Onion October

October has been a layer-y month for me – I feel like things just keep stacking on top of other things. I always think of Wendy Orr’s Peeling the Onion when I hear the word “layers”. It’s a good term to describe my home method of organisation – piles or horizontal filing. Imagine a floordrobe made of paper. I very much admire Teresa’s posts which have a nice focus with by-the-month updates, and make me feel less angsty about only posting every 4 weeks. She describes hers as: “A monthly capture of my feelings and doings, in the raw”.

Australian Venus

I set myself a challenge at the start of the month to reduce my sugar intake – this is layer-themed as well, because I want to be super muscular and get rid of my sheath of fat. I’d like to achieve a flat stomach, like the Australian Venus by Rayner Hoff. I also thought that I was so sugar-infused that if I was stranded on a desert island (this scenario is posed to vegans daily), the cannibals would find that I’d probably taste like maple-infused meat (this was only a minor motivator).

To modify my sugar habit, I’d hoped to go cold turkey, because I took Gretchen Rubin’s Moderator/Abstainer Quiz and I thought I was an abstainer (is it just me, or is that a really gross-sounding word?). It didn’t completely work. A friend who has achieved 0 sugar started taking magnesium and cinnamon. I eat a lot of cinnamon.

Hari’s carrot cake

Even though I’ve had sugary vegan treats once a week (carrot cake from Hari’s in Sydney, raw peanut cheesecake by E, chocolate slice made by my Mum, raw cake by B, and my botanical cuisine reward jar), they were all made by other people, and still much less than my usual amount. I also remember each one vividly!

Another lady at art school tried to reduce her intake of desserts by making a rule that she could only eat things she had baked herself. I have tried this for a few years with less success. As a result, I would normally eat raw homemade cake mix every day. Mostly to console myself about our broken oven (so it’s not like cooked cake is an option). That provides some context for being pleased even with this level of sugar – because I really did used to eat a lot of cake mix. Plus hunny bunny chocolate every 3 days. And 1-2 botanical cuisine jars a week. As well as some cake from Sweet Bones or The Front Gallery. Writing this list gives me the same realisation as those gross TV shows where they put a week’s worth of food in a tube (so wasteful!) to shock people.

Flying chocolate cake

Despite the “moderator” approach, I still had a celebration botanical cuisine Melbourne nights dessert tonight. I pretended I was drilling into the earth through the stratum of cashew and chocolate like the geological coffee plunger in William Kentridge’s mine film. I felt the sugar rush (as exciting as the game in the lego movie) like pressing the recharge resonators button on an ingress portal.

As it’s a Friday, NGAC was doing their usual BiblioDessert – a 3pm tweet about desserts for library people (you normally need a boost by then). So I was obliged to eat some sweets. I will continue to eat less sugar next month, but I did spend a lot more time thinking about sugar and was sorely tempted by my sugar lip scrub. Other things have happened since last month, but sugar and avoiding sugar have been my main obsessive activities.