Free The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones by Sandra Tsing Loh

person in history ever to have sprained her ankle playing Solitaire.”
    “Oh, I’m sure many others have done that,” I say unconvincingly.
    “I’ve got to give it up cold turkey. Kyle! Kyle! No!”
    “Oh no,” I say. “Don’t go crazy.” I’m afraid that if she gives it up I too will have to commit to giving it up, and I am not ready to do that. “What, Clare? We’re already depressed, and now what? We’re going to take away the one thing that dependably gives us pleasure? Remember Jonathan Franzen. Don’t blame the cards, Clare—use the cards. I myself have a Solitaire practice that is very, very sophisticated. My technique has taken decades to perfect. Only the masters can do it—I call it ‘Chasing the Cat.’ Simply put, I openly and without shame set up my computer to ping back and forth between my exciting Solitaire game and my boring article. Over the next four hours, it more and more dawns on me that I’m making no work progress, my Solitaire game is getting more frustrating, I now have just forty minutes until my deadline, I’m really screwing up this time. Now comes the strangely pleasurable adrenaline-fueled panic of having procrastinated for too long. . . . And now my day is exciting. And in panic I finish just under the wire. Whee! It’s like giving yourself permission to smoke just a little bit of crack!”
    “Wow,” she says flatly. “Now that’s pathetic.”
    And with the utterance of that telling phrase—“that’s pathetic”—oh no, the rosy-hued magic spell of our happiness projects is broken. Because in point of fact, we are rather pathetic!

Gym Dandy
    C LARE AND I DECIDE to give our happiness projects—and each other—a break. In the meantime, my menopause expert, Ann, has informed her friend Isabel of my change-of-life situation. Isabel says that to fend off her own menopausal blues, she had tried therapy (expensive), hormones (the bloat), and even a bevy of natural aids like soy and black cohosh tea and Saint-John’s-wort (ran out of cabinet space in kitchen, had to expand Whole Foods “library” onto back porch, raccoons—eventually very mellow raccoons).
    “The only thing that worked?” Isabel insists. “Regular exercise.”
    I’m not typically a fan of exercise, as I have yet to experience its reportedly magical endorphin-rushing effects. Then again, possibly the reason it hasn’t worked for me is that my own form of exercise is doing sudokus—carefully propped up on the “dashboard,” with a mechanical pencil—while walking on a treadmill so slowly I might as well be sitting.
    That said, neither do I feel ready to join Isabel in her clearly mad Groupon offer for “bikini boot camp” that meets in the park every morning at 6:15 A.M.
    It’s at this point, though, that I am sent on a travel-magazine assignment to visit an eco-spa in Arizona for a weekend “yoga retreat for foodies.” It’s, at the very least, a tribute to how creative spa marketing directors become in the off-season: The filled-to-capacity workshop is 90 percent women, of whom almost half seem to be celebrating their fiftieth birthdays. It turns out to be light on the yoga and heavy on the small tasting plates. By the third day, indeed, there have been so many witty amuse-bouches , edgy dark-chocolate creations, and locally sourced gourmet cocktails like prickly pear margaritas that, what with the Arizona desert water retention, I am finding myself feeling just a bit bloated.
    Tucking into yet another arresting appetizer featuring sharp-angled prawns that appear to be on a steeplechase across a field of crostini spattered with goat cheese, I observe humorously to Mr. Y, who has accompanied me, that I am soon going to have to escape the health spa and go home just to be able to fit into my pants.
    Mr. Y jovially agrees, drains his glass of wine, goes to the bathroom in the nearby men’s lounge, and—apparently just because I have raised the issue—cheerfully leaps onto a scale.