The Curse of the Wandering Spoon

There is something in a spoon that belies its actual potential. It is not as unpretentious as it seems. Be warned - it is a dangerous thing and often scoops up more than what is adequate for you. And then of course, there’s the spoon that wanders…

It makes audacious appearances in your child’s plate under the charitable social guise of not wasting food. It nonchalantly makes a business of popping into dishes to check if the salt is right. Inadvertently, it slips into your mouth when you are packing remnants of a meal into leftover boxes. It slips in surreptiously to avail extras for desserts. Sometimes, unabashedly, it plonks itself directly into the family pack ice cream carton all in the name of a bad day. It wanders into the different lunch boxes when you sit together to eat lunch at work. It makes a quick dash into your colleague’s lunch plate on the pretext of gauging the ingredients in the recipe. Then it meanders into the next plate, and then the next…

When you finally stand on the machine that is famed for ruthlessly reducing the self esteem of people ranging from the reigning celluloid diva to the humble homebody, you are catatonic once you shriek, “I could not possibly weigh that much!!”

Yes you do - it’s the curse of the wandering spoon under which you vehemently assert that you have but just eaten small spoonfuls of this and that. It must be the weighing scale that is wrong. So the wandering spoon moves on as mysteriously as god, adding increments to your already burgeoning vital statistics, regardless of whether or not you follow the metric system.

You can wage many battles with the wandering spoon, but if you make it shun carbs, it delves into the protein. If you deny it the sweets, it makes a dash for the snacks. And more than often, the wandering spoon so trains your fingers that they treat themselves as extensions of the spoon. A case in example is the matchless sister-in-law who comes back from office and finds herself in the snack pantry because her fingers willed her there. So immersed are her fingers rummaging through packages and boxes pretending to be spoons, that she wakes from her reverie only when her daughter discovers her there! Being felled by the spell of the wandering spoon myself, I have tried all possible tricks. Then, I found Rujuta. Most see her as Bebo’s size-zero diet guru. As a friend said, “No wonder people who consult with her turn size-zero, after paying her, they have nothing to eat!” I decided to buy her books as they are a cheaper option and recession is still on in my life. To me she is the antidote to the curse of the wandering spoon. Anyone who knows me, also knows that I can quote from both her books. Of course I quote her, she’s the one who reined in the wandering spoon and made it legal to begin the day with a mango!

In this world where being lean is in, where every woman wants to be the yummy mummy, where you blast the fat, with this and that – be it by nibbling on some sort of exotic berry or downing a soulless cabbage soup – Rujuta says EAT. Eat what makes you happy. Eat what you have grown up eating. Eat the moment you wake up or at least within 30 minutes of waking. Eat the samosa. Eat the chutney with the idli. Eat the puri with the chole. Eat the carb, the protein, the fat, the omega 3 fat, and the amino acids – just eat. Just make sure you train that wandering spoon to dig in more when you are active, and less when you are lolling around. Wake up early, ensure you get at least 30 minutes of exercise, have an early dinner and go to bed early. Eat every two hours from the time you wake till the time you sleep – begin with a fruit, have a generous breakfast, a sensible lunch, a light dinner and intersperse these meals with snacks like for example a block of cheese or a handful of peanuts.

It’s another story that friends and family do not want to hear what Rujuta says. “What’s the great discovery in this? That’s the way your grandparents and us have always been living our lives. It’s just that you chose not learn it and banished the breakfast”, says my mom. Daughter has drawn a picture of me with a bubble over my head that reads, “Rujuta says...”. Colleagues turn away the moment I begin to quote and cut me short with warnings and threats to rename me to match the nutrition guru. Out of a lot of love, I parted with my copy of the book “Don't Lose Your Mind, Lose Your Weight”, and left it with sister-in-law – I still do not know which page she is on, or for that matter, if she has at all turned a single page. Probably, she’s lost somewhere in the snack pantry, with all the weight and the mindless snacking. As for the snacking part, since Rujuta doesn’t strictly lay down what exactly is a handful, some interpret it to be an amount that would be a handful for the Incredible Hulk. Then there is the lovely lady who only read the “Eat every two hours” bit and ate a full meal every two hours with disastrous effects. Rujuta also does not mention when to fit in the 5Star, but since she hasn’t banned it, I give my 5Stars the respect they deserve.

The wandering spoon has been reined in. Since it has so much access to food every two hours, it’s tiring out a bit. However, my sincere efforts to enlighten the masses that the curse of the wandering spoon is no urban legend and needs to be tackled with what Rujuta says is met with reactions of the lines of “My spoon never wanders, it goes from the plate to my mouth, and never misses” or “Would it help to use a fork? Anyway it is leaky and can’t carry as much as a spoon?”

Look what I have to live with – around me the motto is lose the mind, not the weight…what a tamasha!

Expect the Unexpected

We’re already one month into the New Year (which did not feel very new what with routine work/school, and no vacations to herald it). Me thinks I should get in one post at least with the run down of what happened in just the very first month of this New Year:

The highlight of the last day of last year was a poster scrawled with wishes and autographs of daughter and daughter’s classmates – I believe their class managed to get an exam postponed citing the fact that it was their dear classmate’s mother’s birthday. Considering that it is a day I share with the Dark Lord (You-Know-Who), I am not sure how it could be made out as momentous enough for the teacher to cancel the exam, but cancel she did and even signed her wishes. Adopted family supplied the cake, the music, and the songs to drill in the message of the infallible frailty of youth and the unpredictability of life.

Then of course, life likes to reiterate the message once or twice with live examples. To what I would like to attribute to thinking a bit too actively about too many impossible things at breakfast, I locked myself out of my car on the third day of the New Year. This was for the fourth time. To make matters worse, the house keys were also in the car. To make matters even worse, the guardians of the extra house keys could not find it. So there were the duplicate car keys so safely locked in the house that even I, the rightful owner, could not get to them. After making frantic last minute arrangements to have child picked up at the bus-stop, a call to the emergency car services ushered a smug mechanic who unlocked the door (I tell you it was a lesson in car-jacking that I can now perform very easily if I had the tools), and sniggered that he would give me a discounted fee, as is due to a repeat offender.

While smirking kid informed me that I had broken the three-time jinx and got locked out for a fourth time so now that opens up the field for many more lockouts, colleagues lost no opportunity in proclaiming age-related memory decay. They sent me off to an in-house Ayurvedic health camp where the doctor in all solemnity declared that fire being the dominant element; a need for some calmness was in order. And for the record, nothing’s wrong with the memory or the head…just too many things in it

Too many things, like for example, how to occupy a teen during her 10-day Sankranti break when she is already miffed about a cancelled holiday to Tadoba Tiger Reserve? Work from home and call over kid’s friends – woe is me! Struggling with deadlines, cooking an Italian order, and startled by the sight of young girls in blue and purple wigs, numerous bangles, and painted faces and flowers on their fingernails. We hadn’t thought of pasta with basil and olives at 13 and our moms had stunted our nails with a simple stare!! Things have evolved so much that “Arre whaat re, arre?” is rolled out delicately as “Aw rei , wha’ re…aw rei?!”

I look at them and I shudder, thinking of the Facebook snippets my younger colleagues have exposed me to of the evolution of some 20 somethings. My jaw had dropped to see a pansy sitting there, posterior aimed directly at the world for a public viewing of another unimaginative tattoo in an unnervingly impossible place. My only thought at that time was that while she is at it, she could tattoo herself some underwear.

I prefer the blue and purple wigs for now and am prepared to expect the unexpected, like for example getting labeled as the Mad Hatter by the Alice and Cheshire in my family, especially since I thought I was oh so sane! Then there is the call late in the evening that frightens the daylights out of me till I realize it is a friend calling to inform me of a hermaphrodite designer in my hometown who shares my last name. And then in the night when something goes BUMP…yes I do still jump, but invariably it is daughter’s water bottle that has tumbled from its jauntily placed edge to flood the floor with water, and yes, I am the one mopping it up at 1am in the night.

So here's to expecting the unexpected – because things happen when you least expect it to and when you look at the bigger picture, the hidden pattern, the secret message, it’s all for the best. Or so I am told ;-)