I remember a stopwatch in my childhood. I think it belonged to my father, though I'm not actually sure. I got ahold of it one day and started timing how long it took me to do things I normally did. I was shocked to find most of my daily activities took a number of seconds, maybe a minute or two. That knowledge was heavy.

If you think about all the tasks of everyday life in terms of individual actions that take merely seconds each, the day seems to stretch on forever in a ridiculously overwhelming fashion. It takes so many seconds to type each sentence in this blog post, to get a glass of water, to put away the dishes from lunch in the dishwasher. 

Knowing that, too, can be a little intimidating. If it really only takes a few seconds to do things, what the hell am I doing all day?

I thought about that sort of thing last night when I really wanted myself to work on PARKER CLEAVES but I was really tired from a full weekend and doing some work for my job already. I set the stopwatch on my phone for fifteen minutes. I wrote until it went off. I haven't read it over yet. I don't know if it's good. Doesn't have to be -- it's a rough draft. It just has to exist so I can fix it. Thinking about all the little fifteen-minuteses, though, is as overwhelming as the first full day of a new job or a new baby -- wondering how you're ever going to get through so many seconds to the end of the day. That's what writing the rough draft feels like to me. 

I could accomplish so much more if I spent more time realizing how little time it actually takes to do almost anything.

Do you ever look at all the people making sexy fish-faces on The Facebook and wonder how we got here?

Then, in the midst of my judginess, I look at my own damn profile picture, which is one of the only pictures I've ever taken in which I'm not smiling, because I was trying to be serious and authorial and not giddy. Totally no different than The Facebook. I'm guilty.

Sometimes I get so tired of myself and trying to promote my writing and trying to be, just, well, MORE. More as a writer, more as an employee, more as a mother, better, faster, more.

I have plenty of friends who ask me why I feel compelled to write books on top of all the other things I do in my life, and I think the real answer is that I take myself too seriously. When I'm honest with myself, I know there are almost 300,000 books coming out every year and it's a bloody miracle if anyone finds mine, reads it AND likes it, so sometimes it seems very silly to keep trying. And here I am, writing another one, not knowing if this next one will be bigger, faster, more or not.

Then I think, well, if I didn't try, then what point is there in doing anything? I was commenting on a post this week about a woman who doesn't like to make her bed because she doesn't see the point, but I always make my bed and the point is to have a made bed because I take myself and my bed very, very seriously. I take everything seriously, except for The Facebook, because The Facebook depresses the shit out of me and every time I go over there I find myself feeling bad that I'm not doing everything better, faster, more, and I hate feeling like that, like just living without hurting anyone else isn't enough.

I think I might need a vacation. 

Last year and this year, we've let my daughter stay home one day a week from summer camp provided she doesn't interfere with my work (well, more than making her lunch and things that can't be avoided). It saves us around $130 a month and it lets her get bored. Remember getting bored? And having to do something about it yourself? I think it's very important for her to learn to putter around the house so she doesn't follow her roommates around like a sad puppy in college.

On most summer Mondays, she watches way too much television, doesn't get dressed until five pm and folds her own laundry. I don't worry too much about her spending a day watching television, because it's one day and then she goes to camp the rest of the week and swims and bowls and makes stuff out of beads and does science experiments. Plus, watching TV all morning on a lazy summer day is fun. I'm jealous. 

And every once in a while, I walk into the living room to check on her and find an intricately constructed story hour so cute I can't even believe it.

She has way too many stuffed animals, too. But I don't care any more. Life's short.

The actual upper and lower scope didn't take long at all. They took all the biopsies they needed this time and told me about my innards. Some more medicines.

They gave me something to dry out my throat that hasn't worn off yet, but I'm otherwise fine. I finished FORGIVE ME, LEONARD PEACOCK and thought about how important it is for teens to have trusted adults in their lives, how the presence of that can make all the difference in eventual psychological scarring.

Last night right before bed I had this horrible fear something would go wrong and I would die during a routine outpatient surgery. It took me a while to stop the intrusive thoughts. I laid down on my daughter's bed and prayed I'd be able to at least shepherd her to adulthood. Then I started to cry from the anxiety and exhaustion and hunger and stimulative laxatives, and then she rolled over in her sleep and punched me in the head.

I'm waiting for them to come home with glow sticks for the holiday and my fears seem silly now, but they were so very real last night.

My plan worked. Slept until an hour before check-in. They are delighted with how long it's been since I had liquid. I'm delighted I got here before the appointment before me and got bumped up.

Thirsty.

*updated whenever I remember*

I have my colonoscopy tomorrow. This is the second colonoscopy I've had, so unfortunately, this time I know what to expect. I'll spare you the details of the gross parts, but in case anyone's wondering what it's like to prep for a procedure like this, I thought I'd liveblog it. I promise I will not talk about my plumbing.

8 am: Coffee. No milk. I poured water into it out of a water bottle to try to fool my mind with the ritual. My mind was fooled. My tastebuds were not. I had two cups and yet somehow still do not feel awake.

8:30 am: Notice I am hungry. Drink lemonade and eat some lemon-lime Jell-o. 

10 am: Make a tasty cup of chicken broth. (Note: chicken broth is a really good thing to drink because it at least tastes like food, whereas Jell-o just tastes like the dregs of childhood and church potlucks.) Decide to pretend I am at a fancy spa having a colonic or juice cleanse instead of sitting around my dirty house trying to work while I mainline clear liquids. Maybe a little soothing music would help. 

10:41 am: Why can't I wake up? Also, I looked up colonics. Why anyone would do that to themselves voluntarily is beyond me. 

Noon: Fed the cat. Jealous of the cat. Looked at my "supplies" and realized I'm going to have way bigger problems in a few hours. 

12:28 pm: Realizing I'm not going to really eat anything today, I check with the nurse and decide to start the cleanse part of the clear liquid diet early so I can go to bed early -- if I want -- without fear. My plan is actually to stay up late and sleep until the last possible minute before my 12:30 Wednesday check-in so I don't have to sit around all morning thinking about how hungry I am. Mix 15 doses of Miralax with Gatorade and take two Dulcolax. Stare at bottle of Miralax and think I can't possibly be taking this much at once, then remember the point of this entire exercise. Stir into large water bottle with chopstick and down the hatch. It will take me forever to drink all this stuff, anyway. Not hungry at this phase because so much liquid going down. Feel bloated and lightheaded.

2 pm: I can tell I'm not going to need the second round of supplies, which is good. Also, I feel totally sick.

2:11 pm: HUNGRY! SO HUNGRY! 

2:29 pm: Hunger's gone. Now I'm depressed. WILL THIS DAY EVER END?

3 pm: Developing a hunger headache. Call nurse to ask if I can take Advil. HUNGER PANG WHILE ON HOLD. No Advil. Only Tylenol. Panic because I never take Tylenol, but I find a bottle in the medicine bin. 

3:22 pm: Hitting refresh on Calming Manatee.

3:42 pm: I don't know why people fast for clarity. There is no clarity, only bad flashbacks to the million things I used to do to distract myself from being hungry. 

4:08 pm: Starting to fantasize about being sedated tomorrow. It would be nice to be asleep right now.

5:33 pm: Fed the cat again. Currently hate the cat.

5:44 pm: I HAZ THE SADS.

9:04 pm: I sent Beloved and the little angel away for dinner because I couldn't stand to smell food. They were gone for an hour and a half, which I spent reading FORGIVE ME, LEONARD PEACOCK and becoming convinced of the awesomeness of author Matthew Quick. Writerly appreciation blinded me to my hunger pangs, but then when they came home, I stood up too fast and nearly blacked out. I decided I needed a distraction, so I watered flowers (it's raining now), took out the garbage and put away laundry while listening to the sounds of my innards. The worst of the cleaning process is over now, so at least there's that, but the hunger is really mounting right now, and I hate to go to bed hungry, so I'm going to try to stay up as long as possible so I'll sleep right up until noon tomorrow. I check in at 12:30 and the procedure is at 1:30, and the nurse said it should be all done by 3 at the very latest. I want to think about all the food I'll eat on the deck tomorrow night watching the neighbor kids and the little angel set off fireworks (remember, kids, I live in Missouri), but that is too depressing as I realized just a little bit ago that I still have eighteen hours to go. How long can I sleep? 

9:10 pm: I swore I would not have any more chicken broth as the cubes have a zillion grams of sodium in them, but I suppose retaining water isn't really a problem at present, is it?

You're supposed to eat protein before starting the all-liquid diet. Tonight we ate at the pool. I had a hot pretzel with cheese, part of the little angel's fries, kettle chips and some chardonnay.

Oops. Stay tuned. Yellow Jell-o is in the fridge.

Yesterday, I found myself in the gastro doc's office for two and a half hours. We went through in detail my history of eating disorders, veganism, vegetarianism, surgeries, childhood afflictions and allergies, family history. The nurse practioner who spent so much time with me reviewed the results from my last colonoscopy. She told me all the things that could be causing my distress. She told me that the last gastro doc eyeballed my gut but didn't actually do a biopsy for celiac disease. She told me sometimes part of my stomach gets stuck in my esophogus. (!) She said they needed to start over. I began trying to hide my anxiety attack.

She ordered labs to look at my kidneys, thyroid, liver. She ordered an upper scope and colonoscopy for next week. She asked for all sorts of things too gross to list. She gave me a sheet on colitis. She told me a list of other drugs that might help, one of which was steroids. 

I started to cry.

I told her one of the ways I manage my eating disorder history is to try very hard to stay in a ten-pound window that is healthy and realistic. I told her I knew it's possible my mother is right and my ED contributed to my current suffering, but that talking about it like that makes me feel like I somehow did this to myself on purpose, which brings back memories of people thinking I did anorexia to myself on purpose, that I am to blame for everything bad that happens to my health. I told her I'm scared of steroids.

She dropped her papers and rolled herself over and touched my arm. She told me she understood and that would be a last resort.

I understand how stupid it sounds to be so afraid of weight gain. Welcome to the wonderful world of ED recovery. I write this here not because I want to scare my family into thinking I'll relapse, but because I work so very hard not to relapse, and I'm always actively managing what I put in my body with that in mind. It's important my doctors understand that if they have choices about which medication to give me, they should not give me the one with a side effect of weight gain. I've been shocked at how willy nilly doctors can be about not telling their patients this pill or that pill could make you gain forty pounds, by the way. It's true that everyone's body responds to things differently -- something I am learning more and more as I get older -- but still. If I were a doctor, I would tell people things like that.

And she said since I'm getting a colonoscopy next week, it won't make too much a difference to eat gluten. She suspects it's not gluten because the situation is so severe, but only a biopsy can tell for sure.

I went a week without eating any gluten at all. It was actually not as hard as I thought it would be. Eating at home was a snap. Eating out was a giant pain in the ass, but we only ate out one meal in that week I was off gluten. More and more, that's the case for us, especially in the summer. It's so expensive. I didn't realize how expensive eating out was until my husband lost his job last fall and we drastically cut our food budget. However, sometimes it's really fun and necessary and being gluten-free while eating out sucks eggs. 

She also bumped up my Welchol to three giant horse pills in the morning and evening to see if that would have any effect. She said at this point, it's just a process of elimination until we figure out what is causing my problems. As I stared at the chart listing all the things that can be wrong with my digestive system, I was pretty overwhelmed. And I felt pretty old. 

She asked me, though, to please let her keep trying to find the problem, since I admitted I'd only gone to two gastro docs once each because what they gave me didn't help. I asked her if she thought that was weird because clearly I had a problem, and she said, "You'd be surprised what people will tolerate until it becomes their normal."

Isn't that an interesting sentence? I am so stealing it.

So now that I have absolute, positive verification that no, what's happening with me is clinically significant, otherwise known as ZOMG YOU ARE A FREAK OF NATURE, I'm promising myself I'm going to figure out, at least, what is causing these issues and see what I can do to bring it down to a low roar. Even though the doctor's office called me in a panic this morning because my insurance is changing again and I don't know the new number and won't until July 1. And my colonoscopy is on July 3. 

Last night I ate a huge plate of broccoli and mac & cheese. Hello, gluten, my long-lost love.

My sister loaned me her boxed set of Battlestar Gallactica DVDs a while back, and I burned through all the seasons in record time. I just binged that show, I loved it so much. So many fascinating questions about humanity. While stumbling around the Internet, I discovered there is another series, although a much shorter one, called Caprica, which is set on Earth and shows how Cylons came to look like people. (There is a lot of other stuff that is not explained, unfortunately, but whatever.)

In the show, a guy played by Eric Stoltz invents a game called V-World. You get into V-World by putting on some whack glasses that remind me of the banana clip in Star Trek only these have lights. It's completely virtual there, and you can't die. If you get shot or stabbed, you de-res and you can't ever go back to V-World. You only get one life.

It's extremely dangerous in V-World, though. People play games of Russian roulette and carry machetes and guns and drive spaceships into buildings. Several characters ask how to win the game, and nobody seems to know. Most disturbing -- most people don't seem to care. They're just excited to fuck with as many people as possible while they're there. Maybe it's because they know they're not really killing someone. Maybe it's because the culture of the game is so violent. But these people shoot guns without even looking at what they're trying to hit.

At one point, one of the main characters asks another what the point of the game is. He doesn't know, either. The man who created the game didn't even give himself an extra life, and he doesn't really seem to understand any of it, either. I don't want to ruin the series for you if you want to watch it, so I won't go on any longer about the game or what happens there, but it occurred to me that I didn't like the scenes in V-World at all, because nobody seemed to care what happened there, if people got hurt, if people were sad. 

One of the things I struggle with most in modern America is accountability and the dissociative imagination at times brought out in certain people by the Internet. If V-World is to the Internet as Caprica is to the U.S. (it seems particularly the U.S., but that could be because I live here), then the people in V-World are physically acting out the racist tweets, ragey comments and hacking that goes on in real life on the Internet. 

While thinking about this yesterday, I had a flashback to ordering a sweater from the J. Crew catalog when I was in college and when I did not have access to The World Wide Web. I did not even have a cell phone, egads. I used the phone attached to the wall in my dorm room and called the 800 number and described the sweater and page number of the catalog to the woman who answered the phone. She was really nice, and we chatted for a while about what a cute sweater it was and whether I should get it a size too big as was the fashion at the time. I told her my credit card number (which was brand new, whee) and hung up. I had to be nice to her -- she was a person, after all, and we were having a conversation with our mouth-holes and everything. That level of personal interaction was pretty much everywhere. When ATMs came about, we were all overjoyed that we could get our money in $5 increments late at night to go to the bars, but also a little freaked out that something might go wrong and there was no person to help us sort it out.

Now we have to do almost everything ourselves. Book travel. Handle our banking. Shop without the aid of a salesperson. Scan and bag our groceries. (Although I think in the small town where I grew up, high school boys will still sack your groceries and carry them to your car for you. That is pretty rare outside of small towns, though.)

Somewhere in between convenience and alienation lies V-World. At some point in the loss of face-to-face or at least voice-to-voice interaction, some individuals morph into douchebags with no moral compass, no personal sense of accountability and pride that would stop them from hurting someone's feelings or even -- virtually -- their bodies, just for fun. Where on the continuum is the turning point? How do we insulate ourselves against the fuck-it point? How do we teach our kids to go on being accountable in a situation where accountability becomes counter-intuitive to the game?

What, indeed, is the point of the game? When did we stop saying "please" and "thank you"? Was it when we went from talking to the J. Crew person to chatting with her on the website? The whole Caprica thing freaked me out sufficiently that I'm going to be monitoring my behavior very closely. I'm very polite and welcoming in my neighborhood. I'm a nice neighbor. I watch people's cats when they go out of town and tell them when their garage door is open and keep an eye on their kids when they're in the cul-de-sac. I send thank you notes, paper ones, when people give me presents. I'm not a total douchebag online, but I could be nicer. Sometimes I think I will say "thank you" and then realize I'm talking to an autoresponder, and maybe that's a piece of it, too. Sometimes I don't even know if who I'm talking to is real or virtual. Does it make sense to be polite to Siri? Does taking her for granted translate directly into walking away from a gas station cashier without saying thanks for giving me directions? 

Where is the line in V-World? 

What is the point of the game?