What a great day.

I didn't end up sleeping at all last night so this is being written through a haze of exhaustion. There's a pretty good chance that I'll fall asleep mid-sentence.

I went to Barnes and Noble and they didn't have a single copy of Marya Hornbacher's book! I was too scared to ask for help finding it, so I looked in practically every section of the store under author names starting with "h." I made sure to look all around the general vicinity just in case one had been replaced in the wrong spot. But no luck! On a whim I stopped at Half-Price Books on the way home and they had both hardcover and paperback. I bought the paper one. I also ended up buying Middlesex - which I'm really looking forward to since I read The Virgin Suicides in less than two hours and then immediately started it again from the beginning. I also bought a book called Smashed about college life and alcoholism. I'm not sure if I'm actually going to read it but someone in my outpatient group said they were reading it and it reminded them of me. That's probably not really a compliment, but I feel flattered when someone thinks of me in any context at all. Like when Kat publicly thanked me for my compliment in her blog; I felt a momentary rush of celebrity.

All I ate today was celery with peanut butter. Probably one and a half stalks total. That's a lot of peanut butter, but it could have been so much worse. I was looking around for food and noticing that once again, we don't have any in our house. That was pretty much fine with me, but it meant I would have to cook something. After scavenging, I decided to make falafel and tabouleh (sp?). Do you have any idea how many calories are in falafel??? Let me give you a hint: it's deep fried!! I have never seen a skinny person eating anything deep fried. But, my sister came to the rescue by preparing herself a large plate of celery with peanut butter and then deciding she wanted cheese and crackers instead. I ate a bit of her celery and was saved. It's weird I don't even feel hungry at all. Actually I feel almost uncomfortably full. And I ate that celery at 4:00; it's now 10:00! Maybe I drank too much water.

I started reading Wasted and I can tell that I'm going to love it. I totally agree that eating disorders are an addiction. It makes me wonder if they could be treated similarly; like with a 12-step program. I guess there probably is an overeaters' anonymous, but what about anorexics anonymous? I'll have to look it up if I EVER get any free time. Although I see my eating disorder and my addiction as opposites, they are complexly intertwined.

I have always been weird about food. When I was a kid my parents had to take me to the doctor because I refused to eat anything but spaghetti. I hadn't eaten in days. I thought that if I combined certain types of spices and ate them, I would be able to fly. Especially the extremely potent combination of salt, pepper, and mint leaves from the garden. It tasted friggin' disgusting. In my early teens I dieted to the point of illness and then was "nurtured" back to health by my mother. After that I developed a binge-eating disorder and abused laxatives and compulsively exercised. I went to see a psychiatrist who told me that my problem wasn't food; for example if I did graffiti or arson I probably wouldn't feel the need to feed my emotions. Misconstruing this as advice, I began to make cuts and burns on my legs to deal with stress. Sure enough, my problems with food evaporated. I was still (and probably always will be) an obsessive calorie-counter with rules about how, when and what I could eat, but this was no longer the main focus in my life and my urges to binge disappeared. As I got older however, this method of self-expression seemed more and more childish. Explaining it to boyfriends was mortifying and I felt like an attention-starved brat when someone would ask about my scars. I found that I could just as easily channel my emotions with drugs, alcohol and promiscuous sex. To me these addictions are totally interchangeable.

Okay. Time for some much-needed sleep.