Minx, Redux

Psst...Over Here!

2008-03-02T22:59:00.001-06:00

The cats and I have moved ourselves to the new and improved Mighty Minx site.

Please redirect your bookmarks and readers here.

Dairy Detox Day 3 (Saturday)

2008-03-01T19:28:00.004-06:00

I now officially know I'm old because I threw a party for a friend who was launching a little side-business venture, and I stayed at her place until about 2:00, and I had to go to work this morning and instead of being buoyed by adrenaline and staying up all day Saturday and repeating the same late night again because you can always sleep it off Sunday, I pretty much just crashed after work. Like, drool on the pillow, don't remember actually falling asleep while reading the news, old lady dozing off. I have friends who've either turned thirty or who are staring at thirty head on, and a few of them party, like, three our four nights a week (granted they're partying with college students who probably look up at them for being more than a fetus when The A-Team was in its prime and I think that's a little bit sketchy but this morning I dropped a particularly nice looking Shredded Wheat out of my Ziploc baggie of cereal into the feet area of my car and I had to REALLY talk myself down from fishing for it and blowing it off at a red light so I don't get to judge anyone again until tomorrow at least), and I just absolutely cannot do that anymore. I really just need to give into the inevitable and get my Murder, She Wrote boxed set and my lap blanket and call it a life.

The party itself wasn't too hard in terms of being tempted to eat cheese or meat, but the preparation for it was just awful. The night of Day 2 and all through yesterday (Day 3) I finally started realizing I couldn't just eat the meat and cheese anymore, and as Lunabella said in yesterdays' comments, it started to make me really cranky. The only way I got around it was to imagine the summer sausage I was cutting up as little baby pigs in a pile, and the melted cheese on top of the bruschetta was glue that would eventually make its way into my stomach and work its fiendish plan to hold my poop hostage for a week or so (you know that's how cheese rolls). All day yesterday I was just HUNGRY, despite having a pretty decent breakfast and lunch. I hadn't been hungry at all the two prior days, so I think it may have been more psychosomatic than anything. I'm hungry right now, too, but I think that mostly has to do with still being a trifle hung over from the glasses of wine my inebriated guest of honor kept asking me to finish for her and also sleeping through lunch. I should probably eat something.

I bought three very promising looking vegan cookbooks from Amazon--Vegan with a Vengeance, Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, and Veganomicon--all by Isa Chandra Moskowitz, who is the host of the Post Punk Kitchen show on NYC cable access, and generally regarded to be an all around awesome vegan chef. The books kind of read like novels, so I'm excited to dig into one tonight. I'm going grocery shopping tomorrow, so I may try cooking again, hopefully with better results than lass month's misadventures.

Also, I didn't make this connection the other three days, but I also stopped drinking coffee the week before I stopped eating dairy, so I'm not sure which symptoms belong to caffeine withdrawal and which are dairy related. I have had some pretty spectacular side of the head headache bursts, which I'm guessing belong to caffeine, but the ongoing dizziness, listlessness, and feeling like nasty stuff is sort of surfacing and then disappearing from my body is likely dairy related. I'm still not sure if I believe if detox really happens like that, so take it for what you think it's worth.

Dairy Detox Day 2

2008-02-28T19:54:00.003-06:00

There are a lot of times I feel really sorry for myself for not being married with kids. It usually happens at work, where I am the only single woman without kids there, and so have very little in common with the forty women there who all seem to be either constantly pregnant or menopausal and obsessed with their grandkids. I have no C-section scars to talk about, no opinions about breast pumps, and I can't joke about planning my ovulation calendar so I can give birth the day after Christmas and stay on maternity leave until Spring Break (Which is apparently like the ultimate goal of any pregnant educator. I had no idea.) Sometimes when I get home to a quiet, dark house, and the only living things there to greet me are the cats in the living room and maybe a cricket or two in the garage, I get a little lonely and wistful.

But then, when I'm at the grocery store and am busy filling my cart with alcohol and party food and waaay overpriced organic cleaners that make my house smell like a flower shop, and I have my cell phone in one hand and a Starbucks in another and I'm clacking along with my splurge handbag and my splurge heels and my splurge sunglasses and I bump carts with a woman my age wrangling one of those kiddie shopping carts filled with five dirty, screaming, wriggling children, all under the age of seven, and all of whom answer to the name Keegan or some screeched variation thereof, I have two very clear and distinct thoughts in my head:

1) This woman is a superhero.

2) I really must make sure to get my birth control refilled.

Day 2 of veganism was way easier than Day 1. No more shaking or nausea. Just a touch of headache and the omnipresent peculiar sensation of emptiness all throughout my body. It's hard to explain, but it's kind of like the knowledge of not ever having gooey, melty, creamy stuff again kind of makes my body feel cleaned out. Or something. I think it's probably just a huge placebo effect.

Tomorrow's going to be interesting, though, because I'm having a party for some friends and obviously they're not going to be down with eating tofu bean dip. I have some regular food and I'm going to attempt to make some vegan party food for me, too. If it's not a complete disaster, I'll post the recipes over the weekend.

It's For My Own Gouda

2008-02-27T21:08:00.005-06:00

I believe I am many good things.

I am kind to children and animals. I will kick your ass twice over in games that involve manipulating words or letters. I make a good pot of coffee, and I think I have nice hair.

But there are, of course, skills I haven't yet acquired in my twenty-seven years on this Earth. I have a black thumb, for instance, and the only green living thing in my house right now is a very tenacious ivy plant that will not die no matter how infrequently I water it or how long I left it outside after the first October frost. I am clumsy and just yesterday found out I have atrocious balance for tango, which will be the source of a tortured, whiny, overphilosophical entry once I get the tango page up and running.

But one of my worst flaws? I have absolutely shit taste in men.

Not every single guy I've dated falls under this category, but an alarming number of them do. To paraphrase Our Lady of the Single Gal with Saddlebags, Ms. Bridget Jones, if there are any "alcoholics, workaholics, megalomaniacs, emotional fuckwits, or perverts" within a 50 mile radius, I will find and date them. This pattern started in college, after having a very respectable relationship throughout high school with a very respectable boy, but not two weeks after hanging out with Real College Boys and seeing that they would be just totally awesome at preying upon every single insecurity, obsession, and bad habit that laid dormant in my otherwise placid character, I called up the high school boyfriend and dumped him, ostensibly for being too far away, but in reality for not being abusive and emotionally retarded and so therefore boring. Just recently, actually, I realized I was falling into the same pattern over and over, and I put a stop to it by going on "dating detox" and trying to get use to liking myself before I went out and liked someone else again. So far being an intentionally single cat lady is a lot like being an unintentional one, except I shave my legs less frequently which is COMPLETELY AWESOME.

So the reason why I'm writing about this nine years later after learning this lesson over and over and OVER, is because suddenly all my bad ex-boyfriends are reminding me of cheese. Stay with me, people.

As my eating habits are getting progressively better and better, I find myself being able to talk myself down from cravings, or emotional eating, and I find the more I stay away from binging and trying to hurt myself with food, the less I want to do it. (Duh.) But I think there's one last piece of the puzzle with this, and so I'm trying to decide if there are just some bad news foods that I'm going to have to cut out of my diet because I just can't trust myself around them.

It's probably going to be dairy, and especially cheese for me. My weakness is ice cream, or nachos, or milkshakes, or bagels and cream cheese, and I can never seem to moderate those foods like I'm able to with other stuff. The other night I was driving home from work and completely worn out and disinterested in popping in yet another frozen meal, so I thought "Hey, I haven't had pizza in awhile" and rang up Pizza Hut. And I kind of knew in the back of my mind that it's never a good idea to buy a whole medium pizza for myself and really expect to ration it, so I decided to try a little experiment--I decided to let myself have as much pizza as I felt like I had to have to get over the desire to eat pizza, no matter how much it took. And seriously, it was so not satisfying as a meal, I probably could've eaten the whole thing just to get that one moment when things felt and tasted as good as I wanted them to in my mind, but I finally just made myself stop because eight pieces is just ew. Everything was just gross...the way it made me feel, the congealed cheese on the top, the way my stomach never felt satisfied and I just kept eating and eating it, and finally I had to stop with the realization that I had ingested about 1,200 calories and really hated every bite. The whole thing made me realize that if a food that I think I love so much can make me feel this nasty, maybe I should somehow stop loving it.

The next day I took the remaining pizza for my lunch at work, and this is where the loser ex-boyfriend analogy really resonated for me. I realized as I sat down with my leftovers that I wasn't going to be satisfied with pizza and water and an apple like I had planned. Of course I needed a can of Coke and a candy bar, because that's how pizza OUGHT to be eaten. I needed the flavor combinations of cheese plus sugar plus chocolate or else it just didn't feel right. One thing lead to another in that situation, and again, for something that's supposed to be so enjoyable, it didn't feel good at all. It's like the loser boyfriend who's super romantic and sweet on the first date, but then he takes you to McDonald's for the second date, and by the fifth date you're bringing him the food to his mom's house because he moved back in with her to "sort out some things" and then by three months into it he calls you on your birthday (which he's forgotten about) while you're sleeping off a midnight shift at your summer job because his truck's run out of gas in Kansas and he needs a ride back and while you're both driving he asks you to pull over at this one dude, Tino's, house so he can "say hey to some friends" and before you can smoothe out your bedhead in the rearview mirror he's selling dime bags from his backpack to the guys who work at the local Mexican restaurant in Tino's driveway and laughing at you while you cry and tell him you have BIG COLLEGE SCHOLARSHIPS, damnit, and he's fucking everything up.

Not that ANY of that has ever happened to me. And I've digressed.

I've talked about this a little bit before, but my point is that I don't want to have an emotional attachment to my food, especially not food that makes me feel so shitty and makes me have irrational emotional attachments to other foods. So I decided to just finally bite the bullet and go vegan because it seemed right and I feel intellecutally good about it, and I think I'm on hour 26 of dairy detox. I'm not sure if there's really such a thing as dairy detox, but I know I feel like shit. Headache, joint pains, the shakes, nausea, dizziness, and I've had about 100 oz. of water today and I'm not peeing AT ALL and my stomach is swollen and hurts like a mother and I really don't know why. I apologize for the graphic detail, but I think it'll be nice to reread this in six months when I'm all vegan-glowy and shit and smiling serenely as I eat quinoa or something vegan-y.

I'll keep you updated on this if I don't die in the process, and keep your eyes open for the birth of the tango blog, coming very soon!

Bump in the Road

2008-02-23T21:51:00.003-06:00

On President's Day I drove up to Kansas University to visit with an old professor who had recently job there. The last time I had been to Lawrence was for summer camp when I was thirteen, and my only memories of the place were how every single building in the town seemed to be at the top of this big giant hill, and no matter where you went you had to go up. I drove in through artfully planned "quaint downtown" part of the city and stopped for lunch at a regional landmark, Local Burger. If you're ever within driving distance of Lawrence, I highly, highly recommend stopping for food there. Best veggie burger I have ever eaten in my life, and the rainbow slaw and vegan smoothies are fantastic.

I wanted to visit this professor to talk about possibilities for doctoral study, and to find out what I needed to do to be attractive for the admissions committees. I posted a few weeks ago about seriously considering law school, and how I had already bought LSAT test prep materials, and I was really working hard on the test, and researching admissions statistics, and figuring out what kind of personal essay would make me seem like I had more to offer than the ability to wipe the noses, tie the shoes, and button the jeans of 15 kindergartners while singing "All Around the Buttercup" and never dropping a beat. (I chalked that up as multitasking. Also, high tolerance for snot, which I'm sure is obviously a big prerequisite for high-paying corporate jobs) But the more I looked into it, and the more I got into playing the numbers games and comparing myself against other applicants and all of that, the more I realized that's really not my bag at all. I admire people who are attorneys; I respect their ambition, and the discipline it takes to throw yourself into a high-stress job, and I really like their money. But it's not me. I don't really have that kind of desire to climb the salary ladder, or to beat out other people for recognition or promotions. When it came down to it, I think I wanted to be a lawyer for the money, and honestly, even the prospect of an entire closet full of Louboutins and fifty dollar underwear is worth doing something I'd potentially hate.

So, after realizing this and being okay with it, I moved on to my other idea of going to back to school for a doctorate in some kind of education-related field. It was exciting, because since the competition for education degrees is so much lower, the chances I would've gotten into a really good school were higher, and there were all kinds of programs at places like Teachers' College in New York and Harvard that I was interested in. And the following part is the only reason I'm posting about this, because otherwise it's not a huge deal:

When I started looking at colleges in high school, my test scores, grades, and extracurriculars were strong enough that I had a pretty good chance of getting into schools like Harvard or wherever. And I wanted to go, although not for really good reasons so much as I just wanted to be able to say I got out of our little pissant town and did that, because it doesn't happen very often. But when my parents and I sat down to have our first talk about schools, they told me there wasn't any money. Not for tuition, not for trips out there for campus visits, not even for the application fees to the fancy schools. We simply did not have the finances to look beyond Missouri for college, and I needed to go to the school that gave me the best scholarship package, and that was the end of it.

And that's what started a very long resentment with my parents about what happened with my education and my future, even though I finally realized I was really just angry at myself for not ever trying to prove that there were alternatives and ways around the huge costs of going to school. I didn't know we were poor enough to qualify for grants and Ivy League poor people scholarships, and I assumed they had researched those things themselves. When my school guidance counselor told me to stop applying for scholarships because it was rude to take money from other people who needed it, I listened, and I was embarrassed for being greedy. I still told reporters and adults in town that I was planning to go to Harvard to study political science, but I secretly knew that the farthest east I was going to go for the next four years was Mizzou, and that was the end of it.

The same thing happened with my husband, who told me I couldn't go out of state to get a graduate degree, because that would separate us. One of my professors tried valiantly to get me to move on, even making a last minute phone call to a dean of her alma mater to see if they'd accept my application late and under the table. I kept refusing, because I thought it was my job to stay here and make money so my husband could go to school. So I stayed in Missouri again, and had an okay time, and did a good job, but all with the terrible feeling in the back of my mind that I was slowly boxing myself into a life I didn't want with every single day I kept saying "Yes, okay" to other people.

My brother, who is eight years younger than I am, and who took notes while all this was going on with me, ended up going to Yale. My parents did the research that time and found out college was completely affordable in the Ivies if you're poor and Midwestern, and my brother just kept telling people what he wanted until he got it to happen. And I watched all of this and just kept silently building bitterness, mostly at myself, until my whole life was centered around being resentful of my future versus his. And it was just one of those things I had to let go, you know? Just like the being angry at my husband, and the being angry at the people who've hurt me...all those things. I had to finally get over it after two years and just plan to find a way to exploit my potential on my own terms from now on.

So the reason I wrote about that wasn't because I've gotten accepted to Harvard or Columbia or anything. In fact, my crappy day last week was because during my meeting with my old professor I found out it's not even advisable to apply for a PhD in education programs until you've taught for five years in one district (which is a long way off for me). I just wanted to write about it, because in the course of breaking the news to my parents and holding my breath for their reaction, they totally came through. They told me they didn't care where I went or what I did, but that they wanted me to do SOMETHING more with my life. That they were sorry for holding me back, and that they'd support me in whatever I chose now. And it was a big, big deal for me, because I really thought I wouldn't have been happy without some sort of pretentious diploma, but really all I wanted was their blessing to get one.

I also figured out that I'm not going to let other people stop me from getting what I want, and I know that I need to get away from this place next year. And I've found some pretty promising options that I'll write about in the future as they pan out, or don't. Or I may end up serving out the rest of my tenure here in Asshatville because I figured out a Ph.D. is the smartest option for me. Who knows?

The sweetest reward in all of this, though, isn't the prospect of Fullbright scholarships or a bigger salary. It's that no matter how much I screw with my future in the coming years, I'm going to be doing it on my own terms this time.

Tuesday, February 19th

2008-02-19T21:05:00.008-06:00

I kind of had a shitty day today, and I'll probably write a little about that tomorrow, but I just needed to note for posterity's sake that resolving to do something constructive with bad news makes the actual bad news easier to get through than wallowing in it.

I didn't stay under 1600 calories today (closer to 1800, probably), but I also didn't binge while I was upset and I didn't even go get any awful fast food tonight, so I feel good about that.

I did indulge in a little retail therapy, but before my Favorite Person calls me up with a lecture, I can say that I think I've justified it very well. I had originally decided to use my new credit card to pay for yoga classes at the Bikram Place because they were $150 dollars and then I could pay it off every month and that would put revolving credit back on my report which would increase my credit score even more since I started fixing it after the divorce, but every time I thought about the cost of tuition, plus the driving involved I just couldn't see how it'd be a very good idea. So, since I'm not going to have that planned expense, I decided to buy one pair of tango shoes that were TOTALLY reasonably priced and would be better for my ankle than the ones I have now. I'm not really in love with the color combination, but it was the closest thing I could get to all black from a company in the U.S., and I know it's a reputable brand, and I can always send them back if they're not good. Also, I think the stilettos look killer in this picture.

And finally, just in case you haven't seen Argentine tango before and you're wondering why I obsess over it (besides the shoes, obviously), here's why. This is my current idol, Graciela Gonzalez, who proves that you can be in the Sisterhood of the Badonkadonk and still move like a goddess. I watch this video at least once a day, which is kind of like how I used to listen to the Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves soundtrack every single night before I went to bed in 8th grade, except now I don't fantasize about marrying Christian Slater at a Renaissance Festival.

Well, not often anyway.

The smell of redemption is a Taco Bell burp and Drakkar Noir.

2008-02-18T11:10:00.006-06:00

I am very surprised I didn't die of a heart attack in high school.

Because I am an unadulterated nerd, while all the other kids I knew were busy doing authentic teenagery things, like having sex in the back of Camaros, and getting drunk on Boone's Farm, I chose to pursue things like band, speech and debate, mock trial. I matriculated through high school basically walking around with a full body chastity suit made out of marching band uniform and encyclopedia and reeking of Eau de Social Retard.

Not only were the activities I chose largely uncool, but they were also super stressful. People in debate and band took their business SERIOUSLY, and so for at least twenty weeks out of the school year I was actually at school from about 7-5 each day, and I spent my weekends bussing to and from various metropolitan areas, pushing around one of those little rolling briefcase things, and living out of suitcases in hotels so I could live out my life of pretending to be a pharmaceutical sales representative, except with cheap shoes and without the never-ending supply of those cool pens with the herpes medicine logo on them. On top of the incessant travel, the late nights and early mornings, the McDonald's for breakfast, lunch, and dinner unless our teacher was feeling generous and took us to Shoney's for "something special", and the sense of never being clean because you basically spend 36 hours of your life each week sitting on the floor of high school gymnasiums in polyester business suits and pantyhose, there was just the stress of actually performing at these things. The stomach gnawing, have to go pee RIGHT NOW oh wait never mind, body chill inducing, can't sit still or I'll die kind of nervousness never, ever went away, no matter how good I got or how many times I had seen my opponents. I was a walking nervous breakdown in patent leather Mootsie Tootsies, and I kind of liked it that way.

I can count on one hand the number of times I've been that nervous since, but it's never quite approached the restrained hysteria I used to feel in high school. I think I got shaky at my first real job interview, and I know I thought I was going to throw up during my divorce proceeding, but that's about it. I am such a cool cucumber now I'm practically comatose.

But yesterday, as I maneuvered my steamboat on wheels into a parking space next to the Presbyterian Church that hosts the weekly tango milonga (yes, THE milonga where I have been humiliated and tortured and have whined about it here many a time), I got a huge case of the old high school panic, to the point I could barely pull my keys out of the ignition because my hands were shaking so badly. I really don't know what possessed me to go, other than the prospect of my spending yet another night with my cats watching Clueless on HBO2 making me want to off myself, but there I was, hooched up with stilettos in hand and staring through the doorway at the very same man who always makes me cry every time I go. I knew tonight was going to be pivotal, because it was the third time I went to this particular milonga, and I kind of also knew in the back of my head that if I ran out tonight like I had the last two times, I wouldn't ever be back.

This time was different, though, for two reasons. First was a conversation I had with the friend who introduced me to tango in the first place, and who's endured my venting about how difficult it was for a year now. She told me that for her, tango absolutely sucked every single time she went for a really long time. It was hard. She was embarrassed about her body. She hated herself. And then one day she realized she had to get over it and it started sucking less and less. And it was very nice to hear that B had gone through the same shitty experiences I had, because I really thought I was the only one who felt too massive to do this.

I had also decided to just stop having such a defeatist attitude about everything. The big conversation with The Friend on Friday made me realize I have the right to stand up for myself, and to get the things I want, and I really want to tango. I'm allowed to tango. It's not my problem if the men in the dance hall don't like my body. It IS my problem if my body isn't in shape to dance the best that it can right now, but my appearance isn't tied to that at all. It IS my problem if I shoot myself down before I even get a chance to figure out if I suck or not, and it's my problem if I decide before I even get in the door that the night's going to be a failure.

So I decided to try, no matter what, and I decided to make sure my body language and the way I interacted with everyone communicated that I belonged there. I practiced for the hour we were supposed to practice, and then when the actual social dance part of the evening happened I resolved to sit there and wait for someone to ask me dance no matter what instead of scuttling out the door after the first five minutes and crying in the car for being a pathetic freak.

And lo, it totally worked. The panic set in after the first round of dances ended and no one had asked me yet, but there were seven women to four men and one of the pairs was dating so they were always together, and two of the other women were ballerina types , and the other three were just plain fantastic, so I was obviously the low girl on the tango pole for the evening. So I just kept sitting and smiling and trying not to look desperate when Hell officially froze over because the Tango Nemesis walked up to ME AND ASKED ME TO DANCE. In front of everyone. In front of people who might see him dance with big-assed, no experience me. Internets, I nearly shat my gauchos right up in that Presbyterian church basement.

And honestly, it was a lovely dance and he even murmured "Bravo" a couple of times to me and didn't criticize me once except to say I needed to get different shoes and we danced an entire tanda and then he ruffled my hair like he was Ward and I was The Beaver and that was that. And you know what? Since he danced with me, another man danced with me and said I did a good job, and another and another until I had danced with every single person in the room. And I was soaked with sweat and out of breath from never resting and wobbling in my heels, but it was totally awesome. Even with the guy who kept burping Nachos Bell Grande in my face and definitely was picking his nose over by the water fountain when I thought no one was watching.

I just can't get over how powerful actually being determined, and positive, and persistent really are. I always kind of chalked it up as Norman Vincent Peale self-help bullshit, but making a conscious effort to stop telling myself "no" every time I get an idea has made a monumental difference in just this weekend. I might actually dig this whole healthy, happy thing after all.

If People Were Meant to Pop Out of Bed, We'd All Sleep in Toasters

2008-02-17T09:51:00.004-06:00

It is beyond amazing how much more I'm accomplishing now that my body clock is resetting itself.

For the past three years or so, I've been averaging about five hours of sleep a night, which I'm certain has completely eroded my immune system, my memory, my cognitive abilities...you name it. And I'm sure it doesn't help The Crazy at all. So about two weeks ago I decided I was going to actually get sleep. No matter what. I was exhausted anyway, so how hard could it be?

It turns out it was actually pretty hard to make myself sleep, and I wasn't prepared for that. Being the master worrier that I am, I usually use the hours of eight to midnight as a time for me to fret over possible life disasters that likely won't occur, ruminate over regrettable things from my past, think about how fat I must look sitting on my bed, berate myself for the mounds and mounds of lard and sugar I had ingested that evening, and so on. So when I started taking away that time from myself to just lie down and sleep, I realized I couldn't do it. It was a hard pattern to break.

When I finally managed to start going to bed at 10 and 11, I was pretty dismayed at how tired I still was even after seven or eight hours of sleep. I figured I'd just jump out of bed, sing to the assorted woodland critters gathering at my feet, whip up a perfect, nutritious breakfast, and flit out the door to work with ribbons in my hair and a spring in my step. (Okay, I would've been satisfied with time for a shower and a SlimFast) But it just wasn't happening. I was still pressing snooze four or five times every morning and on days when I didn't need my alarm, I was sleeping for 10-11 hours at a stretch. I totally went into, "Woe is me" mode, worrying that there would never, ever be enough sleep for me in the world to have energy to do anything except lie there.

I guess if I had been paying attention over the last two weeks, though, I would've realized that I WAS waking up more naturally, just in tiny increments, and that the amount of sleep I needed was starting to reduce each night. Today I woke up completely naturally at about 5:30 and I'm still not a bit tired (the triple espresso I made for myself probably isn't hurting).

There are just two things that bother me about being awake:

First, what do you DO with all this time? I've been up for almost five hours and I've still got like another twelve hours to go. If we weren't having a winter storm I'd go do stuff in the city, but alas. I don't have any hobbies, because for the last two years my hobby has been hating life and writing about hating life. I need to learn to needlepoint or something. I could make wardrobes for the cats.

Second, I'm not so good with being cheerful. It's not really my thing. I'm basically like the biggest, surliest, Gothiest teenager you could ever meet inside the body of a 27 year old woman who shops at Talbot's. Being happy makes me annoyed with myself, and if the goal of getting healthy is to promote the self-love process, how do you deal with the conundrum of simultaneously loving how you feel but also wanting to bitchslap yourself every time you actually embrace something pure and wholesome?

Also, does anyone know what the deal is with DailyPlate? I haven't been able to get on for the last three days.

I am so much better than before.

2008-02-16T07:18:00.003-06:00

There were a lot of big changes in my life the past week and a half, none of which are really worth blogging about, but it's why I've been gone. I also was asked to take back my 2007 title of Miss Big Ball of Infectious Diseases this week because Miss BBID 2008 got caught with racy photos on her Facebook and had to step down, so I've been enjoying the pinkeye and sinus infections that come with my old position as royalty. Attractive.

Anyway, during my mid-February Period of Personal Tribulation (I tried to hire a man to follow me around and sing "Nobody Knows the Trouble I Seen" but all the good baritones are booked into barbershop quartet gigs around Valentine's Day) I started reading a book by Dave Pelzer called Heal Yourself. If you haven't heard of him, he's the guy from the book A Child Called It, which is an autobiography of his life primarily from birth to age 13, when California authorities took him out of his alcoholic, mentally deranged mother's home and put him in foster care. Pelzer was subjected to, and survived, what is believed to be the third worst abuse situation in California history, including being stabbed, poisoned by bleach and ammonia fumes, beaten, starved, isolated from his brothers and father, and forced to endure ritual humiliation every single day for eight years. His Help Yourself book still recounts some of those gruesome details, but also provides insight on how he survived those attacks simply by the force of his sheer will and determination to not die. It's pretty incredible stuff considering he was just a little kid.

Pelzer's main point of the book, though, is to offer advice for people who find themselves, for whatever reason, unable to thrive and succeed in their own lives. For me, there were two chapters of the book that especially resonated. The first was that sometimes you just have to walk away from things and people that are hurting you, forgive them, love them if they need it, but not let the events eat away at your life. Pelzer cites seeing his mother at the last stages of her life, completely overtaken not only by her alcohol addiction, but also by the sheer amount of hurt and rage and hate she had for her own parents, her husband, her children, and anyone who ever crossed paths with her. She was pathologically angry, to the point it drove her insane before she died.

I don't know if I've ever been perpetually angry like her so much as a relentless Pollyanna instead (a fact that I know causes a lot of chagrin over at AFG, since AngryFatGirlzPlusOneGirlWho'sOnlyAngryAtHerselfForVariousDeepSeatedReasonsIncludingUnnecessarilyLowSelfEsteem
is just not a practical new URL possibility. So my thing that I can't let go is how disappointed I get with situations and people when they don't turn out to be good in the way I hoped they'd be. And moreso than any of the things that have transpired over the last year of my life, way more than the divorce, or the financial strain, or the not so stellar weight loss has been dealing with people and situations where I've been dying for some sort of happy closure or resolution and not getting it. It got so bad by this month that I would come home from work, go straight to bed and obsess over the problem, gorge and gorge myself with food until I couldn't move to get my mind off the problem, and then obsess about it again until the waves of nausea passed. The inertia and not moving thing I was having so much trouble with? I finally figured out it was really more because I couldn't stop ruminating on these couple of people and how to deal with them and their toxicity.

Yesterday after one of the more determined, spectacular binges in my personal history, while I was lying on my bed and gasping for air like a goldfish out of its bowl, feeling my stomach debate whether to accept all this food or to reject it right onto my lovely new sheets, and wishing I could just die from the shame and the stress and the physical and mental pain of it all, I finally finally FINALLY why I was doing this, and I decided to stop it right there. I contacted one of the people, asked one last time for a conversation where we could resolve the conversation, and I ended up getting what I wanted. Sort of. It wasn't the happy, friendly resolution I was looking for, and I was pretty disappointed how things turned out, but at the same time I knew there wasn't anything more I could do to change the person, the situation, or the closure to our relationship. I don't think I was in the wrong, people who know both of us don't think I was in the wrong, but even so, no amount of begging or demanding or sulking was going to get the apology I thought I had needed so desperately for so many months. I had done all I can. It was time to let the hurt, the disagreements, and the person go, because they were all toxic, and they were all seriously messing me up.

And you know when they say "a weight lifted off my shoulders"? I had never felt that before yesterday. It was really nice to feel it.

The second thing I took away from Pelzer's book was judging life by this one criterion: Is your life today better in some small way than it was yesterday?

I kind of puked in my mouth a little bit when reading that, because it was just SO Chicken Soup for the Soul and I'm just not down with touchy-feely optimistic things. But seriously, it's a good message, even though I like to rephrase it as "Does your life suck less today than it did yesterday?" Yesterday, prior to that conversation, while I was collapsed on my bed, using a pizza box like a pillow, hearing my cats crunch around on the box of Bran Buds I had accidentally spilled on the kitchen floor on Wednesday and still hadn't bothered to clean up, I decided I had reached a new rock bottom. (Even though I think I've reached rock bottom about 14 times at least in the last year) But this time was different; a new low, a new level of spiritual, emotional, and physical bankruptcy I didn't think I'd fix this time. But I did, at least part of it.

Things can and will get better for me. I think they'll get better for all of us, no matter what we're struggling with. I think we have to believe that, or what's the point in getting up in the morning? The other day I started an opening paragraph to what I guess was supposed to be a book on recovering from binge eating and depression, but I only wrote a few sentences before I realized I didn't have anything to write about. I was still too upset, and all I could see myself writing about was how shitty I felt each and every day until I died and then someone would fill in the epilogue with "And then she died, and her cats ate her eyeballs. The End."

But I don't know. I think, right now at least, it's doable to find at least one thing I can do to recover and feel better each day. I could start with picking up those Bran Buds, although I kind of like how stepping on Bran Buds is like popping whole grain bubble wrap with your feet.

I'll try blogging about them here, so even if I don't have good news to report on the weight-ridding front, I'll at least have something else to write about. Prepare to get intimately familiar with my glowing revelations about disinfecting trash cans or not freaking out and kicking the bank building when the ATM cash mouth thing eats my money but doesn't deposit it.

Weiner Poopie

2008-02-05T23:16:00.000-06:00

I am beyond distraught that we are getting dry-slotted for our third winter storm in a row here near KC, so I'm posting a video that makes life still worth living. Via Dooce:

211.2 and counting

2008-02-03T12:41:00.000-06:00

Thanks everyone, again, for pulling my head out of the cyber-oven. Doctor Andy asked me last night if I felt encouraged to keep writing after all the wonderful comments, or if I was frustrated because I really wanted to quit and honestly, it encouraged me a lot. I kind of view this blog as just a chronology of what I'm feeling at the time, and sometimes the things in my head like, "I want to give up" are more just vocalized frustrations than actual wishes. Sometimes, though, things like, "I want to eat four peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and wash them down with a bottle of Hershey's syrup" ARE actual wishes and more often than not come true. Sometimes I'm afraid I'm too honest here; that the more I write about being upset and trying but failing over and over again, the more you'll think I'm crying wolf. But as whiny and ugly as my thoughts are at the time, they're really what I'm thinking and I learned during college and the course of my marriage that pretending I don't feel that way never helps the situation either.

I guess I haven't been doing as terribly as I thought, because I managed to lose a couple pounds in the course of all this wasting away in bed. I feel good about that, because I could tell there was something not right happening with my body when I was circling around 215-220 over the last couple of weeks. It just felt distended and toxic and wrong somehow, so it's nice to see the numbers came down when my body started feeling better again. I have had two straight days where I haven't eaten anything nasty--that fancy new grocery store with the fancy organic convenience food is really going to be a life saver, I think--and I'm heading up to the Bikram yoga studio to try out a class this afternoon. I wrote an email to the guy who owns the studio at the beginning of this week asking a few questions about whether the practice is too strenuous for really heavy people and whether I could maybe trade tuition for helping wash the mats or doing secretarial work and he wrote back IN ONE GIANT RUN-ON SENTENCE ABOUT HOW EVERYTHING WOULD BE JUST FINE AND I SHOULD DEFINITELY COME AND DON'T WORRY ABOUT A THING and I was like, "Dude. Whoa, dude. " and then I wiped the blood from my poor assaulted eyeballs and reread the message and it was very encouraging and nice, so I'm feeling pretty good about this afternoon. I hope I don't pass out and die in the room, because then when my parents come and clean out my apartment my mom will find the episode of Louis Theroux's Weird Weekend: Swingers I recorded off BBC America and I just couldn't bear the thought of her finding out her heroic efforts to avoid ever exposing me to the idea that people actually touch their bodies together for any other reason than to pass on the love of the Holy Spirit across the pews in church hadn't succeeded.

A lot of the reason I've been freaking out over the past month especially is because I'm kind of coming to this weird juncture in my life where I'm finally getting my shit together here, but I'm also trying to figure out what to do next. Like, on Tuesday, when I go down to my hometown to vote, my parents are also taking me out to dinner because I paid off all my debt this month. My mom said she was proud of me. She actually said she was...proud of me. That's really huge, because I think the last time my mom was proud of me was in 1997 (or maybe during Thanksgiving 2001 when I poured a glass of milk from a full gallon jug and didn't spill any of it on the counter, which had never happened before and has never again happened since). But at the same time that I'm pretty proud of having fixed my financial situation, there's the overriding sense of shame that I got myself into that mess in the first place and shouldn't have, and that I could very, very easily slip up and do it again. I applied for a credit card, at the advice of a friend who is really good with money, only because I know I need to have some sort of revolving debt to rebuild my credit, but I am beyond terrified of even activating it for fear that somehow just HAVING the card in my wallet will mean that I'll pass out and wake up the next morning somehow having purchased a Dyson vacuum, a Shetland pony, and $600 worth of lip gloss. You snicker, but I have empirical reason to be concerned.

I also am minorly freaking because I've finally settled here, and it's been a long time since I've been settled anywhere. My junior year of high school, we moved out of the house I was born in to a brand new house and ever since then I've been moving. I haven't lived in any one place longer than two years; this address is the first I can count as a permanent one since 1998. I have a coffee grinder, a 401K, a garage, and a lovely collection of cleaning supplies that make my house smell like an English garden. I'm very settled in my job right now. I have friends I can drink a beer with if I'm so inclined, and other than a few little dips into despair, I'm not really THAT depressed. Things could definitely be worse.

It's just that this isn't where I want to be settled, and so I'm looking for ways out. I'm going to take the LSAT in June, and I'm thinking very seriously about law school for 2009-2010. I went to St. Louis last weekend to visit some friends, and I loved the neighborhood around Washington University. I'm going to visit another friend in NYC for a week in March, and I'm going to check out Fordham and maybe Columbia. I could see myself in DC, too, or even Chicago after I start giving myself testosterone injections so I grow enough body hair to handle the winters. I have lots of possibilities. But as much as I'm excited about movin' on up and doing something challenging and intellectually stimulating in fabulous places like DC or New York, I am beyond terrified. How do I pack up four years of work and life and all this stuff and cram it into a studio apartment in Harlem? How do I even begin to afford a studio apartment in Harlem? What happens if the cats go insane from being cooped up in a single room for three years and I get evicted because they won't stop meowing? What happens if I go insane because there's a cockroach in my bathtub? I will move if I see a cockroach, I swear to God. What if I become a lawyer and realize I hate it way more than I ever disliked teaching? What if I don't even get into a decent law school and I'm stuck here for the rest of my life?

And I know, intellectually, that if I want a different life I have to start from ground zero to get there. I know I have to take a chance and just do it. I know moving to a different city with millions of cultural opportunities and where my friends are would be infinitely more rewarding than my life here in Asshole, Missouri where "cultural opportunity" means someone hired the remaining two members of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band to play on a trailer in the Wal-Mart parking lot for March of Dimes week. I also know that I'm creating my own perfect storm of anxiety and inertia by worrying about things that aren't even close to transpiring yet, and I should just be focusing on the things I can control now instead of pricing 5th floor walk-ups in Washington Heights that won't even be available in 2009.

I guess sometimes when I get this way I'd like to be able to put my head on someone's lap and tell them I'm really tired from working so hard to make everything better and not being sure what to do and then maybe that someone would just let me lie there for awhile and they'd even let me watch Ugly Betty while they played with my hair. So, in the absence of that, I put out my frustrations here and then I feel better and then I can go back to the really important things in life, like figuring out how to wash out the stench of gasoline and regurgitated Fruit Loops from my work shoes before tomorrow morning.

Are You There, God? It's Me, Erin.

2008-02-01T21:01:00.001-06:00

I am very close to giving up and shutting down this blog.

And I don't want to quit, deep down, but I don't know how long I can string out more and more blog entries about dieting and losing weight and getting healthy when I'm not doing any of those things. I'm getting worse, losing momentum, and I just really want to pull the covers over my head and do the easy thing and just give up.

I know I'm setting myself up to fail. I realize this every single morning when I wake up too late to make breakfast so I grab a doughnut or an Egg McMuffin on the way to work. I know it's my fault whenever I succumb to my usual post-work malaise and burrow in my bed with some kind of junk food and stay there until it's time for to actually go to sleep. I know it's my fault that I don't exercise, and I don't try to make myself cook the food I buy. I know all this.

But I swear, if I COULD make myself do these things I would. I really would. I hate this inertia more than anything in my life. My body has been screaming with pain over the past few weeks because I haven't been moving it, but the idea of exercising or even standing for more than few minutes at a time is exhausting.

I've caught myself praying over this a couple times, and I don't really pray. It's more of a "Dude, help." kind of plea, and I don't know if Jesus or whoever even thinks that counts. But I also know that something has to be pretty bad for me to even subconsciously be praying about it, so that's telling me something has to change. I need something to change.

The more I think about this, the more I'm starting to become convinced that all the problems in my life...my eating disorder, the almost comatose state I go into when I get home, the depression, the anger...they're not the problems. I really think they're just symptoms of some sort of enormous spiritual deficit that I haven't ever identified before. I feel empty. I think I eat and eat and eat because there's a hole inside me that I try to fill in all the wrong ways. I feel like I need more. I just don't know what that "more" is.

Sometimes, even though I'm really cynical about it, I think there is a God that watches over me. I believe this for purely circumstantial and silly reasons, like the time in college when I had thirteen cents in my checking account, and I owed $225.00 in rent by the end of the week and then I received a random profit sharing check from a summer job for $226.00. Things like that tend to happen to me enough that I think there's more than just coincidence to it, although that really doesn't seem to be much of a basis for religious faith. If I wanted to be so precious as to say that God's answered my prayers for help yet again, I guess I should mention that a huge grocery/health food store opened up about ten miles from my house, which means I'd only have to drive 15 minutes to get decent food instead of 30. I also noticed a Bikram Yoga studio had opened up in the same area, which also means I could drive there in 15 minutes instead of 45 or an hour. I don't know why I think those are my only chances to fix this, but right now I do. The yoga classes are hideously expensive; $150 a month, which I cannot afford at all right now, but feel like I need to purchase anyway. I emailed the man who runs the studio and he said he might be able to cut a work study scholarship deal with me if I would commit to going for awhile. I am terrified that yoga will end up just like tango, or aerobics classes, or Jazzercise or the old yoga classes, and when faced with the site of my enormous bulk in the studio mirror, I will leave after the first class and never come back. It'll be another opportunity I couldn't sustain because of the cost, or the driving, or because of my own stupid insecurities. It'll be another disappointment and if it ends up that way I'm just giving up.

Every night when I get home from work and I lie here on this goddamned bed with my laptop and my phone and I slip in and out of a fitful all-night nap before bed I think "This can't get worse. You will never be more emotionally bankrupt than you are tonight. Tomorrow will be better." And then tomorrow's worse. Something has to change. I need to figure out what that something is. Jesus, if you've got me on your Google Reader, I could use a little help. Thanks.

213.5 and Food Debacles

2008-01-24T10:55:00.001-06:00

So last week, in my endeavors to continually pinch the penny (that phrase always reminds me of pooping, which tells me I probably shouldn't have ever been entrusted with the education of young children), I decided to make two giant, inexpensive casseroles and eat them for lunch and dinner, three days each. This attempt to both simplify and budget my life was, of course, an unequivocal disaster. But it's cool.

The first casserole I made wasn't horrible. It just wasn't that great. I got both of these off Aimee's Adventures, and I need to take a moment to say that I don't believe the nastiness of last week's food was in any way the fault of her or her recipes. I'm just a sucky cook, for various reasons. Anyway, I started off the week with this casserole, which from this picture kind of looks like a glistening square of grasshopper abdomens and maybe some postnasal drip but I promise looked pretty awesome when actually prepared. You can click on the picture for the recipe if you want to try it on your own (and then send me some in individually portioned containers so I don't have to cook next week):

It was mostly just kind of bland, probably because of the fat free cheese and the whole wheat rotini that tends to make everything else in casseroles taste like whole wheat rotini, and also because I accidentally grabbed a cream of celery instead of cream of chicken, but in general I it was not completely horrible and I dutifully ate my six servings of it.

Then came this:

And this, my friends, was simply pure evil in a crockpot. I do not know what the shit I did to it, but when I woke up the next morning the chicken chunks had turned kind of a grey-brown, and the squash and the parsnips had kind of congealed into this burnt sienna colored blob. The only things I really recognized were the carrots, and they were just kind of bobbing there in the sea of mush, numbed by the indignity of having to spend an evening in a crockpot with the rest of it. I didn't have anything else to eat, though, so I scooped some into my Gladware container and gamely tried it out for lunch that day. And seriously, when the first glob of it passed over my tongue, I swore out loud. I've eaten food I didn't like, and I've tasted things I'd rather not taste again, but I've never actually eat food that tasted BAD until now. And I know probably 105% of it was because I Rachael Ray-ed the portions and kind of played fast and loose with the seasonings, but still, there was just something unholy about it that a mere human couldn't have caused. That casserole just twarn't right.

Anyway, while I was trying to figure out what to eat for this week, Anne posted this awesome book summary on AFG over the weekend. It got me inspired to see if I could stay within my budget, but also make sure I had a good variety of entrees to choose from, interesting snacks (one of my downfalls last week was not to budget any extra food beyond meal preparation), and as much organic and natural stuff as I could get. No fat free, no lite, no Splenda, no high fructose corn syrup. It takes longer to shop that way, and people give you funny looks when you're holding a canister of bread crumbs up to to the light to read its ingredients, but I've found that it seriously reduces the number of impulse buys I make, and because I'm generally a lot happier with my food I don't go out to eat as often. Here's the weekly grocery list and food plan.

And since I manage to screw up other people's recipes last week, I decided to try screwing up one of my own this week instead. There is a restaurant in Kansas City called Eden Alley, and if you're ever near the Plaza you should definitely go eat there, because it's incredible even if you're not a hippie. The food there is beyond delicious and everything's reasonably priced and you get a ton of it and it's just great. When I was there last time, I had a mushroom and spinach loaf that made me forget ever missing real meatloaf in the first place, and it seems straightforward enough to make so I'm going to try it. There are surprisingly no closely related recipes online for this, so I kind of cobbled a recipe based on Eden Alley's picture and description and some similar tofu loaves on the Interweb. I'm going to make it tomorrow night and I'll let you know how it turns out. The idea of combining natural, simple foods into a recipe seems, to me, to follow the logic of eating simple foods by themselves: it's really hard to mess it up if you're sticking to the basics, right?

But as I figured out with Satan's Savory Squash Stew, the road to Hell is often paid with good intentions, so we shall see.

I Will Never Blog About This Again

2008-01-20T10:06:00.000-06:00

I've been sans blog because I've been really struggling with this entry, but can't quite find the appropriate words to finish. My other entries about the recipes and sundry other thoughts have had to take a number, so they're on deck and will be posted throughout the next week. This is a very long, badly organized, rambling blog. Get a stiff drink and a sherpa before you begin reading:

I had another conversation about weight loss, specifically my lack of it, with The Friend the other day. Yeah, that same friend from this entry. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson at this point, huh?

And I need to preface all of this by saying I'm not writing this for sympathy, and I love you all for how supportive and wonderful you are and how some of you emailed in and offered to gather up an angry mob with pitchforks the first time I wrote about this, but for this entry I just want everyone to kind of think about this, because I'm seriously sort of stuck on what to believe.

It doesn't matter how the friend and I landed on the weight conversation again, but the gist of what he said is distilled down to the following:

1) Losing weight is absolutely nothing more than a matter of burning more energy than consuming it. There's nothing hard about calories in vs. calories out, and people who say it's not that easy are whining.

2) Anorexia and bulimia are real diseases but addictive behaviors like binge eating (or alcoholism, drug addiction, etc.) aren't, because we make the choice to eat the food, or start drinking the alcohol. Likewise, depression or other mental illnesses don't count as a disease, or as legitimate reasons for overeating and gaining weight, because the choice is always there to improve the depression, and therefore the weight.

3) The fact that I've lost about 25 lbs. only means that I've gone from morbidly obese to slightly less morbidly obese (with the subtext of that statement being I crow about it like I've won Biggest Loser, when I haven't really done shit)

4) He doesn't believe I'll ever really lose enough weight to be normal sized.

And finally...

5) I make a hobby out of being fat. That if I seriously ever tried to lose weight, and I got thin and healthy I wouldn't have anything to bitch about, and so wouldn't have this blog, or these people who read it, or anything to say about myself or my life. So I don't lose weight, because if I did no one would feel sorry for me.

Of course it embarrassed me to read those things, especially because I was reading them in a Panera in Johnson County (it's the 90210 of the Midwest, if that helps) during last Saturday's brunch rush, sitting in a huge, overstuffed leather armchair, and wiping big, rolling tears off my cheeks while a table of college girls in North Face jackets and Dior sunglasses gave me funny looks in between sips of their I.C. Cappuccino Chips. But for a week, I tried to be really, really objective about what he said, because I think there's at least a little truth in it. I don't know if I use my size as an excuse, but I know I DO use it for things. I know Pasta Queen's talked about this in an entry before; I use being fat as a litmus test to sort out the kind people from the unkind, and the shallow from the worthwhile. I use it to be invisible, so I can watch how people really are when there's not a pretty girl around to distract them. And yeah, a huge portion of my entries in this blog are about what it's like to be fat, instead of always what it's like to be losing weight. I write them because I feel them every single day, and I write them because I see other fat people going through the same thing, and I read that some of you go through it, too. I write about it because what happens to people as they lose or gain weight is not right. Society wouldn't fathom of telling someone to be a little less Methodist, or a little more white, but our fat, or our lack of it, is everyone's business; the skinny girls get told to go eat a sandwich, and the fat ones are told how much prettier they'd be if they'd just TRY a little harder.

I've been overweight since time immemorial...this part of my life has become my identity, my struggle, and it has colored my view of the world in a way that a normal person simply couldn't understand. I don't expect to be able to tell my friend that I'm scared of abandoning that identity for a new one, because I don't think he'd ever understand it.

I say these things not as reasons for why I'm not currently losing my 2.5 lbs. per week, but because I didn't know before last Saturday that normal people feel contempt for obese people who try and don't do so well. I wondered if maybe there was some sort of fundamental "go get 'em" characteristic that most thin, active people have and most overweight people don't. I know The Friend would call it laziness or self-pity, but I also know I am not a lazy person. I'm a workaholic, and a to-do listaholic, and, well, I'm not the lazy sack of shit he seems to think I am. I know plenty of obese people who run circles around their skinny counterparts during the day, with their families and their careers and their lifestyles. It's not laziness, dude.

So, what is it? I keep calling it the lack of a "Rudy gene" in my head; that ability to take criticism or adversity and just plow through it no matter what. I know in the past when The Friend has goaded me about my weight, he did so with the intention of inspiring me to get up off my ass and exercise, or to remember it as I made a choice between a healthy lunch and an indulgent one. I don't know if he was planning the same thing when he said he felt disdain for me and "all my excuses for not slimming down". I don't know if he wanted me to pull a Bridget Jones and say "Fuck you!" and then spend hours pedalling a workout bike while Chaka Khan blares in the background. I know I didn't; I sank back into the Panera armchair and took another bite from my bagel and chewed and considered what he had to say. I didn't really expect myself to...I've always been one of those people who take the criticism and store it away to beat myself up with it later, rather than using it as an impetus for change. That part IS a character flaw, I know.

So, this is what I've been trying to figure out for the past week: What is it that causes me to be this ambitionless? Why do I get little ten minute flashes of inspiration and then they die out just as quickly as they started? What characteristic causes me to get motivated to make changes in my body, my career, my relationships for about a day and then I'm sucked back into that same feeling of inertia when the day is over? Why have I allowed that inertia to control my entire life, in everything from from choosing a college to choosing a husband, when I know that ultimately it's really messing me up?

I landed on depression, obviously. When I hear teachers or parents berate a kid at school for being lazy or listless or uncaring, I am never surprised to hear that two or three months later the kid's been evaluated and diagnosed with depression. Because depression isn't that kid's personality, it's what's drowning it. I know it's been drowning me for at least twenty years.

And this is where yesterday, at the conclusion of the week-long series of conversations between The Friend and me, that my jaw hit the floor. Number one, as I listed above, was that he believes depression isn't really a disease, and that it can be fixed by making the choice to get better. The Friend used his own case of depression as an example; that it simply was a mental disorder he improved by giving it the good ol' college try, manning up, and overcoming the same way he'd climb a rock wall, or negotiate a business deal, or make a particularly difficult pasta sauce or something. This is where our conversation sort of broke down, because I got all high school debatey and pulled out sections of the DSM-IV where the doctors say depression IS a disease, one that essentially starts out with a badly mixed cocktail of brain chemicals that ultimately erode your brain's structure and ability to cope with stressors or even with the day-to-day trivialities of life. The Friend said he didn't agree with the research, because it just didn't "feel right", I may have said something nasty about the lack of med school diplomas on his wall, and we both threw our hands up to one another and said goodnight.

Here's the thing: there is the kind of depression that comes from losing a job, or breaking up with a girlfriend, or of course being overweight, and then there is the kind of depression that starts for no reason at all when you're a child. I've had the latter since I was about five. I've spent more than one of my own birthday parties locked in a bathroom crying uncontrollably, my seventh because I couldn't stop thinking about all the children in orphanages or old people in nursing homes who didn't have anyone to celebrate their birthday with, my ninth because my mom got irritated at me when I told her I wanted a different Cabbage Patch than I'd received and she said I was ungrateful and I decided I WAS ungrateful and I had ruined my birthday for her, and a couple other ones in recent years for various twentysomething angst reasons. I was carried out of Epcot Center when I was 10 because a week of hearing my parents fighting in our hotel room and throwing up in the bathroom every night from the stress of it all finally wore me down until I decided the Laser Light Display was a nuclear bomb attack and I went beserk. I've spent entire days in bed, not sleeping, not really thinking...just unable to move because the sadness in my body weighed a million pounds and held me there. I was labeled a "high strung child" and a "neurotic teenager", and the thought of depression never crossed anyone in my family's mind until my mother found me collapsed on the floor of our kitchen one day during a Christmas break home from college, unable to do much more than laugh and cry hysterically. She called a local psychiatrist, and started referring to my depression as "my little problem" from that point on. For the past two weeks, "my little problem" has manifested itself in half of my brain, very calmly, urging me to eat at least 4,000 calories a day so I wouldn't give The Friend the satisfaction of seeing I lost weight after our conversation. It's funny, because the normal part of my brain shrieks out the warnings while the crazy part encourages me to eat, and by the end of the 4,000 calories I've been so preoccupied with the Wagnerian chorus of insanity in my head, I haven't tasted one bite of my binge. Don't expect a loss on Monday, by the way. :)

I'm not writing these things to shock you, or to garner sympathy. I'm writing them because I want The Friend, and other people who might read this and not get me and why I sort of fritter around at all this, to understand that sometimes depression is not a choice. Sometimes, you take your medicine and go to you therapy and do quite well for awhile, and then one chemical decides to take the day off and suddenly you're right back to where you started. And in the course of battling through the depression...of getting your head back above water for the 3,679th time in your life...you realize some things, weight loss for instance, have to take a backseat until you do. You're just happy when you eat poorly like a normal person would, instead of binging your life away.

I'm writing this, finally, because anyone who thinks it's a choice to live a life like this; to be that unstable for decades of your life, to have to admit to your parents why you haven't paid bills or cleaned your house for a couple weeks, to walk into work without a shower or makeup because you couldn't make yourself just do it, to be a hundred pounds overweight not because you're not really trying, but because the messed up part of your head won't LET you, to dutifully take your meds and go to therapy and do all the homework and the journaling and the roleplaying and the self-affirmations until you practically have a psychology degree of your own and still you haven't quite found the right combination to keep you happy for more than a few days at a time...to anyone who would seriously think that I, or anyone else like me, MADE THE CHOICE to live like this? You're welcome to go fuck yourself. Seriously.

I'm done talking about this now. I promise I won't ever write why I'm not losing weight again, unless it has something to do with finding out that a grocery store prankster somehow managed to fill up all the fat free yogurt cartons with Ben & Jerry's or whatever. I'll post the exercise logs, and the food journals and the recipes and the product reviews, and maybe if I go through a stretch where getting out of bed seems as unattainable as base jumping off the Chrysler Building, I'll write about other things, like how the front entryway of the Wal-Mart always smells like farts, or how I can't find a vase big enough to sit by my fireplace that doesn't cost a thousand dollars. I'm through trying to justify something that I barely understand myself to a person who doesn't care to even try to understand. My meds feel like they've kicked back in again, because I see the silver eye floaties and that's always a good sign. I'm getting more sleep, and that means more energy down the road, and since I've figured out I'm a wretched cook, I'm going to go back to the original plan of getting entrees and salads from restaurants and splitting them up throughout the week. I have a plan. I stumbled, but I'm getting better. I'm TRYING. And now I'm done bitching.

213.2 and Linky Goodness

2008-01-13T22:05:00.000-06:00

A friend of mine, who's lost about 65 lbs. through Weight Watchers and who looks utterly fantastic and also knows how to do eye makeup better than anyone I know, introduced me to the below sites. They're cool, and there's a buttload of recipes and I pre-made two of them tonight for the week ahead, so I'll let you know how they go when I post my food plan tomorrow.

Hungry Girl

Aimee's Adventures

Well played, Girl Scouts. Well played, indeed.

2008-01-12T20:19:00.000-06:00

Yesterday at work I realized Girl Scouts of America brilliant evil empire.

Have you ever noticed how Girl Scout cookie pre-orders start in early December when all of us, freshly buzzed off Thanksgiving tryptophan and flushed with the holiday spirit, are just absolutely thrilled!!! to buy tasty, tasty cookies!!! from apple cheeked little girls in beanies!!! And as you're writing your name in the little grid on the order form you notice no one else on the list bought fewer than two boxes and Deb in payroll bought seven whole boxes of Samoans and what would it say about you and your commitment to self-empowering and supporting the physical, intellectual, and moral development of girls the world over if you copped out and only bought one measly box of Shortbreads? THINK OF THE LITTLE GIRLS.

And then, three weeks after Christmas, when the holiday spirit packed up and took off for its timeshare in an artists' commune in Taos, and your pants are still straining across your hips, and the only thing you have left to remind you of the October-December orgy of goodwill and snack items made out of Marshmallow Fluff are the remains of pine needles still stuck in the loops of your harvest wheat colored Berber, and when you have completely forgotten you ever had an encounter with the little cherubs in their brown jumpers....THEN is when they extort the money out of you. It's ingenious, really.

I stumbled toward my classroom door on Friday morning, a banana kind of obscenely clenched between my teeth by its stem, strong black coffee sloshing out my little titanium travel mug, and an armload of books and lesson plans and a Real Simple that promised to help me organize my work life by spring. As I rounded the corner to my little classroom alcove, I saw a plastic grocery bag hanging from the doorknob. Inside it were two, ugh, boxes of Girl Scout cookies and a Post-It that said "Ms. Mighty Minx owes Jasmine $7.00".

Craaap.

And, seriously, for a day I was followed around by Jasmine and her Girl Scout posse like I was Lloyd Dobler and she was the paper boy until they finally cornered me during my planning period and stood there until I walked out to my car, dug around for seven dollars, and threw it at them and ran the other way. And now I have one box of Thin Mints and one box of something I swear I didn't order appear to be wafers of fat and sugar dipped in chocolate. I've always followed kind of a slash and burn philosophy with the Thin Mints, because seriously there is just no way that they can sit in my cookie jar without me thinking about them constantly. So, I just kind of take a hit off the box whenever and hopefully the sweet, sweet torture will be done by February.

Seriously, though, considering the frightening levels of childhood obesity and diabetes in America, is the GSA being responsible in promoting stuff like this as their fundraiser? I know they have a good thing going, and they've been doing it for years, and it's a tradition, and if you don't want to get fat off eating your Peanut Butter Patties you can just say no, but still...am I overreacting in saying it sends kind of a sketchy message to tell their scouts to be physically active and nutritionally responsible but to peddle cellulite in a box to everyone they know?

Perhaps a Thin Mint will clear my mind.

Kick to the Back: Or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Embrace the Jam

2008-01-09T23:01:00.001-06:00

Since the flyover states get exposed to trends about 20 years after the coastal states (Missouri just discovered Jordache jeans and recreational cocaine use...exciting!), I hadn't really heard of Turbo Jam until just recently, even though it's apparently been around for at least a decade. I mentioned in a previous post that my mother gives away a substantial portion of her disposable income to Beachbody.com, which is the parent company of a bunch of TV infomercial exercise video sets. Perhaps you've been sitting at home, brushing Flamin' Hot Cheetos crumbs off your chest and flipping between Golden Girls and Judge Joe Brown (it's okay to admit it now...we've all been there and we've all had the grimy, orange stained fingertips to prove it) and you've come across the somewhat painful rap stylings of Shawn T during a "Hip Hop Abs" commercial? That's the same company.

Anyway, being the proficient exercise dilettante that I am, I had tried every Beachbody exercise program available and hadn't really fallen in love with anything. Everything on there is great, and I really appreciate how Beachbody makes sure to market only really quality videos that can produce significant results, but there was never any Holy Grail of exercise for me on there. Until now. At least I hope.

Turbo Jam has been around for a long time, and its original incarnation was as a kickboxing/dance class taught in some small gyms around Orange County, CA. The creator of this program is named Chalene Johnson, and originally I avoided Turbo Jam because I was fairly certain I would hate her guts. She looked like a miniature version of Denise Austin and everyone on her infomercial was always hopping and smiling and looking like they...enjoyed life. Gross. What eventually finally persuaded me was the number of success stories on Beachbody who used TJ as their primary workout. I very reluctantly obtained copies of a few of her videos, and now I'm pretty much hooked. It helps that I am a total hermit during the winter and would very happily hide in my house with some canned soup and HBO until April if I could, so not having to drive to the gym is a huge bonus for me.

Here's kind of a breakdown on what it's like and why I lurve it:

What You Get: The basic set comes with five workouts on two DVDs. Chalene bases her choreography on 11 specific moves that she details in the introductory workout, "Learn and Burn". The meat of the DVD is the "Cardio Party", which is the 45 minute kickboxing/dance workout. In my research online, most people say it counts as moderate to high impact exercise, and the Beachbody claims it can burn up to 1,000 calories an hour. The other long workout in the set is called "Turbo Sculpt", and it includes free weights and other weight-bearing exercises for 40 minutes of toning plus low-impact cardio. The final two additional videos in the set are a 20-minute quick workout and a 20-minute ab toning workout. Also, every video has modifications to make it either high impact or low impact, depending on your fitness level and preference.
There's some extra footage where you can get cast biographies and watch an interview with Chalene. Beachbody offers the starter set for $57.95+shipping, but of course you can get it from Amazon or eBay for a lot less. Turbo Jam has recently come out with a "Maximum Results" series that is exactly the same except they send you weighted gloves along with the shipment. Don't be fooled into paying their price for them, as you can buy the cheaper set and get gloves at a sporting goods store much more cheaply.

Schedule: Since I'm now trying to get all my exercise solely from workout videos, I combine stuff to make sure I'm getting an equal balance between cardio and toning. My plan is to work out six days a week, with an off day on Monday and a light day on Thursday (the nights where I travel to my second job). I usually combine Cardio Party with Ab Jam, and Turbo Sculpt with the 20 Minute Jam as a warm-up. On Thursdays I try to get in either 20 Minute, Ab or both if I have time. If you order the full package from Beachbody, they will send a recommended schedule for both sedentary and active exercisers, so that may help you if you decide to jump in with this.

Extra Information: There are a bunch more TJ products available, including extra Cardio Parties and some different options for circuit training and toning. They're all available on Beachbody and on the other sites I've already mentioned. Also, if you're located in a large city with a pretty decent gym, it is likely that the live Turbo Jam classes are already being held there. They're called Turbo Kick, and they are exactly the same thing as TJ. My gym offers Turbo Kick plus a Turbo Sculpt session back to back once a week. It might be a good idea to go to meet other enthusiasts or to get help on moves, form, etc.

Why I Love It: It's just really freaking fun. It's like Jazzercise but with better music, or like Taebo without the impending feeling of death. Seriously, every single kickboxing or just plain aerobics video I've ever tried has made me feel worked out and completely exhausted. TJ makes me feel worked out and uplifted, and I'm not the kind of person who gets uplifted very easily. The music is awesome...lots of old school hip hop and rap and Chalene edits each track herself to make the moves fit the music. I cannot tell you how many videos I've shoved to the back of my shelf because the music was either shitty or it didn't line up with the choreography.

Another reason why I love this is because Chalene and the cast seem to transcend the stereotype of typical aerobics video people. Sure, they smile too much, (I once tried to maintain a frozen grin for as long as one of the featured exercisers did and I had to stop because my gums were drying out and I wanted to bitchslap myself) and there's some unnecessary hamming at the camera and there's this one horribly awkward older lady who makes my eyes bleed when she tries to get her freak on, but for the most part they're pretty cool. There's a good range of ages and body types and at least two of them lost a significant amount of weight with TJ before they became instructors. Chalene, of course, is the star of the program and as much as I wanted to hate her initially, watch a tiny blonde woman from Orange County jumping around to LL Cool J and talking she's straight outta Compton is pretty endearing, and I personally think her running commentary makes the workouts go much faster than they would've without it. Her counts and cues are like 99% right on, her explanations are great, and she's inspirational without being saccharine, and I appreciate that.

Some Caveats: If you are a person who gives up on exercise videos quickly because it takes too long to learn the moves, this might not be for you. I'm a pretty coordinated person, so I tend to gravitate towards videos that change up the choreography a lot, but I know a few people who hate it for that very reason. It also might not be an ideal workout for people with knee or back trouble. I hurt both my knees and my back pretty badly in a work injury several years ago, and I definitely feel twinges while I'm working out with TJ now. Chalene offers a lot of tips and reminders for avoiding that, but if you're really really weak down there, I'd stay away. Finally, if you don't like a little bit of silliness during your workout, then this might not be good, as Chalene spends a lot of time being goofy and encouraging the at-home exerciser to do the same.

The only single thing I've found that I really don't like about TJ is the "Turbo Sculpt", partly because it's HARD and I start dripping sweat during the warmup and I'm embarrassed that I fall over when I do lunges and sometimes I tell Chalene and the awkward lady to suck it after I've done that and then my cats give me disapproving looks, but mostly because it lacks the same sort of exuberance that the other videos have. I think it's probably unavoidable, since it moves at a much slower pace and is entirely based around weight training. Somehow it just seems interminably long compared to Cardio Party, and it's disappointing when Chalene stops being Chalene and lapses into the run of the mill aerobics instructor cadence for Turbo Sculpt. It's a very, very minor issue, though, and I use Turbo Sculpt regularly despite it.

Bottom Line: I'm addicted, and the majority of people who try it end up that way, too. I can't wait to get my hands on the other videos, even though I doubt I'll get tired of the original ones soon. I'll report back on if it actually reduces the size of my ass in a month or so, but even if it wasn't a phenomenal calorie burner, I'd still probably use it to burn off stress and have fun. I've included links to some shorter segments of the workouts below in case you want to check it out.

Kickin' Core Turbo Jam Ball Workout

The Elite 11 Moves

Turbo Kick Success Story

Turbo Jam Success Stories

Happy Balloon Ascension Day, by the way.

Eleventy hundred million point five

2008-01-06T21:10:00.000-06:00

Dealing with the interruption in my meds was much harder than I anticipated, to the point that the only thing that would stop the low rumble of insanity in the back of my brain was sleep. Or food. Or a combination of both that left my body and brain feeling like twice-microwaved death mixed served with a side of fresh-baked despair.

Anyway, today was a significantly better day than the last several were. Missouri managed to purloin California's tropical climate for a few days, so I got to open the house up to warm, fresh air and sunlight. I did a little housework, exercised, drank water, took my meds, and ate reasonably well. I realized, also, that I'm going to have to change a few things about the way I'm living right now in order to make any more progress at getting healthier and happier. I think, during winter break, I was doing really well despite the lack of meds because I was getting an adequate amount of sleep each night. The shitty thing is that I tend to average around 9-10 hours of sleep when I'm allowed to stay in bed as long as I want, and I'm just as exhausted after 8 hours of sleep as I am after 5. It would probably make sense to go for the 7-8 hours anyway, even if I don't feel it immediately. I also need to stop bullshitting myself about the types and amounts of food I'm eating. Honestly, the reason why I lost so much weight in October and November was because I wasn't eating much, probably because of the initial effects of the Wellbutrin. When I started getting hungry again around Thanksgiving and later in December, I tried to supplement my diet with high-carb vegetarian foods. When stuff started getting out of control around the holidays, my tofu and salads turned into grilled cheese and potato poppers, and no matter how much I tried to spin it, I was eating copious quantities of shit. No wonder my body revolted.

The thing that really kicked me in the ass (aside from my epiphany yesterday afternoon that I hadn't actually moved my body in several hours and that maybe I had actually, finally died from being a miserable wreck and if that was the case my mother would find out I had expired next to an open bottle of vitamin water and a gift card to an adult toy store I won at my faculty Christmas party and she would NOT BE AMUSED) was a set of photos from the New Year's eve party I attended with some friends. The party was the most fun I had had in years, probably, and I met some really nice people, and danced like a madwoman and I thought maybe...MAYBE...I actually looked really good. The jeans I had on were a size smaller than I could've worn previously, and I had a killer pair of red pumps and I actually took time on my hair and makeup and I kind of thought that even if I didn't look good, at least I looked better. But when I got those pictures from my friend a few days later, I realized that the same pasty, double-chinned, and tree trunk-legged Erin who started this whole thing a year ago didn't look a bit different 25 lbs. later. And I think I cringed the world's biggest cringe right then, realizing that everyone at the party must've been kind of taken aback by this tub of lard who was dancing too hard, and laughing too loudly, and maybe flirting when it wasn't her business to flirt because there were prettier girls with smaller asses. God, it sucked to have to realize that.

But it gave me some perspective on how stuff really ought to be going for me, because it's going to be a long, long time until I can look at a picture of my whole body and feel like I look like everyone else. It's going to take months, maybe years, of screwing up and stumbling and fighting not to be miserable when I just want to go back to bed and not wake up. It'll be a process of working day after day to make the right choices, and to talk myself off the roof when I've made some bad ones, and looking any further past the current day will probably drive me crazier than I have been recently. It's such a long fucking road...all of it...and the only thing I really feel like I can do is just take it one step at a time.

215.2 (egad)

2007-12-29T17:17:00.000-06:00

Hey, remember that one time when this weight loss blog was actually ABOUT weight loss, and not my attempt to transcribe the Very Important Life Lessons imparted by ABC After School Specials into weblog form? Those were good times, weren't they?

So, the holiday orgies are finally over aside from a dinner my great-aunt is having to commemorate what would've been her 66th wedding anniversary had my great-uncle not died during my honeymoon (not that he was actually ON my honeymoon with my husband and I, although I doubt his presence would've made any difference in supreme awkwardness of the week itself and in fact might've improved the situation, because every "romantic" getaway really needs a cantankerous, habitual pipe smoker to add some salt to the occasion) back in 2004. I had planned to hop right back on the wagon on the morning of the 26th, but as any dedicated weight-loser knows, it's nigh impossible to just shake off the excess and embrace the semi-asceticism it takes to start shedding pounds again. It's like having to go through heroin withdrawal, except you actually HAVE to eat food. And of course, I still have like fifteen boxes of Christmas candy from my students sitting around and before I could dispose of all of them in the trashcan, a couple of those big pretzel sticks dipped in chocolate made their way into my mouth, and then I found a sack of those cookies with the peanut butter in the middle and fudge on the outside and before I knew it I had the sugar shakes and was staring at the bottom of the trashcan wondering just how disgusting I really would be if I rinsed off the coffee grounds from the remaining candy and saved it for later. (I didn't, but I'm not saying I didn't think about it for a LONG TIME)

Yesterday, I finally got my ass to the grocery store so I wouldn't have a reason for eating yet another cake donut for breakfast, and I think I'm set for a pretty decent week in terms of food. One of my goals, at least until taxes are paid, is to also shape my food lists so they're very inexpensive, but still relatively nutritious and varied. An old housemate of mine used to eat on $15 a week by sticking to a steady diet of frozen burritos and Ramen, but I don't think my body could take the nitrate invasion, so I'm willing to bump up to about $60 a week to include fresh vegetables and more expensive stuff like meat substitutes. If you'd like the grocery list, I've posted it and a kind of loose 1500 calorie meal plan for the week below.

Meal Plan for Week of 12/28/07

Grocery List for Week of 12/28/07

In exercise news, I was completely stoked to receive the Turbo Jam set from my parents for Christmas, most especially because the copy I was using before may have been just a little bit illegal and only existed on my computer in a very small Windows Media format. I could work out to it okay, but only if I squinted or put the computer on the floor and tilted the monitor up at me. I was burning calories like crazy, but I think if I had kept it up my neck would've permanently cricked into that pose Michael Jackson does at the beginning of "Thriller". I have lots to say about the BeachBody family of videos because I've used them off and on for several years, and Turbo Jam is one of the few I can say I actually really really, love. They have the long informercial on pretty much every day on daytime TV, or you can watch the YouTube informercial here.

Anyway, as painful as it is to have backtracked during the holidays, it's nice to always remember this is a lifelong process and no one's going to care whether I arrived at whatever goal weight I have on time or a week late. I hope you're all enjoying the downtime before the new year. I'm off to go make some Boca Joes.

Keeping Up Appearances

2007-12-26T11:03:00.000-06:00

For about 45 minutes last night, I sat at my computer and toggled between two very different websites. On tab #1 I was looking at rows and rows of gorgeous leather handbags, all on sale and all still obscenely expensive. Tab #2 was my bank balance, and a calculator in the corner where I was running figures for the upcoming months before Tax Day.

I had decided, early on in the month, that I would spend any Christmas money I received on something luxurious for myself. Just one thing, but something fantastic, like some really great stilettos, or a new handbag to replace my very cheap one I had been outgrowing for the last two years. I kind of wanted a new armchair to replace the cheap garage sale one I had snagged when my husband took our good one in the separation. I needed a new kitchen table set, or a better looking comforter, or maybe just some new work pants that didn't simultaneously cling to my thighs and slip off my waist. I just wanted SOMETHING to celebrate the end of the year.

But as I sat there with all my options in front of me, I ended up coming to terms with my inevitable choice of not doing anything with the money at all. I decided to pay off the last of my college-era credit card debt early instead. And it's a choice that simultaneously makes me immensely proud and relieved, but that also makes a tiny part of me wistful for something fun.

I got to spend some time with my old high school friends this week, which was an absolute blast because we're all basically grownups, but we're also all still idiots, too. During dinner and drinks and several blasphemous rounds of Taboo, I realized that, comparatively, all of my friends are lightyears more glamorous than I am. My friend J drives the coolest sports car, and M and B have to die for wardrobes and accessories and nice cars and adorable houses, too. S and J spend weekends in Vegas, and even my little brother, who tagged along that night, has the means to spend thousands of dollars on clothes and concert tickets and trips to wherever, whenever.
I felt conspicuously, well, poor in the presence of all of these people, because nearly two years of paying off debt collectors and my ritual of gathering up all the change in my house to pay for frozen dinners the week before I get my monthly paycheck have made me a decidedly frugal person, and in comparison to my friends' expensive clothes and rock n' roll lifestyles, my Wal-Mart couture and hand me down, ginormous, '95 LeSabre looked pretty lame.

I brooded over this through most of Christmas, and spent way too much time tinkering with my monthly budget, trying to figure out some way I could accommodate my upcoming tax payment and bills and still have money left over to buy cool shit. No matter how I manipulated the numbers, I realized 2008, or the first few months of it at least, would have to be painfully devoid of unnecessary purchases. I semi-grudgingly made the call to my creditor, scheduled all my other bill payments, and pouted in my dad's armchair for a few hours while I scowled at the Style Network on TV.

The nice thing about my parents' house is that is possesses some sort of mystical quality that always gives me this nunlike sense of peace and perspective by the time my visit there is done. Even when my whole family's there, it's pretty quiet, and it's kind of dark and everything's overstuffed and comfortable and they have this nice deep tub in which my brother and I take naps and there are no cats to stare at me when I come out of the bathroom in a towel, and everything in the house is kept at almost this unreal level of cleanliness, and the combination of all these things usually means my mind relaxes and clears enough that I have these lovely epiphanies about my life. I'll wake up with gems like, "If you go to bed earlier, you'll be less tired in the morning!" or "Velveeta and Lil' Smokies belong in no federally recognized food group, so you probably should avoid them." Today, after curling up in one of the aforementioned overstuffed chairs and ruminating on what an ascetic I am, I realized something that I think I will pretty dramatically improve my outlook on 2008:

I realized that the major aspects of my life that bother me--my possessions, my appearance, my finances, my career--they're all suffering from the same killer perfectionism that causes me to backslide on my weight loss and getting healthy. I treat my house and my clothes and my car the same way I treat my body sometimes, in that because what I currently have isn't top of the line and expensive and fantastic, I don't take care of it and I let it fall apart while I sit around and dream about having better things. I get frustrated and don't exercise because I can't just go out and run a mini-marathon right now. I trash my car and I let my house get messy to the point that everything is chaos because I'm not driving a $20,000 SUV and living in the cover dwelling for Real Simple like some of my friends are. I don't try at my job, because my job isn't as prestigious or as well-paying as my classmates'. And while I sit and make lists of stuff I want and read success stories about people who've attained the things I want to, I let my own opportunities to just make the best of what I have go by, and that's really not acceptable at all.

One of the things that awed me about my grandmother was how every single thing she owned was as immaculate and as high-performing as the day she bought it. She obviously was part of the lauded Greatest Generation, and so took her Depression-era habits to some fairly ludicrous extremes in her attempt to be frugal and sustainable, but she also lived with such dignity and elegance even though she really didn't have that much money or stuff. It didn't matter that my grandmother wasn't wealthy, and it didn't matter that she was a 4'11" kind of dumpy German woman...the way my grandmother carried herself and worked and lived made her seem positively regal somehow. I want that for myself.

Unlike my grandmother, I'm not going to rewash Ziploc baggies or scrape the freezer burn off a two-year old bucket of sherbet when my grandkids come to visit, but I do want to start acting like my life, right now, is worth something on its own. I know I have things going for me right now...I bounced back from a pretty shitty financial situation, and I have no credit card debt, and my car is paid for, and I have a savings account and retirement funds, and I pay all my bills on time and I can eat and have Tivo and even get Starbucks more than once a week. And I have STUFF...some of it's even nice stuff, and actually taking care of it would probably make it even nicer. I'm not living a completely horrible life, and I really need to start acknowledging that, and working with the things I have--the body, the money, the house, the car, the clothes--instead of always dreaming about the stuff I don't have.

I know it's not quite my time to treat myself extravagantly, but at the very least I'll hopefully have enough focus and perspective in the coming year to treat myself with dignity. And right now, that's enough for me.

T'was the day before the night before Christmas

2007-12-23T10:07:00.001-06:00

I haven't been here in awhile!

These particular holidays, far more so than the other 26 I've had have been completely brutal. Between the finger, and then a knee tear when a little kid did a kamikaze run/hug at my lower half and my knees went one way and the rest of me went the other, and then a nasty cold when I haven't been sick all year, and the millions and millions (well, hundreds) of dollars spent on stupid crap like contributions to the week-long junk food orgy at work and semi-mandated Christmas shirts and thank you notes for the presents I get from the kids and the teachers, and little token gifts I give to all my students at Second Job, and the no sleeping because you're up glitter painting the branches of a styrofoam tree for the winterNOTCHRISTMAS program and at 3 am you felt like it was a good idea to download every version of "O Holy Night" you could find on the Internet and compare and contrast Clay Aiken to Reba McEntire to Andrea Bocelli while you are polishing off a bag of mint truffles because you realized you hadn't eaten anything other than Deb's Delightful Divinity Dip and a handful of graham crackers at lunch that day because you were in charge of fitting 96 second graders for reindeer antlers in the afternoon and you wonder if this Godforsaken season of joy is ever going to come to a merciful end, and, and, and...

And honestly, in the midst of all that, about a month ago now, I forgot one day to take my meds, and then the next day I forgot that I had forgotten, and my schedule got so massively out of whack that my brain chemicals have spent the last three weeks doing the Chicken Dance instead of regulating my crazy. I thought it wouldn't be a big deal at first, and that maybe I could just stop them entirely, but reading Dooce's wonderful entry last week right as I was starting to feel my composure and my ability to deal with stuff start to crack reminded me I should probably be taking them, especially during times like these.

So I'm going to spend the next few days getting back into some semblance of a routine, and I'm going to flush out the chocolate and the salt and the bathtub of soda as soon as Christmas dinners are up (because at my family, our new Christmas dinner since my grandmother got sick consists of Ro-Tel and Ro-Tel related appetizers...fresh food is thereby banished for at least a couple of days) and I'm going to heal my knee and take my medicine and hopefully stop feeling like I am about to explode out of my body and take out a small village with the power of my preservative-fueled rage and depression.

How was that for a Christmas card for all of you? At least I didn't dress up the cats and photograph them in front of the fireplace.

Happy holidays to you all, have safe travel, and a wonderful Christmas. Love you guys.

207.8

2007-12-11T17:51:00.000-06:00

I went to get my stitches checked yesterday by the nice doctor who sewed me up and told me to wash my hair with my hand in a baggie. She said everything was looking fine, and the baseball sized lump on my shoulder from an allergic reaction to my tetanus shot wasn't a big deal, and that I was cleared to do pretty much everything at work that I wanted to except lift heavy boxes and, you know, rub my other fingers against sharp metal trashcans.

As I was walking out I mentioned briefly that I teach music, and so I spend a lot of time playing piano and guitar and drums and various other forms of instruments where my fingers come into repeated contact with other surfaces. The doctor stopped, frowned, and then revised her "cleared for work" list to say I could do everything except play piano, guitar, drums, type a lot, or allow others to squeeze or press my left hand or finger, which basically translates into IS FULLY CLEARED FOR WORK EXCEPT FOR THE PART OF WORK WHERE SHE ACTUALLY DOES HER JOB. So, drinking coffee and picking the dead leaves off my desk plant? Check and check. Now where's my paycheck?

She also added that I can't do any physical activity that involves putting weight or pressure on my finger, which also rules out the kickboxing/weights/yoga exercising I've been doing, so my week is amounting to a whole lot of nothing in terms of activity. Still, I wanted to write, so I decided to focus on a non-scale victory type thing that I'm still currently kind of feeling out right now.

Since I can't play the piano for a week and the rest of my permitted activity revolves around sitting and using up oxygen, I decided to spend all this downtime finishing up some composition projects I'd been working on over the last couple of years. The one I wanted was saved as an attachment in my old email archive, so I had to do some serious digging to finally locate it. While I was browsing the contents of this particular inbox, I ran a set of emailed conversations a friend and I had conducted around July of 2006. This is the one "friend" from that one angsty past entry which was my epilogue to the Year of Angst during which I regularly beat myself up for not being good enough for him or anyone else. Now that I'm older, and less angsty, and have a voluntary retirement account, the mention of which I believe can make even the most raving idiot seem like they're wise and perceptive, I can honestly say I'm not only past the bad parts of that experience, but I'm kind of grateful for it, because it forced me to change a few things about myself that were pretty weak and kind of pathetic.

It was funny, as I read through our exchanges, because I felt the same sense of twitterpation reading the compliments, and the teasing, and the "Gosh, I adore you so much...I just wish you looked as great below the neck" comments as I did a year and a half ago. What made the difference this time, though, was that I saw the comments for what they were: pleasant, endearing, but ultimately empty little nothings that all had the same qualifications attached to them. I cringed every time I read my own simpering, and how I justified his own abhorrent behavior for him by saying it was biological and I totally understood because I knew how ugly I felt, so I could only imagine how ugly I looked to him.

And obviously, if you used to be doormat and you're not so much of one anymore, there's going to be this huge WTF moment where your past behaviors are revealed in the glory of your own hindsight. It's not pretty, realizing I was kind of a spineless loser, and I wonder if I had managed to acquire that particular set of self-confidence and assertiveness sooner in my life, if I'd even be writing a blog about body image and weight loss now. I'm pretty stoked, actually, to be able to look at those past emails and roll my eyes, because knowing that I shouldn't have been treated that way means I've grown a pair, and that I'm not afraid to use them when I think I deserve better. I like that about myself.

It hurts when I go like this

2007-12-08T20:21:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I took 75 fourth graders to a production of The Nutcracker. I had to promote it to them as "the show with the 40 ft. Christmas tree and giant rats with swords", or else I feared a mutiny from the posse of boys who I was forcing to trade in their Wranglers for dress pants and a sweater. The kids were pretty good sports about it for the most part, and as we settled into our section of the 3rd balcony I looked back at the attentive faces and was proud of them in that vaguely maternal way that teachers feel when they realize their 50 hours a week of tying shoes and lecturing and smelling like a combination of desperation, glue stick, and stale coffee actually means something. It was going to be a great day.

Apparently, the great day concluded at the intermission. During our 15-minute break, one of our teachers approached me with a sweating, trembling little boy who said vomiting was imminent. I ran to one of the security guards posted around the theatre and asked him if I could take the kid to a sick room or a first aid station to cool him off and get him some water. They said the EMT wasn't available at the moment because another kid from another elementary school had managed to burn his left thigh (?) on a hot water pipe in the ancient bathrooms of this auditorium, but that we could wait until he was available in the lobby. We went downstairs where more security guards proffered folding chairs and a glass of water for my potential puker (we'll call him PP from now on). While he was drinking the water down PP told me upchucking was an imminent possibility so I frantically ran to the nearest trashcan and aimed it near his head. False alarm, so I laid PP down across two chairs and started to put on my winter coat so I could go get him some Gatorade from the bus. A gaggle of elementary school aged ballerinas were walking out of the show with their moms, having already performed their roles in the first act, and one stopped next to me, and kind of half whispered/half shrieked, "Mom, that lady is bleeding ALL OVER THE PLACE." I looked down and realized that a puddle of blood had accumulated on the toe of my high-heeled boot, and there were streaks of red on the folding chairs and the trashcan I had grabbed for PP. I had ignored the dull pain in my hand, thinking I had just pinched a nerve on the handle of the trashcan, but when I flipped over my palm I realized I had somehow made a huge, deep cut across my middle finger, and blood just kept pouring out of the wound while I stared.

At this point the quiet lobby turned into kind a scene from Keystone Kops. The security guards rifled through their bags for band-aids, while another escorted me to the nearest bathroom to clean the blood off me. I refused to stop moving because I didn't think the cut was that bad and I couldn't abide by the idea of some other person cleaning up my mess, so I kept trying to leave to go get paper towels to clean up the trail of red dots I had made across the marble floor of the lobby. When I finally made it into the bathroom to clean off my shoe, I guess the site of all the blood in the sink and all the extra blood that just kept pouring out was kind of too much, and I got a little woozy and had to be told to sit down on the bathroom floor by some society wives and a poor, traumatized little girl whose Nutcracker experience will always be tainted by "the day that woman's finger got cut off and she asked me to bring her paper towels".

Anyway, the rest of the afternoon involved the EMT and me getting PP to the first aid room to lie down, where he proceeded to lie on an ancient gurney-type thing and moan until I told him the ballet was nearly over and it was almost time for lunch, at which point he improved miraculously and decided he was cured. The EMT bandaged up my finger, which had still not stopped splooging out blood, and told me that I probably wouldn't need stitches, but just in case I did would I please sign this form that said the owners of the complex and the old, sharp, disease-ridden trashcan that slashed me open wouldn't have to pay for the stitches or receive any publicity or ever have to look at me and my poor maligned finger again? I took PP back to the ballet, where we had missed all of the second half except the last ten minutes, and I watched the pas de deux while catching the ever dripping blood in my good hand and wiping it on the ball of gauze the EMT had stuck in my purse.

When I got back to school, our nurse ripped off my Sponge Bob band-aid/gauze dressing on my finger and promptly sent me off to get stitches and a tetanus from the workers' compensation clinic in a nearby suburb. Everyone was super nice when I got there, and extremely worried about the ridiculous amount of blood I had lost and my very low blood pressure and thought I was going to flip out and faint when they injected me with the anesthetic in my finger, so four nurses stood at my feet and shoulders and kept encouraging me to breathe. I filed that away as a Scene From What it Might Be Like to Give Birth, except at the end of the procedure I was the proud mother of three stitches, a swollen tetanus shoulder, a giant, gauzy middle finger. and strict orders to take only baths for the next two weeks and to keep my left hand in a Ziploc bag if it's raining or I'm washing dishes.

So far I've found the finger issue very gratifying in terms of getting sympathy and also being able to flip people off to show them the dressing. The only annoying parts are the fact that I can't do all the job stuff I need to be doing a lot of right now...playing piano, playing guitar, typing two-handed...it's even hard to, like, put my hair in a ponytail or put on a pair of pants without restarting the bleeding and swearing like a dockworker from the little jolt of pain. The reason I mention this is because I wanted to address a comment Jarrett left on my last blog, and I had been struggling for a way to make people who wouldn't get it understand. My last post was about a feeling I get sometimes of not feeling "right" on the inside...like my body is more slow and sluggish than usual, and that things don't seem to be functioning like they ought to. I wrote how for me, it's such a specific feeling that I can even stand on the scale and tell you to the tenth of a pound, just how abnormal I feel at any given time.

Jarrett wrote this very thoughtful comment in response:

For me, being active is important. I'm a year away from earning my black belt in karate, and I want to work myself up to running a marathon in 2009. Those are my goals. Completing those things will require a lot from me. I don't have some weight goal. I have a fitness goal. I want to be able to do those things. Weight goals just seem so arbitrary and self-defeating.

Why do you want to lose weight? Do you plan on being a model, where your weight - just the raw number - is important? Are you going to lounge on the beach in a way-too-small bikini all summer long?

Do something! Make the weight loss a secondary effect of some bigger goal! Make your life a physical one. And? It's really hard to be depressed after spending an hour at the gym. How can you not feel good after that?

It worked for me. It worked for my wife. I'm not saying it's perfect. Just something to think about.

I read through that comment a couple of times trying to figure out how to respond, because there will always be the 3% of me who sees a question like "Are you only losing weight to wear a bikini?" with a "Yes, please!", even though I know the rest of me thinks that's shallow.

Maybe I didn't explain myself very well in the post before: my impatience and frustration and not feeling great every single day isn't a matter of numbers, or of seeing the scale dutifully knock off a couple of pounds every week. Some days I wish it would, because it's much easier blog-wise to come back every week and report a loss on the scale than to say, "Dear Blogosphere: today my left ankle looks less fat in my work shoes than it did last week. Progress!", but I totally get that the scale isn't a desirable, or even reliable, way of measuring true weight loss.

I think my impatience stems more from the fact that when I feel my body getting icky on the inside again like it did last week, I know that'll be that much more time before I CAN start planning for marathons or more tango classes or black belts. Because, at least for me at 5'1" and just a little under twice what I ought to weigh, my body's just not ready to go out and push for a fitness goal or train for something big and grand that would make the weight loss secondary. I already am exercising, but I don't talk about it because I don't want to jinx it, and I also don't think it's something really worth talking about. I exercise so I can get into a healthy enough state where the exercise is meaningful, and not just recuperative. I have done the training stuff when I was this size before and it ended up in big injuries and setbacks, so right now I know the responsible thing to do is to take it slow, even though it's driving me crazy. Based on previous experience with all this stuff, I know when my body is going to be ready to run again, or dance without being awkward and overtired too soon, but every single time I feel my body getting stubborn and refusing to metabolize like it ought to, or just feeling run down and toxic and lardy, then that's just another day where this has to be a weight loss thing, and not a healthy thing.

It's kind of like my giant ass is the big, gauzy middle finger that screws up the rest of my life.

Feeling Dirty (and not in the good way)

2007-12-04T20:57:00.000-06:00

Have you reached that point in your weight loss journey (I swear to God if I have to write the phrase "weight loss journey" like I'm some sort of dumbass Chicken Soup For The Dieter's Soulu author, I'm going to fuh-lip OUT. Please, please, please open your thesauruses (thesaurii?) and give me a new phrase. Good people, I beseech you) where you are so obsessed with your own weight you can actually feel how much you weigh?

And you know those amusement park people who stand by a scale and give you like a free inflatable whale or a coupon for kettle corn and three hot dogs if they can guess your weight within five pounds? If I were that person, and my doppleganger happened to be patronizing the Six Flags over Bumfuck Nowhere where I'd inevitably be working, I would wager I could guess my clone's weigh down to the ounce, because that's how freaking in tune with how fat or not fat my body feels at any given time.

I happened upon this article some mental health researchers in the UK published a couple years ago about the mental phenomenon of "feeling fat". The short version is that apparently an area of our brain controls whether or not we feel our bodies shrinking or expanding (adorably labeled the "Pinocchio Effect" and "Alice in Wonderland Effect") so, scientifically, being fat is a state of mind.

And of course I ran across this article as I'm spending another week feeling my body slowly expanding in all directions like a Macy's Parade float (if such float were 5'1" and blonde and tripped over cars and tall people as it made its way through Manhattan) It's so weird, this plateau thing...how for a couple days you can be at a new lowest weight and then one thing can screw it all up so you spend the next week fighting off those 3-4 lbs. you've already actually lost. It's kind of demoralizing, this up and down, and I'm starting to get frustrated with how quickly I plateau after a little loss. Not super angsty frustrated, but just kind of whatevery about the whole thing. I'm not going to give up, but I'm not sure exactly what I should be doing differently.

The weirdest thing about this whole "feeling fat" phase is how kind unclean I feel on the inside. Do you ever get that feeling? Where everything's kind of puffy feeling and your body is sluggish and maybe there's just this...not right feeling just under the surface of your skin? Yes? Maybe? Are you backing away slowly and not making eye contact? It's okay. I forgive you.

My friend Veggie B, who's moved to Asheville to become a professional hippy and WHO NEEDS TO UPDATE ONE OF HER BLOGS PICK ONE I DON'T CARE WHICH ONE BUT IT'S BEEN TWO MONTHS, WOMAN! would say that feeling that way means you're either filled up with physical toxins or emotional toxins and you need to clean them out somehow. I don't know how much I believe in toxins, but I do know this happens every single time I eat some less than wholesome food. Obviously, the weight gain isn't permanent, because it would've taken at least a couple weeks of making very unwise food choices to accumulate the calories to make that happen, but it's just weird how long the scale sticks up in the high numbers and then only falls a half pound or a pound each time. Wish there was a way to kind of get things moving along again.

210.4

2007-12-02T10:51:00.000-06:00

Oh, hey look everybody...the scale finally decided to stop being a little bitch and quit pretending I was NINE POUNDS HEAVIER THAN I WAS LAST WEEK. Oh scale, you sadistic little trickster, you.

Thank you.

2007-11-30T21:45:00.000-06:00

I'm sure I've made it pretty flamingly obvious by now that being earnest and sincere are not among my principal traits, so understand that I'm barfing a little bit in my mouth right now as I write this, but I never knew that I had such wonderful friends until this week. To everyone who sent their thoughts and good wishes, and to the ones I know who sent flowers, and ate tostada mountains, and offered to come with me, thank you very much for being my friends. I am very grateful.

How I Will Lose 230 lbs.on Thursday

2007-11-27T21:44:00.000-06:00

I was going to save this post for Thursday, but the events of today all seem to be pointing to "Write Me!", so here we are:

On Thursday I go to court for my divorce hearing. 9:35 am at the 17th Circuit Courthouse if anyone wants to come and, like, root for me with foam fingers or something. I am to bring a copy of the final divorce decree which I must purchase off the Internet and print off tomorrow afternoon. I've been told that this isn't like divorce court on TV; it's a law day proceeding and I'm scheduled in amongst burglary cases and probation violations. Maybe one of them will give me a tattoo while I wait. There are two women at my work who have recently gotten divorced, and they both have counseled me to bring someone along, that no matter how emotionally detached I've become from my husband in the past two years, actually watching your marriage dissected and then dissolved by a stranger in a robe is one of the most demoralizing things you can go through. "Be grateful you don't have children," they say. "Yeah," I say in return.

I have been looking forward to this court date since September when I filed it, but over the last few weeks I've been developing a really intense feeling of dread about it. When people ask when I finalize, and I tell them November 29th there's kind of a "So, woot?" reaction and I just shrug in assent. Because yeah, in some ways it IS woot...I'm really, truly free and not in relationship purgatory where I get in trouble for checking divorced on legal forms because I'm still technically married, and where my taxes get better (I think) and I'm legally my own person again. But on the other hand, I will have to go there to the court room on my own and see my husband again after nearly a year and a half of not seeing him, and he emailed to say he's bringing his mother and I think seeing them together will make the disappointment and the failure so palpable and awful.

My father offered to come with me to the hearing, but I turned him down. I probably should've said yes, but I can't imagine why him losing a day of work would do any good. My father and I have a relationship built around saying as few words as possible, and somehow the idea of getting divorced and then sitting and munching a Blooming Onion while talking about hardly anything at all just doesn't seem very desirable. I took the entire day off for the hearing, because even though I have a scheduled docket time, my coworkers said that was really more of a hopeful estimation than a firm slot. Plus, they said, there will be a lot of crying and no one wants to come back and teach a gaggle of children after something like that. It looks like Thursday afternoon I'll have a date with my bed and my cats and maybe a weepy chick movie (okay, and some ice cream. I'm only human) and a good long whiny day of thinking about Being Alone.

I have, for all practical purposes, basically been divorced since July of 2006. That's the month my husband packed up about a third of his stuff and moved out as a "birthday present". I had taken an extended summer break from work to visit my family during this time, and when I came back to the house we had shared during the first, awful months of our separation, I returned home to a house he had left full of trash, and cat feces, and rotting food and all sorts of other awful things that make me feel like I can never get the house clean enough again, no matter how much scrubbing or bleach I use. The day after my birthday, when I moved back in, marked the very first time in my life I had been completely on my own...I was broke, terrified, living in a stinking pit of Hell, and completely clueless about what to do next.

I'd like to say the weeks and months following that summer were an inspiring journey of personal growth, complete with my very own Authentic Joan Cusack-style Best Friend who arrived with a bucket of margaritas and a sympathetic smile, but that didn't happen. I spent most of 2006 either drunk on Missouri wine (the shame!), or asleep, or dating really inappropriate men all because I couldn't handle the fact that I felt so completely lonely and unable to help myself. When 2007 rolled around, I knew I had to make a change or else I'd be so fat and slovenly I'd get fired from teaching and I'd have to start operating a phone sex business from my couch where I'd moan and coo in between bites of BBQ Pringles except I'd never make any money because I'm pretty sure no one calls 1-900 numbers anymore and then I couldn't pay my rent and I'd get evicted, and, and, and...

So anyway, 2007 was sort of my faltering attempt to move from being lonely to simply being alone, and I think there's a big huge difference between those two words. Because when I say I'm alone, I mean I know I'm ALONE...with my family an hour away, and no reliable, close friends within driving distance, if my car breaks down I'm screwed, and if I try to wax my own eyebrows, there's no one there to slap me back to my senses before half my forehead is burned off. But even if I'm alone, I can deal with the situation; when I was lonely all the time, the idea that my Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha never arrived along with my two dozen pairs of designer shoes after I filed the divorce papers really pissed me off, and I just couldn't handle it. But being alone made me start taking better care of my money and my house. It made me realize that I couldn't go out and try to date if I had no idea who I was and who I could potentially like. It made me learn to ask for help if I needed it, which was hard. It made me start a blog, and keep going on the blog even when I just wanted to stop writing and drift off into self-pity land. I've learned to diagnose all the worrying sounds in my car, and fix a few of them. I've repaired a garage door, and scraped a foot of ice off my driveway. I am more assertive, and willing to confront people to get things done. Being alone does good things.

I still get lonely now and then, too, though. This week--I guess because of the hearing and maybe a little bit of the Happy Couple Holiday Syndrome-- has been especially hard. On Sunday my dishwasher exploded, and as the cats perched on the kitchen table, I scrambled to the laundry room to grab every towel I could find to dam up the gallons of water leaking from its bottom. Today I stood at the top of my stairway, a pair of scissors in a shaking deathgrip, convinced by some odd sounds that a burglar was in my living room. Later that evening, my car wouldn't start. Twice. After a come to Jesus moment where I mentally went through my bank account to determine if I had enough money to pay for a wrecker and a rental car and determined I absolutely did not, I started it and it was fine. Everything that happened this week has ended up just fine, but there are just those moments where you wish you had SOMEONE...even an ex-husband so you could turn to them and say, "Maybe we should get a watchdog." Or something. You get the idea.

So, on Thursday I am going to try my best to go to that courtroom and just deal with the situation with as little guilt and regret as I can muster. It's probably going to suck a lot, and I am not looking forward to seeing J or J's mom one little bit, but it's going to be over soon and then I get to finally get to cut that one last tie to a past I'm not very proud of. I think I'm going to go do it alone, because after all that's happened in the past two years to change me, I think it seems fitting.

Gobble, Gobble

2007-11-25T21:30:00.000-06:00

I just returned from an extremely relaxing, enjoyable Thanksgiving weekend during which the following things occured:

Mizzou won!
My mother drove my brother and I 8 miles towards the Kansas state line, parked the car on the shoulder, and refused to turn around until we sang "O Holy Night" for her without interpreting in the style of a Robert Goulet and Liza Minelli duet as we are sometimes wont to do.
My aunt got tipsy during her birthday fiesta at our local Mexican restaurant and gave us each "gifts" from her travel bag. My brother's was a boomerang...it is still unclear why.
I saw a bunch of my very old friends from high school and was relieved to find out they're all fine, upstanding, young adults and no longer play Magic: the Gathering (at least not openly)
Watched my mother cook, for the first time in her life, an entire meal from start to finish without any help. While she did forget to put sugar in the pies (and quietly freaked out as I stuck the front half of my body in the oven to stir in the sugar) and she caught the turkey just a tiny bit on fire, everything turned out nicely and we had a great dinner.

And of course...

I'm fairly certain I ate my body weight in leftovers. And also my body weight in foods found in restaurants. And Wal-Marts. Basically I started pigging out on Wednesday and haven't stopped since. And of course, the pigging out started not an hour after I gave myself the very firm talking to about NOT letting Thanksgiving be an excuse to go crazy...oh well.

Two steps forward and one step back, no? Hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving.

2007-11-20T10:23:00.000-06:00

Fair warning, people. This post is lengthy. I wrote it for selfish reason, but of course you're welcome to read it. Please know it's long and rambling and I absolutely will not resent you for stopping in the middle because you got bored. Just putting that out there before we start.

I really really wanted to go to bed early tonight and get a decent amount of sleep so I could be industrious and show up early for work so I could actually DO some work, but the fire alarm at the very top of my vaulted ceiling in my bedroom has a low battery and is CHIRPING once every minute as I am slowlyCHIRPtorturouslyCHIRPcompleCHIRP driven out of my mind. When I read the ad for my house in the paper, the idea of having vaulted ceilings was simply too posh to imagine. I've since come to the conclusion that the only thing a vaulted ceiling contributes to your life is the omnipresent dread at the thought of someday having to either buy or borrow a 12-foot ladder to change the battery on the smoke alarm that the moron mounted 10 feet above my head and which WILL NOT STOP CHIRPING. At least being jolted awake every 59 seconds gives me plenty of opportunity to write.

Remember tango? Remember how last week tango was this incredibly therapeutic, life changing event? Also, remember how last year at a tango thing my world was crushed by a moron in dance sneakers and I turned into a hermit for a month before I finally decided it was wasn't the greatest idea to avoid sun and human contact for the rest of my life? (I would link, but I'm typing this on Google docs and I can't, so if you want to read the detailed post about it, search for "tango" in my blogsearch bar)

Yeah, well.

I wish Yosemite Sam or someone Wild West affiliated would've drawn helpful warning signs on pieces of driftwood that said DANGER, TURN BACK NOW or EMOTIONAL BITCHSLAP AHEAD and posted them in regular intervals throughout the last three weeks so I would've at least thought about the possibility that dancing with strange men wasn't always going to be puppies and unicorns. Or I wish the high school me who diligently wrote down every profound quotation she encountered (So I could whip it out to impress a date? I seriously have no idea why) with a purple glitter pen in a spiral bound journal with a picture of a cat on it would've made a copy of the "Those who do not learned from the past are doomed to repeat it" page and stapled it to one of my hands so that every single time I put my hand on a man's shoulder to dance, or I gesticulated in my efforts to explain my addiction to tango and how just WONDERFUL it is and how FREEING and la la la...that the stapled paper would've reminded me not to put myself into the same position as I did last year, and to proceed with caution.

I guess I need to preface the rest of this post with this thought: if you have lived your life as a woman who, shall we say, is more prized for her cerebral qualities than her aesthetic ones, you also live your life through a series of little disappointments that change you in very small but profound ways as you grow up. At least that's how it happens for me. I mentioned in another post that I really believe there are three categories of women: beautiful women, tragic women
(not in the La Traviata sense, but in the pageboy haircut/inexplicable interest in raising guinea pigs and playing ragtime piano sense), and invisible women--those who aren't attractive, but they aren't unattractive either. I place myself in the third category because I've been invisible dozens and dozens of times in my life...at dances, at parties, as I walk into a restaurant with a gaggle of gorgeous girlfriends...and the knowledge and experiences of never quite being pretty enough to be worth notice kind of slowly chips away at you until the you that you could be in those situations is completely obscured because you're just the DUFF (www.urbandictionary.com if you don't know what that means).

And yeah, yeah...I will inevitably get an email from a Bona Fide Pretty Girl who will remind me that supermodels have problems too. In fact, it seems my friend Doctor Andy and I were writing at the exact same time about similar issues, and he published his own thoughts from a different perspective last night. I get that beautiful women have to deal with being objectified for their appearance, and always questioning whether opportunities or attention is coming because of her intelligence and accomplishments or the way her ass looks in a pair of Levis. I know that pretty girls suffer from the pressure of always maintaining their beauty, and that it's really hard and it can make them every bit as insecure as invisible women. But here's the thing, I'm pretty certain that 100% of women would rather be objectified for being attractive than unattractive. Even if the attention is negative, it comes from a positive place; beautiful women get stared at because their beauty is pleasant to behold. Invisible women get ignored because no one really knows what to do with them. Biologically, we are useless...thank God for brains and senses of humor or Darwin would've weeded us out in favor of Victoria's Secret models a century ago.

I think if you're a woman who's spent a lifetime of always being invisible, of always being the girl about whom guys would say, "God, Erin would be the world's most perfect girlfriend if she just didn't look like...Erin." If you've spent your life as the sidekick or the Gal Friday or the girl who matchmakes your guy friends with your girl friends because you know there's no chance the guys will actually want to date YOU, then you also know that over time, the chipping away sort of stops because there's nothing left of your self-image to destroy. That's when the insecurity starts to become very comforting. You know you don't have to shave your legs when you go out to dinner with a male friend, because there's absolutely no chance that your male friend asked you out on a date because he doesn't think of you that way. You don't have to worry about staying late at a bar and having perfect makeup or saying the perfect thing or pretending to be flirtatious when you'd rather be at home watching a Will and Grace marathon on Oxygen because you know you're not going to go home with anyone that night. After awhile, you realize you have a pretty good thing going; you can relax and be yourself and as long as you don't suddenly develop an interest in rodent farming or maybe learning Bulgarian folk dances or something, then you're going to be pretty comfortable as an invisible woman.

I'm sure the three of you who've kept reading to this point will say, "But Erin...what about inner beauty and finding your true worth through who you are and not what you look like?"

Hold on, I'm getting there.

The peculiar thing that tends to happen when someone like me finally gives up trying to be aesthetically beautiful and just starts tinkering around with life is that those women usually find someTHING to give them confidence and beauty rather finding someONE to validate them that way. And we've all seen enough Tyra (Don't lie; you've at least been subjected to secondhand Tyra and you KNOW that you've been wanting to YouTube her "All About the Vagina" show for a week now) to know that gaining strength through an internal rather than external transformation is going to be a substantially more gratifying experience. Every single Jennifer Weiner book, every single Bridget Jones or inspirational strong woman movie with a Whitney Houston soundtrack and starring Angela Bassett is about this, and they've become fixtures in our canon of social tropes because that process happens in real life. People who are damaged, especially women, find something inside themselves that is stronger, more capable, more talented, and more beautiful than they ever knew, and the confidence that knowledge instills in them also makes them ultimately more attractive than the pretty girls they're friends with.

And I guess that's what was happening to me over the last month; the first two weeks of tango lessons was about me getting over my fear of touching men again, and of my fear of being rejected for my size and my looks. When my worries about resting my body weight against K, my teacher, finally faded by my third lesson, and my mind stopped shrieking in horror everytime I looked at my profile in the practice mirror he had installed in his living room, I started focusing on actually dancing and connecting and moving my body to the music. The third and fourth lessons were absolutely lovely...we walked and turned and swayed on the dance floor and at the end of our last dance of our last lesson, K stepped away and broadly grinned at me. He was very pleased with the way I was dancing, he told me; I was on cloud nine. My third lesson butted up against a little tango practice party he was holding at his house, so I stuck around and sipped wine and nibbled on apple slices while the dancers arrived. I wasn't intending to really dance, because everyone else there was pretty advanced or at least experienced and I didn't want to make a fool of myself in front of people I'd have to see at milongas or other workshops later. But K asked me to dance, and then later Rich, a honest to goodness Conventionally Attractive Male, asked me too. Rich, I found out, was 27 and a swing dance teacher who had recently developed a similar tango addiction. We danced, and it felt really nice...he was encouraging when I did well, and he was patient when I didn't know what to do next. He helped me breathe and relax, and we had a very musical, lovely dance together. When we were done he asked me how long I'd been dancing, and he was impressed when I said just three weeks.

I wish I could've written about those exchanges in more eloquent terms, but for now I'll just say that I hope everyone who's reading this knows what it's like to feel beautiful for something you do...how extraordinary it can be to trust yourself enough to let go and make art, even if it only lasts for the length of a three-minute tango song. For an entire week I walked around like Helen of Troy; my posture changed, I smiled at more people, I was vibrant and energetic and charming, and I was SO excited for the next time I got to dance, because I had a feeling it was going to be every bit as incredible as the past two weeks had been. I think, maybe, the way I was acting and the way I perceived life after feeling so good about something made me beautiful. I still have the world's greatest expanse of thigh, and my wrist and collarbones are not so much prominent as faint suggestions, but for the first time in a long time, I managed to step outside my physical appearance long enough to be actually beautiful.

I was having a fabulous day Sunday; I woke up late, puttered around the house a little, and later met Doctor Andy for dinner after watching an opera in which he played in the pit orchestra. After dinner I headed over to the old Presbyterian church that hosts the Sunday milongas (enter my mother's voice in your head saying "Social DANCING? On a SUNDAY? In a CHURCH? I guess it's none of my business what you people do up there.") and I was secretly pleased to find out that no one else assembled in the class had taken tango before. There was just NO WAY this could be disappointing, right?

(Notice what I did right there with the foreshadowing. Pulitzer Prize, here I come.)

So, remember when you started reading this at the beginning of this post and before the ten minutes of your life you wasted reading the rest of it and will subsequently never, ever get back...minutes you could've spent inspecting your belly button lint or texting inappropriate limericks about your boss to your cubicle partner? Okay, so back then at the beginning I mentioned last year I took some tango classes at the suggestion of a friend and ended up having kind of a major depression because one of the teachers there told me my body was too fat to tango properly. And of course, the moment I looked up from changing into my tango shoes, there he was again next to a woman who appeared to be in her early thirties, and who also appeared to be wearing a homemade Holly Hobby dress and pigtails and plastic flower barrettes. I'm sorry if I step on anyone's toes, but if I meet you and you are above the age of 11 and you are wearing any combination of the above outfit and you have not just come from a Britney Spears lookalike contest or your bedroom where you were busy playing Naughty Schoolgirl and Stern Headmaster with your lover, then I will judge you. No excuses.

Apparently, the girl was a coworker of the man who hates my body and she had taken a few classes with him in September and so they spent 40 minutes of our hour-long class demonstrating how to walk, how to embrace, how to do all the things I desperately wanted to do. And while the girl was not bad, per se, she was distracting, because she bounced and tittered and fell over a lot and I just wanted to scream because all I wanted to do was actually dance like I danced with Korey and not hold onto the arms of a diminutive Welsh woman who decided to try tango because she loved the guy who played J. Peterman when he won the Dancing with the Stars challenge during the first season. As the practica ended and the milonga began, the instructor who does not like me actually asked me to dance, which seemed to be a hopeful sign. We danced one song, inexplicably going round and round the room in a weird box step that no one has ever actually done in tango that I know of, and then he stepped back and said, "I can tell you're nervous. Thank you for the dance." And that was that. I guess nervous is better than fat.

To the man's credit, he was very congenial to me when we weren't dancing, but he also didn't ask me for another dance despite the lack of female partners there. Other men trickled in, and one by one we were eached asked to dance a set. I would inevitably start the dance with "I'm a beginner, so be gentle" and they would respond with, "I'm sure it's not as bad as you think" and then we'd dance and it WAS as bad as I thought and so we'd suffer through the eight minutes together and then we'd be done. No second dance. No more conversation.

And this is where the insecurity started seeping back in, because with Korey there was never any question of was I good enough or was I doing the right things...we just danced and he taught and I listened and it got better and better and better. But while I was dancing with these new men the prevailing thought in my head was that it was kind of like having really, really awful rebound sex after breaking up with a longterm partner. It felt disconnected and stressful and just kind of disappointing and I just wanted to go hide every time it was over because there was no connection, and the reason there was no connection was because I lost my confidence more and more as the night went on. I left early, because after a small group of Turkish ballerinas (not even kidding) wandered off the campus of the nearby university and into our milonga, I knew there was no chance of me getting dances with the men anymore. None of them had danced tango before, but they just looked so gorgeous at being bad that every single man in the room gravitated toward them. In contrast, I was sweaty, dishevelled, huge, and awkward trying to hide my bulk in one of the folding chairs in the corner of the room. I wasn't beautiful anymore.

So, this was Sunday, and I went through a 24-hour period of extreme self-pity and blubbering in my car and rewatching Bridget Jones for the 312th time while eating Indian takeout from my go-to restaurant for all things comfort food, and finally tonight I managed to get some perspective on the situation. Of course, I'm going to have to go back and not let this man discourage me from doing something that made me so happy. Of course I'm going to have to deal with my size and my looks on my own terms, because permanent, sustainable change is never going to happen unless I do it for myself. Of course I'm going to have to keep reading other tango blogs that say you're just going to have to act like a goddess because tango isn't about physical beauty so much as attitude and to talk to friends who all will reassure me that tango is a horrible struggle to overcome insecurities and learn about yourself and that's why it's so addictive and because it's a lot more than just dancing...it's figuring out how to live your life, too. I know all these things, and yet right now I'm really cringing from having to face them.

The saying "beauty is pain" keeps popping into my head as I write this entry, because I think it means something different based on the type of woman you are. The conventional interpretation of it is funny; we all have to go through waxings and haircuts and shaving and plucking and exercising in order to conform to the generally agreed upon definition of beauty. Maybe for the truly beautiful woman, like Doctor Andy wrote about, the saying means that your pulchritude will never give you the privacy you need or friendships that aren't also confused by attraction. What it means for me, is that if you don't have the luxury of looking like a woman every man wants to have, then you're going to have to fight for your beauty, even if you lose it over and over and over. It maybe means that you're going to have to accept your child bearing hips or your too-thin mouth or your mousy brown hair and find something else that makes you magnificent. Maybe it means that you're going to do something to change those things, but that you also have to realize that those things aren't the most important part of who you are. It means that other people, like Asshole Tango Man for me, may be able to squash your confidence in a single sentence, but it's your obligation to yourself to do the work to build it back up.

God, that's a scary, wonderful thought.

Existentialism on a Grand Scale

2007-11-17T21:33:00.001-06:00

My work's Biggest Loser challenge will have officially ground its tedious, soul-sucking self to an end this coming Monday with our final weigh-in and awarding of prizes. At some point in the last eight weeks one of the organizers made a giant bulletin board in our faculty lounge with a progress bar for each of the teams and little car cutouts with our names and our team nicknames on it. They're supposed to look like they're racing...little Beetle Bugs frozen against the corrugated paper like a finish line snapshot from the world's most annoying NASCAR weekend. The funny thing about the little car board is that they've been stuck in the same position for the past five weeks...Team 1 is just barely inching out Team 3, and Teams 2,4, and 5 are lagging somewhere closer to the starting line. I presume our challenge organizers simply haven't had time to update the board, but it's also kind of poetic it was left that way, because I think that week three was right about when everyone started realizing that maybe this whole Biggest Loser thing was a really bad idea.

My friend Stacie, whom I've mentioned in previous posts has been starving herself to win the challenge and looks dangerously gaunt and weak as a result, plunked herself down at one of our lounge tables the other day and started shoveling the contents of a very heavily loaded taco salad into her mouth. Pausing between snarfs, she looked up at the rest of us, sighed, and said, "I'm really freaking sick of dieting, you know?"

We knew.

For me personally, the Biggest Loser challenge thing has served as little more than a huge roadblock in my own getting healthy plan. I started out the challenge weighing in at 219.5, but only because I stood on the scale with two layers of clothing, my tennis shoes, a full stomach, and pockets full of keys, my cell phone, and about three dollars in change. I went in there weighing about 6 fake pounds more than I normally would've, and I'm guessing that at our final weigh-in, even if I stripped down, starved myself the entire Sunday before, and exercised like crazy, I'm still going to end up at about 212 lbs. So basically, over eight weeks, I've managed to lose all of 1.5 pounds of actual weight. And for what? I'm going to get a 40 dollar Wal-Mart gift card if my team wins...there's no chance I'll win the individual challenge because some of our, um, more substantial teachers have shed 20-30 pounds in the last eight weeks just because they've never dieted before. So now I'm pissed because I've basically done nothing for the past two months, and not because I wasn't dieting hard enough, but because I was dieting in the first place.

I came to the sobering realization this week, as I was drinking coffee and reading about Marie Osmond instead of actually writing lesson plans, that I lack some sort of basic integrity--a central core to my character--that I really ought to have as an adult. I think I'm flakier than I was five years ago; I promise people I'll do things so everyone will think I'm helpful, I'm an overachiever, a real go-getter, and then it takes me way too long to actually deliver on the promises. I let my opinions get swayed too easily by other, louder people because I don't like the confrontation inherent in standing up for things I believe in. I do about 50% of the work I ought to be doing because I know that's really all will get noticed, and relaxing is so much easier than pushing and pushing to do extra things. I prefer to do the things that are easier and that get me by than the things that are really good for me in the long run. And having realized all this in one big caffeine-inspired epiphany really made me kind of disappointed in myself.

And the weight loss stuff, at least in the last few months, is one of the few areas in which I can say I've been acting with a consistent pattern of insight, responsibility, and care for a long-term solution instead of a quick fix, so it's a particular letdown that I've allowed myself to backslide into all the bad habits I worked so hard to extinguish this fall. I wasn't interested in exercising yet, so in order to post a loss each week I didn't eat hardly anything for the 24 hours before the weigh-in, and then I joined all the teachers in the post weigh-in binging that started with lunch in the faculty lounge and usually didn't stop until late Friday night after lots of Mexican food and margaritas. And as things tend to go, since it was so easy to eat like shit on Friday, the binge days turned into binge weekends and then I spent the better part of the week alternating between asceticism for the sake of the weigh-in and total apathy for the whole thing. (Invariably, total apathy was more satisfying if it also involved a chocolate milk shake)

It seems the only person who isn't totally over the challenge is my teammate, and infamous Atkins dieter of posts past, Gen. She's been trucking along, losing 1-2 pounds each week and doing really well, and I'm genuinely proud of her. For Gen, it's all about willpower, and I know she battles each weekend when she's with her husband and her friends. She comes back each Monday talking about how "bad" she was, and how she's going to have to be really good before Friday so it doesn't show up on the scale. I know, to her, that "bad" means she had a slice of bread or maybe some alcohol or chocolate on a girls' night out, and whenever she says stuff like that I bite my tongue hard, because to me it's just absolutely insanity to wreck a good time by worrying about one tiny slice of bread. But that's how she rolls...I think she likes the way deprivation feels and she really grooves on seeing how long she can stick to her plan, even if weekends are always just one big excuse for her to be "bad".

So in this case, I wonder whether integrity also means willpower, or whether willpower is just a crutch for not having any sort of personal rudder for how to improve your health in the long run. Does not dieting require more character than dieting, or is it the other way around? This is making my head hurt. I think I need an apathy shake.

Slowing down.

2007-11-11T15:11:00.000-06:00

I decided to go home to see my parents this weekend, partly because I hadn't visited them in a handful of months and there were promises of homemade pie and getting some Christmas shopping done and out of the way, and also because a weekend in my hometown means I get at least 24 hours to not have to focus on bills and housework and needy cats with digestive issues, so stuff tends to get sorted out in my mind.

I drove home on Saturday afternoon after two weeks of feeling pretty nasty, healthwise. My general mental/emotional well-being has been steadily improving and stabilizing for the past several months, and I've been feeling so good that Therapist John pronounced me cured and sent me on to embrace my new, shrink-free lifestyle last week. I'm pretty proud of that, because he's told me several times that only a very small number of people actually do the work it takes to get emotionally okay, and it's something I had to really struggle with for awhile before it kind of "took", but obviously it was totally worth it.

For some reason, though, while my brain is perky and ready to embrace life, my body's kind of rebelling against anything that doesn't involve curling up on the couch and reciting every single line of Center Stage as Oxygen reruns it for their 134th time this year. I'm worn out whether I sleep for five hours or ten, and I've caught myself mentally chronicling every single headache, bout of dizziness, or muscle pain I've had in a running monologue like I'm holding court in the shuffleboard shelter at the Boca Raton Golden Years Retirement Ranch or something. You know that feeling when your body is kind of screaming out for you to exercise it...stretch it, run it, build muscle...something? I have that feeling all the time, but when I actually go out to do something about it I return in even worse shape than before. I'm going to make an appointment with a family doctor to get a check-up soon, because it's ridiculous to be this young and to be constantly feeling this old all the time. At this rate I'll be riding a Rascal through the grocery store and taking out my teeth for an afternoon nap before Bingo by the time I'm 32.

The other thing that's been really bothering me is this Biggest Loser thing at my school, because a lot of my bad habits have started creeping back in in my efforts to make sure my weight is at its lowest on weigh-in day. I skip meals 24 hours before it's time to weigh in, and then I spend the next two days pigging out on total shit because I'm so famished from starving myself to stay ahead of the other teams. I know the other women are feeling it too, but we're all so terrified of disappointing one another that we keep pushing ourselves. It's only 40 dollars...big deal...but we're all acting like this is life and death, and we really need to stop it. I heard from one of the organizers that they're going to resume the contest in January after giving us time to "be bad during the holidays", and I just got disgusted with the whole thing. What's the point of doing any of this if it's just for the money or for the bragging rights, and everything is totally contingent upon whether or not it's convenient for us to lose weight at that time? Even my one ally at school in this whole "Stop dieting, people!" campaign has become a traitor, approaching me sheepishly after a few unsatisfactory weigh-ins to ask me if I'd buy some Hoodia capsules for her so her husband wouldn't find out she was taking them. I've decided to just quit the contest after this last weigh-in, because I feel like I need to stick to my principles on this, even if no one else cares.

It's really nice to hear when people have noticed I've lost some weight, and I'm even starting to see it myself...I had to have my picture taken for an interview someone did with me for a thing on weight loss bloggers, and I've posted it here because it shows me about a quarter of the way through with the actual weight loss part of this. This picture was the first time I've noticed any change in my body, so it was good to finally be able to acknowledge to myself what people have been saying at work and at home. I don't want to get comfortable here, though, and fall into that cycle of slacking off and then over-trying to make up for it and failing because it's too hard. And that's where I am right now...I'm too focused on short-term results and not so focused on actually eating well and moving around as a part of my life. I need to get my head back in the game somehow, because I don't want to be reading this entry a year from now and realizing I've been in the same holding pattern of assing around/feeling guilty that I can fall into so easily if I'm not thinking about what's important.

It's The Most Wonderful 16% of the Year

2007-11-01T21:13:00.000-05:00

How did the candy consumption go for you last night? I bought my Halloween candy on Monday and filched seven snack-size Kit Kats between then and Halloween. I think that's pretty good, considering the other forty-six pieces actually made it into someone else's mouth.

Since retailers and advertisers have pushed the official start date for the holiday season up to BEFORE Halloween, (Incidentally, I sort of stopped dead in my tracks and tripped over a rug today as I walked into one of the schools in our district and saw several children, some of whom were still wearing Halloween t-shirts, gawking at a giant, inflatable snow globe with Santa's village inside it. One of the teachers said a group got together at about 7:00 am to get it set up in time for "the Christmas season". Gross.) it seems now is as good a time as any to start working on a game plan for hunkering down and enjoying the holidays without spending New Year's Day prostrate on the couch and lamenting the tens of thousands of calories you ingested during the last two months. I know the season is a magical time, full of cocoa and cookies and eggnog and those marvelous bacon-wrapped Lil' Smokies that kind of skeeve you out even as you're licking the mystery sauce on your fingers and diving for more...

I know all that, and yet I hope this year I can whittle down some of my gastronomical excess of Christmases past. Last year at my work, we had a finger food buffet for an entire work week, and so for those five days my lunchtime meal was nacho cheese. Sometimes nacho cheese with hamburger, sometimes with Ro-Tel tomatoes...but always nacho cheese on chips and for some reason even though I think my body basically went on strike and refused to function until I STOPPED INGESTING CHEESE, I thought it was my social obligation to eat that junk every single day.

So, obviously, the next 61 days are going to be tough for anyone attempting to either lose weight or be consistently healthy. So I thought I'd share this website I use a lot for motivation and focus right now, so maybe it'll do some good later when we're all slumped over in a tryptophan coma and watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade with the sound off so we can mock the entries. Or maybe that's just me. Anyway, the people who've lost weight on that site are amazing, and I'm assuming they got that way because they didn't eat five bowls of nacho cheese in five days. Here's hoping their mojo works for me this time around, too.

Attention, Nicole Richie:

2007-10-30T17:26:00.000-05:00

It is now officially 43 hours after my departure from a weekend in New York, and I think this is the first hour of those previous 43 in which I've had the time to actually sit down and think. Funny how work doesn't really care that you're a fabulous jet-setter who reads Vanity Fair (okay, and People) during her flights and who gamely deals with flight delays and excruciatingly long runway taxis by chatting up the uber-suave Italian couple in the seats next to you about their vacation to (inexplicably) Columbus, Ohio. I got home Monday morning at about 2 am, hopped into bed until 6 am, hopped right out of bed and have pretty much operated on adrenaline up until about two this afternoon when I crashed and begged the nurse to hook me up to an intravenous caffeine drip.

One of the SUPER WONDERFUL quirks about my body, besides the child-bearing hips (I apparently got the "Quadruplets? No problem!" model), is the fact that any sort of narcotic that enters my system, whether it's cough syrup or Chianti, apparently takes an express route away from my pancreas and straight to my brain, thus negating any reasonable chance of normally metabolizing all the caffeine or alcohol or high-grade Sudanese opium (kidding!) I've consumed, and ensuring that the root beer float I had last Friday is going to make me feel like a meth addict until at least the following Wednesday. It's actually kind of handy for me; I don't like the taste of alcohol and I was always too chicken to try drugs in college, so I learned I could pretty much simulate the effects of a normal person's beer buzz by drinking down, say, a grande Frappuccino. On a typical Sunday morning during my first two years of college at a super-rural, super-Christian liberal arts school, most of my friends would be staggering to church still drunk (having likely gotten drunk after realizing they committed to spending four years of their lives at a super-rural, super-Christian liberal arts school) or coming down from a marijuana high, and I'd be working off the shakes from a Saturday evening bender of Mountain Dew and Twizzlers. Unequivocal lameness is my anti-drug.

So anyway, while I was sitting at my desk at work and trying not to shake uncontrollably from the cup of coffee I had to boost me back up to fighting form for the rest of the day, I happened to run across this article from the good people over at That's Fit regarding the link between childhood obesity and mothers who smoke while pregnant.

My mom is a lifelong pack-a-day smoker, or was until she gave up cigarettes last winter after visiting my grandmother in the nursing home and seeing room after room of elderly emphysema patients tied to their oxygen tanks and barely able to get out of bed before collapsing down again, winded from the exertion. My mom also smoked while she was pregnant with me and my little brother, a fact that I conveniently use to assign blame for all my faults, from being really short to having an unfortunate addiction to Perez Hilton. This article makes me wonder whether or not I can really point my finger at one of her discarded packs of Marlboro Lights as an accomplice in developing my Rubenesque figure.

At the end of the study, the scientists speculated that babies of pregnant smokers were likely nutrient starved while in utero, and so have to make up their deficiencies by eating lots and eating often as they grow. But does the fact that right now my inner voice is seductively whispering about the jumbo bag of mini candybars nestled in my plastic jack-o-lantern bowl really mean that I was deprived of whatever's in a Kit Kat wafer as a fetus? By that same logic, and as several other studies have suggested, the fact that my body was pumped full of nicotine and tar every time my mom lit up a cig means I should have the same cravings and withdrawal symptoms that an adult smoker has even after quitting for several years. Honestly, though, I think I'd prefer eating one of my Halloween Kit Kat bars that had been dipped in ketchup and dredged through used cat litter before I'd willingly suck down a cancer stick, so I'm not really buying the whole retroactive eater/smoker hypothesis.

As I commented on this blog entry, I think maybe the more plausible explanation for the link between pregnant smokers and obese children is that women who don't shrink from putting huge amounts of toxins inside their own body, especially while growing life inside it, probably don't give healthy lifestyle choices much of a thought in general. Cigarettes cost a lot of money, and if your family was like mine, paying for Mommy's cigarettes meant that we'd have to cut corners somewhere else and that usually meant we ate a lot of frozen or packaged junk food instead of fresh fruits or vegetables. My dad also smoked when I was a kid, and I remember that neither of them really had the stamina to get up and run or jump or play with me or my brother, so we usually ended up bonding as a family through movies or television instead of something more active.

I'm not entirely sure if I buy this article, but I think even if it doesn't pan out as a solid biological link between cigarettes and fat, at the very least it'll scare a few female smokers into realizing that if you repeatedly put something nasty inside your body while you're pregnant, you're a total moron and your baby will suffer.

I'm interested to know, though: Among those of you who are or have struggled with obesity, how many of your mothers smoked while she was pregnant with you?

Therapy on Three Inch Heels

2007-10-25T19:52:00.000-05:00

I ran out of gum last night.

Now hush yourselves and your replies of "So what?", because for me, running out of gum is a BIG freaking deal. I buy gum or mints or breath strips every single time I make a trip to a store, so that every pocket of every purse from every decade in which I ever bought a purse can be overflowing with some sort of breath-related paraphernalia. I am obsessed with minty freshness. I need gum.

So, of course, during my trip up to the trendy Bohemian part of KC, in which I got lost in the interwoven, poorly marked streets and terraces and avenues, and during which I stopped at a pretentious, arty European bistro where I ate a pretentious, arty, and overpriced vegetarian crepe with lots and lots of garlic and tomatoes, I ran out of gum. I parked underneath a SURVEILLANCE IN PROGRESS sign in a vaguely seedy apartment parking lot and began frantically rummaging through every fold of the three purses currently occupying the passenger side floorboard of my car. I found empty gum packages, and discarded gum wrappers, and even the pistachio colored dust from a package of spearmint Extra, but there was no actual GUM to be found. I pondered going back out into KC Bohemia long enough to stop at a grocery store and replenish, but that would've involved maneuvering my giant boat of a car back across several pedestrian crossings and through the langorously moving throngs of college students with their charmingly sloppy clothing and their messenger bags and their beaming, unstressed faces just radiating the joy of responsibility-free living, and at that moment...driving my inherited powder blue '95 Buick Lesabre with my grandmother's United Methodist Women bumper sticker still clinging tenaciously to chrome, smoothing down the soccer mom haircut my stylist decided I needed earlier in the day, and so desperate for non-garlicky breath I would've been willing to French kiss a stranger for the toothpaste in their mouth...at that moment I was just not having any of it, so I sat in that darkening parking lot and just fumed over my situation, silly as it was. It was going to be a bad evening.

Part of the reason I was so uptight was because last night was my very first time to try dancing again after this incident occurred in the fall of last year. Over the past twelve months I've mooned over tango-tagged YouTubes, browsed vacation packages to Buenos Aires, and kept a close eye on the Kansas City tango forums, all without actually doing anything about getting back into it. When I found out that our local tango teacher was going to be in town for a few weeks before leaving for Argentina, I decided there was really no more excuses for not dancing, so I signed up for private lessons with him. I was already shaky and nervous about the prospect of coming back to an activity from which I backed away to spare myself further humiliation; the idea of doing it on a private basis while breathing my toxic waste breath on a near-stranger was enough to send me over the edge.

While I was changing my shoes in the little family room of the sprawling American Foursquare manse my teacher owns, I wondered where my omnipresent pessimism had come from. If I had to fill out a personality inventory, I'm pretty sure I would've marked "optimist" if given the choice. I think, or at least I used to think that way. I have optimism for other people and situations that happen to me; I completely believe my friends and family will pull through whatever crisis they're experiencing, and when my finances are stretched or I'm faced with a problem at work I have every confidence in my ability to pull through and make the best of the situation.

But when it comes to my sense of self-efficacy in accomplishing things that would make me a happier person, or a more fulfilled person...well, I have none. I spend a few minutes each day researching ideas for a new career, but the prospect of returning to grad school or starting out on a new job path petrifies me. I make excuses to avoid social gatherings because I'm certain I'll have a rotten time. I doom new relationships before I give them a chance because I assume they'll end up like my marriage. I am an unequivocal, unabashed pessimist when it comes to doing anything that would soften my cynicism for the world and my place in it. While I was sitting in that little room waiting for my lesson, I realized that 100% of that negativity came from the way I feel about myself, and that I blame external circumstances as a way to hide the fact that I don't really think I'm worth having the good things in life. The undesirable people at potential parties or evenings out hide the fact that I'm scared that no one will talk to me, or I'll be the ugliest, most awkward person in the room. The cost of continuing education, and the risks involved in leaving one career for a completely different one are all things thousands of other people have had to conquer in their lifetime, but I refuse to believe it can happen to my satisfaction because deep down I'm really frightened that all I'll end up being is another unmotivated, underachieving employee with an extra diploma in the back of my closet. And this gum thing...well, I knew it had very little about what was going on in my mouth, and way more about what was going on in my head about my body and my appearance. Let's face it, a lifetime of being not very attractive has probably made me more self-centered about my looks than I would've been had I ended up a raving beauty. The "bad evening" wasn't going to be bad because my breath could cut crop circles so much as I was going to have to let a man put his arms around my body, legs and torso up against mine, and guide me to depend on him for movement and standing still and expressing something we couldn't do without the intimacy of a physical connection.

The first quarter of our lesson together was...rocky, I would say. We danced a song to see what I remembered, and I was so stiff in his arms I actually gave myself, like, tango whiplash from holding my shoulders tight. When he turned off the music, I silently congratulated myself for not falling over, not sweating, and not breathing, in or out, at all (although if I had, I really doubt the stank breath would've made much difference...he had a good 18 inches on me in height, so the only thing I potentially could've offended was his left nipple). He looked at me, cocked his head, and kind of sighed before he said that somehow my body managed to be simultaneously weak and rigid at exactly the same time. This was not news to me; I had nearly passed out from the combined effort of sucking in every single one of my bodyparts that had jiggle potential and also holding on to him without actually putting any of my weight on his body. I was basically a how-to on embodying every single bad tango habit in the first five minutes of my dancing career.

We spent the next hour talking about how essential being aware of where your partner's body is, being present in the moment and in the music, and being patient and trusting enough to wait for your partner to move when he wants and stop when he wants. We did lots of exercises that involved leaning into one another with my boobs smooshed into his chest and holding our arms out at the sides, and the entire time we were doing that I fought the mental image of one of my favorite scenes in cinema history ever, except mirrored by my instructor and I like a Rorschach blot of total awesomeness.

I was really surprised at how much just dancing and learning with this man dredged up all sorts of really intense, shitty reactions. Like, how I stiffen whenever someone touches me, and how I can't trust anyone enough to actually depend on them for something as simple as moving my legs to the music in the direction they want to go. It took me at least 30 minutes of the lesson to finally believe that pressing my stomach up against his pelvis wasn't going to result in him recoiling in disgust, and even though right now I intellectually believe he was fine with it, I still have this awful thought in the back of my head that he's going to dread dancing with me every single time I show up because I'm just not worth it. This whole concept of just...letting go...it's been a problem my whole life, and a lot of my relationships and ambitions have suffered for the lack of it. I can't hold hands with a boyfriend while we're walking down the street, or lie on the coach together to watch TV without the fear of somehow crushing his body with my own. In all the plays I did or the recitals I performed in college, my performances were always marred by the fact I could never really get inside the music or the character until the very last second before the curtain rose, and then it was too late or not enough. I walk through life with my shoulders squared for battle, because the idea of just embracing the freedom abandon, even once, means I will make a fool of myself, and in my addled brain I already have enough reasons to look like a loser on a normal day; I don't need this too.

And I know that's not really true...I KNOW it's not. But I still don't really believe it, you know? My friend Veggie B! and I talk often about holistic medicine and whole body wellness because she's living out in Hippie Xanadu (Asheville) and learning about natural healing and massage. Our last conversation revolved around the idea that everything going on in your body, good or bad, is intrinsically linked to what's going on (or has been going on) inside your brain. And some of it is obvious: indigestion is related to stress, depression can cause all sorts of maladies, when you're anxious your immune system is less able to fight off infections. I mean that's all pretty duh, right? But the idea of it really got me to think about the whole pathology of why I got fat in the first place, and why I'm still fat now. I mean, I know I was a chubby kid because I ate a lot and I sat at home and read instead of going outside and playing like I should've. But after a point, when the innocent overeating turns into emotional overeating...why does your body go along with it? Why can't your brain discern that this isn't good at all, and it should be stopped. If Veggie B's theory holds true, I'm fat because something in my brain tells me I should be. And I knew, right there as I was clinging on to my teacher's neck for dear life while I learned the back ocho, that maybe I'm fat because it keeps people far away from me, and that I create the distance for myself because I don't really think I'm worth getting close to...that inevitably I'll be a disappointment to whomever sees through the sarcasm and emotional frigidity and then my secret'll be out and the world will know that I'm not much. Pasta Queen once explained obesity as kind of a superpower...that it gave you the ability to be invisible enough in society to observe the true character of the people you know. I agree with that, but I think maybe if you wanted to extend the whole Justice League theme, it's also kind of a ready-made force field too...a 100 lb. flak jacket that lets you hide from meaningful interactions and relationships because you can always assume they're going to reject you offhand, just because you're fat. Apparently, obesity is my uber-lack of gum. Or something.

When the next couple came in to dance at 8:00 pm, I absolutely did not want to go, and it only had a very little to do with the usual, "Hey, I'm getting better! Or less bad!" kind of reaction. I just wanted to stay draped around that man's neck for the rest of my life, not out of any sort of lust or crush or anything like that, but because I COULD and it was okay and he didn't start projectile vomiting when I touched him and Paraguay didn't spontaneously combust when the back of my neck started to get a little sweaty and for at least, you know, five seconds of our first lesson together there was a connection...a total abandonment of reserve and pretense and my infuriatingly omnipresent internal monologue that so easily stymies the joy I can find in truly nice things.

Anyway, I have three more lessons coming up, and I think they'll be good, and even if I end up being a totally horrendous dancer, at least I'm getting some pretty inexpensive therapy in the process. And yesterday morning before I had coffee, took a shower, fed the cats, or made my bed, I went to the store and bought three variety packs of gum, two Listerine breath sprays and a tin of Altoids. Next time is going to be a good one.

The BMI Photo Project

2007-10-21T20:44:00.000-05:00

I wrote a post a few weeks ago about finally slipping out of the "morbidly obese" and into the plain old "obese" bracket of the Body Mass Index charts. I talked a little bit about how shocking it was to find out my size meant I was unhealthy enough to die from it, since I was pretty sure I felt pretty vibrant and lively most of the time.

If you need further proof that BMI is only objective in the eyes of the National Institute of Health or the Center for Disease Control or whoever thought it up, here is a Flickr Project devoted to putting faces to those numbers:

Check out the very compelling BMI Illustration Project.

Malingering

2007-10-20T21:38:00.001-05:00

I should just never, ever write posts that even allude to success or well-being or self-satisfaction because they will inevitably come back to bite me in the ass.

I feel so bad for my poor, neglected blog and my shiteous posts of late, but I cannot get over feeling sick this year. This week I felt so generally ill I managed to convince myself I had diabetes, drove to an urgent care facility in Kansas, and pleaded with the staff to give me a finger-prick test. I laid on the examining table for an hour while people poked and prodded my flesh and I peed into a cup and the whole time it was going on I pretty much knew I wouldn't end up being diabetic, because whenever I get this sick there is never, ever anything specifically wrong with me.

The doctor came in after my lab results were done, and I had this brief moment of wanting to soil my pants when he sat down on his rollie-stool, pulled out my chart and said with a wry voice, "Well, your urinalysis came back and your blood sugar is absolutely perfect, but you are..."

...and I'm not exactly certain what he said at the end of that sentence because my mind's ear heard "PREGNANT" and I had a little mini-panic attack because even though I intellectually knew there was no possible, biological way I could've ended up pregnant, I am so paranoid about getting sperminated that I will run to the drugstore for an EPT if I even so much as bump into someone wrong at the post office. So, after a brief, torturous moment of envisioning my new future of Pampers and paternity suits, I realized that he was handing me a prescription for antibiotics and not prenatal vitamins. Apparently, I've been harboring a rather nasty and persistent infection in my body for several weeks and it was to blame for the nausea, and the fever, and the dehydration, and the swollen eyes, and the swelling, and the temporary anorexia, and the overriding feeling of wanting to just embrace sweet, sweet death every time I had to move my body (but, unfortunately, not to blame for my ill-advised purchase of an unreturnable fuschia print kimono dress from a Target clearance rack last Tuesday).

Since the Cipro started kicking in mid-afternoon today, I've already started feeling a little perkier, and I'm hoping tomorrow I can actually get up and move around a lot more than I have for the past month. In a way, it's encouraging to know that this bone-crushing fatigue was at least in part due to being legitimately sick instead of just sedentery or depressed, but it's also kind of a startling wake up call for me to realize that my immune system is a lazy bastard who prefers clipping his toenails and watching reruns of "The Nanny" on afternoon Lifetime to actually PROTECTING MY BODY FROM DISEASE. I was the most healthy, sturdy person I knew all the way through childhood, adolescence, and college; I'd have like one bout of flu or strep once a year and would otherwise be so vibrantly, annoyingly healthy that I'd have to fake sick in order to get to take a day off once in awhile. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that my health problems started right when my marriage fell apart, and that living on a futon and drinking myself to sleep every night for a year and a half during the "we're separated but living in the same house/shut up it's complicated" period probably wasn't the greatest choice for me health-wise, but it's been almost two years since that happened and no matter whether I get more sleep, less sleep...whether I shop at Whole Foods or spend a week scarfing down coney dogs at Sonic...whether I'm working out or napping every day after school...nothing I try or do seems to ever give me enough breathing room with my health to actually DO anything about it.

I'm not exactly where to turn on this. Should I get a full workup at my doctor's office to find out if something bigger is the underlying factor for all these illnesses I've had in the last year? Should I just keep doing what I'm doing and try to take regular baths in hand sanitizer on the side? Should I look into something more holistic, even though I'm not sure exactly what "holistic" entails?

I'd really appreciate advice or ideas, because I'm sort of stuck. I just want to feel better, be able to be active and healthy as much as possible. Because there's still a lot of stuff about life I need to investigate, you know? Like why my town's Super Wal-Mart always smells like farts, and how wide my mother's nostrils will flare when I mention that I'm thinking about going back to school for another degree. I just don't want to keep missing out on life, even though hunkering down amongst the blankets and the pillows and the cats for the past month hasn't been all that bad, either.

Linky Goodness

2007-10-20T21:31:00.001-05:00

Since I've been spending a lot of time in bed on my back (that really didn't sound as dirty inside my head), I played around with my template and added a bunch of links to excellent nutrition/exercise resources on the Web, non-diet blogs I read every day, and my treasure trove of my very favorite timewasters. Check them out, but don't blame me when you find yourself skipping work next week to read through ten years of IRC chat archives on Bash.

2007-10-15T09:20:00.000-05:00

Aight, so. The Biggest Loser thing.

Two weeks ago I received a very innocuous email in my work inbox from a friend of mine who asked if I wanted to do a weight loss challenge. I was all for it, assuming it was just a thing among our friends and we'd go walking after school and maybe go for salads on Friday nights and it'd be fun and I'd be able to blog about it and that was it. I was so, so wrong.

It ended up being a school-wide thing, and we were divided up into teams of five with each member assigned to a team so we would all roughly have the same aggregate weight. So it was kind of like a team comprised of The Fat Girl, The Kind of Chunky Girl, The Two Ladies Who Want to Lose 10 lbs. Before Their Retirement Cruises in 2008, and The Girl Who Really Had No Business Losing Weight At All. I'm sure you can all guess which role I'm occupying in this debacle. I am on a team with Gen, she of the hotdogs wrapped in cheese infamy from a prior post, and before we even started the challenge I started hiding my carbs from her ever-watchful eyes during lunch. God help me when I walk into the cafeteria on baked potato day, because I feel like I have to go home and put on a hairshirt or flagellate myself to work out the palpable disappointment she has for those of us not strong (or masochistic) enough to endure Atkins for the duration of this thing.

Anyway, so things kind of got out of hand the first week when a huge argument ensued amongst the Ladies Who Lunch (although not so much now) about whether we should choose the winner by the amount of pounds lost or the percentage of their starting weight lost. I was the one who suggested the percentage thing, figuring it wasn't fair if the thin women who joined the challenge to build muscle or get healthier couldn't even begin to compete with the substantially larger women who could lose 10 lbs. just by cutting out sugared sodas. Apparently this was high blasphemy to the other women, who started screeching about "ridiculous amounts of algebra involved" and other blindingly intelligent statements about skinny bitches who didn't need the win anyway. We reached a detente by dividing up the kitty (we're each paying $10 to lose weight) so that the person who lost the highest percentage of body weight got an individual prize, and the team who lost the most poundage would get a separate prize. All was well in Mudville until another woman suggested whoever gained or who just didn't lose that would should have to pay a penalty fee into the kitty. At this point I stalked out of the lunchroom, a Gladware container of whole wheat spaghetti in my hands and a look of supreme disgust on my face. I think I may have told her what I thought of her idea in slightly too-harsh terms, because now she doesn't make eye contact with me in the hall. I'm fine with this, as it seems to have simultaneously abated her entreaties for me to accompany her to an Assembly of God speed-dating night next month. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I wrote the above half of this post at the beginning of last week when my mouth was filled with the pleasant, minty taste of indignation and I had lots and lots of bad things to say about this challenge. I guess I've backed off this week, mostly because, well, my team's in the lead (the prospect of easy money usually shuts me up pretty quickly), and also because the attitudes from all the teams has made a profound switch from catty to supportive and that's heartening to see. I'm still worried about the women who leave the nurse's office in tears because they only lost a pound and their friends lost seven that week, and we've all been commenting on how gaunt my friend Stacie's face is looking since she stopped eating solid foods and started sucking down protein shakes for every meal, but I guess a thing like this is all about figuring out your own limits and what's healthy for you, and not what's healthy for everyone else.

I'm doing pretty well on my own; I'm sitting very comfortably at about 210.5 lbs. this week, which means I've had a 3 lb. loss in the last ten days and I've also officially reached my goal of losing 10% of my body weight (were I still in Weight Watchers I would be fondling my 10% keychain right now). I'm very, very happy with the progress I've been making and as the clothes start to get a little bit looser each day I'm more and more motivated to keep plodding along. I have two new goals for the end of 2007: First, I'd like to drop under 200 by New Year's Eve, which I think is imminently doable in eleven weeks, and I'd also like to completely pay off my credit card debt by December 31st as well (slightly less easy, but certainly within reach if I can break my habit of staring lovingly at high-heeled boots on endless.com for the rest of the year).

One other major goal is to seriously try to get moving again. I baaaadly need to exercise, or else all this fat loss is going to turn into muscle loss and someday I'll be 104 lbs. of pure jiggle and that ain't pretty. I've confessed before that I really despise exercising, and I hate nothing more than getting home from work and having to change clothes and go right back out to hit the gym. With this second job and the screwed up hours of our local rec center, especially, it's very difficult during the school year and I don't ever seem to make in time to actually do anything. I would ultimately like to buy a used treadmill sometime early next year after I've finished paying down some stuff, but in the meantime I'm going to actually use my gym membership and start slowly like how I slowly got the eating and the crazy thing under control. This week all I'm going to make myself do is three 30-minute workouts and that's it. It's lame, I know, but any other time I've created elaborate workout schedules and resolved to pick up my 90 minute/5-6 days a week workout regime from days of yore, it never works out. I gotta start thinking less like College Student With No Perceivable Responsiblities Erin who could go to the gym at 10 am as easily as 10 pm and more like Old Lady Erin Who Gets Excited Over a Good Pair of Naturalizers and Also Has More Bills Than Time and realize I can't go full out until I've built up the stamina and the desire to do so.

I actually get a week where I'll be home at night more than not, so I'm looking forward to checking in with each of you soon. Have a great week, and take very good care of you!

Update, Part Deux

2007-10-07T21:40:00.001-05:00

The old monitor is dead! Long live new, bigger monitor!

I actually scored my replacement monitor at a garage scale last week, but I then got very distracted by the new! fancy! laptop! that showed up in a box in my classroom on Wednesday and demanded to be taken home and stroked lovingly for the rest of the week. I had a business trip from Thursday to today and now I'm finally home, listening to my cats engaging in a standoff with some random cat who's decided to make my Adirondack deck chairs his new permanent base of operations, and feeling decidedly overstuffed after my weekend of a lot of eating and not much moving.

The woman who accompanied me on this trip is a bona fide Uber-Mom, in that she packed three travel packs of Kleenex, a flashlight, four bottles of lotion, fourteen cans of diet soda and juice, a bulk pack of Kashi cookies, a bag of chocolate, and a box of Poppycock all in one medium-sized purse. During a minor electrical fire in our hotel, she managed to emerge from the bathroom completely butt-naked from the shower, dress herself in a very tasteful capri pant and brushed cotton jacket ensemble, and apply lipstick in the amount of time it took for me to murmur "I think I hear an alarm", then say, "I don't know if this is something to worry about, but people are running", and then shriek "There is SMOKE and you're going to have to STOP PACKING UP THE POPPYCOCK".

Anyway, spending the weekend with Uber-Mom was spent eating and then eating and then wishing Uber-Mom's mother had never introduced her to food, because this woman? She likes her food, and she likes it in copious amounts at regularly scheduled intervals regardless of how full we were from the meal before. I left for the trip fairly buoyed because the scale was sitting at 213, and now the thousands of pounds of food rotting in my intestines is going to make it a little bit difficult for me to pull off a successful weigh-in for Week #1 of our school's Biggest Losers competition (more on that debacle tomorrow).

I hope everyone's week was good, and I'll check up on you starting tomorrow night. I'm really looking forward to getting back into the swing of eating comfortably, eating well, and never, ever eating Poppycock again.

Status

2007-09-28T22:35:00.000-05:00

On temporary hiatus due to the death of my monitor. I'll be back very soon. Happy Johnny Appleseed Day!

The one in which I have absolutely nothing witty to say

2007-09-19T20:07:00.000-05:00

My second cousin Aimee was on Nightline last night in a feature about her life with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), and how she's preparing her kids for her death. I never spent that much time with Aimee; she is twelve years older than I, and she was off doing important things like a studying abroad in Paris and living with her husband, Jim, in a suburb of Chicago. She had this gorgeous wavy red hair, and a ready smile, and my most striking childhood memory of her is when she offered to help me with one of those puzzles where the two circles link together and you have to figure out how to slide one out from the other, and as I sat on the floor and looked up at her joking with her siblings as she played with the puzzle, I thought I would probably never again be in the presence of someone so unassailably exotic and fabuous.

Aimee and I, of course, grew older and as I transitioned into Nerdy Teenager with Unfortunate Hair and Glasses, she turned into A Bona Fide Cool Mom. She and her husband and her kids would drop in on my grandmother every few years, and we'd engage in the ritual of the extended family; the Chamerniks would crowd together on my grandma's divan, and we'd assume our customary places in the armchairs and against the walls and we'd pass around pictures and admire Nick and Emily as they played on the floor and eat some sort of fried poultry and cream pie and then we'd all agree to see one another again in a year, or two years, or whenever.

The last time I saw Aimee, though, was about four years ago when she was pregnant with her third child, Alex. No one said anything, but we all knew something was wrong. Her speech wasn't clear, and her magnificent smile seemed somehow dulled and off balance. The family gossip mill started churning, and eventually the word was out that Aimee had been diagnosed with ALS. We shook our heads and were saddened in the way that semi-casual observers tend to be, and then I lost track of her and Jim and the kids for four years.

But Aimee's been busy since then! It's been nearly 66 years since Lou Gehrig died, and ALS unfortunately hasn't reached cause celebre status like AIDS or cancer, because it doesn't currently have a Magic Johnson or a Katie Couric to put a powerful and resonant face on the disease. As with other auto-immune diseases of its kind, scientists are perpetually close but no cigar in finding treatment or a cure for it, and no one seems very motivated to give it enough attention or money to advance the progress. So Aimee decided she would be the face of ALS, and she's been writing to newspapers and magazines and appearing on television to appeal for support. I found her blog semi-accidentally a few months ago, and I visit it regularly now. Her writing is simultaneously so hilarious and so exquisitely painful to read that I inevitably end up in tears one way or the other by the time I'm done. I also found out that she's a rabid Cards fan, so of course that reinforced my estimation of her uber-coolness (even if she did marry Jim, who has equal passion for the Cubs).

Anyway, I know I haven't written very much about weight loss in the last few weeks, and I apologize if you're coming here and getting disappointed at not getting to read about how big my ass is, or whether garlic or cheddar croutons have more calories. I promise we'll be back to regularly scheduled programming next week. I just wanted to share the Nightline clip and Aimee's page with you, to show you how beautiful and articulate and strong she is, and how much ALS sucks for not letting her stay in this world for very much longer.

Nightline video clip from ABC

Aimee's website

The ALS Association

Now with only one foot in the grave!

2007-09-15T17:36:00.000-05:00

Hey Internets, I'm obese!

I was having dinner with a friend who reads this blog and also keeps up with a lot of people in my blogroll, and he mentioned that a few of those bloggers only use their BMI as a weight loss indicator. And because I still am kind of All Things Weight Loss on the inside, even though I've ostensibly shunned formal dieting and I sit in my work's food lounge smiling beatifically like some sort of oracle of self-acceptance and emotional peace while Gen miserably wraps her hunks of meat in bacon and dips them into nacho cheese and then sacrifices the liver of a wild boar to Dr. Atkins, as soon as he said "BMI" my mind immediately snapped into "Hmm, I wonder what I weigh now?" mode. And even though I was like 99% invested in the rest of our conversation that evening, a tiny little part of me was pining to reunite with my scale and see whether my slightly looser pants this week were actually loose or just stretched out to the point of giving up.

So this morning, after sort of ignoring all this weight loss business in the wake of being Officially Insane in the Membrane, I woke up and performed my little weighing in ritual of peeing, stripping down, and blowing all the air of out my stomach (because air weighs SO MANY OUNCES). I sort of half squinted through my dirty contacts, and then I had to bend over close to the numbers because I really couldn't believe what I saw.

217.5 lbs. Hm.

This is pretty good, considering I was climbing back up near 227 about three weeks ago, right before I had my little mad scene and decided to go for help. And really, the most gratifying part of it is that I've done this completely without dieting. I'll admit that the Wellbutrin seems to be playing its part in toning down my appetite, and that's fine, but I've also somehow decided that fruit is better than ice cream, and water is better than pop, and having a bowl of brown rice and vegetables is a definite improvement upon three frozen Totino's pizza and a bag of honey mustard pretzels.

As my brother's summer job boss would say, "Too cool. Too cool."

So, back to the BMI. When I first started this blog, I dutifully weighed myself and took all my measurements and went to the little government health website that calculates your BMI for you. When I clicked "submit" and a big red block of text showed up next to my BMI of 42.9, I was really sort of taken aback when it said I was in the "morbidly obese" category. I sort of furtively looked around my room for a gaunt hooded figure with a scythe, and then looked down at my body for signs of impending disease or death. I couldn't really find any.

Being morbidly obese to me means having to use the motorized shopping carts at the grocery store because walking to the bread section and back is impossible. Morbid obesity means clothes don't carry your size anymore, and your body starts betraying you in ways that it shouldn't for your age. You limp, you huff and puff on a single flight of stairs, you move slowly and ungainly and simple chores and household tasks are a monumental undertaking. In my mind, morbid obesity means diabetes and heart attacks and maybe the necessity of surgery to help get your body back into fighting shape. I am NOT morbidly obese.

I'm not claiming that I am in any way in truly acceptable physical condition either, though. I'm not good at running, and I can't even do one real pushup, and my body doesn't bend and flex and move as efficiently as it used to, but my blood pressure is low, and my body is healthy, and when I walk I do so quickly and smoothly, and I can work for hours and hours without needing a break. My body, if not aesthetically pleasing or athletic, is at least functional. And yet, I might as well have printed out that big red DANGER sign on that website and taped it to my chest like a big scarlet F, because science and mathematics have decided that my weight was inching me closer to my deathbed with every ounce I gained.

And so this morning after being surprised by the 217.5 on my scale, I remembered last night's dinner conversation and decided to check my BMI just for fun, and since I managed to lower it three points this year, I'm now squeaking just under the morbid obesity line at 39.7. Obviously not so good, but at least I didn't earn the scorn of the NIH this time.

I made a little bar graph of my progress since January, because I don't really think the numbers on the side of my blog give an accurate picture of my gains and losses over the last nine months. There were sometimes I'd weigh in on my calorie counter website, but not here because I wasn't blogging or it wasn't "official" or for whatever reason, and so I stuck those things in on this bar graph to see if I could notice any trends. So, here it is:

I think this tells so much more of a story than those numbers, because it just proves to me how much of getting healthy just has to become ingrained in your mind as a matter of fact lifestyle, and not as an undertaking with an absolute beginning and absolute end. Looking at it like this also lets me be so much more forgiving of the progress (or lack of progress) I've made since January. Analyzing the numbers and realizing I've only lost 17 pounds since January kinda made me cringe, because what have I been DOING this whole time? When I look at the graph, though, I can tell you exactly why the weight spiked. I see February and I can say, "Right, my grandma died in February and I really took it badly." I look at that last little spike and I know that that's where the depression started going out of control and I was eating so much I couldn't breathe and of course there'd be a weight gain when something like that happens. And now there's my new measurement of 217.5, which tells me on paper I'm doing as well as I thought I was in my head.

When I started all this, I really thought that getting to a 35" waist or an under-40 BMI or dropping below 200 lbs. was the absolute most important priority I had for the immediate future. Somehow though, even back then, I knew it wasn't going to roll that way. The bar graph wasn't going to look like the side of a mountain so much as a big, craggy, drama-filled mountain range that just wound on and on and on. If you had told me that in, say, January or even May of this year, I would've been profoundly disheartened to hear it. Now, I'm just kind of "Eh." about it. If I look at the scale next week and it's on 215 or something, then awesome...I'm on the right track. If I spike back up, then I know I need to stop pulling into Taco Bells and start spending more time at the places with the salad bars and the veggie wraps. That's cool with me, because hopefully the aggregate successes will mitigate the times when I can't always keep it together.

But at least now that I know that the government has helpfully provided an arbitrary number to endorse my opinion that my weight (never mind the fact that I commute hundreds of miles each week on heavily trafficked highways and I fly in airplanes and I often fall asleep at night with my back door unlocked and my baseball bat nowhere near enough to protect me and sometimes I try to plug in my hairdryer with wet fingers) isn't suddenly going to cause me to unceremoniously drop dead while playing "Skip to my Lou" with a bunch of first graders, I can stop being so obsessive about alway wearing clean underwear. I just figured that if I did keel over because of my ABHORRENT AND COMPLETELY LIKELY TO KILL ME CASE OF MORBID OBESITY, I at least ought to try make my mother proud.

On Becoming My Own Best Friend

2007-09-13T20:58:00.000-05:00

I gotta tell you, this medicine either really works fast or else I'm experiencing the most spectacular bout of placebo effect anyone has ever felt in the history of the world. Therapist John and the family practice doctor who prescribed the medicine both cautioned me to be patient, that the antidepressants take about three weeks to kick in, and not to expect any significant change for at least a little while. I assume they stressed this either because they didn't want me potentially to head back to my house and break open my boxes of razor blades and cyanide tablets and the noose collection that I have lying around JUST IN CASE, or because they didn't want to see me back in their office the following week begging them for a higher dosage or a frontal lobotomy.

On the other hand, I am that girl who goes to a party and has like one glass of wine and still manages to get completely drunk and ends up making out with your roommate's brother's lab partner in your bed with your special quilt your grandma made for you in 1996, so maybe my nervous system is just nervous enough to respond quickly to the drugs. I don't know what it is, but I'm definitely not complaining. As trite as it sounds, it's like the fog in my brain has lifted a little bit, and I can just deal with things better. I was so terrified that this medicine would make me a walking zombie like I was during my brief time with Prozac, but it hasn't so far. I can still be sad and happy and cry, but it's like once it's over...it's over. My little problems stay little, and they don't turn into giant disasters that threaten to ruin my life. I feel tired sometimes, but only at the times when normal people feel that way. I completely astounded myself by lying down for a nap and then waking up 15 minutes later and ready to go. Prior to this week a 15 minute nap would've turned into a 12 hour sleeping jag, so this is incredible.

Another thing Therapist John and I discussed is how to make life easier; how not to expect perfection, how not to stress, and how not to let my inevitable inability to meet my own standards completely get me down. We specifically tackled my eating issues, namely the fact that I'm basically eating myself into poverty. I never realized this until recently, but even though I budget about $400 a month for food, and I spend every single dime of it at the grocery store, I still spend about another $300-$400 in eating out expenses. And the eating out isn't just like grabbing a salad from McDonald's...when I'm really mired down into a deep depression, I can easily waste $40 on a single binge.

I probably had an inkling that this was happening, but it wasn't until I rationalized it out loud with John that I really got what I was doing: My family has always been a family of enthusiastic and prolific (if not necessarily good) cooks. We keep our pantries full, we serve a big country meal at every dinner, and we clean our plates. My ex-husband came from a family who was even more obsessive about having a bounty of food all around; his dad regularly spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars a week to feed the family. So when we were together, we cooked often, and we cooked a shitload of food for every meal.

So I still have these habits ingrained from when I was married, even though I'm spending four nights out of the week on the road, and on the other days I'm usually too tired to cook. There was also the profound guilt of letting a hundred dollars of food rot in my refrigerator every week, and then the tediousness of having to sort through the produce to salvage what was fresh, and figure out each week what I needed and what I didn't, and wasting 20 minutes each morning preparing these elaborate lunches so everyone would think I was super healthy and conscientious when really I went home every day after work and inhaled fast food like I was training for a professional eating career, and then of course the awful feeling of not measuring up to my own standards because I couldn't get it together enough to fix a solid meal every single night of the week. I really felt like a huge fuckup.

So John asked, "Um...why can't you just plan to eat out on those nights?"

Duh.

So I've given myself permission to eat out whenever I need to, even on days when I'm at home because I know I don't like to cook for myself, so I probably won't. I gave my pantries and my fridge one final cleaning, and I have to say that looking only cereal and bread and some fruit and other staples is really kind of refreshing. It's like the simplicity of not seeing piles and piles of food going to waste makes it so much easier to focus on eating healthfully, rather than eating abundantly. And two really fortuitous things about this plan is that my school's nutrition program has started offering a salad bar three days a week, and a baked potato bar one day, so for $2.50 a day, I'm set for lunch. The other thing is that my commute between my first job in my little town and my second job in KC is a veritable orgy of really healthy veg-friendly places to eat. Have you tried the Jason's Deli chain? Oh my, if you haven't, you really, really must. So financial problems hopefully solved, because I figured out I could give myself permission to do something not explicity included in my Agenda for World Domination, as long as it makes me healthier and happier.

And the other thing (and this is one of those moments where it's like I'm admitting I finally learned how to tie my shoes or wipe my own ass and everyone who reads this is probably saying "Jesus, Erin, you're a moron.") is that I've de-stressed myself over reading blogs, or not reading them. I have this awful, awful guilt about writing blogs and having all you wonderful people reading them faithfully and commenting and contributing and making me think when I go for months without looking at a single blog by another person. And it's not because I don't want to...it's because once I start, I feel compelled to visit and comment on every single blog I like every single day of the week. And when visiting blogs starts to feel like my third job, I get a little antsy, and my ass gets numb sitting in this crappy office chair. So, since I'm all about organizing things into little piles and buckets and containers, I have bookmarked every blog I love and have divided the group equally into the seven days of the week, and now I only have to visit four or five a day. And as stupid and basic as that was to come up with, you have no idea how relieved I feel.

I like being nice to myself. Hopefully I can parlay this into other being nice activities, like a house cleaning routine or establishing a non-stressful exercise habit in the near future, because I really haaaaaaaate to exercise and clean my house. Hate them. Hate, hate, hate them.

Maybe with all this money I'll save from not buying out every Taco Bell between here and Nebraska each week, I can hire Merry Maids and have a shiny, be-muscled fellow named Knut come give me herbal body wraps and cellulite reducing massages instead.

It gets a little grimy.

2007-09-11T21:52:00.000-05:00

The only negative thing I have to say about New York is that it's a little bit bad for your skin.

My plane touched back down in KC at around 11:30 on Sunday evening and I hit the ground running and haven't stopped since, which is why I haven't written, but I'm afraid if I wait too much longer I'll lose the onomotopaeia that was running on a continuous loop in my brain during my entire vacation.

When I got off the train and into my taxi, I was determined to be blase about the whole affair. My friend had been joking earlier about Midwesterners in the double decker tour busses, with their unfortunate clothing and omnipresent dopey grins on their faces and even though they're my peeps, I didn't want to be that way. I was surprised, too, that as we were heading from Queens into Manhattan that New York wasn't this big, huge THING I imagined it was. When I was a little kid, I used to read atlases and maps like they were picture books, and I memorized the geography of the places I most wanted to visit. I used to be able to name eight streets in any direction from the Eiffel Tower, and I know London like I'd lived there all my life. But New York...New York City was the one that consumed me the most. I followed Broadway with my finger as it sliced through the pink map blob of Manhattan...memorized the location of every park, whispered the names of the neighborhoods to myself like they were a private, sacred liturgy. When I grew older New York became the setting of the books and movies in which I'd lose myself on a Sunday afternoon, where life passed by in a Woody Allen montage of sitting on park benches and window shopping on 5th Avenue, where I watched four rather ridiculous women date, break up, get married, and have preposterous sex all while conducting their own true love affairs with the city where it all happened. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Gershwin, The Met and the Guggenheim and Central Park...everything in New York had reached this enormous, overpowering mythical status in my heart and mind, and when my friend and I worked out the details of my visit there, I thought my entire body was going to explode with the sheer exuberance of finally getting to see what I had built up over the past twenty years. So I have no idea why I decided I wanted to play too cool for the Big Apple, other than my fear of being lumped in with the gaggles of gawking tourists from Des Moines and Broken Arrow, but I hailed my cab and barked out my destination with as jaded a voice as possible in the hopes that I could blend in with the city and its millions of harried, irritable citizens.

The cynicism lasted until I made it to my friend's apartment and he grabbed my hand and made a beeline for the windows of his living room and bedroom. The views...my God, the views in this building! The Empire State Building to the left and off in the distance, the Woolworth Building close enough to see across into its hundreds of windows; from the elevator lobby on his floor the Statue of Liberty looked like a tiny, blue-grey Army man across the harbor. I would've coveted the apartment anyway because of the hardwood floors and the gas range and the superdeep bathtub, but the views had me at hello and I think I would've been perfectly happy perched on my host's window ledge and staring out over the mindboggling expanse of buildings reaching all the way to the mountains of New Jersey.
For the rest of the trip, my vocabulary failed me and I had to resort to the most trite exclamations over and over and over again with each landmark we saw. I think I used up my lifetime quota of "awesome" and "amazing" before we even made it north of Canal St. We went to Chinatown and Little Italy and on the subway and to Rockefeller Center and Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall and Columbus Circle and I've forgotten the rest but we went nearly everywhere. The two things that got me, though...really took my breath away were Times Square and Central Park. I initially didn't want to go to Times Square; we had walked a lot and we were sweaty and tired and it just seemed like such a silly thing to go look at giant billboards and the Naked Cowboy. We ended up going anyway, and I couldn't hide the huge grin on my face as I felt the energy and excitement of all the lights and the people and...just...everything. If I could've hired an orchestra to stand behind me and play Rhapsody in Blue, I would've, because that was the only thing that could've possibly defined a good New York Moment for me.

And Central Park...wow. Oh wow. Wow. That's all I could say, was "Wow." And it wasn't even anything specifically impressive about the park itself (although the giant boulevard with those incredible trees that framed everything so perfectly that I felt like I was in a Seurat painting absolutely made me stop dead in my tracks), but the more I thought about how much planning and foresight it took for those guys back during the Industrial Revolution to preserve 16 square miles of nature and to make it beautiful and special and fill it with exquisite things so everywhere you walked you felt like you were in a story book, the more I started to realize that it was the little things that makes New York what it is. The way every old building seems to hold secrets inside the ornate trimmings on their facades. How the streets of Manhattan were each made a monument to the history that transpired there. How you could walk down the streets and hardly ever see the same type of person in a row. And what struck me the most was just how intricately connected everyone and everything in the city was; 8 million people who manage to live and work and pretty much stay out of one another's way in a city that exists to serve every need they might have. That feeling of being connected, of experiencing the energy and vitality of all those people, of being a part of something bigger than myself...those emotions finally, mercifully made me feel so alive, and it's a high I haven't quite come down from yet.

On the plane ride back to Missouri my usual neuroses about flying were replaced with something a little more zen. I curled up under my blanket and stared out the window as the city gave way to perfectly arranged suburbs, which blended into the huge patchwork quilt of farmland that stretched from Ohio all the way back home. I realized that a huge part of my problem right now is that I don't feel connected to anything here. Missouri is my home, and I respect the people I know and I'm proud of my state and the towns where I've lived, but I don't really feel like I belong here. I never have, and as long as I continue to exist in this culture of country music and cow tipping, I probably won't be able to shake the feeling of being a puzzle piece that got mixed into the wrong box. I don't know if moving to a big, giant city like New York would solve the problem, but I liked what I felt there, and I'd like to feel it again.

I just did some calculations, and I think I could maybe afford a Manhattan apartment if 8 other people lived with me. I totally think it'd be doable if we kept to a strict bathroom schedule and, like, three of those people weren't super picky about camping out on the fire escape. It'd be fun!

So who's with me on a co-op in TriBeCa?

On a Clear Day...

2007-09-03T17:40:00.000-05:00

My weekend was pretty nice, all things considering. As I wrote before, my plans to go to NYC to visit a friend were cancelled, but have been rescheduled for this coming weekend. I primarily spent this weekend doing little things; cleaning out my refrigerator, reading, writing a little, and thinking a lot about what to do next.

On Saturday afternoon I drove into the southern suburbs of KC to return some library books and go shopping at the sprawling, faux-bricked outdoor mall that boasts a large number of stores I can't afford, and a smattering of ones I can. This particular suburb is one of the toniest in Kansas City, and the entire two-block area is a monument to providing merchandise for citizens who have NASCAR-type tastes, but Maserati-type pocketbooks. Driving by the Dean and Deluca store that sits catty-corner to the tastefully remodeled McDonald's always makes me snicker.

I stopped at a Barnes and Noble to pick up a couple books and came back out to my car to watch the mall entrances belch out gaggles of shoppers onto the parking lot. It was early in the afternoon, and the sun warmed the back of my neck through my rearview mirror. I glanced at the clock; it was too early to go home, because home meant another grey afternoon inside 1,200 square feet of beige carpeting and unadorned walls. Home meant inevitable sadness, tears, loneliness.

I ended up driving to a park a friend of mine had pointed out near his condo as we were driving to lunch one day, and it was the absolute perfect place to end up....large, clean, and nearly empty except for a B-school type dad and his three screaming, squawking children fishing by a creek's edge. I found a tree near the creekbank that afforded me privacy and a view of my car in the parking lot, and I laid down to read. Since I started suffering from regular bouts of really serious depression, it seems like my concentration has disintegrated with each passing month. When I was in high school, I decided that since I was probably never going to be a pretty girl or a popular girl, I'd at least make a stab at being The Smartest Girl in the Universe, so I read voraciously and memorized any factoid I could get my hands on. At some point during my sophomore year of college, as the crying jags and the lethargy increased, my cognitive abilities started plateauing and then declining, and I never have really regained what I think is a working sharpness of wit and mind. It's gotten bad enough in recent months that I haven't been able to muster up the concentration to make it through an entire adult book without having to reread the first five pages over and over until the words stop swimming and reconstitute themselves into something I can understand. I'm pretty ashamed of it, especially when friends ask me what I think about politics or current affairs or Greek philosophy and I either have to furiously Google what to think or say, or I have to own up and admit I have no idea, because depression has made me stupid.

So until I can start reading big girl books again, I'm on a Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret kick, with a goal of hitting all the Newbury Award winners in the hopes that making it through eighty or so years of baby fiction will get my brain in shape to tackle real writing soon enough. I'm in the middle of Despereaux now, and it's cute, even if I really wish I were reading The World is Flat or something else smart sounding.

Anyway, as I laid there with Despereaux propped up on my chest and my hippie tote bag cradling my head, I felt my eyes drawn toward the latticed canopy of leaves above my head, and the startlingly blue sky peeking through it. I took a picture of it with my cellphone, but the photo doesn't do justice at all to the way the branches intersected with one another, like a latticed cathedral ceiling just out of reach of my fingertips. The photo couldn't capture the way the wind cut the perfect warmth of the seventy-something degree day, so that no matter whether you laid in the sun or the shade, there was no possible other reaction than to close your eyes and breathe one word: autumn. I couldn't show you how the whole outside smelled of that particularly delicious warm scent that gets in my cats' fur after they go outside and I hold them to my face and breathe in deep until the perfume of the grass and the trees and an earth finally put on the cooling rack after three months of baking fades from their skin. But the two hours I spent outside was nearly perfect, save the tiny ants nibbling away at my calves and my arms, and right after I took that picture I leaned my head back, closed my eyes, and actually smiled a genuine, in only momentary, smile of contentment.

I spent the rest of the weekend in a slightly less blissful state; I made the mistake of buying some jasmine rice in bulk a few weeks ago and this morning I woke up to a grain weevil infestation of every single bag of flour, rice, pasta, and cereal I had. After I silently fuh-reaked out, threw away every grain product in my house, and spent two hours watching Anthony Bourdain and scratching away imaginary bugs, whom, I was convinced were reenacting Sherman's March to the sea (if Sherman were these lovely mo-effers, and the sea was my ladyparts), I had a really long talk with some friends of mine about we were going to move forward in our respective lives, and for me specifically how I'm going to get happy in the next year or so. I've been realizing during the last few months that I'm really not happy with my current career, and I'm definitely unhappy with where I live. There are only so many weekends of deciding between tractor pulls or beer league softball games for entertainment before the hoity-toity part of my personality rears its well-coiffed head and demands culture. And while I'm always aware that I have landed a completely cushy teaching job in a great district with wonderful people and I should be going to early church with the 80-year old women and working that kneeler and thanking Christ I have the salary I do for what I do, I really dread going to my job. I don't think I'm a great teacher (at least not a disciplined one), I don't use my voice correctly so I'm going to ruin it in five years anyway and I won't be able to sing or teach, and I'm really shy, so picking a profession that involves eight straight hours of standing up in front of kids and doing my dog and pony show is kind of torture for me, even if they are a captive audience. At least I can bribe them with stickers. And heroin.

And then there's the problem of having no other passion for anything else in the world, unless it's writing, so I don't know of any other career that I'd just jump out of bed ready to tackle each day. I keep thinking that maybe I'd like to be a real writer, maybe a freelance pop culture or critic-type writer for magazines or websites or something, but I don't exactly know how to break in with a completely wrong set of degrees and no experience and honestly I don't really know if writing about your issues on a tiny blog can translate into actual journalism. I have a couple of friends who are freelance writers, and one or two in publishing, so I thought about asking for their opinions.

There is, of course, the "Erin's mom" voice inside my head that makes me feel guilty for wanting more out of my life. Both of my parents are extremely intelligent people...brilliant in some areas, but neither finished college and they both have worked in low paying, kind of menial careers their entire lives. When I got my current teaching job, my mother made a big point of telling me that I make twice as much as she does and of course seem to do half the work since I get summers and holidays off. My father isn't as vocal, nor as indignant as my mom when I say that I might like to do something different, but I can see him wince when I discuss more school or a career change, or maybe a move to a big city. And sometimes I can convince myself they're right; that giving up a decent salary and a low-rent house and a 401K and retirement for a shot at a completely risky career and a lifestyle I can't afford is ridiculous, and I shouldn't be thinking about it.

I think, though, of my friend from high school who got married and decided with her husband to bike to all 50 states for two years, and my friends who've gone on to play in symphonies, or the ones who've spent a semester in Europe or joined the Peace Corp or lived on a polyamorous ecovillage, or even the ones who are slaving away in PhD programs so they can say something significant to the world when they get out, and I want to say that I finally figured out what I wanted and went after it, too. Even if it is about five years later than they did.

Do you ever get afraid that if you figured yourself out enough to actually go for the things that would make you happy, that you wouldn't recognize yourself anymore? I felt that briefly while I was lying underneath the tree...during those four seconds that I closed my eyes and smiled, I stopped being She Who Ruminates and Frets and just became some chick in a park instead. It was a disconcerting feeling, because I didn't know what to do with myself without the depression and the self-loathing and the ubiquitous sense of detachment from a normal life and the people who live it. I cannot imagine myself as healthy AND happy AND satisfied with my career and my friends and where I lived at all. I have no idea who I'd be or what I'd feel like because I never, ever have felt satisfied. Maybe we're not supposed to have everything we want, though. I don't know, but I can always hope that's not the case.

2007-08-30T21:28:00.000-05:00

I hit a trifecta of body image remarks today, which was kind of interesting:

My friend Genevieve lost about 60 lbs. after her wedding with the Atkins diet, but has since gained about 20 of it back. I personally think she looks great...tanned, muscular legs, an average frame, and only a little noticeable lumpage around her stomach and back. But since it's Gen's body and Gen's neuroses, she is completely devastated by the extra poundage that's crept on in the five years since she was married. She decided about two weeks ago to recommence her Atkins-ing, and has been so meticulous about counting carbs that when another teacher accidentally knocked over a canister of sugar as we were all preparing our morning coffee, I actually saw Gen duck as the granules cascaded over to her side of the counter, and even though she claimed she didn't want to get her shirt all sugar-dusty, I think she was really secretly terrified that somehow she'd snort sugar through her Eustachian tubes and then Dr. Atkins would rise up out of his cheese gilded casket and take away her ketosis privileges for a month.

Gen eats some pretty nasty shit when she's doing low-carb...today I saw her eat a hot dog wrapped in a carb-free tortilla and she turned down my offer of organic strawberries in favor of some turkey jerky her husband left in the glove compartment of their car after a fishing trip. She's cranky and miserable and she thumbs through the food and wine section of our newspaper like she's poring over letters from a lost love. When someone walks in with a cookie or bread or pasta she acts like we're about to sit down to a meal of anthrax and hand grenades and she turns away from the table, shrieking, "Get that stuff out of my sight!". Basically, Gen is annoying the shit out of me with her diet and how much she's punishing herself and her incessant talk of "being good" or "being bad" or "cheating" and how she's only lost 4.5 lbs. in two weeks and even though that's perfectly acceptable by nutrition standards it's not good enough for her because she's not perfect yet.

And when she said that...that she's not perfect yet...you could kind of feel the wind sucked out of the room, because even though we were all offering our Diet Platitudes and I was hawking the Intuitive Eating book and feeling a little smug because I had dropped a little weight this week (albeit mostly because my new allergy meds make me not want to eat as much and our librarian has brought frog legs into lunch ever day this week and her graphic discussions of catching and gigging the frogs have rendered me appetite-less, and yearning for a trashcan and a quiet corner where I can dry heave until someone from PETA comes with the van and takes me to a better place), we all knew the feeling of being not perfect...not good enough. None of us is an Eva Longoria, or a Cameron Diaz. And feeling the collective weight of a dozen women all knowing what the others were thinking was extremely powerful and sad.

#2: NBC reran the "Womens' Appreciation Day" episode tonight. It's one of my favorites, and this clip from it was the second time my eyebrows raised over some body-image stuff today:

And this is kind of how I feel about the whole "Real Beauty" campaign in general. Every time I read the articles and the blog posts about how celebrities benefit so much from the art of Photoshop and that the media sets unattainable standards for beauty in our society, I roll my eyes, because we've been bleating out this same complaint for at least a decade now, and nothing's really being done about it. Nothing substantive, at least. If we're so adamant about being happy with who we really are, and not participating in punitive, damaging beauty rituals and exercise and dieting, then why aren't there more people putting out more resources on how to accomplish it? Why are the celebrities who claim to be the most ardent proponents of being natural and self-possessed still the ones who voluntarily drop twenty-five pounds to make the cover of Vogue? Why does Oprah still binge diet, and the Dove "Real Beauty" campaign still used coiffed and primped models, albeit plus-sized ones sometimes? Taking the point to its comedic extreme like they did on The Office just reminds me how the self-acceptance movement has great intentions, but there's a flaw in the execution somewhere because as long as we're preaching "You're gonna have to be tolerant of our flaws", even while giving us every available tool to still obsess over them, then women are still going to feel like shit about themselves.

And then I ran across this link on Tom and Lorenzo's site (I like how the Internet can let me pretend I'm on a first name basis like fabulous faux-celebrities like La T.Lo...Les T.Lo? Whatever.), and it blew my mind. I don't really care about how Brittany Murphy has awful undereye bags and how the Vastly Inferior Second Mr. Darcy has cystic acne, but the pictures of Beyonce and Kelly Clarkson and all the modifications they made to their bodies are remarkable. They seriously shaved off two pants sizes from Kelly's backside, at least.

And I guess that's how it trickles down...from the celebrities who stake their bank accounts on silently accepting the fact that they're not good enough for America without Photoshop, to their doctored photos that subsequently land in our mailboxes and on our computer screens to torture us and make us feel completely inadequate next to their unattainable beauty. It's funny to think that somewhere in the monied hills of L.A., starlets and A-listers are having the very same conversations over their $25 salads and Fiji waters that Gen, the teachers, and I had at our plastic lounge tables over plates of beef jerky and frog legs today.

2007-08-29T10:57:00.000-05:00

I looked forward to yesterday afternoon as if it were the commencement of some grand vacation, like if I could just hold on until Tuesday afternoon I'd win an all-expenses paid trip to the magical kingdom of Prozac Land and never have to look back. I worked with one eye on my kids and the other on the clock, and when our contract time was up at 4:00, I speedwalked out the door and cursed at the drivers, most of whom seemed to have rescheduled their Sunday afternooon pleasure cruises for mid-week rush hour, the entire 30 mile drive from where I work to where I get to be crazy with impunity.

I arrived, furious at myself for being seven minutes late, and affixed the fake smile I always wear when I go into the office complex where my doctor works, because grinning incessantly at the other elevator riders CLEARLY means I'm just popping into the mortgage company down the hall and not following the woman who is currently pulling her six-inch pink vinyl wedges off her feet so she can pick at the dead skin on her toes into the psych offices. Because I am a horrible person, I always do a scan of the other patients in the lobby and play a quick "What's wrong with them?" game inside my head. I've found this is way more rewarding than in an ENT lobby, because while deviated septums and chronic tonsillitis people are pretty obvious to spot, it's hard to figure out whether the same lank hair and dark circles that I sport everyday as symptoms of not caring enough to take care of myself equates to the same issues for the woman across the room who also looks weary and haggard. It's always women in the lobby when I come to this place...forty-something housewives clutching their office copy of Good Housekeeping to their chests like some sort of genteel, suburban shield...a teenager curled up into a corner chair, fingers tracing over the oyster-pink lattice of scar tissue on her forearm and staring sullenly at the profile of her anxious, harried mother who seems to be trying to balance maternity with the laptop perched precariously on her knee. Everytime I see a self-harmer, my own fingers brush instinctively against the nearly invisible half-moon scars on my own wrists and arms. I don't do blood, so I was a cigarette lighter burner. Somehow that seemed more romantic in college.

As I worked my way through the lobby, then the receptionist desk, and finally back to my doctor's office, I went through my same routine of trying to be ask perky and seemingly normal as possible...."Yes, Erin!" "I'm here to see John!" "New insurance card!" "Great! Thanks!" "I need regular treatment and maybe medicine! Depressed and suicidal, yes!" I'm pretty sure had I kept it up for much longer, there would've been a lithium prescription marked FILL ASAP at the bottom of my purse by the time I left.

But I made it in, and we talked, and for the first time in all the times I've visited John it didn't feel like I had solved any problems, because of the handful of therapists I've visited in my time, John is a world-class champion of helping you figure out the problem and finding ways to solve it. The small, wan woman who saw me for six months in my college town squeaked her office chair back and forth and fingered the trim on her omnipresent beige cardigan (from Scotland, she told me once), and never once offered advice or opinion until the day she prescribed me a tranquilizer and OCD medication, neither of which I apparently needed so I spent the next half-year basically either in a coma or irritable as hell. But the reason I keep coming back to John, besides the fact that in our first session he dropped the f-bomb twice as my heart erupted in a celebration of foul-mouthed kinship and exhilaration that if he felt comfortable saying "fuck" to a stranger then we probably wouldn't be doing much putzing around in our sessions, was that he helped me feel like the crises I perceived in my life were really much more manageable than they seemed at the time. So that's why I could go in once, work on my own for a few months, and then go back in if I needed extra help or feedback.

But this time, as John and I talked, there were a lot more of those characteristic therapist pauses, where he'd squint at me and try to telepathically extract whatever I waswithholding; what it was that was making me feel so incredibly black and hopeless. But the thing was, I was searching my brain too, and I couldn't come up with anything at all. Should I have told him that I recently saw a picture of myself smiling with my mouth open and I looked so much like James Gandolfini that I've since refused to do anything but half-smirk with my lips clamped shut? Was I supposed to say that the single nicest moment of my day is when I check my email one last time before bed, pick up the cat who sleeps on my feet and put her next to my pillow like she's a baby while my other cat follows us into the bedroom and assumes his position next to my hip? That I think the very idea that I'd sate my maternal instinct with an animal while being too terrified of screwing up or neglecting my own child to actually have one is incredibly pathetic? Should I have just advanced three months worth of therapy and had the breakthrough right on our first session back and tell him that a decade of avid navel-gazing gives me the authority to say that every single problem I think I have...of the relentless anger, of not feeling wanted, of feeling worthless, of having overwhelming guilt when I want to have a more exciting job and a more extravagant life...that I can trace every single one of those things back to my relationship with my mom and that really the only big problem I have is how to forgive her but still keep my distance and get over it on my own terms?

Because if I thought those things would've helped in the half-hour time we had, I would've blurted them out. I would've talked and talked and journaled and did worksheets if it could've stopped the way I was feeling right at that moment...the awful melange of relief and terror when John finally wrote out a list of recommended medications on his eggshell blue Post-It pad, turned to me and said "Well, you're officially depressed". So right there on his bone-colored suede loveseat that's almost too comfortable because if you try to lean back you recline so far that you look like Ed Bundy I almost started to cry. And I don't cry unless Grey's Anatomy is on and there's a pint of ice cream and maybe a glass of wine involved. My eyes started leaking when, as I turned to leave his office, he gave me a look of such genuine sympathy that I forgot for a second that he gets paid to be kind and caring. The look he gave me, the little pat on the shoulder, and the fact that he asked, "Are you okay?" and then kept listening...I've been waiting for those things to happen for two years now from somebody...anybody at all. I used to look hopefully at people in stores, at restaurants, on the street, just to see if maybe they saw the actual me who was drowning in all this fat, these emotions, this self-abuse and that they'd rescue me. No one did, of course, so I stopped thinking about it. And it's weird, because when it finally did happen, I had absolutely no idea where to start.

It's funny, because when you finally decide to stop pretending that everything is okay, and you give yourself or someone else permission to start stripping open your veins to see what's really in there, you start actually FEELING things again, and it's so excruciatingly painful. I made it to my car okay, but when I dropped my keys as I was trying to unlock the door, I lost it. I started gasping out enormous, heaving sobs that didn't stop until I pulled off for bottled water at a fast-food restaurant twenty minutes later. I cried when a friend popped up on my IM and sent me a link for a pair of Gucci pumps she had just splurged on. Another friend, whom I was tentatively planning to visit in New York City for Labor Day, called to cancel, and I blamed my broken voice and sniffs on the cold I'd been fighting all week, and when he hung up the phone I burst into tears again and cried for two straight hours until I was finally so sick of crying I started laughing and then I took a bubble bath and cried there too because it seemed poetic and right while my cats sat by the tub and judged me as they are fond of doing.

And the thing was, were I pregnant or a hormonal woman in an hour-long network dramedy, this would be totally funny, because I'd be played by someone fun like Sara Rue or that new Hairspray girl and I'd be crying and spluttering and dabbing at my eyes with a handkerchief that my best guy friend (who I didn't notice for the first half of the season but who later seduces me in some sort of zany but touching episode during May sweeps week where I learn what true love is) gave me at a coffee shop where we meet for breakfast each morning and interact with the charmingly eccentric citizens of our quaint New England town called Stars Hol...oh wait. But anyway, since I am decidedly NOT that girl and yet I was still crying at ridiculous things. I mean, I wasn't REALLY expecting to go to New York City and it absolutely couldn't be helped that he had to cancel, and I shouldn't have gotten so excited at all, but for the late part of Monday and all day Tuesday I got more and more excited because I really wanted to see my friend and I'd never been to NYC, and my brother was going to be there that weekend too, and I just wanted so badly to get away from my town and its black hole of culture and knowledge and the rough people in it and the sad children with permanent Kool-Aid stains on their cheeks and rotting teeth and, and, and...

And I needed to take a step back and realize that once I opened up this whole can of worms, there'd be a lot of nasty stuff leaking out before I started to heal again. And that instead of doing the whole "I'm all right! I'm excellent!" thing that I tend to do until I finally bottom out once every two or three months, I'm just going to have to be oversensitive and easily hurt and disappointed and I'm going to have to learn to deal with all of it until I can finally even my emotions out into some semblance of normalcy. And that'll be okay, especially after I go get a prescription on Tuesday to help me do that.

And funnily (health and weight loss blog...right. I keep forgetting), all this melodrama has resulted in a downward-trending scale again. I guess the same voice that said "You could totally just end this all, but the pills and the vodka are on an entirely different floor of the house and futon is just as comfortable as it was in college and you'd probably not want to commit suicide until you cleaned your bathrooms so your mom wouldn't be ashamed when the paramedics come to haul you out and who's going to feed the cats and would they eat your face if they got really desperate and you're out of black ink for your printer so you couldn't type a suicide note and you know you have a tendency to be wordy so it'd be hard to write it out..." Well, that same voice told me it probably wasn't the greatest idea to buy fifty dollars worth of junk food and eat it in one sitting. My eating habits have been surprisingly ascetic, because I just don't have the desire to do anything but sit around and mope. So, I guess that's good. I have an Official Erin Is Fucked Up Weigh-In of 220.4 lbs. for today, which is a loss of about 3 lbs. since two weeks ago. I'll take that.

Finally, now that I've officially written an entry longer than my senior capstone term paper, I just want to thank all of you very much for being incredibly supportive and kind and generous with your thoughts. I get attached to the little IPs I see scrolling through my site tracker each day...I like waking up with 121.48.73 from Australia, and seeing who's logging on from clandestine government offices or big fancy firms in New York and London. So when I see the names with the visitors and know that you're all human too and you've all been through or if you haven't you care anyway...well, it's the most humbling and gratifying feeling I've felt in a long time. Thank you very much.

A problem in my life.

2007-08-26T11:01:00.001-05:00

Elementary school teachers have this bizarre practice of speaking loudly about their children and classes in front of said children in the hopes that somehow their discussion will spur on better behavior. Since I'm one of the cadre of teachers deemed a "specialist", meaning I see every kid in the school for about an hour a week to work on fine arts-related stuff, I get to go through this exchange five times a day with various teachers.

Even though every fiber in our beings are burning to actually talk about stuff like how hungover we still are from Teacher (Tequila) Book Club Night, or how Janeane from the fifth grade wing has been shacking up with her boyfriend who lives 40 miles away and you can always tell when its one of their early-relationship anniversaries because she calls in sick on the same day every month, teachers obviously can't talk about those things in front of the twenty-five or so little darlings who're lined up in the hall and hanging on our every word. So we perform our strange little public school Kabuki performance with one another so the kids can learn how not to be little shits to one another.

One of my favorite teachers in the building made me laugh the first time we had this exchange because as we were droning on and on about SELF-CONTROL, and BEING KIND TO OTHERS, and NOT COLLECTING BOOGERS YOU FIND DRIED ON THE SIDES OF THE BATHROOM STALLS, she finished our conversation with "Well, these certainly are problems in our lives." And that's when I broke my teacher character and started snickering because that phrase just struck me as something you'd hear in an AA meeting that it seemed kind of absurd to discuss as a concept to a bunch of second graders. When I started giggling, she did too, and I shot her a woman power salute with my fist held high and responded with "But we shall overcome." It's become our little tradition to wrap up our class hand-offs now, and the kids even mouth along when we come to our two favorite lines in the conversations, and it's funny. And then I go back to my life of singing "Froggie Went 'a Courtin'" for three more hours and wondering if we could lobby the school board to let us start bringing vodka in our Nalgene bottles this year.

Anyway, I guess that phrase sort of explains my having yet another absence from this blog, and from all of you. Because the Big Problem in My Life...even more of a problem than the fact that my hair will hold neither curl nor highlights, and that my 200 glorious channels of television (did I mention I can pause live TV?) did not include Fox Sports Midwest, so I will have to spend the winter and early spring in a deep state of personal reflection so I can decide whether or not I want to fork over 50 dollars for the MLB Package next summer...my big problem has flared up to the point that my life is rapidly becoming unmanageable again.

Since this is primarily a health and weight loss blog, I try to touch only briefly on the fact that I have a pretty major case of depression. I do so partly because I know how tedious it can get to listen to someone mentally ill talk about their mental illness, and also partly because I never really figured out which came first, me being fat or me being sad about being fat. But over the past several weeks, the realization that my untreated depression is screwing up every fact of my life is becoming more and more indisputable, and at this moment I'm pretty much in a holding pattern until I can do something about it.

When I say that I've been on a diet since I was nine, I'm not exaggerating. Likewise, when I close my eyes and think back as far as I can remember in my childhood, I've been depressed. At least, I think. Or maybe I was just high strung and neurotic as my mom claims. But I remember so many times being so overwhelmed with sadness as a little kid that I'd just cry and cry, or I'd vomit, or I'd stop eating, or I'd eat too much. And the more I think about it, the less I can remember a time when the fact that I felt broken, or malformed, or just not right hadn't shaped the way I looked at everything and everyone around me, and that's fucked up.

There are so many things I despise about depression that I could spend a week just writing about it. I hate the way it makes your body feel like it weighs 6,000 lbs. so everything is harder, and how it turns your bed into the one place you can find solace, so that every evening involves a three hour nap because you don't feel like you can make it until bedtime. I hate how, in the course of writing half of a blog entry, I've had to lie down three times now because the act of not being in a horizontal position for more than ten minutes is just too fucking draining for me right now. I hate how it renders you a succubus to everyone you know...you become this selfish wretch who can only take and take from people because you need so much attention and care, and you can never give back in a sufficient way. I hate how all I want to do is be alone because pretending to be normal around people is just exhausting, and then I sit and wonder why I'm so desperately lonely sometimes. I hate that it makes you seem like such a loser to the people around you...that your house is a mess and you're always broke and your makeup and hair are never quite right and you're always tired, and always behind and always trying to clean up one mess while hiding another. And it's not because you're lazy or slovenly or a fat pig, it's because when you're depressed, one little tiny problem seems so big that when you don't fix it, it causes all kinds of other problems that make your life out of control and no matter how much you work at it, or how motivated you are for a few days or a week, or how many books you read or techniques you try, you can never quite get it all together.

And I finally got fed up with it enough this week to call and schedule an appointment with my therapist...a very patient and indulgent man I manage to see twice a year in spring and fall. I would like to see him regularly, but I don't go because my insurance doesn't cover mental health treatment, and also because when I do go I'm usually not that depressed, so I can stretch out the benefits of one therapy session for several months before I realize I'm not getting much better. My shrink is a cognitive behavioral therapist, which means he prefers fighting demons with self-talk and rationalization more than drugs, but he's always offered medication if I thought I needed it. I've always turned it down in favor of the folders of CBT information and journaling exercises he's given me, because in my years of dealing with this, the medication has never worked. But I think I'm going to go in Tuesday and beg for something...Wellbutrin, maybe, because even when I do self-talk myself out of a major downward spiral, all it does is get rid of the immediate crisis. It never really seems to lift me to a point where I can say I'm not sad, and that's really a pathetic way to be.

So, I'm really sorry that this blog hasn't turned out to be what I hoped for. I'm sorry if this isn't what you come here to read, but I don't know how to write about treadmills and veggie paellas when really my life revolves around pacing between my computer and my bed and eating junk food on my couch. I'm so very, very sorry for not giving back to you guys like I should, because you're all wonderful and I really am rooting for you. Maybe if I can make it 'til Tuesday and turn this around I'll be back in some sort of fighting form.

2007-08-24T22:12:00.001-05:00

Oops, I mean Saturday. Promise!

2007-08-22T21:22:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the absence the last two weeks, and I promise a catch-up post on Friday. Be well, everyone!

Seriously, just stop.

2007-08-08T21:42:00.000-05:00

Remember Susan Powter? My earliest memory of her is from her Stop the Insanity! phase in the early nineties; my cousin brought a copy of the book to our family Thanksgiving and spent the weekend in my grandmother's rocking chair, her nose buried in the book as she gave my family scathing looks anytime someone proffering a bowl of mashed potatoes or wild rice dared to pass within her invisible force field of New Dieter Restraint and sanctimony.

I remember sitting at the dining room table in my grandma's house, spooning forkfuls of the obligatory sweet potatoes with carmelized marshmallow into my mouth and staring at the top of my cousin's blonde head with a mixture of resentment and abject envy. My cousin was SO cool in my eyes...an only child whose coddling was so thorough that by the age of nine she was already a full-fledged uber-bitch. She was the first in the family to own a Nintendo, the only kid I knew who was allowed to go to pop concerts, and who--gasp--owned Madonna's Sex book when she was 12. She also regaled me with stories of making out with junior high school boys and told me what the word "orgasmic" meant over iced hot chocolates at the coffee shop where she liked to hold court and draw abstract graffiti on her jeans with black Sharpie marker. My cousin J was a bona fide badass in my eyes, so anything that caught her interest was all the more exotic and alluring to me as a result.

Since my mother was determined to ensure that I would NOT become an cranky, adolescent sex-kitten like my cousin, she refused to let me buy the Susan Powter book on the grounds that Powter looked "a little like a Nazi" and that it probably didn't say anything that I didn't already know about weight loss. A few years later I checked out the book at the library, and confirmed my mom's suspicions: Susan Powter did, indeed, have an unfortunate buzz cut, and I already basically figured out everything she had to say.

So why is Susan Powter super healthy and I'm getting fatter and fatter by the week?

I guess if you asked me where I've been for the last several days, I'd have a lot of answers. For instance, I've been pausing a lot of live TV(!) with the DVR on my new satellite(!) and then looking triumphantly over at the cats like I just discovered fire or something. I've been trying to figure out what the hell is going on on Big Love because I still haven't seen the first season. I've been frantically getting my room ready for the beginning of the school year (yuck). I've been entertaining houseguests and catching up with old friends (yay). I've been tentatively stepping into the world of tango again, with plans to start classes again with my super-expensive but oh-so-totally-worth-it tango shoes I purchased from the very kind and supportive Veggie B!, and I've been taking stupid pictures of my cats on my cell phone, especially when they're cute and sniff said tango shoe, as seen in the picture below:
So anyway, all those things were great (except for actually having to work for nine whole months in a row again...le sigh), but the real reason I was gone was because I was doing a lot of thinking. And thinking ain't never end up good. I guess last Monday after I stepped on the scale and jumped immediately into my routine of cognitive behavioral therapy wherein I say my litany of "You Really Aren't THAT Fat" affirmations like, "It's just water weight"..."No way could you have eaten five whole pounds of food in one week"..."Maybe you just PMS, like, through the entire month" I sort of hit diet bottom.

And this diet bottom was different from all the other ones I've had where I've eaten a lot and not exercised and ended up a few pounds heavier and then I spend one evening sitting in my bed and pouting and promising desperately to go right back on the diet the next day and to really TRY HARDER and DO BETTER and WHY can't I just get this right just once and WHY am I such a diet failure and what's it going to TAKE and, and, and...

This diet bottom was the realization that I just absolutely cannot do the diet thing any longer. I am sick of totalling up calories, of bargaining with my food journal and figuring out how many calories of exercise (that I'll never do) it'll take to equal out an extra piece of cake, and whether I can go out to eat with friends and still eat the "right foods" and not be tempted by the "bad ones". I realized that even though I'm supposed to take a fairly relaxing mini-vacation with my family this weekend, I am absolutely going to pieces over the idea of maintaining a diet while we're going out to eat and on the road. It shouldn't be STRESSFUL to go enjoy myself. I shouldn't have a bad day or a good day or a bad or good WEEK just because the scale tells me whether I'm good at burning calories or not.

I've been dieting every day since I was nine. I can't do it anymore.

I've been reading Intuitive Eating, the book that a lot of people I know who've recovered from eating disorders have recommended to me when I talk about those same issues. I've been resistant for a long time, because the nature of the book makes it sound like you have to have a lot of faith in yourself, and I don't think there's ever been a day where I've trusted myself around food, ever. I have to admit, the book is boring as sin, but it does reassure me on a lot of different issues, especially the part that recovering the natural balance in your body between hunger and satiety is a long process that will involve lots and lots of trial and error. I'm actually, surprisingly, okay with all of that.

Anyway, I guess there'll be a lot of things to talk about in the coming weeks, especially as I attempt to figure out what the hell I'm going to do. But I do know that tonight, as I clicked open my nutrition journal/calorie counter out of habit, felt the familiar, nauseating wave of dread pass through my body, and then said "fuck you" to my computer screen and clicked out, that that was the nicest feeling I've had in a long, long time.

And it kind of makes the phrase "Stop the insanity!" take on a whole new meaning for me in the process.

Ch-ch-changes..

2007-07-30T11:43:00.000-05:00

Right now a burly man named Dearl (the self-control it took to resist asking him whether it was pronounced "Darryl" or "Pearl with a d" was monumental, I assure you) is ruining my privacy fence by hammering a large satellite disk into the wood, and I must admit I couldn't be more thrilled. I really thought I wouldn't mind only having five and a half semi-watchable television channels for the rest of my life, but when I realized that the reception was getting increasingly poor (interestingly, whenever there's a full moon it's the worst) and that my little streaming Internet TV resource wasn't quite as reliable with getting the shows up as it used to be I succumbed to my dark fantasies of spending Sunday afternoons catching up on all the shows I DVR'd over the course of the week and making sure that every single word uttered by the ridiculous Jonathan Antin was captured for my amusement for the rest of my life.

So I signed my life away to Dish TV and now for the value price of fifty-something dollars a month, I, too, can complain every week that there is absolutely nothing of value to watch on my 200 channels+HBO like a good, honest American ought to. I am so beyond stoked, and as soon as Dearl comes into the house and finishes hooking everything up I'm going to tip him twenty bucks to sit on my couch and eat popcorn and watch the last five minutes of The View with me in HDTV (every wrinkle on Barbara's face!) and let me call him anything other than Dearl and then promise to never, ever speak of it again.

And then the other, equally embarrassing in a different way update for today is that it appears I'm going to have to become quasi-vegan again, and this time for legitimate purposes.

A few years ago, I was really sick for several months whenever I ate red meat. As in, my husband and I would go for lunch at a restaurant and I'd chance a bite of his hamburger just for a taste and then three hours later I'd be crumpled on the floor of my bathroom with tremendous stomach pains and nowhere for the food to go but...out. (Sorry) Doctors thought the enzyme required to digest beef had somehow gone missing because I wasn't really eating a lot of meat at that point, and that basically if I endured the nastiness of reacquiring the enzyme I'd be fine. And I was, and it was all good. But then this last year I started having the same symptoms again, even though I had been eating red meat with abandon and there was no reason for it at all. So I just decided to give up on meat in general, especially after watching Fast Food Nation at home, alone, with half of a Quarter Pounder chewed up and sitting in my mouth because I was afraid to swallow what I had just seen being slaughtered on the TV screen in front of me.

So yeah, I buy into the big, crunchy, vegetarian philosophy of not putting rotting flesh into my body anymore and I feel all the better for it. It was an easy switch to make because I'm an odd soul who really likes the taste of tofu and soy meat, and I only very rarely feel like I'm missing out on food except when I pass buy a BBQ restaurant or have to hang around a bonfire with a Boca hot dog kind of flopping on my stick while everyone else proudly brandishes their plumping, juicy weiners (snicker) around the fire.

And so while the meat intolerance issues are really no big thang for me, finding out that I'm lactose, or at least cheese, intolerant kind of is. I arrived at this through a series of incidents over the last month or two where eating anything involving lots and lots of dairy (ice cream, pizza, nachos...sob) would cause my body to say, "Bitch, please" and then I'd end up spooning the toilet for a few hours just like I did with the meat. So, while I'm praying to whoever's listening at this point that I don't become completely environmentally allergic and end up living on a sustainable commune and trading my organic beets for undyed cotton muumuus with my Old Order Mennonite neighbors like the lady in My Life Among the Amish did (actually a really cool book that inexplicably found our way to my house when I was a teenager) I've realized I need to make some major changes in the way I eat so my body doesn't feel quite so ravaged by its own distaste for really satisfying junk food.

And it's funny, because while the meat thing never fazed me once, when I first attempted to reconcile myself with the reality of possibly not having cheese again, I almost started crying. My darling grandma once told me that back in the 50's her doctor told her she needed to lose her baby weight, and that the best way to do it would be to walk around the block a few times each day and avoid lots of butter and sugar. So, being the diligent woman she was, she dutifully made her constitutional around her neighborhood block 8 times each day and cut the fat out of her diet. She told me, though, that she didn't know that corn on the cob--her favorite food ever--could be eaten without butter and salt, and so when she served it to her family she had to leave the house and go sit on the back porch and cry because she missed it so much. And while it always makes me laugh to think about that sort of naivete, I completely sympathize because the idea of living in a world without cheese and ice cream was just devastating to me for the first few days I thought about it. I'd look at a veggie burger and think I'm missing out when I avoided the obligatory slice of Muenster or Cheddar. I grumpily sat through veggie fajitas at a Mexican restaurant with friends because I couldn't pile on the sour cream or dip my chips in the heavenly spinach queso they serve there. I started envisioning my post-dinner evenings as bleak, endless torture sessions where my nighttime TV rituals were turned into stoic meditations because I couldn't have my dish of ice cream with my hour-long dramedies. And I went on and on feeling totally conflicted and wrecked and sad about this lactose thing until I finally had enough cheese incidents that even the idea of having my stomach revolt so violently makes me want to avert my gaze whenever I see a cow.

But, like, isn't it funny how we have emotional attachments to the foods we eat? How, in some cases, the presence of the perfect birthday cake or the pile of cheese fries at Happy Hour can be more important to a special occasion than the things we do or the people we experience it with? I mean, what are we really missing out on when we give up foods that don't treat our body right? Because, honestly, if I hadn't had the physiological motivation to say goodbye to cheese,I probably would still be piling it on everything I made and wondering why the fat content of my food was so high. I honestly believe, as silly as it sounds, that I am addicted to cheese and ice cream and stuff like that. I miss the way it tastes, the way it makes food more interesting, the way it pulls apart from a pizza and stretches all the way from the plate to your mouth...it's every bit as insidious as drugs or porn or things like that. And all just because some silly animal byproduct makes me feel soooo good. Food really shouldn't have the power to do that.

A lot of people have suggested getting those Lactaid tabs and dealing with it in that way, but I sort of don't want to. My body is telling me that this food isn't going to be tolerated any longer, and I want to use it as a reason to make another step away from eating shit and embracing a lifestyle that includes more vegetables, more wholesome foods, less fat and oils and stomach pillaging. I don't know a great deal about listening to your body or intuitive eating, but I figure if in its natural state, my body is saying in its John Turturro voice, "DO NOT SEEK THE CHEDDAR" I should probably heed the warning and not try to circumvent it with more chemicals.

And I really think if I'm moving this far towards veganism on the food spectrum, it also gives me license to stop shaving my legs or wear makeup. Or at least, you know, have a token Phish song on my iPod or something.

Let your freak flag fly, comrades.

We gonna drink Bacardi like it's mah burfday...

2007-07-27T11:09:00.000-05:00

Last year my birthday was kind of a comedy of errors, as my grandmother's cancer tests came back to confirm that the whistling in her lungs was due to a rapidly growing tumor, my husband decided to finally move out, but trashed our house as a final birthday present, and because of all of this everyone seemed to forget I was having a birthday until my mother remembered mid-Hamburger Helper preparations, and asked if fried ice cream at the local Mexican place counted instead. Since he knew I was down, my favorite person sent me a note that said something like, "I expect that by the time you're 27 you will be fabulous". And I chuckled, and imagined a future full of mani-pedis and size 8 couture (well, Old Navy couture...but the FABULOUS kind) and strings of male admirers who could make sardonic jokes about Proust and had never, ever been near the Bates County Mud Run.

So, 365 days later I have to chuckle, because by those standards I've failed miserably. Well, except for the scads of Old Navy clothing I seem to collect on a monthly basis. A girl can never have too many jungle green scoop-necked tees and grey hoodies in her closet. Being 26 going on 27 was hard...maybe the toughest year I've had yet, because while the intense emotions of a failing marriage and a separation were behind me, the rebuilding was yet to be done. And there was the new job, and the new singlehood, and the no friends, and all that stuff. And as you've read in this blog, the all important quest towards Getting Better has been pretty fumbling for me, even though I've learned an immense amount in the process. I do think I grew up a ton in the last year, and I'm proud of that....much more so than if I had spent the year running through boyfriends and partying and being tanorexic and stylish and superficial like I tried so hard to be at the beginning of 26. I'm really, really glad I didn't go down that path, because I don't quite think I'm the kind of chick who can pull off fabulous.

And I'm not really sure why I'm typing this...it's not to extract birthday wishes or pats on the back from anyone (although, by all means...)

But I guess it was partially an explanation of why I haven't posted any weigh-related progress this week. I haven't eaten poorly, but I've eaten too much and at odd times, and it's all related to a long story involving vomiting cats and finally breaking down after watching too many episodes of The View where the antenna reception makes horizontal lines crawl across Joy Behar's face and ordering satellite TV and now I'm going to be able to record every word, nay every BREATH, Kathy Griffin takes on television because it comes with free DVR and how I had had a torturous half hour of trying to decide between Netflix and Blockbuster Online and how I ended up leaving Netflix for the better deal and writing an "It's not you, it's me" note in the "reason for cancellation" box in all seriousness and I felt really bad until I saw they had charged me twice this month and now it's on, bitches, and how I think I might seriously be lactose intolerant except maybe just with cheese, and, and, and....

And also because my brother's boyfriend informed me that since I'm turning 27 on the 27th, and also that I'm turning 27 on 7-27-07 that folk logic says I'm having a golden birthday and that means something special should happen. And I started kind of looking for the specialness to kick in around Tuesday and since nothing did I started thinking instead...about a lot of stuff, really. Like how I wish my life had more outward direction, more focus on other people and on things that don't only affect me. I wish I weren't such a consumer...that I bothered the environment less with the way I lived, and that I was more careful about how much energy I'm using, how much trash I'm producing each week.

Basically, for my 27th birthday, I want to seek more purpose in my life. More self-discipline. More compelling reasons for doing what I'm doing. Why am I obsessing over scales and calories and exercise if the sole reason is to just look better...be more attractive? Really, what's the point if it's only for me and only for those specific reasons? I need to think about all this stuff more...each subject could easily be a tediously long blog post on it's own (lucky you guys!)

The 94 year old great aunt has requested my presence in the hometown for a birthday fete this weekend, so I must go collect my finery and prepare for a weekend of speaking loudly into hearing aids and trying to avoid cramming seventeen pieces of chocolate cake down my throat.

Here's to being fabulous in a more productive way...I hope.

Grr...arrgh...mmph.

2007-07-23T11:06:00.000-05:00

The numbers on the scale were trending downward in a major way this week. I head steady in the mid 219s all the way through Thursday, flirted with the 218s on Friday and then between Saturday and today I magically appear to have gained back around three pounds. I think the cats are attaching me to a salt lick IV drip while I sleep.

Actually, it's what happened to me this time last week too. I ate a bunch of junk food crap on Saturday and Sunday and filled up with sodium and fat and regretted it on Monday and I didn't drink any water and the only exercise I had was softball.

So, first I obviously need to get over the slacking. I didn't think I was doing SO badly, but maybe cutting corners adds up. And if I want pizza next week I'm only going to get it if I make it, so it'll be personal sized and sans copious amount of oil.

But also, I'm going to start weighing in on Thursdays from now on, because dammit...I deserve to post a loss. I think it's going to be unavoidable that I will eat more calories and fat and salt on the weekends, even if I make sure to curtail it from now on, so I'll wait until my body stops feeling like a giant sodium blimp each week to get a better picture, and I'm going to hold off on weighing this week too.

Just sticking that in there for posterity so next week when I look longingly at the Domino's on the drive home from work I'll remember it's not really worth it.

Damn the man.

2007-07-19T16:14:00.000-05:00

I have a confession to make.

And I normally wouldn't have ever really written about this because I feel like such a douche for saying it, but I finally got to see that episode of A Different World where Dwayne Wayne becomes an afterschool mentor for rival gang members played by those adorable boys from Kriss Kross and I spent a fantastic seven minutes daydreaming while they rapped about how "bangin' is a shame, and gangs are to blame" that Whitley and Denise Huxtable transported me back to 1992 so I could lavish myself in their collections of New Kids on the Block Hats and kicky print vests over tuxedo shirts, so I'm feeling like I'm in a pretty good place emotionally right now.

My first weight loss blogs? Not this one, but the four before this that all have about three entries apiece and then found their way to the Great Blog Campmeetin' in the Promised Land? They were all written for a guy.

And this guy is actually not a horrible person, on balance. He has a great job, cares about the environment, makes me laugh, likes the same music I did, and made hours-long conversation seem like an absolute joy every time we talked. But this guy had a little problem...he wasn't into fatties. And as he told me this after a long period of being a fantastic friend during my marriage, I felt that instinctive shrinking in that I do when someone around me who I like has a disdain for weight. So I made jokes, and I made excuses for him...I said it wasn't his fault that he was only into thin women, because "it was biological". I told him it was just fine that he felt ashamed for being attracted to me, but only from the neck up. I preened whenever he said no other female connected with me like I did, and that I had a gorgeous face and a great sense of humor and that he had real feelings for me. And I tried to ignore the fact he said all these things through text messages at 3:00 am when he was riding home from some bar or concert and bummed out that he hadn't left with a girl on his arm.

And our relationship reached a real low point when I agreed to write an online personals ad so he could meet women. He called me his "sexretary", and he sent me the login information so I could weed out the unacceptable women and write back to the promising ones. He said that we should make a deal: that he would get all the sleeping around out of his system (I think the euphemism "wild oats" was used several times), and I would lose enough weight to fit into a size 8 and then maybe we could be a real couple.

And Internets, this is where you get to question my character as a human being, because I was all for it.

And so I started to follow the diet he recommended, and I let him berate me for eating cheese on my salad, and I got so neurotic and anxious about sending him pictures of my body and weighing in that I actually began to GAIN weight. I still have a cache of emails from me to him in my outbox, and every single one of them begins with "I'm so sorry, but...". And so after about six weeks of this, of him pushing for progress and me defiantly giving him excuses, we just dropped it entirely. And we started arguing a lot more than we talked and now our interactions are limited to brief hellos and how are yous and I spend a little time every day looking at his icon on my messenger and wishing we could have just one more decent conversation as a way to say goodbye.

And I'm posting this not out of a need for any sort of emotional catharsis, but as an explanation mostly. A, a different male friend of mine recently started reading this blog, and had a few questions about women's body-image and self-esteem and all the emotional reasons why we're doing what we're doing, and I'm afraid I didn't really give him great answers, as I tend to be flippant in the face of emotionally raw stuff.

We were discussing my last big post where I questioned the need for separating physical appearance from physical health as a motivation for eating right and working out, and he asked me if it was ever possible to just lose or gain weight for health reasons only. And I told him I didn't think it was...that for every woman trying to change her body and her life, there probably was the voice of at least one man in the back of her head that would always push her to run further, sweat more, eat less stuff. And I think that's where our wires got crossed, because A took that to mean that for every woman losing weight, there's a man she wants to attain as a result. And I know why he thinks that, at least in my case, because we spend a lot of time discussing dating and relationships and sex, and I often lampoon myself as a husband-seeking , sex-crazed coquette because I assumed he knew that's pretty much the opposite of who I've become. I guess facetiousness gets lost in translation somewhere between the keyboard and the IM window, and I need to be more aware of that.

But to answer A...when I say there's a man's voice in every woman's head, I was generalizing the basic desire that anyone feels to be adored, accepted, beloved for who she is. And it may not necessarily be just an old boyfriend or a thoughtless teenage boy in high school or whatever...it could be a mother, or a girlfriend, or even just a stranger on the street who made a snide comment in passing...but those voices exist, and it takes a lot of strength to rise above the basic sentiment of you're not good enough for me. Sometimes it takes hundreds of days of failing, thousands of miles on the elliptical...it takes pain and sweat and tears and that exquisitely painful process of breaking yourself down, looking at all the pieces, and then putting yourself back together again to make someone recognizable and yet stronger. I'm trying to say the emotional reasons for losing weight never really go all the way away, even though most of us evolve to a level where working and out and eating right for the sake of feeling good is a much more viable option for our lives.

And am I saying that anyone who chooses to lose weight hates themselves? No. I'm also not saying that I was immune from seeking out external motivation for changing my life at first, even though I can honestly say it's not the case anymore. I have four dead blogs of food journals, apologies, and self-loathing to prove it. And I was worried initially that this blog would go by the wayside too because all I wanted to do was get thin and get revenge...I'm very thankful I ended up realizing there were much more rewarding reasons for writing here, and trying these things in my real life.

But when I weigh-in once a week, or when I decide whether or not it's worth it for me to have a bowl of ice cream with a friend, do I hear that guy's voice in my head? Absolutely. And as much as I hope it'll fade the more time and healing I put between us, I doubt he'll ever completely go away.

Day 9

2007-07-18T11:59:00.001-05:00

From now on I'm going to just leave a link to my DailyPlate page each day for the Challenge end of day wrapup. That way I can save more room for the..ahem...weightier posts here and if you want to see what I ate or didn't eat or how I felt while I was exercising you can browse my account at your leisure.

Happy Wednesday!

Tuesday, July 17 Wrapup

Can't We All Just...

2007-07-17T12:33:00.000-05:00

It is hot today, as it ought to be for mid-July. But it's that first wave of heat where everyone forgets it was ever hot in the world and we all walk around with fixed grimaces and schlumpy bodies and everyone raises their eyebrows in greeting in a silent, mass proclamation of, "Damn...it got hot."

And with that heat always seems to come that peculiar sense of irritation...the righteous indignation of stepping out of a shower only to find yourself sweaty and mussed again fifteen minutes later. The way no air conditioning can ever hope to compete. The children who suddenly find their twelve-week paradise of summer vacation to be tedious, endless, dragging on because it's too hot to play outside, and lounging in the climate controlled depths of a basement is ultimately every bit as boring as school.

I'm in a bit of this summer funk today, as my sweaty work clothes hang weirdly on my frame, the little wispy hairs escaping my ponytail curl up at the nape of my neck...things that might be romantic in the light of autumnal nostalgia, but right now are just plain annoying. My cats are even whiny...pacing between front door and patio door, meowing pitieously until I open a door for them to leave, and then refusing to budge when the first heat waves off the baking concrete tingle their whiskers. Even the Internet is sluggish today.

So I'm blaming the heat because I was reading several blog posts and forums this morning with my breakfast and now it's lunchtime and I'm still having a problem wrapping my head around the issue:

As a warmup to the Blogher conference in Chicago on July 27 and 28, Laurie Toby Edison, who writes at Body Impolitic announced a panel for BlogHer called "Our Bodies, Our Blogs".

Laurie describes on her site as such:

I’m planning to talk about body image in the broader sense. Obviously I’ll be talking about the issues of fat, beauty, power and health at any size - but body image (as folks who read us know) includes a lot more. When the beauty standard is young, blond, white and thin, it leaves almost all of us out. It leaves most women and men feeling “never attractive enough”, causes endless discrimination, and makes billion$ for the beauty and diet industries. There is so much we can talk about - fat/size, aging, ability/disability, color, “right” facial features, class, children.

Okay, cool. Had I gotten the cash together to book the transportation and a non-skeevy hotel, I would be there with pen and legal pad firmly in hand. I think it's an important subject, I think it's a great idea to bring women together under that particular discussion umbrella, but I'm really having a hard time justifying the motivation and some of the tangential issues with the panel and the movement at large (pun totally intended).

The panel was started by Laurie partially because it's an important and prevalent issue for most women, but also as a response to what she deemed "fat-offensive" items in the 2006 Blogher swag bags (fat free cookies, health water, etc.) And that's fine...I can understand how someone who devotes herself to disspelling the need for such projects would be bothered by seeing them in a giftbag from an organization who also claims to support her causes as well. But I also think it's important to remember that if an organzation like Blogher is going to build and maintain a presence in the online community, they're going to have to accept sponsorships wherever they can get them for awhile, and so maybe it'd be okay to pick your battles from time to time.

And now, for the other more important issue:

As usual, I was a little late in getting my thoughts together on this, so by the time I sat down to write this post, Jen had already read the same forum posts and the same blog entries and had also summed up her thoughts on it very nicely. I won't waste time pointing you to who said what since she already did it very succinctly http://yawwblog.blogspot.com/2007/07/do-i-really-hate-myself.html.

So basically the argument Jen is making boils down to this question: If you're currently attempting to lose weight, and if you blog about such issues, should be you be welcomed at a panel about self-acceptance and body image?

And of course the authors of the blogher posts and the prospective panelists all responded and said "Yes! BUT..." And then went on to explain that eating problems and the subsequent weight loss attempts to correct the eating problems all stem from self-hate, and so therefore aren't really aligned with the principles of the self-acceptance movement.

And this is where my mind started going a little haywire, trying to wrap itself around these arguments. And I need to preface everything I'm going to write from this point on with the following disclaimer:

I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I'M ABOUT TO TALK ABOUT. I am ignorant of body politics. I have never, ever studied feminism or feminist movements. I have very little knowledge of any acceptance movement at all. The following paragraphs are only based on my impressions of the above discussion on Jen's blog as well as my own impressions of the very little corner of the body-image acceptance movement I've read about or seen. Please, if somethign I write about here can be improved by a book or an article or another blog that you think I should read, leave it in the comments. If you think I'm an irresponsible female for never participating in gender studies in college, please let me know who I should start reading so I can become more informed. I would really appreciate that, thanks.

Okay, so.

The body image panel discussion, and Laurie's blog bothers me on two different levels: First, whether or not Wendy McClure should speak at the BlogHer panel because her participation in Weight Watchers was counterintuitive to the body image movement?

What?! This was Brain Explosion #1 for me today.

And I understand (at least I think) that the basic premise is that if you love your body, why would you spend time and money and effort to change it to meet societal expectations of beauty? That any sort of diet and exercise effort should be done for the sole purpose of improving physical well-being and that's it. In essence, if you're trying diet back into your Skinny Jeans, you're too self-loathing to join the ranks of the Body Image Warriors.

I sort of get it...yes. It's the same argument we've been hearing ever since Twiggy bumped out her more Rubinesque counterparts on the cover of Vogue: media puts too much pressure on women to look a certain way and society only values young, thin, white women, etc. etc. etc. so why should we concede that this is how it's going to be?

And you know that battle cry has reached fever pitch when a lingerie model is now telling us to embrace her fat self or shut up:

And so our new Patron Saint Tyra is telling us all to say "So What?" on her show, and she even convinced her audience of fawning women to don red bodysuits with individual body weights proudly emblazoned on each girl's chest (notice in the clips on her show that no one over 160 lbs. made it actually onscreen) and so it seems that the body acceptance movement is gaining momentum in the very arena that caused the problems in the first place. So what bothers me is that the rest of us, unassumingly counting points or writing about cravings on our online journals or slogging away on a treadmill each morning are now no longer part of that community. We're the enemy, we're the backslide to the body image movement because we hate ourselves enough to change how we look.

I absolutely do not understand why there must be a size acceptance camp and a weight loss camp and ne'er the twain shall meet. I think it's stupid, actually, because anyone who approaches this with an ounce of common sense will recognize that the healing process of losing weight, of accomplishing more things with your body than you thought possible at first, of being able to slip on clothes without worrying about what you look like...of those vast improvements in mental health far outweigh and often support the physical benefits of weight loss and a healthy lifestyle. Every single person whose life has been changed through weight loss has talked about the immense sense of freedom they attain while they're going through the motions of working off the fat. They talk about the broken relationshps they've been able to heal, of the new self-confidence, the sense of efficacy...and yes, they gleefully recount the times they've been checked out by someone at the supermarket, or the day that they managed to walk into a non-Fatstore and try on a pair of jeans without tears of shame. And I know the Size Acceptance movement says it should never be about the last part, but it is. It always is, and it always will be. Validation for one's successes, at least in some small measure, will always be an innate human need, and there's nothing that redefining how we're supposed to think about ourselves can do to combat that.

I also understand that another problem with weight loss blogging as a means of size advocacy is that it's a fairly self-centered activity (as Jen admitted in her post). When I write what I ate, what I was thinking when I ate, how I'm feeling, etc., I'm not doing it to inspire anyone at the moment. (Although when people say they draw inspiration from my words, it's a phenomenally gratifying feeling). I'm writing here because I don't have a support network in my own real life, and this is the best way I know to reach the widest variety of people going through a similar process. In my writing, I am not changing minds or effecting societal progress...I know this. But as I considered that, I also realized the other question I have for the size acceptance proponents:

If size acceptance is built upon the idea that you should be comfortable in your own skin, regardless of your weight or appearance, then why be political about it?

Laurie Toby Edison has posted a gallery of her photographs of female nudes entitled Women en Large. From an artistic standpoing, they are brave, bold photographs. They're unforgiving to the women's respective bodies, but they're also respectful, open, and even whimsical in some. But as I looked through each of these...thought about the strength it would take for women like that to strip down and pose and be open to thousands of people viewing their voluptuousness, their rolls of creamy skin, their stretch marks...the primary response in my head was "what is she trying to SAY with all this?"

Because if the purpose of the size acceptance movement is to tell women and men not to worry about what other people think of you, then why publish these photos at all? Or, is the purpose to desensitize the world to the stigma a fat body carries with it wherever it goes? In that case, where does the self acceptance come into play? Why didn't she just give the photos to the women who posed for them so they could enjoy their bodies?

And I wonder about this a lot...whether the size acceptance movement is going awry in politicizing their agenda. I thought about this as I caught a few minutes of the reality show America's Got Talent and watched a performance by the plus-sized girl group The Glamazons. I argue that The Glamazons have made it as far as they did not because of extraordinary talent (their ability to harmonize and exude stage presence is questionable in comparison to the other acts on the show), but because they were, in fact, all fat. The judge's comments were primarily geared towards congratulating the girls on their bravery for appearing in ass-baring lingerie and jiggling and dancing with abandon like the supersized Christina Aguileras they were obviously trying to imitate. So what is this communicating, that these women are being honored specifically for being overweight? It seems to me that size acceptance, in what I understand to be its original form, is completely lost when it's being used as the label for getting other people to accept individuals of size, rather than offering support for anyone who has a problem with their body to improve it and ultimately make peace with it in the process.

I suppose what I'm trying to say, in a very inefficient manner, is that I like the spirit of the size acceptance activists. I like what they stand for, but I do not like their politics. I'm angry that Wendy McClure was made to feel even a little unwelcome because she had the audacity to look for a tool that would help her feel better about herself. I'm angry that talented writers like Jen are told there must be something psychologically wrong for them to want to reduce their body shape and look better. I'm irritated that just because I want to feel that profound sense of relief when I walk into a store knowing that there WILL be something there to fit me, that I've been branded as superficial, body-conscious, shallow for wanting to look a certain way. If that's the case, then label me as such, but I'm fairly certain that in the last seven months of learning how to eat correctly, to vanquish bad habits, to move past all the hang-ups I have about how I am and what I can do, I've done more for my own self-acceptance through dieting than I ever would by simply throwing my hands up in the air and saying "so what?"

And now the cats and I must retire to the patio with a big glass of water and a fan. Because damn...it's hot.

Days 7&8 and Weigh-In

2007-07-17T10:38:00.000-05:00

I kept sitting down the last two days meaning to get this entry done, but I got distracted by something shiny each time. I apologize.

Day 7 went very well. The softball game was a bit of a disaster, as my friend Jenny and I found out we were the only non-high school or college baseball players on the time, and we ended up playing our first game against a team who had played with one another for 3 years, and who were using this sort of beer league setup as a way to stay in shape before their next tournament season started. We lost 12-5, but it could've been worse because we were shut out until the 5th inning. I've found my contribution to this particular softball team is going to be as the "thinking man's player" who cannot hit, can't really run or field, but can definitely wait all day for the pitcher to lob balls at me so I can earn a walk and take my base. I have never received so much acclaim from my teammates as I do now when I refuse to swing the bat. So far, it's working for me.

I ended Day 7 at 1550 calories (had cottage cheese, 3 new potatoes, an ear of corn, and some tomatoes for dinner) and the hour of softball for exercise.

Day 8 was also fine, except our gym is still closed with no explanation, so my window of opportunity for exercise was blown when I drove out there and back. I also didn't get a full gallon of water down, and I'm a little surprised that I'm dehydrated this morning. I guess that's why I always felt so deathly worn out during the school year, because I usually only had about 20 oz. of water in a day. Had the usual cereal/fruit/tea for breakfast, black bean nachos for lunch (I am so beyond sick of black beans right now, but I had to finish the can or they'd spoil), and a veggie burger and baked kettle chips and ice cream for dinner. Not a very well rounded day, nutritionally, but I ended up at 1599 calories and 50 g. of fat for the day, so it's fine.

I weighed in yesterday morning at 221.4 lbs. which is a 2.6 lb. loss from my previous weigh-in of 224. I'm irritated I gained that much weight in June, but it's good to be on the losing end of it again.

Days 6 and the first half of 7: On Planning, Sleeping, and God.

2007-07-15T10:40:00.000-05:00

On Planning

One of the nice things about the summer vacation teachers get is how very few things can get so easily stretched into much greater amounts of time. During the school year, I have approximately 45 minutes between the absolute last time I can hit my snooze button and still be able to shower and the deadline for when I should be racing into school, a coffee cup clutched in one hand and a shopping bag spilling over with pipe cleaners, clown hats, a Lean Cuisine, and an expression on my face that says, "If someone even glances at me this morning before I suck down this coffee, I swear to God I will quit and go to law school and I will leave the P.E. teacher in charge of Seussical the Musical and we all know how it sounded when he tried to karaoke to Kenny Chesney last September so BACK OFF." So in those dark forty-five minutes between blissful sleep and the moment that my veins are laced with sweet, sweet caffeine, there's not a lot of time for silent reflection and thoughts about the day and wholesome bowls of cereal and grapefruit.

But summer is obviously different, and completely abudant with opportunities to sort of stretch out activities. I wake up at 8:00 but lounge in bed until 9:00. Breakfast lasts through the last hour of Today and well into The View until Elizabeth Hasselbeck's voice starts making me grit my teeth and I turn it off. Cleaning and lunchtime are interspersed with breaks to read books, go outside and give pep talks to my mournful looking tomatoes, painting and repainting my nails...and the day just continues in this pattern of lazy idyll until I fall asleep with everything in its place and the smug knowledge that while my little brother is crawling out of bed into his car for his 7:00 am summer job, I will be able to ignore his morning phone call and crawl back under the covers for at least a few more hours before I start feeling guilty.

So I was surprised, after a bout of near perfection on days 1-5, that Day 6 sort of fell apart by a sheer lack of planning and foresight. Saturday is the day most closely resembling a typical school day for me, since I get up at 7:00 to make it to work before 9:00 with the commute. But since I had gotten used to staying up late and sleeping late, too, getting up with the alarm was way hard, which meant I didn't wake up in time to make breakfast which meant I was starving by the time I drove the hour commute back home which meant I didn't want to wait to eat lunch which meant that the leftover pizza and breadsticks came out of the freezer, made a pitstop at the microwave, and contined straight into my mouth. Strike one. Strike two was the small buttered popcorn and Coke at the movies in place of dinner. Strike three was the four pieces of dark chocolate at my desk while I tried to update drivers for a program that had stopped working. So yesterday, with the addition of no water and no exercise because the gym was inexplicably closed, was not a good day. I need to always remember to plan, plan, plan and make getting meals ready and breakfast set out and my clothes picked before the morning to be a priority or else all my good intentions will probably get pushed aside in favor of easier things or...gasp...fast food. And I don't want that to happen.

On Sleep

Despite all my opportunities for rest and relaxation, I haven't been getting the best of sleep in the past few weeks. I go to bed around midnight, wake up at 2:30 and then stay awake until 4:30 for seemingly no good reason at all. I've been having these bizarre hot flashes as soon as I get into the bed where my neck feels like it's 400 degrees and no amount of undressing or ponytailing or keeping a fan on my neck seems to help. So when I finally can't stand my fake menopause symptoms, I wake up and walk around and read and do stuff for a couple hours until I cool down and then it starts all over again, but at least by the time I can't stand it again it's time to wake up. We got a set of eight lovely pillows for the wedding three years ago, but I guess after three years those pillows couldn't take it anymore because they're all now roughly the consistency of heavy fruitcake and sleeping on one of them feels like being propped up on a concrete block. So I went to the store and got two different kinds of therapeutic pillows...one designed to keep my head at the right angle and one designed to wick away body heat, and I switched out my bedspread for a lighter quilt and everything seemed to work splendidly last night. So splendidly that I slept straight through my alarm and missed church by a good fifteen minutes this morning. At least I have one issue on my not being able to wake up for work problem fixed, though.

And On Church

Apparently my little requirement on my 30-Day Challenge about going to church raised some eyebrows, because I don't really seem like a churchy kind of girl. And it's true that I'm not, really. I got an email from someone who also pointed out how insane it is to say that showing up at church is somehow going to make me lose more weight, and if that's all there were to this challenge or this blog then I would entirely agree. But I've said all along that this stuff isn't just about fitting into a size 8...if it were I'd have 79 posts worth of food and exercise logs and careful measurements and all that good stuff. But I want to get better in a lot of different ways, and so for me going back to church is part of that.

When people say they were raised in the church, it's usually a figure of speech, but I'm at least 40% completely truthful when I say I was raised IN the church. I went to daycare at a church, I spent nights there at choir practice and handbell practice. I hung with my grandma and my great-aunt as they quilted and crocheted and glued and sewed every Monday afternoon for our annual bazaar. My mom worked as our church secretary for seven years, so I was there a lot even if I didn't want to be.

And when you show up to church more than once a week, and when the adults who go there parent you the same way your mom and dad do, and when you eat meals there and make your friends there and get married there, church becomes a vital part of your life even if Jesus doesn't. And that's kind of how it was for me; I loved the traditions and the liturgy and the music and the people at church, but I never quite bought into the New Testament. And I didn't know where I stood on Jesus and Heaven and how all it took was belief in salvation to actually get into Heaven.

So, since the OBVIOUS choice for anyone doubting their faith was to marry a minister of that very faith, that's exactly what I did. And so I became a minister's fiancee and wife and went to church every Sunday without fail. And as my marriage got worse and worse and we separated and I had to start telling people who asked, "I'm getting a divorce. He cheated. He's a minister. Yes, that's weird." And so in the process of getting angry at my husband and extricating my life from his, I started also really getting mad at all the other hypocrisy that existed in Christianity and the people who claimed to love God and do his work.

So basically, for me, going back to church is a way for me to figure out whether being mad at my husband needs to translate at being mad at God, too. Because I want to believe in something. I think you need to. The greatest people in the world...the Gandhis and the Mother Teresas and the Dalai Lamas all believe in something. I haven't quite figured out whether or not that something needs to also come with the Methodist potluck after the late service and The Bible and Jesus and all that, but I'm working on it. And I made sure to start attending a church that is working for social change as well as healing through faith, because that's important to me. I like being part of a body of people who want to work together for the environment, for gay rights, for urban renewal...all that bleeding heart stuff that really gets me excited and fueled to take on the rest of the week.

So do I think that praying to Jesus is going to magically reduce my ass? Nah. And I don't even know if reaching out to God as a way to gain strength to exercise and eat right is even a viable option for me like it was the first time I lost weight. I just needed something I could do that felt familiar but also is going to challenge me to interact and think and grow into a more responsible, proactive path in my life, and that's why I decided to go back to church.

Except not today because of the terrific therapeutic pillows. So since cleanliness is next to Godliness I'll have to do that to make up for it. Then our first softball game tonight, wherein I will prove that I am a horrible, horrible athlete.

Wish us luck!

Day Five

2007-07-13T17:22:00.000-05:00

I sipped a cup of jasmine tea tonight, brewed the right way with loose tea leaves and an infuser and a little bit of patience. I'm not really a tea drinker unless it's something sturdy like black tea that I can drink with milk and sugar and pretend is coffee, but sometimes when things slow down, I like to make and linger over herbal tea.

The first time I'd ever had real jasmine tea was nearly two years ago, the first week after we moved to Kansas City in August of 2004. Some old friends from college were meeting up and invited me to tag along. I drove in from the far south suburbs, nervous about the way my JC Penney couture and boring haircut and equally dull life would clash with my friends and their bohemian, artsy roommates and acquaintances. And I thought it was funny, as I parked my car on the side of an oak-shaded road in the part of Kansas City where the gracious neighborhoods just begins to brush against the ghettos, how far removed I felt from a lifestyle that my friends still carried on...how I used to be so flamboyant, so crazy-wild in my own way, so utterly hungry for the future and how fabulous life could potentially be. I wished more than anything, as I walked up the stairs to the decrepit but still magnificent porch of the erstwhile mansion that now housed my college student friend and her roommates, that I was so ashamed of who I had turned into and what she would think of this quiet, mousy, dumpy woman who rang her door.

The evening was remarkable for me as a series of firsts: first taste of Middle Eastern cooking that would begin my lifelong quest for the perfect saffron rice recipe...first cup of French press coffee at the little Westport coffeehouse known for its flamingly unique clientele and the fact that it trumped the neighboring Starbucks for business every day it had been in existence...first tango lesson...first cup, then two, then five of jasmine tea on her leaf strewn porch as we wrapped ourselves in down blankets and watched an unexpectedly early autumn wind whip rainbursts and tree branches across the yard in the twilight.

And it was also the first time I admitted to anyone I was desperately unhappy about the way things were transpiring in my life. My oldest friend had just proposed to his girlfriend and asked me for marriage advice, and in searching for something wry and witty and helpful to say, I finally just broke down and told the truth...that I felt trapped, unfulfilled, terrified that nothing would ever change. That I had considered leaving him but was afraid he couldn't take care of himself. And as we sipped tea, and talked through that night, and assuaged our respective fears and concerns about the future, I remember thinking that this night was a truly extraordinarily bright spot in a long stretch of pretty dark days.

I don't know what I expected my friends to do after the night we met. Somehow I wanted us to form a bond over our secrets and insecurities--kind of a broken hearts club that we could use as an excuse to meet, to interact, to heal. Selfishly, I wanted a reason to drive up to Westport each week, wanted a buddy to push me into meeting interesting people, wanted to become interesting again myself. But as old friends tend to do, our promises of staying in touch and getting together often fell by the wayside; my oldest friend proposed to his girlfriend and went back to Austin for the school year, my college friend stayed busy and eventually moved to Switzerland to live with her boyfriend. And I didn't see another soul besides my husband and my family and my coworkers for seven more months, because it had just gotten that dark. Day after day after day of despair and unhappiness, with just that one bright spot--"the night I had jasmine tea", as I framed it in my mind--to illuminate my memories.

A few days ago, I walked into my county courthouse with the intention of filing for divorce. I had researched the process of filing a no-fault, no-lawyer divorce petition on the Internet, and assumed that walking into the circuit clerk's office with a driver's license, a checkbook, and a winning smile was all I need to have to start my path toward dissolving my marriage. The very unamused assistant at the front counter informed me that I should've also proffered the appropriate forms with the identification and the money and the smile, and when I asked her where I could get them, the numbers of eyes simultaneously rolling itoward the office ceiling probably would've challenged the Guinness World Record for bureaucratic exasperation.

"You'll have to consult with an attorney about the proper forms." Her eyes never glanced up from the fish tank into which she was irritably tapping food flakes.

"But I don't want an attorney, and the Internet said you'd give me the appropriate forms here."

I could hear my voice approaching howler monkey pitch like it does when I realize I look very stupid in front of a lot of people. I found out later that if an employee helps you find documents, or helps you prepare them, then they can be considered a contributor to the overall case and can risk being subpoenaed for the hearing or even sued for bad information by a litigious person. The pro se divorce FAQ I consulted included neither this information, nor the fact I had to show up with my own papers. I turned and walked out quickly, embarrassed and annoyed that something I thought would take thirty minutes, something that would be worth a pithy blog entry at the end of the day, actually required effort and seemed a little complicated.

So this morning at 8:00 I woke up, got online and peeled a banana while I looked for divorce petition forms on the Internet. I had a bowl of cereal while they printed out--all seventy-three pages of information. I drank a large coffee while I read the instructions. Three hours later I was ready to finally fill in blanks.

After seven years of college and grad school, countless term papers, research projects, technical writing portfolios, reviews, essays, and comprehensive exams, I can honestly say that filling out the paperwork for divorce was the most complicated thing I have ever done. The resources available for an individual trying to navigate the judicial system on their own are scarce, and the ones available for Missouri residents all linked to the same Missouri Divorce Code...a labyrinthinian mess of legalese, statutes, and absolutely no useful information at all. I finished the petition, the social security verification, the proof of residency, the financial affadavit, and the request for service at 3:00 pm, packed the last three years of my life into a manila folder and went back to the circuit clerk's office with what I hoped was the appropriate paperwork in hand. I handed her everything I had, sort of half-begged her to blink twice or tap a pen or something to let me know she had everything she needed to make the hearing packet (she didn't fall for that), and then was informed that I needed to come back with 120 dollars in two money orders and I would be partially on my way to a divorce. I went through six security lines, had my purse inspected four times (by the same security guard who recognized me EVERY SINGLE TIME but apparently couldn't bear the idea of not fondling the lid of my Chapstick as I went through). I wrote down Google search strings and website addresses for pro bono family law advocates for two women who had come in searching for help and advice and who were near tears and close to being kicked out of the courthouse for expressing their frustration in the loud, defiant way that low income people from the country get when they can't get the help they want.

And then I had to call my husband, because I had lost the apartment number for his address and he can't get served if they don't know where it is.

I expected things to go better on the phone than they did, because a month ago my husband called to ask why I hadn't gotten around to filing for divorce yet...he wanted to move on with his life and I was holding him back. So, you know, I thought he'd be glad, and he seemed okay when I hung up the phone after I thanked him for the address. Then he called a second time, and a third, and a fourth and a fifth and a sixth time, and with each call he got increasingly agitated and irrational, as is the pattern with my husband. He emailed three times, threatening suicide in one, proclaiming his loyalty and love in another, and demanding his scuba flippers and a set of music books back by the end of this week in the third. During his final phone call, he broke down sobbing and asked me how I got through the last year and what he could do to handle this better...that he wasn't getting any better.

And I really wanted to tell him that I hadn't done so great. I didn't have a secret, except that I failed most days and I was miserable most days, but that I had to start small and work on the tiniest things before I could even conceive of feeling normal again. It was a good day back in August after he moved out when I remembered to feed the cats, and it was progress in December when I could go out in public alone and not start crying at the couples and the lights and the intimacy and the hope of the holidays. I was proud of myself in January for starting this blog, and in March when I started making friends and going out once in awhile, and in May when I began to feel good about my job and the way I reached out to kids and other people, and in June when I got my hair cut and I remembered that I can be attractive if I try and two weeks ago when I finally...finally started not being angry at my friends or angry at my parents or angry at God and myself for all the shitty things that have happened. And then there was this challenge on Monday and how each day is a little better than the last one, and each day some part of me that got ripped open and was raw and scarred for so long finally gets to heal a little and that I can finally look at the future and not be too terrified of it to move...

And I really wanted to tell him all that, but he wouldn't have believed me. I wouldn't have believed myself if I had heard it last year. It's not my place to be his best friend or his shrink or his emotional support right now and I had to tell him that even though I just wanted to let him know that if he can forgive himself, it'll be okay. That he wasn't a bad person...that we both screwed up in our own ways. But I don't think it's possible to tell someone who's not ready to heal on their own that it's all going to be fine.

And so, for the food part of this entry, since I was at my desk all day assigning value to assets (few) and debts (copious) I forgot to eat. I had the breakfast and then at 7:00 when I got home after some errands and a run to the movie store, I didn't want to make anything. So I cheated, and I got a veggie pizza and some breadsticks. But it wasn't because I needed to punish myself for my life mistakes like I used to, or that I needed cheese and grease to fill some sort of emotional void; I just didn't want to cook. So I had two (okay, two and a half) pieces and a couple of breadsticks and I put the rest in the freezer and it was what it was. I had pizza. I didn't binge. I don't hate myself. I ate and I'm full and I'm satisfied. And tomorrow I will have oatmeal and weird Asian vegetables and whole grains and it'll all be fine.

A few months ago--probably a few weeks, even--I would've labeled today a "dark day". Maybe one of the darkest in awhile, because of the significance of the divorce filing and my husband's pain and my pain and the fact that it's only the first Friday of a month-long challenge and I already broke my main rule, but there were also good things about today, too. I opened a savings account at my bank, and I planned it so I'll have enough money to turn it into a money market account in a few months. I paid down a third of my outstanding debt with a little bit of money I saved up over the summer, and I doubled my payments for the rest of my contract with my debt people. My debt manager lady said she was proud of me and I think she really meant it when she said it. My mom said she was proud of me, too. My first statement from my mutual fund annuity came in, and my little 100 dollars in the fund is already chugging away at building interest. My loud, trashy neighbors have moved out and were replaced with a little family that's quiet, sweet, and who have children who bounce beach balls in the backyard and who like to hang wind chimes from the privacy fence. I think I'm going to bake them cookies.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that dark days do not have to be monumental if I don't want them to be. Today is just a day. Day 5 of 30, or Day 194 of 365, or Day 9,684 in my life so far. It had some bad things, it had some good things, but as long as it teaches me something to help make Day 6 an even better day, then it counts as a positive. I don't want to live a life where the good days are buffered by weeks or months or even years of darkness anymore. I don't want to sustain myself on pride or anger or self-pity. I want to be able to eat pizza and have it just be food. I want to keep learning lessons, and having After School Special types of moments where I get sheepish and realize the world doesn't have to be as difficult and upsetting as I'm making it. I want to just keep...breathing.

I'm sort of glad I drank jasmine tea tonight, even though I didn't realize the significance of it until I wrote this blog. It's finally time to let the old "jasmine tea night" from two years ago slip into the past, where it belongs.

Placeholder

2007-07-13T15:47:00.000-05:00

Oops, I thought I had posted an entry last night, but it's floating around somewhere in cyberspace.

Day 3 was fine with food, exercise, and water. Saw people, went outside. Had a good day.

Day 2 Wrap Up

2007-07-11T21:40:00.000-05:00

Food: Was excellent, actually. Daily Plate has me at 1551 calories and 52 g. fat. I really need to work on getting the fat down, but usually non-meat protein is higher in fat than, say, chicken or fish. Oh well.

Breakfast: 2 Kashi Go Lean Blueberry Waffles; 1 tb. peanut butter; 1 medium banana; black tea

Lunch: 1 c. whole wheat spaghetti; 1/2 c. basil and garlic pasta sauce with 1 Boca Italian Sausage diced into it; Salad w/reduced fat feta, veggies, and garlic and rosemary viniagrette; apple; water.

Snack: 1 string cheese; 1/4 cup pistachios; 1 handful blueberries

Dinner: Eggplant Stir Fry in a Citrus Soy Glaze (**see below for details); Brown rice; 1/3 roasted red pepper; diet cream soda; 3/4 c. Edy's No Sugar Butter Pecan; handful of raspberries; 1 square dark chocolate.

Water: 144 oz.

Exercise: Got my ass kicked by Turbo Jam and Turbo Sculpt. I heard people rhapsodize about it before, but I really had no idea....fantastic workout.

Saw People: Yup.

Went Outside: Yup.

Cleaned Something: Oh, yes.

**Okay, so my cooking philosophy usually involves staring into my refrigerator and thinking "What would look pretty on a plate? What's just about to rot that I can salvage? Hey, nacho cheese might taste really good on a bagel." I usually don't have a lot of luck with recipes, because I'm oppositionally defiant to them and in purposely not following the measurements, I create crap. So I do my own thing and sometimes it ends up pretty good, like the eggplant stir fry I made. The picture is below, and if you click here, it'll take you to a Google doc with the recipe I made for it. Bon appetit.

The void that doesn't need filling

2007-07-11T12:13:00.000-05:00

I have this distinct feeling that my ass is smaller than it was just a week ago. If you have a badonk, you know what I mean when I say that it's an omnipresent force in your life. It's always...THERE. Bumping things off tables or brushing against people in department stores. When you swing your body around to check yourself out in a mirror, it seems like your ass catches up with the rest of you a half second later and ruins the profile. It's there to remind you you're just about too big for your last pair of fat jeans, it's a water-dark, supersized Rorshach blot on the side of a concrete swimming pool when you stand up to jump back in, it's the first thing you think of in the morning and the last thing you think about your life. THE ASS can ruin whole days if you let it.

Well, my ass is missing some of its bulk, and that's completely weird to me, because in the time that I was actually working to lose the weight I never felt like I got smaller. But I think I am. I really do. My summer jeans aren't quite clinging to my posterior the way they were a month ago (maybe I've finally just worn them out and they're too weary to do anything except sag). And most important of all, I feel that....absence. Some part of me isn't where it used to be.

I must say, I'm rather thrilled by this.

Challenge Day One

2007-07-10T22:27:00.000-05:00

Eek.

So the first day of this was good in terms of following the rules, but not great in terms of actual nutrition.

DailyPlate.com reports my caloric/fat intake as 1957 cals/87 g.

The teacher friends and I were seduced by the fabulous chips and spinach queso at our local Mexican restaurant, which is where I consumed the bulk of my cals/fat. The burrito itself wasn't so bad, and I did great at breakfast and I doubt we'll be there again in the next 30 days so I'm glad I ate what I did, and I'm glad I got to see them most of all.

Breakfast: Fiber One w/Raisin cereal, skim milk, banana, black tea w/Sweet n Low

Lunch: Black bean Monterey burrito, copious amounts of chips and dip, Diet Coke, water

Dinner: Leftover bean burrito, refried beans, Spanish rice, Edy's no sugar butter pecan ice cream, raspberries, Diet cream soda, water

Water intake: 132 oz (woot)

Exercise: About 30-45 minutes of softball practice. Daily Plate calculates I burned around 350 calories for this, but I think they're dirty overexaggerating liars. Although I did fall to the grass in exhaustion and laid there apathetically while my friend Jen's 125 lb. Malamute made out with me.

Saw people: Check

Went outside: Check

Day 1 is a success, I think.

Grocery List for the Week of 7/9/07

2007-07-10T10:44:00.000-05:00

Here's the link to my grocery list for this week, since a few of you were interested:

Grocery List Week 1

Hark, a challenge! (Why am I suddently entitling everything like it's from a Renaissance Fair?)

2007-07-09T14:03:00.000-05:00

I realized that starting today, I have exactly 30 days entirely to myself. And I know that those of you with real jobs are rolling your eyes because YOU don't get an automatic 30 days to yourself at your job, but President Bush doesn't tell you how to do your job, and you don't also have to sometimes be in charge of scraping dried boogers off of bathroom stall handles, so you eye-rollers can go ahead and just suck it.

I can see this upcoming month going two possible ways: first, it's a disaster because I never leave my house and I end up sublimating my boredom and loneliness with a whole lot of ill-planned craft projects, online computer games, and of course food.

Or, I can actually get better, get happier, and maybe at least even out the dreadful farmer's tan on the tops of my feet where the sun has emblazoned burnt sienna latticework on top of my painfully white skin. I've also been thinking about the way I'm consuming SO much paper and plastic and water bottles by eating out almost every evening, and so I'm going to make sure that's a goal in this endeavor as well.

So here's my 30-Day Erin, Stop Being Such a Whiner Challenge:

Rule 1: Unless on vacation or showing up to a previously planned dinner date or get together, all meals must be taken at home, even on nights when I work late. I'd rather eat healthy food late and risk a slow digestion than shove a Baconator down my throat on the way home from work.

Rule 2: Food will obviously be of the healthful variety, with an emphasis on the principles of the G.I. Diet as a guideline for what to buy. Any snack food, frozen junk food, full-fat cheese product, or "heat and eat" type food will be thrown away as of Monday, July 9.

Rule 3: I will blog each day about food intake, how I'm feeling, what I'm planning for the next few days unless I am on vacation. On Monday evenings I will post my grocery list for the week.

Rule 4: I will have 128 oz. of water each day, but only in a glass/Nalgene bottle, and never from bottled water. (I reached the breaking point on my justification for bottled water consumption when I paid $2.50 for 16 oz. of Fiji water the other day at a coffeeshop. I can't abide by all the bottles we drink and then trash, especially when the majority of it is just purified tap water)

Rule 5: I will do 30 minutes of exercise each day starting Tuesday, July 10 and will blog my accomplishments each evening.

Rule 6: I will go out and do something that involves interacting with people at least once per day. There will not be a day when I spend the entire 24 hours in my house, having conversations only with my cats. (Even though my cats have gotten a lot more interesting and opinionated since they started watching The View)

Rule 7: I will go to church

Rule 8: I will clean something in my house each day

Rule 9: I will spend some time outside in the sunshine each day.

Rule 10: I will never make more than 10 rules for myself even though I loooooove making lists.

So, this sounds doable enough. If you'd like to follow along on your own challenge for the next 30 days, that'd be cool. Just email me if I'm not already linked to your blog or if you don't post online so we can keep in touch.

HRM, the Queen of Self-Loathing Land hath declared It Restrained Exhilaration Day

2007-07-06T18:21:00.000-05:00

(I made him put his breeches on just for this)

WHEREAS: Even though some days I wake up and put on my clothes and I feel like my old shirts and jeans are so tight you can see the outline of my spleen through them.

And WHEREAS: Even though I don't really DO anything to deserve it.

And WHEREAS: I can't really see it myself because that would be admitting I'm good at something.

BE IT RESOLVED ANYWAY: That today two people, independently of one another, came up and said they'd noticed "I'd lost a bunch of weight".

Happy Weekend...I'm on a mini-vacation 'til Monday.

2007-07-05T12:53:00.000-05:00

I perched on the edge of the black examination chair, legs dangling centimeters off the floor like some kind overgrown eight year old and stared at an insurance noticed taped to the wall. Something about how we should write to CIGNA and chastise them for not meeting the clinic's terms. I really like coming to this hospital, which is odd I know, but some clever architect managed to hide the actual hospital-y parts below the ground and grouped all the outpatient services into this lovely shopping mall atmosphere. There are glass elevators and fountains and a coffee place, and when I go there for appointments, I feel like I should be walking out with a Nordstrom's bag on one arm, too.

This was a visit with my ENT who gets to visit with me for sundry reasons each year ever since I realized that my rapidly failing vocal health was probably not a good physical path for a music teacher to travel. This time he was there to look at my tonsils and determine whether or not they should be exorcised from my body and hung from the London Bridge for making me use up all my sick days on actually being sick, rotten traitors that they are. He didn't really give me a strong opinion one way or the other, but a tangential conversation we had made all the difference in how I'm feeling since my sulky post of last Tuesday.

I walked into his office wearing yoga pants, a tie-dyed t-shirt, and flip flops, which I ordinarily wouldn't dare wear in public for fear of seeing my grandmother's ghost, looking disapproving and resigned to her sloppy granddaughter, floating in a corner and knitting some sort of commemorative quilt at the same time (I presume even in death her Teutonic genes enable her to multitask with ruthless efficiency, and that the afterlife has the shiniest linoleum floors its ever seen). But I had driven straight from summer school, where I get to mess with kids who can't read well in the mornings and teach yoga in the afternoon. The ENT is usually used to seeing me in some permutation of black dress pants and button down teacher shirt, so he asked me what I'd been up to this summer, and when I told him about the kid yoga his normal expression of bored amusement lit up into something resembling genuine interest.

We spend the next fifteen minutes discussing what I did with the kids, and his Bikram classes in the heart of Kansas City and how the hot yoga classes I once attended weren't true Bikram classes so I should really come and see what it all was about, and how the winner of the 2007 Yoga Games came to class and performed and he was truly incredible and if I ever wanted to go to his studio I should mention his name so he could get 20% off, and then FINALLY when we ran out of yoga conversation he remembered I was here about my tonsils and we got back down to business.

When I walked out of his office, I felt this peculiar sense of lightness, and it took me the entire trip to the parking lot before I realized what it was: while we were discussing yoga, and his progress and my progress, and especially my interest in the most physically demanding and kind of competitive form of yoga there is, he never once indicated that it was absurd for someone like me to participate in those classes, and to be with those kinds of people. My ENT is the paragon of health; glowing skin, lithe body obviously built for endurance athletics, and every time we talk he mentions a new physical activity he's challenging himself with. I feel like Jabba the Hut talking to him, even though he's an extremely kind and unassuming man.

But it completely blew my mind, because in everyone of the yoga classes I've taken, in the dance classes filled with their Russian former ballerinas, in the Pilates workouts and the tennis afternoons, I have run into the people who look me over and say "You're seriously doing yoga? Isn't it difficult to do if you're not already in shape?" "Tennis is a pretty big cardiovascular workout...are you sure you don't want to start with walking?" And the comments roll on and on and I end up just sort of cringing underneath the shame of them, all the while furious that I'm relegated to the fat lady exercises that I don't want to do. But this man...he ACCEPTED me. Even while I was frantically trying to come up with novel things to say about yoga so he didn't think I was a fraud, he just kept acting like it was the most normal thing in the world for a 220 lb. midget to be able to do a handstand or a Scorpion. And in not questioning how someone like me could do something difficult, he very much helped blow a good portion of my funk away for this week.

I suppose it's little secret that I have something of a self-esteem issue, and I swear to you I cannot figure out why that is. I know, intellectually, that I am good at things. I had trophies and plaques and scholarships in school to prove it; I have job accolades and compliments to validate it now. But I absolutely cannot translate any of that into really knowing that I'm good, that I can do stuff, that I deserve better things. And it's also fairly obvious that I bounce from one exercise, one diet plan, one philosophy on life faster than a Paris Hilton headline pops into my newsreader every morning when I log on. I quit so much because I don't really ever believe I'll succeed. I don't stick with anything because I don't want to admit to failing.

I've felt recently sort of spiritually bottomed out, although I'm not really sure what that means even more. When I lost weight last time it was joyful; I talked myself through hard runs, and tempting meals...I seemed to spend a great deal of time focused inward in a really good way. The difference was between then and now, I guess, is that I was a fairly devout Christian at the time. Things and circumstances have changed, and I'm confused about how to regain that level of commitment and dedication and sincered belief in my ability to succeed, because in each of those things I was confident and self-assured and successful, and that's what's missing at this point. Right now I feel pretty empty...raw...joyless...and I didn't used to be that kind of person.

I think I need a pretty rigid routine, and I think I also need to find something to get me out of bed in morning that doesn't involve work or the pressing need to vanquish the pile of dishes from my sink before things grow on them. I have this whole next month free of obligations, and I can already foresee a disastrous stretch of napping, getting depressed, being alone, and getting more and more unhealthy as the weeks progress. I desperately need to find something else to do, something to focus on, something that makes me feel more alive and ready to actually believe in myself, even when very few people seem to believe in me, too.

Or maybe I should just take up crystal meth. I hear provides similar results.

2007-07-02T12:18:00.000-05:00

I am blocked, and that annoys me to no end, because I'm not lacking for things to write; I just don't really feel the need to expand them beyond a topic sentence and a couple of paragraphs that ultimately lead to nothing even remotely resembling a conclusion.

I am not out of money right now, I have food in the cupboards and social engagements on my calendar. Nothing is hurting, or infected. My car works. Work isn't challenging in good or bad ways. My cats are still adorable. My eating habits have been acceptable, though not stellar. My gym membership expired yesterday, but I didn't renew it because I have a subscription to an aerobics class right now. I went once and have neglected to go again, but I probably will this week. I don't expect to lose weight this week, but I also don't expect to gain anything big. Frankly, I don't care.

I have never, in my entire life, been at a point where I would admit to being bored and disgusted with who I am and what I'm doing, but I think I've finally gotten there. I was cleaning out old Rubbermaid containers of stuff I've carried with me through college and grad school and my last job, and I found a pile of legal pads from five, six years ago stacked neatly in a corner. In my cramped, precise script I had written out shopping lists and meal plans, all perfectly enumerated on a weekly calendar that looked like I had drawn out with a ruler. And like every shopping list I have ever written since I stopped sponging off my parents, the food on it was fresh, healthy, low-fat, no sugar...hopeful, ambitious, and probably wasted in favor of takeout and ice cream. I have been pulling the same bullshit for five years and all the gorgeous lists and tables and entries I made have rendered me enormous, unhappy, and positively lavishing in my own torpor.

I am so, so tired of this holding pattern I've been in since college, and I am so very sick of people who helpfully offer suggestions to make me feel better. "Take a dance class!" "Find some interesting friends in the city!" "Get season tickets to the ballet!" "Stop shopping at Wal-Mart if the sight of braless women in muscle shirts depresses you!" Great, thanks. But the problem is everything seems to be dependent upon everything else in order for me to make a clean break from this malaise...I can't go into the city to do things until I can afford to lose a quarter tank of gas with each jaunt northward, and Iget a fuel-efficient car, but I can't get a car until I pay off my debts, and I can't make substantial payments on debts because I have to eat and stuff, and I can't get the things I need because I'm always paying off debts, but I can't use a credit card to get the things I need because I have to pay off old credit cards, and I can't move into the city because I can't afford the rent, but even though I pay a smaller rent on a bigger place outside of the city, I can't get into the city to make upf for the fact that I live in the flabby, warty backside of the Universe because I can't afford the gas...

And it just goes on and on and on.

And it's not like I haven't tried to find a loophole out of this cycle of not being able to move forward. I'm not just sitting on my ass and complaining about my life. I really have paid down a ton of debt in the last two years, I have researched bank loans for people with messed up credit, I have considered getting a third job just to make car payments, I try to find substitutes for expensive yoga or Pilates classes by doing my own on video or teaching it myself to the kids at school. I research grad schools and make contacts with other people who could help me in the future and try to do research and write and do whatever I can to pad my resume for the time when I can apply in four years. I feel like every day I square my shoulders against whatever battle I have to fight in order to retain some dignity, some footing in moving ahead, and then I go to bed with a clenched jaw and regrets about whatever I screwed up or didn't accomplish enough of during the day before.

I do all of these things...but for what? I'm still supersized, I'm still poor, I'm still the tired, wan girl who might've been pretty at one point but who isn't worth the second look in the grocery line or the bookstore because whatever spark she used to have has since extinguished under a mountain of bills and stress and self-doubt.

And now I've just realized how incredibly stupid my problems must seem to someone who actually has to deal with real issues, and I'm sorry for that.

Anyway. Back to the food, because that's what this is about:

Breakfast: Banana, Iced latte (5 pts)

Lunch: Broccoli cheese soup: (6 pts) Garden salad w/FF dressing: 0 pts

Dinner: Probably Pei Wei

Sometimes I hate my rotten life, especially when I realize it's not even interestingly sucky.

2007-06-27T10:11:00.000-05:00

Weigh-in Edition, Week: God only knows

Weight: 220

Progress: -1 lb.

Total Progress: 14 lbs.

Pounds to go: 90

I was pleased to see a loss this week after a month or so of steadily gaining again. It's funny, because during the Great Ass Reduction of Ought-Two, I felt like I was losing weight too fast...close to 60 lbs. in about six months and from a lower starting weight. Now I'm overjoyed to just not gain each week. I can't imagine my metabolism has gotten so lazy in just five years, but maybe it's a give and take; I've gained perspective and restraint and maturity and in return have had to accept the thyroid of an 84 year old grandmother. My mother hypothesizes that my killer tonsils have allowed my body to harbor some sort of infection for the past year which explains why I'm always dragging, always sick, always pathologically attracted to my office futon and body pillow at 4:00 pm when I probably should be doing productive things instead. Maybe I'll turn around after the ENT yanks the toxic little effers out this summer.

Anyway, veggie and bean fajitas for lunch today with an apple. If I can make it through the afternoon doldrums without giving in to naps or cheese-based snacks or fast food for dinner, I'll be golden for the rest of Wednesday.

Finally...What a Good Food Day Looks Like

2007-06-26T21:35:00.001-05:00

Breakfast: 2 Kashi Multigrain Blueberry Frozen Waffles, 1 Tb. creamy peanut butter, 1 banana, green tea

Lunch: 1 Cedarlane Couscous and Veggie Burrito, grape tomatoes and edamame, 1 apple, water

Snack: 2 mozzarella cheese cubes

Dinner: Black bean and veggie fajitas, 2 flour tortillas, shredded soy cheddar, 2 Tb. guacamole, 1 Tb. nonfat sour cream, 2 Tb. pico de gallo, 365 Brand Organic Corn Tortilla Chips, 1 Sugarfree Jones Cherry Soda, 1 Kashi Oatmeal and Dark Chocolate cookie, 1 mango

Points: 33

2007-06-25T11:46:00.000-05:00

One of my piano student's mothers decided to take lessons from me as a means of keeping up her mental alertness and concentration. I tried valiantly to convince her to buy a Sudoku book... a much cheaper and ultimately less humiliating option...but she insisted and has been showing up in my studio without fail every week since January. I'm very glad for her company, and I like that I have a student who can discuss the latest episode of Big Love and swear when she misses a note and who doesn't come in dressed in all manners of Hello Kitty kid couture, but teaching her is a painful experience completely unique to the awkwardness of teaching kids how to learn a new skill.

She's progressing quite rapidly, actually, and apparently has had some fine arts training in the past because she approaches each song with a fairly musical sensibility, listening for nuances in phrasing and always being careful of "making it flow", even though a student of her ability level really does well just to pound out notes and rhythms. The frustration in our lessons doesn't stem from whether or not she hits a black key or a white key, or whether "On Top of Old Smokey" retains a modicum of recognizability; I think the real tediousness in her lessons lies with how fearful she is to actually just sit down and play.

Every weekend there is a different excuse for why things aren't perfect, or why she doesn't feel ready to really "perform" for me. There's tendonitis, and the in-laws are visiting, and the husband is out of town, and it's Purim...each and every reason accompanied with a resigned sigh and effusive apologies for having to listen to her playing. But the thing she doesn't realize is, I LIKE to hear her play. I love to hear how she's progressing and learning and I like weeding out the little bad habits she has so I have something to actually teach and refine in her musicianship. I get paid to do it, and the only thing I mind about her as a student is her relentless self-doubt and toxic perfectionism that keeps her from just messing up gloriously and then fixing the problem later. Kids don't have that problem; if they screw it up, they'll either admit they had a brainfart or they simply didn't practice and then they'll correct the problem and we'll move on.

I wonder how adults become so fearful, so guarded against acknowledging that there may indeed be a deficiency, but that it can be made up by charging ahead and trying again. I wonder at what point we start to shrink away from taking chances, and being uncomfortable, and even being a little bit in pain as we journey down the path towards something we want. I am, of course, being an utter hypocrite, because I do it in my own way every day just like any other adult: "I just can't pass up chocolate!" "I try to exercise, but I'm just so worn out and sick all the time!" And it's pathetic, because those excuses are flimsy at best, and yet I'm using them as the absolute truth for why I can't accomplish any of my own personal goals.

This weekend I stopped at bookstore to see if I could find a copy of Passing for Thin or When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies, since both had come highly recommended to me and I was worried that the last thing I remember actually reading this month was the back of my new shampoo bottle. Of course, my local Borders is lame and probably stopped stocking those books in order to make room for their FOURTEEN KIOSKS of Harry Potter merchandise, so I ended up with Erin Shea's Tales from the Scale and a book I'd never seen before, entitled Skinny Bitches. I, of course, started with the latter, because the 12 year old boy in me reasoned that a book with curse words on the cover could only get better inside the pages. I wasn't disappointed.

The book is written by a former model cum holistic medicine expert and a former Ford Modeling agent who are, in fact, "skinny bitches". The difference between them and your run-of-the-mill Nicole Richie or Olsen twin is that these women are glowingly healthy on top of their stunning looks. I was immediately hooked by chapter titles like "Don't Be a Pussy" and "Sugar is the Devil". It's like reading a note from your mean, pushy best friend who knows where all the good parties and the best shoes sales are and calls you a "whore" affectionately and you let her because you know there's a really kind heart beating behind her bullying facade. Their basic premise is that if you want to be thin, you have to be healthy, and if you want to be healthy you have to stop eating crap.

Well, duh. Obviously. But the book presses on to explain that you can't eat meat, can't eat dairy, can't eat sugar, can't drink coffee or non-organic alcohol, can't eat processed, refined, artifical foods and ever expect to REALLY be healthy in your life. And I definitely agree...a pure vegan lifestyle is probably what nature intended for us, and my friends who are vegan are basically glowing with vitality. I've read books on the vegan/whole foods/holistic lifestyle before and I've slammed them shut with an enthusiastic vow to replace Cheetos with quinoa, mozzarella with tofu, and I do great and feel amazing for a week or so until unplanned hunger hits, or I smell barbecue smoking in a pit, or I'm just too tired to deal with processing ANOTHER fruit smoothie for breakfast and then I fold and start my inevitable backslide to the Land of Egg McMuffins and Curly Fries.

And so, until I got to the "Don't Be a Pussy" chapter, I read this with the same amount of skepticism I reserve for any crunchy hippy diet book and figured there was just no way to deal with it. But those final chapters really resonated with me...what are we so AFRAID of, that we can't let go of the junk food and the overeating? I know that while I was researching vegan recipes this morning I was also staring longingly at the recipes that featured feta, or monterey jack, or sour cream in their ingredients list. Did you know you can actually get addicted to cheese? I know I definitely am, because the idea of living in a dairy-free existence sends me into such a dither...I get shaky and anxious, like somehow just THINKING about a world without muenster means that grocery stockboys are actually pulling it off the shelf even as I type.

It's just ridiculous. If you asked the average person if they would like to start taking illegal drugs so they can feel the effects...the highs as well as the lows and all the side effects...they would probably say it wasn't worth it, don't you agree? But that's because they're not addicted, obviously. So WHY is the notion of not having cake, of not having Oreos, of not having nachos so emotionally upsetting? The only thing I can figure out is that we're addicted to the foods we love, because otherwise we'd all be clamoring to buy tempeh and broccoli because we know that ultimately they're tons better for our bodies. And why are we so terrified to feel hunger? Humans endure sunburns, menstrual cramps, broken bones, kidney stones, childbirth, the flu, strep, migraines...all of these things with a fairly stiff upper lip, but when our stomach starts feeling empty and we have a little light-headedness why do we act like someone just amputated our thumbs? A blogger I read regularly, and I'm sorry I can't remember who, reminded us a few weeks ago that Gandhi fasted for weeks, and most of us can't make it through the evening without a Fourthmeal now...what the fuck?

I spend so much of my time making excuses for why I can't do my very best, even though the resources are all laid out in front of me every day. The research has been done, the friendly neighborhood Whole Foods and the Wild Oats have been constructed, the trashcan is waiting for me to dump my bags of crap food and to move on with my life. What am I so afraid of? That the detoxing is going to hurt? That I'll be boring if I prefer salads and spring water to brats and beer? That it'll be hard work and it won't be any fun? Puhleeze.

We have all accomplished much, much more difficult feats in our lives, and probably for a much smaller payout. Why are we so scared to actually challenge our bodies to do the same?

2007-06-21T14:13:00.000-05:00

I have had the distinct pleasure of contracting strep for the fifth time this year yesterday, and as my tonsils were staging a mini Central American revolution against the rest of my body I had plenty of time to languish in my bed (I am SO in need of a Victorian settee...and maybe a bustle and a fan...much more dramatically effective for languishing) and think about how good my swim/walk workout was on Tuesday and how great it'll be to get healthy so I can actually try to move my body more than once a week or month at a time.

Anyway, while my pain sensors stop being such grumpy poodles and my left ass cheek heals from having a giant needle of antibiotics plunged into it, I'll tackle Laura's meme, since she was kind enough to tag me.

WHAT WERE YOU DOING TEN YEARS AGO?

Ten years ago I was 16 and getting ready for my senior year of high school. I think I probably would've been at this three-week long fine arts camp where I had a wonderful time but was egregiously misinformed as to the idea that one can make a viable living off one's passions.

WHAT WERE YOU DOING A YEAR AGO?

Hmm...last year I was not in my best form. I was a part-time professional towel folder and disgruntled employee at Wal-Mart until I walked out and never came back, I was in the process of packing up my husband's possessions in the hopes that putting his toothpaste in a hard to find box would actually prompt him to GET OUT OF THE HOUSE (It didn't until the tail end of July. The man's tenacity is extraordinarily impressive.) And I was finishing a long, slow slide into the worst physical shape of my life...infections, weight gains and pains, and general illness that's only just now working itself back to normal. I am SO glad it's not 2006 anymore.

FIVE SNACKS YOU ENJOY
1. Chips and salsa
2. String cheese
3. Almonds
4. Fruit
5. Kashi Cookies

FIVE SONGS TO WHICH YOU KNOW ALL THE LYRICS
I have a problem with not being able to remember the lyrics to any song I hear on the radio, even if I've heard it a zillion times. I'm that person that sort of half-mumbles until the chorus and even then I'm a half-second behind the music because I'm waiting to hear the words so I can confirm I have it right. My brother won't even let me sing in the car with him because it's so annoying.

I do know pretty much any song you would've sung in any elementary music class by heart, although having an intimate knowledge of "Skip to my Lou" never seems to help me at parties.

FIVE THINGS YOU WOULD DO IF YOU WERE A MILLIONAIRE
1. Pay off all my debts
2. Buy a truck for my dad
3. Pay for my brother's college
4. Buy a house
5. Buy a fuel-efficient car for me

FIVE BAD HABITS
1. Eating my feelings
2. Not saving money
3. Being extremely hard on myself
4. Being messy
5. Putting on too much nail polish on purpose and peeling it off, Bonne Bell style

FIVE THINGS YOU LIKE DOING
1. Watching movies
2. Writing
3. Painting and drawing
4. Dancing
5. Teaching kids stuff

FIVE THINGS YOU'LL NEVER WEAR AGAIN

1. A Wal-Mart smock
2. Tapered legged capris
3. My wedding rings, unless I reconstitute the engagement ring into a solitaire necklace
4. Fake nails
5. Suntan panty hose (my mother used to insist there was no such thing as nude hose, so I spent the better part of my adolescence looking like I had just come from the Swingin' Senior Dance at the Boca Raton Retirement Ranch)

FIVE FAVORITE TOYS
1. My cell phone
2. My computer
3. My iPod
4. My thingy that turns my iPod into my car stereo
5. Hmmm...I'm a bit of a neo-Luddite. I do think it's cool my TV has a DVD and a VCR built into it. Does that count?

"INSTRUCTIONS: Remove the blog in the top spot from the following list and bump everyone up one place. Then add your blog to the bottom slot, like so."

1. Tam's Fitness Journal
2. Lose Weight With Me
3. Kathy Calculates
4. The Pursuit of Healthyness
5. Minx, Redux

"Next select five people to tag:

1. Brenna
2. Lori
3. Abba
4. Luna
5. Lukos' Mom

ALSO: I'm getting referred for a tonsillectomy this summer (Ice cream! Excruciating pain and hemorrhaging!) and I'm getting mixed stories on whether or not it'll require a lot of down time, etc. If you've had a tonsillectomy as an adult and can comment as to the nature of the surgery, could you leave a comment please? Thanks.

2007-06-19T11:27:00.000-05:00

Last night after work I pocketed the money I receive for teaching the progeny of the various KC suburbanites who spend their "me time" hunkered down in the back seat of their Lexus SUVs with a grande half-caff marble macchiato and every mobile telecommunications and organization device legally available for purchase in the western hemisphere. Sometimes they fall asleep back there and it's darling when I have to escort little Chutney or Farnsworth out to the car so we can knock on the windows and rouse the parent to take them home. Seeing a member of the upwardly mobile wiping their drool off the tastefully beige leather seats of their luxury vehicle with a Kleenex hastily plucked from the depths of a Coach satchel makes all of this just a tiny bit more worth it.

I meandered over to the local sporting goods store to check out their swimsuit collection, where I was confronted with the reality that...duh...generally, retail athletics stores sell products for people who are ALREADY athletes. I pulled a size 18 exercise swimsuit off the rack and tried to pull it on over my thighs with absolutely no luck, and there simply weren't any bigger sizes available anywhere. I've always been under the impression that swimsuit sizing follows dress and pants sizing pretty closely, but apparently Nike and Speedo both cut theirs smaller. (Or else I'm really just that fat). I was a little disheartened, because I figured the only place that would probably have plus-size swimwear available for purchase off the rack was Wal-Mart, and Wal-Mart seems to specialize in being purveyors of the ugliest swimwear you could imagine, and I wonder if conception of their plus-size swimsuit collection began with a deal brokered with Omar the Tentmaker and his rejected fabrics from the Fall 2007 Tent Season.

Nevertheless, I was a determined to end up with a swimsuit, so I went to The Mart anyway and confirmed that they had absolutely nothing worth buying. It seems like they would profit from at least a small rack of suits that women who actually want to MOVE in the water would wear, but the entire display was nothing but suits with tiny straps, no straps, those skirts that are supposed to hide your fat but instead act like beacons of obesity because they're ORANGE! WITH RUFFLES!, and those weird tank suits made out of ribbed material that always look promising on the hanger but seem to lose elasticity the exact moment the fabric hits your body. I bought myself a pair of goggles as consolation and left otherwise empty handed.

Right before I went to bed last night, I remembered I had an old racer back tank suit left over from when we swam a lot during my honeymoon and I fished it out from the depths of my armoire to try it on. I was close to fifteen pounds smaller when I got married, and the suit was marked "Large", so I was really expecting disaster from this encounter with Spandex. Oddly, the suit seems to fit everywhere it counts...nothing is splooging out from the armholes, and my ass is entirely covered by the seat of the suit. I can definitely tell that my stomach is nowhere near as flat as it used to be, and my thighs look like two pale pink bratwursts exploding out of their navy blue encasings, but I can live with that for now.

I'm excited. I'm going to move my body...and with any luck, when I move it in and out of the pool, there will be absolutely no one there to see me do it.