And in other news
A list!
1) I've been pondering the question, "If you woke up tomorrow morning without a weight/eating problem, what problem would you focus on instead?" Answer: my problem focusing, and more specifically focusing on writing. I'm getting next to nothing written these days, and yet the one day the other week when I hid in the bedroom with my laptop all day with my earplugs in, I got a LOT written. I really, really, really need to work on focusing. Mental imagery work, here I come.
2) I'm coming to terms with how I write. First comes a few chunks of stuff-- the things in my head that stuck in my mind. Then I mess around with those for a while, rearranging words, editing, adding stuff, expanding on images, rearranging whole chunks of things, until I have a more substantial chunk of stuff. Then I add a few more chunks, and repeat the whole process. Initial, fresh-from-the-brain chunks are never, ever pretty, and the original words and phrases will almost never make it through the messing-around-and-expanding process that comes after it. This process has made several of my friends threaten to murder me if I don't just sit down and WRITE, but the more I do this, the more I realize... it's just the way I work. I keep thinking of this special I saw on the Discovery Channel or some such, where they showed various tunnels (focusing, I believe, on the Big Dig and the Chunnel) and how first they'd have a machine that dug a little ways, and then they'd quick build the structure of the tunnel right in that fresh area to make sure it wouldn't collapse. I'm like that, when I come to writing; if I don't shore up each bit as I go, the whole thing caves in. I can't wait until I've dug the whole tunnel before building the structure under it. It doesn't mean I'm a bad writer, it just means that's how I work, and I have to expect that and work with it.
3) Related to both 1) and 2), we're rearranging our apartment, and may be able to put a wee writing station into the bedroom, where I will sit in blessed isolation from husband and cats, with my earplugs in, and work on my damn writing.
4) My Hub has gotten all determined to join a gym. I am leery of this, but unlike my experience with Bally's (who are, I must say, the damn devil incarnate), it looks like we'd be able to get out of this one if we agree it's not working into the way we live. My main concerns are as follows: a) that the gym, while in walking distance from our apartment, is not in EASY walking distance from our apartment, b) that due to this issue we'd end up using the car to get there in inclement weather and I HATE the idea of being dependent on the car for something, c) since it's not right near our apartment or our workplace, and since we tend to go all homebound after work, we'd have to make a determined effort to go to the fucking gym, and d) it costs money, and I hate spending money. On the other hand, it has a pool (sadly, for summer use only; it's up on the roof), it's NOT underground (the Bally's I belonged to was, in fact, underground, and this weighed upon my soul like you would not believe), it has a lot of different cardio machines as well as your basic indoor jogging track, it appears to have a good line-up of classes, and the cost is not as oppresive as most of the other places around here.
We have a set of one-day passes that we're planning on using tomorrow. Gulp. I can't help it, I get very nervous at the idea of exercising around other human beings, particularly guys, and the likelihood of me being the lone female in the freeweight section is quite high. I hate being the lone female anywhere, particularly in a situation where there's going to be a certain amount of expectation that I won't be able to measure up to the group norm. (Computer classes are bearable, because generally I will kick everyone else's ass by the end of the class, but weights? Oh dear God.) I do not want to be mocked, and I also don't want my fear of mockery to catapult me into trying to be hardcore, which I am not and which always leads to a bad landing.
I really do want to try a yoga class, though. I've never done one with an instructor about and I'd really like to try. And a dance class. And I would love to be able to run inside again, and not on a treadmill, so I could get back in 5K shape (this time, with Hub!). And swimming! I could totally do something different for my cardio every week, or every day (of my cardio days) for the week! And my Hub would go with me! Okay, this might be really cool.
(Also. I know I love the recumbant bike, but I would love it more if it wasn't sitting in my damn living room taking up space all the time. I don't think we should go all crazy and SELL it, but maybe it could end up in the basement storage space. Maybe. With my writing workspace and the recumbant bike out of the living room, we might have a bit of space to breathe again.)
5) Still contemplating babies. Which is, really, related to my goals of the year: writing and muscle. I would like to have a respectable amount of muscle mass (and a respectably lower amount of fatty mass) by the time we start trying to have kids, because apparently that makes it easier to carry around that belly, aleviates some of the wacky physical issues, and (on a note of pure vanity) would make it a lot easier to drop the baby weight once the baby is born. And I want to get writing, and even if I can't get a book entirely written pre-baby, I want to have the ability to concentrate on writing firmed up so that I'm not so friggin' distractable, because having kids = MUCH MORE DISTRACTION THAN NOW.
6) My Hub is in desperate need of new pants. His are falling off, in spite of his having not only tightened his belt as far as it can go, but also having added a whole new notch in the belt. His pants have always been too big, in a way; since he carries most of his weight in his gut, he'd have to buckle his belt below the belly and he'd still end up with pants that flapped around like sails. Now he tries to buckle the belt in the right place, but it slides down because his middle is too small for these pants, and he is SWIMMING in the damn pants. His shirts are too big, too; he's gone from "hey, look, I can button the top button on these shirts!" to "okay, I can almost wrap the sides around to meet in the middle." Again, he always tended to buy a size up, due to the belly, so without the belly it's just... holy crow. Must buy the boy new clothes. MUST.
7) I'm so, so happy about making it through the whole Thanksgiving/Christmas season without candy or cookies or pie or cake or ice cream or whatever. Which is weird, because up until the past month or so I could have never imagined holidays without them. Or life without them, for that matter. I am now living sans coffee, and (except for the occasional cup of unsweetened chai) caffeine-free. Again: something I could never have told you was possible before. Those were two of my big limits, where if something threatened to take my coffee or my chocolate away, I would've wailed, gnashed my teeth, and maybe committed MURDER. And now... poof, nothing. Weird to realize how an addiction is really an ADDICTION, you know?
1) I've been pondering the question, "If you woke up tomorrow morning without a weight/eating problem, what problem would you focus on instead?" Answer: my problem focusing, and more specifically focusing on writing. I'm getting next to nothing written these days, and yet the one day the other week when I hid in the bedroom with my laptop all day with my earplugs in, I got a LOT written. I really, really, really need to work on focusing. Mental imagery work, here I come.
2) I'm coming to terms with how I write. First comes a few chunks of stuff-- the things in my head that stuck in my mind. Then I mess around with those for a while, rearranging words, editing, adding stuff, expanding on images, rearranging whole chunks of things, until I have a more substantial chunk of stuff. Then I add a few more chunks, and repeat the whole process. Initial, fresh-from-the-brain chunks are never, ever pretty, and the original words and phrases will almost never make it through the messing-around-and-expanding process that comes after it. This process has made several of my friends threaten to murder me if I don't just sit down and WRITE, but the more I do this, the more I realize... it's just the way I work. I keep thinking of this special I saw on the Discovery Channel or some such, where they showed various tunnels (focusing, I believe, on the Big Dig and the Chunnel) and how first they'd have a machine that dug a little ways, and then they'd quick build the structure of the tunnel right in that fresh area to make sure it wouldn't collapse. I'm like that, when I come to writing; if I don't shore up each bit as I go, the whole thing caves in. I can't wait until I've dug the whole tunnel before building the structure under it. It doesn't mean I'm a bad writer, it just means that's how I work, and I have to expect that and work with it.
3) Related to both 1) and 2), we're rearranging our apartment, and may be able to put a wee writing station into the bedroom, where I will sit in blessed isolation from husband and cats, with my earplugs in, and work on my damn writing.
4) My Hub has gotten all determined to join a gym. I am leery of this, but unlike my experience with Bally's (who are, I must say, the damn devil incarnate), it looks like we'd be able to get out of this one if we agree it's not working into the way we live. My main concerns are as follows: a) that the gym, while in walking distance from our apartment, is not in EASY walking distance from our apartment, b) that due to this issue we'd end up using the car to get there in inclement weather and I HATE the idea of being dependent on the car for something, c) since it's not right near our apartment or our workplace, and since we tend to go all homebound after work, we'd have to make a determined effort to go to the fucking gym, and d) it costs money, and I hate spending money. On the other hand, it has a pool (sadly, for summer use only; it's up on the roof), it's NOT underground (the Bally's I belonged to was, in fact, underground, and this weighed upon my soul like you would not believe), it has a lot of different cardio machines as well as your basic indoor jogging track, it appears to have a good line-up of classes, and the cost is not as oppresive as most of the other places around here.
We have a set of one-day passes that we're planning on using tomorrow. Gulp. I can't help it, I get very nervous at the idea of exercising around other human beings, particularly guys, and the likelihood of me being the lone female in the freeweight section is quite high. I hate being the lone female anywhere, particularly in a situation where there's going to be a certain amount of expectation that I won't be able to measure up to the group norm. (Computer classes are bearable, because generally I will kick everyone else's ass by the end of the class, but weights? Oh dear God.) I do not want to be mocked, and I also don't want my fear of mockery to catapult me into trying to be hardcore, which I am not and which always leads to a bad landing.
I really do want to try a yoga class, though. I've never done one with an instructor about and I'd really like to try. And a dance class. And I would love to be able to run inside again, and not on a treadmill, so I could get back in 5K shape (this time, with Hub!). And swimming! I could totally do something different for my cardio every week, or every day (of my cardio days) for the week! And my Hub would go with me! Okay, this might be really cool.
(Also. I know I love the recumbant bike, but I would love it more if it wasn't sitting in my damn living room taking up space all the time. I don't think we should go all crazy and SELL it, but maybe it could end up in the basement storage space. Maybe. With my writing workspace and the recumbant bike out of the living room, we might have a bit of space to breathe again.)
5) Still contemplating babies. Which is, really, related to my goals of the year: writing and muscle. I would like to have a respectable amount of muscle mass (and a respectably lower amount of fatty mass) by the time we start trying to have kids, because apparently that makes it easier to carry around that belly, aleviates some of the wacky physical issues, and (on a note of pure vanity) would make it a lot easier to drop the baby weight once the baby is born. And I want to get writing, and even if I can't get a book entirely written pre-baby, I want to have the ability to concentrate on writing firmed up so that I'm not so friggin' distractable, because having kids = MUCH MORE DISTRACTION THAN NOW.
6) My Hub is in desperate need of new pants. His are falling off, in spite of his having not only tightened his belt as far as it can go, but also having added a whole new notch in the belt. His pants have always been too big, in a way; since he carries most of his weight in his gut, he'd have to buckle his belt below the belly and he'd still end up with pants that flapped around like sails. Now he tries to buckle the belt in the right place, but it slides down because his middle is too small for these pants, and he is SWIMMING in the damn pants. His shirts are too big, too; he's gone from "hey, look, I can button the top button on these shirts!" to "okay, I can almost wrap the sides around to meet in the middle." Again, he always tended to buy a size up, due to the belly, so without the belly it's just... holy crow. Must buy the boy new clothes. MUST.
7) I'm so, so happy about making it through the whole Thanksgiving/Christmas season without candy or cookies or pie or cake or ice cream or whatever. Which is weird, because up until the past month or so I could have never imagined holidays without them. Or life without them, for that matter. I am now living sans coffee, and (except for the occasional cup of unsweetened chai) caffeine-free. Again: something I could never have told you was possible before. Those were two of my big limits, where if something threatened to take my coffee or my chocolate away, I would've wailed, gnashed my teeth, and maybe committed MURDER. And now... poof, nothing. Weird to realize how an addiction is really an ADDICTION, you know?
posted by Meg at
11:27 AM
4 Comments:
I just smile every time i read your entries, coz you and your hub have such a positive, sane approach to leading a healthy life. your bub will be lucky to come into the world with such groovy parents :)
and just a wee word on the gym. i know the money can be an issue, but it can be really cool to have a 'third home' to go to, somewhere that's not work or home. not only is there the added variety to your workouts, there might even be a nice wee lounge you could hang out at to do some writing ;)
By
Shauna, at 7:01 AM
I love your blog.I really really do.I am always on the search for NON-DIET type blogs,I sincerely believe in a better way and I think you have it :)
By
lisa jane, at 9:14 PM
just sending you a big blog crush kiss.Ive been reading your archives the last couple of days and I just adore your blog/you.You are hilarious and I love your attitude.I also love your pashion.
Im not sure what else I can say just..go you!!!!
By
lisa jane, at 3:51 AM
I too must give huge kudos to your blog. I too have done the whole "lose-a-ton-of-weight-and-now-must-maintain" thing and so I can relate. Yet for some reason your writing gives me motivation to continue to be good--or at least try harder to be good. Keep up the positngs, please, they really are a delight to read.
By
Anonymous, at 11:36 AM
Post a Comment
<< Home