I’m entering Topcat‘s challenge via Weebles Wobblog. Weebles had me laughing out loud. Go look at the pictures on her blog.

Here’s mine, from 4th grade. I know there’s one of me from high school with painfully crimped hair, but I’m too lazy to go look for it.

Dereck is one-tenth of the way to his dream of leaving his cubicle for a bike trip across America, doing good things for strangers.

I’ve donated a few bucks; how about you? Come on, you can spare the price of a movie!

Following the advice of Golden Zen, I was planning to write letters to those who have wronged me as part of the process of “letting it go.” It’s a method that has worked well for me in the past, even if I do set off the smoke alarm when I burn them in the kitchen sink. Then I decided to write a template that other readers could use as a basis for their own letters. But I couldn’t get farther than this:

Dear [insert name or epithet here]:

Why? Because every dispute is particular to the people involved. Any template I composed would be so bland as to be useless.

Instead, I’d like to write about how to get to the point of actually having fewer problems to let go of. I am troubled, when someone says or does things I don’t like, by an inability to respond right then and there. In other words, to “say exactly what my heart prompts me,” as a fortune cookie once advised me.

I end up feeling like a coward, and to be quite blunt, I think it IS cowardly of me not to respond. I think it stems from a desire to be “nice,” but “cowardly” is the more accurate description.

(For many people, anger is deeply troubling. I have often felt guilty about simply being angry, as if the emotion itself were toxic. There’s a lot of self-help these days that says exactly that, that anger is toxic, but I don’t agree. I believe anger, like fear, is a useful emotion of warning.)

What happens next? I go home and stew about it, for days, sometimes weeks or months. If it bothers me enough, I will eventually bring it up again with the “offending party,” who has, by that time, completely forgotten about the incident that’s been vexing me.

And when I open my mouth to let out those first words, I can feel myself flush with the anger I’ve been holding in. My voice often quivers because I’m still so upset and I feel stupid about it.

I am convinced my life would go more smoothly if I would just spit out my anger or disgust or whatever, in as many words as necessary, and then sit back and see what happens. A few nasty fights would ensue, but the air would be cleared, and I wouldn’t have to beat myself up later because I was too chicken to react honestly.

And perhaps, as I became more comfortable with expressing myself right after I’m offended, I would become less vehement in my reactions. A woman once told me that I “go for the jugular.” That was a long time ago, in college to be exact, but I don’t believe I’ve changed as much as I should have. I’m certain that I treat people that way because I hold things in.

I realize the above is not exactly what Golden Zen meant by “letting go.” But I don’t believe letting go has to involve a Buddha-like renunciation of emotion (and I’m not saying that’s what she meant either). The lovely ritual on this blog involves describing what needs to be let go of—all I’m talking about is doing that more immediately.

I’m interested in what readers think. Am I just making excuses to yell at people? Is it gutless not to express yourself in the moment? Is it socially destructive to think every wrong must be addressed? Or even half of them? Should I just get over myself?

I’ve been trying to pull my sweet tooth for years.

It wasn’t always this way. I could eat whatever sweets I wanted, thought nothing of putting two tablespoons of sugar into each of several daily cups of coffee, had a reputation as the girl who found the best desserts.

It’s charming, isn’t it, when you see someone not too overweight (5 foot 7; 155 pounds) and attractive who can’t manage to stop eating sweets?

That’s what I thought.

But in my forties I began to wonder if my dedication to sugar was a more powerful addiction than any I’d had: nicotine, say, or caffeine.

Those two I’ve overcome. I know now that I can have the occasional cup of coffee or black tea without needing one every day for the rest of my life. I know that with nicotine, there is no safe amount.

But with sweets? Well, the tooth is still in my mouth, string tied around it, and that string is attached to the doorknob. But I haven’t slammed the door.

Doing the Denver chocolate theme brought it home to me. One day near the end of September, I came back from the grocery store and calmly sampled twelve chocolates in a row. I didn’t stuff them into my mouth, and I was able to taste the different flavors in each one. But still…twelve in a row? And I wanted more.

Joel Fuhrman, who wrote Eat to Live, says that when we have a sweet craving, our bodies are really craving fruit. Now I love fruit, but twelve different pieces of fruit in a row? Even kiwis? Or strawberries? I’m not sure I’d want to do that.

Even though I couldn’t manage to stick to that particular diet, I do believe that our bodies naturally crave fruit sugars. It’s just that my body has been programmed to crave processed sugars mixed with dairy products, and it doesn’t want to stop.

I’d love it if I could get to the point with chocolate that I’ve reached with caffeine. Where I could just have a little. Maybe even buy a chocolate bar and leave it in the cupboard for two whole days! I’m not there now.

With caffeine, it took me years to get to that point. I started drinking coffee with milk and sugar when I was a child and didn’t stop having at least one cup a day until I was thirty-nine. I often think that my sweet tooth came in while I was drinking that first cup of sugary, milky coffee with my mother.

How long will it take with chocolate? I’m not sure. I keep hoping someone will offer sage advice other than, Just eat a piece of fruit every time you have a sweet craving.

Or, go cold turkey.

I don’t want to say goodbye to sweets, even for a while. I just don’t want to slam that door.

In the process of copyediting a manuscript recently, I came across the website for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It used to be two separate agencies: the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and Customs. Now they’re one agency under the Department of Homeland Security.

Here’s what the About page says:
“Created in March 2003, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is the largest investigative branch of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The agency was created after 9/11, by combining the law enforcement arms of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the former U.S. Customs Service, to more effectively enforce our immigration and customs laws and to protect the United States against terrorist attacks. ICE does this by targeting illegal immigrants: the people, money and materials that support terrorism and other criminal activities. [emphasis mine] ICE is a key component of the DHS ‘layered defense’ approach to protecting the nation.”

Now this is a classic problem in copyediting. Did the writer of this page intend to equate all illegal immigrants with terrorists? The way it’s worded, that is the only possible conclusion.

Do you think it’s badly worded? Or does ICE think “illegal aliens = terrorists”?

As Golden Zen says, some things I just don’t control, like the writing on government websites.

But I can express moral outrage, can’t I? Maybe someone will notice. Last time I checked, most illegal immigrants or illegal aliens were looking for a job so they could send remittances to their family at home. When did trying to feed your family make you a “person who supports terrorism”?

Perhaps some of them are criminals and terrorists, but ICE shouldn’t paint them all with the same brush!

I’ve been reading a lot about Hurricane Ike in the last few days. Someone who was doing a search for Gilchrist found this post on Blogger, which I wrote in April 2007 while doing a road trip down the Texas Coast, birding during migration. There are a few photos of Galveston Island and Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge. There’s also more on other parts of the Texas Coast–I drove all the way from High Island to Brownsville and then back to Denver.

One caveat–for those of you in the midst of the hurricane damage, the tone of the post may seem flippant. I was on vacation, trying to write in a way that would entertain my family back home. If you’d like to just look at the photos, you can find them here.

Here is a link to photos after the storm, and this is the NPR article. I looked at some of those photos and couldn’t even figure out where the road through Gilchrist was.

There’s also this article in the Christian Science Monitor.

I’ve never lived through a hurricane. Growing up in Kansas City, Missouri, I was sometimes awakened in the middle of the night to go sit out a tornado in the basement, but the two houses I lived in never got hit. I’ve experienced ice storms and snowstorms, but nothing like this. I admire the spirit displayed by the people who live there.

I’m very, very sorry.