You may or may not have joined the Twitter revolution (either way, I understand), but if you have and you’re not following Stuart the Cat, you’re totally missing out. His simple yet insightful view of the world is changing humanity one Twitterer at a time.

http://www.twitter.com/stuartthecat

If you’d like to follow me, I think it would encourage me to write better, wittier things– tweet them, I mean. As it stands I have trouble caring what the 10 people who follow me think.

http://www.twitter.com/linabeau

See you there.

About a month ago, my favorite gym fairy (who, as mentioned, needs to be Best of Boston….) George descended upon my Saturday cardio class looking noticeably thinner than the week before. In the world of hard-core fitness (a world I now think I’m officially a part of), showing up thinner in less than seven days is like fucking Edward Scissor Hands and then going for a swim off the coast of Cuba… you are going to get attacked. To make matters worse, Georgie went ahead and teased the entire class by telling us that if we stayed for the second round of class (immediately following), he would tell us all how he shed 10lbs in 7 days. I have never seen so many people in a cardio class in my life.

The key to George’s sudden weight loss was a program called IsaGenix. Now, I’ve learned via Twitter that if you mention this product in ANY negative fashion, thousands of angry Isa-Twitterers will come out of the woodwork and Tweet you to death. I can only imagine what today’s Google Keyword search is going to do to me. (Hello, crazy IsaGenix people. Welcome to my blog. Now leave me alone.) The program is a “cleanse” which rids your body of the evil toxins that are weighing you down and keeping you from being the best possible person you can be. Actually what it is is a 9 day torture test to see whether or not normal people can live normal lives without food.

Like all stupid things in life: hammer pants, scrunchies, that time Coke fucked up and changed their formula, I needed to go ahead and try it. You know, just so I could blog about it. Had I been smart about it, I would have blogged during the actual cleanse, alas I did not. Mostly because cleansing turned me into a unique person who couldnt focus on benign tasks like sharing her life with twelve people.

For two days you drink some cleansing juice. Mine was “tropical berry” which, in IsaGenix land, is cousins with rancid organic apple juice. For two days at the beginning, and two days at the end you drink this juice and if you find yourself unbearably hungry, you are allowed an almond or two. How generous. The middle days (5) you drink two meal replacement shakes and then are allowed a 4-600 calorie meal– either as lunch or dinner. Think of it like a glorified SlimFast plan. During these nine days, I compiled a list of things that I was learning about myself through the cleanse. So here is is, Everything I Ever Needed to Know, I learned on an IsaGenix Cleanse:

1. Poo is Precious

I know. It is completely unladylike to talk about poo. So we wont. What we will talk about is what happens when you realize your rear functions have been… defunct… for more than four days. A girl who doesn’t believe in God starts saying prayers that the savior will send her a turd. After day five, the anxiety over the mass that is growing in your defunct belly becomes overwhelming, and you ask the hubs if he’ll just beat on you for a while. Lightly, of course.

The real kicker is when your meal replacement shakes give you Devious Gas. A rare breed that cannot be trusted unless one is seated on the cool promise of porcelain. Trust me on this, cherish your poo.

2. It’s the texture, not the flavor.

I actually learned this lesson years ago when I had to fast for an exploratory stomach surgery: hunger is nothing. I could go days without calories; it’s the longing for something in the mouth that becomes unbearable. I actually remember standing over the kitchen sink (during the fast) and chewing up stale loaves of bread and spitting them in the sink, just so I could remember what it was like to feel food. My dad accidentally caught me, and I dont think things have ever really been the same.

On day two of the cleanse, I had taken out nearly eight packs of gum. I was chewing the calorie equivalent of a Big Mac in increments of “Not a Significant Source of Nutrition or Calories”. They only say that because they dont know that some people use them as meal replacement.

As weakness turning to longing, I thought I was ready to lead a debate against religious activitists. You think your God is the reason and source of life? Wrong. It’s restaurant week. It’s gluttony and pleasure and fluffy carbohydrates. That’s what it’s all about. Ave Maria.

3. About your friends…

They only like you because you drink and because you eat. No one wants to be around a dieter. It’s a close second to a recovering alcoholic. (Sidenote: once you hit the 5-10 year mark of recovery, this doesn’t apply. We’re talking about alcondriacs– a breed of people who go to Betty Ford and emerge convinced that EVERYONE is an alcoholic. I don’t want anyone falling off the wagon, I just want them to shut the fuck up about it.)

For nine days I was a nobody. I wasn’t drunk enough to be honest, full enough to be tired, or engaged enough to care about anyone else. I was hungry. Plain and fucking simple. I wanted to eat babies. Covered in mayo. Fried.

Yum.

And now here I am. Maintaining. Drinking Devious Gas Shakes and playing poo roulette.

God Bless IsaGenix.

As most of you know, Stuart is our cat. There are days when I find myself recounting stories of Stuart while simultaneously ignoring the innner voice that’s chanting, “No one fucking cares. In fact, you’re actually freaking people out, cat girl.”

As you can see, I ignore that inner voice. If I had something better to talk about, I’d be talking about it. As it stands, though, I ain’t got shit. Except Stuart, of course.

Stuart George Wayne Edward Beaulieu, Cat Elite.

But the thing about Stuart is that he is more than a cat. I don’t mean that he is a soul, or that his eyes tell me things about the state of humanity that only God could know– because those sorts of things are truly the statements of lonely cat women, but I mean that he is something else entirely to hubs and me: He is a mediator.

Some people have open lines of communication. Some couples turn off the TV, put away their dinner plates and excessive work loads, and have intimate conversations about the state of affairs within their family. Hubs and I use Stuart as a tool of passive-aggressive puppetry, a highlighter for the deeper dysfunction within our unity.

Overtime (I think), you learn that there are things that you can’t say to your spouse. Marriage can make you forget it, but everyone has feelings and perserving those feelings is 90% of the battle. Telling hubs he is a useless sack of laziness? Not adviseable. Having Stuart mention to him that he is ashamed to call him “father”? Completely acceptable. In fact, downright constructive.

In the days of Milo, hubs and I could have entire conversations abot how much we loathed each other through him. Milo would tell hubs that he was scared of him, that the way he spoke to his mother (that would be me) make him scared that he would end up splitting holidays and having to spend Thursdays and every other weekend at a converted frat house in Allston. In turn, Milo would tell me that as a mother I was dispicable, that my housekeeping tendencies make him feel awkward about inviting friends over, that he was nervous the tabby from upstairs would come over, see the kitchen, and tell everyone in the building that Milo’s parents didn’t own any soap.

And there you had it. We would each apologize to Milo and walk away with a broad marital perspective. Put that in your marriage rules pipe and smoke it.

Milo was different, though. He didn’t lend himself to impromptu corrections about minutia. He truly shone in crisis situations. When anger was lurking at the surface–late at night, dishes undone, nothing on TV, hubs tapping his pen, watching TED– there was Milo, ready to tell dad how disappointed he was in how everything had turned about. Give him the eyes that only a child can, and plead with him to do better, to try harder, and goddammit get up and do the fucking dishes.

Not so with Stuart. He seizes at the climax, the pressure of picking sides between the man who feeds him and the woman who purchases the food is too much. Trivial, frivolous arguments– those are where Stuart finds his sweet spot. Recently, his position has morphed into something else: he is the cruel voice of all things painfully obvious, but never mentioned.

(Sitting on the bed, mom and Stuart watching TV, dad walks in wearing a towel. Stuart looks up and speaks.)

“Gee, dad. Where’d you get that belly? How are we ever going to play in the father/son softball game with you looking like a slugging monkey.”

Then hubs stands there, torn between whether to beat me within an inch of my life, or simply play the game.

“Oh, buddy. Don’t worry. Haven’t you seen mom lately? She’s been working out so much she looks like a big, butch lesbian. And you know how much they love softball.”

Translation: Hubs, you may need to pay attention to the weight that may or may not have added to your midsection. It’s becoming obvious and I’m slightly embarrassed by it and definitely less attracted to you. Caroline, your working out is not only making me resent you slightly, but your barrel arms are making me feel like less of a man, and with this recent weight gain I’m feeling vulnerable.

Now, you tell me if you’ve gotten that much out of thousands of dollars and hours of couples therapy.

You need a Stuart.

There is a difference between the moment that your heart breaks—that unmistakable pain that starts some where inside your being and slowly makes its way to your heart, a pain that makes you certain that there is no tomorrow—and the moment that your heart breaks open. The pain, though nearly unbearable, almost identical to heart break, bears with it a distinct and beautiful difference: somehow, some where, at the end of a pain that seems as though it will last forever, is a light. It’s a sign of hope. It doesn’t make promises. It doesn’t tell you in the middle of the night that everything is going to be okay. What it does is remind you that beyond what we experience, beyond what we are certain will consume us, is something else. When your heart breaks open, it is raw and fragile. It is a gift that so few people are given. It is the opportunity to look inside the heart. What you find in there is what guides you towards that light. And eventually it will heal.
And then all you have to do is remember what it is that you saw when your heart broke open.