Author Archives: Lise Quintana

My Big, Fat Geographical Ignorance

January 2, 2023 By in travel Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

This morning, I got up at 3:30am so I could catch one plane to Dallas, then another to New York. It was still dark out as we took off from San Jose, but I couldn’t sleep on the plane. As we flew over some mountains, I looked out the window of the plane and realized it looked like the ocean floor. Peaks and valleys, tiny snatches of green, softened by a blurring layer of sand.

No, it’s not sand, you moron. It’s snow.

I realized this as I recalled the time I flew into Denver one winter night in 1997 and looked out the window as we landed. I thought that Denver must still be building their airport, because they hadn’t paved the runways – they were still rough dirt roads. Except that they weren’t. They were perfectly serviceable tarmac covered in snow.

Don’t blame me. I grew up in Phoenix.

The next time I opened the window shade, we were flying over farm land. But it didn’t look like the lovely farm land above, full of neat squares of different colors of green and brown. This farm land had neat squares, but in the middle of each one was a giant circle, like this is where all the aliens come to practice their crop circles. I have no idea what that’s about. Then again, what I don’t know about agriculture can (and does) fill an entire library.

As we touched down in New York at a little after 5pm, I pulled up the window shade and…it’s dark out. All the hours of sunlight have been spent either in an airport or on a plane.

At least that part of our trip’s done. Next stop – will our luggage be in our stateroom when we arrive? There’s still time to place your bets!

Lent Comes Early!

January 1, 2023 By in travel Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

I was looking at the calendar and seeing that Lent comes in February this year, which is a bit earlier than usual. People who observe Lent also often observe Shrove Tuesday, also known as Pancake Tuesday or Fat Tuesday. It’s not just an opportunity to confess all your sins (that’s the “shrove” in Shrove Tuesday), but also an opportunity to gorge oneself before a season of fasting. For a lot of people, it’s not just gorging – it’s using up everything in the fridge so it doesn’t all go bad during Lent.

I realized that’s what we’ve been doing for the last few days. We haven’t gone grocery shopping, choosing instead to eat cheese on toast to use up both the cheese and the bread, squash and mushroom soup, lots of salads (using a very loose definition of salad, which is “cold vegetables in a bowl with a sauce of some description on them”).

So now I’ve invented a new game: “Eat, Freeze, Dump.” It’s like the old classic “Fuck, Marry, Kill, ” only with food. And our last chance at the “eat” part happens tonight when we have dinner and then go to bed at about 7pm, because we have to get up at 3:30am.

The other fun game is “what goes on the grocery list when we get home.” The good news is that I don’t have to think about that for a few months yet.

Future Perfect Tense

December 30, 2022 By in travel Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

We leave in just under three days. I say “just under,” because at this point, the time until we leave can be comfortably counted in hours (about 68). I have made my packing lists, I have begun packing up things that I’ll take on the plane. Our clothes left two weeks ago. And yet, my own travel experience tells me that I will forget something. Nothing show-stopping, and nothing that cannot be purchased anywhere in the world, but still, when one has had more than 18 months to plan, forgetting anything is galling.

I was talking to my sister on the phone last night, and telling her about the fight in my OCD brain between trying to be as complete as possible in my listing and also trying to anticipate what I’m going to forget. Because I can’t shake the feeling that I will start unpacking things once we get into our stateroom and I will have forgotten something. (Ladies and gentlemen, we have achieved title.) But how do you anticipate what you’re going to forget?

At this point, all the big things are accounted for, which leads me to speculate that the thing I’ll be kicking myself for is something I don’t currently have, but wish I had. That lip mask Sephora sent me a sample of that I’m really liking. A new hat of some description. A full set of professional watercolors and an easel. I have no idea, but there will be something. And then there is the part of my mind that says that because I’m worrying about little stuff, I’ll forget something big. Medication. My passport.

It’s like in fairy tales where the main character is told not to do a certain thing (look in a room, eat something, ask a question), and although they live their whole lives knowing about that proscription, circumstances conspire to force them into doing the very thing they were prohibited from doing, with disastrous consequence. My worrying about forgetting something will force my brain into such a spin that it will, in fact, cause me to forget something.

My only hope is to pack everything now, put on the clothes I plan to fly out in, and just stand by the door for the next two days and two nights until I leave, moving only to add things to my bags as I remember them.

Yeah. That’s a great idea. I think I’ll do that.

Help.

Days Spent in Free Fall

December 26, 2022 By in travel Tags: , , , Leave a comment

You all know that we sent off our luggage just about two weeks ago. Meaning that we are reduced to a tiny fraction of our normal wardrobes, but at least the luggage is out of the way. Okay, most of the luggage is out of the way.

But even with that large hurdle cleared, it still hadn’t sunk in. It still felt hypothetical. I could joke about our luggage not showing up in our stateroom, I could joke about testing positive for COVID, I could joke about shocking our fellow passengers with…well, with just about anything I wear, say, or do. I thought the panic I felt was as bad as it was going to get, but I was so, so wrong.

As the time came closer, I realized just how much work I had to do for Zoetic Press, how much work I had to do to prepare for Christmas (for which my older daughter traveled from Connecticut), and how much work still had to be done to prepare for the trip. But I STILL didn’t freak out.

And then my husband did our final check-in for the cruise.

Why was that the thing that made me lose my shit? Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t decide which of the four thousand things on my list to do first, I couldn’t sleep.

I spent 12 hours a day working nonstop to get all the Zoetic Press stuff done, another six working on Christmas stuff, and the other six sleeping. When I wasn’t lying awake and thinking about everything I still had to do. And finally, I just snapped. I told my poor husband that I never wanted to go on this trip in the first place, that I didn’t want to go at all. That this whole venture was dumb. And, saint that he is, he took it as well as can be expected when one is told that the thing they’ve spent a year and a half planning, preparing for, and getting excited about is dumb. I am lucky beyond description that he’s lived with me for more than twenty years and so doesn’t get angry and vindictive when I lose my everloving mind.

Then I finished all the Zoetic Press stuff, and nearly all of the Christmas stuff, and I was still panicking. There was still so much stuff we had to get before we left, and suddenly we’re looking at the luggage we have and the stuff we need to bring (like four months’ worth of meds) and realizing we’re not going to have quite enough room. The good news is that we have time to figure stuff out.

I forced myself to put everything down and spend Christmas Eve and Christmas day focusing on time with my family, and it gave me a chance to breathe and calm down. It was an island of happiness in a sea of naked panic.

As of today, we’re six days away from leaving. The house is a wreck with the stuff we brought home from Christmas, and I’ve changed my mind about what I’m wearing on the plane and from there, onto the ship, about sixty-eight times an hour.

Stuff that’s going horribly wrong:

  • I need refills of two meds, and I’ve contacted my doctors, but it’s highly unlikely they’ll even see the messages between now and the time I leave
  • Our washing machine, which is likely as old as the building we’re in, has now sprung a leak – we have to buy a new one
  • Our refrigerator is completely full of more food than we’re likely to eat in six days

So…less than a week to go, and so much stuff to do. We’ll see what gets done, and what will sit here for four months and greet us when we step through the door! I’m really hoping it’s not a refrigerator full of angry, sentient leftovers.

Packing Hack!

December 14, 2022 By in travel, vacation Tags: , , Leave a comment

When you hit a certain age, you have meds. It’s just a fact of life. And when you travel, you have to take those meds with you.

Now, you could pack giant bottles of pills, although they take up an unnecessary amount of space. If you’re the kind of person who is okay with opening several bottles of pills and fishing out the right dosage every day, maybe that works for you. It doesn’t for me. I am absolutely one of those people with the giant pill organizer that I sit down once a week and fill.

Twice a day, morning and night, I get to take a big fistful of pills – a lot of vitamins and supplements, a few prescription medications. I feel like that scene in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, where they’re having breakfast in the middle of nowhere and Bernadette’s breakfast consists of nothing but a bowl full of pills and capsules. With that organizer, it’s easier for me to remember to take my meds, and when I take them, I know I’m taking all of them.

So how do I have that same confidence once I’m on the ship? A few months ago, I ordered some pill pouches – tiny zipper bags that will each hold a morning or evening’s worth of pills. Now that we’re getting down to the time that everything has to be packed and shipped, I realized I needed to pack my meds. How do I do that in a way that won’t take hours?

I specialize in breaking down processes into their component steps, and here, there are two steps: sorting the pills into groups, and then getting them into the pill pouches. There’s really no easy way to sort the pills, but that doesn’t take a long time. The time consuming part is getting them into the pill pouches. There are big, commercial machines that will help you do that, but I don’t need to spend $1400 to do this.

Not only am I great at breaking down tasks into their component parts, I’m also great at improvising solutions from what I have at hand. Here’s what I put together.

It’s a letter-sized sheet of paper, folded in half vertically. I cut the edges 2/3 of the way to the center so that I had four flaps on each side. Then I folded each flap into a tube using a Sharpie as a rough size guide, and taped it together. I put tiny craft clothespins on the folded edge to make it stand up better, but tape would work just as well. Now all I had to do was fit the pill pouches onto the tubes and sort the pills – they’re already packed! It took less than half the time I expected it to – a little over three hours to do 240 individual pill packs, and I only used the one sheet of paper.

Now that they’re all sorted and packed, that’s one less thing I have to worry about.

Time for Second Guessing!

December 13, 2022 By in travel Tags: , , Leave a comment

I spent most of a day packing and re-packing my list of stuff, and felt pretty good about it. Smug, almost.

But even before I went to sleep that night, I was already second guessing every choice I had made. Should I have packed more than one black turtleneck? (Although seriously, who do I think I am – Steve Jobs?) Should I have packed those really cute cigarette pants with the roses? And did I pack those walking shoes I had bought specifically for this trip? The problem is that I packed on Sunday so that my husband could clutter up our bedroom with his packing on Monday so that the luggage could be picked up Tuesday.

After he was done with his packing Monday afternoon, my husband came down and announced “Wow, even after I packed a bunch of extra stuff, I’m still not even close to filling up my suitcase.”

Now I am not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. Instead, I am happy to fill that mouth with those cute cigarette pants, the walking shoes that I had not, in fact, packed, and a bunch of other stuff. We weighed our luggage, and what we just shipped is collectively 220 pounds of luggage, clothes, and sundry other stuff. And that’s just what we shipped. See those two little carry-on bags in the corner? Those are coming with us, along with our overnight bags.

Today, that luggage was carted off, and the next time we lay eyes on it, it will be in our stateroom aboard ship. Theoretically. Hopefully.

This is the part where someone says “What could go wrong?”

Switching Gears

December 11, 2022 By in personal, travel Tags: , , Leave a comment

Normally, I’m in this space talking about my whole weight loss thing and how that’s going, but it’s time to switch gears, because this next four and a half months is going to be all about the cruise I’m taking with my husband. “Holy shit!” I hear you cry! “A four and a half month cruise?!” To which I reply “Don’t be silly. We don’t leave for a couple of weeks, so the cruise itself will only be four months.”

And what happens first? PACKING. How do you even pack for four months? My first question was “Do they have some kind of enormous luggage storage rooms so that we have somewhere to store our steamer trunks and hatboxes and croquet mallets and stuff?” For months I looked for that info, and couldn’t find it anywhere. On cruises we’ve been on in the past, we just shoved all our luggage under the bed, but the longest cruise we’ve been on before now is 3 weeks. Fitting a couple of big suitcases under the bed is no sweat. But how do you find room for luggage for FOUR MONTHS?

Turns out, even on a trip of that length, all your suitcases have to fit in your room. Since we’re not members of the royal family, we have a normal stateroom, which will be about the size of a parking space. Okay, two parking spaces. We’re taking two really big suitcases, two smaller carry-ons, two overnight cases, and two enormous duffel bags. What’s going to end up happening will be a sort of turducken of luggage: the folded duffel bags will go into the overnight cases which will then go into one large suitcase, and the packing cubes will go into the carry-ons, which will go into the other big suitcase. Problem solved!

Well, that problem at least. Now that we know how we’re going to pack, the next question is what are we going to pack?

First, we had to do a little reality check. Yes, we’re leaving for four months, but do we have to pack four months’ worth of stuff? I mean, I don’t own 120 pairs of socks. Wait, bad example. (I really like socks.) But I sure as heck don’t own 120 pairs of underpants. We decided that three weeks’ worth of clothes would be the right amount.

Then I started laying out three weeks’ worth of clothes. Oh, and also a bathing suit. And pajamas. And don’t forget the formalwear. And shoes. Undershirts. Sweaters. During the trial run, I had all my clothes stacked up on the bed such that the bed was almost entirely obscured. (See picture left.)

I did a little research. I mean, that’s why we have the internet, right? So that we might learn from other people’s mistakes. And what I learned was that, whatever you initially took out of your closet, put half of it back. Every single article agreed that less is more, and if there was anything urgent you had forgotten, other places in the world will have them and gladly sell them to you.

So I put stuff back. When I finally started packing, I was a little disoriented that it seemed like…not a lot. Especially considering we’ll be going from England in January, through the equator, and into a southern hemisphere late fall, then back. We’re opting for the classic plan: layers. I’ve got undershirts, button-downs, trousers and all manner of socks. I even have hats (one for cold weather, one for warm), gloves, and a scarf. I plan to be a warm, happy onion.

The luggage service comes on Tuesday to pick up all our luggage and take it to the ship. This isn’t a service of the cruise line – this is something you have to arrange yourself. But for a couple of non-neurotypical people who aren’t exactly spring chickens, it’s worth the cost to not have to keep track of eight skillion pieces of luggage.

This gives us about 20 days to freak out about “Did we pack X?” “Should we bring Y?” “Did you pack Z? I needed it!” I can hardly wait!

The Disappointment of Joy

September 28, 2022 By in leisure, practical advice Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

I love holidays. I love family gatherings, I love shopping for gifts (wrapping, not so much), I love making holiday food, I love singing along with holiday music. It doesn’t even really matter what the holiday is – birthdays, Christmas, Arbor Day – whatever. But holidays come with their own self-contained heartbreak: by definition, they only last 24 hours. I think a lot of people feel the same, because nowadays we talk about holiday seasons. We get weeks, if not months, of time to anticipate and enjoy all the parts of holidays we love. As I write this, it’s mid-September and I’m already seeing Christmas merchandise in stores, and I love it. The anticipation, the building excitement, the planning, the fun of that secret stash of presents or decorations or recipes whose unveiling will undoubtedly bring happiness – I’m there for it.

For Christmas specifically, the buildup is just huge, and I think it reveals a truth that many people are only just coming to realize. Having a thing isn’t nearly as cool as getting a thing. This phenomenon explains the rise of the unboxing videos and the proliferation of TikTok and YouTube channels exclusively devoted to innovative ways to wrap gifts. The anticipation, the delightful torment of beautifully-wrapped mysteries under the tree, the urge to shake every box and guess what’s in it – I contend that it’s much better than the actual holiday, where you spend the morning tearing into all that wrapping paper, opening parcels from distant family with the label “Do Not Open Until Christmas,” crack all the crackers…and when the last present has been opened, there’s a little letdown. Wait…that’s it? No more? It’s not the stuff – heaven knows I don’t need the stuff. It’s the opening.

We tend to go a little crazy in my family.

But wait – there’s a great solution! ADVENT CALENDARS! The beauty of Advent calendars is that they’re a chance to have a tiny bit of that joy every day of December leading up to Christmas. Go to Amazon and look up Advent calendars, you will get thousands of results. Chocolate, tea, alcohol, beauty products, toys, ornaments…there’s almost nothing you can’t find a whole bunch of in an Advent calendar.

And because I’m me, if a little is good, then a lot must be great! A typical December comes with at least a dozen Advent calendars (not counting the cheap ones you find in every grocery store with teeny, waxy chocolates in them – we normally have one or two of those as well) of varying sizes descriptions. The star of the show is a wooden box with 24 drawers, each of which I’ve filled with some tiny present and candy. I spend months buying things specifically for the Advent calendars, and watching my adult children open them is as exciting as if I were the one getting the presents.

Everyone should get Advent calendars – even non-Christians. Maybe we should rebrand them as Heathentide calendars, which means we could enjoy them for the entire lunar month between the full moon before Christmas to the full moon after (this year, that would be from December 7, 2022, through January 6, 2023). For Heathentide, you don’t have to buy presents. Pick up stuff from your house – used wire twist ties, empty potato chip bags, dryer lint – and stick it into the boxes. Then experience the unbridled joy of getting to open stuff that you’re never going to think about again and feel no guilt about throwing away.

Where Have I Gone?

August 2, 2022 By in personal Tags: , , , 3 Comments

I’ve talked before about the Thin Bubble. It’s that air of civility that surrounds thin people and colors how they see the world, and how the world sees them. If you’ve been thin all your life, you’ve probably never noticed it. People accord you basic civility every day, and you believe that’s just how the world is. But if you’re fat, you know that it’s not how it works for everyone.

When I was in my late 20s, I lost a great deal of weight. I got down to what would be considered a “normal” weight for my height, and for the first time, I experienced life inside the Thin Bubble. I’m not talking about people finding me sexually attractive – that’s an entirely different thing. This is much more basic and mundane. Service workers now greeted me when I came into a shop. Strangers smiled at me and greeted me. But at that point in my life, I was married and running a daycare, so it’s not like I was out in public much.

Then I had another baby, and put on weight. And put on more weight. And before I knew it, I was back to where I had started, plus some (anyone who’s fat knows exactly how this goes). I went back to being invisible – to having service workers look right through me, to being able to walk into a crowd of people and have no one meet my eye.

Now, twenty years later, I’ve lost weight again, and things have changed dramatically. I’ve never been any great beauty – I’ve known that all my life. And now that I’m solidly average in every way, I’m a very different kind of invisible. When I was large, people looked at me and their minds said “unacceptable” and filtered me from their perception. For purposes of, say, navigating around me in a crowded room, I registered as something like a piece of furniture. The physical fact of me was undeniable.

Nowadays, I walk to work most days, and once I’m at work, I break for lunch or to go to the post office, which involved walking through downtown. And every day, people bump into me and act as though I sprang up right in front of them. I’ve had people look right at me, bump into me, and then look surprised. At least twice, I’ve nearly been hit by cars whose drivers looked at me in the crosswalk and started forward anyway. I am now so average that I am functionally invisible.

I never for a moment thought that I’d be leered at in the street or propositioned by strangers, but I never realized I’d disappear entirely. Now part of me is wondering if I need to change my demeanor. Become one of those people who greets everyone they pass in the street. Someone who waves at passing cars. Someone who calls out to people from halfway down the block. But honestly, that kind of behavior – having to engage with literally every person I encounter – would be a nightmare. I couldn’t do it. Which means that either I never leave the house, or I learn to live with being invisible.

All my life, all I wanted to be was invisible. It’s not what I thought it would be.

Post-Surgery Update: Part 2

July 22, 2022 By in Uncategorized Tags: Leave a comment

I’ve put this off for a while, partly because my feelings about the aftermath of the surgery are complicated, and partly because some of the fallout is still going on.

Once the drains were out (which normally takes two weeks, but for me took a month), I thought things would finally begin to heal. I was wrong.

The first indication of trouble was that the intersection of the two huge incisions on my stomach began to open up. First it was a tiny hole, then a series of tiny holes, then one big hole, leaking yellowish/greenish fluid (there is no better color to say “this isn’t a good thing”). The surgeon thought it was pseudomonas, a fairly common post-surgical infection normally cured with the antibiotic Cipro. I took the Cipro for ten days…nothing. Another ten days…nothing. Another ten days…nothing.

By this time, I had moved. Going to my surgeon’s office twice a week for him to look at me for five minutes and swear I was getting better wasn’t an option anymore. I went to my regular doctor, who cultured the wound (which had now become three wounds at different points along the incision). It turned out to be actinomycosis, an infection so rare that neither my regular doctor nor my surgeon had ever seen a case of it. I was referred to an infectious disease specialist, who confirmed the diagnosis. The treatment is a LONG course of penicillin.

It’s the end of July now, so it’s been nearly six months since my surgery. I’ve been on penicillin for two and a half months, and I’ll be on it for at least another four months. Probably longer. The infectious disease specialist said that actinomyces is a really slow-growing bacteria, but that means it’s also slow to cure. And it’s hard to tell how things are going – the disgusting discharge has slowed, but I now have about twelve open wounds across my lower stomach, with new ones opening up occasionally.

Was it so bad?

There are so many things about this surgery that didn’t turn out the way I was hoping. The first is that I had specifically asked my surgeon to remove my belly button. There’s a complicated reason for this that I won’t go into here, but I made myself very, very clear. He ignored me. What I have now is a wrinkle of skin a good 4″ higher than my belly button should be, in the middle of a bunch of other scarring. It looks like what it is – a mistake. The second is that the loose skin I thought he would remove from the backs of my thighs is still there. My buttocks look like deflated balloons. And the disgusting, leaking, yellowy-green cherry on this botched meat cake is the line of open wounds along my lower abdomen.

I know far more about wound care than I ever thought I would. There’s now a shelf above my dresser that’s full of nothing but combine pads (they’re thick, 5″x9″ surgical pads), surgical sponges (normal people would call them gauze), and prescription antibiotic spray. The amount of medical waste I generate is embarrassing, because the wound dressings have to be changed at least twice a day, and medical stuff is all individually-wrapped for sterility.

All this drama has meant that it’s taking me a lot longer to process the emotions than I think it should have. I’m finally coming around to feeling okay about how I look in clothes. It’s still a surprise to me that I now fit in easy-to-find, off the rack clothes, and post-surgery, they fit the way I expect them to. It’s now been nearly three years since I had my bariatric surgery, and I haven’t experienced the weight rebound a lot of people experience. I weigh myself daily, and it’s been within a few pounds for the last year and a half. My bariatric surgeon, my regular doctor, and my other surgeon all say this bodes very well for my long-term success. So, that’s a victory.

I wonder how long it’ll be before the good feelings outweigh the bad regarding this whole exercise. We’ll see.