everything in excess

so, once upon a lifetime when i was turning 30 some sweet friends wrote a birthday poem that they read as a toast. it was also a rather amusing roast as they had incorporated a number of my nonsensical facebook status updates. among them was "moderation is overrated". i used to say i did everything in excess, that i was happy to live to the point of tears. and while i think i'm calmer now, i realize in unguarded moments that i think i still live with that passion.

my previous post was clearly an example of thinking too much. i was contemplating my overthinking (i know, sigh) while running on the treadmill (another sigh, but the air is too bad to run outside) the other day. i became distracted when the sports news came on and found myself getting all teary over the world series and matsui being the first japanese-born player to be named MVP. seriously. i often get teary over sports. not because i care about the games, but because of the vulnerability of it all - the raw emotion and camaraderie and human connection. professional sports for me are just nicely contained narrative arcs of challenges being overcome, hearts swelling (and often beautiful people). but all athletic events have me over-emoting. i have never watched the nyc marathon without sobbing. and not so much for my amazing friends who have finished the race, but for the sheer humanity of it. watching strangers streaming pass, lost in the their own personal crucibles in this very collective way, i am just overwhelmed with feeling. i used to cry at my sister's high school volleyball games over the way the teammates supported each other. the high-fives always did me in. (she eventually politely requested that i get a grip or stop coming.) as i was trying not to loose my balance on the treadmill, teary-eyed during the bbc world sport segment, distracted from my analyzing my overthinking, i realized that i am probably also guilty of overfeeling. and if that is not a word, it should be.

i sometimes wonder if being sensitive is a good quality. ("being sensitive" might be one appropriate way to describe me. others might include soppy, crazy, or simply open-hearted. actually, i like open-hearted. that about sums it up.) i spent the last two days at a really interested conference of chinese social scientists on health, environment and development. i learned a tremendous amount and it will really help us with a social policy advocacy project we have focusing on environmental health. one of the sessions was devoted to issues of livestock practices, animal diseases, the impact on human health and development. obviously, we were focused on china. the presentations were, in a word, alarming. they may have fully convinced me to become vegetarian again.(something i have been toying with already for ethical / environmental reasons. i have already basically given up seafood because i just can't in good conscience eat fish when aware of the havoc wreaked by the fishing industry.) at lunch, i expected at least a few others to feel the same way. and i asked, but no one else was responding as deeply as i was. they transitioned straight from the little pigsty of horrors presentation to happily lunching on pork. my sensitive self couldn't take it.

i am still continuing to cook and contemplate justice. (aside from abstaining from meat, i really worry about how environmental health issues will play out here and am trying to educate myself enough so that our project may be a meaningful drop of water thrown at that savage sea.) this morning: oatmeal raisin cranberry dark chocolate chunk cookies (dark chocolate is a health food). tomorrow: my mum's vegetarian chilli and wholewheat honey bread. i think am hoping to direct all my excess thought and emotion into something tangible, nourishing. rather than let my thoughts eat away at me. turn them into oven-baked open-hearted goodness i can share. i suppose it's a healthy approach....