(k) plan and everything. That full-time job covers half my family's expenses and without it, we'd be screwed.

I wanted to wipe the smile off his face.

If it had been just this guy, I probably wouldn't be so pissed off. But almost every contractor who has come into my house has made a similar comment, like they can't fathom I could possibly be working as I sit in my office and type away silently. Every single one of them has felt the need to comment something very similar to "don't work too hard." 

But why do I care what the contractors think? Beloved can't fathom why I would give a shit. They're here to do a job, we pay them, they leave. But it's that I'm here the entire time they are working. I hear the hint of derision in their voices as they ask which website I write for, again? And what exactly do I do there? 

I've given a few of them my business card to end the discussion. Yes, dumbass, I have a business card and a title and a corporate address.

BUT WHY DO I CARE WHAT THEY THINK? I know what I do for a living. I know I work really hard. I know when I need to, I can pull off normal business wear. Would anyone ask me what it is I do again, exactly, if I were typing away silently in an office building when they walked in carrying a ladder? I don't think so.

BUT I STILL SHOULD NOT CARE. WHY DO I CARE?

It's totally bugging me.

I've read more books and articles than I can count about how the brain functions, how negative thinking becomes a very real rut, how worrying doesn't do anything but give you serious health problems. I became convinced that my stress reactions were more harmful to my health than French fries and adjusted accordingly. I'm very interested in being a happy person. It's a personal goal. I'm very goal-oriented, just work with me here.

I read somewhere people are happiest while exercising and something else of course I can't remember. I decided they were happy while exercising because when it's burning you can't think about all your problems -- you're concentrating on breathing through the effort. There's just not time to be sad. Or maybe it's endorphins. I don't know, I just make sure I exercise four or five times a week. 

I read about how when you're younger, you equate happiness with some sort of ecstasy or emotional high, a very RAH RAH LET'S GET CRAZY AT DISNEYLAND kind of happiness, and when you get older it's more let's sit on the deck and chat over a bottle of wine happiness. I look for moments when I'm relaxed in my day. In the summer, it's the drive back from dropping my daughter off at summer camp. The air is fresh, the windows are down, I haven't fully switched into work mode yet, and the day seems very full of possibility. 

---

Earlier this week, I was up for two hours in the night with the little angel and found myself a puddle on the floor the next day. The day after that, I was fine, having had my seven hours of sleep. It's truly shocking how much being tired or hungry or hot or cold or in pain will do to my mood. Part of happiness, I think, is alleviating physical discomfort so I don't concentrate on it -- or even if I don't concentrate on it, it seems to find its way into my mood without my realizing it -- so part of happiness is tending to my physical needs just like you would a toddler's. Eat regularly, sleep regularly, stretch sore muscles, take headache medicine, layer.

Once my physical needs are met, "happiness" is really "interested." I might be relaxed during my leisure time, but it's not really super satisfying unless I feel like I'm learning something or pondering something or hearing a new story about someone or having a good conversation. Watching boring TV can actually make me cranky, because I have so little free time I hate to waste it on something stupid. I realize how snooty that sounds, but I am pretty demanding about plot when it comes to entertainment. Realizing that has saved me hours of Real Housewives watching.

---

Last night I fell asleep in the little angel's bed after we read together and she shut off the light. When I woke an hour later, groggy, my plans for writing seemed doomed. I sat at the table and thought about what I wanted to do. Beloved's traveling most of this month for work, so I have a unique opportunity to really focus on my writing in the evenings. 

I bemoaned how tired I was. I really didn't want to write. I wanted to couchmelt and watch TV. I did that the night before, though, and I thought how once when I bemoaned that I would be twenty-eight when I finished my master's degree (I know, I know), Beloved pointed out that I'd be twenty-eight someday whether I finished the degree or not, and it's shaped my writing life ever since. I wanted to couchmelt, but I also wanted to have written, to be moving forward on my new novel and be closer to seeing the story emerge from the depths of the well. 

So I took out my notebook (longhand works better for me after sitting in front of a damn computer all day) and closed my eyes and pictured the scene. I told myself to just get two handwritten pages. Then the scene became a little clearer and I knew I wouldn't write the whole thing, but I would write to a natural stopping point in the action, and I did, and it was nine and a half handwritten pages, and I was happy.

---

This morning I saw this article about the most common regrets of the dying, and once again, happiness as a choice came up. 

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

"This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realize until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called 'comfort' of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again."

I ended up staying up later than I meant to. I'm trying not to get mad at myself for not being perfect -- not eating perfectly, not drinking perfectly, not going to bed on time perfectly, not having my house cleaned perfectly or my yard mowed perfectly. I've found I can't be interesting and perfect at the same time, because doing all those things I just mentioned perfectly takes a tremendous amount of planning and effort. If today were my last day, I wouldn't regret having eaten a peanut butter-slathered bagel for breakfast (which I did), but I would regret it if I didn't write last night. It's the one thing I did all day that was all mine, just for me, and creating something original does, in fact, make me happy.

At long last, a project I've been working on with the other editors of BlogHer and Open Road Media has come to fruition! Today is the book birthday of BlogHer's first food anthology, ROOTS: Where Food Comes From & Where It Takes Us.

Isn't the cover pretty? ROOTS features the work of the following writers: 

• MaryAnn Parker
• Michael Procopio
• Lucy Pearce
• Somer Canon
• Eugenia Gratto
• Doris Marbut
• Maki Itoh
• Evangelina (Vangie) Sosa
• Molly Stephens
• Ina Kota
• Yasmeen Hilmi Richards
• Tammy Kleinman
• Tori Avey
• Laurie White
• Angela Tung
• Marge Perry
• Sean Timberlake
• Diana Veiga
• Lynne Rees
• Angela Rapids
• Casey Barber
• David Leite
• Jessica Spengler
• Ann Courcy
• Arva Ahmed
• Elizabeth Ranger
• Elizabeth Heath
• Christine Pittman
• Julia Rosen
• Carrie Pacini
• Linda Lange
• Erin Deniz
• Sarah Melamed
• Madeleine Morrow
• LindaShiue
• Allison Zurfluh
• Judith Newton
• Valerie StreeterAlbarda
• Amber Kelly-Anderson
• Anita Breland

This project was really fun for me. It's hugely rewarding when blogging and booking come together in my world, and this was one of those times. Here's some more info about ROOTS if you like reading about food, recipies, family history and discoveries.

Where to get ROOTS:

• Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Roots-Where-BlogHer-Anthology-ebook/dp/B00CSCNJXS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1369421157&sr=8-1&keywords=roots+blogher
• Apple: http://www.blogher.com/frame.php?url=https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/roots/id648670885?mt=11
• OpenRoad: http://www.openroadmedia.com/roots
• B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/roots-stacy-morrison/1115409233?ean=9781453297094
• Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17938134-roots
• Kobo: COMING SOON!

DJ Nibbles loves it when things get published.

Hoggin Craft now has its own home on the web with nine custom pigs currently for sale. You can also email me your theme and we'll custom-design one for you.