Food and Breaths

As I laid (or is it "layed," or does that just refer to what the oviparous do to eggs?) around convalescing after surgery the week of Xmas and New Year's, I ate a lot. Especially cookies. Mom's world-famous snickerdoodles, the peanut butter cookies with the Hershey's Kiss in the middle, the peanut butter cookies with the strawberry dollop in the middle, the M&M cookies. Yum. And then I put on 6 pounds. In one fucking week, from not moving and just eating. That's almost an average of a pound a day. If Robert DeNiro or Christian Bale or some morphy morpher actor needs help gaining weight, I've got the plan for them.
So tonight's dinner was a spinach salad with pomegranate and mixed nuts.
Speaking of food, I was administering a reading assessment today. One of the passages was about the food groups (my favorite food group is tobacco). I ask students "concept questions" to determine their familiarity with a topic. However familiar one is with a topic will, of course, impact their comprehension. I know that I would have difficulty reading a science textbook or financial information because I have little background information about those topics. Anyway, the responses I get to questions are astounding. For instance, when asked what are foods in the meat group, one 5th grade girl, who has repeated 5th grade so many times she is nearing voting age, stated, "...um, moose?" And...um, horse? Buffalo! ...and ham." I would like to add that she looked like deer in a headlight (though that was not mentioned as part of the meat group) when asked any question. A 3rd grade boy, when asked what are types of dairy products, responded, "cavities." Sure that I must have asked the wrong question, or he must have misunderstood, I asked it again. This time, the dairy products, the foods made from milk, he said, were, "Grapes. Apples. Oranges. Strawberries. That's all."
Unfortunately, these kinds of responses are not an uncommon occurrence. One child told me that one of the foods from the meat group was dog food; am I not appreciating cultural differences? After reading the passage, one child informed me that bread was made from little things that look like bread. How edifying!
But I do love my students and I love my job and I love when they get things and they are engaged in a book. It's magical and I feel joy.

On another note, I've noticed lately that my shoulders are perpetually tense. Literally lifted more than half the time. All these years I've wondered why my shoulders are so tight. I'll be siting here eating, or just reading, or driving, and I realize that my shoulders are hunched. It's a sad and desperate thing. I have to remember to breathe.