10:05 AM
resigned to not finding work here. I keep looking at newspapers and web sites, to no avail. I'm losing my enthusiasm. I suppose I needed a reminder of why I needed to escape this place the first time around.

All I know is that when I set a deadline for myself, somehow I make it happen. In this case it is New York: March 30, 2001. We'll see how it works out.

There aren't enough jobs here to keep me busy sending out resumes and it's a waste to send resumes to New York more than a week or two in advance of my return. I get more response from New York, but it's always, "We can't do anything until you're here, call us when you get to town."

So, bottom line, I have to get into town.

. . .

I've reached my limit of how much abuse and negativity I can take. I feel myself shutting down, which has the opposite result of the badgering's aim. Instead of motivating me to be the maid, to help her make her house into the superficially beautiful place she wants, it makes me care less and less about this place.

I'm sick of focussing on how things look. What about how they feel?

. . .

I discovered last night that my brother thinks my mom and I are going to die because we're fat.

I thank you poisonous, racist black grandma and aunt for yet another mind fuck.

Exhibit A: I did a family tree, both sides, for a health class in college. It's not the fat people who die young in our family. They tend to live into their 70s and even 90s. The smokers, however, almost always die in their 50s. My grandmother's generation is thus far the only exception. She and her sisters were all smokers at one time -- she and one other still smoke.

The other two gained weight upon quitting and she harps on it every chance she gets, just as she obsessed over my mother's weight and told me from the time I can remember that I would be "fat, just like your mother." Yet it was my grandmother forcing me to eat after I was full or offering me Kool-Aid when all I ever drank at home was water or milk.

Exhibit B: My brother and I still have a fat parent with no serious health problems.

Exhibit C: Our smoking parent had the first of four heart attacks at the age of 41.

He also developed insulin-dependent diabetes, probably not because he ate sweets everyday, all day, as the stereotypes would have it, but because he didn't eat for days at a time and then ate a pint of Ben & Jerry's.

Needless to say, that's far more a shock to the system than eating a balanced diet and having desert.

Our father died at 50 years, 4 months, and 3 weeks old, outliving his own (fat and I believe smoker) father by only a few years. Our maternal grandfather died at the age of 56. Our maternal grandmother, who was heavy in her 40s and 50s but lost excessive amounts of weight after her husband died because she doesn't remember to eat at all, is still alive in her mid-70s.

So someone explain to me again that fat is what we should be worrying about.

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