Allie Griffith's Open Salon Blog

Met my halfway goal: 50 pounds by my birthday!

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:06:51 -0400

I started my weight loss plan (not going to say diet, because it isn't really, more a lifestyle change) on January 15th, with the goal of losing 100 pounds total and 50 pounds by my birthday, five months away. My birthday is Sunday, and today I hit my goal with three days to spare.

My BMI has gone from within a hair of 40, the range considered "extremely obese", which creates an extremely high risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and hypertension, passed through obesity class 2, in which the risk is classified as only very high, and into obesity class 1, unadorned high risk. A little more than 10 pounds - close enough to smell it - and I won't be obese anymore, just plain old overweight, at only increased risk. And several studies show that being only moderately overweight carries no increased risk at all.

I started trying to loss weight in hopes of improving my overall health. I suffer from what the doctors call "lupus-like syndrome," which is to say I have many of the symptoms of lupus, but my antibody profile doesn't exactly match that of classic lupus. For some reason, my body produces antibodies to attack itself. Like lupus, lupus-like syndrome is frustrating in that any symptom can appear at any time as the body launches a new attack, then fade away for months. Bouts of illness are called "flares." Typically my flares involve inflammation of my heart lining or blood vessels, which sends my cardiovascular system into a frenzy and fills my blood with waste products. It's nearly impossible for me to exercise during a flare, which is the primary reason I gained so much weight. But, unfortunately, the weight gain was adding more stress to my already overloaded cardiovascular system. I needed to do something, or die. Waiting for a time when I felt better to start exercising wasn't going to work, because I felt bad all the time.

Losing fifty pounds hasn't cured my autoimmune problems. In fact, at times, it seems to have provoked them. Any stress tends to trigger an autoimmune flare, and operating on a caloric deficit counts as stress. I've spent several weeks of this time struggling with chest pains, muscle and joint pains, headaches, muscle tremors, skin freakouts (I don't get the classic lupus 'butterfly' rash which has left Seal so scarred, but my skin has its own repertoire of terrible ways to behave), fevers, purpura (bruising of the hands and feet), and, most annoyingly, a menstrual period every 21 days as my body adjusts to less estrogen, which is produced by fat.

But! I kept going. And I made my first goal, despite all.

My resting heart rate has dropped from 72 beats a minute at the best of times and much higher than that during an autoimmune flare, to well under 60 beats a minute. I had a flare last week, and instead of shooting up into the physically uncomfortable feels-like-someone-is-chasing-me when I try to sleep 100+ range, my heart rate only went up to about 70 - a perfectly normal rate.

When I started, I had to stop and rest while walking the third of a mile around the lake. Now I can walk two miles easily; when I'm not having a flare, I can walk pretty much as long as I want to walk. I've been using my stationary bike to push myself, because it has a palm pulse sensor so I can tell from moment to moment if my heart is having a fit. It's necessary because when I'm having heart inflammation, my heart can go from a safe range to over 200 beats a minute instantly. The sort of chest band/wrist sensor you have to check periodically was never going to work - I had to be able to watch it constantly to learn how to feel what was happening with my body and how much I could push. When I started, if I wasn't having a bad day (when I could do no exercise at all) I could only do about two and a half minutes of slow pedaling before having to stop and let my heart calm down. Now I can sustain strong pedaling for thirty minutes at a time. My muscles get tired, but my heart chugs along safely in the target range.

Now that my heart is better behaved, I've been adding a little strength training, gradually. Among other things I embarked on the "100 pushups in six weeks" program and surprised myself by being able to do 10 pushups on the initial test. I kept it up until the fifth week of the program, by which point I realized that I was hating and dreading every day of that stupid program and sick of feeling like a noodle between workouts. Dread is not a good motivator, so I'm looking for another program. I notice, reading other people's comments, that no one ever finishes the program in six weeks, not even the creator of the program. Hmm. Surely there's a workout program which will enable me to get stronger without actually praying for anyone's death.

(It's tempting to insert a line drawing of myself, with DDD breasts, doing a pushup, next to the '100 pushups in 6 weeks' line drawing of a svelte breastless chick doing a pushup. I haven't done the drawing, though, so you're just going to have to imagine it. I reach the ground quite a bit sooner than she does.)

I'd say it's been tough, but you know, it really hasn't been all that tough. The toughest part is wanting to grab a bite to eat while I'm out running around and not having any place to grab a bite that isn't chock full of sodium and corn syrup. The next toughest part is having a refrigerator full of tomatoes and knowing that if I don't make that pasta I said I was going to make they are going to go bad. I want to be a celebrity and have someone else cook for me. Cooking is fun when you're in the mood, but in the middle of June on a lovely hot day full of lightning bugs and the singing of cicadas, I am more than likely not in the mood.

The easy part has been calorie control. Once I stopped drinking corn-syrup laden Coke which made me crave sodium-laden prepared foods which made me crave simple-carb and fat-laden junk, I found myself naturally tending to eat fewer than 1600 calories a day. After a while I stopped counting, since it didn't seem to be necessary.

Best of - cheap, delicious, quick, and satisfying:

Smoothies made with frozen fruit (a different kind each day) yogurt, and flaxseed or ground walnuts or almond slivers.

Quickie homemade sushi made with Japanese import brand microwave sprouted brown rice, veggies, and sardines. This rice is so much better than anything available in any American store. Two minutes to perfect rice that has the texture of real sushi rice.

Roasted kale - like potato chips but with actual food value! And not 160 calories a pop!

Worth it:

Grass fed steak. Yes, it's worth the extra cash. A little goes a long way, the animal has been treated decently, and the meat has a fat profile more like salmon than like typical American grain fed beef.

Homemade soup. It's a hobby. But when you're finished, you have something delicious that you can feel good about eating. The other day I was wanting soup and feeling lazy, and picked up a can of Campbell's beef soup in the grocery. Looked at the label, put it back. 39% of your daily sodium per serving. Bad enough. But much worse when you realize that one measly can of soup, which I normally eat all by myself, supposedly contains 2.5 servings. Do the math - you can get your entire day's serving of sodium from a single can of Campbell's soup. And to balance out the heinous saltiness they put corn syrup in everything.

Not worth it:

Oatmeal. Yes, it's cheap, yes, it's healthy. I loathe it. I loathed it as a child and it turns out I still loathe it.

Fat free cream cheese. I think it's made from chalk.

Free, free at last:

Coke. Don't drink corn syrup. I feel so much better now that I'm free of my Coke addiction. My cravings are better now that I'm not kicking my blood sugar around. Even my teeth are brighter.

Sodium from prepared foods. I lost twenty pounds the first month of my diet, mostly from water weight because I wasn't eating so much prepared food. Now that I'm eating normally, when I do eat something I used to eat, it tastes unbearably salty.

But, alas, I will never stop craving:

Fried chicken. There's simply not a way to eat fried chicken that doesn't involve absurd amounts of empty calories.

Pig fat: don't try to feed me lean bacon. The fat is the point. The fat is delicious. No amount of eating delicious healthy foods seems to put a dent in my craving for luxurious white crusty swine.

And now, onward to the next goal!

What D&D taught me about birth control

Sat, 6 Jun 2009 00:06:35 -0400

The year was 1983. I was fifteen years old. My friends and I were sitting in the bleachers, which was where high school students ate lunch at our school, since the cafeteria wasn't big enough for all the students. There were five of us, three boys and two girls, sitting in a rough circle, colorful hardcover books spread out on the bleachers around us. Periodically one of the jocks sitting higher up in the bleachers would peg one of us in the head with a peanut M&M, but we ignored them. We were far away in another world.

Today, we were staying in an inn. The handsome gentleman who had played my friend and I against each other, finally choosing me over her and leading me back to his room, had turned out to be a vampire. My loyal (despite our romantic rivalry) half-elven cleric friend had suspected foul play and followed with the other two friends, a dwarven fighter and an elven mage. The three of them had come running in response to my screams, but the ancient vampire had proved too powerful and well-prepared for them. I was the last person left standing, as he advanced towards me, trembling in my nightdress.

"I still have spells prepared," I said. "I'm going to fireball him."

"You carry your spell components in your nightgown?"

Our dungeon master, a scrawny, buck-toothed, but utterly charming boy who made no secret of the fact that he was praying for my current boyfriend to drop dead, was a stickler for the rules.

"Maybe I was expecting a situation like this..."

"Maybe you weren't," said my best friend, laughing.

"Okay, describe the room again," I said. There were windows on one side, a door on the other. I was trapped in the corner, backed up against the fireplace.

"Is there something like a stake in the fireplace? A piece of firewood?"

"It would count as an improvised weapon. You're a wizard. And it would be on FIRE. If there even is such a piece of wood."

He made up a number, a random chance that there was a sharpened stick of about the right dimensions among the burning logs. Rolled. There was. I lunged for it, grabbed it. He made me roll not to drop it from the pain of grasping the burning wood. I made the roll.

"This is so stupid," he said. "There's like, zero chance you can just rush at a vampire and stab him through the heart with a piece of firewood. I should just kill you all and make you reroll characters."

"Give me a chance," I pleaded.

"All right. One in a hundred chance. Roll percentile dice. No modifiers, because the whole situation is absurd. On a natural one hundred, you can stab the vampire."

And I did. And the dice clattered, and spun, and we all leaned forward to see: two ten-sided dice, each with zero uppermost. Or, in percentile dice terms, one hundred.

I thought about that roll later the next year, when I missed my period. I was the sort of person who read things, so I had dutifully read the little paper insert which came in my fake leather "wallet" of pills, all of it, down to the fine print about weight gain and blood clots. The pamphlet explained the odds of getting pregnant while using the Pill versus other kinds of birth control, per sexual encounter and over a period of a year. Then it explained the risk of death using each method, versus the risk of death from complications of pregnancy.

I don't remember the exact numbers now. I do remember that the Pill was less likely to kill you than being pregnant was. That mostly everybody got pregnant within a year of having unprotected sex. That condoms, as used by the average moron, were surprisingly ineffective and the rhythm method, backed up by taking basal temperature and checking mucus consistency, was surprisingly more effective than I would have guessed. And that the Pill, if you took it at the same time every day and didn't miss any, was supposed to be about 99% effective.

Well, I took the Pill every morning after I brushed my teeth, and I never missed any. But I had skipped a period, coming up on two, and my breasts were sore and I felt terrible every morning, headachy and nauseous. There were no over-the-counter tests in those days, or if there were I didn't know about them, so I made an appointment with my gynecologist and told my mom I thought I had a yeast infection.

A nurse took my blood. I'm not sure why it was done that way instead of by the pee-on-a-stick method - perhaps because my appointment was after school and I hadn't known to collect morning pee. Possibly the evolution of pregnancy tests was just not as advanced as you might think at that time. I don't clearly remember. Presently the gyn, a comfortable older woman, came back to talk to me.

"Negative. It's still possible you're pregnant but very unlikely. Some women do skip periods when taking the Pill. Make another appointment if it keeps up and we'll swap you to another kind of pill."

"How unlikely is unlikely?" I asked her.

"Oh, a blood test this late is more than 99% accurate."

Knowing that didn't stop me worrying. I knew that 99%, what most adults around me thought of a certainty, wasn't a certainty. Somewhere out there someone was that 1%. I knew it could happen. I had seen those dice turn up. That wasn't the only time I had seen them turn up. My friends and I rolled dice every day. I knew by feel, through experience, how likely one percent was, five percent, twenty percent.

I think, in retrospect, that I probably was pregnant. When I finally did get my period it was severe, a real gusher. And many years later when I had a miscarriage, it turned out that my Rh negative blood contained antibodies against my Rh positive fetus, which normally only happens when a woman has been pregnant before. But there's really no way of knowing. I could have been pregnant, or it could just have been one of those things that happens sometimes.

It made me think, though. How much of a risk is too much of a risk? How much fear is too much fear to live with? And I decided, not to become abstinent, but to think things through. If I did get pregnant, what would happen to me?

I asked my mother what she thought. My mother knew I was sexually active. It was she who had first taken me to a gynecologist, she who said that if I wanted to have sex I should do it safely under my own roof and not in a car or a park where I risked being harrassed by police or hurt by strangers.

"I would make you get an abortion," she said, without hesitation.

"You don't have the right to do that," I said.

"Yes, I do," she said. "You live under my roof and you live on my money. It would be me raising your baby and I'm not going to do that."

I was outraged. "But it's my body! If I said no, you couldn't force me."

She told me that I could say no, but then she would throw me out on the street, and I would be placed in a foster home. And besides, the discussion was stupid, because I was smart and didn't want to throw my life away.

And she had a point. I didn't want to throw my life away. I certainly couldn't see myself being tied, through a child, to my current boyfriend. But I didn't like the idea of abortion, either.

So what did I do?

You can probably guess. As most sexually-active people do in the same circumstances, even adults with theoretically mature judgment, I went on having sex. And I prayed, a lot, that those dice would never come up. I decided that the risk of getting pregnant was low enough that it wasn't worth giving up sex, which I really loved. I should point out here that sex, for me, as a teenager, was an entirely blissful, fulfilling, and soul-enriching experience which made me feel better about myself in all ways, and if I could go back in time to advise my virgin self whether or not to remain a virgin until the age of 18, I would laugh and say, "Are you kidding? And lose some of the best memories of my life?"

And my luck held through high school. It held until my second year of college, and when it ran out it wasn't because the Pill failed but because I had stupidly gone off the Pill between boyfriends. I trusted my new boyfriend to pull out, and he didn't pull out. I swear I knew the exact moment it happened, could feel the arrow hit the target. A week later I had minor bleeding and rejoiced that I had my period - but it was bleeding from implantation, which stopped almost as soon as it started. This time at the gyn's office the message was, "These are 99% accurate when negative... it's more than that when it's positive. False positives are very, very rare."

Suffice to say I felt very stupid because I had been very stupid. I wavered back and forth on whether or not to have an abortion (complicated by his being Catholic and convinced that abortion was murder) and finally settled on pretending this wasn't really happening to me alternating with intense praying that the baby would just die and relieve me of the responsibility for killing it. And then it died, and I felt absolutely like shit, as if my prayers had the power to kill.

Before I became pregnant I had been clinically depressed - the depression was one factor behind my (unusually for me) reckless sexual behavior. Absurdly I had begun to emerge from my depression only after I became pregnant - carried on a potent wave of good feeling which must have been caused by hormones, since logically I had every reason in the world to be miserable. I miscarried, but the mood boost remained. I never went back into that dark night, that unreasoning blackness of spirit imposed on the mind by the body.

No, any misery I felt after the miscarriage wasn't chemical but purely mental - guilt and self-loathing. I was certain I had been wicked and yet I had escaped punishment. In a different era I would have flagellated myself, or joined a convent.

I had a revelation then.

Did you know that supposedly, in America, 50% of pregnancies are unplanned? And of those about two-thirds are unwanted?

I've rolled a lot of dice in my day, so I know what one percent feels like. But it doesn't take a dice-rolling geek to know what fifty percent feels like. If you've ever flipped a coin, you know what fifty percent feels like. Fifty percent is half.

Pardon my language, but... Jeeeesus. Half of all pregnancies are unplanned. Point five times point six six is... a third of all pregnancies are not only unplanned but unwanted.

We are some dumb broads, you know? Oh, don't shake your head. I mean it. With birth control as almost effortless as it is today, for one third of all pregnancies to be unwanted means a lot of women are a lot of dumb.

And that was at the root of my revelation. We're just not very smart, most of us. Not even me, the one who was supposed to be so smart. We can know the odds and we still choose to ignore them.

In the face of such an absurd magnitude of stupidity, what possible response is there but compassion? What's the right answer to an unwanted pregnancy? How the fuck should I know? I'm the one too dumb to take a pill. You may be shaking your head as you read this, but odds are, you're pretty dumb too. We're all stumbling around in the dark here, and sometimes we fall down and hurt ourselves, and sometimes we hurt other people, and it's really pretty terrible that so many people get hurt, but who would want to punish anyone for it, when there's so much hurt already? It seems to me that in a bad situation, you try not to make it worse, you do the thing that contains the disaster that's happened already as much as possible and causes the least possible new disaster, and sometimes it's not obvious what that is, not to anyone.

I hold strong opinions about a woman's right to control of her own body, and those form the basis for my rational support of the right to legal abortion, but the basis for my irrational support for it is this: we're dumb, we mess up, and I'm on the side of anyone trying to muddle through life, because this shit ain't easy. The numbers don't tell the parts of the story we need to know and almost everyone rolls those dice sometimes.

Truth, fiction, and lies on OS: a discussion

Thu, 4 Jun 2009 11:06:38 -0400

In a previous post, now deleted, I raised a question of OS community etiquette: what should a good community member do in response to a post which appears to be untruthful?

Some blog posts are retellings of life experiences. Some are fictional, or at least fictionalized. I think all writers do that - I know I do, anyway. Most of my real life stories have at least some elements altered to make them work better as writing, or conceal the identities of people involved.

However. Even when I'm writing fiction, I try to make it TRUE. I once wrote about my father, who used to beat me as a child, changing his personality abruptly after an accident he had when I finally hit him back, and becoming a wiser, gentler man. As it happens, the conversation I describe between my father and myself is fictionalized; my father is not a talker, and the apology came slowly, a few words at a time, over a great many years, not as I tell it in one go. But nevertheless it is TRUE that my father used to be abusive and now is not, that I believe as a result that people can change, and that if my father still beat me I think it would be horrible to write a piece of fiction-cast-as-a-true-story that gave hope that abusers can change when I had never seen any evidence of it.

That's fiction. Good fiction is truer than truth; it can tell a story with not just local but universal application.

So what about lies? Where's the difference between lies and fiction?

A lie is something that the teller knows isn't TRUE. And truth isn't just a matter of events, but also the meaning of events. A lie is always deliberate; if two people honestly differ about the interpretation of events, neither one is lying, though one may be mistaken. The sort of lie I'm talking about here is an instance where the liar knows full well it's a lie.

Many times on OS I've been confronted with posts told as real life stories that I did not believe ever happened to the person telling them. Usually those stories are plays for sympathy or praise. While a part of me screams out in protest when I see others commenting sympathetically on a made-up story of travail, I don't think it's the better part of me. Anyone pretending to suffer for the sake of garnering compliments on the internet deserves pity, not censure; and it's just possible that some of the people commenting sympathetically are smart enough to see through the story too. In any case, such a story does no harm to anyone.

But what about real, hard lies, stories told that are not just untrue in themselves but false in their meaning? What about propaganda?

We've seen, recently, how false stories of this kind can take hold in people's minds. Fox news tells the lie that the majority of women have late term abortions frivolously, to get rid of unwanted babies, when in truth almost all late term abortions are a painful choice to terminate a very much wanted baby because of illness of the mother or the baby - and a man steps forward to enact vigilante justice on the doctor. The man's church says that in a way, if you read the Bible right, the Bible supports his conduct. Many people in America, including some otherwise good-spirited souls on OS, buy into the lie.

What about that sort of lie?

What about Joe the Plumber, a man who isn't Joe, isn't a plumber, isn't in a position to buy a business at all, whose made-up "true story" was used to attack Obama's position on taxes by claiming that it would hurt real people in a way that wasn't true either?

What do you do when someone tells a story that isn't true, in support of a larger lie?

Well, it depends, doesn't it? In the matter of Fox News or Joe the Plumber, I think it's essential to call the liars out and discredit them as publicly as possible. I think it's good that we have capable journalists who do the sort of research necessary to find out the real facts and broadcast the errors in the stories.

What about OS? What about posts that aren't true, in support of lies?

Fact checking on OS is limited by anonymity. Except in rare cases, attacking the factual basis of a post made here is limited to calling out failures in internal consistency. And there's an additional matter of politeness. If every time a story seemed far fetched, fifteen people called the author a liar in comments, soon no one would have the nerve to post anything but pablum. Polite discourse on OS is fragile; it depends on an unstated agreement that we all pretend to be here for the same purpose, to write and read for each other's betterment.

Besides - and this is the insight I gained, from the kind and helpful comments of the community on my now-deleted post - it doesn't matter.

I don't mean that the truth doesn't matter. I will never mean that. The truth does matter. It matters more than anything, because truth is all that allows one person to learn anything about the world we live in from another person. What I mean is, the factual truth or lack of factual truth of a particular story doesn't matter to the people who hear it. Did you notice how, even after "Joe the Plumber" was decloaked, the people who supported McCain still loved Joe the Plumber? It didn't matter to them that Joe wasn't a plumber and wasn't going to get his taxes raised for buying his own business because they believed in the truth of the larger story. They believed, whatever circumstances surrounded Joe, that it was true that Obama's tax plan would punish hard-working people for trying to better themselves by giving money to those who didn't work.

Attacking Joe didn't discredit Joe. To discredit Joe successfully, the attack would have to have been against the notion that taxes harm those who work hard.

In the case of the post I was concerned about, it's possible to attack the truth of the larger story, without ever calling the author of the specific story a liar. The made-up nature of the post distracted me, in fact. Because, whether true or false, it doesn't prove what it's supposed to prove. And THAT I can say, perfectly within the bounds of OS etiquette, without stirring up shit or causing a fight or resorting to private messages. (Thanks, by the way, to those who suggested private messages, but they don't really apply in an instance where I'm certain the poster was deliberately telling a lie - you can't have a civilized conversation with someone who isn't obeying the rules of civilization. Besides, as a rule, I try to avoid saying in private things I wouldn't say in public. It keeps me better behaved in private.)

So, that's my conclusion, and many thanks to those who helped me reach it. There was a comment I could have left which would have served the purpose of pointing out the falsehood of the author's conclusion without accusing anyone of lying. And that's a good thing, because the more polite we can be to each other while discussing emotionally-laden subjects, the better. That we all gather here and talk to each other and for the most part everyone remains civil is a small miracle, if you think about it. And that's a truth I can believe in.

Angel, Accident, Falsely accused of smoking pot at school

Sun, 17 May 2009 00:05:28 -0400

I've been sick, I was out of town for a while, and I had a nasty fight with family which put me in no mood to write. But! Today I'm finally getting around to revealing which of my 3 statements was the lie. Thanks to OEsheepdog for the Open Call, 2 truths and 1 lie.

The real truth is I'm a very bad liar. I knew that if I tried to make up a fabulous story, it would be obvious to everyone. So I cheated a little. There are two truths and one story that while mostly true contains a lie.

Truth 1: Yep, I once dislocated my shoulder while rollerblading down the curved ramp of the elevated parking garage of the Clark Tower, which is (at a modest twentysomething stories) the tallest building in Memphis. The parking garage is six stories tall, I believe, one of the very few elevated parking garages in Memphis. Memphis is mostly spread out with lots of trees and small buildings and acres of open air parking lots. Back in college I used to date a guy who hung out with a bunch of other guys who would do crazy things like breaking into the bison enclosure at Shelby Farms to do a little cow tipping - bison tipping, that is. One of the crazy things they did was rollerblade down the aforementioned ramp late at night when the building was closed. Just get going and lean into the turn, letting the slope bring you up to speed. They claimed to have clocked one guy doing 60 mph. I suspect that figure was exaggerated for the sake of impressing me, but they got going pretty darned fast. They wore football helmets and hockey pads for these runs.

I'm a mediocre skater at best, but I do have more courage than brains, and when they offered, I had to try it. Hit a patch of oil on the third turn and spun out and flipped into the wall. Fortunately the pads kept me from busting my skull and the wall kept me from plunging to my death. Dislocated joints hurt.

Truth 2: I have seen an angel. I'm pretty sure I was five. I know I must have been four or five, because it was when we lived in Jackson. I was in bed, supposedly asleep, and I woke to find a towering column of flame watching over me. "Don't be afraid," she said to me. (Columns of flame have no secondary sexual characteristics, and neither did the voice, but I felt certain at the time she was female.) "Go to sleep now." And - this is what's strange, and what makes me feel that this was a real vision and not just an unusual dream - I did stop being afraid, and I did go right back to sleep. And I remembered it when I woke up, although I remember almost nothing else from that era.

My family were not particularly religious, and although I would attend church with my mother after we moved to Memphis, I had never been to church in Jackson. I can't think of any way I would have been exposed to the concept of angels as creatures of fire. It was only years later, reading Ezekiel, that I had a moment of recognition. I wasn't otherwise given to night terrors or fancies. I'm aware that none of this is very good evidence. My primary reason for believing is entirely subjective and not able to be shared: the feeling, a feeling I had not felt before and have only felt since in the presence of the holy, a feeling reminiscent of being held in the arms of my mother, but more so, combined with the wonder of seeing something beautiful and the strange clarity of standing facing into a strong wind.

She was a tower of flame, as I said: red, shifting flames that did not burn and had something of the quality of the afterimage you see after looking at too bright a light. The shape gave the impression of wings and of a robed woman but was neither.

One lie: I wasn't suspended from school for smoking pot. I was suspended from school for refusing to say who was smoking pot. Maureen was the one smoking pot. (If you're reading this, Mo, hi!)

Both Maureen and I lived too far out in the country to ride the bus to school, so we were part of the group of kids whose mothers dropped them off on the way to work. A janitor would let us into the gym almost an hour before any other adults arrived, so we had plenty of unsupervised time to get up to mischief.

That morning she and I arrived together because I had spent the night at her house after attending a Van Halen concert. The year was 1984, the album was 1984, and David Lee Roth was past his best moves but did not yet look like an elderly lady. At the concert both Maureen and I had purchased t-shirts, and we were both wearing them, in defiance of the school's dress code which did not allow any form of writing on t-shirts, but in obedience to the long-standing student tradition that anyone lucky enough to go to a concert the night before must wear the shirt proving it to school the next day. We expected the usual routine: get called out of homeroom into the office, lectured about our shirts, asked to change. Protest that we had no other clothes. Since we were too young to drive and both our parents worked, we would not get sent home - the headmaster would shake his head and tell us not to do it again.

So I was expecting it when Maureen was called out of class mid-morning, and I was expecting it when half an hour later I was called out of class too. She passed me in the hallway, escorted by two teachers, and gave a tiny shake of her head, which seemed to be a warning.

I was cheerful. I knew that I needed to pretend repentance well enough for the headmaster to pretend to be satisfied, and so I put on a long face as I entered the office.

The headmaster was unexpectedly accompanied by the Dean of Students and the head of the school board (also founder of our small private school), and he wasn't cheerful at all.

"Do you know who was smoking marijuana in the girl's locker room this morning?" he asked.

As a teenager I had a highly developed sense of honor. Over the years I've come to believe that there are times when lying is the right thing to do. At age 16, I still believed the truth was sacred.

"Yes, sir," I said.

Before the teachers arrived, Maureen had gone into the locker room to finish off the roach she had in her purse from the night before. I had declined to join her. I was a control freak who preferred watching other people act stoned to being stoned myself. I often enjoyed a contact high from other people's smoke, but I hadn't smoked last night, and I hadn't smoked that morning.

As it turned out, Maureen had left the tiniest bit of a roach in the sink's lint trap. The girl's coach, after smelling the tell-tale scent of smoke in the locker room, had discovered it. Told to investigate, our teacher had noticed the same smell on our shirts, which we had worn at the smoke-choked concert the night before.

"Was it you?"

"No, sir," I said.

There was an audible sigh. The assembled authorities, who had been tensely perched, visibly relaxed.

"Who was it?"

They leaned forward in anticipation.

"I'm afraid I can't tell you."

Consternation. Red-faced sputtering. Threats.

I don't clearly remember whose idea it was, but I was told that school policy mandated expulsion for drugs on school property. If I told, I would only be suspended, for knowing about it. If I failed to tell, all the suspected parties would be expelled. I wouldn't succeed in saving the guilty party in either case.

It's funny, remembering this. I started to write, "I felt sick." You'd think that I would have felt sick. I was a straight-A student, the leader of my class in most subjects, the person who had been featured in the papers for high scores on the PSAT, looking forward to a scholarship to the college of my choice and a brilliant future. All of that would vanish if I were expelled, my whole life down the toilet because of one ill-fated clothing choice.

But I didn't feel sick. I felt exhilarated. Honestly, I live for that feeling. It's like the feeling of seeing an angel, but angels don't show up on cue. Flying down an elevated parking ramp on rollerblades sometimes gives an echo of the same feeling. The most reliable way to get it is to stand up for what you believe is right, in the face of injustice. If you live a life where you get that feeling on a regular basis, you know you're doing it right.

I didn't back down.

"We're going to have to call your parents," the headmaster said.

"You do that," I said.

I was lucky, in ways I didn't know at the time. In 1984 no one would have dreamed of violating a student's rights by drug testing. There were no policemen in schools and it never occurred to the school staff to wreck the lives of their students by giving them criminal records. It was just my word, and Maureen's word.

I saw Maureen outside, hours later, in the parking lot when our parents arrived.

"You gave me up," she said. "They told me after you talked to them that you gave me up."

I was inexperienced in being a suspect, but I also had a mother who had raised me on a diet of cop shows and murder mysteries. I recognized a basic interrogation technique: pretend to know more than you know, so that the suspect breaks down.

"I didn't tell them anything," I said. "If you want to tell them, that's up to you."

Maureen had quickly realized that as long as we were both under suspicion, she had a chance of getting off because they wouldn't punish an innocent person, but if she ever confessed, she would be expelled. So she had refused to say anything. She could have gotten me out of a mess by telling the truth and taking her punishment, but I didn't blame her: I didn't hold her to the same standard I held for myself. We had never been friends, we just liked the same music.

I expected my parents to kill me. I think the school staff expected the same thing, which was why they let us go home to our parents. But they hadn't reckoned with Maureen's parents, who were redneck alcoholics who had bought the pot for her in the first place, and they hadn't reckoned on my father, who had raised seven children before I came along. My father had bailed his kids out of jail before and was not fazed by uproar from the staff of a private school.

I think he was amused, to tell the truth. He told me a rambling tale of a crazy exploit that had happened to him and three brother officers while they were stationed in Hawaii.

"You shouldn't have gotten caught," he said. "Do what you like, but don't be dumb."

"Maureen's the dumb one," I said.

"Well, you knew that on the front end, so you were dumb too."

That night there was an emergency board meeting. I knew none of this at the time, but would learn it later. The zero-tolerance policy regarding drugs was a new one which had never been tested; previously our school had no drug policy, because "Our students don't take drugs." Some board members were concerned that the policy was too harsh. Maureen was a middling student but I was an excellent one. There was that article in the paper. And there was another issue, which was that I had won the state Latin contest for my age group and placed eighth in the state math contest. Those exploits were featured in the school's brochure, along with those of a student in the class above mine who had won the state science fair, along with a full scholarship to Stanford, for inventing a new cancer drug derived from goldenrod.

It's funny, more than one commenter on my previous post expressed disbelief that a school would bend the rules for the sake of a student who exhibited academic excellence. My tale might be true, they reasoned, if I were a football player, but no one would make an exception for a Latin contest winner.

I'd like to say that my fine alma mater had uniquely high regard for scholarship, but really, it's not so much that as that we had a unique way of sucking at sports. We didn't just have a bad football team, we had no football team. We weren't able to field enough players. We had a basketball team, though, in the bottom league. I seem to recall our record for the year was 28-0. Once, the year before, we had won a game, against Messick, which was a tiny, motheaten public school in a poor section of town, with holes in the wall and no gym, in danger of being closed down for lack of funds. Messick had been so humiliated that the next year they clobbered us - their score was in the triple digits and I don't think we scored. We sucked so bad that our school didn't even try to win homecoming games - it was such an obvious lost cause - instead the players started fights on the court, in hopes of salvaging some sort of dignity by having the game called.

With a sports program that bad, really the school's only hope of attracting paying customers was academics. And we had some brilliant students. The joke was that our school had no "normal" program. There was a gifted program, and there was a program for students with learning disabilities, and that was it. The gifted students were mostly upper-middle class who carried the burden of maintaining the school's reputation as an outstanding academic institution. The "learning disabled" students were mostly perfectly average children of the very rich who needed a rubber stamp from an outstanding academic institution to get into an Ivy league college.

The next morning my parents and Maureen's parents and Maureen and I were summoned to the school office, where the Dean of Students informed us that we had both been given three days of at-home suspension, to be followed by probation for as long as we remained at that school. Any further infraction and we would be expelled. We were expected to be grateful for the mercy of the school board.

The weather was beautiful for those three days. I rode my Appaloosa gelding and lounged in the sun working on an early tan and caught up on my reading.

And here we come to the most bizarre part of the story.

I suppose I should have predicted this, but I didn't: I had become a Cause. The entire student body, and many of the teachers, who were a Bohemian lot with probably some pot smoking in their own spare time, thought I was a freedom fighter against the oppressive authoritarian overlords. They admired the way I had refused to narc on Maureen. In general, most of the time, I was unpopular in school, a fringe member of the fringe clique of theater kids. But the day I returned to class, I received a standing ovation.

I'm told that at most schools, at home suspension is not a punishment but a vacation. It wasn't that way at my school. At my school, there was a policy that students were not allowed to make up any missed work, and had to receive a zero for it. In our highly competitive school, three days could make a huge difference to a final grade. In addition, because the administration had become aware of what they considered inappropriate support for me among the teachers, the teachers had been warned that they were not allowed to change the dates of tests or assignments. I had missed the date of the presentation for a major reading assignment in English class, several graded homework assignments, and a secondary test in my math class.

The administration did not think to ban the teachers from offering extra credit questions on tests, however.

I mentioned that our school was competitive. Part of that competitive spirit was that several of the teachers read off each student's test scores aloud at the end of the semester. If you thought you had done badly, you were allowed to ask the teacher to skip you - which was an open admission of shame. There was only one girl who regularly opted out. The rest of us sat alert and quivering at each number, hoping to hear our rivals vanquished. It wasn't, in retrospect, the best way of teaching us affection, or compassion.

That day was different, though. Both my English teacher, a colorful ex-hippie who had been both a Peace Corps worker and a nun, and the math teacher, a drab, emotionless man devoted to chess who had parted his hair the same way for so many years that he had a broad groove of bare scalp in the middle of his head, were among those who read scores out loud. They hurried through the alphabet to my name; everyone was waiting.

I remember the teachers' voices so clearly, and the thrilled hush of the whole class holding their breaths, rooting for me. I can almost remember the actual scores: "One hundred eight. One hundred. One hundred five. Zero. One hundred ten."

In our school, the teachers were allowed to determine the numerical value of their grades, but in general, a 95 was an A, and anything above an 85 was a C. My score in math was exactly 95. The math teacher had never established whether the rule was "95 and above" or "anything above a 95." For a few moments uproar reigned, as students shouted out protests that it wasn't fair to give me a B. The stolid, logical math teacher blinked at his students from behind his thick glasses, and uncharacteristically caved.

I pulled off a B, just barely, in English, and a cheer erupted.

That was my only B. Ever. It kept me from being valedictorian, which probably wasn't a bad thing, since I can only imagine what I would have come up with to say to a captive assembly of parents, administration, teachers, and students at graduation.

Maureen left the school at the end of the year. I can't say I was sorry to see her go. And I won the state math contest and the Latin contest the next year.

Open Call - Two Truths, One lie

Fri, 1 May 2009 00:05:42 -0400

I once dislocated my shoulder while rollerblading down the ramp of an elevated parking garage.

I saw an angel when I was five years old.

I was almost expelled from high school for smoking pot but the school board called a special meeting and changed its "no tolerance" drug rule specifically to allow me to accept a suspension instead of an expulsion because I had won the state Latin contest and it was in the school's brochure.