Dad

It's been a little over a year now that he's passed away, right before Christmas in 2008. He'd been in nursing homes for 9 months - from the worst to the not-so-bad. It was my decision to commit him, after he had fallen and fractured his lower lumbar in the apartment he shared with my mom.

He'd always been angry, as far back as I could recall. He was deeply unhappy, convinced the world was out to get him, that everyone else was stupid. And he worked hard, from 4am to 4pm, as a short-order cook at a greasy diner in the Garment District for 25 years. He would come back tired, read the Post, yell at us, have a tense dinner, yell again at us, then go to sleep. I remember always trying to keep quiet so he wouldn't have a reason to yell at us.

My mother, in comparison, was a saint. She had come from a very happy, healthy family in Wajima, Japan, a small fishing village where, for some reason, her family had been famous for their lacquerware. They'd been wealthy, and I remember so many stories of her father who'd never said a bad word about anyone and had been a community stalwart, someone looked up to.

I tried to make sense of why they had to have met. There must've been a reason for it all. But my mother took the spirited verbal abuse, the cold disregard, the sharp temper ready to erupt at a moment's notice. We probably should have recognized it as mental illness a long time ago.

But this just constituted a normal day in our mostly silent household.

Foooood

Of late, I've been totally food-obsessed; I think the correct term is "food-addicted." Am wondering how many others out there are suffering from this too. Well, that's an overstatement - I'm not suffering from it, yet. It seems to go hand-in-hand with a bout of unemployment these days.

As a freelancer, gigs come few and far between. I'd worked for fifteen years as a news producer for a Japanese network and though the hours were long and erratic, I knew where I was headed most weekdays. Nowadays, though I get out as often as I can, to spend time with friends and family, to network, I spend alot more time at home than I used to. Self-made projects, seeking out work leads, can only take up so much of your time, and therefore my focus has been on acquiring, consuming and relishing food. Alot of it.

So as I try to keep up on news by perusing the different news sites like the NYT or BBC, new international news programs like Fareed Zakaria GPS or the Amanpour show, or even watching the different evening news broadcasts (never really did that before because I was never home to watch them), I munch on things. Unhealthy, fat and dairy-laden things, usually.

But to counter this self-annihilating habit, I run. Which increases my appetite, and often for healthier items, but I consume more nonetheless. Overeat. Indulge. Satisfy my hunger cravings for food since work is not close at hand.

Yet it's such a vicious cycle. When I had worked at CNN, on stressful night shifts, my best friend was the vending machine. The long walk to the other end of the floor was my only daily exercise. I ate, I snacked nervously as I struggled to keep up with the news, to learn the CNN in-house computer systems, as I sweat about the show's impending deadline hour.

But saggy parts of my body and face tell me what I need to do. Lose the munchies, focus on something promising and most probably glorious ahead, and take care of the body that'll house you hopefully through another couple of decades of loving the news, of hoping for the best.