I Am That Girl Now

This looks to be a travelin' year

2008-02-28T10:17:00.003-06:00

Money, I have to say, sucks. Our rent just went up $35/month, which on top of our electric bill doubling and the price of various groceries going up (meat and milk particularly) is causing a certain amount of gnawing anxiety about the future. It doesn't help that our company just fired six people today; according to our president that's all the staff cuts that'll happen, but since my Hub and I are both employed by the same company it really does remind one at moments like this that having both one's employment eggs in one basket is possibly not the best idea. Too late to really do anything about it now, at any rate; with the economy going south, it's not a good time to switch jobs-- and I'd feel bad about possibly taking a job away from someone else who really NEEDS the work, you know?

Recessions are scary things, I tell you. This is my second while in the workforce, and it looks to be a lot worse than the first. We're continuing to pay down the student loan like mad, which is probably stupid-- if we were sane people we'd be making the minimum payments and socking the rest into savings to keep us afloat in case next year there's another budget deficit in our company and one of us gets laid off because of it. Our credit cards are almost free of any lingering debt (mild problem with my Hub's card, but it should be taken care of by mid-March), my medical bills are paid (or will be as soon as the bastards finally apply the check), our taxes for the year will be paid tonight or tomorrow, and I figure that if worst comes to worst, we'll have enough money to pack our possessions into a U-Haul and drive back to the old homestead to live with my parents for a year. It's been done before-- and this time, at least they have high-speed internet, which is frankly all we need to sustain our lifestyle. Well, that and occasional access to sushi and Thai food, which is problematic in the small-town Midwest, but oh well.

Must admit that I'm looking for corners to cut. It sucks to be my Hub right now because he is JUST starting to get a handle on his spending (I really need to stop enabling him when he goes on one of his "I just need to get out of the office, so we're going to go out to eat" jaunts) and now I'm eyeing his parking expenses and all the times he buys extra food. Poor boy. I can't help it; if there's any way we can sock money into savings again, I intend to do it.

I've just been working on the budget again, specifically in this case hashing through the travel budget. We throw in $70 per month, which used to get us airfare to wherever my family was gathering for Thanksgiving or Christmas plus car rental for Christmas or Thanksgiving for my Hub's family, who live closer. (We trade off; one family gets us for Thanksgiving, the other Christmas, alternating by year.) After a tense situation with the travel budget last year when airfare skyrocketed, my Hub got over his intense dislike of long car trips and, last year, we drove the 13-hours-each-way journey to my hometown not once, but THREE TIMES.

This year looks to be no different. The budget thus far looks like it can handle two or three trips out to see my Hub's family, and three or four trips to see mine. This does not include the possible trip to go see my sister and help move her from one side of the country to the other, which I am considering, but which would need to be funded by me alone. (On the one side, it might be kind of fun, and I love my sister and would rather not have her drive the whole thing alone. On the other side, OH MY HOLY GOD that's a lot of driving.)

We have five trips planned already, four of which are necessary; one is extra. There's the trip (which needs to happen pretty damn soon) to visit our nieces and nephew and, incidentally, my brother-in-law and his intended. The trip home for my sister's wedding. The trip home for the great outdoor music festival. The trip out to ye olde homestead (quite literally; my mom's family farm) for Thanksgiving. The trip back to the in-laws for Christmas.

The two extra, thus-far-unplanned-albeit-much-bandied-about trips are starting to look like trips that would involve Doing Things. New things. Camping and hiking, on one; roller coasters on another. I am dubious of all these things.

I am not typically an outdoorsy girl. My sister and my dad go on camping trips out in one national park or another every summer, and it sounds like this year will be no different-- except for the part where they've invited me and the Hub along. Mom will not be coming, since she hates camping quite a lot, and my sister's fiance' (who will be by that point her husband) is stuck with work, but apparently they want us along.

My Hub wants to go, rather desperately. One of the wacky things about getting him into regular contact with my family is that they influence him in strange ways, on things where I've always been the odd duck out. He encounters these things via my family and then gets very enthusiastic about them, so I end up getting dragged along and, here's the weird part, most of the time I end up enjoying myself. In this case: camping.

I associate camping with a lack of toilet facilities, possibly due to the girls-only camping out in a cow pasture at a friend's grandma's farm back in high school (one morning we woke up with a cow staring through the tent door, I shit you not), and while I am vaguely okay with doing that overnight in an all-girl environment, more than one night is not okay. So when this idea came up, I immediately called my sister to find out how the hell one peed in a national park. Happily, she assures me that when Dad says "camping" he means "car camping" (with daily loooong hikes to see pretty things) and so we would have facilities at hand. Which is a relief.

That said, there's still the rest of it. The outdoors. Lots and lots of hiking. Mosquitos and bears and lord knows what else. In the great tradition of my mother and her mother before her, I am spending some quality time freaking out about all the unknowns involved.

Part of my thing about unknowns (both "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns" as Donald Rumsfeld would say) is, I guess, a lack of assertiveness... which sounds weird, but hear me out. Known issues, I can plan for and work around. Unknown issues, I have to deal with on the spot, and either shut up and deal with it or-- a new option for me-- assert myself in order to take care of myself. Some stuff I have to ask for on the spot, like if I get tired and have to rest or am hungry and want to stop to eat (or have to pee and have to find somewhere to go), but some stuff I have to assert myself about earlier, asking questions and participating in the planning. I'm... really not used to that. To be honest, that part scares me more than the actual camping or hiking. Asserting myself as an equal partner in this stuff is a freaky concept. Having some control is a comforting thought, don't get me wrong, but doing the part where I actually speak up and take some of that control? Oy. Nerve-wracking.

I'm trying, I'm trying. I'm getting little practice sessions every day at work, when I have to poke someone about an e-mail that they still haven't responded to, or ask if they've finished project X yet. As they say in Intuitive Eating-- granted, in reference to a whole different thing-- each little instance of finding that you can do something weaves together, over time, into a structure that you can stand on, and trust, and feel confidence in. Hopefully that means that over time I won't be so scared of new, unknown things anymore, because I'll have the confidence to ask questions-- not to mention have confidence that I can walk into any situation and if I need to change something to suit myself, I will be able to ask and take care of it.

In the meantime, it's still nerve-wracking.

I'm continuing to work on recognizing my hunger and my fullness. It's odd, because while I can recognize the extremes (starving half to death and stuffed to the gills, respectively) the smaller levels on the way up are still strangers to me and I have to listen like crazy. For instance: today we had sushi for lunch because, seriously, had to escape the atmosphere of morbid paranoia at the office. My combo had three rolls. I stopped with six pieces still on my plate, listening to my stomach, and couldn't tell what the hell was going on because it was just plain quiet, so I split the difference, ate two more pieces, and left the other four for my Hub. Right now I feel slightly overstuffed, so apparently my initial instinct was correct. It's just so damn hard to leave food on my plate when I can't tell if I'm full or not-- and harder still to leave food knowing it will immediately disappear into my Hub's mouth. 'Cause then it's GONE. That's the scars of twenty years of dieting, right there-- that "fuck, if I don't eat it ALL then I'll regret it forever because I'll never have it again!" mentality. You'd think it would just be about sweets and junk food, but I have low levels of this reaction even for ordinary food like tuna noodle cassarole.

I'm trying to think of hunger and fullness along the lines of another biological need: having to pee. It takes a lot of time when we're little to learn to go before there's an imminent explosion, because the signs before that point are a lot more subtle. All of us learn to recognize those subtle signs eventually, though, so we take care of things long before the point of no return. We learn to recognize such subtleties in our bladders that we can gauge, when on a road-trip, whether we'll make it to the next road oasis in 23 miles or if this one, right here, is our best bet. Hunger and fullness can't be that different, can they? I learned one; surely I can learn the others.

An ENTIRE MONTH LATER I am finishing the review!

2008-02-25T13:00:00.000-06:00

I started writing this on 1/25/08-- strangely, a full week before my life briefly blew up on February 1. It may have been one of the outlying warning signs, I think. Anyway, since I'm reviewing Shauna's book The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl, I am going to throw in a bonus review for the hell of it, on Rethinking Thin by Gina Kolata.

Okay, so, about The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl. I quite honestly rode past my El stop the first time I read this book on the train, because I was so engrossed in the early adventures of tiny!Dietgirl that I looked up groggily at Fullerton and realized moments before the door closed again that, wait, I was supposed to get off BEFORE this, and jumped off the train in the nick of time. And the thing is, it pissed me off mightily, because I wanted to keep reading! I did something I haven't done since my college days: I kept the book out and read out of the corner of my eye while navigating the steps down, corridor across under the tracks, and steps back up to the opposite platform. Then kept reading-- mind you, this was in single-digit temperatures and I had no gloves with me-- while waiting for the train.

Also out in the cold, I was about to cry, because while Shauna's trademark combination of graceful wit and hilarity was very much in evidence in those early chapters, there's a lot of painful stuff in there and it resonates, man, it resonates hard. I do not like remembering being at a place where I hated myself and couldn't stand being in my own body, I don't like remembering the stuff that made me grow up the way I did or the times when I was so depressed after college that I hid in my room all day and only ventured out after dark to get groceries and rent movies, but at this point it was like someone had pulled it gently from my brain and put it down on paper, only changed a little. And now I'm getting all welled-up again, because of this weird thing where I don't like to feel bad for myself about those times, but reading about someone else having such similar times meant it was okay to feel bad for her... so I could feel bad, at last, about those experiences, through her. I'm doing a terrible job of explaining it but maybe this is what Aristotle referred to with drama as catharsis, an acceptable release for emotions. Either way, many many thanks to Shauna for writing it because dear God, I needed that.

It's a wonderful book. I've read all the Dietgirl archives so you'd think that reading a book I already knew the ending to would be less engrossing, but, nope, every time I picked it up (I have had four books on rotation this week, another thing I haven't done since college) I got sucked right in. It's such a wonderful mix of big dramatic stuff (large amounts of weight lost! moving across the world! meeting a guy! Red Square! impending doom! weddings and more weddings!) combined with wacky hilarity (farting and Elvis and drunken babble and all) and unabashed honesty about the whole sticky business of owning and caring for a body in transition. I am also now of the opinion that Dr. G needs to be cloned and these clones distributed around the globe to women everywhere, because he sounds like an utter delight and a real keeper.

I kept wondering how the hell she was going to turn this into a story with an ending, but she did, and did so beautifully, and I damn near cried. I feel so proud and sort of ready to bound off into mid-air. Oh, Shauna: NICE JOB.

Next up: Rethinking Thin. This ended up being the last of the pile o' books on my nightstand from my ill-fated whoops-wait-that-didn't-use-the-gift-certificate! Amazon purchase, most of which were about fat. And holy cow, this is the most scientific one of the bunch. No Fat Chicks was electric with the fervor of a woman who'd just discovered how she personally, among millions of others, had been fucked over by the diet industry, and extensively covered how the whole thing works, from models to magazines to WeightWatchers to Lean Cuisine; The Diet Myth was a drier read by a lawyer reviewing the supposed scientific case that being fat will kill you, who takes short breaks among all the data and the fascinating sociological narrative (including a fascinating look at the Clinton/Lewinski mess with an eye toward the influence of fat and dieting upon the psyches of Clinton, Lewinski, and Linda Tripp-- AND Hillary for good measure) to burst out with worry over what the hell is going to happen to his daughter as she grows up among the fat-is-bad noise machine. Both are clear from the outset about what their conclusions are.

Rethinking Thin is more coy about its main premise, and instead leads the reader through the whole thinking process, handing us more and more evidence along the way, until we reach the end of the book gaping at the sheer overwhelming mass of accumulated evidence indicating that the diet game is complete bullshit. Even better for the average reader (i.e. those without a weight problem) who is likely to think that the problem with fat people is that they don't really, REALLY try to lose weight, this book also follows a group of people serving as test subjects for a study on whether Atkins does better than traditional calorie-counting. We meet them, we see their initial desperation, we share their initial triumphs and fall into the same belief that this time, this time, it's going to be different and they're going to make it, they're going to become skinny. Then, as time goes on, we see the inevitable plateaus, we watch them struggle as their bodies take back control of the situation and render each dieter helpless before their hunger and the need for a variety of nutritional components. In the end, the system didn't prove that one diet won out over the other-- it concluded that they both sucked.

There's so much scientific data in here that I nearly burst my brain trying to work it all in. Kolada lays out the details of study after study after study showing that the appetite is controlled by forces determined by a person's genetic code, and that no amount of willpower is enough to fight the body when the body really, really, really wants something. We also get a frightening history of the past 100+ years of diet insanity, from the "chew your food insanely thoroughly" movement and women taking digitalis (!!) to increase their metabolism, to the birth of the low-carb diet (not from Dr. Atkins, but before the turn of the last century) and the original low-calorie health-foods dieters (which incidentally produced the breakfast cereal as we know it, via the accidental invention of the cornflake), to the ham-handed attempts of doctors in the 1920s testing to see what would happen if they just sawed fat off a person and the first bariatric surgeries, to the long, long story of how more modern scientists are slowly untangling the process of how the stomach tells the brain "enough" and how that process can differ between a thin person and a fat person. It's just crazy.

I finished it about five minutes before calling my parents for our weekly hour-long chat, and it came in handy when I made the mistake of mentioning the buffet my Hub and I had gone to and how he'd eaten easily twice as much as I had. My dad immediately started talking about how Mom eats twice as much as he does, all the time; he meant to give it a jokey tone but we all knew it was another one of his supposedly sly attempts to poke Mom about her weight. For the first time I can remember, I had information immediately at my fingertips and I crushed his comment in the most chipper way possible. I didn't yell, I didn't point out that he was being a jackass, I just mentioned that hey, I just read this book that talks all about how people have completely different appetites determined by their genes, and how the process is so long and complicated that the scientists don't know the half of it yet, but they do have a LOT of things in that process documented that differ from person to person and affect each person's weight. Dad backed up really fast at that point, as he is wont to do when he discovers that he's up against someone who's loaded for bear with information on a subject he really knows very little about beyond surface assumptions.

IT WAS AWESOME. I was so proud of myself. I protected my mom! I stood up to my dad! I wasn't scared! It was great! For that, this book is already worth the cost (admittedly, I bought it used and hence discounted, but it would've been worth the full price). Bravo, Gina Kolata.

Putting all of this together with the other books-- No Fat Chicks, The Diet Myth, and the gentle "banish disordered eating and accept your body no matter what weight it turns out is your natural one" views of Intuitive Eating, I've got a wealth of material that all informs each other. From No Fat Chicks, I know the extent of the noise machine, how pervasive the "lose weight so you can count as an actual person" message is in our society, and how incestuous the relationship is between women's magazines and the diet industry, and how freakish amounts of diet studies are sponsored by companies that stand to make money off women's hatred of their own bodies, and how deep fat prejudice runs, how bad it can get. From The Diet Myth I know what the "fat kills" arguments are, how the studies are flawed, how they're ignoring other studies that indicate that the whole concept of "eat less, move more, lose weight" is hopelessly useless, how journalists always tip the story towards the "fatties suck" side, and I was introduced to the concept of a "moral panic", which is certainly what we're in the middle of right now when it comes to obesity. From Rethinking Thin, I've got a pretty good handle on how amazingly complex the human body is, and how appetite is an innate survival trait, genetically created, and difficult to fight. From Intuitive Eating, I've picked up on just how disordered the eating of even the average American has gotten, and how trying to get skinny can give you the opposite affect (not to mention the new studies these days indicating that whoops, artificial sweeteners make the body expect sweets and can actually make you fatter as a result).

Conclusion: Bodies come in a vast, vast variety of weights, just as they do heights. Humans are genetically wired to have a 20 to 30 pound range of weight individual unto themselves; below or above that range, drastic measures need to be taken to keep ya there. Years of dieting count as drastic measures, but generally they end up counting as drastic measures to keep the weight high, because all they really do is teach the body that starvation is right around the corner, so keep the metabolism low and don't let go of any fat, ever. Disordered eating (which actually includes diets) messes things up further.

What I can't hash out yet (and it sounds like nobody else can, either, so at least I'm not alone in this) is what happens in the cases where something does work. Is there such a thing as "doing it right", or did it just work for the people it worked for and they're a minority? Am I at the bottom of my weight range right now (if one assumes my top weight as the top), or was my top weight entirely due to severely disordered eating, and I'm at the top (or middle?) of my natural weight range right now? As I continue intuitive eating, will my weight go up, or down?

I'm also not sure how much it matters, at the end of the day. The two things I seem to have latched onto as great truths are that I should accept my body for what it is and love it, and that I can have a natural, satisfying relationship with food. And if I both feel good about my body and feel calm and satisfied in my eating, then that's honestly all I ever wanted. I used to think that's something that dieting could give me, but it never did; I was never at peace with my body or with food. Nor did it occur when I was ferociously non-dieting, eating food to prove that I could, or to sop up excess negative emotions. I never felt good about my body either way; I never felt at peace with food either way. I always, always was preoccupied with food to some degree (more so when I was dieting than when I wasn't). And I just can't deal with that anymore, can't handle hating my body anymore (even at my thinnest, I had lots of spots to complain about and a deep distrust of it, just waiting for the fat to come back), can't deal with having food be such a huge thing in my life. I want more than that.

2008-02-19T20:00:00.000-06:00

Okay, I had a whole post about stuff which had NOTHING to do with me, or mental health, or dis-disordering one's eating, or yoga, or meditation, or personal finances, or ranting about diets, and I don't mean in a refreshing "oh thank God, she's onto a new topic" but more in a "wow, is she taking too many cold meds?" way. I'm trying to piece together some kind of what-I-learned summary that can be useful as a parallel to something from the fatblogosphere but honestly at this point it's almost time to do yoga and I want to keep an eye on the Wisconsin primary results after eight. So. Here's a ramble-y update instead.

1) Okay, did you see the stories on how diet soda can seriously mess you up? I am bereft. I'd heard rumors about this for a few years, but mostly on blogs, not on the news, and as close as the two are getting to each other (God bless Junkfood Science), these were not the kind of blogs that act like news organizations, they were the kind of OMG THE WORLD IS GOING TO BLOW UP blogs that do not inspire confidence. So... this was more of a "oh, hell, they were right" kind of thing.

I've been trying to go off diet soda for a while now. Mostly because of the caffeine, which I try to avoid because I seriously have enough problems even without it. And because my boss's dentist told him that his one-per-day diet cola habit was dissolving his teeth, which wigged me out, but that is neither here nor there. Thing is, that logic led me to have decaf versions instead, and now I am hearing bad things about them. Well, PHOOEY. I suppose I'm going to have to just go ahead and stick to un-soda drinks from now on-- mainly water with lemon, as is our wont, because we are so damn cheap-- and have full-on sweet-ass soda once in a blue moon if I really want it. What the hell, it'll save me money, I guess.

2) I'm re-reading Intuitive Eating, inspired by Mae over at The Pretty Face, who is going deeply into it with her therapist and is awesome enough to post about her progress-- which I applaud and consider a damn brave thing to do, considering that it's a difficult thing to articulate and that it lacks any tangible number-based goals and markers the way that scale-based progress does. This time, I think, I'm going to do actual work with it, try to incorporate it into my life instead of sort of padding around the edges. I suppose the past several months count sort of as the first phase, in which I got used to the idea that I am never ever going to diet again, and read a lot of books about the damage dieting can do, am doing pretty well with honoring my hunger, and kiiiind of started making peace with food. It comes and it goes, and I'm glad for every time I have a good moment that I can remember later and remind myself that it's possible to be comfortable with food.

I have some amazing moments that make me go !!! in retrospect. My husband ordered pizza on Friday, and I got myself three pieces. Put 'em on the plate, and as I was carrying it out of the kitchen I clearly remember hefting the plate, looking down at it in amazement, and thinking, Good Christ, that's heavy. That's a lot of food. It kind of caught me in the middle of the whole thing, so when I ate them ('cause of course I ate them! they were yummy!) I made an effort to take my time and "be present" for the eating process, so my mind would recognize that I had eaten, y'know? And then I thought about more, and contemplated my tummy, and decided, No, that will do. That may in fact have been too much. Five minutes later, my stomach was informing me Oy, that was totally too much, what were you thinking? So, small victory: I recognized the size of what I was eating, I ate it mindfully, and I have a clear mental image of the aftermath to remember next time, so hopefully next time I'll pause between the second and third slices. And, hey, I was full. It is not unknown for me to try to eat the whole damn pizza, yea, even in these enlightened days.

I had another one of those moments when it occurred to me that we have had tortilla chips-- flavored ones, even-- on top of our refrigerator since Saturday. I ate some of them Saturday, got bored with them fairly quickly, and haven't been back since. This is huge news because tortilla chips in general (Doritos in particular, but any kind with flavored dust on it) are a long-standing weakness of mine, going back to the days when the people I baby-sat for every evening after school regularly stocked Doritos of one kind or another, which I was welcome to, and which my parents never had around-- and taking on special significance during college when I had a long-standing joke about choosing my vending machine "meal" items based on color (Coke: red can, Doritos: red bag) and also did my first full-on binging with a bag of Doritos and a pint of ice cream (that, a 2-liter of soda, and two or three one-dollar/one-night movie rentals, and you've got my idea of an enjoyable Friday night; granted, sometimes pizza would replace the Doritos). Ah, chips.

My point being that it's typically impossible for me to get chips and not eat them immediately, as in eat damn near all of them immediately. And we've had these since Saturday. And I've been hormonal. I'm kind of amazed at this. I consider eating them every night, but the thing is that I'm never in the mood for them, or not hungry, and I never end up eating them. It's the damnedest thing.

Here's another one: I was reading Intuitive Eating this morning, and I considered getting a bag of chocolate to keep in my desk, the better to convince myself that I could have chocolate any time if I wanted it, and so forth. Considering is as far as I went, though, because, I swear to God, a weary little voice piped up in the back of my head saying Oh, God, do we have to? I really don't want any chocolate.

SERIOUSLY.

The most astonishing thing was that when I consulted my stomach, it turned out to be true: I wasn't hungry, and the thought of chocolate gave me a sort of weird "bleah, ick" feeling. I changed my thought process, wondering if maybe I should still buy it in case I wanted it later, and the little voice piped up again: If we do, we'll just buy a damn candy bar, or pick up one of those little pieces from the free bowl in the mailroom. Now shut up about chocolate because I'm seriously tired of talking about it.

And you know what? That's exactly what happened. I kind of wanted something sweet right after lunch, as I tend to do, so I snagged a piece of chocolate from the free candy bowl, and relished the hell out of it, and moved on. It sounds like such a small thing, having a day when I treated chocolate like a tiny part of my life instead of something huge and important, but it felt big.

3) It has occurred to me that I'm learning from meditation in wacky ways. I've mentioned before about how I'm learning to treat moments when my brain wanders off following one thought or another, the gentle "hey, when you drift away from concentrating on your breathing, no big; when you recognize that's what you've done, don't judge yourself on it, just let go and go back to the breath" attitude. What I realized today is that that's concentration, at least what passes for it with me. Not only that, it's having an effect on my work performance; while I'm still just as distractable, I notice the distraction earlier and go back to what I was doing without kicking myself or, for that matter, fighting myself on it. It seems that when I'm not punishing myself for being distractable, my rebellious half isn't so keen on running off away from the task at hand.

Amazing.

Still working on the thing where I avoid certain jobs at work. Some things I've got a handle on-- my customer service and e-mail/voice-mail response time is up a billion percent in the past few months-- and some things I'm trying to figure out. Part of it are the things I don't think I should have to do; because I'm actively denying the fact that I do in fact have to do these jobs, I'm neither doing something constructive in a) doing the job or b) putting together a game plan for having someone else do the job. Which means that it gets put off until the end of time.

Part of it, I've noticed, is where I hit things I don't know (or things that I'm uncertain on, or things that I know part of but I feel unsure of a particular detail or even if a detail exists). I get antsy about things I don't know, and avoid them, put them off, pretend they don't exist. Which is a problem at the moment because one of my big projects for the year hit a snag regarding things I don't know, and I got stuck. The clear answer is to ask someone else, which I still haven't done. If I want to get the damn thing done, though, it would probably be a good idea to ask someone and get moving again. Breathe in, breathe out, make the call.

So... progress, I think. And now, yoga time.

The stunning concept of doing something for the pure hell of it

2008-02-18T11:32:00.005-06:00

This cold season is the worst, I swear. I'm still draining yuck out of my sinuses (and one ear, which I'm keeping a wary eye on) after almost two weeks, and when my Hub caught the cold from me last week, he ended up spending two days at home before venturing back to work, insisting on driving for the last two days of last week and now again today because he was too wiped to contemplate using the train. On the one hand, he really is, although I'm pretty sure he'd survive it if we had no other means of transportation. On the other hand, I'm wondering if I just got a lesser version of the same cold, or if it hit him harder than it hit me, or if I'm just all-around tougher than he is, because I took one day off and still went to physical therapy that day, taking the train in fact, and took the train to work the rest of the week. Probably a combination of all three, although I am enjoying the possibility that I am bad-assed.

I did two sessions of very very very gentle yoga-- the first yoga DVD I ever bought, as it turns out-- the week before I got this cold. Then I was laid out for pretty much another week, because this is the cold that eats all other colds for breakfast. On my way home from work last Wednesday, I was all by myself because I'd given my poor Hub this cold and I started thinking that I should do some yoga when I got home. On the one hand, I was feeling a little feisty and wanted to use the other "introduction" yoga DVD that I have, the one that's a step up from the other, twice as long, twice as hard. On the other hand, I still wasn't sure if I was physically up to it. I'd meant to do the other DVD a few more times before venturing into anything harder.

I finally decided hey, what the hell, I'll do the harder one. Do it carefully, and only go as far as I can, and take breaks if I need to, because the DVD doesn't know more about what my body can do than I know. Do the DVD, in a word, mindfully.

So I did.

Essentially, I'm starting over. I know the poses, but it's been a year and my body is forgetful. My flexibility has gone right back to pretty much zero. I'm still terribly nervous about my shoulder; I'm doing my PT exercises every day but a part of me still lives in dread that I'll reach a certain way at some point and feel that flash of dull pain again, signalling that the inflammation is back, that it will always come back, that my bones are too close together and I'll have to get the surgery. So I wasn't really expecting this to be any kind of profoundly positive experience.

Boy, was I wrong.

It's been a whole different experience this time through. For one thing, I've been doing meditation for a year now, and that influences my attitude more than I expected. I can concentrate on my breathing while I move and hold the poses, something that I used to really not be good at. More to the point, I find that I have something invested in the breathing-- I understand what it's for, I grasp the meaning, and thus I think it's important.

Another thing is that my physical therapy has made me very, very aware of what the muscles in my shoulders and back do, why they exist, how they move. I thought it would make me hesitant and more prone to quit; on the contrary, I have ended up working harder because of it. For the first time, I've really heard the instructor on the DVD talking when they add detail to poses, telling me to "sink the spine into the back, pull the shoulder blades together and down, keep the neck long, the shoulders away from the ears". Suddenly it makes sense! it means all the things that my physical therapist has been telling me about proper posture and the muscles that need to be strengthened to keep me from getting injured again! it means that if I do these poses with a view toward working my back properly, instead of stretching out my recalcitrant hamstrings, yoga can actually be part of my therapy instead of a danger to it! Oh, happy day.

The real difference, though, didn't occur to me until last night, after my third session of "real" yoga. I've been doing yoga every other day, using the body scan meditation on the "off" days, and even though I consciously set up that schedule a whole week ago, it didn't strike me until yesterday that I'm not doing this for exercise. It's not exercise for me now; it's meditation. It's one of the things that I do when I have my hour every night to work on my concentration and my ability to relax; it's something I do to keep in touch with my body and with the current moment.

Not exercise.

People, it floored me to realize this. For the past twenty years, I can't name a single physical activity that I undertook without an intention of burning calories. I live in a densely populated urban area where I walk to get from place to place, but any time it became something more challenging, like seeing if we could walk home from work (about six miles, last I checked), it immediately crossed the line into exercise. Even paddling around on our beloved inflatable kayak was exercise; I enjoyed it, sure, but again I always had it in the back of my mind that this was an acceptable pastime because it was physical and burned calories.

Every other time I've done yoga before this month, I did it for the exercise-- usually in combination with something more cardio-oriented, like running or pedaling an exercise bike. Not this time. I actually have been doing something physically challenging without thinking about burning calories. THIS IS HUGE.

I remember getting a free session with a fitness coach at Bally's (oy) back when I was newly moved to Chicago, when I was worried about gaining back the weight that I'd lost on my anorexic-level diet and obsessive exercise, back home. The woman asked me what kind of exercise I liked, and for a minute I just kind of stared at her with a blank expression, baffled at the whole notion of enjoyment in combination with exercise. I'd been on the yo-yo diet cycle for more than ten years by that point and nobody had ever told me that I had the option of doing things I enjoyed for exercise. By that point, I really didn't have anything that I liked to do, physically, so I just gawped at the woman like she was a crazy person. I didn't like any exercise. There was the kind I could stand, and the kind I couldn't stand, and that was pretty much it.

I have vague memories of this not being true when I was a child. I liked to ride my bike. I liked to twirl my baton. I loved dancing and swimming and running around the park with my sister, chasing our dog. Having read and adored the (incredibly racist and sexist in retrospect, holy shit) Tarzan books, I aspired to climb trees-- something which I never really got the hang of, which is just as well given my fear of heights. I ran around like any other kid, acting out my imaginary world.

What I really remember, though, is the summer when I was twelve and my dad decided that, as part of my punishment for some completely unrelated thing involving my grades, I would have to do a series of chores every day all summer. Vacuuming the house was one, I remember that. Cleaning the dog poo out of the backyard, which was a disgusting and odeous task. There were other things that I've forgotten, about ten in total, and one was exercise. Every day I had to either work on our Nordic-Trak cross-country skiing machine (remember those?) or run around the park X number of times. Absolutely required. And, like the rest of my chores, it was something I had to get done in the morning before I was allowed to do anything else.

My sister didn't get this punishment, of course, because she hadn't been acting out at school via procrastination and occasional cheating. If she had, I'm not sure whether or not she would have had the exercise portion tacked on. Maybe she would have; that was the summer marking the worst point of the war between my parents regarding my mom's weight, and it's possible that my dad was panicked enough about either of his daughters following in their mother's footsteps that he might have made my stick-thin sister exercise, too. I doubt it, though, because that was the summer he convinced me I was fat. That was the summer his cousins, visiting on their way somewhere else, couldn't remember us kids' names and referred to me offhand as "the chubby one", which infuriated my dad-- at me, for existing in a way that brought on that comment, and he yelled at me about it later that night. That was the summer I saw him forcing my weeping mother onto the bathroom scale. That was the summer he admonished me that I didn't "want to turn out like (my) mother". That was the summer he started criticizing the way I looked, changing forever the way I looked at myself in the mirror. That was the summer he criticized my running on the few times he bothered going running with me, calling me lazy when I was honestly tired.

I came out of that summer associating exercise with forced drudgery, I came out of that summer convinced that I was no good at any kind of physical movement, and I came out of that summer horribly self-conscious about what I looked like in public. I wouldn't go swimming anymore, or go to dance lessons, or play kickball at recess. And since then, I haven't done anything physically challenging (or at least physically interesting) just to do it, just to experience it; I've always had that exercise angle going on, and it never lasts.

So... WOW. I've recognized for a while that I used to have a capability to do physical things for the pure hell of it, and that I lost it, and why, but before now the enormity of what I lost was still a little lost on me because I didn't know, in the here and now, what it was like to enjoy moving without any thought of exercise. Now, I kind of do, and it's a little freaky. It's like I've taken my whole concept of how to tell if I'm "doing it right" and turned it upside-down; instead of looking to other people and their views and judgements of me, instead of looking to the experts who talk about what burns the most calories or has the biggest health benefits, I'm checking inside of me, asking hey, is this okay? we feeling good? we enjoying this? and getting answers, listening to them.

What I'm hearing from inside these days is that I like meditating. I don't do well with sitting meditation, but the body scan works wonders, and yoga works that same me-with-my-body vibe. Possibly it's because what I need, more than anything else, is to get out of my own head and reconnect with my body. And maybe this is acting as a bridge into other activities, reconnecting me not only with my own body, but with the joy of moving my body for the sheer hell of it. Not because anybody else makes me. Not because I should. Not because I'm fat and I deserve to be punished. Just because I like doing something.

I'm vaguely eyeing other activities at this point, but right now I'm just enjoying the fact that I have this one. It's a glowing little personal triumph, all mine.

Reaction vs. Response; Acceptance vs. Denial

2008-02-08T11:38:00.000-06:00

I still owe DietGirl a review, but in the meantime, I thought it was better to write SOMETHING than to lapse into another one of my absences.

I'm back on the dedicated meditation train this week. I've been getting spotty about it in the past four months or so, and it's been showing: I get more tense, I get more emotionally volitile, I don't handle stress as well. The biggest thing I noticed, though, was the same thing that kept me off this blog lately: I hit a point where I had a lot to do, and a lot that I owed other people, and somehow that made me just... power down, go into hibernation mode. Now that I think about it, that happens a lot. In my good spots, I agree to a lot of stuff and get kind of ambitious, and then I hit a bad spot and the stuff on my list just looks overwhelming to the point where I can't do any of it at all, and I go into hiding. This time through, I had a very bad day last Friday, a full plate all weekend just with chores, and by the time I looked at my in-box on Monday I just couldn't handle anything anymore, and I spent the day putzing around online (which meant avoiding most of my usual sites, since I "owed" people things there, too). Which just made it worse, since nothing got done, and then I woke up Tuesday feeling so overwhelmed that I could barely handle going to work; I had to put in my earplugs (sensory deprivation almost always helps) and power through a bunch of stuff.

Wednesday I stayed home sick, which worked out well because I was sick. It gave me a chance to be quiet and still and empty all day, with nothing expected of me, and that was enough to re-set my mental computer; I've been slowly crawling out of the mess ever since then. I think that part of the problem might have been that I was getting ill-- that never does well for my stress levels or for my ability to concentrate-- and part might have been the lovely winter storm cycles we've been getting that have dumped about a foot and a half of snow on us in the past week, but most of the problem was the same thing it always is: that "too much! overwhelmed!" point, where I react by running away and hiding.

I know that my first reaction to anything is an automatic fight-or-flight reaction... oh, hell, who am I kidding? it's the "flight" reaction, I very rarely manage to stand up for myself. So my first reaction to stressors is to run away, avoid them, duck out, ignore them, deny their existance. I refuse to engage, and then spend a lot of energy staying well clear of them. Then, because I haven't done anything about them, they start weighing on my mind and it becomes twice as exhausting, dragging all that weight around, and I don't feel up to doing anything, and thus the weight builds up and my will-to-work goes down until I'm paralyzed and freaking out. Clearly this reaction is not working for me.

I honestly haven't figured out what's behind all of this. It could be my general fear of imperfection popping up again, or just my chronic general anxiety. It might have something to do with the tiny fear-feeling that pops up out of nowhere when I'm in the middle of a project, and I've noticed that if I don't pay attention at that moment, my automatic reaction is to go do something else instead. It's an incredibly fast reaction; I feel that twinge, and next thing I know I'm surfing the internet.

That one, at least, I have a handle on these days. I still don't know what the hell it is that sets me off, but while my reaction is to bounce off and surf the net, I'm teaching myself a response-- to stop, do a couple deep breaths, recognize that even though I don't know what's up, I'm anxious and glitchy and need to calm down, and then keep working on the same project. Which isn't to say I'm paying attention that much, but I do notice when I make a move to switch from one window to another, and that's when I stop and breathe and stay in one place instead. So instead of an automatic reaction, I do a deliberate response.

What I need is a deliberate response to the TOO MUCH TO DO feeling. I already know that what makes me feel better is to complete SOMETHING, even if it's something small-- anything off my plate is an improvement and it makes me feel more in control of the situation. Get out of denial and into motion.

That reminds me of another thing I've been pondering lately: the concept of acceptance. It is mentioned a lot in my meditation CDs and in my new-to-me copy of Full Catastrophe Living: Accept that X is happening, it says, or accept that you are who you are in this moment, or accept that someone else is doing what they're doing. Which, even in my chronically-afraid-of-confrontation state, strikes me as a very annoying thing to say. "Accept it," these days, generally means that something is how it is, and you just have to get used to it, and if you don't like it, fuck off. That didn't seem to be what the meditation stuff meant, though, because they kept saying that only after accepting something can you respond to it, whether positively or negatively.

There's a subtle distinction there, and I had to really fight it out in my head, but I finally did. They're not having acceptance mean approval, by any means. They're not saying that acceptance means the end of struggle, either; you can still fight against it and say that it is wrong. I finally sorted out that when they use the word acceptance, they're meaning it as the opposite of denial. Acceptance = admitting something exists, admitting it is happening. Accepting racism or sexism, then, would mean admitting that it is occurring, not simmering down and letting the bullshit continue. Acceptance is only a step on the way to action, not the action itself.

Therefore, response is a three-part process: acceptance of the problem, deciding on an appropriate action, and then going forward with that action. Reaction, on the other hand, skips over the first two parts and goes straight to an unthinking action. I can react to something while being in denial about it, or while avoiding it, as I've proven to dramatic effect all week. I can't respond to it, though, without accepting what's going on.

Example: Phone rings at work. Old reaction (this is really what I used to do, up until about a year ago): flinch away from the thought of more demands upon me, and promptly ignore the ringing phone unless it's my boss or a few other in-house people. Call goes to voicemail, and I then ignore its existance forever because I don't listen to my voicemail. New reaction: flinch away from the thought of more demands upon me, then breathe deeply twice as the phone continues to ring, then answer the fucking phone in my best customer-service voice.

I just have to expand that to the rest of my life. When I think about it, I already have in some areas: I get the mail from the mailbox and open it, instead of doing what I used to do when I was first out on my own and ignoring the mailbox for weeks at a time out of sheer dread; I pay my bills (mostly on autopay) instead of putting it off; I answer all my e-mail at work and try to clean out my virtual in-box before I leave for the day; I listen to any voicemail that gets left while I'm away from my desk and answer it. Hard-learned reactions, every one of them, and a lot of work stuff didn't get sorted out until the past six months. I'm still sort of surprised that I didn't get fired; I can only conclude that nobody really knows what I do all day.

So there's my latest breakdown of what I need to work on: acceptance. Recognize the impulse to hide from something, breathe a few times, and dive in. Answer the e-mail from my friends and relatives that I've been ducking for the past week. Pick up the pile of assorted junk in that far corner of the bedroom. Start by not adding to it anymore, maybe, and move on to slow chipping away at what's accumulated already. Move forward.

::breathes deep a few times before hitting POST::

A rant, if you will, about pretty much everything

2008-01-25T08:26:00.000-06:00

I'm in thinking mode. I've been reading a lot-- a lot-- lately, and this time I've moved briefly out of my glut of listen-to-your-body/instincts/etc. books and into a glut of seriously-the-diet-industry-is-fucked-up books. Books that indicate that a) it doesn't seem right for women to be put in the position of having to hate their bodies in order to prove that they're good people, b) what the hell is wrong with people that the level of vindictive hate toward fat people just for being fat is way higher than for, say, drug addicts? c) it seems a mite suspicious that there are a LOT of people making money off the fact that we're on a perpetual weight-loss cycle, particularly given their incestuous relationships with women's magazines and with the studies done on how fat effects health, and d) possibly, just possibly, not all women have the same body types, women naturally put on weight in bits past the age of, oh, fourteen, and maybe we should get over expecting everyone to have the body of a teenage model when that doesn't seem to be physically possible.

My Hub has been giving me a lot of raised eyebrows at my reading material. We got in a very cranky fight once about the entire concept of size-acceptance because he'd read on [very annoying website/forum name deleted] that this meant claiming that morbidly obese people had no health problems. Which is NOT what I meant. I was going with two points:

1) Correlation is not causation. Meaning that although extra weight, heart disease and diabetes seem to go hand in hand, the real thing that causes heart disease and diabetes and whatnot is a crap diet and a lack of exercise, not the weight. Eat better and get exercise: be more healthy. Lose weight by any means necessary: be less healthy. The thing that makes you healthy is not the weight loss, it is the healthy foods and exercise. Your weight is a symptom, not a contributing factor. And frankly, in a lot of people it's not going to match up exactly with their health. People can be perfectly healthy and fifty pounds overweight. People can be skinny and terribly unhealthy. Follow the health, not the weight.

2) The first point aside, how exactly does it help to hate on people "for their own good"? Seriously, this is the worst kind of concern trolling in the history of concern trolling. People are not really that concerned about the health of a fat person walking down the street; they are pissed off that their vision is being polluted by a fat person and they want that person to be skinny so that they, the viewer, can only see things that they find attractive. People discriminate against fat people all the time-- dating, employment, customer service-- and that's not out of concern for the fat person's good. That's out of pure "eeew, yuck, fat cooties". There is no respect, no admittance that yes, we're all human beings here and worthy of being treated with dignity. And frankly, there's no reason for that. It's mean. It's stupid. It's like we're all living in eighth grade, all the time, and I swear to God I thought people were supposed to mature as they got older, have we forgotten how to do that?

In conclusion: a) fat does not necessarily mean bad health, just as skinny does not necessarily mean good health, b) you're not really concerned about someone's health when you bitch about seeing a 140-lb woman on a billboard, and c) does someone's bad health mean that you should mock them and discriminate against them? ("Hey, that guy's got cancer, let's make fun of him!" doesn't parse very well if you're not, you know, in elementary school.) I'm still pissed off about that argument, in case you couldn't tell.

What I'm getting out of all of these books, besides what I mentioned up top, is this:

We do honestly eat like shit in this country. Big companies make a lot of money off of that, too: all the most convenient foods are terrible for you. Fruits and vegetables and lean protein and whole grains don't really figure into convenience; wanting to eat those last three in particular takes learning and dedicated time, instead of just toss, heat, and go. Don't even get me started on fast food. There is serious BIG MONEY in all these things, and the problem isn't that people don't know what the calorie content is, the problem is that this stuff is convenient and the healthy stuff isn't. That's it. It's not asking people to choose between apples and oranges, it's asking people to choose half an hour of work vs. waiting in line for maybe two minutes, or nuking something in the microwave for three, and either way doing no work whatsoever.

Also: we do honestly get shit exercise in this country. And there's a lot of money in that, too. Lots of money in TV, lots of money in video games, lots of money in cars, lots of money, now, in computers... and it goes on and on. Our housing is arranged in suburbs so we can't walk down the block to get a gallon of milk, we have to take the car three miles. Public gathering spaces aren't really so much of a thing anymore. The whole world is arranged for us to do as little exercise as possible to get through our days.

These things, I've been saying since forever. The game is rigged, and in order to overcome it and actually eat well and get exercise, we have to go way out of our way and that sucks. We have to spend a lot of extra time and a lot of extra money to live healthy, and that's not easy, and it shouldn't be treated as such because that ignores the reality of the situation and makes it so that nobody talks about how to honestly fix the fucking problem.

Why? Back to the Myth of the Lazy Fatties. Can't talk about how these things are a lot of work because only fat people have a problem with it, and they only have a problem with it because they're fat and, hence, lazy! BAAAAAAAALLLLS. This isn't something that only touches the lives of the fatties, this is an everybody thing. The skinny people just get to ignore it because nobody looks at them with that "shame, shame, you're doing all this to yourself on purpose" look.

Which leads me to the next point. Yes, to a certain extent we do do this to ourselves. A lot of us, me definitely included, have deep-seated issues about our looks and that turns into disordered eating, and turns into a lot of hiding at home so that we won't have to deal with having other people see us, which in turn doesn't really lend itself to an active lifestyle. Technically, though, even a rat in a maze chooses to go down corridor A, which has proven itself safe if nonetheless an eventual dead end, versus corridor B, which is obviously the right one but which gives the rat an electric shock every time it tries to set foot on it. It's the rat's choice, though, which means that the rat is stupid for ending up in the dead end time and time again. Even when the electric shocks get turned off, even though the rat can't tell; stupid rat. Obviously, it's a choice.

I am starting to feel a lot of anger toward the people dolling out the electric shocks, let me tell you.

My sister always says 'it's like we grew up with two different sets of parents' and, you know, that's true, and in the end I think my problems with my body image comes down to this: I was the first one to hit puberty, and it happened while my dad was in the middle of a war with my mom over her weight. My dad promptly went to work on making sure that I wouldn't turn out like my mom (a phrase he actually used on me, many times, which in retrospect pisses me off a LOT), assigning daily exercise, shaming me for eating more than I "should", shaming me for my weight. Which, seriously, was perfectly normal for my frame. Put that together with the way he reacted to me having problems in school in fourth grade through sixth grade-- gee, ironic, all around the same time!-- and what we had there was a recipe for disaster. It's no surprise that I grew up skittish and passive and headed directly for an eating disorder. Just as it's no surprise that my sister, having a naturally skinnier frame that doesn't come with as much boobs & butt, and who never had problems at school, didn't grow up with the same problems that I had.

I ate my way into larger and larger sizes in a way of rebelling against the notion that I wasn't good enough as I was, and that I had to be controlled because I couldn't be trusted. If my dad and I had concentrated our war on something else, like sex or dating, I probably would have ended up sleeping with every boy in town... a fate which I missed out on because I was convinced at age 13, 5'2" and 120 pounds, that nobody would ever want me because I was so grotesque. Instead, I spent all my pocket money on fast food and then, when I went to college, I spent it all on Ben & Jerry's and Doritos and pizza delivery. THIS is simple cause and effect: mercilessly shame a pre-teen about her body, and you get a socially inept teenager/college student with an eating disorder who is convinced that you hate her. You do NOT get a girl with good health, confidence, a healthy body image, and an intact loving relationship with you. How the hell my dad thought this was possible, I will never know.

Again, this is stuff I've known for forever. I haven't looked out at the big picture for that stuff, though. I haven't looked at what gives people like my dad the ammunition that they use, their concepts of "normal" and "health" all wrapped up in skinny. I haven't looked at the studies that skewed the results and the politicians that used it to create a public scare, I haven't looked at the businesses that can only keep the billions of dollars coming their way if women hate their bodies and will do anything to change them, I haven't, in short, noticed that it doesn't make any sense to start the whole process of shame when shame does more damage than it ever, ever helps, and yet that's all that our entire society seems to do regarding fat. I haven't looked at it before, and it's seriously starting to piss me off.

I eat mostly healthy foods. I exercise a moderate amount. I have awesome scores for blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol. I carry between fifteen to thirty pounds more than my Weight Watchers goal said I should. I'm pretty fucking healthy, my husband thinks I'm the most gorgeous woman he's ever met in his life, I'm good at my job, I have excellent relationships with my family (even my dad, who still might get yelled at for past events if I ever get my courage up) and friends, I give money to charity and give blood and go to church, I take great care of our finances, and I keep myself clean and moisturized and deodorized and my hair is brushed and my teeth are brushed and all my clothes are clean and ironed.

FUCK the weight. If it moves, it moves. If it doesn't, it doesn't. I am through freaking out about this because all the stuff that is important to me is already taken care of. I'm healthy and I'm happy and I intend to stay that way. All I want out of life now is a normal relationship with food and with exercise, and a better ability to deal with stress, and I think I'm on track for eventually having all those things. To hell with expectations of what I should look like: my experiences and thoughts and feelings here, inside my body, need to be at LEAST of equal importance with other people's thoughts and feelings about me. Because it's me, and I am more than what other people think about me, and that's the end of the damn story.

Welcome to Chicago!

2008-01-23T10:00:00.000-06:00

There's something about Chicago in the winter that I dearly love. Admittedly, it's cold, it's bleak, the sky goes iron-gray, we have zero humidity and hence cracked and itchy skin, it snows and, in spite of it being a strong pedestrian town, some of our neighbors utterly refuse to acknowledge the concept of shoveling the sidewalk (note: one of them will shovel a path from their door down to the street, but ignore the sidewalk, the bastards). The wind picks up. The temperature goes down. The sun is only visible during work hours, when we don't get to enjoy it. I still love the season.

I understand that if I was in Los Angeles right now, there would be no snow on the ground and I could walk around in my shirtsleeves or, at most, a hoodie. Friends and family living in various places around the country see every winter as a chance to poke fun at me for living in Chicago, as if it wouldn't be worse in, say, Buffalo, or Minneapolis, or Montreal, or Toronto, or Anchorage. I explain every year that winter is worth it, for the amazing spring and fall we get (and the hot-but-it-could-be-worse summer), and besides, it's not that bad. That's when people start laughing at me.

The thing is, it's really not that bad, once I get the hang of it. It takes a while every year to get my brain recalibrated, the same way that it takes a while each January to force myself to write the new year instead of the old, but once I get the hang of things, it's not that bad. Chicago folk are tough and practical by nature, and I think that's mostly our winters at work: winter survival is not cool by any stretch of the imagination, so there are several months every year where even the rich people wear puffy coats (some still go for fur coats but they are still puffy) and funny-looking hats, where even the flakey guy down the hall will have earnest things to say about making sure there's kitty litter tucked in the trunk of his car, where even the fashionistas in Lincoln Park will adjust to the need for long-johns and layers and waterproof boots. There's a marvelous leveling effect there. It's even a time of great civic... well, not exactly pride, more like identity: we are bonded together as a city by the common need to bitch about street-plowing (it's lightning-fast and efficient by most standards but we are a demanding folk) and The Way People Drive In This Shit (more cautiously than you'd think) and Why The Damn Train Is Taking So Long To Get Here (still generally a fast and well-organized service, for all the bullshit involved). I take it back, actually, there is civic pride proper, which can be boiled down to a single concept: We Are So Bad-Assed That This Fucking Weather Ain't Got NOTHING On Us. When the weather first dipped down into the single-digits this past weekend, nothing slowed down. Everyone joked about hiding inside until Monday with a stock of DVDs and frozen pizzas, but we all knew that if the Bears had made it to the playoffs half the city would have been swarming the stadium. And when it came down to it, it wasn't that bad, you know? Add another layer of socks and an extra t-shirt underneath, break out the down coat and the fleece-lined boots, put a hat on underneath the hood, get a big scarf on the top: problem solved. The city keeps moving, even if the population finds it rather difficult to lower their arms due to the many layers. We Are That Bad-Assed.

Not only that, but there's awesome stuff to make up for it. When we look out at the lake, not only do we get the huge flood of steam coming off it every time the temperature drops, but on certain gray and mildly-cloudy days the sky so exactly matches the lake that it's almost impossible to figure out where the horizon is, and that's a trippy experience you can't get without the big lake and freezing temperatures.

It's a season of unlimited snuggling on the couch because that'll never make you too warm. It's a season of cats wanting lap time instead of draping themselves along the windowsill. It's a season of hot drinks and soup and fresh-baked bread. It's a season of crazy knit or fleece hats, with pom-poms or surprising colors or goofy decorations. It's a season of having something to do in that awkward moment when you've just come in someone's front door, having an instant conversation topic in the questin of where to put coats and whether or not to leave shoes or boots by the door. It's a season of fireplaces and heated discussions about the football post-season games and wondering whether we'll get a good crop of Superbowl commercials this year. It's a season of bulky sweaters and squabbles over the thermostat. Oh, Chicago. Never change.

Hopefully this won't have to be reposted once I've had sleep

2008-01-16T13:24:00.000-06:00

The thing is, I had a GREAT morning before I left for work. I woke up half an hour before the alarm and didn't feel like snoozing anymore, so I showered, fed the cats, meditated for ten minutes, woke up my Hub, got frisky with my Hub (yay morning!), had breakfast, brushed teeth, dried hair, made snacks, and was still out the door on time.

Similarly to the last time I spontaneously awoke before the alarm (last week, I think), all went well until I got on the El. I didn't fall asleep hard this time, but I did fall asleep, and even after jogging around our (largely empty) office a bit and indulging in caffeine, I still feel like I'm about to tip over.

I caught a goof on my husband's paycheck which means they owe him twenty bucks on his next paycheck (and let's just say that it's a good thing I'm watching now, 'cause he didn't notice at all, and it would have been deducted on every paycheck all year had I not noticed), which is all well and good but it means he's $20 short this pay-period... which is really not helpful. I'm trying to get him to follow a spending plan! WORK WITH ME, UNIVERSE, PLEASE.

My Hub is having a worse day than I am... at least, he was. He was so beat and so depressed that I convinced him to take a half-day and go home. Hopefully this fixes things, because I honestly don't know if I'll be able to help. I'm already pretty groggy and I don't imagine it'll improve after work. What the hell is wrong with this week?

My chief concern for the day is that I've got a good friend who went to a fertility doctor and was told, flat-out, that they don't perform IVF on patients with a BMI over 40, and won't do so without a doctor's note if the patient has a BMI between 35 and 39. Now, because my friend desperately wants a baby, she's gone into full-on diet mode. Which isn't the problem. I worry about her, since she seems to be paying more attention to the outside cues than the inside cues and I hope she actually does eat when she's hungry because that way lies madness, but that's not the problem.

First part of the problem: the fact that the doctor has a policy based on BMI. I had a lot of red flags go up on that one. It doesn't say anything about blood pressure, or diabetes, or, you know, anything that might be a legitimate medical concern: it just flat-out assumes that if one has a high BMI like that, one is too risky a case to impregnate. I understand that it's taken as a kind of shorthand for having medical conditions, but dude. Seriously. There's being fat, and then there's being a health risk: these two things may occur together, but assuming that the one is the cause of the other is like saying that pimples cause emotional disturbances in teenagers, when the real cause of both is an excess of hormones. Excess weight and health problems may have the same cause-- eating crap and not exercising-- but what if a person is eating healthy, getting plenty of excercise, scores perfectly on health issues, and still weighs in heavy? What then?

I put my friend in touch with a fat-friendly fertility specialist, "just as a back-up" in case it turns out that a) her doctor is a real asshole when it comes to fat people or b) she gets healthy but doesn't lose weight, in which case she plans to give the current doctor a very rude gesture and go make an appointment with the other one. Yay for First, Do No Harm and their list of open-minded physicians!

Second part of the problem: all the rest of our friends, who immediately jumped on with "yay, lose some weight! we will support you!" instead of "wow, what a fucker! we will support you!". And all the suggestions. Weight Watchers, calorie counting, exercise routines. I mean, hooray for health and all, but it's long been my experience that having some other person in authority impose ye olde "you need to fix yourself before you're worthy to do X" thing is never a good thing in terms of weight loss or, more to the point, mental health. JEEZ.

The point at which a very dear friend suggested a weight-loss calculation tool which, it turns out, adjusts every few weeks to stop counting the exercise you do because your body has "compensated" for it made me want to weep. Because that's definitely not be a sign that your body is compensating the way that starvation victims' bodies compensate. It just means you need to try HARDER and eat LESS.

[Here I would normally rant about diets in which I was encouraged to eat less and less and that "if you don't add on calories for exercise, you'll lose weight faster" and how that ended up making me feel cold in the middle of the fucking summer when it was 100 degrees out. Oh, wait, this is a rant, just shorter.]

I think the lesson to be learned here is a) I have learned a great deal this year regarding how to deal with doctors, b) I do not like it when people pick on my friends, c) I am still not very good at dealing with it when other people have concepts that do not match up with my experience, and d) I am still really easily triggered when it comes to people talking weight-loss because my first thought was "you know, you're right, I should really get in some extra time on the elliptical machine."

I gotta remember-- and this is really hard-- that I gotta live in a way that keeps me sane and healthy, not in a way that makes me skinny. Which for me right now means meditation, intuitive eating, listening to my body's inner cues (which right now are all saying GO TO BED EARLY TONIGHT, YOU DORK), and a certain amount of emphasis on getting exercise and proper nutrition. I may lose weight this way, I may not, but I can't let that be the point or I will lose my mind again and, really, who wants that?

Slightly hilarious side note: I bought a book called "The Gift Of Fear" used over the internet, and I'm only now noticing that it fits in perfectly with my other preoccupations of late: it's all about checking in with your inner instincts and trusting them. You'd think I'd spent a lifetime doing my best to ignore my inner cues and instincts and intuition. OH WAIT, right, that's exactly what I did. Never mind.

Also purchased:

No Fat Chicks: How Big Business Profits Making Women Hate Their Bodies - And How To Fight Back by Terry Poulton

The Diet Myth by Paul Campos

Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss--and the Myths and Realities of Dieting by Gina Kolata

Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress by Jon Kabat-Zinn (yeah, I know, I bought this a year ago, but I lent mine to a friend and either she thought I meant to give it to her or she's lost it or something, any way I'm now treating it as a gift and am re-ordering it).

AND I'm still reading three books I got for Christmas AND reading DG's book. Just reading on the El isn't going to do, man; I'm going to have to put in some serious hours off-train in order to catch up. It's like being seven all over again and coming home from the library with a stack of books that my mom thought I'd never get read in two weeks. (By the time I was ten, she had ceased to worry about that, and instead worried that I'd finish them too quickly and need to be hauled to the library again at the end of the week. My poor mom.) Ahhhhh, BOOKS.

It's a wacky week so far

2008-01-15T08:59:00.000-06:00

First of all, EEEEE, I got my copy of DietGirl's book! It is shiny and new and MINE, ALL MINE. A very biased plug, admittedly before I have read the whole thing: go buy the thing, folks! Yes, it's not out in the U.S. yet, but it's in Canada and it's in the U.K. and it'll soon be (February?) in Oz! Our Shauna is hilarious and brave and stubborn and completely unafraid to air all the goofy things in life. I continue to hope that I'll grow up to be half as amazing as she is. I've had a peek at a few ~~chapters~~ pages before official worktime started, and it's fantastic stuff. ::jumps up and down in blogger solidarity::

Secondly, the mad warehouse of fun that is physical therapy has re-started as of yesterday. I'm back in, and doing much better than I was before, thanks to the cortizone shot the doc gave me at my last appointment. Pain-free!

Thing is, I remember full well that the LAST time I had a cortizone shot, I went on to re-fuck-up my shoulder just a few months later. Therefore, I'm taking this therapy seriously. I want my life back; I want my shoulder to work properly and let me do yoga again. I've been on tiptoes over this thing for ages now, have been dealing with it in one way or another for a solid year, and I just want to go back to the way things were before I did whatever it is that I did. At my last doctor's appointment, he said, "I hope all goes well and I never have to see you here again." Which, dude, right back atcha. I would like very much to put this chapter of my life behind me and be okay again.

Another reason not to fuck up one's shoulder: I got the bill for the MRI today. !!!! Most of it paid for via insurance, but still !!!! Well, I guess we have insurance for that reason. Oh, shoulder. So expensive you are.

Slightly related question: I have heard tales of suppliments to cushion one's joints, particularly knees. I keep having the urge to start running again, but my knees complain whenever I do, so I've been stuck on the elliptical machine for a while now, looking longingly at the treadmill. Anyone out there have any experience with such suppliments? If I can get this knee thing figured out, I want to get my Hub training with me and see if we can do a 5K race in the spring. Weirdly, I miss it.

I chickened out of the Martial Arts class on Saturday. On the one hand, I rather want to try it. On the other hand, I'm worried about my shoulder, which fits in rather nicely with the sheer terror I get when facing new classes of some kind. Made it very easy to justify not going.

Speaking of the Hub, he's in the doghouse at the moment; he would be more so if he wasn't so darn cute and if he hadn't sensibly cooked me an awesome dinner when I got home last night. After two weeks of tracking his spending, it turns out that he's spent $160 on food. Not groceries; those are covered. This is "I am a sad panda and want to eat takeout/frozen pizza" food, or "I am a bored panda and want to go to a restaurant" food. We seriously need to teach him some other method of stress relief, because that's just not right.

Today is his first day of real Mvelopes fun. For the past two weeks, he was letting me do all the work and scrutinizing the thing out of the corner of his eye. Now he promises to actually pay attention and attempt to stay within his boundaries. With added reason: after the events of this past pay-period, I concluded that having him send $150 to his credit card every pay-period wasn't going to be possible, because he's so unused to having to restrain himself that by the end he was concluding that he NEEDED all this shite, IMMEDIATELY... and then that we NEEDED to go to Chili's (!) for dinner, and that he would gleefully put this extravagance on the credit card. All of which resulted in him being incredibly stupid and negating half of the payment he put on the damn thing at the beginning of the month.

He was saying stuff that I swear came right out of the how-to-be-a-nutty-dieter handbook: not only the "well, I already fucked up this pay period, I might as well cheerfully continue causing as much damage as possible until the 15th" bit, but the Last Supper routine: "I'm going to be good starting on the 15th, so I'm going to be retarded with my money now while I can and do all the things now that I won't be able to EVER EVER AGAIN." I'm becoming convinced that this is the way that all human minds operate. As a species, we do not respond well to limits.

I'll fully admit that I'm not responding well to limits right now, myself. Due to the Amazon.com goof (oh how could I be so stupid) I was out of money for the last week, with $8 clutched firmly in my bank account so that I could go out to eat for Friday lunch (if my college friends and I don't see each other then, we just don't see each other, so it's like an investment). Now I'm going to be low on funds because I'm sending $50 to the future bro-in-law for my sister's birthday present.

Next pay period, February 1, is the last one that I'll be quite so pinched; that's the last one that I have to save $25 toward a two-year subscription for X service instead of a quarterly subscription, which'll mean that the price-per-month will be cut in half, as I save it up again slowly over the next two years, and that I will actually have my Meg's Stash money stashed away for my own purposes again. I have three virtual envelopes labeled in anticipation: one for the slowly-accumulating subscription cash, one for gifts (which I always forget I'll need money for) and one labled "Meg: Adventure!" in the expectation that I will need some ready money in the event of sudden adventure. My life has thus far lacked such excitement, but it might still happen! Perhaps with an envelope marked for that specific purpose, I will find myself seeking out adventure. Perhaps adventure will hear about my bold envelope-marking move and come seeking me. Limitless possibilities here, y'know.

Things I would like to discuss with the universe

2008-01-10T11:47:00.000-06:00

(And, before I start: yes, I am trying to take these things up with the people who might actually give me answers. They just haven't got back to me yet and this makes me feel tense.)

Problem: Why didn't Amazon use my gift certificate that I had thoughtfully saved in their little save-yer-gift-certificate thing? Did I fuck this up somehow? Why did it charge me money? Why wouldn't it let me cancel the order once I twigged to the fact that it was about to charge me?

Preferred result: Amazon staff will reply to my e-mail saying "Goodness gracious, something went wrong there. Why, we'll refund your money immediately." And then I can use that money for my sister's birthday present (which I foolishly agreed to pitch in for, $50 worth, and which I won't be able to afford if Amazon keeps charging me, ACK).

Problem: I can't remember which of the windfall checks we deposited last January is from X, and which is from Y, and frankly that does mean a lot because of taxes, and I would really rather know this before we go to see ye olde financial advisor (sigh) tonight.

Preferred result: Magically, the information will appear on my desk. Alternately, I'll remember where we deposited the checks, because apparently I need to know that information in order to get someone to tell me. Alternately, our financial advisor will be willing to throw together some kind of tax estimate based on both versions.

Problem: I think I may have run the car out of gas, and it's (badly) parked a block south of our apartment. It had a quarter-tank of gas when I got there, and then when I re-started the thing in order to park it somewhat closer to the curb, it suddenly started flashing the GAS light at me and the needle was pegged near the zero mark, in the red zone. I'm baffled as to how I lost several gallons of gas, or possibly broke the car. (Eeeee.)

Preferred result: Everything will be fine and we'll have enough gas to get to the gas station. On Tuesday, that is. No money in the budget for gas until Tuesday. I have no bloody clue how we used it all up, although my Hub driving to work four times in two weeks (one week having two days of work as we were just back from vacation, one week having three days of work as it involved New Year's) may well be a clue.

In other news...

My Hub has got the hang-- kinda-- of Mvelopes. So far he does not blindly hate it. So far he does not mind having eight different totals for his checking account versus just plain looking at his checking account. The main problem thus far is getting him to check the damn thing instead of looking at his bank account. He forgets.

He did, however, make the decision to move money over from one envelope to the other, sacrificing his video game money in order to go out to eat. I'm kind of satisfied; he had that moment where he had to think about it, and that's a big step. He also realized that while he doesn't have a video game per se that he wants to buy, he does want to throw more money at X-Box Live points, in order to buy more content, since he's burning through his current balance like WHOA. And he's pleased that he doesn't have to remember not to spend his NPR money or the Yahoo money (automatic payments every month), since those are tucked into their own little envelopes. I totally understand that one, since I had the same reaction of "WHEW, there's a layer of stress I didn't even realize I had, all gone" when I first set up the household budget on the thing.

He might get the hang of this. I think it might work. He doesn't have to do any math or any upkeep (I'm handling the which-envelope-does-this-go-in maintenance, since I'm already doing it for everything else) and just the fact that the money is in seperate piles, piles with names all symbolizing things he wants, is already much different for him than just looking at the single nameless mass of money in his checking account. Looking at the names means that every time, he remembers that he might not want to spend $20 on [random item here] because that'll take $20 away from something else he really wants.

It's all about names. He laughed at me when I said that I loved knowing that all the money had names, but really, that's the thing that makes it work-- that moment where you look at it and remember "Oh, right, that $50 is earmarked for Mom's birthday gift," and then don't spend it on something else. It's magical.

Also, it is Thursday, and we have not driven to work at all this week. My Hub has a $0 balance in his "parking" envelope in Mvelopes. Coincidence? I hope not. He hasn't said anything, but then again we haven't had cold/wet weather in which to walk to the El, only chilly/dry and warm/wet. He may start bemoaning his fate when the weather starts acting like proper January again.

I really, really wish we could telecommute during the winter months... well, I probably could, with a slight upgrade on my laptop. My Hub, on the other hand, needs to be at the office. And since I don't mind dealing with the weather half as much as he does (or perhaps I'm just more determined to not pay the $14 to park downtown), that pretty much ruins the whole point. Oh well.

We've eaten salads or at least mostly-veggie dinners for three days straight now, and I think we'll end up with at least one more salad dinner tonight, since we have chicken breasts and from-scratch croutons already made. All I have to do is slice up the pears, wash and spin the lettuce, have my Hub make the dressing (he's good at it, hence his eternal fate), and chuck lettuce, dressing, chicken, croutons, pears, goat cheese, and chopped walnuts together. Instant-ish awesome dinner!

You may have noticed I'm slowly adding tags/labels to my posts. It's slow going, since I have to go back and read all the damn things, but I will get organized. More or less. I'm not sure what good this will do me or any of you darling readers, but all the cool kids are doing it, so I feel strangely compelled to keep up.

FOUR. HUNDRED. BABIES.

2008-01-08T20:41:00.001-06:00

My Hub found this and showed it to me a long time ago, and we showed it to my whole family over Christmas, and now my sister and future BIL are both quoting it all the time. My apologies if you've seen it before, but seriously, I love this thing.

Oh, and the sequel!

A wee cry for help

2008-01-08T19:05:00.001-06:00

Okay, since I'm clearing up a lot of fun stuff on the blog, I might as well ask: any of y'all with a blog, can you advise me on feeds? Where do I sign up? Do I need to sign up? Er... how do people use these?

I'm very good on ~~illegally bittorrenting~~ magically procuring television programs and using everything on Firefox but I have to admit that the feed thing kind of passed me by. Help!

A kind of frightening read

2008-01-08T12:06:00.000-06:00

In my post on inside/outside cues, I mentioned a study done back around WWII where a bunch of normal guys had their food intake studied for a few months, then drastically reduced.

Today, I found that study. Apparently this is better known than I thought; in some places (particularly eating-disorder blogs), they toss the name "The Minnesota Semi-Starvation Experiment" around as a descriptive reference.

Personally, I've been reading through this and it's more frightening than the relatively calm and soothing summary they have in Intuitive Eating. It's a LOT more frightening.

Okay, so I mentioned-- because Intuitive Eating mentioned-- the obsession with food, toying with food for hours, binging, and so forth. What I didn't mention, because I didn't see it, is a lot more hair-raising.

Cookbooks, menus, and information bulletins on food production became intensely interesting to many of the men who previously had little or no interest in dietetics or agriculture, (p. 833). ... In addition to cookbooks and collecting recipes, some of the men even began collecting coffeepots, hot plates, and other kitchen utensils. According to the original report, hoarding even extended to non-food-related items such as "old books, unnecessary second-hand clothes, knick knacks, and other 'junk.' Often after making such purchases, which could be afforded only with sacrifice, the men would be puzzled as to why they had bought such more or less useless articles" (p. 837). One man even began rummaging through garbage cans. This general tendency to hoard has been observed in starved anorexic patients (Crisp, Hsu, & Harding, 1980) and even in rats deprived of food (Fantino & Cabanac, 1980).

I'M SORRY, EXCUSE ME, WHAT?? Seriously, I've never heard of this before, and yet the description is perfectly familiar from my WW days, in which I printed out a million recipes, was TiVoing about eight different cooking shows, went to the store several times a week because I felt I must buy such-and-such ingredients, and, oh yeah, the hoarding. Not hoarding food, although there were a bunch of instances (some documented in the early days of this blog) when I would find free food at the office and haul the whole shebang back to my office just for me. And the shopping I did for non-food stuff was just huge. I was trying to keep us to a budget but I kept going insane. This is the first time I've heard that it might have had anything to do with my diet.

The men demanded that their food be served hot, and they made unusual concoctions by mixing foods together, as noted above. There was also a marked increase in the use of salt and spices. The consumption of coffee and tea increased so dramatically that the men had to be limited to 9 cups per day; similarly, gum chewing became excessive and had to be limited after it was discovered that one man was chewing as many as 40 packages of gum a day and "developed a sore mouth from such continuous exercise" (p. 835).

::hair goes up again:: Coffee, check; tea, check; gum, to the point of a sore mouth, CHECK FUCKING CHECK. Oh my God. And yeah, I used a hell of a lot of spices; how the hell else do you make it through without resorting to spiking up the taste factor?

Although the subjects were psychologically healthy prior to the experiment, most experienced significant emotional deterioration as a result of semistarvation. Most of the subjects experienced periods during which their emotional distress was quite severe; almost 20% experienced extreme emotional deterioration that markedly interfered with their functioning. Depression became more severe during the course of the experiment. Elation was observed occasionally, but this was inevitably followed by "low periods." Mood swings were extreme for some of the volunteers ...

You know, I've said for a while that WW was the starting point of me driving myself into depression. I've just never had any kind of back-up. And that was before I read the next paragraphs:

Irritability and frequent outbursts of anger were common, although the men had quite tolerant dispositions prior to starvation. For most subjects, anxiety became more evident. As the experiment progressed, many of the formerly even-tempered men began biting their nails or smoking because they felt nervous. Apathy also became common, and some men who had been quite fastidious neglected various aspects of personal hygiene. During semistarvation, two subjects developed disturbances of "psychotic" proportions. During the refeeding period, emotional disturbance did not vanish immediately but persisted for several weeks, with some men actually becoming more depressed, irritable, argumentative, and negativistic than they had been during semistarvation. After two weeks of refeeding, one man reported his extreme reaction in his diary:

"I have been more depressed than ever in my life ... I thought that there was only one thing that would pull me out of the doldrums, that is release from C.P.S. the experiment I decided to get rid of some fingers. Ten days ago, I jacked up my car and let the car fall on these fingers ... It was premeditated." (pp. 894-895)

Several days later, this man actually did chop off three fingers of one hand in response to the stress.

YIKES. Pretty much all I can say to that. YIKES. Remind me, next time I say that diets can make you crazy, that this is not hyperbole. Holy CROW.

The volunteers reported impaired concentration, alertness, comprehension, and judgment during semistarvation; however, formal intellectual testing revealed no signs of diminished intellectual abilities. As the 6 months of semistarvation progressed, the volunteers exhibited many physical changes, including gastrointestinal discomfort; decreased need for sleep; dizziness; headaches; hypersensitivity to noise and light; reduced strength; poor motor control; edema (an excess of fluid causing swelling); hair loss; decreased tolerance for cold temperatures (cold hands and feet); visual disturbances (i.e., inability to focus, eye aches, "spots" in the visual fields); auditory disturbances (i.e., ringing noise in the ears); and paresthesias (i.e., abnormal tingling or prickling sensations, especially in the hands or feet).

Okay, I had the decreased need for sleep, the dizziness, the headaches, the hypersensitivity to noise and light, the poor motor control, the decreased tolerance for cold temperatures, and the tingly feet.

Looking back, I had one friend-- hilariously enough, the one who is now on the Soup Diet-- who, when I reported dizziness and sensitivity to cold (I didn't feel the rest of it was worth mentioning, I guess) put that together with my increasingly weird behavior and pretty much flat-out said that I needed to eat more and that this was looking a lot like an eating disorder. At the time, I was so angry with her that I couldn't see straight. I ranted about that comment to my husband for hours. Bless his heart, he assured everyone that I was fine, thanks, that he was around me all the time and would know if I had an eating disorder...

...which, well, he didn't. He knew from anorexia and he knew from binging & purging, but he had absolutely no knowledge of my bouts of compulsive eating, and my behavior was otherwise (or perhaps entirely) a model of woman-on-a-diet behavior. He was worried about my mental health, sure-- the time that I sat in a bubble bath for an hour waiting for relaxation to kick in, after which I broke down weeping all over the place, was kind of a clue-- but he had no reason to connect it to my diet.

Speaking of which:

At the end of semistarvation, the men's BMRs had dropped by about 40% from normal levels. This drop, as well as other physical changes, reflects the body's extraordinary ability to adapt to low caloric intake by reducing its need for energy. More recent recent research has shown that metabolic rate is markedly reduced even among dieters who do not have a history of dramatic weight loss (Platte, Wurmser, Wade, Mecheril & Pirke, 1996). During refeeding, Keys et al. found that metabolism speeded up, with those consuming the greatest number of calories experiencing the largest rise in BMR. The group of volunteers who received a relatively small increment in calories during refeeding (400 calories more than during semistarvation) had no rise in BMR for the first 3 weeks. Consuming larger amounts of food caused a sharp increase in the energy burned through metabolic processes.

This explains so much about why the "maintenance" portion of WW broke my will to live, I can't even start. I was, in fact, up about 400 calories a day (8 Points, OMG, such riches!) from my dieting levels, but considering I was coming off of a 1200 calorie/day diet, and that my basic metabolic calorie needs at that age and weight were at least 1900 calories/day, my body probably looked at that and laughed and laughed.

I will say this for Body For Life, which I tried after I finally dumped WW: I ate. That program is probably responsible, via sheer amount of food, consumed every three or four hours, plus a splurge day, for giving my metabolic rate a chance to revive. (At the time, I was horrified at the sheer amount of food I would eat on my splurge days. In retrospect, that was my body recouperating from its metabolic winter, and it did me no harm-- didn't even really cause me to gain weight.) True, the sheer amount of planning and work I had to do just to eat proper food all the time was prohibitive over the long run, and my plunge into crazy was in full swing by that point so that behavior didn't help, but as for my metabolism? It helped a LOT.

I've got less compulsive, disordered behavior re: food than I did in 2005. That said, I've been spending a little time mentally glancing back over the past twenty years. My first battles with my dad over my weight started right when I hit adolescence, and I cannot remember any time after that where I wasn't self-conscious about what I ate. I can't remember any time after that when I wasn't self-conscious about my body. I've been doing this for twenty years, folks. The long and the short of it is that I don't know what my natural weight is. I'm pretty sure that my natural weight is not what I was when I started WW, just because I know I had to work really really hard to get up there. Based on the fact that I have a history of lurking around this weight, even when binging and engaging in no nutrition whatsoever (a long period in college, a long period after college, and now this past year, although frankly I've been doing pretty well regarding nutrition this past year as such things go), I suspect it might be around where I am right now, maybe within ten pounds lower due to my continuing mental issues about food. I guess we'll see, if I get this stuff kicked to the curb.

In short: someday I want to grow up to be Shauna. SOMEDAY. ::shakes fist at sky::

In the meantime, I'm making some notes on this study. Just YIKES, people. Next time I start exhibiting any of these symptoms, PLEASE come and sit on me [/Tracy Jordan].

"One moment at a time" is actually pretty tough

2008-01-07T12:47:00.000-06:00

Reading through my past posts has been something of an eye-opener, particularly once I got back to the point prior to September 2005 when I was in manic perfectionistic mode. There are at least three or four posts there that, in retrospect, set off huge alarm bells for "dude, you are driving yourself into depression, stop having such strict standards, stop being so judgemental and harsh on everyone, particularly yourself, and get in touch with your stress because OH MY GOD YOU DIDN'T KNOW THAT MEANT YOU WERE STRESSED?" I just want to take that old self and sit on her for a while until she calms down, and try to talk her out of this self-destructive course.

Also I've noticed that I continue to go "aha! I have the answer!" on a regular basis regarding my same problems, just with new answers every time. For the most part, I think all the answers apply, and I'm just kind of building on each one every time. Or something. So every time I think I have the answer, apply a large grain of salt; in another six months, I'll have picked up another piece of the puzzle and will be saying "Let me amend what I said before" again.

With that in mind, I wanted to talk about this thing that... okay, I forget what it's called. It's the phenomenon in which the limit is gone past, and we go "well, fuck it, I've screwed this up, might as well screw it up MORE." Former Weight Watchers Points-counters, repreSENT: I can't be the only one who had this happen. After the limit is breached, all restraint goes, and crazy-ass eating occurs.

I had this happen when I was shopping for New Year's Eve, only with the budget, not with food. Which, well, now that I think of it, that's happened a lot with money in the past, particularly with my Hub, who will always have that attitute: "Well, we're already going over budget, so why not order pizza, too?" This time, though, I managed to recognize it when I was in the middle of it, breathe, remember that just because the stuff we needed for the party was going over budget didn't mean that I had to buy more stuff on top of it because "what the hell, I already fucked up, might as well get everything we want". And it was fine. And, really, we already ended up having way too much food.

Incidentally, my Hub went out to get eggs, milk, and flour (he wanted pancakes on New Year's morning) and returned with those and then frozen pizza, taquitos, and another twenty dollars' worth of stuff on top of that. ...Oops.

My poor beleagered Hub. He insisted on buying the "Rock Band" video game before Christmas; I admit fully that it is really fun, and it's been an awesome party game, but it cost $150, and he didn't have the money for it. He knew full well that I was going to hate him buying it on credit, and I took advantage of that by "letting" him get it without guilt-- but on the condition that as of the New Year, his money accounts would go through Mvelopes, too. He went along with it. He is not really happy about it thus far, and doesn't get it, and is mopey when I bring it up. That said, we've got the money for the entire household into this thing, finally.

My job in this, thus far, is not to judge or nag or be weird. Just let the thing track purchases, and sort them into their envelopes. That's a major first step. Having to make choices about priorities comes later, when he runs out of money in his Parking envelope and has to make a decision to raid another envelope for the funds-- thus making it obvious that his parking decision is robbing him of the funds for the next PPV, or his next video game purchase, or the next time he wants to eat at a restaurant. And he'll be able to actually look at the totals from his purchases at the end of the year (or maybe just a few months from now) and recognize that hey, that's a lot of money he's spending on parking, maybe just once a week is okay. What he does with that knowledge is a whole different thing, but going from ignoring the situation entirely to knowing is huge. I just, er, have to make sure that he doesn't avoid looking at the thing. And I have to do that without being a pain in the ass. Yeowza.

Knowledge is power, it's just not COMFORTABLE power. There is a glorious luxury-- I've written about it before-- in ignoring things. Ignoring what the balance is on the credit cards is a big example, but what I'm thinking of more these days is ignoring my own feelings. I out-and-out said a few times in the early days of my blog that I'd been completely oblivious to being stressed until such-and-such brought it to my attention; stressed, or scared, or annoyed, or happy, or nervous. Ignoring it when I felt like my whole life was a series of pointless tasks, because frankly I'd MADE it a series of pointless tasks. Ignoring how my body felt: hungry, or full, or tired, or overworked, or underworked; ignoring it when my body very much wanted chocolate; ignoring it when my body very much wanted vegetables; ignoring minor injuries that turned into major annoyances; ignoring the bad posture that aggravated those injuries. By avoiding knowledge of what my body was feeling, I was disassociating myself from my body, protecting myself from the shame of being imperfect.

I do this on everything, really. In any given moment, I've got my brain somewhere that has very little to do with what is going on: thinking about the past, or fretting over the future (although a quote I read lately indicated that worrying about the future does about as much to help with future events as chewing gum has to do with defusing a bomb, which is an awesome comparison), or making a judgment on whether or not I like something, or whether or not someone ELSE likes something, or whether or not it's a good thing. I keep catching myself in the middle of having arguments with people who aren't here and who haven't actually said the thing that's set me off-- or, most of the time, people who were here within the past 24 hours and who said something that I didn't get to respond to in a satisfactory manner. Or I'm working through how to do a project. Or I'm distracting myself with a book, or TV, or the computer. Or with my latest obsession.

Living one moment at a time is not comfortable stuff. It's the thing we're told to do to get through any big catastrophe, but the thing nobody seems to mention is that the worry about the future isn't the real problem, it's just a symptom of really really really really not wanting to be right here and right now. Even when right here and right now is not that bad, it's hard to hold my attention on just being here and being me, because I'm sort of bracing myself in advance, to cushion the blow of the inevitable bad stuff that's coming.

So ignorance is bliss. Except for how, the more I do this, the less I'm actually present in my own life, the less I really experience, the less I can remember later about what I'm experiencing now. And apparently that sneaks up on me, because if I don't really experience the time I spend with my family and friends, then I feel lonely, and if I don't really experience and deal with the stress I'm having, then the stress just piles up and piles up until I blow many fuses, and if I don't really experience (and savor, and smell, and enjoy) the food I'm eating, then I'm not satisfied with what I eat even if I eat huge servings of awesome food and, voila, I overeat.

So, back up, ignorance is blissful, but it fucks up my life. Which, I tell you, sucks. Because I really don't feel up to paying attention, and I really really don't feel up to dealing with the emotions involved in my daily life.

They talk a lot about paying attention in both the Mindfulness Meditation stuff and in the Intuitive Eating book. The Intuitive Eating book doesn't talk a lot about how to deal with it, granted, and (probably because it's more focused) doesn't talk about how not paying attention to food and body sensations may be part of a larger problem. So while I've picked up from Intuitive Eating that the sensation of "full" is not "I am stuffed full of food" but rather "I am no longer getting the 'hungry' message and my stomach is just kind of there", I had to go back to Mindfulness to get the message on how to deal with stuff.

And you know what? Their answer is sort of revolutionary: learn to be in the moment while we're in pain, while we are unhappy, while we are stressed out, while we are angry. The idea being that the bad parts of life are still parts of life, and the pain is still part of our experience, and that, while escaping from these things has its place, living in the moment-- without judgment, without dismissing your experiences and emotions as useless-- could be more useful. That maybe living in the moment, noticing but not running away from the emotions that come up, could give us the opportunity to notice and examine those emotions and recognize where they're coming from. And-- oh boy-- accepting who we are in that moment, without judgment, and with love.

I've been trying to do that, with scattered success, over the past ten months or so. The times I've had less than stellar success, I've noticed, is when I'm trying to be-in-the-moment in such a way where I'm pretending that if I only pay attention, I'll enjoy this. The rest of my brain can sense such self-applied bullshit, though, so I usually get bounced off into a wacky zone. A big part of that was that, in trying to convince myself that if I just relaxed I'd enjoy [fill in the blank], I was not taking into account who I actually am, what my actual likes and dislikes are-- because to a certain extent (oh, who am I fooling, it's pretty much all the time) I don't accept that I am that person. I want to believe that I'm much more adventurous and bad-assed than I actually am, and when I came up against emotions to the contrary, I was dismissing them and looking for the "real" emotions. Which pretty much means I wasn't doing this right: I wasn't open to the possibility that I honestly, underneath the reflexive fear and discomfort that comes with some things, I might just plain not like it.

I can't really state it any better than this: Kate Harding writes, in The Fantasy of Being Thin: "[This] is, of course, a pretty normal part of getting older. You start to realize that yeah, this actually is it, and although you can still try enough new things to keep anyone busy for two lifetimes, you’re pretty much stuck with a basic context. There are skills, experiences, and material things you will almost certainly never have, period. It’s a challenge for all of us to understand that accepting this fact of life does not necessarily mean cutting off options or giving up dreams, but simply — as in the proverbial story about the creation of the David — chipping away all that is not you. But for a fat person, it can be even harder, because so many fucking sources encourage us to believe that inside every one of us is 'a thin person waiting to get out' — and that thin person is SO MUCH COOLER."

Oh God yes. I remember I had this list of things that I intended to do, when I got thin, and then when I got thin I didn't do any of them. I forget what all was on the list, but I do remember that they pretty much all involved athletic craziness that, let's face it, I am absolutely never going to do-- not because I'm a chicken, but because I am not a big fan of discomfort (cold, dirt, you name it) or being scared out of my mind for the purpose of getting an adrenaline rush. Therefore, some of the things on that list aren't ever going to happen simply because they're not really something I want to do, they're something that the person I want to be would want to do.

It's time to repurpose the blog, I think, because if you read my mission statement it's a rejection not only of my body before I lost weight, but of everything I was, personality-wise, when I started. That's pretty fucked up right there. Over the past almost-three years (!!!) my priority has shifted from become the girl who could stay thin to deal with who I am so I can stay thin to deal with who I am so I can be happy. So when I started working on the Intuitive Eating thing, it wasn't to get thin, but rather to resolve my issues with food-- and if that means that I stay this weight, then so be it, and if it means that I gain a bit, so be it. I want to eat like a normal person, without the disordered thinking and the binging and the good/bad dichotomy. I want to be healthy, I want to be more relaxed, I want to love myself more, I want to be less of a judgmental jerk. I want to write for the love of it, for a specific audience, instead of reflexively trying to please everybody. I don't want to be scared of what other people will think.

I'm always going to have a certain tolerance level for the company of others, and it's not going to be the same in different situations, and yeah, that won't always make sense. I'm always going to have my worldview trend dramatically downward if there is cat litter on the bathroom floor (there's a reason we have a big orange broom in our teeny bathroom, and that is it), because I cannot stand getting crap stuck to my feet. I'm always going to cry when we drive away from my parents' house, even though I know it breaks my Hub's heart. I'm always going to be kind of a flake about appointments all winter because I won't like going outside until spring, and then when it's really hot in the summer I will likewise be cranky because while I can always wear my big poofy down coat in the winter, there's a limit to how many clothes I can remove and still be presentable during the summer.

It's possible that some things might change, if I'm less scared and am paying attention during them. I might learn to like activities as much as stories. I might be less tense around friends and acquaintances (it's a strange fact of my life that I am gloriously uninhibited amongst strangers, because if they have no prior knowlege of me then I have nothing to live up to and no limits on the bullshit I can sling). I might be able to argue with people without feeling the cold hand of death clutch all my internal organs, and hence a) be somewhat more logical and convincing, b) avoid veering off into YOU JUST WANT TO REPRESS ME, YOU ARE A JERK territory and c) not leave the argument feeling as though I've been beaten up and threatened with more.

You know what else is weird? Going into tasting food, when I'm trying to be mindful, is kind of a scary experience. I move the fork toward my mouth and have this twinge of oh, God, what if I don't like this? Which leads me to believe that I've spent way too much time zoning out while eating. I think that this may have to do with me never being a picky eater in the past (except for, well, healthy stuff like spinach and green beans and sweet potatoes and olives and fish but the point here is that I did like them eventually); now that I'm paying attention, I've realized that there's some stuff that I just don't like, and suddenly the world is rife with possible dislike. If I don't like something, then suddenly I have responsibility to myself to actually act on the dislike: to send restaurant food back to the kitchen and pick a new dish, or make a request about the cooking if that was the problem; to admit to my Hub that this dish didn't turn out very well this time; to figure out what to do if I'm at a party or someone else's house; to take an item back to Trader Joe's and say "okay, I know you have that 'if you don't like it bring it back' policy, so I'm bringing this back."

Most of these things risk bringing attention to myself, which still makes me nervous, and standing up for myself, which is even more nerve-wracking. And all of these things mean that I have to disengage from the process of eating, which is still weirdly difficult for me. If I'm at a restaurant, I might have to wait another twenty minutes for my new food. If I'm at home, I might have to make a whole new dish. If I'm at a friend's house, I might end up having to be polite, eat what I can stomach, and then wait until I get home to eat a proper meal (or, as has occurred in the past, have a late-night Taco Bell run). In short, there are abundant reasons for me to discount my feelings on these things, because paying attention means a lot of bother.

That's the whole thing in a nutshell, I think. If I pay attention, I risk realizing I don't like something. If I don't like something, I risk having to stand up for myself and having to work to make it right. And people, I've ignored whether or not I like a lot in my life, so I'm kind of terrified that if I pay attention to everything, I'm going to be overwhelmed by the stuff I have to deal with.

Baby steps, maybe. Maybe just deal with the food.

A link, a to-do list, and more on my Hub vs. the budget

2008-01-07T08:30:00.000-06:00

Have you ever had a doctor dismiss your symptoms, telling you that they'd go away if you weren't so fat? First, Do No Harm: Real Stories of Fat Prejudice In Health Care is collecting these stories all in one place. If you have one, submit it. And if you don't think that this is a problem, just start reading-- you may be really, really surprised.

The last few times I've been at my PHP's office, I've noticed that there's a big stack of Weight Watchers material there. I think I may be mentioning FDNH to her, and handing her the website URL. I love my doctor more than ought to be humanly possible, and often when I'm sick I end up treating her like an extra mother ("heeeelp, I'm siiiiiick"), but after reading all this stuff I can't help but have my antennae up, just in case.

Today I need to:

1) Re-schedule my annual girly exam because I just realized while gazing at my Pill pack this morning that I've brilliantly scheduled it for the middle of my period;

2) Schedule an appointment to have the blood-donation folks suck my blood again, since apparently now that I'm on their list they will be banging on my door every six weeks;

3) Call the physical therapy folks and get another four weeks of PT scheduled. Which I know I have to do. I just... it's winter in Chicago, okay? Yesterday's (and apparently today's) freakish warm weather aside, usually it's cold. Often it's snowy. Often I must, as a habitual pedestrian, tromp over sidewalks where some bastards haven't shoveled*. And always, after four P.M., it's dark. We're due for relief on that last in mid-February, but I'll be tromping around in the cold and dark with a lack of constant footing and traction. Oh, and in-between such tromping there is the PT, which I am irritated with, too. ARGH.

* I suspect their thoughts on the matter are something along the lines of Oh, it's just an inch of snow, it doesn't really matter, I can get away with not shoveling when in practice, in a pedestrian-heavy city such as ours, an inch of snow does not magically disappear but instead is crushed down by many feet into a treacherous section of bumpy, dippy ice... at which point any sane person would be tossing ice-melt of some kind out there to avoid lawsuits, but apparently they're too far in denial to even contemplate that. Although, to be fair, some of them are such bastards that they don't shovel (or for that matter pay some enterprising pre-teen a lousy five bucks to shovel) under any circumstances, even when there's a good foot of snow on the ground and people have had to tromp a narrow path through, which is also treacherous because this is a dog-heavy neighborhood so the walls of snow on either side of said path are laced with dog pee. Which one wants to avoid. In short, I fully believe that there is a special section of hell reserved for people who don't shovel their walks or provide shoveling business to pre-teens who can't legally hire themselves out to fast-food restaurants.

Oh, and 4) Call my parents, because my out-to-dinner adventures last night fell during the time that I usually call them every Sunday night. The guilt is already suffocating. I do miss them, really, I just forgot!

So it's a busy day.

I miss my sister. I got used to having her around and I still wake up every morning with the vague idea that she's asleep in our living room and I must be careful not to disturb her. There's some sizeable part of my brain that apparently feels that her being in Chicago is the proper way of things, instead of something that only happens once in a blue moon, and that part of my brain refuses to accept that she's back in California. Sigh. Come back, sis!

My Hub is maybe feeling better. He slept a ton yesterday and last night, and is all zinc'd up and oregano'd up and vitamin-C'd up, but the real test will come around noon. He generally starts feeling weird around noon, if he's going to do so. Everyone we know seems to be getting sick, so it's a very real possibility that it's just that time of year, but if I can keep us both from getting ill at the same time this year, I would love to do so. Most of our functionality as a couple depends on only one of us being out of service at a time, which means being drunk, being stressed, or most certainly being sick.

I was going to do my physical therapy at home this morning, but ran out of time before we had to run for the train, so I hauled the giant rubber-band along with me and did them first thing at work. Went pretty well, and I'm pleased to have it over with for the day. I was doing it in the darkened interior conference room, though, since I don't currently have an office (only a cubicle), and every time someone walked by the door I about had a heart attack, expecting them to flip on the lights and ask what the hell I was doing in the dark with a big rubber thing.

Hub on Mvelopes is going vaguely well. Which is to say, I continue to do all the grunt work since I'm doing so on the other accounts anyway, and the real fun is going to kick in any minute now when his "discretionary" funds get low and he has to start making decisions about what other funds he'll have to sacrifice for whatever new thing he wants (which, when he's sick, I fully expect to be food and parking).

Now that I'm thinking about it, this is a more grown-up version of the budget game I played with the kiddos during our belated Thanksgiving visit. In that case, I told both of the girls as we went into their New Favorite Store (the craft store-- I'm so proud) that I was buying them each ten dollars' worth of stuff, but only ten dollars, and they couldn't go over. Immediately, the two of them became hyper-aware of price tags: "Oooh, this is cool! But it's more then ten dollars." They were given sudden education on the store practice of pricing things ending in $0.99: "Wait, you mean that $2.99 is pretty much the same as $3? But it starts with 2!" I wrote down each of their selections as we went, and pretty soon you'd've thought they were veteran penny-pinchers instead of kids from a house where the word "budget" has never been spoken. They traded stuff back in when they found things they liked more. They compared different kinds of yarn to figure out what kind was the softest and the cheapest.

My oldest niece hit a point where she became frustrated that she could not get everything she wanted, and tried to haggle her way out of it by seeing if maybe I might buy her things "for [my]self" and then just happen to let her use/keep them. It was a tense couple of minutes, but the rules of the game specified that $10 was their limit, period, so she eventually settled in and did some last-minute trading to get the most for her buck. Smart kid.

So now we're about to hit that limit with my Hub, and it'll be interesting, to say the least, to see what he's going to do. Will he start trading things in and be okay with that, accept his limits? Will he try to bargain with credit cards? (Which, considering the fact that I'm making him do this because he ran up a balance on the credit cards again, would be a dumb move.) Will he be frustrated and grouchy? And, the biggest question of all: will a few pay periods' worth of this sort of thing cause him to change his behavior? Will he content himself with buying a new video game every other month instead of every single month, and shift some of that money elsewhere? Or will he cut back on going out to eat? Or will he drive to work less often, saving money on parking? Right now, that's a mystery, since he wants it all and hasn't been forced to prioritize. Watch out.

(Side note: I am having a tight month with money, starting with my sister having been in town, continuing to my Hub getting sick, and including the friend-in-town dinner last night; next payday, my sister's birthday occurs and I've pledged $50 to the get-her-a-big-awesome-present pool that her fiance and our folks are part of. I've got enough money for clothes (oh God how I need a new bra), donations, and lunch with my always-lunch-on-Friday college buddy, but all the other envelopes have been ransacked to keep up and I'm going to be determinedly Not Buying Anything until February. So I'm a little tense. Oh, AND: we may be staring down the barrel of a tax issue, so I'm trying desperately to throw as much as I can at our savings account right now. That makes me a little MORE tense. My poor Hub has terrible timing.)

I fully admit that I wanted this, right from the get-go when I signed us up for Mvelopes, although I have been (grudgingly) okay with him not being on Mvelopes as long as he doesn't rack up credit card debt. Having him blithely unaware of his spending is one thing when he's accepting the finite limit of his paycheck; when he moves on to use the credit cards again, there's a problem. It came to my attention because he put a giant video game thing on the credit card, but it turns out that the $150 there was only about 1/3 of the balance; the rest of it was made up of his "day-to-day" expenses: parking, food, new games. Nope, sorry, unacceptable. The whole reason he has a "fun money" budget that's twice as much as mine is so that he can save money to deal with the big things, with the expectation that he'd be keeping the day-to-day stuff under the limit. It turns out-- here's the funny part-- that if he'd waited until New Year's Eve to buy his new game, he would have had enough money without resorting to the credit card, and I wouldn't have pulled that promise out of him to go on Mvelopes. The boy needs impulse control in a big way. I am hoping and praying that knowledge of his spending and a small amount of built-in planning will help.

FYI

2008-01-06T17:34:00.000-06:00

First of all: go read Kate Harding's latest re: the new Weight Watchers ads. It's funny 'cause it's true. Also frustrating because it's true. [This hereby takes the place of a post that, really, nobody wanted to read, including me, and I was the one writing the damn thing.]

I've been doing a little housekeeping today. Cleaned up the links a bit, added to the "Essays and Rants" section, and added Amazon links to products I actually do own, use, love, and feel comfortable recommending (of which, apparently, there are... six?). So anyone wondering where I got started with mindfulness meditation, or dealing with perfectionism, or lifting weights, or deflating pimples (ha!), now you know. (And FYI, that pimple-deflating stuff does work. Not immediately, but overnight, to the point where I don't spend my whole day fighting the urge to pop the fucker and have it over with.)

Also: food!

One of the glories of going back through the old posts has been seeing stuff I cooked at one time or another. Particularly since it's after Christmas and New Year's, and we just this morning got rid of the last of the utter crap food in the house. By which I mean that after a few weeks of eating and being surrounded by utter crap food, lovely nutritious food starts to sound AWESOME.

So far, one previously forgotten recipe has reappeared: the pasta tossed with roasted cherry tomatoes and roasted broccoli, a bit of the reserved pasta water (starchy, ya know?), some dried rosemary and basil (we, er, got one of those adorable rosemary "Christmas tree"s from Trader Joe's and then forgot about it entirely when we went on vacation; didn't mention it to the friend who was coming in to feed the cats; it is technically alive but all the needles died so we had to strip them off to save the thing's life), and some goat cheese. The goat cheese is a new addition since last time, added because it sounded like it would go well, and because we got a log of goat cheese on Saturday and there's too much of it just for the two nights of salad that we have scheduled this week.

You know, when I mentioned this dish on my blog, I mentioned that it was soooo filling that I had to unbutton my pants and sit around on the couch all pooched out. And yet, this did not cause me to choose a small portion size for lunch. I remember thinking "well, this is mostly vegetables, so it's not like this is actually two cups of pasta" and... yeah, let this be a (pyrrhic) victory for inner cues vs. outer cues, because my dumb brain judged it on the outer cues 'cause I was hungry and then I ate it without paying enough attention and now I think I may die. My poor stomach is trying to figure out all the broccoli with all that pasta in the way. Ohhh, bad plan.

That said, I'm totally looking forward to having this ready-made for dinner tomorrow night. Monday nights are lousy cooking nights.

In other news, my poor Hub seems to be coming down with a cold or some other form of lousy crud. He has been dosed with those Zicam things AND Emergen-C AND oil of oregano capsules, so I'm hoping like crazy that the symptoms subside. I'm also taking Emergen-C and oil of oregano just in case because the nature of marriage makes it impossible for one partner to duck germs from the other partner.

Big post in the works; will probably be up tomorrow if I have a dull stretch at work. For the moment, go check out that link I mentioned.

ETA: Met friends for dinner. Got a Stilton burger (with roasted garlic and some great grainy mustard, if you are ever in Chicago GO TO GOOSE ISLAND), fries and a pint. Finished half of everything (to my Hub's delight, since he got the leftovers when I got home)-- a first for that place, but for once I was paying attention, so when I stopped being hungry I stopped eating... and, boom, perfect, it was beautiful, it's half an hour after I left and I'm comfortably full. Bonus: I may have been the slowest eater there, which I would say was a first, except for that time when DietGirl was in town and I talked so much I forgot I had food-- seriously, that never happens.

So that was cool.

The down side: it seemed like everyone else was discussing their new diets. One of my friends is doing, I swear to God I wish I was joking, a Good Housekeeping Soup Diet. It does, I believe, involve cabbage.

I was good. I said NOTHING. I breathed deeply and let go, albeit with a mental note that if I wanted to have a brain-exploding moment later, I'd do so on this blog. See, on the one hand, I'm kind of pleased that she's not doing Weight Watchers again, because since I'm the one who got her into WW in the first place that was continual itchy guilt for me. And since she was doing weird random diets before WW, at least that's nothing different. On the other hand: Cabbage. Soup. Diet. Oh God.

Inside, outside

2008-01-02T07:38:00.000-06:00

Happy New Year, everybody!

For those of us in this part of the blogosphere, New Year's is a particularly loaded holiday. Not New Year's Eve, but New Year's Day. Resolution time! This year I'm going to lose those last ten pounds! or This year I'm going to track my eating every day! or This year I'm cutting out refined sugar completely! or This year I'm going to go to the gym five times a week, every week! or of course ye olde favorite, This year I'm really going to do it, I'm going to lose weight and have it stay gone!... that sort of thing.

I'm not. Not this year, not ever again.

Back before my wacky hiatus, I had a few posts on diets and the Tamagotchi syndrome of over-complication and some musing re: the 90% failure rate of pretty much every diet on the planet. I got stuck directly after that, probably because I was spending a lot of time trying to figure out where I could possibly go. I thought myself into a hole, basically.

What strikes me most about those posts in retrospect was, mostly, the rules for having success in changing your life:

action almost always trumps inaction

planning is crucial; even if you don’t follow a given plan

things are easier to do when you understand why you’re doing them

your brain likes it when you make things as simple as possible

Where I got stuck is, basically, that any action I know how to do when it comes to losing weight is an action that lends itself to Tamagotchi syndrome: takes up too much of my time, lends itself to obsessive behaviors and burn-out, and any forward momentum I gain from it comes to a screeching halt if I stop the weight-loss action in question. The other place I got stuck is this: DIETS SUCK A MAMMOTH AMOUNT OF ASS. I cannot even begin to bear the idea of going back on another diet. I'm done.

I'm not planning on burying myself in chocolate or never going back to the gym again; I'm not hurling myself into another round of "fuck you, diet, I can eat more than you EVER GODDAMN DREAMED OF" reactive eating. I've simply come to the conclusion that whatever healing needs to be done is not going to be accomplished by loading myself up with someone else's arbitrary rules.

I'm currently in the middle of reading Intuitive Eating. Highly recommended. The long and short of it is this: the majority of eating problems come from paying more attention to outside cues than to inner cues. Outside cues about food such as the size of the serving at a restaurant and the feeling that if you don't finish those last three bites you're wasting money, or, on the opposite side of the spectrum, the social pressure of having everyone around you ordering salad when what you'd really like is some red meat, or simply not paying attention to the experience and taste of the food as you eat it, to the point where the only thing that really registers is the moment that there's no more to eat. Outside cues about body image coming from every damn billboard out there that uses skinny women as props to sell products, and every diet commercial, and every "OMG celebrities are mildly overweight/have cellulite IT IS A SCANDAL" magazine headline, and the comments of well-meaning relatives (or, for that matter, the comments of snide fuckers on the street whose parents clearly did a poor job of raising them), cues from every movie where a woman of normal weight is "the fat friend" who says wise things but never, ever gets laid-- everything saying you should look just like this when for God's sake even at skinny-minnie sizes no two women look alike or have the same bone structure or have the same genetics indicating where their pockets of flab should go. That isn't even bringing up the almighty scale that we live or die by when we're dieting.

And where do we go, when we determine that we need to lose weight? We go straight for a new system of outside cues. These are good foods, these are bad. This is how big a serving is. This is the sum total we're allowed to eat today. This is an acceptable facimile of an ice cream sandwich-- acceptable in terms of calories or fat grams, not in terms of taste. This is how much we need to exercise.

Why? Because we're not trustworthy. Because clearly we can't figure these things out for ourselves, so rather than getting urged back into a normal relationship with food and our own bodies, we're taken from one outside-cue-driven relationship to another one, and it keeps cycling like that until we don't have the faintest idea how to trust ourselves with food anymore, and we're convinced that our bodies are horrible enemies.

They did a study, back during World War II, to see what would happen if you took average, healthy men and restricted their food intake. While they were on this restricted diet, these average joes suddenly became obsessed with food, talking about recipes and dessert, playing endlessly with their meals to make them last longer or wolfing them down helplessly. Some broke into the kitchen and ate everything in sight. All of them, after the restricted-diet portion of the program ended, would eat significantly more at an average meal than they did before the restrictions. It took months for them to get back to normal. The lesson to be learned here is this: the way diets are designed makes everybody on them become sort of crazy, because our bodies are not programmed to make us meet the current social expectations for our weight, but to protect us from starvation, and when our bodies sense starvation, THEY FREAK OUT.

The answer, according to this book-- and while Your Milage May Vary, as always, I really do recommend reading it if only because getting the full story filtered through a blogtastic game of Telephone is probably never good-- is in giving yourself full permission to eat whatever you feel like, loving yourself no matter what you look like, and to concentrate on paying attention to those inner cues. I remember reading once that tiny children are finely tuned to eat exactly as much as they need, so a kid who's had 200 calories of juice an hour before dinner will eat about 200 calories fewer at dinner, and it's only once they get older and are more attuned to the outside cues and pressures that they change that; in retrospect, it makes sense that adult humans ought to have the same abilities, it's just that we've been swimming in outside cues for so long that those inner voices are complete strangers to us.

I was working on this post before Christmas-- LONG before Christmas; according to the datestamp it was December 4th-- and I got distracted, because I started to realize that this linked up with a lot of other things I've been working on for the longest time.

Self-Esteem: I don't think I'm ever going to be able to top myself on this subject while this post still exists, but I'm seeing where it links in with the inner/outer cues thing now. Outside cues tell me that I'm too wide, I'm too short, and my nose is funny, and my hair is now going GRAY oh my GOD. Inside cues tell me that I feel pretty healthy, shoulder notwithstanding, and that there is no such thing as "too short" because this is the only size I've ever been as an adult and my whole worldview is based on this, and that my nose is stuffed up but otherwise a perfectly cromulent schnoz, and that the gray in my hair is sparkly (and I really like sparkly). Outside cues tell me that I am disorganized and flaky and undependable; inside cues tell me that I do just fine with the proper tools (such as Mvelopes and, if I can save up $200, this freakin' awesome receipts/documents scanner with organizational software) and people need to chill out. Outside cues tell me that I need to change myself to be worthwhile; inside cues tell me that I'm just fine.

Drive and Ambition: Back when I was in therapy, I had my biggest hang-up about drive and ambition, and I suspect that my therapist and I were speaking two different languages regarding such. I kept asking if I give this up, if I learn not to be so terrified of authority and not to kick myself endlessly if I don't hew closely to some rigid routine, how the hell am I ever going to get anything done ever again? I don't think I ever got a good answer, because either my therapist completely missed what I was saying or I wasn't articulating it very well, but I look back at that (and my current meanderings) and recognize that, as in my diet, I've become so accustomed to needing outside cues to jump-start my work that if I remove them, I don't honestly know what to do anymore. Talk about a situation where I need to listen to my own internal cues again; I'm probably worse off here than with my food situation.

Judgement: I am, I have to tell you all, a crazed judgemental bitch on occasion. The expressing of such sentiments usually coincides with a certain week of the month, but I have to admit that I have these thoughts all the time and most of the time I don't notice them, because, well, I tend to see these as Great Truths and I figure that since they're RIGHT, it doesn't mean I'm judgemental. Or something along those lines. Lesson learned lately: a) I'm not necessarily right, b) indulging in judging other people against my personal standards of Great Truths is just something I do to make myself feel smug and superior, and c) it does too mean that I'm being judgemental, and also it means that I'm being a prick.

This fits into the outie/innie thing because if I'm really honest with myself, those Great Truths that I'm holding up are the ones that I generally feel sort of nervous about holding to-- ones that suit my inner cues better than the outer cues-- and, as such, I'm now using a new form of outer cues by mentally inflicting my personal creed on everyone else. (Which, considering how often I change my personal creed? Oy. I officially apologize to the world in general for being such a pain in the ass.) The Buddha once said, "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense." Which is a hell of a quote, and in the middle of elliptical-machine work yesterday it suddenly sunk in that I have to do that for me, and believe that the way these things work with my own reason and my own common sense means more than what anyone else says-- inner versus outer. And then, in return, trust that other people will be following their own reason and their own common sense, and that I don't need them to go "oh my God, you're SO RIGHT, how could I not see it before?" and hence make me feel more comforted in my choices.

Stress: Christmas was, yet again, one of those eustress ("good" stress)-ful times. I love my family, I love how complete it feels now that my Hub and my sister's fiance' are part of the picture, I love how my Hub gets along with my folks and my sister, I love how seeing things through my Hub's eyes makes me enjoy things a lot more. That said, I had to sneak off once a day or so and sit in my parents' darkened office, where it was quiet and private, and just be quiet with myself for a while, remind myself that I did not have to agree with my parents' views on X, Y or Z, that nobody is forcing me to agree with the direction their church is taking (which, seriously, YEOWZA; all the people are still lovely but somehow there's this weirdly defensive fundamentalist thing creeping in and it's worrisome), and that life did not hinge on how much people liked their presents.

Every time I focused on outside cues, the dissonance between what I am (and what I feel to be okay) and what was expected gave me stress. Every time I just sat back and was who I am, everything was okay.

[Incidentally: There is a salon that I walk past on the way to my physical therapy appointments which has a saying painted on its wall: Beauty = Confidence = Power. Personally, I would switch the order: Confidence = Beauty = Power, or for that matter just take the Beauty part out of the equation, or rephrase it as Confidence = Being Interesting and Attractive = Success And Power. (Why use one word when I can shove extra ones in, I ask you?) Again, there's the difference; getting your confidence from outside responses, or having confidence in the first place and generating those outside responses. And that phrase frankly irks me every time I walk past the place because I am always irritated by this idea that changing our outer appearance will solve EVERYTHING.]

In summary, there's a clear similarity between a lot of my issues, and the answer to all of them is to strengthen my attention to my inner cues, my inner self, and to pay more attention to my "right inward measure" than anyone else's. If I'm calm and collected, I'm probably okay. If I'm being defensive and ranting, I'm probably off again, so beware.

In other news, my shoulder feels fine. This is purely because, at my latest appointment with my doctor, he gave me a cortizone shot, re-prescribed physical therapy (I have to call those guys again) and so, hey, cortizone, WOO HOO AWESOME. Except for the part about six hours after my shot, where I woke up out of a sound sleep because my shoulder hurt like it was on FIRE, and continued hurting, for no good reason, for about the next twelve hours. I checked the internet (one-handedly) in-between taking pills and icing my shoulder, and discovered that there is a 2 to 5% chance that such a reaction will happen six to eight hours after such a shot, that it is called a "steroid flare", and that it might last as long as two days. Thank God that it only lasted twelve hours. I ended up on Valium for half of that, which my Hub thought was pretty funny, but people, let this be a lesson to you: your doctor may forget to mention that there are side effects to things, even things that went perfectly fine the last time he tried it ten months ago. Communication is key.

That said, I totally forgot to go to my annual girly exam on Monday, which I kind of have an excuse for because, well, it was New Year's Eve, but on the other hand I now have to reschedule and eat a bit of crow. Oops.

Weight Watchers has come to my attention again. I have had things to say about Weight Watchers before, but now they're pissing me off further with their new-for-the-New-Year ad campaign about how diets suck-- and they're "not a diet". I went through the roof when I saw the first commercial along these lines, and then had to explain to my dad why I was yelling at the television. For the record: until they get rid of the scale and recipes and measuring devices and focus entirely, resolutely on fixing the person, not the weight, I utterly refuse to believe their bullshit about not being a diet. They are a plan that involves ignoring inner cues and fixating on outer cues. They are a diet. I fully admit that I feel tender and defensive on this one and so I get a bit ranty on the subject, but the point is that this not-a-diet thing is a LIE. Their Core program is better than the Points program in terms of inner-versus-outer cues, but the whole thing still revolves around a scale, which is the ultimate outer cue, so I continue to look at them balefully from across the blogosphere. (And so, apparently, does Erin at Lose the Buddha. I know I just said that I shouldn't have to look for outside cues for this sort of thing but it still feels AWESOME when I end up having a similar opinion to Erin. Like I won the lottery.)

I said once, regarding Weight Watchers' mythical land of Maintenance, "Without the scale moving, suddenly all motivation has to come from something else, and, really, there's not much to fall back on." In retrospect, that's the inner-cue/outer-cue thing in a nutshell: they make you dependent on that outer cue, and then it's gone like a bad break-up.

The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl is out in the UK! and... not here. ::weeps:: Well, this might call for some extra shipping. I've ordered things from Amazon.uk before and it's worked out... slowly and with extra cost, no question, but it WORKS is the thing. (ETA: oh my, and the dollar/pound conversion rate. OUCH. Oh God how the dollar has fallen.)

In other news, remember waaaay back when I had this big post about feet, including my sort of love letter to my own feet? My sister was staring at my feet yesterday, and finally said, "Your feet look so much like mine that when I see them I keep thinking, 'wait, what are my feet doing over there?'"

My sis is getting married in June, and wants to use my wedding gown. Which, first of all, is such a trip because this is my dinky, skinny sister who's been two-to-eight sizes smaller than me my whole life (depending on how big I got) and I know I was thin when I got married, but even back then we didn't try on each others' clothes so this is all wacky for me. Second of all, when we put her in that gown the other night, she was beautiful, which I expected, and it fit, which I'd expected, but it's different on her than it was on me, which was news. It just goes to show that it's not just the size difference between us; my sister's body is not the same as me-at-that-size. I've got bigger boobs and wider hips and a shorter torso and narrower shoulders. It just finally hit me that yes, we have different bodies. Never did before. Go figure.

And that, my friends, is all for the day.

Mini-Me and the two kinds of smart

2007-12-04T11:06:00.000-06:00

You guys, you guys, I spent the whole weekend with my unbelievably adorable nephew and nieces, and I have some kind of child-associated endorphin thing going on now. HORMONES, I thought, but the more I think about it, the more it can be associated with two unrelated things:

1) I was some kind of ninja when it came to the kids; I dealt with them brilliantly the whole time and came out of the experience thinking you know, I might turn out to be a really great mom at some point.

2) My darling, darling eight-year-old niece whom I will call Mutie, because she is some kind of mutant of adorable cuteness and morbid fascination with monsters and death, and who has become my instant favorite because OH MY GOD SHE IS TURNING INTO ME.

Nothing against the first part (WHICH WAS GREAT) but the second part, having my own personal mini-me, was awesome and scary. Awesome, because Mutie kept following me around, repeating things I said and imitating my facial expressions. Scary, because it's not just that: it's that we are frighteningly alike.

(Bear with me on this one, because I might come off sounding like I'm extremely full of myself. Really not, I promise; I'm still striving for some normal level of self-esteem.)

My mom, who is a teacher and has been for forty years, says that there are two kinds of smart. There are the kids who have excellent intelligence, but who aren't good at things right away and have to power through that "woe, I'm not good at this!" thing in order to learn. Then there are the kids who just, WHAM, get it immediately, and who have to be brought back through the steps to make sure that they got every detail, because otherwise they tend to think they're done and they might have missed some key element.

I'm in that second camp. So, as it turns out, is Mutie. And until this weekend it never occurred to me that a lot of attitudes I have are associated with that quality.

I mean, yeah, this is great stuff, but since it's a trait that I had since I was born, it really skewed my whole worldview. I always did well in school, I always picked things up quickly and could move on to what I wanted to do, which was typically hiding in the book-nook with a Nancy Drew mystery. I lived in this big bubble of being able to conquer elementary school as easily as breathing; it was a bit of a challenge, but not much, and so-- well, look, when you have no experience of a normal learning curve, you just think that this zero-to-sixty, straight-up-the-wall curve is normal. And when something comes along that isn't the case, that whole worldview goes haywire.

Back in third grade, I was supposed to learn the multiplication tables. Didn't happen, because our teacher that year was having some kind of issue, so our entire class fell behind and never realized it. The fourth-grade teacher figured this out early the next year and ran the kids through multiplication boot camp, but not me; that summer my family had moved across the country and I was in another fourth-grade class, one where everyone else in the class already knew their multiplication tables from third grade. Which, if my parents had known that I'd missed out on that part of math, would have meant some extra work over the summer, but since they didn't know, and I didn't know, the first time I had a math quiz I was shocked to the bone. I failed. I failed spectacularly.

Granted, this wasn't my fault; I hadn't been taught the multiplication tables and had only the vaguest idea what was going on. I was horrified, though. This was my first experience with being at the back of the class, struggling to catch up, and I was so baffled by the experience that all my eight-year-old brain could make of it was that I must be broken. Something was horribly, horribly wrong if I couldn't sail through class and get an A as easily as breathing. I was mortified, embarrassed, ashamed; I hid the grades from my parents and resorted to cheating on the quizzes so that my shame would not be noticed.

It wasn't that it was hard; if I'd had this stuff as part of my normal classroom experience I'm sure it would have gone just as swimmingly as everything else. It never occurred to me for a moment that I needed to admit that I was having trouble and ask for help, because I'd never had to do that before. Even if it had occurred to me, I'm not sure I would have done so, because I was a pretty shy little person and I had trouble talking to the teacher.

As most novice cheaters are, I was busted shortly into my quiz-faking days, and that brought the issue to my parents' attention. Oh boy. I'd been embarrassed before, hiding things as if I was trying to hide the fact that I'd wet my pants in class (which I'd done once in third grade when I was too shy to ask the intimidating substitute if I could go to the bathroom), but when my parents found out that I'd been cheating, my dad went through the roof and I had a brand new experience to go with the original shame: a newly-developed fear of getting caught. Fear of my dad catching me, to be specific.

I can tie so much into that, looking back at it. Nobody recognized the original issue to be what it was: a bright kid bewildered by her first taste of failure, who needed to be taken by the hand, reassured, and led through the stages of how to power through something that I wasn't immediately good at. Probably this was because I was shy; it's tough to notice a problem in a quiet kid. It might have a lot to do with being at a new school, too; nobody knew what to expect out of me, so that first failed quiz didn't ring the alarm bells it should have. Regardless, what happened was that I had quite the negative experience with that first failure, and all my feelings of horror were accidentally re-enforced by the way that my dad freaked out.

Now, my dad is a math teacher, so I ended up getting tutored within an inch of my life and never fell behind in math again: straight As all the way through college. The immediate problem was solved, but I'd learned to associate not-being-good-at-something with fear and embarrassment, and that was a much bigger problem. I hadn't learned to get help when I had a problem: I had learned that if I was having trouble with something, if I couldn't pick up a concept or a knack immediately, I would be yelled at and punished. (Remember, I was eight. I couldn't disassociate the original problem from the problem I'd created by cheating. Smart kid, but still a kid.)

That was when I started hiding things from my parents. When I started procrastinating on things that weren't easy for me-- and sometimes on things that were easy for me, just because it made me nervous for some reason. (Which, when my dad found out about that, was a whole new can of worms. Dad was pretty much on edge from the time I was eight until I was twenty-three.) I recoiled from anything that was hard for me or anything I even thought would be hard for me, as if I'd touched a hot pan and was snatching my hand away from it.

I had learned that I could fail, and at the same time I'd learned to be terrified at the concept of doing it again.

It really didn't help that Dad completely lost his mind over this. I can understand why, in a way; it must have driven him bonkers to see his kid, who he knew was so smart and so capable, dragging her feet in school. He thought I was just being lazy. I got a lot of stern lectures about laziness, about living up to my potential, about how smart I was and how I ought to be getting better grades. Again, the correct message-- if this is hard for you, come talk to me and I'll help you work through it-- never got through. All I heard was that if I was having a problem, I was bad, I was a disappointment, I was going to be punished. That led to me hiding even more stuff from Dad, and lying-- two things that pushed his buttons more than anything else-- and our relationship went completely downhill after that point, not recovering until I was in my late twenties.

I still did well in school. Typically straight As. (The one time I got a B, my dad-- once again-- hit the roof. And, yeah, that was because I got busted on procrastinating again, but see how I remember it?) I was in a special "gifted" program from sixth grade onward, and my GP teacher (I found out last night, when I mentioned this to my parents) told my folks that at some point, I wasn't going to be able to sail through stuff anymore, and she wasn't sure how I was going to handle that. This kind of pisses me off in retrospect, because that did happen, and when it happened it threw me into a major depression, right in high school-- and they were warned. They knew this was going to be a problem. Nobody did a damn thing to help me out, to teach me how to swim before my metaphorical mental town flooded and I started to drown.

I don't blame them, per se, because it's not like either of my parents had any idea how my brain worked; they're both smart people, but they're the first type of smart people, with a learning curve for everything. I baffled them. My sister-- who is the kind of smart that I am, but who is much more outgoing and learned how to ask questions and get help and work hard-- beat me at absolutely everything, just because she could power through that part where she occasionally wasn't good at something right away, and because of that I can chart almost every point in my life where I might have gone on to do something phenomenal if I hadn't been terrified of failure, if I had known how to buckle down and work at things I wasn't immediately good at. School choice: my sister got a full-ride scholarship to a highly ranked college, while I got scared of the pile of applications and went to the state university where I knew the staff in the music department. Auditions: considering my fear of failure, being a vocal music major was probably not the right idea, since a very high percentage of all auditions lead to being in the chorus or outright rejected. Grad school: I made a half-assed attempt to get in, but the process scared me even worse than applying to my undergrad college, AND there were auditions in the process due to the aforementioned vocal music degree. GENIUS.

This, in short, is the answer to why I can't seem to balance achievement with mental health: the only way to achieve is to risk failure, and I am scared shitless of failure. So I'm a very bright person in a mediocre job that isn't really what I want to do with the rest of my life, unable to find a way out, and unable to push myself to finish my damn book and get that published, which has been on the top of my to-do list for the past five years. There is not enough ::headdesk:: in the world for this.

Now, remember, the reason that this all came to mind was my darling little niece Mutie. This is a smart kid the same way I was: quick, picking up the knack for new things with ease, straight As, probably not challenged enough at school. I gave Mutie and her sister spool knitters ("French" knitters, they were called on the box) for an early Christmas present, and Mutie was delighted and happy with hers until she quickly hit a roadblock: she was, in fact, doing it wrong. I started to show her how to do it the right way, and in the middle of this she burst into tears, ran to her room, and burrowed under her pillow. Her parents were completely baffled and thought she was just trolling for attention, or being over-sensitive, or just being weird. I, on the other hand, recognized this immediately and went after her to assure her that it was okay to not be good at it immediately, that she could come back and I'd help her on it, and it would all be okay. That this didn't make her stupid, or a bad person, or wrong; it just meant that she was human on this one thing, and that this was the way that most people learned things; she just usually got to skip this part.

Not sure how much of that filtered through. She's eight, after all. I did sit down with her folks after that, though, explaining the mentality and what she might be thinking, and what she needed at this point. Again, I'm not sure how much of that got through, but I really hope that they got it, because if there's any good to come of living through this myself, it'll be if my niece can get help from it and come out on top. Because that's a bright kid, and if she gets the knack of having to work her way through these things, she'll be unstoppable. If she gets scared, though, the way I do, then she'll end up on the bright-but-lacking-achievement pile of humanity along with her auntie.

Like I said, this really had never occurred to me before, not with anywhere near that much clarity. I knew I was scared of things, I knew I was scared of risk, I knew I recoil from these things instinctively and that I can't seem to shove my way through them to come out the other side, but I never put it together to realize why I react that way. It's kind of floored me.

So here's the thing. I have to learn how to do things that don't come easily for me. I have a vague idea of how this is done-- seek help, get advice, plug along with hard work-- but I kind of wonder if I'm missing something. This is how it's done, right? Is there anything else I should know?

Oh, lord, it's been a while.

2007-11-29T14:02:00.000-06:00

Sorry, sorry, I know, I should have said something. I just kind of put myself on vacation without actually mentioning it to anybody; in retrospect, a very rude thing to do. Sorry! I'm not dead. I'm not hurt. I'm not pregnant. (Not technically trying yet, just a brief flirtation with not using barrier protection while I was on antibiotics, which, yes, I know, dumb.) I'm okay.

Life continues. The good news is that I'm in the midst of physical therapy to fix my bum shoulder; the bad news is that I'm in the midst of physical therapy to fix my bum shoulder. (Ha.) On the up side, it will fix my shoulder and I enjoy chatting with my therapist, who is not the type of person I would generally chat with (I don't think she watches anything on TV but reality shows; seriously, WHAT?) but who is cheerful and nice; on the down side, I hate actually doing the physical therapy. For one thing, it hurts. I get fewer manic twinges from the shoulder than I used to, but I lost a fair piece of muscle mass from my upper body this past year and more than that the muscles affecting my shoulder, so I get very very sore and very very tired over stupid amounts of exercise for the dumb thing. It's very disheartening. Anything I once had, I'm going to have to rebuild. I'm looking forward to going back to yoga again, but now I'm kind of scared of it, too. I'll probably plant myself face-first on the floor the first time I try downward-facing dog again. Eee.

I get an MRI today in order to make perfectly sure that I didn't manage to tear anything. Everyone's pretty sure I didn't, but understandably they want to know. Me, too. I get a little careful of my shoulder, still, which is to be expected after having it fucked up to some extent for most of the year, and knowing it's not seriously injured would make me feel a lot better.

I'm still meditating. Mostly (and this is hilarious when you think about it) on the train every morning, but I'm also trying to incorporate it into my daily life. For example, if I stay in the moment and don't freak out over all the bajillion things attached to any given piece of work (it's too big, too complicated, I'm going to get yelled at if I do it wrong, I should have done it earlier, I'd rather be Christmas shopping and that says a lot because I hate Christmas shopping), I can get work done. If not, no work gets accomplished until I'm pushed into it. So staying in the moment is kind of a requirement.

More in that vein: I've ordered a new CD set of little meditations, since I'm still no good at just doing it myself when I'm in a pinch; these are shorter, so I'll theoretically be able to pop them in when I need to take a break. I've also ordered a book on mindful eating, since... well, therein lies the post.

There's this ramble at the beginning of an Alabmama 3 song that uses the phrase-- lewdly stated but accurate-- "whatever you fuck your brain with". It's linked to references to drugs, alcohol, too much sex, TV, and so forth. In my case, whatever I fuck my brain with is food.

When I'm paying attention-- and I'm trying, trying, trying to pay attention to my life these days-- I can tell the difference between a "hey, I'm hungry" pang and a "want want want, give me something easily attainable that's all mine" vibe. Clearly the latter is something that should not be fed, but that's a lot harder than it ought to be. When I want food, it's not the food that matters, it's the want. It sings out so clear and so loud that I can feel it in my skin, this rampaging desire to get and to have and to devour. It drowns out a lot of other things, both when it's ramping up and when it's sated.

The main thing is that that want isn't hunger, it's a desire to fuck my brain with food. It's maybe the most blatant sign possible to indicate when I'm going haywire; that I'm scared, that I'm stressed, that I'm nervous, that I'm angry, that I'm frustrated, that I need to take that part of my brain and knock it sideways, and food is the big hammer. Not just food, but crackfood, binge-food; candy, chips, cookies, big-taste things. I didn't need this when I first went on Zoloft (ah, the honeymoon period), but it came back, big time, and it feels like the defining feature of my life over the past ten years, really: no matter what else changes in my life, I always end up diving face-first into crackfood when under stress.

Besides the obvious problem of oh my too-tight pants, the bigger problem with using food to fuck my brain with is that, well, I'm fucking my brain. I'm avoiding things, pushing things under the rug, denying problems to myself, and getting absolutely nowhere. And when I do make progress, when I push myself to write or to complete things at work, I never think about food; I can dismiss it and just keep rolling. It's when I start worrying again, or when something gives my self-esteem a slam, or when I get sick and slog through my life, or when I'm frustrated and biting my tongue over something-- then, boom, all progress stops and I'm back to cursing myself and reaching for the candy bowl.

As they say in the mindfulness books, the only answer is to learn to be in the moment, no matter what the moment is-- to be able to exist and stay present when stress occurs, in spite of really really really not wanting to be here because the moment sucks. In a crisis, the one who can keep all their marbles is the one who gets out with the least damage. Right now I'm not set up to managing a crisis, I can barely manage to plow through a stack of overdue paperwork without shying away and getting all avoid-y. The bottom line is that I gotta keep working on this.

I have made progress, of course. I haven't had a meltdown since March or so (which was back when I was still on Zoloft!)-- none of those crazed, nigh-suicidal oh my god everything is so fucked I am in such trouble nothing can solve this nobody can help me everything is horrible aaaaah times. So yay for that. And I can answer the phone and remain calm in the face of freaky customers, without getting my very curt voice happening and without saying random rude things. Big improvement! I went through my annual review at work very calmly, and it all worked out very well in spite of the fact that I got none of my goals accomplished due to the new database being a piece of crap. So I suppose the progress indicated is, on the whole, that I am better at handling things that are thrust upon me. Taking the initiative to go out and do them, on the other hand, is a whole 'nother step.

So, that's life at the moment. I'll try to be better about posting. Again, I'm sorry for the mammoth huge delay!

I feel so famous now

2007-09-19T14:32:00.000-05:00

Ladies and gentlemen, the CEO of Wesabe personally replied to my last post. This was so totally not what I expected. I'm kind of wigged.

Um... hi? ::waves to Jason Knight:: Welcome! I like your service. I like the blog. I like the attitude. I am utterly terrified of the fact that I was noticed with such great speed and actually responded to. I have mentioned many products and services on my blog and this is the first time anyone related to 'em has popped up to chat, much less the CEO.

Ah, intarweb.

I kept working on creating a good reply for his reply, and then I discovered that this was getting way too long, and besides, it really deserved its own post. In my last post, I said:

...if the returns for all one's hard work is to maintain the status quo, it's quite discouraging, and any bump in the road becomes a justified reason to throw up your hands and say "to hell with this, I would rather go broke/be fat/lose the game than have to spend all my time doing this shit."

To which Jason replied:

I disagree with your closing comments about people abandoning projects because of a "bump in the road." It is actually the road that causes them to abandon the goal.

I sat here thinking, "Well, that wasn't what I meant," and feeling rather misunderstood, until I went back and realized that what I was thinking in my head and what I was typing with my hands were kinda different. So, let me try this again.

First of all, I meant to say that the "bump in the road" is not the real reason for quitting a self-improvement program: it may be the reason given, the rationalization, or the excuse, but the underlying cause is going to always be the crushing amount of work that it takes to keep up the program. On that, I believe Jason and I are in agreement.

I believe we are also in agreement that this is a fault of the self-improvement program and not the person. A program that can be adhered to and kept up only during the best of all possible circumstances is not a practical plan.

I think that what I was taking for granted, at that moment, was that I was writing purely for a fatblog audience, and I forgot to include something that we all know, but don't talk about: we never say the diet was too hard, we always say it was the bump in the road, and everyone will assume it's our fault anyway.

There are three pieces of common knowledge, things that EVERYBODY knows are true, that come into play here.

1) Fat people are LAZY.

2) Losing weight is EASY.

Beautiful stuff, here, because the one proves the other. Losing weight is easy, and since it's easy, the only reason that fat people are still fat is because they're lazy, and weak, and other things meaning that they don't want to work hard or can't handle working hard.

(I could have sworn that I saw something in, or linked to, the Wesabe blog that glanced off of this topic, but I can't find it for the life of me now. Rest assured, Jason and Marc and all you adorable folks, I believe you know this stuff. I'm just bound to pontificate when given the chance, and here it is.)

The thing here is that these two things are bullshit. First of all, people say "it's just a matter of eating less and moving more" all they want, but the results that such a (very wise) plan would result in would be very, very slow results. Which, in a perfect world, would be what everyone meant by losing weight. In this world, though, the yahoos who point fingers and say "shut your pie hole and move your ass!" are not talking about slow results, they're talking about fast ones.

Back to what I was saying before, about how we don't like to say that the diet was too hard. Since everyone in the world tends to think it's their business how much we eat and weigh (sweet holy pancake stacks, the amount people have gone on about how "fat" Britney Spears looked at her Video Music Awards performance... seriously, put me on the record as wanting to look that "fat", albeit not that drugged and brain-dead and completely out of it), we are exquisitely sensitive to things that will play into those two "common knowledge" memes. We sense them coming, and try to avoid them when we can. In this case, we don't say that the diet was too hard, because we know how that'll make us look. Instead, we point to what was happening in our lives when we bailed on the diet.

I will bet that everybody who's ever bailed on a diet was running on empty for that last stretch, slogging along, and the "bump in the road" that throws you completely off the program just happens to coincide with the time when you take a look at what you're spending your time on and say, "Something's gotta give, here."

Let me stress that by "bump in the road", I mean big things like buying a house, selling a house, moving, getting fired, starting a new job, having a death in the family, having a new baby in the family, planning a trip, going on a trip, having the car break down unexpectedly, having a real jerk of an ex-boyfriend keep calling and calling and CALLING, getting married, having the basement flood, going back to school, declaring bankruptcy, getting divorced-- things like that, which are universally admitted to be stressful. These things happen. Big, time-consuming, labor-intensive self-improvement projects are going to seem a little pointless at times like those... but small daily things that are a part of your life, like brushing your teeth, you keep. In order to survive the stressful points of life, a self-improvement project must therefore be small and unobtrusive. Name me one commercial diet program that's designed to do that. And if you do, be prepared to bring statistics, because if it has a 90% failure rate within the first five years-- or an 80% failure rate, or a 70% failure rate, or anything over 50% which is still freaking ridiculous if you ask me-- then it is not a small, simple, unobtrusive program.

90% failure is not considered acceptable. If a game is designed so that 90% of people can't play past the first level, it's a bad game. If a diet is designed so that 90% of people fail, it's because they're bad people. What other business can get away with this and still make so much money? What other business has, as a central if unstated core of its business model, a dependence on people hating themselves as they are and blaming themselves if that business' product doesn't work for them?

We're all so ridiculously caught up in this that we see people going back to Weight Watchers, for example, over and over and over again, always thinking that it was some sort of problem with them, not that the program is flawed. When you're on Weight Watchers, it's even worse; check any WW board, anytime, and if somebody tearfully blurts out that they're just not losing weight, everyone will ask if they're eating inside their Points range, if they're weighing and measuring precisely, if they're exercising hard enough, because the assumption is that if it's not working, it's your fault, 'cause you're doing it wrong. Not that the diet is hard. Not that any maintainable weight loss is going to be slow, and that a lot of times when your body stops losing weight it's because an inner alarm bell has gone off saying "oh fuck, we're starving!" It's not because living on a diet is insanely difficult shit to pull off.

I do not have a good answer to this, except that as far as I can tell, constructed diets are just no good. I do not, as of yet, have a working alternative. All I've got is that fat (and by that I mean any weight above the happy normal spot your body really wants to live in) shouldn't be treated as a punishment, or as a disease, but as a symptom of something else in life that may need to be changed. It's going to be different for everyone. Eating only fast food? Eating too much? Stress eating? Not enough sleep? Not enough movement in our lives? What fixes it will be different for everyone, too. Meditation? Church work? Vigorous sex (Hallelujah!)? Running? Yoga? Only you can figure out what fills the need. Do that. Bring something to your life that makes you feel happier, not more righteous. It's not the fat's fault that our lives lack things, and losing the fat won't mean that we get those things. In the end, improving your life-- not your waistline-- is going to be a lot more important than weight loss could ever be.

...Okay, I'm just gonna shut up now. Suffice it to say that I wish we had a program like Wesabe for weight loss, but at the same time, I am convinced that the reasons people have extra fat are so varied, and the best ways to improve their lives are likewise so varied, that I don't know if that would be humanly possible.

Some stuff we already knew

2007-09-07T09:39:00.000-05:00

I mentioned Wesabe in my last post, and I may or may not have mentioned the blog that goes with it, Wheaties For Your Wallet. If I didn't, I apologize, because these are some chipper, delightful folks, and they've introduced me to a new brand of geek: the social-software creators. These people don't just use stuff like Flickr and del.icio.us, they make it, and they love it, and they think about how it works and why it works a lot. Which means that they talk about, and link to, some real brain-bustingly awesome talks on the natural behavior of groups on the internet (I knew groups operated that way, but it never occurred to me to actually think about it, you know?), and-- this being the whole point of the post-- the role of self-awareness and monitoring in staying engaged in working toward a goal.

The post in question (which was off of 43 Folders, a life-hacking site) says some things that I think we can all relate to:

...Any idea that helps you to become more self-aware can usually help you to reach a goal or affect a favorable solution. That’s pretty much the entire bag of doughnuts right there.

Self-improvement juju works not because of magic beans or the stones in your soup pot; it works because a smart “system” can become a satisfying cipher for framing a problem and making yourself think about solutions in an ordered way. Systems help you minimize certain kinds of feedback while amplifying others.

Also, when you’ve undertaken most any kind of program, there’s usually a built-in incentive to watch for change, monitor growth, and iterate small improvements (think: morning weigh-in). While I don’t doubt that some systems empirically work better than others, I suspect that success with any of them has much to do with how we each think, behave, and respond to our environment.

His basic guide to having a good operating system for self-improvment:

action almost always trumps inaction

planning is crucial; even if you don’t follow a given plan

things are easier to do when you understand why you’re doing them

your brain likes it when you make things as simple as possible

I read that and thought, "Dude. He has just given us a roadmap to success."

In the post on the Wesabe blog, Marc linked that post to a number of other things:

Cars equipped with displays that show gas mileage, when compared to cars without the mileage display, get better gas mileage. That little bit of knowledge helps the driver drive more economically. More visible energy meter displays in the home have a similar effect... people use less energy when they’re often reminded of how much energy they use. Weighing yourself daily or keep track of everything you eat, and you’ll find yourself eating less. In the same way, using a program like Quicken to track your finances might compel you to spend less, at least in areas of your life where you may be spending too much.

Which, yeah. Where things diverge between the gas milage meter and a diet or Quicken, however, is what Marc calls "Tamagotchi Software" syndrome: you work on this thing, and you get changes and results which are cool, BUT a) to keep things moving, you have to expend an excruciating amount of work, b) after a certain amount of time (longer for the stubborn and bloody-minded), the reward is not enough to convince you that doing this excruciating amount of work is worth it, and c) if you stop doing the work, your Tamagotchi/personal finance/diet will fall over and die. He doesn't add what dieters would automatically add as d) once stopped, it's even more painful to get back on board than to start in the first place, because OH MY GOD ALL THE LOST EFFORT FROM LAST TIME.

I'll add another geek note: anyone else play Animal Crossing on the GameCube? When we first got that game, my Hub and I played it for hours every night. We built little houses, made animal friends, planted trees, collected fruit, fished, saved money, traded codes online for new fun things at the store, and breathlessly awaited the nightly arrival of the little dog with the guitar who would sing a new song every night. There was a certain point at which the game sort of peaked, though; there was no new world to conquer, no new rewards, BUT, as we discovered, if we didn't keep working in our little Animal Crossing towns, we'd lose our stuff because it knew how long we'd been gone, and it would punish us. Grass would grow, mail would stack up, food would go back, houses would fall to ruin, animals would be mad because we hadn't been around to talk to them in forever. We felt like we were just being forced to do upkeep, in spite of the fact that our interest had flagged. This was no longer fun. And, in the era before pretty much everything game-wise was online and would eventually offer more content for download, there was nothing coming down the line except more work. We abandoned the thing.

The main point here is that as time goes by, the higher the workload, the more likely people are to abandon the project. This can be cancelled out if the returns continue to be high (results, money, pounds lost, compliments gathered) or even increase, but if the returns for all one's hard work is to maintain the status quo, it's quite discouraging, and any bump in the road becomes a justified reason to throw up your hands and say "to hell with this, I would rather go broke/be fat/lose the game than have to spend all my time doing this shit."

So, to review: Anything is better than nothing. Simple is better than complex.

It's nice to know that weight-loss is not unusual in this, you know?

And now, some actual weight-type news.

2007-09-06T11:17:00.000-05:00

I continue to eat only when I'm hungry (next step: figuring out how to stop when I'm full, which I'll get to as soon as I can figure out how to tell when I'm full), to calm myself down via other means, and to dutifully log my weight every morning. I'd been kind of worried that this would turn out to be an exercise in futility, but on the other hand, if it's gonna work, it's going to be slow and long-term, right?

So, as of this morning, I've been doing that for two weeks. Not counting the short time that went totally whackjob via my period (having never recorded my weight daily before, I'd never realized that my weight goes up a good five pounds the day before my period starts), the results are in: it appears that I'm losing about a pound every week.

!!!

Well. I hope it keeps up. I suspect that I may have to battle my two other behavioral issues with food, "eating more mindfully" and "stopping when I'm full", in order to keep things going, but right now my body is responding peaceably enough to my switch from food-as-stress-relief to relaxation-as-stress-relief. All I'm doing besides that has been a moderate amount of exercise, three or four times a week. Haven't gone back to sugary soda (never intend to), but I'm pretty much eating whatever I want to. Bacon has occurred four times in one week. (PMS, what can I say?) I'm trying in a vague way to get healthy meals on the table, but I'm not stressing about it, I'm not measuring portions.

My theory is that for some folks, like myself, weight gain occurs on a moderate scale because of the usual factors (portions too large, eating too much junkfood, beer & soda consumption, etc.), but the majority of the pounds are associated with stress. (Note, once again: SOME folks, not all.) Food = stress relief. Entering a traditional diet means not only depriving oneself of that stress relief, without finding any replacement, but it also means more stress on top of that because diets are stressful, for pete's sake. Lots of extra work, lots of new rules, lots of new activities shoved into an already-busy schedule, an overwhelming sense that if the scale doesn't move YOU HAVE FAILED; all of it, very stressful. It becomes a huge relief to cheat on or to outright dump the diet, just because of the extra stress it causes and the way that it blocks you from your one source of stress relief, the bastard thing.

Therefore, in this case, I'm taking care of the first issue first. Make sure that I have a functioning non-food source of stress relief, solidly establish the new source of stress relief so it's not new and weird and untested, then switch over the stress relief to the new, non-food source. All of this before any futzing around with the food itself actually occurs, which, as we all know, is a stressful thing to introduce to one's life. And... so far, so good.

Hilariously, I've also developed a weird new hoarding habit. It hurts my soul to give up free candy, and then watch it disappear without having partaken, so I will grab a mini-Snickers from the bucket in the mailroom... and then put it in my desk drawer. Haven't eaten any of it. I've got a little stash now, and in a strange way it brings me a sense of comfort and stability. I can have it if I want. I can have it if I get hungry. I'm just not hungry now. And, since I bring real snacks with me to work, I still haven't come to the point where I'm actually hungry and out of food and so must resort to the candy stash.

I suspect this will come in handy as Halloween approaches.

On the financial front: I know I've talked a lot about Mvelopes, but there are other programs out there. PearBudget is an Excel sheet thing-- they're working on a Web 2.0 verion-- and free. Expensr works in a similar manner to Quicken or MS Money (you know, the traditional options), but is online, and free. (Not my thing, 'cause the budgeting options it has right now don't, for example, require that all the money that you budget actually add up to the amount you take in, which I'd think would be required for a budget, but hey, whatever.)

Most interesting of the non-Mvelopes options I've come across is Wesabe, which is to personal finance what Flickr is to pictures and what del.icio.us is to bookmarks. Very Web 2.0. Your personal info is personal, no question, but your participation builds the application-- de-coding your bank's cryptic "description" of a transaction to something that humans can use ("084 TRADJOE CHICAG IL 773549", for example, could be "Trader Joe's, Lakeview Chicago"), or tagging it with your rating for the company, or tagging it with your own notes-- into something that could eventually become seriously amazing. Think of it: you enter your own experience with a mechanic, and somebody else in your neighborhood who's looking for info on local mechanics can find it later. You put up your own helpful hints for lowering your grocery bill, and it goes up with a bunch of others so that you end up with a big page of helpful grocery hints, some of which may be dumb but others of which could be fantabulous. And the more people participate, the smarter it gets. It lets you-- nay, encourages you to-- put up your goals, with pictures, right there on a sidebar where you see them all the time. That, right there, is awesome. The creators of Wesabe have said in their blog that what they really want this to be is a way of letting people get the most from their money that they can-- the best quality, of course, but also a group support for paying off debts and starting to live inside the constraints of what you earn.

And it's free. So... awesome.

I'm kind of an early adopter on these things... not really early, but earlier than the other folks I know. Flickr, Gmail, Amazon, eBay, Netflix, Napster (the real version, back in the day), blogging; I tend to discover these things a bit after the real crop of early adopters has started to wax lyrical about them, and adopt them about a year or so before they become totally normal. The problem there is that some of them don't end up normal; my poor beloved Webvan went broke in 2001, and another dot-com startup, Kozmo.com, that would bring me food and a movie within an hour of ordering it on the web went belly-up around that same time (and since I was single and living alone at the time, Kozmo was very much missed every time I got sick and didn't have anyone to bring me hot food and fresh movies). So I could be wrong on this one, but so far I haven't seen it go wrong.

In OTHER other financial news, our car has gone wrong. I lost the battle of do-we-accept-your-mom's-old-car-or-not, and my Hub is sentimentally attached to the thing since it was his mom's, and so there's no getting rid of it. That said, I long for the simple days when we had no car. True, this meant a lot of walking in horrible weather, and true, this meant that we had to rent a car to get out to see the in-laws for Thanksgiving, and true, this meant that we didn't have the questionable luxury of driving to work and paying $14 for parking under Millennium Park. That said, not-owning is a simple state, one in which I understood what was expected of me, and one which brought few surprises to the table which could run us untold hundreds of dollars in repair fees. Owning a car, on the other hand, means taxes and insurance and gasoline and parking and new tires and repair work and a bloody city sticker which we must purchase annually to prove our right to park on Chicago streets, and we still use the El nine times out of ten, so in my mind we're paying for something that we don't need and making ourselves psychologically dependent on owning.

ARRRRGH, cars.

In other other OTHER financial news, we have a meeting next week with our financial planner. This should be fun. I'm in a much better mood now that I've publicly fumed and now that I feel in control of the situation; we're going to turn the variable universal life policies into term life, and drain the mutual funds in order to kill off half the student loans. That'll leave us with disability insurance, term life insurance, and Roth IRAs, all of which are good things, but which I'm going to start checking into to see if we could switch over to other kinds that a) aren't under the Ameriprise banner and b) might be more in tune with what we need. I've got another financial planner lined up, a fee-based one (and yes, referred to from Dave Ramsey's site) who would be unconstrained in choice of product and whose loyalty would not be under question; as time proceeds we'll move things that direction.

Happily, we're not out that much money; we're not going to have to pay anything on my Hub's insurance policy even if we just drop it (yay) and for all things I seem to have caught it early enough that, at the most, we're $2K behind where we ought to be. That's a lot better than it could be, and a relatively cheap price for the resounding wake-up call that this has been. It could be much, much, much worse. I'm going to focus on that, instead of on the parts that make me very very angry.

Also, a wee story that comforted me when I was in the midst of kicking my own ass over having not checked these things out before (yes, that was stupid; anyone who is not clear on the fact that I had already realized that, and who thinks that I need it explained to me again, or who wishes to rub more salt in my wounds, you may want to check that impulse rather than testing my dearly-won zen). Once upon a time, scientists hooked a bunch of people up to machines to scan their brain activity and then had them do a test. It was structured thusly: first, the question, then a space for them to answer, then an indication of whether they were right or wrong, and then the correct answer would be given. There was a space of time between each. They ended up having two distinct types of people: first, the people whose attention remained rapt up until the point where they got to find out if they were right or wrong, and then slagged off for the real answer; second, the people whose attention remained keen all the way through the process, because if they got an answer wrong they became really curious about the right answer. On a re-test, the people who were curious about the right answer were the ones who scored higher the second time around; the other folks just stayed static.

Moral of the story: being wrong doesn't mean bugger-all except a chance to learn a new answer, and if you only care about if you're right or wrong, you're not learning. It's kind of a cold moral and ignores the fact that it sucks wretchedly to be wrong about something when you've stupidly put your trust in someone whose loyalty lies elsewhere (as is the case this time, and on lord knows however many other occasions, since I never lack for naive trust), but at least it's something.

The other moral of the story, although not that story, is that although I always think I want more to eat after I get done with lunch, and always think I want a treat, within half an hour of lunchtime I'll end up with heartburn or other proof that my stomach has different ideas than my head, so it's a very good thing that I just hopped right on the internet and ignored the yen for a treat.

Well, now I'm pissed.

2007-09-04T16:42:00.000-05:00

The lovely cliopatra mentioned, in response to my last post, that I should check out Dave Ramsey, his website, and his radio show. To which my initial response was something along the lines of "oh, fuck, not another quack," but after some research I'm going to say right now that for an opinionated, pushy, more-right-wing-than-I'm-really-comfortable-with, often cranky guy who is blissfully naive about what the housing market has been up to in some places (it's been wacky all over, but some spots it has been BEYOND INSANE and the concept of such does not apparently fit into his worldview), Dave Ramsey is indeed right on a hell of a lot of things. He is, in fact, a pretty smart guy, and has a clear concept of priorities, which as mentioned before is not something I've been good with. Reading his stuff was a much-needed thwap upside the head, so thank you very much, cliopatra.

After voraciously reading everything on Dave Ramsey's site, I sat down and did some math on our current situation. And promptly got more than a little pissed off. See, in our current situation, we do not have a lot of disposable income. Some, but not a lot. What we need more than anything is to get rid of my husband's student loans (ARGH ARGH FUCKING STUDENT LOANS) as soon as possible.

My financial planner's advice? Consolidate the loans and you'll save money! Reality? Consolidating the loans meant that we'll be paying off the fucking things for longer, with a shitload more interest going to the student loan company. 18 years and $24,000 in interest from now, we'd have them paid off.

Keep in mind, we had a windfall which would have paid off more than half of the loans. Our financial planner's advice? Put it in mutual funds! No risk, and a better return than our silly ol' savings account! Reality? I don't know what the blue hell happened, but eight months later there's $600 less in our mutual funds than we gave them. By my conservative estimate, we would have earned $700 in interest in our silly ol' ING Direct savings account. So this is bullshit for two reasons: not only did she not tell us that we were cutting our own throats with interest on $40K+ in student loans by not paying off half of that, but she then put us into mutual funds which are apparently sinking slowly into the muck.

For the third reason I'm furious right now, more than a year ago she convinced us to start up Variable Universal Life Insurance policies. The reason? Well, it's an investment! For our kids! That we haven't had yet! So basically I found out today that we've been throwing $300/month between the two of us into insurance policies, which aren't getting a very good rate of return at all, which won't do us a damn bit of good financially until fifteen years from now, which are yet another thing that are keeping us from doing the most financially responsible thing at the moment which is PAYING OFF THE FUCKING LOAN, and which, I might add, charge us more for the "insurance" portion (vs. the "investment" portion) than double the amount of term life insurance would cost us.

I'm not sure if we're going to be able to get out of those. We might not. Right now the surrender value of my Hub's policy is in the negative, like by $1000, and I am not keen on the idea that we might have to PAY these fuckers to get out of this ridiculous thing.

The long and the short of it is that our financial planner has been doing financial advice that's more useful for settled, rich 50-year-olds on us. What we needed was somebody to say, "Look, we'll get you set up with disability insurance, Roth IRAs, and life insurance, but right now we're not going to push 100% on those because your first step is to kill off that fucking student loan, and then your next step is to make sure you've got a good safety-net savings account in a mutual fund" (that doesn't SUCK, I would hope) "and THEN we will go full-bore on those other things, including the future education of your future children. First things first, though, because you're only around 30 years old."

People, learn from my example. Only use fee-based financial advisors. Do not use the ones who are paid commission on the shit they sell you, because for instance they get a bigger commission for cash-value life insurance policies (Dave Ramsey, Suze Orman and many others, I have belatedly discovered, think that these things are a giant rip-off). And if your gut tells you, like mine told me, to keep a windfall check in a lovely ING Direct savings account (4.5% interest, I might add; I love these guys, and have used them for nearly five years now) or the proven stockpile of your choice, then go with your gut. Financial advisors work for you, not the other way around.

Also: FUCK YOU, AMERIPRISE. I'm so mad right now that I can't see straight. Seriously, just don't go anywhere near those people. Ever. Our financial advisor is a lovely woman, and we like her a hell of a lot, but that doesn't change the fact that she did a horrible job with our money, doubtlessly because she's constrained by the people she's working for to only use the stuff they've got. FEE-BASED, guys. ONLY USE FEE-BASED. It's the only way to know who's paying 'em.

Anyway, in other news:

This minor catastrophe has, strangely, led me to realize that I might really like being what is called either a "financial coach", "financial counselor", or (my favorite) "financial guru". Not the person who sells the mutual funds and insurance products, but the person who sits down with you and a few months' worth of bank statements and credit card statements and helps you hash out what you're spending, and from there on, what you should be budgeting. Hell, I think I'd be happy as a clam if I could specialize in teaching kids just out of college how to budget, how to live within that budget, and how to pay off their almost-mandatory-these-days mammoth student loan and credit card debt. I would love that. I would do that for free. I spend all day at work shuffling numbers and data to help corporations in an industry that I very frankly don't give a rat's ass about, so the idea of having some kind of hands-on positive effect on someone's life is intoxicating.

Granted, I gotta figure out what training and certification one needs to be a freelance financial helper-elf (and now I want to do this even MORE so that I can use that title), but I'll figure it out. If nothing else, I would like very much to be able to do this sort of thing on the side, so that I have something to look forward to while I'm at my useless job.

Kidding myself is a luxury I just can't afford

2007-08-24T07:35:00.000-05:00

My Hub would sooner put a fork in his eye, I think, than do any kind of financial tracking. (Let me pause to offer a fervent prayer to my deity of choice that this does not turn into another thing that will bite us in the ass.) When he has money, he spends it; when he doesn't, he stops spending and mopes; tracking or analysis of his spending would give him the chance to even out the bumps in the road, but he holds to a general rule in life that if a thing involves self-exploration or analysis of any kind, it's not for him; he prefers to be unencumbered by such. He'll take the trade-off of having days-- occasionally weeks-- in which he doesn't get to spend money and has to sit around feeling poor and morose.

I, on the other hand, adore tracking, but only so long as it tells me good things. The history of my financial tracking efforts dates back to 1999, when, freshly installed in my first solo apartment here in Chicago, I set up a complicated tracking system for all my receipts, used it for about a day and a half, and then watched out of the corner of my eye as it gathered dust until I finally ditched it after six months. I clearly remember feeling strongly that I ought to organize my finances, but I didn't have a clear idea of why, and I was really not good with how, since I really had no idea where I was headed.

My second shot at tracking occurred in 2001, although, having learned from 1999, I compromised and made it so that I would divide all my money into two accounts-- one that would automatically pay all the set expenses, and the other that I could use for the ATM. Which wasn't so much "tracking" as "well, at least this way the bills will get paid." In retrospect, it was a very rudimentary form of the Mvelopes system I've got set up now, but with only two sections: set expenses and everything else.

After things got complicated when me and my Hub moved in together and got married, and I ended up in charge of money because I was the less-flighty of the two of us, I sought the services of a financial adviser. Note to everyone considering this: this solves fewer current problems than you might think, because while they're setting you up for the future, financial advisers don't do much to sort out what you're doing now. This mostly led to us adding on more and more bills for insurance, IRAs and the like, with a twice-yearly pattern of collapse and digging back out again via tax refund or bonus check. We'd get frustrated with the tight noose of the budget and the "I'll pay it off right away on payday" credit purchases began, which quickly turned into balances on the cards, which we'd "solve" by throwing all of our tax refunds or bonus checks at the balances, and then we'd be good for a few months before it would begin again. Every time, I'd start to avoid doing the math because it would tell me things I didn't like.

Apparently in order to keep us from going under, I have to pay a service to do all the math for me. Well, so be it.

The lesson learned here, I think, is that we have a vast ability to kid ourselves, which kicks in right about the time that the empirical data coming in stops telling us good things, stops making us feel proud of ourselves. It's easy to track information when the bottom line keeps improving; when it stalls, or starts going sour, that becomes difficult-- and that, I've found, is the most important time to keep tracking, keep your eyes on the empirical data, and avoid the huge temptation to start kidding yourself. Which sucks.

We are the children of the good times, folks, and it's hard to learn to restrict yourself when there's no outside force that makes you learn. Our generation (and yes, I'm generalizing about the United States again) hasn't had to learn self-restriction, hasn't had to learn to make do, because more is always available-- and, worse, more is the culturally accepted method of making yourself feel better. More credit, more clothes, more house, more food. Less, then, is not something we're accustomed to doing. Less feels not only restrictive, but embarrassing; with what seems like the whole world spending money they don't have and eating tons of food, restricting yourself to necessities looks freakishly monkish by comparison. So when reality strikes, and the alarm bells go off that say "something's gotta change", it's so, so tempting to avoid thinking about it because you just want to stay in that dream of denial a little longer, that dream where you're not that far over, it's not so much of a problem that it can't be fixed right away, so the strict rationing doesn't have to begin again quite yet.

Gotta tell ya, folks, my vast ability to kid myself has led to project "take off that depression fat" turning into project "oops, put on another 10 pounds on top of that". Which I can blame all I want on my Hub and his bulking diet (and oh, I do), but at the end of the day there has to be a point where I stop and say, "Okay, that didn't work. Try something else."

The trick is finding a happy medium between a) spend ALL DAY keeping track of shit (i.e., which is what my time on Weight Watchers turned into) and having any break from that unbearable load make it incredibly unlikely that I'll get back to it unless forced to, and b) spending no time at all keeping track of shit, which means I can kid myself all the damn time until, again, forced to admit that something has gone awry.

For finances, Mvelopes takes the middle option for me, since after the herculean task I had of setting up eight months' worth of finance tracking by hand (my one gigantor complaint: they do not let you upload past info from your bank and sort it, which means no reports for pre-Mvelopes months, which... WTF, dude, I NEED that in order to sort my shit out in the FIRST place, otherwise I'm just putzing around moving things into envelopes with no concept of what my real budget is)... er, after my initial giant task, it's actually been very very low-maintenance, just takes a few minutes of the day to handle, and thus I don't have a real excuse to "take a break" every once in a while. I am pondering low-maintenance options for food intake at the moment (please, don't try to sell me on anything right now, due to being uncomfortable with the process in the first place and demand-resistant in the second, it would probably just send me into another round of avoidance), and have given myself a mental deadline of next Friday.

It's odd, trying to hash out something that's low-maintenance that will give me enough information to keep me from kidding myself. Everything I've seen from commercial diets is pretty much an engraved invitation to an eating disorder, or a one-way ticket to malnutrition, or utter crap, or two out of three, or all three. I'm sort of leaning toward a combination of tracking my weight (like, daily, on a spreadsheet, with graphs), keeping up the exercise, keeping up the meditation, and making a vague effort at "eating better", because frankly I know what my problem is: I've got a moderate amount of OCPD, that I've soothed the tension and stress from that by indulging in mindless eating, comfort eating, comfort purchases of large containers of junk food which then gets eaten mindlessly because it's right there, and other food-related crimes against my stomach.

That's it.

That's the main thing.

That's what has buggered me after every diet, that's what makes each diet such an effort in willpower, that's what makes my mind drift toward thoughts of chocolate whenever the tension levels start creeping up. That's what drives me toward shopping for clothes and books and electronic doo-dads when I manage to avoid the chocolate.

I've mentioned before that it's been almost impossible for me to focus both on weight-loss and financial solvency at the same time, but since in this case the root of the problem is the same damned thing, I'm going to do something very foolish here and tackle both at once. Neither my body nor my bank account can continue to pay for the problems that my head is creating. It's time-consuming to spend 40 minutes doing walking meditation on the elliptical every other day, and to spend 40 minutes in a prone position on the off days, doing a body-scan meditation, and it's time-consuming and awkward to have to stop in the middle of things and re-focus myself and just breathe, because I can tell I'm getting wacky again. On the up side, it costs nothing and it's calorie-free, and it does make me feel better than a chocolate bar or a shopping excursion, so there you go.

If I can get into the habit of eating mindfully 80% of the time or more, and practice non-food-related calming methods, and track my weight (I put together a spreadsheet with a "scatter" graph on Google Docs where today I started tracking my daily post-pee, pre-breakfast weight), and keep exercising, I should be okay. I don't think I have to spend all day tracking things; I just have to stay fucking well calm.

Example: got to work this morning and beheld my desk, covered in paper, including three notes from my boss delivered after I left yesterday. I'd already had the vague idea brewing in the back of my mind that I ought to go get candy or something, but the desk really made that thought stand up and wave its arms around for attention. Did a minute of meditation, and that seems to have settled down, but I'm guessing that my project for the morning is going to be catching myself every few minutes and re-focussing, re-calming.

That's just where I am. No good kidding myself about that.

Bacon + chocolate = pure evil

2007-08-21T09:01:00.000-05:00

I walked home from the doctor's last night (I'm fine), for the sake of a little time to clear my head. Walked by Whole ~~Paycheck~~ Foods and thought, "Well, I'm out of awesome chocolate, I should pick up another bar."

Lo and behold, I came face-to-face with this.

Yes, that is what it looks like. It's a gourmet chocolate bar made with bacon.

I stared at it for a while, and then, because my Hub has often claimed that there is nothing, nothing that cannot be improved by adding bacon, I bought it to bring home to him. (And a bar of Green & Black's Maya Gold, because there was no way I was staking my entire week's chocolate future on something that looks like a photoshopped joke idea.)

He was astonished. And intrigued. And a little scared. He made me take pictures of the entire process of him tasting a piece of the chocolate, and the faces he made were just priceless. I asked him how it was, and he just kind of blinked at me with this blank look on his face and shook his head. "I don't know. The chocolate was good, but it was... I don't know."

About an hour later, he convinced me to try some. This was a mistake. You know how the taste of bacon kind of goes up in your sinuses and lingers? Imagine that, plus salt, plus milk chocolate. If you can imagine that, you're a brave one, and you're also short of the mark because it was SO MUCH WORSE THAN I THOUGHT. On the one hand, there was nothing wrong with any of the ingredients. Good bacon taste, good chocolate taste, but as Xander Harris once said, "THESE ARE UN-MIXY THINGS." It made my brain hurt. It wormed its way into my sinuses and stayed there. I couldn't stop tasting it. I had to drink some hideously dry wine to get some other kind of taste up in that region, because the longer it stayed with me, the worse my brain-pain became.

People: don't do this. Just don't. Vosges does some awesome mixy things, but this is not one of them.

In other news, I kept my equanimity all the way through my doctor's visit, which was good. Then I went home, which was likewise good. Then I called my parents, and that's where things went haywire.

People in my family are under a lot of stress these days. There's a wedding that may or may not happen, and the open-ended question there is dragging all of us through a lot of tension, along with trying to figure out where the line is between "helpful advice" and "pushy busybody". There are several family members-- not immediate family for me, but close enough for my folks-- who are having a lot of health issues, so there's a lot of guilt and exhaustion flying around, along with the worries about care and money. My folks are within a few years of retirement, and of course the stock market promptly started going haywire-- hopefully their financial advisor was following proper procedure and had them in low-risk bonds and whatnot, because otherwise this is going to be bad-- and some serious bad drama is happening at my dad's workplace that is making him seriously consider turning in his keys and never going back. Which, frankly, I'd support, because he'd probably make more money going full-time with his much-beloved side gig, but the idea of such upheaval is making my mom's gray hair even grayer.

In short, these are not soothing conversations, and I never come out of them well. There's something about parents that will push a child's buttons, no matter how little the parents intend to and no matter how old the child is. When my parents are tense, I get tense. It has a lot to do with associating that tone of voice from my father with bad news for Meg, like I've disappointed him, or I've crossed him, or he's just generally pissy and is going to take it out on me. (Ah, childhood.) I ended up in knots by the time I finally prised myself out of that phone call, and it took a lot of deep breathing, a little bit of crying, and some quality cuddling to undo most of those knots.

I'm still kind of tense, and I'm recognizing the particular brand of tension as my "What? What did I do? How am I not good enough now?" tension. It sets me up to overreact to everyone else and feel like the world is out to get me, which is really not the case. Well, not so much "out to get me" as "vastly disapproves of me". So I start withdrawing and avoiding contact with people, which... is not good. Ah, fragile self-esteem, complicating everything. Yeowza.

Also, saw a picture of myself which I did not like. My Hub said, "But, you're gorgeous!" and I said, "Yup, no question about that, but there's a bit more of my gorgeous self than can fit into most of my favorite clothes, and this is photographic evidence which I cannot deny." I'm trying to hash out what to do about that, because I am not down with the idea of going whole-hog on a diet, and to add to the fun my Hub is still on bulking rations and eating hamburgers twice a day. Difficult to live with that. Also bad timing by falling in a budget-tightening time. You'd think that since both budget and diet = belt-tightening of a sort, that this would match up well, but that's... well, it's never been the case for me in practice. Hoping to change that by doing a LOT of deep breathing. A LOT.

Sigh.

Well, on the up side, tests of the Mario Badescu Drying Lotion have been done, since my Hub had a lovely pimple appear over the weekend and I pounced on it immediately (much to his horror). Seems to reduce inflammation and take care of the juicy white center of the whitehead overnight, leaving a lurking red spot in the morning. I could not get my Hub to agree to a second treatment, so I can't speak to whether a second shot of the stuff the next night (or, under makeup, in the morning-- it is pale pink and definitely does not blend with most people's complexions) would eliminate the red spot over the next eight hours. Further tests to come! Onward and upward!

Walking meditation, budget brain.

2007-08-20T09:44:00.000-05:00

I've been back on the elliptical machine at the gym these days, and since I am not by nature okay with cardio (in the past, I've watched DVDs of TV shows to bribe myself onto the machine), I've been trying to do what Jon Kabat-Zinn refers to as "walking meditation". In his books, he seems to assume that this would be walking around in circles in one's place of residence, or around a track or some other set thing where the scenery is not a big deal and the surface is unchanging; personally, I find that it's perfect for the treadmill or the elliptical machine. I can close my eyes and spend 40 minutes ignoring the rest of the gym, ignoring the lights and buttons on the control panel, vaguely hearing the music from my headphones, and just concentrating on being right here with my body, step by step by step.

Sometimes it works better than others. Yesterday it worked exceptionally well, as I tried to unwind a nasty tension headache (and if you make it through the rest of the entry, you may understand why I had that headache)

Five days through our first pay-period on Mvelopes, and all's well thus far. More than well, actually; I'm hugely relieved that when my Hub asks, "Hey, how much do we have left in the budget for groceries?" or "Do we have any extra cash in the budget for gas?" I can open my account, point at the screen, and give him precise answers. The embarrassing thing is how much better I feel to have the numbers coming from somewhere else; it's like when I was doing the math, it was somehow my fault that we didn't have more cash in the budget for gas, but now that I can point at the Official Numbers a la Mvelopes, I am blameless, 'cause it's just the way it is, no arguing with facts. I don't have to freak out about my math maybe being wrong, but more than that, it gives me a feeling of having Authority behind me.

I think what this means, mostly, is that I am a wuss, and am not really that good at being the iron hand o' the law at home because, in my head, it seems to be less important to have all the books balanced than to have my Hub like me. So sad. Ah, well, at least we have something in place that works, you know?

I am enthralled at being able to see how much money is left in each envelope. If I look in the checking account, it'll say $1,000, which I know in a vague way means money for X, and Y, and Z, and all that, but it's so absolutely, uncompromisingly clear in Mvelopes what that money really means. This is for life insurance; this is for the phone/internet bill; this is half of the rent that's not due until the first, but which the paycheck on the 31st won't be able to handle entirely; this is for groceries, and no, it's not equipped with a great deal of wiggle-room. It's like having a little imaginary account for each one. My anal-retentive, obsessive-compulsive side is in ecstasies over this, but mostly, it's just such a relief to have it all laid out like this. I don't have to go back to our Excel budget and do math every time I want to know if we have money in the account for such-and-such. I just know. Every time.

Totally can't lie to myself anymore, or conveniently forget after a while and thus miss the trends. If I have to transfer money from my Clothes envelope to fund my splurge-y purchase of Mario Badescu products (I totally bought some, will let you know how that works out), then that notation is still there next month when I talk myself into buying frozen pizzas and beer, and the month after that when I ask "hey, why do I never have money for clothes?", I'll know why. Oh yes, I'll know.

I'm looking forward to showing this to our financial advisor. I am such a kid; something in my head is longing for approval, praise, and possibly a gold star on my chart (gold star = an elementary school thing, at least in my experience). This is the hardest thing about being an adult; no praise for doing your homework or washing the dishes, it's just expected. Phooey.

Re: this week's groceries, I brought the thing in under-budget for the first time in... well, as per my records, at least eight months. (Probably more like five years. Oy.) This took a strict list, striking several things off of said list because we didn't really need them this week, adding up an estimate before I left the house, and (I am such a geek) crouching over my grocery cart in a corner and doing some feverish work with a calculator before bringing everything up to the counter, still holding my breath. About eight bucks under budget! Hooray! I did a little dance right at the check-out counter. AWESOME. Best part: this included bacon and spinach, which had been on the list provisionally "for if we have enough money".

I do wish we had more money. Apparently part of the reason I avoided getting the budget this detailed was that I didn't want to know just how tight things were, and now I do. An extra $500 coming in every month would let us step up the repayment of my Hub's student loans (er, more on that momentarily), put a little more into savings, and give us a little more leeway so I could budget in some non-essentials like Christmas gifts and birthday gifts. An extra $700/month would make it so that we could do all that and handle something like, oh, say, child care. I'm considering the idea of a second job, since the headhunter hasn't called me in three months (grrrrr) and it seems like there's no new job for me on the horizon. I have to admit I'd prefer to make money off my small talent in writing instead of doing retail work; perhaps I should put up a sign that says WILL BLOG FOR $$. (Seriously, I would. If anyone wants to hire me, e-mail me and we'll talk. I can swear less and make more sense if called upon to do so.)

My Hub is adjusting to the current regime, which at the moment is the most I feel comfortable asking for. I did get him to add his student loan info and his 401k info, so now I can get a much more accurate look at our net worth, and for that, I am grateful. (It may take a strong stomach to deal with watching our 401k accounts in the current market, but I gotta remember, long term.) I asked if he wanted to put his checking, savings, and credit cards on Mvelopes, and he snapped that he was just going to assume that his fun-money was being "frittered away on parking, restaurants and video games." Which... well, fair enough. He seems to have sniffed out my clever scheme in which I hoped that, by tracking his expenses for a few months, he'd eventually start to see patterns, and start planning ahead a little, and maybe, maybe decide that he was spending entirely too much damn money on parking and restaurants.

Note to self, #1: Remember, he's not dumb, and he can read me like a damn book. My subtle little schemes are nowhere near as subtle as I think they are, and he doesn't like it when I do that. Say it all out loud, or don't say it at all.

Note to self, #2: It's enough for the moment that he's no longer being backed up and/or occasionally subsidized by the shared account. He's doing more thinking about things now. As long as this doesn't turn into a credit card issue, which would impact both of us, then it's his money and if he isn't ready to deal with being responsible with it, then he's not ready, and that's fine.

Note to self, #3: Get him used to checking Mvelopes for info. Do not answer questions anymore or look info up for him; tell him to go to Mvelopes and look it up his own damn self. If something happens to me, he's going to have to know how to find this information.

I complained to one of my buddies on Friday that I still kind of resent the whole thing because before we got involved, I was pretty flighty when it came to finances, myself. It was finding out about the balances on his credit cards and his student loans that shocked me into the realization that he was even more financially flighty, and that this meant that if I wanted to avoid a 21st century Dickensian fate, I was going to have to step up and not just get my own shit straightened out, but his, too. Deep down, I'm still kind of mad about that-- about being so alone in this, most of the time, and feeling like he's undermining my efforts or, at best, being a heavy weight that slows me down.

Even more, I resent the student loans. More to the point, I resent the years he spent not paying them, back when he was with his ex (who is even worse with money, if you can believe it), and the extra year of deferment he took during the first year we were living together, that I couldn't talk him out of taking. Particularly the part with the ex, because the money those two wasted together could finance a small but well-equipped army. I know the money this woman makes, and even though I know that they're both financially retarded and that actually paying down the balances of those student loans would never have occurred to either one of them, on days like Friday-- when I got access to his student loan history online, and saw just how much interest racked up over those years-- I am still pissed. It's not right of me; he's apologized, hundreds of times, and I really need to be able to forgive this for my own sake, if nothing else (unforgiven stuff just burns in the back of my head and adds to the stress levels). For some reason, though, I feel like I need some kind of big extravaganza of an apology and a thank-you, from both him and his ex, for shouldering this where they couldn't. I feel like I deserve a parade, and flowers, or at the very least an acknowledgement of what a shit deal it is, and how much they fucked over the future by making those decisions, which eventually became fucking over me.

I know I'm not going to get it. Most days, I'm okay with that. Friday, I was not okay with it, which made it an exceptionally unfortunate day for us to have dinner with his ex. (Which is a thing that we do, 'cause we're all still friends, mostly due to her exceptional grace and generosity of spirit.) To make it even less okay, we had a flat tire, and this led to some friendly advice from her direction on how old the tires were and how I ought to put some room in the budget for all new tires. I managed not to say the first three things that came to mind, all of which had to do with ancient history and her less-than-stellar track record with money and all of which were really not acceptable, but I did snap at her that I really wasn't comfortable with financial subjects tonight and could we please change the subject?

I didn't exactly avoid being rude. I have mixed feelings on the subject, because current-her didn't deserve being snapped at when we were just having a friendly evening, but past-her deserves a lot of ire for putting me in a lousy situation, in spite of the fact that I walked into this with my eyes open, and that by anyone's standards, as her ex's new wife, I owe her apologies just for existing. It's complicated. I'm still hashing out how I feel about it. The long and short of it is that all the complications came, once again, from not relating to someone on a purely here-and-now basis, and by over-thinking things and letting my head get in the way. Gotta work on that. I can't fix the past, I can't change it, I gotta let go-- and, apparently, I gotta let go every day, because it seems like I don't have the mental oomph to let things go for good.

In other news, off to the doctor's today, to ask some questions about some funny stuff going on with one leg (this somehow makes me feel like a horse) and a weird spot in one eye. I'm hoping she'll just tell me that this is nothing to worry about, but if either of them is something to worry about, I'd rather I actually told her. Besides, it's a good point to check in; three weeks off Zoloft. So... well, we'll see how that goes.

Money may not make the world go around...

2007-08-10T08:06:00.000-05:00

...but it does just fine at brewing a shitstorm here on the home front.

I've spent three days uploading our financial histories for the year into Mvelopes, a fine bit of online financial software which I highly recommend. It's like Quicken and that sort of thing, but it lets you divvy up the cash per paycheck before you spend it and keep track of how that budget works for you-- including which Peter you end up having to shortchange to pay Paul, as it were. I've divvied up everything into specific "envelopes"-- categories, such as groceries, rent, yadda yadda yadda.

Ran some reports.

YEOWZA. OUCH. OH, BUGGER.

Well, that explains why we keep running out of money. That lovely budget that I put together works very well when it comes to some things, but others-- like groceries-- it does not. After some scrutiny and discussion, we've concluded that it's because some stuff is just not a monthly expense, it's a weekly expense, and that budgeting for being paid twice a month is not the same as budgeting for being paid every two weeks. There are some things that we need money for every weekend, such as grocery shopping and quarters for the laundry, and there are many occasions when we end up having three weekends in one pay period-- which is one weekend over the budget.

Also: a short rant. Here's the thing: both of us have a certain amount of "fun money" per paycheck. My Hub gets twice as much as I do, which happened not so much because I am a self-sacrificing sap but because I'm trying to keep him from going into debt. If he gets X amount per paycheck, then he can put some into savings and then when the next big thing comes along (and it will always come along) that he desperately MUST HAVE RIGHT NOW, then he can take money out of his savings account instead of putting it on a credit card. So this is an improvement over before, really.

Currently, in order to deal with stress, he comforts himself with driving to work instead of taking the CTA a few times every week (absurd parking fee every time), frozen pizzas (which is a large reduction in expense from when he used to order out all the time) and beer (or, more often, diet soda with a shot of liquor in it, which he deems more financially prudent), and more occasional things such as purchasing video games, books, and whatnot. This is where finances get dicy, because any reduction in his "fun money" amount per paycheck means that he either goes ahead and puts expenses on the credit card (TOTALLY NOT WHAT I'M GOING FOR, ARGH), or is sad, and miserable, and broken, and pissy, and cranky, and altogether not a joy to live with, and there's really only so much of that I can take before I can't stand seeing him like that and give in, as I always do, and fund these things out of my accounts or the shared accounts.

We just can't fucking well keep this up, you know? It's not a major financial issue at the moment-- we're not going into debt, at least, but this stagnation is not good-- but we absolutely can't add anything more. Like, say, kids. So that makes it an issue. More importantly, though, this is really not a healthy way to deal with stress.

I know well the way of external-object-based stress relief. Bad day at work? Pizza for dinner! Cranky at the Hub? I deserve to buy a bag of baked Doritos! (Which is sad because they totally taste like cardboard with Doritos dust on them.) I deserve to go out with my friends and get plastered! I deserve to go shopping (oh, Ann Taylor, why must you have sales? why must your store be located between me and the El?) and get a new outfit! I deserve to go wacky on Half.com and order an entire set of mystery novels from an author I just discovered! I deserve this bag of mini-Snickers! DAMMIT, I AM STRESSED, I NEED THIS.

...Which, wait, hold on. "Need" is a very strong word. Seriously, do I really need this stuff? I can't fit any more books in our apartment, I really don't feel like working off the extra calories of the Doritos or pizza or mini-Snickers, and while I do kind of require new clothes, it's not exactly prudent to go and spend $45 when that means I'll have to avoid spending any more money until the 15th, just so I can afford to go out to eat with my buds on Friday. It is not cool to be desperate for some object that I feel will soothe my problems. Particularly when I'm pretty sure it's not so much the fact that these are great things to have, as that I want them, I'm cranky, and the act of buying them somehow proves my worth. Today, I am worth the extravagance in money and space and calories! Today, I am so important that my whims mean more than the budget, or the meal plan!

Well. That's just not healthy. It's also not as effective as you'd think.

I'm starting to break out of this, I think. I've been able to recognize those moments for a while now, and I'm trying to combat them by giving myself other ways to calm down.

Which... okay, I can remember very clearly that back when I first started this blog, I was trying to figure out this sort of thing. And, in retrospect, it was pretty funny. I would read how a nice-smelling candle would make me feel better, or a nice bubble bath, and I would march out and buy candles and bubble-bath liquid; I have a very clear memory of stoically soaking in the tub, covered in bubbles, lit by candlelight, still tense as a board and wondering how long I was going to have to do this stupid pointless shit in order to feel better. Shortly thereafter, I recall, I ended up weeping all over my Hub. This period of time was also when my binge-eating kicked in again-- shocker. I could not fucking well relax. I didn't know how. I read all these articles on how to relax, and I tried out tons of stuff, but nothing ever really worked and I'd end up binging some more.

That was the summer of 2005, which ended with Hurricane Katrina, my catastrophic meltdown spurred on by seeing something so horrific happen, my diagnosis of depression, the Zoloft, and therapy. Now that I'm off Zoloft (one week and two days and nothing bad has happened; huzzah!), I'm pretty clear on one thing: relaxation is crucial for my mental health. Cruicial.

Budget-wise, I'm also clear on one thing: if we don't find some relaxation techniques that aren't tied to spending money, we're in trouble.

I think I'm improving on this. The first step was being able to recognize that I was having those moments, AS I was having those moments; the second step was to develop a way to deal with stress without requiring external input (for me, it's meditation, but as they say in fandom, your milage may vary); the current step I'm on is being able to recognize in those stressful moments that I do have a choice in what technique I use to deal with it, and that one version is totally free. I don't hold any illlusions that I'll get myself into a 100% healthy stress-management level, but I'm shooting for about 75%. Also hoping that, over time, continued mindfulness practice will lower my overall stress levels so I don't hit quite so many "peak moments", but instead will be able to dissolve little pockets of stress along the way.

The problem is that I'm not there yet, and the much, much bigger problem is that my Hub isn't there at all. Okay, that's not quite true; he's taken the first step of realizing that there are other ways to deal with stress, thanks in part to me using him as a sounding board about my meditation project. He has, on a few stressful occasions, asked me what he's supposed to do in this situation; I talked him down and got him breathing and rubbed his feet. Lately, I've been trying to explain that it's a long-term project-- that meditating every night is, literally, practicing for those moments, getting it ingrained as a reflexive response the way that fighters have to get moves into their muscle memory so that they don't have to think of what move to use to defend themselves. So... I gotta remember, these are big steps forward, and modern boys are not known for introspection. This is going to take some time. Lord knows, I've been working on this since March and I feel like I'm still scratching the surface.

So as things go, I feel like I've got kind of a plan. I want to get my Hub to have-- and manage-- his accounts on Mvelopes, so at the very least he's assigning his transactions to the appropriate envelope and will get a basic knowledge of how much he's spending each month. And I want him to start investigating alternate modes of relaxation, at times when he's not stressed, because trying a new form of relaxation in the middle of a stressful moment is just not useful at all. Which means that for the forseeable future, he'll still be responding to stress with money, and will still be spending that money... so I must be patient and not flip out over that.

On a side note, I was on the phone with my sister for two hours the other night and read her the chapter on demand-sensitivity and demand-resistance from Too Perfect: When Being In Control Gets Out Of Control, because some stuff she'd been saying led me to believe that her fiance' is very demand-resistant, especially considering that his mother is one seriously pushy broad and any sane human being would need to develop demand-resistance to survive her presence. She's written down the info for the book and is going to check it out. She's also concluded pretty much what I did-- that our family, both sides, is riddled with obsessive personalities, and the problem is that they feel very justified in being so, because of THE DEPRESSION. Seriously, it's 75 years later and any "why/why not" argument about obsessive traits like frugality and cautiousness is automatically won by somebody talking about "well, back in THE DEPRESSION, this and that, which is why I'm right." Most of these people weren't alive during THE DEPRESSION. Including me, because I've used that argument. It's like my family's version of Godwin's law. Gads.

Anyway. More later, probably; it's been too long and I have much built up. ;-)

Let the fun begin

2007-08-03T14:43:00.000-05:00

I've got two half-finished posts sitting in the queue, so I'll try to finish this one, at least, and get it up. I have not forgotten you all, I'm just getting all scattered this week. Bah.

So, I took my last bit of Zoloft on Tuesday. Since I've been taking half a pill every third day for the past month, today (Friday) would have been when I was supposed to have the next pill, and I didn't. Haven't. Which I'm pretty sure means that if anything is going to happen, it may well start happening today.

Trying my best to stay calm. I've talked myself out of a few trees already, spent more than half my allowance for this pay period in an hour's time (but, you know, AWESOME CLOTHES, so I'm kind of okay with that), doing my breathing, trying to get a little one-minute meditation in whenever I have a chance. I think I'm okay, but I've got this strong sense of impending financial doom going on that is kind of hard to pin down. It's tied in with my recurring freak-out about how the hell we're ever going to manage to afford kids; we're pretty much breaking even right now-- not managing to save any more, but not going into debt-- and I'm not only irritated that we can't manage to get money saved, and am pissed that our nest egg, safely ensconced in a brokerage account, is apparently LOSING money, but add the concept of affording kids to that and... I break. I kind of feel like giving up, selling all my belongings, and moving into a nunnery. Pretty sure that we're actually fine and that this is just my stress-generator talking, but at the same time, it's kind of uncomfortable.

Also: Lollapallooza is now in full swing, two blocks away from our office building, and it's so fucking loud that not only can I kind of hear the music, but the windows-- fifty-plus stories up-- are SHAKING. I would say that this means I'm getting old, but I've always been averse to ongoing sessions of very loud noise, so I'm still just as cranky as I've always been, I guess. Still. If this was our downstairs neighbor at home, I'd be banging on the floor asking if possibly he didn't need to make it so that the entire apartment complex could hear Sexyback for the eighth time. As it is, I'm feeling peeved at a large swath of humanity congregated in Grant Park. GRRRR.

Mental note:

2007-07-27T11:26:00.000-05:00

What in the hell was I thinking, not signing up to attend BlogHer? IT'S RIGHT HERE. I could be there RIGHT NOW. Instead, I am at work, doing nothing of particular interest.

Okay, I know what I was thinking, I was thinking "Wow... I seriously don't have an extra $200 at the moment." ::headdesk:: Still. STILL. It has finally hit me that there is all this awesome stuff going on and I am not there. Grrr.

Green & Black's chocolate = SO DAMN GOOD

2007-07-27T09:35:00.000-05:00

God bless her, DG brought me chocolate-- a bar of Green & Black's Maya Gold chocolate. I made it one whole day before breaking off a few wee squares of it for testing purposes.

OMG. SO GOOD. ::dies:: I don't think I'll be able to face the idea of ordinary chocolate ever again. I mean, I have a serious weakness for designer chocolate already-- my love for Vosges is already documented, particularly because they do an annual batch of exotic chocolate bunnies for Easter-- but OH, MY, GOD. Orange and cinnamon and nutmeg and vanilla and AWESOME DARK CHOCOLATE, all together; genius. It's so damn good. I have no words. Usually dark chocolate is an iffy prospect for me; I like it, but it's got that harsh edge. Here: NO HARSH EDGE. Or if there is one, it's disguised brilliantly with the twist of orange and the spices. It's like if God made some kind of dark-chocolate chai tea, only more awesome.

Seriously: best gift ever. I am aswoon. I have been picking at it very gingerly, because it's the only one I've got, but now I discover that lo, they are here in the U.S.! In fact, in Chicago! At Whole Foods! I am so happy. Not really eating it any faster (although I am now grudgingly sharing with my Hub), but still, YAY.

Note to DG: while you're in town, see if you can find some Vosges bars, particularly the Black Pearl. There's a boutique in the mall at 520 N. Michigan, and I know they have them at Macy's... if I'd known you were bringing tasty treats I would have arranged an exchange!! (Oh, and re: the other stuff we talked about, check Nordstrom's at 55 East Grand Avenue.)

Anyway, my point being, DG is so incredibly adorable. SO CUTE. I had a sign all set to wave in case we didn't recognize each other, but it turned out that we did just fine; she started waving from across the courtyard of our office building and my Hub said, "Is that her?"

"Who?" I was looking in the wrong direction.

He cranked me around to look right at her. "Her! There!"

At which point I shrieked a lot and we did a hilarious run to go hug each other on sight. It is always so wacky to meet internet buddies; there's this "OH MY GOD, IT'S YOU, YOU'RE REAL!" moment, then a "...and now what do we do? Christ, there's no editing function here" moment, then eventually things settle into a groove. DG was no exception to this.

I brought my Hub along on our brief tour of Millennium Park ("This is cool. This, also, is cool. Oh, and this. Um... that's all we know.") and then we hauled DG up into our building ("This is our office. Um, it has windows... and you can see down... there's the lake!") where we snuck into an empty section so that we could look out windows with impunity. Both my Hub and DG did an excellent sneak, complete with miming guns at the ready as they went through the door, and at that point I figured out that this was definitely going to go well. We also learned that midges, which I'd always assumed were some kind of Scottish gnat, are in fact EVIL BITEY THINGS which have gnawed the hell out of poor DG's ankle.

For lack of anything more intelligent to do, we hauled her back to our place, with a short drive past Wrigley Field ("they play baseball there, and stuff!"), where DG checked out the apartment and met our cats, one of whom had to be hauled out from under the couch because there had been construction noise outside all day and she was in full freak-out mode, poor thing. Then on to the famous home of the KILLER MARGARITAS, which had the entire sidewalk outside ripped off so we had to walk in the middle of traffic to get to the restaurant, and face down a construction crew, and pick our way through gravel and sand. We must EARN the right to drink there, it seemed.

Here's the thing: I don't go to this place a lot. I need an excuse, such as visitors (strangely, both times we've gone there this summer have been to hang out with visiting Australians), and in-between visitors I remember that the margaritas are awesome, and that they taste very good, but I forget that they sneak up on me mid-way through the smallest size and knock me for a mammoth loop. So I was very enthusiastic about going, but I forgot that I would get completely hammered off of one wee margarita. Happily, DG also got completely hammered off one margarita, so it is now my belief that it's not me, it's just that those margaritas are packed with some kind of super tequila with MAGICAL DRUNKY POWERS.

At this point, things got wacky. I could not stop talking long enough to remember to eat the tasty food I ordered, which I'm sure contributed mightily to my continuing lack of sobriety. I honestly wasn't trying to limit my food intake, I just COULD NOT SHUT UP. ::headdesk:: On the up side, we all got to see each other's driver's licenses, which is always good fun, particularly since my Hub's picture looks like a mug shot after being nabbed for drunken disorderly, and mine looks like I have scalped myself (the problem with cutting my own hair is that sometimes, I get carried away with the cutting part). And I got to see the historic "you rawk" train ticket! Very exciting.

We picked our way very carefully out of the restaurant ("Obstacles! Oh, obstacles!") and back to solid land, where we fed the meter and then wandered off in search of shops. Did not in fact go to any of the sex shops, but did go to The Alley and Beatnix and that sort of thing. Much wandering and pointing. I think DG took a picture of someone's house. I know (for I have seen proof) that a picture was taken of us giggling our way down the street. Huzzah!

By the time we found the car again, we drunkards were getting snoozy, so it was decided to drop DG off at her hotel. My Hub, who was driving (very wise), wanted to know where the place was, and we both said "W... it has the big W." He apparently did not find this to be helpful. (Earlier in the day I had actually typed "W" into Google and hit enter before realizing that no, that's not going to find the place for me.) We cruised down Lake Shore Drive instead with our eyes peeled for the giant W, and eventually found it. Looks like a very posh place; good deal for BlogHer folks! Sad farewells &etc.

I am so damn glad I got to meet this lady, and almost just as glad that my Hub got to meet her, because I've been talking about this visit non-stop ever since and it's great to have someone to babble at. She is everything you'd expect from her blog: sweet and hilarious and brilliant and bubbly and adorable. I am still all delighted. GOOD TIMES. Must meet her again, only next time I am going to make my Hub sad and leave him behind, and keep DG all to myself. HAHAHA.

ALSO.

2007-07-25T12:22:00.001-05:00

Those of you who still get acne in your thirties and beyond, like me, know of the Quest to Find the Perfect Acne Treatment. Oh yes. This week's edition began last Friday when I ran across Mindy Kaling's shopping blog, Things I've Bought That I Love. (Side note: Mindy Kaling plays Kelly Kapoor on The Office, as well as being one of the writers for the show, and I am now officially in love with her because she burbles happily on this blog and is generally awesome.) I got a little obsessed and read all the archives, and lo and behold discovered her post on Mario Badescu Drying Lotion, which I had never heard of before in my life. However, THE QUEST is always in the back of my head, so I had to check it out.

Over at their website, it said that their stuff was available at Marshall Field's. I work about two blocks away from the original Marshall Field's, the store that takes up a whole city block and is over seven stories high (I only go up to 7 because that's where I meet a friend of mine for lunch every Friday), so I thought, COOL. And then I thought, HEY, I am supposed to go over there anyway to meet K. for lunch, so we can just run downstairs after eating.

Well, that was the plan. The plan went to shit as K. and I wandered the aisles, trying to figure out where things are. Marshall Field's, which is now actually Macy's (damn you, New York, why must you intrude?) although I have yet to hear anyone call it that, has many many counters, each with a different brand, and no map; I thought it seemed rather rude to ask someone at brand X where brand Y was, so we bumbled around for a good long time. Finally we found a counter that had more than one brand, so we asked the girl there.

"Oh my God, I totally know what you're talking about!" she yelped. "The drying lotion, right? That stuff is great. I have it at home. We don't have it here, though. Nordstrom's, or Bloomingdale's, except Bloomingdale's usually doesn't have stuff that we don't have, so try Nordstrom's."

I'm mostly amazed that of all the people in the store, we found the one chick who knew EXACTLY what we were talking about even though the store doesn't stock it.

So, I went back online, thinking vaguely that I'd order it there, only I realized at the last moment that I must be strong and save my money for drinking with a certain Australian/Scottish blogger gal-pal, so instead I just got bored and filled out their skin analysis thing. Lo and behold, they send me an e-mail directly after, saying that such and such products would do well with my skin and would I like free samples sent to me?

Damn, are you kidding me? I most certainly WOULD like free samples sent to my door. I said yes, certainly, and now free samples are winging my way. I still don't know a damn thing hands-on about their products, but thus far their online customer service is AWESOME.

In the meantime, I have found that Marshall Field's now being Macy's is probably what messed me up, and that Nordstrom's does indeed have this stuff, and that their store up on Grand is having an Event for them in a week or so. Well now. If I like those free samples, I may go to that, too.

I shall update re: THE QUEST once I get my samples and find out if this stuff is indeed the bomb like Mindy Kaling says it is. WE SHALL SEE.

I get to meet DietGirl and you don't! NEENER!

2007-07-25T09:47:00.000-05:00

Just got off the phone with the brilliant DG, who sounds positively adorable. Plans for tonight include touring Millennium Park and then hitting Boystown to discover margaritas the size of our heads; not generally a bright idea for mid-week when one is planning on working the next day, but what the hell, how often does DG show up in Chicago? Every day? I THINK NOT. Special occasion, then. Huzzah!

I am so bouncy and delighted that I'm having a difficult time getting anything done today. FIVE MORE HOURS and I get to meet DG! There is always the possibility that we may hate each other on sight, but I suspect this will not happen. My Hub is going to meet her, too, in order to insure that there are no axes or chain-saws about her person, and the evening will end either with a) watching fireworks or b) watching pre-recorded, downloaded television, depending on how many margaritas I consume. Considering my alcohol tolerance of late, I'd say... one should do it.

SO EXCITED. EEEEEEEEE.

OH FUCK I FORGOT TO BRING THE CAMERA. FUCK OH FUCK. Hrm. Possibly the evening will include a run home to Casa de Veres to find the camera and introduce DG to our two cats.

EDIT: It turns out that my Hub has remembered the camera. A king among men, he is.

I have two more doses of Zoloft before being DONE. I'm actually pretty calm about this, because meditation and working to restrain my rampaging toxic perfectionism has kept me calmer the past few months than Zoloft has done anytime after the first six months I was on it.

I now own Too Perfect: When Being In Control Gets Out of Control, and my advice to you, dear readers, if you are anything like me, is to find this book as soon as possible. Alternately, if you know perfectionist people (and I know more of those than of the normal sort), there is also a guide inside for how to deal with them (us). I am very tempted to get a copy for my parents, BOTH OF WHOM exhibit these qualities, only in very different ways. (Dad: crazed perfectionist overachiever. Mom: has such high standards for doing things that often she either does things over-obsessively, or is too exhausted by the concept of such a huge undertaking that she can't do it at all.) I came by this honestly, I guess.

The author gives some instruction in how to overcome these tendencies, but also stresses that the most important thing is to learn to recognize them in yourself, and to be aware of what's going on, and to remember, when things come up, that this way of viewing the world is optional. Very good stuff. Very useful. And, seriously, I can't believe how much stuff in my life that I thought was unique to me actually fits in with this mentality-- balking and dragging my feet at the barest hint that I "have to" do something, freezing in place and procrastinating because tasks seem so big, being incapable of telling what is an important task and what isn't because it seems like they ALL need to get done, being exhausted just by all the stuff in my head when I'm really not getting all that much done... all these things are typical. All of them. I can't get over that. Finally, FINALLY, there's an answer to what the hell is wrong with me, it's understandable, it's fixable, and I don't need medication or brain surgery or years of therapy. It's a huge relief.

So, right now I'm working on that, and keeping up on the meditation, which goes very well hand-in-hand with it. My brand of mental wigginess tends to put me more inside my head than in the current moment, at any given time, so training myself to a) recognize that I've sunk back into my head and am running in little circles, and b) get out of my head and back into the current moment, is a hugely important thing.

Just as important is remembering not to use the words "I have to" or "I should" about something unless I really do, and to use the words "I want" about stuff that I do, in fact, want. Part of using "I should" for everything is that it turns everything into a chore, even the stuff that is exciting and great fun, like games and visitors and going out. Which also means that I lose touch with the sensation of what it's like to want something, which means that I can't tell what I want. Which is just not good.

Shoulder still sucks. I'm babying it. No yoga, no upper-body lifting. I went through a few weeks of sporadic gym attendance but am back to a regular schedule now, just getting on the elliptical machine. I want to get back to doing lower-body lifting again, along with the elliptical, but we shall see.

Funny thing: I used a different elliptical machine last night, due to the fact that the INSANELY LOUD MUSIC was going on in the aerobics class area again. (I now bring earplugs as a matter of course. Just in case.) This one has the heart-rate monitor thingies on the moving handles, not on the stationary ones, so it has a feature where it automatically adjusts to keep you in your target heart rate zone. I vaguely assumed that this meant that I hadn't been working hard enough and that this would keep my ass kicked, but no, turns out... exact opposite. Had been working too hard, and it kept alerting me to calm the hell down.

Seriously, the thing that I wish I'd known a long time ago (and which I wish I could remember all the time) is that I make these things out to be harder than they are, because I think I have to overachieve, when in fact I just have to do an enjoyable amount to see health benefits. I don't have to kill myself on these machines and end up dreading going back. I can do a smaller amount and want to go back.

I think I'm slowly getting back into a mental zone where I'm ready to start up some stuff again, if I can keep it in the "want to" rather than "have to" headspace. We'll see. I'm still new to this "want to" thing, so I still have to figure out what I want.

More OCPD things I've found

2007-06-27T14:42:00.000-05:00

This is serving as sort of a bookmark for me at the moment-- sorry, folks.

Another descriptive article about OCPD.

A much more in-depth series of articles.

Too Perfect: When Being In Control Gets Out Of Control by Allan Mallinger and Jeannette Dewyze-- a book I've seen recommended and which I seriously have to get.

OCPD board on MSN.

Online self-tests for OCPD.

Holy crow

2007-06-25T14:18:00.000-05:00

So, I was stewing about things this morning, trying to put together a summary of how I react to things and about how it all comes back to feelings of control vs. powerlessness, and on an odd whim I decided to check online to see if there are better ways to deal with this stuff than what I've already embarked upon.

Lo and behold, I came across this article on Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder, where I read this:

Generally two hallmark thinking styles are pervasive for persons who suffer this condition. The primary manifestations of OCPD entail either a bent toward perfectionistic standards or righteous indignation. Along with perfectionism comes relentless anxiety about not getting things perfect. Getting things correct and avoiding at all costs the possibilities of making an error is of paramount importance. This perspective produces procrastination and indecisiveness. The second factor entails the rigid ownership of truth. This feature produces anger and conflict. Persons with OCPD generally lean toward one of these perspectives or another. In some cases both perspectives are of equal magnitude. Rituals, on the other hand, often play a relatively small part in this complex syndrome of perfectionistic mannerisms, intense anger and strict standards. Their way is the correct way and all other options are "WRONG".

Holy hell.

I'm not sure if it's as obvious outside of my head as it is inside of my head, but that's me, in a nutshell. Not to mention this:

It is not uncommon for a person with OCPD to feel deeply entrenched in the belief that they are a "Good Person." This belief can paradoxically often lead to feelings of depression and disappointment. The high standards which a "Good Person" is expected to live up to are often far beyond the capacity for any human being to consistently fulfill. A belief such as "I know that I'm a good person, but I hate myself for doing so many wrong things" is not uncommon. This self-hatred along with tremendous disappointment can easily lead to feeling of depression. Since ones humanness prevents an OCPD sufferer from living according his own high standards, a tremendous amount of self-hatred is imposed.

And this:

It is not unheard of for someone with OCPD to feel that he is flexible due to an occasional shift in his beliefs. If one listens carefully, the shift in position can be dramatic and equally dramatic is the degree to which the new truth is held as fact. The knowledge that abortion is "murder" can be converted to the fact that the freedom to chose represents every woman's "God Given" right to make decisions about her own body. Most examples of this particular cognitive shift would tend to go in the opposite direction.

And this:

This indecisiveness can have devastating effects on academic, professional and interpersonal relationships. From early adolescence, through college, perfectionism can take an otherwise straight "A" student and bring him to the brink of failure due to incomplete assignments. Having to get the term paper exactly correct makes for an almost impossible task. An extremely difficult time making decisions (always looking for the correct choice) contributes to procrastination. Frequently even starting a task seems impossible, due to a need to sort out the priorities correctly. If it takes an hour to complete the first paragraph of a report, because revision after revision never seems to get it perfect, imagine the anguish experienced when contemplating the completion of a two thousand word essay. The time it could take to complete a ten page report might be multiplied by five due to checking or rewording so that it is just so.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! GET OUT OF MY HEAD!!!!! I don't know if I've written it here or not, but my inability to get writing done anymore due to my perfectionistic bent has been worrying me, a lot, for quite some time. Seeing it described elsewhere, in the middle of a report categorizing a whole lot of other things that describe me to a T, has wigged me out.

Oh, and this disorder tends to co-exist with eating disorders. I am somehow not at all surprised.

I looked elsewhere. Found more exciting things, such as the possibility of this being an inheirited trait (it tends to occur in families) or maybe developing because of a certain kind of upbringing (again, this would tend to occur in families, so nature/nurture/takeyerpick) involving a lot of punishment and not many rewards, so the child develops these traits as a way of avoiding punishment.

So, on the one hand, I am wigged, particularly because everywhere I looked for more information on this, it indicated that it was insanely difficult to treat. That said, it appears to be insanely difficult to treat both because it involves long-term work on creating new ways of dealing with things, and because of the nature of the beast itself. I suppose that when the whole disorder comes from I'M RIGHT, YOU ARE WRONG, if the therapist or psychiatrist is perceived as being WRONG then it gives the patient every perceived right to ignore what they say.

Currently, I'm looking at the bright side. For one thing, I've known for quite a while that something in my operating system is working so inefficiently that it is bogging me down and exhausting me. I've done the vast majority of the grunt work over the past five years (oy, FIVE YEARS), digging into my brain to figure out what the hell is going wrong, and stringing together patterns. Really, I've done most of the work myself, and this is just a nice way of describing what I was flailing around, attempting to say.

For another thing, it's confirmed what I've been suspecting the past few months: what I need, more than anything else in the world, is to learn to let go. Hauling around the extra mental rocks (I'm now adding "perfectionism" and "truth-owning" to my mental list of heavy mental rocks) is exhausting, and is making it so I just don't have the energy for anything else-- like writing, in particular. I'm just hoping that if I can manage to let go enough, and learn to accept risk, that'll be half or more of the problem solved, right there.

Oh blessed shoes, and other life events

2007-06-22T17:22:00.000-05:00

I have mentioned, lately, that I love my feet. I do. I do not, however, love my annual struggle to find sandals for the summer that will fit them and not result in big blisters all the time-- particularly since these ain't no sittin' round lookin' pretty sandals, these are for GOING PLACES, so if they're only comfortable for about ten minutes of walking, tops, they're no good. This was not an issue until I graduated from high school, because I could always find sandals of good, comfy leather, with an adjustable strap across the toes and an adjustable strap around the ankle, and all was well with the world. Then apparently the shoe industry decided that they hated me, and lo! it became impossible for me to find any of those particular sandals. All I could find were ones that had a front strap that was completely fixed in place, no way of adjusting it out to make room for my full glorious tripodal footbreadth, and so for years on end I've spent all summer with giant blisters all over my feet. (Okay, I take that back-- once about five years ago I had a glorious pair of perfect, gorgeous, comfy sandals that were lined and padded and just wonderful, but I wore holes in them over two summers and broke one of the straps, so there went that party, and I've never seen their like again.)

This weekend, however: VICTORY. I found a single pair of marvelous sandals, on sale (it frightens me that at thirty percent off the SALE price, they were still $35), and I bought them immediately and with no regrets. I've worn them every day this week, and nary a blister has developed. I am so happy, folks, I can't even express it. Proper sandals! Hooray!!! I swear, if there'd been more than one pair there (and I did look), I would've bought them, too, just to stock up for when these inevitably fall apart. One can't trust that another pair of sandals will be there again next summer.

Bad news, though: my shoulder's gone out once again. I can only guess that it's a combination of a) push-ups and b) a single yoga class in which I spent half the time doing downward-facing dog. My reaction to this is basically OH, BAAAAAAALLLS.

See, I had this figured out. This summer, I was going to work out four times a week: one session of yoga, two of lifting, and the last being our weekly trip in our little inflatable kayak. Apparently, this plan was too much for my shoulder. BAAAAAALLLS.

So... well, really, what can ya do? Back to the doctor. (I have to call Monday; today was a summer outing at work that has left me pleasantly drunk. Hooray for free beer on the company nickle!) This time, I'm going to ask about physical therapy, because I can both hear and feel my bones popping into place when I lift my arm and I am pretty sure that a) this isn't supposed to happen and b) this is what's causing the bursae in that area to get all inflamed.

I forget who asked-- sorry!-- but I am still working hard at the gym. Just at a good variety of things. And I am still smug about lifting more than a lot of those other girls-- there was a desperately thin girl doing squats holding a pair of five-pound weights, and all I could think was "holy crow, I bet I could do squats with her on my back, and her little weights, too." Numbers aren't going up at the moment because I'm transitioning into a new program which has me doing fifteen-rep sets, instead of eight-rep sets, and this makes a huge difference in what I can lift. More than cut it in half, the first time I did it-- I think it went down to 65 pounds-- which makes sense, considering that I'm doing almost twice the number of reps per set. It is MEAN, I tell you. Yeowza.

The shoulder thing throws lifting, yoga, and paddling into disarray again, so the last time we went to the gym, I ended up on the damned elliptical machine again, which wouldn't have been half so annoying except...

Okay, story time. Our gym is designed poorly. On top of that, there does not appear to be enough space to accommodate what they want to do, which apparently is to have every machine on the planet in there, so any time you're not on the stairs, the odds are good that you're edging around a machine or apologizing someone for running into them. The aerobics floor is in a big open space, so when you're there, you can hear all the noise from downstairs with the numerous noisy treadmills, and when they play music for a class, the acoustics mean that they end up playing the music louder than they would in an enclosed space, since nothing is bouncing back at them.

This time, the guy running the class apparently turned the volume up to ELEVEN [/Spinal Tap] because I, on the elliptical machine at the edge of the floor, could feel the beat in my sternum. Happily, I had special earbuds for my mp3 player, the squooshy type that are supposed to keep out ambient noise. I can't say they were successful, in this place, but when I turned off my mp3 player (TOO MUCH NOISE, so I had to do whatever I could to survive), they did serve some use as earplugs.

I spent the whole time on the elliptical working on keeping my zen, because after five minutes of this I was ready to leave. My second impulse was to make snarky comments about how loud this was. The third was to sack up and go complain to somebody in charge. I concluded that all the last two would be futile (this is not exactly the greatest gym in the world in many ways), so I concentrated on using it as a practice session for keeping my cool under pressure. Breathe in, breathe out. Relax the soles of my feet. Pretend that the back of my neck and my upper back is made of a specialty porous material that lets rage leak out, so it isn't being held in by anything. Follow the feeling of anger in my head, watch it, consider it, nod and think "yup, that's an angry feeling, all right".

I'm spending a lot of time doing that these days, mostly using internet arguments as time to practice that mindfulness. That's the one good thing about the things. There will ALWAYS be something on the internet that threatens to make me go nutty. The latest was when I came across the latest kerfuffle that has crossed many political and fandom lines-- the explosion of anger from female fans of superhero comics, particularly about female superheroes, over the way that female characters are being portrayed as helpless victims and/or drawn as a "stick with water balloons" figure. (For an excellent summary and explanation of why this pisses women off, I highly recommend this editorial.) I read, I agreed-- then I read the comments and my blood started to boil.

There are a few things that occurred to me while I was on that elliptical, one of which I just used when I read the comments on that editorial and felt myself wishing to commit more violence [/Illyria]. The biggest of these was that, for a girl who's always stressing out about how little time she has to get stuff done, I sure spend a lot of mental time stewing over things that I can't do anything about, either because it involves the opinions of others, or because it's something that occurred in the past and is over and done already. A physical equivalent to this would be willingly carrying around a bunch of giant rocks all day, in spite of the fact that they have no value and I will never be able to do anything with them. Exhausting for no reason. So I just have to step back and think-- Woman, just drop the rocks. Drop the damn rocks.

...And I just left this post sitting unposted for several hours while we had visitors over. Just now getting back to it. I'd like to add, before signing off, that the visitors we just had over are some of my most stress-inducing friends. Glorious people, but I just have reactions to them sometimes like mental allergies, which wear me out and make me a bundle of cranky before the night is through. Tonight, before they got here, I sat and meditated for about half an hour.

It was a fantastic visit. Almost no stress. I let go of a lot of things that came up-- I can remember moments where I recognized that conversation topics were flying past and that I wouldn't be able to tell a story that I'd intended to, and instead of getting frustrated, I just let go of those particular rocks because the time had passed and we were on to something else. It helped a lot.

As a more humorous and much less ladylike example, I also used mindfulness this week when stuck in the car and needing very much to pee. It was wacky. I completely let go of the frustration of "dammit, I should've gone before we left" from the past, and the "oh my God, it's going to take us forever to get home" in the future, and just sat with my mind on my very annoyed bladder, letting it yell at me for all the stress it was under, not freaking out over this. I won't say it was the most pleasant ride home, but I did manage to keep things together and stay remarkably calm about it, which is a change-- usually I'll be furious and stressed out, all on top of dealing with a very stressed bladder, so I'm generally a basket case by the time we get to a bathroom. This time, though, I calmly walked up the stairs and got the keys out and opened the door, without dancing all over the place or shrieking or otherwise losing it. Hooray! At the age of thirty-one, I've succeeded not only in mastery over my bladder (which, really, is old hat by this point), but in being calm and adult about having to wait to go potty! Huzzah!

Man, I'm telling you guys, individual mileage may vary on this mindfulness meditation stuff, but as far as I'm concerned, it's working very, very well. Which reminds me: we're a week out from my next step down on Zoloft, where I'll be taking half a pill (25 mg) every three days. At the end of July, I'll stop altogether. Based on how very well I'm feeling these days, I think this is going to end up being a success.

I think they got the wrong message out of Cinderella

2007-06-21T17:22:00.000-05:00

It just so happens that I was reading the last part of the Cinderella story last night-- not the Disney version, but ye olde version complete with the stepsisters hacking off parts of their feet in order to fit into Cinderella's shoe. So it made my jaw drop completely when I read this:

It is 8 o’clock on a serene blue morning in Beverly Hills and Dr Ali Sadrieh, a podiatrist, has just performed a 45-minute operation on a client, cutting a section of bone out of her toe to shorten it. She was awake during surgery, watching a film; next week Sadrieh will do the same thing to the second toe on the other foot. There was nothing medically wrong with the toes, but his patient didn’t like the way they protruded over the lip of her high-heeled Manolo Blahniks.

Welcome to the wilder shores of La-La Land, where cosmetic surgery has finally travelled the full length of the female form. Down the phone line from California, Sadrieh’s voice is upbeat: “Toes are the new nose,” he tells me happily. “Just a little marketing phrase I’ve coined.” His demographic in Beverly Hills, he explains, includes a high percentage of young attractive women who take care of their feet: they have regular pedicures, paint their nails and wear shoes that expose their toes, and they are unhappy if the second one hangs over the edge.

There's another chick in this article who was so unhappy with her feet (which, truth be told, sound like they looked just like mine, isn't that a cheerful thought?) that she had freakishly extensive surgery that they called a 'full foot lift'. They basically changed the whole shape of her foot. Her FOOT. That she uses to WALK. Because she felt that her feet were ugly, she chose major surgery (including for the love of God FAT REDUCTION ON HER TOES) which left her unable to walk for weeks, wracked with pain, and she's still on crutches and hobbling around.

The part that really killed me was the end, where it was indicated that this is the new plastic surgery fad that's sweeping the nation (or, at least, the parts with too much money and not enough common sense or self-esteem), because even pretty girls are discontented with how their feet look. So, I guess, yay for them, because now they can get surgery for that and finally move on to finding some other imaginary quality about their bodies unattractive.

Wow. People, I have seen a great many feet in my time, because they're the one thing that (up until this point, apparently) haven't haven't had the "approved proper shape" declared by the powers that be and thus forced people to be exceedingly self-conscious of them. Folks let the feet fly free all summer long, even people who cover up all other body parts, and so it's easy to get a look at a whole lot of feet and get a realistic view of what the range of "normal" is for human feet-- and that's a pretty damn wide range. I think what I'm trying to say, here, is that this may well be the only body part that I don't have some kind of issue about, because I've really never seriously thought that there was a "right" way for feet to look.

Let me tell you about my feet. I have feet like my mother's, only longer, which only makes sense since I'm taller, too, so my feet are proportionally different from hers. They are short in length, size six and a half, and are majestically broad; I don't so much have regular feet as I have tripods. They're pure hell to try to shove into those pointed pumps that people like so much for some reason (I do not get it, I may never get it, and I am grateful that due to the natural shape of my feet I have never worn them and so don't have my toes permanently jammed into that wedge shape). They have very high arches and lovely narrow heels, qualities which once made a dance teacher of mine very jealous. They have massive callouses, almost entirely on the ball of each foot, which adds to the fun of getting the things shod. They are very sensitive on the arches, and I have found that if I can relax the arches of my feet, I relax everything. They are goddamn strong. They are tripodal, which gives me an extra boost in balance. They have forcibly kept me away from entire species of shoe which, if I had fit into them, would have hobbled me or left me mincing along, unable to stroll across the Loop in the mornings, unable to put on a burst of speed to get to the elevator right before it closes, unable to walk for walking's sake any time I choose. They have, in doing so, shaped my life and my personality. I'm sure that some people would find them very ugly, but I find them to be similar to the rest of my body and my personality-- elegant in spots, broad and unashamed in others, scarred and rounded and curved and cute and cheeky. They are my goofy, rolly-polly adorable feet, and I have to say that the thought of having them surgically altered startles the hell out of me, because...

Well, first of all, because they're FEET. People: feet look funny. I may experience blind spots to anyone's body issues but mine own, but feet? Feet I understand as being very individual and exceedingly random, because, well, LOOK AT THEM. Feet! Even the word is great fun to say. FEET FEET FEET.

I admit, I still have a lot of issues about my body, and about what other people think about it, but on this particular topic I seem to have found a place to stand. (Er. Pun.) Feet are made to carry us, to hold us up. Feet are extremely utilitarian. Sure, you can dress them up, and that's great fun, but at the end of the day these suckers are meant for locomotion, baby, and I respect that. If I hold onto that firm respect for my very utilitarian feet, and start looking at the rest of my body, I find very utilitarian awesome bits everywhere.

Check this out, for example. I know this ought to be an obvious concept, but it still blew me away: bones in different people are different sizes and shapes. I mean, maybe I knew it on one level, but I had absolutely no idea that the same bone from two different people could look THAT MUCH different.

Your hip sockets can point at a very different angle from someone else's! Your femur can have a drastically different bend at the "neck" than someone else's, which really makes a big difference in whether or not you can do the splits! Bones grow on a SPIRAL! Did you know that? I sure as hell didn't. And once I started thinking about how different just our bones can be, it occurred to me that all the other stuff on top of the bones is able to be just as different.

Back to feet for a minute: what really astonished me was just how different my thoughts on what feet "should" look like (i.e., a huge range of possibilities) to what other body parts "should" look like (a much more limited concept). It makes me think that there must have been a point back in my childhood, before puberty and all the issues that came with it, when I felt about my whole body the way I feel about my feet: vaguely aware that there's some stuff I can't do with it because it's just made that way, and that there's other stuff that it's pretty awesome at, and feeling pretty good about it on the whole. And-- the thing is, yesterday I didn't know what that would feel like at all, and now I have something to base it on. Which is pretty cool, you know?

Perfect Girls, Staring Daughters: a review

2007-06-06T15:30:00.000-05:00

I've read this almost twice now, some parts more than that. I've told my Hub all about it. I am, in a number of ways, still digesting the whole thing, but I feel like I need to talk about it in order to work it through my mind properly.

First and foremost, this is a great book. Courtney E. Martin will be here in Chicago to do a reading (at Women & Children First, up in Andersonville) on June 27, and you bet your ass I'm going to be there. I want to shake that woman's hand and thank her. Frankly, if I had the money, I'd be buying up copies of this book and handing them out to every woman I know.

It's not about eating disorders, exactly. It's about what makes us susceptable to them, what starts us down that road-- the deep yearning for acceptance, both from ourselves and from others, and the conviction that unless we're perfect, we can't get that acceptance and won't deserve it. I'm sure I must have met women who have utter buoyant confidence in themselves from top to bottom and all sides 'round, but I swear I can't name any off the top of my head. Which, really, is a shame, because the number of women I've met who have brainsmacked me with their sheer awesomeness is a number which would have to be written in scientific notation, it's so damn big.

The point being: Are you a woman and/or do you know women? Do you feel driven to perfect yourself, or ashamed of your own imperfection? Do you watch others with an eye to cataloguing their defects and comparing them to your own? If any of that rings a bell, then, regardless of your relationship to food and exercise and body image, READ. THIS. BOOK. If for no other reason, do it because I want to hear what you think.

I can remember crying for days after I found out that I got a scholarship, because it was only for $500 per semester. The ones that covered more, and particularly the full-ride scholarships-- I thought I was in the running for those, and when I didn't get them, I was devastated. I actually ended up getting three different scholarships for my first year of college, but I thought I was a horrible failure because I hadn't managed to scholarship my way out of having my parents pay anything.

I don't think I've ever mentioned that before, to anyone, because I'm aware of how it makes me sound like an ungrateful twit. (So now I post it on the internet! Hooray!) Not to mention, it makes me sound ridiculously full of myself. It's not so much that I thought I deserved those scholarships, as that I felt that I was expected to get them, and when I didn't, I felt like I had disappointed my family and my teachers. Any comments to the contrary sailed right over my head.

I'm not sure how I got it in my head that I was expected to achieve at that level, but I do remember my senior year of high school being a crushing horror for my sense of self, as I filled out form after form that basically asked why do you think you deserve this? and I couldn't think of a single damn reason. I abandoned whole applications just because I couldn't face the question anymore. Lord only knows what I might have achieved if I'd believed in myself a little more and expected a little less.

The thing is, I've been caught in a version of those applications since I was eleven or twelve. I was a "gifted" kid, a straight-A student, and ever since I can remember I've been told a) that I have great potential, b) I need to live up to that potential, and c) currently I'm not living up to that potential so I need to stop fucking around and get a move on. I've had great guilt for not being a published author by eighteen, not paying for my own college education, not getting the lead roles in the musical and the opera, not going on to grad school, not using my degree for my job, and, oh yeah, not being a size six. Nobody actually told me that I had to do any of that stuff, but I felt the pressure nonetheless: I was special, so I had to achieve special things, or I wasn't any good at all.

I never expected to read a book that laid out that mentality, that said, "look, this is common, you're not alone in this, and it's okay"-- much less one that was written by someone who's in it herself, who's part of this generation, who's seen what it's done to her friends, who's had the same pressures and fears, who can honestly say "there but for the grace of God go I" because she was the roommate of, cousin of, teammate of, friend of, so many of these women that walked a very similar path and walked it into darkness. That gives her credit, in my eyes, that an older woman wouldn't get. She's here with us. She knows what it's like. She's written our reality, spoken it out loud, made it admitted and real and something we can talk about and analyze and work with. I'm more than a little bit awestruck.

Even more impressive, this book is written with love. With compassion and empathy. Every woman whose story is told, here, is not a clinical subject described in terse terms, but someone seen as strong and beautiful and fiercely intelligent, someone with whom the author had a connection. I've seen reviews some places, obviously by older people from other generations, where this technique is sneered at, but if this had been a more clinical book, a more detatched book, it would be a lesser book. It would not have had the impact on me that it did. There's real mourning and real loss here, real anger, real fear, all of it spoken without shame.

This isn't a book about abnormal people, and it doesn't treat us that way. This is a book that looks at what is normal in our culture today, by an author that's experienced it. This is normal, and that's just not right. We should not be expected to hate ourselves for being imperfect. We should not be expected to attain perfection, and shouldn't be treated as if it's something we could do if only we get off our lazy asses and work just a little harder, kill off those weaknesses, ignore our bodies' messages. This shouldn't be normal. This should not be what we expect of ourselves, or of each other.

I cried, reading this book. Nobody in this book is me, and none of the stories are quite like mine-- some of them are so vastly different that I wouldn't have read them for themselves, had they not been part of this text-- but the emotional thread going through all of these stories was almost identical to my own. I looked in here and saw myself, saw my sister, saw my cousins, saw my high school friends and my college friends and the friends I've gathered, online and off, since graduation. I identified with this book, almost to a fault.

I think the main thing here is that this book has so much hope in it, so much complete conviction that we are worth more than what we think, that we are all so beautiful and so talented and so brilliant, all in our own imperfect, fragile, messily human ways. And because the author has that credibility, that knowledge of what it's like, it's like she knows each of us and is showing us our own potential-- not, for once, the potential to be thinner, or the potential to accomplish something, but the potential to love ourselves and find peace with our imperfection.

Go to the library, or the bookstore. Get the book. Read the book. Courtney's last chapter indicates that she believes that this won't be an issue to be solved by a large social movement, but instead via millions of individual stories-- and I was struck instantly by the fact that these stories are already being written on blogs. Ladies, go read this book, and come back; we have a conversation to begin, and I want it to begin as soon as possible.

Gotta write this down before I go to bed

2007-06-01T23:32:00.001-05:00

I keep running into things today that I want to share with you guys.

1) We threw the inflatable kayak in the trunk of our car after work, along with our life vests, and went to the lake. Lake Michigan. As my Hub intoned, "the big lake they call Gitchi Gumee". Granted, we were just in the harbor, but I felt very small and ridiculous, trying to face such a big expanse of water with a little boat made mostly of air.

I got kind of freaked out very quickly, because my instinct was to paddle around in very shallow water, whereas my Hub decided immediately to strike out across the water toward a buoy. For a while, neither of us got our way, because it turned out that we had the seats in the kayak backward and were also holding the paddles upside down (two realizations which led to a lot of thrashing about and quite a few uncomfortable moments where I thought I was going to end up being pitched into the water), but eventually we got it all hashed out. There as still quite a lot of going in small circles and accidentally smacking each other with paddles or splashing each other with water, though. And I promptly decided that okay, I was done now, I had had enough of being uncomfortable and off-balance (lordy, what a core workout) and being nervous that we were going to be yelled at (again) by lifeguards at the swimming beach (which, apparently, we were way too close to), and being anxious about the possibility of falling into the drink (and yeah, we had life vests on, but I would get WET and COLD), and mostly being generally anxious about trying a new thing and not knowing how to do it right and not being very good at it. Oh, and because I was stuck out there, because my Hub was having a really good time and had no intentions of going back to shore.

As I told my sister tonight, it quickly turned into a hilarious metaphor for our marriage. Remember my use of paddling on the water as a good description of what can and can't be controlled in life? Well, I forgot about the other person in the boat, which is a very big thing. Sure, the water has the most influence on what's going on, but if you can't get the other person in the boat to agree on a direction or figure out how to paddle together, this is a doomed enterprise. I would love to have a video of the two of us squabbling and shrieking and laughing in that boat tonight; it's us in a nutshell, particularly because we finally did get it all figured out and managed forward motion in a more-or-less straight line. Because my Hub talked me through my nerves and was smart enough to keep me out in the boat until I started having a good time in spite of myself. Because I realized that I was going to be out on the water for a while, and I realized that I could either do my deep breathing and get around to enjoying this thing that I'd been looking forward to for weeks, or I could freeze up and freak out and weep and have a miserable time and fuck up our brand new hobby. Because we argued and flailed about with our paddles in a very unprofessional manner and ended up having a whale of a good time.

I just-- wow. It was phenomenal. I was scared of it and I did it anyway, and it was great.

2) Talked to my sister on the phone tonight and not only has she heard of Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, but when she found out that I had the book, she squawked in delight and demanded that I tell her all about it when it's done. I should mention that my sister has always been the overachiever in our family; the skinny one, the runner, the vegetarian, the straight-A student, the one with the full-ride scholarships and the overwhelming amount of bad-assed determination. I was completely baffled that she'd heard of this book, let alone that she'd want to read it, because... well, she's skinny.

Yeah, okay, I'm kind of a dope. More on that when I talk about the book.

Still, it was fascinating to realize that we have a whole big batch of knowledge in common on body issues; she's come across this stuff when it drifts up against her main field of study in grad school, while I've done it purely because, well, I gotta figure out how to get my brain screwed on straight. We started swapping information we'd read in articles and encountered in our own lives, like how she's heard about men having a false idea of the male ideal body and how more and more boys are working out compulsively and taking steroids just to look like that, while I've got this information secondhand from my Hub from the guys he talks to online and the general knowledge in their community about how steroids work (even if they don't act on it, they seem to know, just like all women seem to know how eating disorders work even if we don't have them). We've both seen the thing in Jane where they'd discovered that 75% of women are unhappy with what their breasts look like, and they suspected that it's because most of the time the only thing we see are "perfect" breasts on TV and movies and whatnot, so they had readers send in boob shots. It's an amazing thing to see, because I didn't really realize how ingrained the "perfect" look had gotten in my brain until I saw picture after picture of these normal, imperfect boobs, all different, one after another after another, and it's like something went sproing! in my head.

It really made me realize something. We all talk about how the airbrushed, impossibly thin, impossibly primped women in the media are fucking with our ability to recognize our own bodies as normal, but it wasn't until I saw that parade of boobs that it really hit me just how much it had messed with my head. I mean, I'm a smart woman. I'm an educated woman. I know the tricks the media plays. For some reason, I thought that this meant that while I was affected by this stuff, I wasn't really affected by it.

WRONG!

Go back to the Dove ads that were so screamingly controversial last summer (or was that the summer before?): normal women of various imperfect body types, proud and happy and posing in their undies. I still remember that my first thought when I saw those ads was OH MY GOD FAT, and that it took me a second to realize that, no, these women looked like the women I saw on the street, in the office, in my family; these are perfectly healthy women who just don't happen to be a size zero, and who are too tall or too short and have big hips and narrow shoulders and too-small or too-big boobs, who have a normal amount of fat stored in their rear ends, whose torsos are too short or too long, whose thighs and calves don't match up.

Every once in a while I really need to go back and remember: yeah, this affects me. It affects me right now.

3) I have started reading Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, have made it to chapter 3 and have wept all over the place. Oh my God, you guys. It's all of us. It's all of us. There's this dichotomy that's been put up between the skinny girls and the fat girls-- the dichotomy that made me surprised that my sister had ever heard of this book, let alone would be interested in reading it-- but it's not there, it's fake, we're all the same. I'm seeing myself in here, and I'm seeing my sister. I always thought that she escaped all of this, that I was the one it happened to, but-- she's just showing it in a different way. None of us learned how to be happy and love ourselves, and we just have to, we really do, or else we are going to continue beating ourselves in hopes that our morale will improve [/USSR].

You have to read this, you guys. You absolutely have to. Put it on your summer reading list. It's one thing to know that the rest of us in the fat-blogosphere know and share certain thoughts and experiences-- realizing that it goes so much further than that is priceless.

I'll write more about it when I finish and am, er, coherent. Don't wait for me, though. Go find this book and read the damn thing.

4) My Hub grabbed my butt this evening while he was hugging me. "God, I love your body," he said happily.

"Me too," I said, and I started laughing because while that wasn't what I meant to say-- it seemed too proud, too inaccurate-- it sure as hell sounded good. "I love my body, too."

Too many priorities is the same thing as none at all

2007-05-31T14:09:00.000-05:00

I tend to suffer from-- as I've been told on multiple occasions-- an inability to prioritize. I either have ONE THING as the only thing that I do, or I am attempting to do everything at once. I always believe that absolutely everything is important, so the thing I end up doing is the thing that shows up in my in-box at that particular moment, or the subject that my Hub brings up while we're getting ready for work... that sort of thing. I have attempted to change this by writing everything down. This just means I have a very long list of Things To Do.

I'm trying, trying, trying to learn how to prioritize. The first step, thus far, is realizing that there are a zillion bajillion kajillion things that I could, in potentia, do, and that there's no way in hell that I can possibly do them all, not even if I just did them all for about a minute. I'm just not going to live a zillion bajillion kajillion minutes, and, frankly, most stuff takes more than a minute to do. This sucks. This is a limitation, and I hate those. This is, however, reality. Gotta deal with it.

Second step is realizing that there are several different kinds of stuff to do. There's stuff that I want to do. There's stuff that I have to do. There's stuff that I just kind of end up doing when I'm tired or otherwise just need to give my brain a break. And, well, there are things that other people want me to do, which I used to think would trump every other kind of want-to/have-to, because I tend to discount my own thoughts on what's important. There are limits to how much of each of these can possibly exist in my life, again because of the time limitation inherent in being a mortal creature. One thing I've noticed, though, is that all these things will occur in my life, and some balance needs to be achieved, because any time I've tried to cut any of these things out my life has gone all whackamaroo.

Third step, apparently, is learning how to distinguish between these types of things. I'm kind of waffling around there at the moment, because this is a harder trick than I thought it would be. For instance, I seem to not be so good at recognizing that when someone else wants me to do something, it is not automatically a HAVE-TO situation. I still cringe somewhat when I turn something down; I always feel like I'm going to get in trouble for this, or that I'll be hated for it, or something.

A step that I have yet to achieve is to balance all these things. I'm just plain not good at it. I am a creature of great inertia; whatever I am doing, I tend to keep doing. I'm also prone to forgetting that "just five minutes" for something never is, and that even if it would be, I can't afford a lot of "just five minutes" things for the same reason that I can't afford a lot of "just five dollars" things-- they add up, and my time (or money) is finite.

There's a lot of stuff that I won't get to do. This sucks. I guess that making priorities for yourself isn't so much about deciding what will get done, as what won't get done; if I'm going to spend an hour writing, I won't get to spend that hour vegging out on the couch with my Hub, because I still need to get to sleep at a reasonable hour and no, cutting an hour of sleep out is just not an option because every time I've tried that I turn into a horribly cranky person who gets nothing done whatsoever.

Some stuff that I think is important, won't get done. At least, it won't get done by me. I may be able to convince my Hub to do some of it, but that's another learning process right there: accepting that I don't have to do all of this stuff personally, and that, yes, some of my stuff may be important enough to ask other people to help. BIG STEP. I think I've managed this a few times, but, you know. It's hard.

And now I'm using this post to avoid doing something that I really wanted to do, which is just a weird thing altogether. SO. Gonna go do that instead.

Control

2007-05-31T08:26:00.000-05:00

I've mentioned this in the past, but I've been doing a lot of reading lately. Fat blogs, feminist blogs (which I am: face it, fat IS a feminist issue), eating disorder blogs (God bless The Disordered Times), weightlifting blogs, books on mindfulness meditation, that sort of thing. The gorgeous thing about broadening one's reading base and looking at new things is that one ends up with some of those awesome moments where you read something that takes everything you've thought and turns it ass-over-teakettle. It's the swoopy, falling, soaring sensation of being on a roller coaster or being caught up in a tornado: gravity, or other things which you took to be universal constants, is suddenly in question. I've had a few of those moments this week.

It all comes back to control. Control is a common thread on fat blogs, causing celebration when we manage it and causing horror and depression when we don't. A great many of us have high standards for ourselves and describe ourselves as perfectionists. There's a general tendency for us to get hung up on numbers and accomplishments and discipline, and to beat the bloody hell out of ourselves when we fall short. That's going to be a bit of a problem in any arena, really, but combine that with the Diet & Scale type of plan that Weight Watchers personifies, the type of plan in which at the end of the day the thing that we're the most hung up on isn't something we have any direct control over, and it's no fucking wonder that a very small percentage of people graduate into a normal, active, healthy lifestyle, while most of us end up either gaining all the weight back, getting ourselves an eating disorder, or both.

I've just ordered the book Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body, and I suspect I'm going to have a lot more to say on the subject after I read it. Quite a lot more. But right now, I keep going back to the fact that during the two periods in my life where I was clinically depressed, I functioned extremely well. In some ways, I functioned better than my "everyday" self. During my college depressive period, I was a straight-A student, a star in the choir, a leading lady on the stage, a hell of a writer; during my latest depressive period-- well, you can go back and check it out because the whole damn thing is documented right here. If you're looking for it, you'll see that I was a maniac, obsessed with details, determined to perfect myself. I was making all the right food and exercising like mad and getting involved in things and being the perfect wife. In both cases, I was a basket case behind the scenes, and only a big external force (the end of college the first time, Hurricane Katrina the second) brought my drive to miserable perfection to a jarring halt. I achieved in spite of being depressed, because one of the big things driving me into depression was the same thing that drove me to succeed.

It's a horrifying realization. When one has a tendency toward viewing the world in black and white, as I often do, the obvious conclusion is that I can either choose to be a lazy, happy loser, or a driven, miserable achiever. Given that I have been taught that achievement is more important than personal happiness, the very idea of chosing personal happiness gives me an automatic sense of shame. The thing is, it's a false dichotomy, based on some very flawed ideas.

At the risk of talking too damn much about mindfulness meditation again (I occasionally suffer from Hey, I Have A New Thing And Think It Is So Awesome, Everyone Should Do It, Too syndrome, known to the rest of the world as "the zeal of a recent convert"), I had one of those world-shaking paradym-flipping moments while reading one of the FAQs for such. The question is basically "I can't control my thoughts when I'm meditating! How do I fix this?" and the answer is "Everyone's like that. That's how brains work. Your thoughts aren't something to fix or control: they're something to observe and be aware of. They're just thoughts. You're fine. Relax. If you forget what you're doing, come back to doing it when you remember, and don't kick yourself."

...Dude.

DUDE.

I don't know when the correct answer to anything that I've gotten into was "control doesn't matter; you're fine as you are, learn what that is and enjoy it." Yeowza. That's just... that's... wow.

Here's what I'm thinking lately: I'm never going to be perfect. I'm always going to be wandery, and forgetful, and have a limit to how many projects I can juggle at once. I'm never going to get everything done on time. I'm never going to always get eight hours of sleep per night. I'm never going to be able to be everything to everybody; I love so much different stuff that I'll invariably end up half-assing everything, occasionally going whole-hog on one thing while ignoring everything else. I will cause misunderstandings. I will misunderstand others. I will occasionally fuck things up in a spectacular manner. I am very probably never going to fit into my wedding dress again. I am absolutely never going to look like that fitness model. There are some clothes that will never, ever look good on me, no matter how awesome they look on other people. I will occasionally forget to clean the cats' litterbox and they will pee on the bathmat and I will probably step on it as I'm getting out of the tub. (Yes, this has happened more than once.) I will squabble with my Hub over ridiculously stupid things. I will probably be directly responsible for a lot of mental issues in my future children. Sometimes I will be the one who passes supremely smelly gas in the elevator.

This is all fine. The fact of the matter is that I yam what I yam, and I'm delightful and frustrating in equal measures, the way every human being is.

Life, I'm concluding these days, is like paddling around on a river. (Yes, okay, this is on my mind a lot, I can't help it, I am REALLY looking forward to our new hobby.) There's a certain amount that you can control via paddling. There's also currents, and waves, and occasional assholes who pay no attention and cause you to have to veer way, way out of your way to keep from capsizing, and the wake from powerboats going too fast, and you can't control any of that stuff, ya just deal with it as best you can, and plan to get wet and/or occasionally fall out of the boat and really, you're never going to get places as fast as you think you will. It's just how things work.

I do want to be thin; I think, though, I want that in ways that are not healthy for me. I think that I tend to equate it with beauty, and with self-control (and hence with being a Good Girl, sigh), and with being a person that doesn't have any problems. Obviously all this is bullshit, and it's surprising that the problems I developed as a result of my balls-out drive for 120 pounds didn't actually cause me to immediately think "Hrm, I can't see living like this being any kind of a good thing." It exacerbated a lot of my issues: belief in a formula for success (and any deviation from the formula being horrible and bad and thus evidence that I was weak and awful), belief in a perfect ideal self that I'd get to if I just worked hard enough (which, really? what the fuck was I smoking?), and worst of all, belief that I would feel better, I would feel good, if I was thin.

I did not feel better when I was thin. I felt shitty. I was five pounds above my perfect goal, and I kept thinking that if I could get there, it would all be okay, and all the shitty parts would stop. Going right along with this was the fabled golden land of Maintenance, which-- seriously, folks, it's just more of the same calorie-counting obsessiveness, just with a slightly more lenient number. If I could just do [fill in the blank], I would feel better.

I fully believed that if I didn't feel good at the moment, that was okay because it was goading me toward being thin. It was okay to hate where I was right now, because it drove me to achieve. Here's the thing, though: if I don't have the ability to feel good about myself and be generally happy right now, as I am, there's no chance in hell that I'll have that ability at any other weight, or through any achievements of any other kind.

Again, I don't mean to get wacky with the HIHANTATIISAESDIT Syndrome, but there's a phrase that is used repeatedly in one of my books: There is more that is right with you than is wrong with you. I keep repeating that to myself these days. Even at my worst, there's a remarkable amount of stuff that I get right: I drive on the correct side of the street, I can locomote, I can type, I can use the phone, I continue to be able to access the majority of the words in my vocabulary at any given time. Whatever it is that I've fucked up, no matter how important it is, it isn't everything. It can't be.

Self-esteem is not to be found through self-control. Self-esteem is something that comes out of love for yourself as you are, not love for what you can or might accomplish, not love for what you've already done. Self-esteem doesn't give a damn about who you might be under the very best of circumstances or if you try your very best; self-esteem is love for yourself as you fail, and as you achieve, and as you stagnate, and at all times and in all situations. It is not something that you get "only if you deserve it". You deserve it now, as you are. You deserve love now, as you are, from yourself and from others; at your very worst moment in life and if you have completely failed, you will still deserve love from yourself and from others. You are worthy. Not what you do, not what you're making of yourself: YOU.

I don't know how to convince anybody of that; I don't know how to convince myself of that. Success and hard work (through which success will come) are positively worshipped in this culture, in a very individualist manner, and while there's nothing bad about working hard and succeeding, there's a weird thing that goes that goes along with it, in which achieving an end result (or even just having it) means that you are worthy, and deserving, not only of having that success but of being lauded and praised for your success.

Hard work is assumed to be inherent to the process. Worth is measured by possessing the end result. So that means that if you're rich, you obviously worked for it and you obviously deserve it; if you're thin, you obviously worked for it and you obviously deserve it; if you're successful in business or in entertainment or whatever, you obviously worked for it and obviously deserve it.

Leaving aside the fact that a) success does not always follow hard work and b) people who succeed are not inherently worthy of such (I think the phrase I'm looking for, here, is "born on third base and thinks he hit a home run"), the major problem that comes from our national religion of success is that those who don't succeed don't deserve to succeed. Unsuccessful people are somehow inferior, and deserve to be looked down on. If you're fat, that's your fault. If you're poor, that's your fault. If you're unsuccessful, it's your fault. And not only is it your fault, it also indicates that you're fundamentally fucked up because if you weren't inferior or unworthy you would have figured out how to get your shit together and become thin, or rich, or successful, because isn't that what everybody wants?

And the thing is, I don't think that everyone actually wants to be thin, or rich, or successful; I think what we actually want is to feel worthy, and in this culture, if you don't have an inherent sense of worth, the only way to have people believe you're worthy is to prove it. To be rich, to be famous, to be thin, to be pretty, to be successful, to be powerful. To drive yourself to the top.

There's such a wealth of success in this country, though, that we seem to be giving ourselves a success-disorder that mimics eating disorders. It's not enough to be well-off; you must be AWESOMELY rich. It's not enough to be pretty; you have to be flawless. It's not enough to be thin; you have to have a flat tummy and protruding collarbones. (Again: ARGH.) It's not enough to be famous; you have to be even MORE famous. And since there's a reality check in place-- really, not everyone can be at the top of every pile, it just doesn't work that way-- we fake it: fake our own beauty with makeup and photoshopping and plastic surgery, fake our own financial success by buying "proof" on credit, fake our own power by spending a lot of time being a talking head who puts down other people. It's this whole anxious culture of complete bullshit, populated by anxious people who are all trying desperately to prove that they're worthy of taking up space.

And the thing is, we are worthy of taking up space, we are worthy of being loved, we are worthy of experiencing joy and contentment. Money and fame and power and beauty and thinness don't buy love, or joy, or contentment; we all know that, but it's so easy to turn around and look at ourselves and think, "I'm miserable because I'm fat, and I'm fat because I eat so much/don't exercise enough, so if I worked harder and had more self-control, I'd be happy." Sadly, no.

I don't know what brings joy, or love, or confidence, or self-esteem, but I do know that being thin isn't it. Immersing myself in anything in the hopes of ignoring myself isn't it, either-- and I've tried this with everything under the sun in the past thirty years, except for illegal drugs, and that's just dumb luck because I never happened to know anyone who'd hook me up. Tried it with food, tried it with books, tried it with work, tried it with alcohol, tried it with school, tried it with performing, tried it with relationships, and with food, and food, and food. Didn't work. So the only thing I haven't really tried is to stop and listen to myself, and stop treating my own thoughts and my own feelings as something so fucking frightening that I don't dare accept that they exist. To stop treating my body as something so horrible and frightening that I could only deal with it by ignoring it or by trying to control it and force it into a new shape. To just stop, and to just be who I am, and accept that this is who I am.

I'm not entirely certain that I can succeed at this, and I'm not sure if it's something that would work, anyway-- but I've tried the other stuff, and know for a fact that they don't work. So, essentially: fuck control. I have a life.

I so totally need sleep.

2007-05-30T14:22:00.000-05:00

Insomnia for two days running, which is not cool. I am attempting to roll with it. I mean, it's not something I want to use as a long-term lifestyle, but I don't operate heavy machinery, it's my week off between programs at the gym (more on that momentarily) so I won't be doing heavy lifting, and there's not a lot going on that requires me to be smarter than the average bear, or possibly six-year-old. So. Rolling.

Before I forget, my latest awesome blogfind: Shapely Prose. What is it about Chicago that we have so many smart women who write so well?

Tomorrow starts the first day of the second stage of tapering off the Zoloft: half a pill every other day, instead of every day. I have decorated my birth-control pill packet with little stickers every other day (usually I just put a sticker on the second Monday into the pack, as a reminder to do my breast exam; my doctor is NOT going to yell at me about that again this year, dammit!), so I won't forget. All set.

Deep breaths. Deep breaths.

My Hub is in a state of deep paranoia about me getting off the drugs, since his ex-wife tried it last year and fell immediately back into depression as a result. There are several big differences here, though: 1) I'm tapering off, not going cold turkey, 2) I'm doing this under a doctor's supervision, 3) I have a significantly healthier lifestyle going than she does, and don't have to deal with a mentally challenged stepchild, and 4) I actually have a pro-active therapy program going to deal with stress and emotional upheaval. None of these things, separately or together, give me any guarantee of success, but I like to think I've got a better chance. Still, any time I have a bad day his first reaction is "OH MY GOD, IS IT THE ZOLOFT? ARE YOU GETTING OFF THE STUFF TOO QUICK? ZOMG!"

And, no. Typically I am just having a bad day in those cases, and more often than not these things occur when I haven't done my mediation. I haven't made it to the point yet where I can always recognize the stress as it's approaching and deal with it in a good way; occasionally I overcommit or I don't tell him when something is bugging me, and things blow up. Still working on it.

The big fun news: we bought a boat! A little inflatable tandem kayak/canoe, specifically, which will deflate down to backpack-size (26 pounds) so that we can tote it around to our heart's content. Sturdy, certified, unpuncturable. Cheap for a personal boat, too: I think we spent about as much on life vests as we did on the kayak itself. We wisely refused to compromise comfort and quality for a lower price in that case, since life vests are no good if we don't wear them.

(It's also worth noting that of all the paddling vests that are out there, the versions earmarked for women appear to merely be smaller versions of the male versions, and only one brand-- the Stohlquist BetSEA-- took into account the fact that women have boobs. ONE. [Note: I have found a few other brands online, but the BetSEA was the only one in stock at this particular store.] This baffles me more than I can possibly express. One would think that this would be a key factor in the design process, since this isn't a fashion thing, it's a LIFE SAVING DEVICE. I need to be able to cinch a PFD in such a way that it won't pop up over my head if I fall into the water, dammit. RESPECT MY BOOBAGE, LIFE VEST DESIGNERS.)

Anyway, I'm looking forward to this in a major way. I've been talking about kayaking and other forms of paddling, on and off, since around the time I started this blog, but while my Hub was leading a more sedentary lifestyle he didn't feel the pull toward it that I did. It's no coincidence that this is the first summer that the two of us are both relatively in-shape and relatively strong, and hence feel up to a new challenge. This is going to be a hell of an upper-body workout, I hear. Woo!

In other news, anorexia nervosa has struck again in my family. Not immediate family, but close enough (details withheld due to the internet being the internet and all that; it's one thing to bray my problems all over, but someone else's would just be bad taste). My parents are baffled and feeling powerless, anxious, and frustrated-- par for the course, really. I filled them in a little bit on what I knew about anorexia and eating disorders in general, but I'm pretty sure that this was less help for them than it was me making myself feel better by putting it in the context of Meg-the-quasi-expert instead of Meg-the-concerned-relative. Sigh.

No, really, I'm fine.

2007-05-25T11:51:00.000-05:00

Jealous of the fact that my Hub has the day off, hence giving him a four-day weekend (why didn't I think of that?) for the holiday, jealous of a friend of mine who is getting free lunch and probably getting to sneak out of work early 9[rant re: our company president deleted just in case]), jealous of friend's boyfriend who has recently upgraded jobs so that now he's working in a field that he really wants to, in a gorgeous company. Generally angry at the high percentage of idiots at our company at the moment, all of whom seem to want me to do their job for them.

But really, really what's ticked me off today is this:

A teenage girl who claims she was gang raped by three 13-year-old schoolboys was overweight and would have been “glad of the attention”, a barrister told a jury.

The 16-year-old and her friend told a court the boys mugged them for their phones then raped them repeatedly in a park while filming the ordeal on a mobile.

But lawyer Sheilagh Davies, acting for one of the defendants, said the girls consented to sex “maybe to gain attention, maybe to gain affection”.

...

...

...

ARE YOU FUCKING WELL KIDDING ME???

I have no words. Seriously. It already infuriates me to hear the "it's the woman's fault for being attractive/dressing 'provocatively'/acting such and such a way" reasoning for rape, but to a certain extent (and yes, this is just sad) I'm used to it. Taking it a step further and indicating that because the girl was fat, it indicates consent for being gang-banged by THREE THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOYS?

Sweet Jesus. I am so angry right now. This is so far over the line, we can't even see the damn line anymore. This is a defense lawyer looking out at the jury, assuming that none of them would want to fuck a fat girl, assuming that they think that no other guy would want to fuck a fat girl, and thus because this girl didn't meet their personal standards of fuckability that somehow creates doubt that she was raped. Clearly, a fat chick is lucky to have anyone willing to have sex with her at all, even the rat-bastard little shits who just mugged her for her cell phone, so really, when the chance came up she jumped all over that.

I continue to be baffled by the fact that people still think that rape has something to do with sex appeal, that it somehow occurs because the rapist finds his victim attractive, that a guy can't get an erection if the chick isn't hot. And hey, what guy hasn't been frustrated by not having the chance to fuck someone he found desperately attractive? It's soooo understandable, isn't it?

No. It's fucking well not.

Rape has been used since time immemorial to prove mastery over conquered foes and slaves and pretty much anyone that the rapists felt needed to be put in their place. Rape is not about sex. Rape is not flattering. Rape is about proving that someone is powerful, and someone else is not; that one person can force another person to share their very body, and thus prove in a physical way that the other person is lesser, weaker, smaller, that the rapist is bigger, more powerful, more important.

And for the record: yes, being fat can put a certain crimp in one's social life, but I hardly think that leads directly to the assumption that a fat woman would be grateful to be raped. This is like thinking "wow, nobody has hugged me in a long time; sure, it's okay if you hit me in the face!" or "gee, I haven't gotten a present in a long time; hey, it's okay if you rob my apartment!" Just plain does not fucking compute.

Lately, this concept of "fuckability" has been preying on my mind. From Leonard Nimoy's artistic photographs of nude obese women (that one's actually a good thing; good for you, Len!), to this WaPo article demonstrating just how bad for your feet those sexy high heels are, to the new idiocy sweeping the suburbs: all-female pole-dancing parties, to the bizarre concept of the "sports corset" (seriously, WHAT?), to that completely whackjob ad for breast implants implying, somehow, that big boobs = brains, to Joss Whedon's awesome rant linking the new film Captivity to the "honor killing" stoning death of a woman in Iraq, to this thoughtful article on the Girls Gone Wild phenomenon and why a display of female sexuality is seen as more important than the actual experience of sexual pleasure for the females in question.

I haven't yet read Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body by Courtney E. Martin, but I read the excerpt from it on Alternet, and it hit me like a sledgehammer: the shit I went through, the desperate desire for acceptance that drove me alternately to work my ass off to become perfect and to despair and give up-- it's not just me. I'm not alone in this.

And then I read the comments on Alternet, which started with a guy bemoaning the fact that MORE women didn't starve themselves, in order to make it so that there are more women out there that he finds fuckable, and I kind of snapped. It went right back, in my head, to the Dove campaign with the regular-gal models that so many people (mostly men) reacted to with disgust, not having it ever enter their little heads that a company that advertises to a female demographic may not have male preference in visual fodder in mind when creating an advertising campaign.

I'm just... what the hell? Seriously, this is insane. I keep looking at the whole loop, thinking that somehow it's all turned into a situation where it isn't enough to be conventionally attractive, or reasonably trim; there was an article up in the New Yorker a few months ago (alas, they have it behind their damn wall) about how the thing that's in now isn't chiseled abs-- it's chiseled COLLARBONES. And they don't mean just having the little divots at the top show up, either-- they mean having the whole fucking collarbone stick out. IT'S A BONE, PEOPLE. A BONE. ON A PERSON. THOSE ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO SHOW. OH MY HOLY HECK.

Here's the part where my brain breaks: taking all this together, women are sexy if they're a) putting their sexuality on display and b) skinny enough to have "chiseled collarbones". And since they're sexy, they're "asking for it" in the case of rape. The rest of us, without chiseled collarbones, are fat, and, being fat, are apparently desperate enough for love that we won't mind being raped.

I really hate this world sometimes.

Two weeks, two days, still okay

2007-05-15T13:48:00.001-05:00

The days are uneventful, except for my cat continuing to lock himself in cupboards (he figured out how to open them and go inside, but he's got an all-black coat, so when we find the open door we don't see him and so we latch it again... oops) and my Hub musing the prospect of cutting weight at some point in the future to show off his new muscles (I am so not looking forward to that).

Apparently the headhunter has found some job that might suit me. I'm supposed to go over today after work to chat. We'll see how that goes.

I can now squat 135, which means, hooray, I did three full sets with a 45-lb. plate on each side of the bar, looking like an honest-to-goodness weightlifter. I was so proud. I wish we'd had the camera (with camcorder function) along to witness this miraculous event, because it was just so awesome. My sister and I are planning to have me try squatting her when next we meet, which I suspect will mean that she will cling to my back like a monkey, rather than have me try to heft her up onto my shoulders somehow. When and if that occurs, my Hub swears to record the moment for posterity on video, the better to astonish my parents at Christmas. (Although, at this rate, who knows; it may BE Christmas by the time my sis and I get together again.)

This is a short post. Work has gone insane, almost to a literal degree.

And now you can't shut me up!

2007-05-01T14:59:00.000-05:00

Day eight on reduced Zoloft. So far, so good. I've had several things come up that, two months ago, would have reduced me to a tightly wound stressball on the verge of tears, and I was just fine with it. Calm. Asked questions about stuff I didn't know, asked for help when I needed it, wasn't freaking out about what people thought of me. Take that, Zoloft; meditation is continuing to kick your ass.

My shoulder is doing well enough to switch to a upper/lower body split. Which is good, really, but I need to put together a better upper-body workout. My lower body stuff is great, since I've been working on that for two months; squats, step-ups, lunges (oh my God, I can do lunges! I still hate them, but I can do them!), hyperextentions, all that good stuff. I suspect I'm going to have to consult one of my Hub's books and put together a proper routine.

Need to get back to cardio, because I need to burn off some of this fat. Problem: I hate cardio. ARGH. I sense some quality time doing fartlek-style interval training outside coming up.

Good news: one of my friends, who took up strength training on the advice of her doctor (and a lot of encouragement from me and my Hub), has, after just one month, pretty much eliminated her carpal tunnel pain and has significantly lessened her lower back pain. I'm so proud.

I forgot to mention several magical things that have come with squats & meditation (although not both at once; that would be a transcendent experience of a very wrong kind and would involve LOTS OF PAIN).

1) Guys. I can squat. Like, I can lower my ass toward the floor, and not a) fall over or b) tip forward with my heels hiking up behind me. My heels stay on the floor. These are things that did not happen previous to the first week of March, when the Great Big Weight campaign began. I am so thrilled about this, I find myself doing little mini-squats while waiting for the train, just enjoying the fact that my body finally works in a way that everyone else's has all along. When I was all dressed up for a college-reunion-ish shindig last week, dress and heels and all, I tested a squat to see where I'd go with it (answer: ASS TO GRASS, baby, and even though it totally doesn't count because my heels were three inches in the air it still felt AWESOME). I often do little sumo-squatting poses just because I can.

See, I walked on my toes since I was born, which as far as I can tell is due to my tendons in my ankle area being shorter than normal. My entire life, I've been trying to figure out what the hell to do about this, because although it's definitely a memorable way to walk, it has fucked up my general skeletal alignment and made it hard for me to do a lot of things well. Squatting with low weight did not help. Stretching did not help. Lifting small weights with my toes (to contract the muscle that runs up the front of my calf) did not help. Squats with heavy weight, on the other hand, helped in just two damn months, not because my tendons have grown any, but because the other muscles have developed enough to compensate. Those muscles on the front of my calves are hugely stronger, and my quads are stronger, and to top it all off having this notion of how to move has actually changed the way I walk.

2) Mindfulness meditation being all about keeping one's brain in the moment, it is a hell of a thing when it comes to food. I have a tendency toward constantly thinking about the next thing, and the next, and hence giving somewhat shoddy treatment to the thing that I'm actually doing at that very moment; food is no exception. While chewing one bite, I tend to be readying the next bite, so I end up with too much in my mouth per bite, chewing incompletely, and bite follows bite so quickly that everything is done way too fast and I end up feeling unsatisfied, mentally, because I missed the whole thing.

I know I've thought about this before, talked about it before, tried to fix it before, but I think that this time, because it's tied to everything instead of just being associated with the reasons that it's hard to control my weight, it has sort of clicked. I'm at great risk of rushing through my life without actually experiencing any of it, much less enjoying the damn thing, so this is a great place to start. I've been trying to relax and concentrate on the sensations of having food in my mouth, of how it reacts to tooth pressure, moisture content, the tastes, yadda yadda yadda. Huh.

3) Doing things mindfully is kind of like indulging myself, in the best possible meaning of the word. Not thinking about anything else except for what's going on is a form of pampering. I'm not sure how to explain this, except for maybe that since I am generally ALWAYS thinking of what's coming next, planning ahead, and so forth, letting go of that part of my thinking for a while feels like a decadent vacation, even when what I'm doing is taking a shower, or brushing my teeth, or writing, or going to work.

4) Speaking of writing, learning how to relax into a task is helping me get my ass back onto the writing thing. Again, I've said shit like this before, and I realize that, but if one keeps falling off the horse then continuing to climb back up is as much of a victory as learning to stay on the damn thing. Hopefully this time is the time I learn to stay on, but if not, at least it's boosted me back on.

5) Big weights mean that I absolutely have to have good form and good posture, or else I'll hurt myself. I absolutely have to do things with concentration and mindfulness, listening carefully to my body and not doing any careless motion, because even if my legs can squat 130 pounds, that doesn't mean shit if my back can't take the work. It's starting to become automatic, though, to shift into good posture-- shoulders back, chest out, nice curve in my lower back-- in order to pick up anything, no matter how small. I think that's good. Hopefully it'll protect me from injury in my everyday life, not just in the gym.

6) If I can't do something right with big weight, that means that I have to take weight off, because my head, my habits, and my stabilizing muscles aren't up to the task that my bigger muscles can handle. It does not matter if my quads can handle 150 lbs if I don't have the strength elsewhere to keep it balanced. I can't hop ahead like that; I have to wait for the little pieces to fall into place, and just keep working. Doesn't mean that I'm failing; it just means that the little things are catching up. There's a metaphor for life there somewhere.

In other news, I'm trying to convince my Hub that we should just take the express bus after work that goes directly to our gym, rather than drive those days and end up spending $100/month on stupid parking. I may have convinced him to try one day per week. This is kind of a battle; while I don't mind the bus at all, my Hub has something against it. Grr. I'm not giving up on this one, though; this is one of the more ridiculous frivolous expenses we have these days, and if he wants it, he has to budget for it; it is absolutely not coming out of our main account.

We have to get the afternoon mini-meal hashed out, too. This battle has gone several rounds over the past few months, and every time I think we have it figured out, it goes awry. The thing is, my Hub must be fed regularly. He fails to comprehend that this means that he must plan for this and deal with it his own damn self. As a result, he hits hungry-stage right around the time that we leave work, and wants to make dinner immediately after we get home, which I still consider to be freakishly early for dinner. Everything else must be scheduled around the Feeding. This will not fucking well do.

Breakfast, we can handle. We are both packing mid-morning snacks/mini-meals. Lunch, we prepare in bulk and pack for the week. I'm convinced that the way to deal with the mid-afternoon mini-meal is to prepare them in advance, too. I'm going to throw something together tonight for just that purpose, and hopefully it'll fix all these stupid issues.

Okay, so it's been a month.

2007-04-30T11:58:00.000-05:00

It's been a busy month, though, and I'm still working out how to balance everything. Still on the wagon, still going to the gym, can now squat 125 pounds (barely), still doing my Mindfulness Meditation stuff for stress reduction, and am now, finally, starting the process of tapering off of Zoloft. Eep. I am admittedly worried about the point where I let go of it completely; I've heard tons of horror stories about "brain zaps" and other withdrawl symptoms. DO NOT WANT.

(Off topic: I Can Has Cheezeburger is a glorious, glorious brainsuck. I don't know why I'm laughing so hard AND YET I AM.)

I have to say this: meditation is awesome. I don't know if it has lowered my general anxiety, but it sure as hell does give me at least half an hour every day that I will be able to relax, and over the past few weeks whenever I've found myself in the middle of a big honkin' flare-up of fear or anger, I've been using my breathing and trying to get out of my head and see the big picture. It's actually quite useful. In terms of keeping me from freaking out, meditation has thus far worked better than Zoloft and therapy, but I suspect that this will last as long as I keep, you know, doing it; therapy was the bomb while I was in it, and sorted out a lot of my long-term issues, and Zoloft stabilized my braaaane chemicals, but meditation is a pro-active, I-am-figuring-this-out-myself thing that makes me actually practice calming down on a daily basis. Highly recommended.

I think I may have finally answered my eternal question of how I can have motivation that isn't, er, motivated by fear (of my boss, of my dad, of embarrassment, of that general "getting caught" thing), or blunt force of will, or other things that make me lose my damn mind. I think that, in general, the state I've been in when I've been unmotivated hasn't been exactly peaceful, it's been more of a state of avoidance. That's where the either-or feeling has come from: either I'm calm and unproductive, or frantic and productive, because I've been getting my "calm" from avoiding the whole thing. (Oh joy.) At no point am I usually looking at the situation in a frank and honest manner without freaking out, so it's the times when honesty is brought to me against my will (by rediscovering a time limit, or having someone catch me slacking, or whatever) that I experience the wish to change things.

Examples are many, but the most obvious one, both historically and to a certain extent now, is the pudge. If I can ignore my flabby zones, I'm fine, no bad feelings! If something comes up to put me in the spotlight, then I'm frantic: swimsuit season! upcoming wedding! high school reunion! going home for Christmas! can't fit in last summer's clothes! The binary approach here is clearly not working for me.

So there are three parts that I'm working on. One is to know what's going on in my life, honestly and without gloss or condemnation, and accept that this is how things are at this very moment in time. The second is to sit down and ask myself, often, what I really want, and get a clear mental picture of it; to my surprise, being able to visualize things like that brings motivation right with it. The third part is to work out steps to take in the direction of what I really want.

I got a call from a headhunter last week, which kind of freaked me out a lot for all the aforementioned reasons. I am used to dealing with my job situation by ignoring it, because working toward getting myself out of it means bringing myself face to face with the whole reality of the situation and I panic and it's all bad. This time, I accepted the opportunity to come in and talk, and spent the weekend thinking.

Some calm examination of my current situation indicates that it's not dire; nobody's going to fire me. It's also far from uncommon in the company I work for; as far as I can tell, once they hire a person and like them, even if they phase out that person's job or reorganize, they want to keep them on, so we end up with a whole lot of people working in jobs that they're not qualified for, making shit up as they go along. It's like a weird cousin of nepotism. I.T. in particular was plagued by this for a few years, which is why I ended up in I.T., which is why the boss I had in that department knew nothing about I.T. but they needed a manager so they transfered him into the department, which resulted in a whole lot of I.T. trouble. That said, while I'm not qualified and was never formally trained, by sheer lucky accident I turned out to be very good at my job. The problem is that I.T. is actually getting their shit together and killing off the access of untrained folk like me. So the situation here is this: I could probably be employed here for another twenty years if I don't do anything dramatically stupid; they like me and would cheerfully shift me around to any sort of assistant-type opening they have. The thing is, I don't want to be an assistant. I want to do more than that. I want to do what I'm doing now, only more so, without the bullshit make-work parts of my job, and I want to learn more and grow and have, you know, a future career that I could advance in. I want to work for a place that is more service-oriented than finance-oriented, because I'm kind of a socialist softy at heart and I can't get behind the idea of promoting a brand or a product. I want to work for a place that is willing to take me in at a sort of starting-level position and give me a ladder to climb, point me in the right direction and let me get trained and educated. I want to work for a place that has a good balance between work and home, that doesn't expect me to work sixty hours a week and has a certain amount of flexibility when it comes to family time.

I told the headhunter all of that and she was totally down with it, and work has begun to find me something that would suit. And I'm calm about it. Seriously, I don't know when in my life I have handled anything half so well. Every other time this sort of thing has come up I have gone into a complete panic. WOOOO, MEDITATION!

(Another tangent: I came home from going to the grocery store the other day to find my Hub lying on the floor, looking contemplative. He explained that he was trying to figure out "that mindfulness stuff" and had been trying to relax his leg, which had been cramping after a too-big session at the gym. He says he'll try the body scan tape at some point, which I'll believe when I see it, but-- interest!)

The other major thing that I've discovered from all of this is that I have a great life. I have a great husband, two great cats, great parents, a great sister, and some perfectly lovely friends. I have a great apartment that has furniture for all the functions we need and that is within walking distance of Trader Joe's. I have a gym membership that allows me to go lift heavy objects every other day, which makes me grow stronger. I have a paycheck and money in the bank, and a little nest egg that ought to be big enough for a down-payment by the time the housing market stops losing its collective mind. We're gearing up for having kids in a year or two, and I'm starting to really trust that we'll be able to handle whatever comes up. Nobody's making me leave Chicago for the suburbs; if the housing thing doesn't work out, we'll just rent and send the kids to the parochial school attached to the church I attend. My parents are almost set for retirement, still have all their wits about them (or, as they like to say, they still have the small amount they started with) ,and are healthy. My sister is engaged, gearing up to get her doctorate, and is healthy. Her fiance is, as far as I can tell thus far, kind of a guileless doof, but he's smart and loves my sister a lot, and he's healthy. My husband and I are healthy and love each other. It's spring, all the flowers are in bloom and the trees are getting leaves and the grass is green. It's all fantastic. As far as the important things go, I'm blessed beyond anything I could ask for. As they say in the book, there is far, far more that is right with me than that is wrong with me.

I'm learning to feel whole, I think. Whole as I am, right now. It doesn't mean that I don't want to improve things, or change things, or get new things, but I don't have to improve or change or get new things in order to feel whole. It's counter to the feeling I got from my childhood, which was that I would have to fix myself, get myself up to par before I was acceptable. It also runs counter to the whole capitalist/consumer thing, which seems to indicate that a) you, the consumer, have a problem, and b) this problem can be fixed by spending money on [fill in the blank].

You're fat! Buy our food, which has zero nutritional value but has fewer calories and no carbs/fat/melamine, and your problem will be solved!

You have a headache from being so stressed out! Buy our magical pill, which won't do a damn thing about you being so stressed out but it WILL take care of your headache!

Your skin has too many wrinkles/blackheads or is too dry/oily! Buy our magical cream!

You are bored! Consume more media! Consume DIFFERENT media! Consume BETTER media!

I mean... yeah, that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but not much. I can't help starting to think that maybe a lot of our problems are exacerbated by, if not outright caused by, this illusion that all of our problems can be fixed via stuff that my grandparents would have called "frivolities" (a word that seems to be fading into obscurity as the very notion behind it gets lost). Granted, my grandparents were also very religious, so their answer to any problem would have been to pray on it, which I don't do half so much as they would have liked. Still. Every generation has a one-size-fits-all answer for what ails us, and while "pray on it" was my grandparents' answer, "buy something" is apparently my generation's answer. And it just doesn't do much for me, really; it makes me feel like I'm doing something, sure, but it doesn't really apply to the problem. I used to buy Doritos, now I buy new clothes; same damn thing at heart, and while both pleased me at the time they didn't address the actual issue, didn't make me feel more worthy or more loved.

I don't know where the hell I'm going with this, honestly, besides this: I'm fumbling toward some kind of answer for myself, and so far it means a whole lot of babbling and thinking and nothing definitive. Thus far I've managed to patch together that my life on the whole is good, and that any problems within that life can't be solved by adding more or better products, but maybe... maybe by being truthful with myself about how life is, and what the big picture is, and what I want, maybe I can figure things out that way. I can hope.

RAWR.

2007-03-30T09:39:00.000-05:00

I hate my job at the moment, but that's not the point of this post, it just happened to come up because I'm at work. Anyway.

I'm squatting 90 lbs. for three sets of eight reps. NINETY. My Hub asked me how I felt after the first set last night, to which I replied, "Mean."

"Go take a walk, mean girl," he told me, and I did. While I was toodling around the track, which goes around the whole freeweight area, I beheld several trainers, one having a girl do squats with a 15-lb. weight in each hand, which made me go, "DUDE. I AM SQUATTING THREE TIMES THAT AMOUNT." I felt so proud. Another trainer was doing half the work for the guy that he had on the leg press machine, which baffled me. I went back and reported these things to my Hub, who was in the midst of deadlifts, and he told me, "Welcome to being smug."

Mmmm. Smugness tastes like cookies.

Apparently I'm ahead of the curve yet again among my friends; now they're asking my Hub for help setting up strength-training routines for them. It has occurred to me that I might have more influence than I thought I did, because every time I do something it ends up filtering through to everyone else. Weird, dude. I am so totally not a trend-setter. This feels like the blind leading the blind.

In other news, my food intake has sucked rocks this week and my meditation practice has likewise sucked the aforementioned rocks, both for the reason mentioned at the top of this post: I currently hate my job, because it is giving me vast amounts of stress. I took the day off yesterday for mental health, slept half the day, re-did my meditation (which went much, much better that time), and felt great. Came back to work today: instant reappearance of stress and desire to eat a vat of cookie dough. Goddamn job.

My church is doing a 5K run out at the lakeshore tomorrow morning, and in spite of the fact that neither my Hub nor I have trained for this one whit, we're strongly considering showing up just for the hell of it. Might as well. Why not? Money goes for a good cause, and if we need to walk, we walk. There are not words for how much I love having my Hub on the fitness bandwagon with me. Having to do this all by myself sucked in a number of ways; this is just lovely.

My shoulder still feels fine. Even better, I don't seem to get sore after workouts very much anymore; my muscles are tired, but are not on fire. Yay. I suspect that'll change when it's time to switch up exercises and I find new muscles to annoy.

My balance is improving. Seriously. I thought it was pretty good balance before, but apparently this is one of those things where I had no idea what I was missing before all my stabilizer muscles started getting stronger. Even just standing up is different; the little wobble I barely noticed is now gone. This is so wacky. I guess spending a lot of time having to keep a barbell balanced on my shoulders as I go up and down is, surprise surprise, making all my balancing muscles get their damn act together for a change. EXCELLENT.

Flexibility also improving; go figure. I do like this weight-lifting thing; it has all sorts of nifty benefits. And, yes, I like it much better now that it's no longer threatening to kill me.

I officially love the assisted pull-up/chin-up/dip machine. LOVE IT. Granted, part of this is because I harbor a delusion in my subconscious that I may someday be persued by ninjas or pirates (or vampires, or zombies, or lions, or pretty much anything; I have a lot of chase scenes in my dreams) and as such I will have to be able to pull myself over a fence or up into a tree. So doing assisted chin-ups and pull-ups makes me feel very happy about life.

Oh, and I must alert you all to the fact that sugar-free/fat-free pudding plus milk plus protein powder = VERY NIFTY MORNING SNACK. That is all.

ow ow ow

2007-03-26T15:09:00.000-05:00

Well, my legs are fine, probably because they're already adjusted to the concept of pushing heavy weights here and there (85 pounds on 3 work sets of 8 reps each; I feel like friggin' WONDER WOMAN), but the rest of my body hurts like crazy and I am very much not wanting to go back to the gym today.

To my sadness, I cannot manage the bar for the bench press. Woe is me! Which, my Hub says, is fine, because that means he doesn't have to spot me on those, because I'll be using dumbbells and won't be risking having something come down and crush my throat. ...Okay.

I did squats, bench press, rows, pull-downs, and a great deal of godforsaken ab work which involved some sort of inclined bench and then what my Hub told me was called a "captain's chair" (I think he may be full of shit). Squats were difficult, but I'm not sore. Everything else HURTS LIKE CRAZY. Like, every single ab muscle everywhere, and my back, and every arm muscle, and my pecs, and... really, it's like I'm wearing a shirt of sore. The good news is that my trick shoulder is still just fine. Hooray!

My form on squats has improved a LOT. First few times, I didn't pull my shoulderblades back enough, and thus didn't have enough of a "meat shelf" to hold the bar on, and so the first bumpy vertebra at the end of my neck ended up sore. The last few times, no soreness there. WOO. I'm starting to look like I know what I'm doing, too. So now I just have to do that with all the other exercises and joy will be mine.

Off days, I am theoretically doing yoga. I say "theoretically" because I hurt too much to do so on my off days right now. I did it Friday, and then Saturday we went to the gym and I've been going "ow ow ow" ever since. Thing is, this is basically what I've wanted to have happening for my fitness routine, so I'm pretty happy to have it finally going.

Meditation is good stuff. I'm not sure what it's doing for my brain yet, but I've had a few real good sessions, and I've been trying to incorporate it into a life in little bits. Mostly I'm still hashing out how to get enough sleep, once again, since I have to get up at 5 AM in order to have enough time for this stuff (since exercise is in the evening now). Ah, well.

Bless us, every one

2007-03-22T15:21:00.001-05:00

Holy crow, folks, my shoulder is-- I hesitate to say this-- feeling okay. I got the shot and started taking the horse pills last Tuesday, was feeling a lot better by last Friday, and a week later it... it feels like a shoulder. There's still a bit of what my doctor called "crunchy" noises, a bit of the click & pop when I rotate my arm, but no pain. WOO!

I'm still planning on being cautious, but dammit, I want to do something. My Hub is working out a lifting plan that will make it so that I get used to how things work re: the upper-body stuff, but lift light (and ice before and after), only going heavy for squats and possibly deadlifts. I'm planning on taking another look at the assisted pull-up machine, because I want very much to be able to do proper pull-ups and push-ups by the end of the year.

Speaking of squats, I was up to 85 pounds for my work sets this last time. My Hub asked me if I wanted to take it back down after the first set, to which I replied, "No, I'm planning on kicking this thing's ass, don't mess with my plan." And I did. Ha! That said, I'm pretty sure that's still going to be my max for this next workout. Alas. I yearn to be able to put one of those big-girl weights on each side of the bar, and the 25 pounders are the first ones that look like big-girl weights.

Speaking of girls, there's almost always one or more other females in the freeweight area at our gym. Even better for my poor self-esteem, all of us look like regular gals, not like shiny perfect gym-rats. As winter ends, the skimpier gym-wear is coming out, and I find myself fleeing the areas where all the skinny, shiny, blond-y people congregate.

I am slowly becoming infatuated with the freeweight area. It's starting to feel like a familiar, comforting dive, like the skanky neighborhood bar where you know everyone, or the table at the edge of your high-school lunchroom where all the freaks & geeks would hang out. The skinny pretty people are regarded with scorn in this area. And, like every other freaks-and-geeks congregating area, there are endless varieties of snobbery in the freeweight room, so everyone can feel superior to everybody else no matter what they're doing. I am currently operating on the "I'm doing compound exercises, which are superior to the doofy little single-muscle bicep curls that this other chick is doing" superiority complex, along with the "I am using freeweights, which are superior to using those damn machines" superiority complex. More common is the "I can bench more than you!" superiority complex, along with the "I look better than you do" superiority complex, but you also get the "my sets have more reps than your sets" superiority complex, the "supersets beat simple sets" superiority complex, the "my workout has more obscure and cool-looking exercises than yours" superiority complex, and of course the occasional guy who seems to feel that there is a contest occurring on who can grunt the loudest when lifting. Everyone gets to exist in their own little bubble of superiority. It's glorious. Then everyone rolls their eyes at the occasional Barbie-doll impersonator wandering in from step class to find the water fountain, and we are all joined in feeling superior to THOSE people. Ahhhhh.

Also: it has giant fans. No other area in the gym has giant fans, apparently because cardio must be as sweaty as possible.

I told my dad all about my adventures in lifting heavy weights, and it seems to have scared the daylights out of him to hear about his baby girl doing such a thing. "Don't get hurt," he pleaded, several times over the conversation. "Be careful. Don't get hurt." Poor Dad. I feel bad about freaking him out, but... dude, it is completely awesome to lift heavy things. It makes me feel so damn POWERFUL.

Bonus: of all the damn things, this is actually increasing my flexibility. For years I've avoided squats, or done wacky versions, because the tendon behind my ankle is so inflexible. I nearly cried from fear when I got into the power cage for the first time, but my Hub got out a 2x6 board and had me prop my heels on it while I squatted, and it worked. This last time, my fourth squatting session, he had me try a set without the board, and while I couldn't go as low as I wanted to, it was still significantly lower than I could before. Hooray! This builds strength, balance, and flexibility; what more could a girl ask for?

If work is slow today, which I hope it is, I'm going to spend a quality amount of time learning from the great Krista over at Stumptuous. If you haven't read Krista's stuff, DO IT NOW.

My Hub has started to feel vague yearnings toward running a 5K. Since his last flirtation with running occurred right before the cold weather set in, it occurs to me that running is a seasonal thing, a yearning that strikes us when the amazing Chicago spring starts up. Spring in Chicago is... oh, man, it's wonderful. Our winters start out mildly cold and then kick our ass for all they're worth in January and February-- snow and ice and temperatures that make you want very much to curl up in a cup of hot chocolate-- and then at some point, every March, it just stops. Bam, one morning you wake up and it's fifty degrees out, and birds are singing and rabbits are chasing each other across the courtyard, and that's the morning we just say "wow, we totally need to go for a very, very long walk."

In other news, mindfulness meditation continues. I have got my ass out of bed at 5 AM every morning this week, spread out our thickest yoga mat on the floor, popped on my headphones, made sure my Hub wasn't going to interrupt me with thrashing around on our squeaky bed or stomping out of the room to go pee, and flopped out on my back to close my eyes and ponder my body parts one by one for forty-five minutes. This is harder than I thought. I had several times this week where I was missing the whole lower-back/upper-back/tummy/chest/neck/head/whole body section, because my brain apparently went into outer space somewhere after pondering my pelvis. I'd suddenly hear the ending parts of the meditation and think "fuck! have I been asleep?" and then realize that I couldn't remember anything for the past twenty minutes. Whoops. I've managed to stay more or less aware for three out of five days, though, so, yay.

I'm not very good at this. I am, however, dedicated to making it through the first eight weeks, because the point (as they say so many times in the book) is to just do the damn thing, whether or not you think you're doing well, whether or not you think you're getting magical benefits out of it. I know that I need to work on my concentration and my ability to let things go, and this is the first mental exercise I've ever had that has led me to connect those two problems and think that maybe, just maybe, I could fix both those things at once.

So, week one is almost over. I do the body-scan meditation every morning in week two, and then in week three I get to move up to some yoga. I think it's week five when I try sitting meditation. Whee! I'm scheduled to start whittling down my Zoloft at the beginning of May. Lots of light, good weather, and I'll have been working on mindfulness meditation for eight weeks; just gotta make sure I'm back off caffeine by then (some Cherry Coke Zero snuck in there; why don't they make a caffeine-free version of THAT?) and I should have the best chance I possibly can of getting through the transition without having my brains fall out.

Sugar has also snuck back into my diet. (Shh, don't tell my Hub.) This has had the predictable result of making me more anxious and putting a few pounds back on my ass. I'm going back to the anti-sugar hypnosis mp3. Might as well; worked the first time.

I read a lot of blogs, most of them by womenfolk and many of them feminist, and as link led onto link yesterday I ran into an oldie but a goodie: Hugo Schwyzer's post about "pleasure, feminism, food, and sex". Worth reading. I'm still mulling this one over in my head, since the concept of "pleasure = penalty" is one that I've taken for granted for much of my life.

Another link I'm mulling over: one of Krista's "rant(s) of the week", this one by guest Gus Sonnenberg on his "daddy fitness" workout, designed to keep him able to do the things he really wants to be able to do. What do I really want to be able to do, physically? Walk all over the damn place. Tote groceries up stairs. Put boxes on shelves. Lift heavy objects off the floor without hurting myself. Give my nieces and nephew piggy-back rides. Paddle a kayak. I'm sure I'll think of more... it's something to think about, definitely.

A bold new whatever

2007-03-16T08:36:00.000-05:00

Oh, my, it's been a while. Sorry about that, folks!

First, we got sick. My Hub got a miserable cold, and after four days of taking care of him I came down with the same damn thing. Between the two of us, things were screwed up for well over a week. It's amazing the bad food choices that one can make when it's impossible to taste anything.

Then, when I was finally getting back up and about, work went insane. Like, seriously insane. We underwent a database conversion that was supposed to propel us into the space age, only to find that it bombed us back to the stone age, instead, and I have been forced to metaphorically chip tools out of flint in order to get anything done, which takes a lot more work than one would think. This caused me to careen very close to losing my damn mind, because I didn't have the basic idea in my head that it is hard to achieve my original goals when I'm busy re-inventing the wheel, here. It felt like I was going crazy, because no matter what I did, things broke, and everything I did just dug us deeper into the hole. I was so, so, so stressed out; my back hurt, my stomach was full of acid, my head ached, I just felt drained and angry and awful.

However, things are back to normal, more or less. I talked to my boss and was assured that none of us are doing what we wanted to get done at this point in the year, and that some days I was the only thing keeping the department above water (awww!). My Hub is all better, except that for some reason he cannot stop farting (in the loudest, stinkiest way he can, and accompanied by a lot of good cheer on his part). I'm mostly better, although there's still a lot of snot lodged in odd crevices in my head.

Good news: I finally saw the specialist for my shoulder pain. I have an official diagnosis of rotator cuff tendinitis; no bone spurs, no tears. I was shot up with cortisone and given a bunch of horse pills of the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory variety. If I'm still not well in another six weeks (ANOTHER SIX WEEKS?!?!?!?!?) I am to call the doctor again. In the meantime, still no yoga or upper-body weight lifting. Phooey.

[Side note: Why is it that every time I end up going to a specialist of any kind, they're the most annoying kind of jokey doctor imaginable? The oral surgeon that removed my wisdom teeth couldn't stop making horrible puns and jokes; this guy, on the other hand, seemed to think that he was a lost Marx Brother and so there was a lot of fast patter and occasional slapstick.]

That said, my Hub has started training me in the gym on squats. It seems that squats, along with deadlifts and bench presses, are some kind of holy trinity of the weight-lifting variety. I'm getting most of my information from my Hub, before I get my hands on his books; it's okay nonetheless because one of his great gifts is the ability to break anything down into plain, coloquial English. These days, he is becoming insanely well-read on the subject, and can rattle off the names of various muscles and explain what they do, and what exercises hit them, and he can also talk at length about body chemistry. (Six months ago he knew none of this. I'm so proud... stunned, agog, but still so proud.) As a result, this dominates our conversations these days, and as a result of THAT, I'm picking up even more knowledge than I had before.

As far as I can tell, the reason that squats, deadlifts, and bench presses are so beloved is because each of them works a bajillion muscles in the body, instead of just one or two, so you don't have to spend two hours working all these muscles individually (and yes, I'm exaggerating a wee bit, as I am wont to do). They're also more practical exercises: lifting things up off the floor, for example, will always be a useful thing to be able to do.

Also, they are Hardcore and Cool, or something like that. According to my Hub you get more cred at the gym for using freeweights vs. machines, and much more cred for doing squats and deadlifts vs. bicep curls. Which is why, when he got me started doing squats, there was no fucking around with dumbbells or exercise balls; I was put directly into the cage and we started me off with the 45-pound bar.

First of all, I hadn't known I could squat 45 pounds, so this was a surprise. I was even more surprised that I could squat 70 pounds, which is what I ended up with for my working set. Hooray! Last night, after a week off from sickness, I did squats again, and am now up to 75 pounds for my working set. I'm pretty sure that this is a negligable amount in the grand scheme of things, but before this my experience was limited to our dumbbell set, which goes up to maybe 25 lbs per dumbbell, and I'd never maxed that out, so I'm downright giddy with power now. I AM MIGHTY. RAAAAWR!

We'll see how my shoulder shapes up. I want very much to get back to yoga (for more than one reason; more on that momentarily) and to start doing proper weightlifting; I want muscle, dammit, and the strength and nifty body shapes and better metabolism that go with it.

Here's the other big topic: the stress thing. Those of you keeping score may recall that I'm supposed to be starting to taper off my Zoloft use soon, and so I was even less pleased than normal to have something near to a nervous breakdown on Wednesday. Seriously, I just fell apart and was convinced that my life was going to collapse, that I should never have kids, because I'm clearly never going to have a good career and can't manage anything and will never make enough money and am clearly a LUNATIC on top of everything else and so on and so forth. In short, that was a bad moment, the worst I've had for quite some time, and it happened while I was on medication. Not good.

So: new tactic. The other week I heard something on NPR about treating pain and stress with "mindfulness" meditation, and I've been reading about it here and there ever since. After Wednesday's nastiness, I've ordered Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness and the Guided Mindfulness Meditation audiobook that works with it. I'm prone to high stress and anxiety, I know that, and I'm also aware that many of my biggest food-related stupid moments occur in times of high stress. (Which is just what I do to myself; what I dish out onto other people is even less excusable.) I want to fix this before kids come into the picture. More to the point, I want to fix this for myself, because I don't like being tense and stressed-out. So: I'm going into training, essentially, for my brain. I may wait until after I've done this for eight weeks.

The book and CDs come today, so I start tonight. Yeowza.

Possibly this is the meaning of life

2007-02-19T14:44:00.000-06:00

We seem incapable of having actual food prep habits. I've given up hope that anything will stick, long-term; constant flux seems to be the nature of things and I am beginning to believe that ours is a life of constant attempts. Then again, we do have some hard-and-fast rules: for instance, when one of us cooks, the other must wash up.

The thing this week is that, after weeks of letting me toddle off to do the grocery shopping by myself, my Hub came with me. This resulted in a spectacular blowing of two weeks' worth of grocery money all at the same time, because I wasn't watching the grocery cart all the time and he kept adding stuff. Two kinds of juice instead of just one for his post-workout drinks, for example. Two bags of chicken breasts. Two containers of cottage cheese. (The man loves protein, what can I say?) Three bags of frozen vegetables instead of our usual one.

On the up side, before we left for the grocery store, a few things happened. First, I went through and tidied/rearranged our cupboards, so for once we can actually find all the things that we have in there, and I had a pretty good idea what we had before going to the store. Second, we started batting around ideas for meals while we were still at home, so we'd a) be able to go through some of the stuff we already have, b) not overbuy in areas we're already covered (um, anything grain-related), and c) not have to do that pesky thinking thing when it's time to cook. I made a list of possible meals on the kitchen whiteboard (an invaluable tool; we write our grocery needs on there as they come up) and off we went.

All meals written up there are on a three-part construction: protein, whole grain or fiberous starch, and vegetables. So we've got salmon, wild rice, and asparagus; pork chops, sweet potatoes, and green beans; shrimp, wild rice, and edamame; chicken, sweet potatoes, and green beans; meatloaf (containing oatmeal) and spinach; chicken, spelt, and broccoli... yeah, it goes on like that. For some reason it keeps slipping my Hub's mind that the vegetables are necessary, so he'll make protein and grain/starch and then forget about the veggies-- or, if he's packing lunch, he'll forget to toss in a container of frozen veg. I'm trying to drill this one into his head, for both our sakes.

I rearranged the freezer so that the veggies are all in the door-- at least, all the OPEN veggie bags. Bags of frozen berries (my favorite dessert) go there, too.

My Hub made meatloaf, which is great. He used extra-lean ground beef, oatmeal, chopped onions, and I forget what all else, but this was his "good-for-you ingredients" version. Last week's lunch was lasagna (whole wheat noodles, fat-free cottage cheese, homemade tomato sauce, lean ground beef). We end up ordering pizza (whole wheat crust) about once a week, or (now that we've stocked up) my Hub eats one of his frozen pizzas and I get one of my South Beach frozen pizzas. Generally we eat oatmeal for breakfast. Altogether, this is pretty awesome; we seem to have found a nice balancing point where we're concentrating on making sure that the food we eat 90% of the time is healthy stuff, albeit being healthy stuff that we happen to like a whole lot. Consumption of white bread, potatoes, white rice, chips, crackers (now that the shit that was left over from the Superbowl party is gone; I have SO learned my lesson there) and sugary treats of all sorts has fallen to an all-time household low. It's not perfect, by any means, but it's stable, it doesn't involve a lot of thought, we're not stressed out by it, and we're happy-- that last being, I think, the most important thing that can be said for any diet.

My Hub went to McDonald's yesterday, where he purchased a Happy Meal-- complete with those apple dipper things and a little 8-oz. thing of low-fat milk. I have done this myself, often, since that's actually the size of a proper meal, and it's cheap as hell-- but I never expected to see my Hub do it. I'm so proud.

I may be losing weight again, now that the Superbowl leftovers are in the past and I'm back to the gym. It's the wrong time of the month to check to be sure, but I'm guessing by the end of the week I'll have an answer. Things seem to be shaped a bit differently, that's for sure. If my guess is correct, I'll be edging past 15 pounds lost to something like 16 or 17. Not bad.

Also... ::sigh:: I'm going to call the doctor about my stupid shoulder. It's been six weeks, I've been very, very gentle with it, and it still hurts. And this time through, I've made sure that the "flexible spending" medical savings account has enough cash in it in case they want to charge me my entire deductable for one damn shoulder. Feh.

Most excitingly, though: I made mini-quiches last night! Yay! Haven't done that in a long time. (Mental note: next time, either grease the muffin tin properly or use those wretched paper cups. D'oh!) I threw chopped-up Canadian bacon, spinach, and goat cheese in there, poured in EggBeaters (with which I'd mixed a bit of Frank's Red Hot sauce, dried basil, salt, and pepper), baked at 325 degrees for 30 minutes, and voila! protein for my mid-morning snack! I've been trying to make do with protein-less options for the past week, and it's been murder. (Doesn't help that during PMS I am a raging ball of hunger.) Once my body gets adjusted to being fed every three hours, it WILL be fed every three hours, or else it will be ANGRY, and apparently several pieces of fruit will not suffice, it wants PROTEIN.

We continue to close in on my get-off-of-Zoloft date. I'm staying on it through March, but I'm guessing that anytime after Easter is fair game. Yay!

Oh, God, do I need a nap. I stayed up an extra hour getting those quiches made last night, and it's hitting me now. Oof.

Wow, am I in a foul mood

2007-02-16T08:24:00.000-06:00

I've got PMS, definitely. Getting to work this week has been work in and of itself, which has not made me particularly pleased with life. Podfitness, which I signed up for and then cancelled after I found out that it would not deal with my legally purchased iPod songs, has now charged me $19.95. Seriously, I cancelled after one day, and supposedly I was in the midst of that "try it now for free" period, and if I wasn't pleased with the service before then, I REALLY don't like it now. And the chick in the cube next to me has gospel music playing every minute of the day, she doesn't turn it down when she's on the phone (which means she raises her voice to talk over the noise, making things worse), and I am trying to get to a calm enough mental place where I can talk to her about this rather than screaming.

To top it all off, someone has stolen or thrown out my water bottle, and now I have to get a new one.

I am wound so tight right now, I don't know what to do with it. It's a damn good thing that I've got the physical part of the binge thing taken care of, because if I had the least physical excuse, the mental drive toward solving my problems with a bag of Doritos would be just insane right now. It's bad enough as it is.

So, did you hear about Peter Pan peanut butter and the salmonella thing? Long story short: don't eat that peanut butter. Added and unrelated exposition on my part: don't eat that peanut butter anyway, because it is full of sugar and wacky added crap. Sugary peanut butter triggers my binging; natural peanut butter does not. Ponder that one for a second.

Actually, what the hell, a good rant could get a lot of this unfocused rage out of my brain. Since I haven't ranted for a while on non-food food, I may as well do so now!

I hate diet food. By this I do not mean single-ingredient foods, where they are what they are, such as fruits, vegetables, meat, nuts, milk, eggs, olive oil, whole grains, or natural peanut butter (it has ONE INGREDIENT, it is PEANUTS, this is the best thing ever). These things are fine. With the probable exception of the peanut butter, my ancestors would recognize these things as food. The object of my ire is the packaged, highly-processed, shelf-stable crap with ingredients that came out of labs instead of farms, the stuff that's been intricately pieced together and then post-operatively pumped full of nutrients.

Every time nutrition science comes out with a new conclusion about what makes some foods-- and these are whole foods, I'll guarantee you-- good for us, the food industry retools the same old shit to fit these guidelines. I will tell you right now that no matter what they do to a breakfast bar to give it all the nutritious properties of a piece of broccoli, it is never going to give you the benefits of broccoli, because a) science is just not that smart, and b) food products invented in a lab don't have anywhere near the fiddling-around time as food products that evolved over a few million years, including a few thousand years of human fiddling. (Example: carrots. If you think they've always been that bright orange color, think again.) In a few thousand years, we might get this right. A few decades, though, is just not enough time.

Here's the other thing-- and I know I've talked about this stuff before, it's one of my ranty subjects. Humans are programmed on a genetic level to seek three things which, on a caveman's diet, would have been rare: sweet, salt, and fat. Even up to and through the Industrial Revolution, these things were still a pain to get-- sugar in particular, which was very labor-intensive, needed to be imported, and hence expensive. Meat (and hence lard) and butter were also labor-intensive. Getting salt from either ocean water or mines was also labor-intensive, and although it wasn't quite as expensive as other things, it was one of the few methods of preserving food available at the time, and so deeply necessary; it also was prone to government intervention and taxation.

Fast-forward to the twentieth (and now twenty-first) century, and suddenly we've made all these things cheap. Granted, we still think of meat as the most expensive piece of the menu, but it's not like ye olden days when poor folks could go weeks without eating meat; anyone can go to a fast food join and pony up a buck for a hamburger. (I come from Kansas; don't get me started on the meat industry. Making this stuff cheaper is at a huge cost, environmentally and socially and, yes, for our waistlines.) Fat is absolutely no problem; we can get it any old way. Salt and refined sugar are cheap; go to the store and price a container of Morton's and a 5-lb. bag of sugar if you don't believe me.

And somehow, that wasn't enough for the food industry. Things needed to be saltier, fattier, sweeter, and cheaper, because all these things make people's taste buds happy (except the "cheaper" part, which makes the wallet happy) and so they'll buy more of that product. Enter hydrogenated fats (replacing most animal fats in the 1960s): cheaper, and then also a longer shelf life = cheaper to produce. Enter high-fructose corn syrup (starting in about 1975); cheaper to get, and it's easier to mix and has a longer shelf life than sugar, so the product becomes cheaper to produce. And salt? As far as I know, they haven't lab-created SuperSalt yet, but they certainly use a ton of it, because it fixes problems like dryness and chemical aftertaste, and it makes other tastes stand out more-- including sweetness-- and the more something tastes like something, the better, says the industry.

Don't get me started on the lab-created flavors. I have been screwed up on what is actually orange-flavored my whole life because of this; compared to an orange-flavored candy, an orange seems flavorless. This is just screwed up, folks.

Leaving aside the definite health problems associated with trans fats and the questions raised about HFCS, the thing is, things made with this stuff are cheaper than they have any natural right to be, and sweeter/saltier/fattier than they have any natural right to be. This is not cool. I am not a scientist, I am not a nutritionist, but I do eat, and I do notice things, and I've noticed that in the time that humans have been eating this sort of thing ("food" may be going too far), we've been eating too much of it and getting really damn fat.

I'm not going to say that these things are addictive, because-- like I said-- the human body is genetically wired to seek this stuff out. I do think that having it be so cheap is a problem. I do think that having this stuff be ready-to-eat is a problem. I do think that we don't have a lot of natural resistance to this stuff. I think that we're raised in a society where everything has artificially flavory flavors, is too sweet and too fat and too salty, and that as a result it takes a while to adjust to any kind of diet that relies on natural foods, which have natural flavors.

And that's where the diet food thing comes in, and I hate this stuff with a passion, because it's a big lie. It's trying to keep you in that zone of artificially-high flavor and sweetness and fatty textures, trying to assure you that you can still eat this way and lose weight, and in doing so they keep you from getting used to real foods. It's a way to wean yourself off the full-strength shit, I guess, but don't for a minute believe that any of this stuff is actually good for you.

Sometimes, good-for-you stuff, real food, has more calories than a processed meal. This alone can make people forego real food. The thing is, real food does stuff for you beyond calories. It's more filling. It's got all sorts of complicated enzymes and vitamins and fiber and things that science probably won't figure out for another twenty or forty years. It makes your body work the way it ought to work. It fuels you right.

I can't even be holier-than-thou on this because we've been working our way through the leftovers from the Superbowl for two weeks, and the bread and crackers-- both purchased with an eye toward pleasing our guests, who are not accustomed to the things we try to buy ordinarily-- and, I will admit, the beer, didn't get pitched out the way that the chips and cookies did. We've been eating them, and I'm pretty sure that my hilariously weird week-long five-pound bloat was entirely due to white bread and crackers. And I gotta tell ya, once the idea of instant food is out there, and the memory of refined sugars and flours is fresh in my body's memory, it is damn near impossible for me to get my ass in gear and make real food. I start doing the teenage thing where I mope around the kitchen looking at all the full cupboards and the full refrigerator and the full freezer and whining, "There's nothing to eeeeeeat!" There's plenty to eat, of course, I'm just not seeing the things that I'm craving.

I'm convinced that if I someday get to the point where I can prepare healthy food when I'm in one of my exhausted, cranky, self-destructive moods, then there'll be no problem anymore. The deck is stacked, though. Totally, totally stacked.

...Okay, I feel a little better. (Bonus: my tea is here! I finally ordered my tea and it is here! SO HAPPY!) Time to go on with life.

Bonus post: my new default dinner menu

2007-02-12T10:11:00.000-06:00

I like to cook, except when I don't. There are some times when the creative aspect of it is the best part, and I go all crazy with an elaborate preparation... and then there's every other time, when I'm tired and really don't want to have to think, and go with one of my default menu items.

The new default menu: chicken, green beans, and sweet potatoes. Which sounds very bland and horrifying, I know, but WAIT, let me tell you how I make it!

In order of preparation:

The Sweet Potatoes: Totally my favorite thing right now. I put the oven on 400 degrees, peel the sweet spuds, chop 'em into little cubes, and then toss them (either by the Large Plastic Ziplock-style Baggie method or the bowl method) with a tablespoon of olive oil, salt, and-- this is key-- cinnamon*. I put a sheet of aluminum foil on a cookie sheet (because really, I hate dishes and we have no dishwasher) and spread the spud-cubes out on them, then bake for 20 minutes, stirring them around at about the half-point or whenever I remember to do it, whichever comes first. Since these take the longest of anything, they get started first.

* The more fragrant, the better. We tend to grind our own cinnamon by chucking a stick of the stuff into our never-really-used-as-a-coffee grinder and zapping it a few times, because it smells FANTASTIC and really cannot be beat, but determined scraping with a microplane grater gets the same result (albeit with a lot of very annoying work) and, okay, theoretically pre-ground cinnamon could be used but please remember that it doesn't have a great shelf life so the newer the package, the better.

The Chicken: I thaw two chicken breasts, usually by the chucking-in-a-bowl-of-water-in-the-sink-with-cold-water-running-for-convection's-sake method, which I get going before starting the sweet potatoes. Once they're thawed, I put a good heavy pan on the stove and get it heating-- no oil yet. Then I pound the chicken flat (use the pounding method of your choice; I tend to put it in a large baggie and then whack it with our cast-iron skillet), because flat cooks more evenly and it only took one time with not-quite-done chicken for me to get paranoid about it. I brush the chicken with olive oil and season both sides with a mixture of salt, garlic powder, dried dill, and ground black pepper. By this point in the process the pan should be space-shuttle-reentry hot, so I turn the heat down a bit and then put the chicken in to sear-- at least two minutes per side. This should get some nice brown crusties on there.

Then comes a wacky thing which may be my own invention (I'm not sure why, or when, I started doing this): once both sides of the chicken is seared, I get some water and chuck it into the pan. Not a huge amount, only like 1/4 to 1/2 of a cup. This is based on the sauce-making technique where you dissolve the bits of lovely carbonized food stuck to the pan into a liquid, only in this case I keep the chicken in the pan because a) it's not really that complex of a sauce, b) there's not a lot of it, and c) this not only makes the chicken look brown and tasty (it's like an instant dye process), but it gets some liquid back into it.

The Green Beans: While the chicken is searing, I toss frozen green beans in a bowl and add lemon juice, balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper, and either minced garlic or garlic powder (it really depends on how lazy I'm feeling), then nuke 'em until hot-- which in our little microwave is usually about four minutes. Stir halfway through the nuking process.

I'm fond of this dinner because I know about how long it'll take (about thirty minutes), I don't have dishes competing for oven/microwave/cooktop space, and a minimum of dishes are dirtied. My favorite dish of the three is the sweet potatoes, I have to admit, because I'd been casting around for a way to get them on the table faster and with a minimum of effort, and this does the trick. With the roasty-broccoli thing happening a few times a week, too, we're getting at least two of the magical very-good-for-you foods incorporated on a regular basis. My next goal is to get a good, fast, non-stinky fish dish going; I have a few possibilities lined up. Really, anything that's fun to eat, tasty, easy to prepare, and good for us is a good thing to have. Also on the list of things to experiment with: fast spinach sides, a return run at bulgar wheat, and my eternal attempts to make friends with winter squash.

In other phenomenal news:

1) THE COLD SNAP HAS BROKEN. Oh thank God. Today we walked to the train station like normal people, and walked across the Loop like we used to, and it was glorious. I can't even believe how little we walked over the past week and a half. It was crazy. I felt so cooped up and miserable, because even though we were going places it was always being in one place, then being in a car, then being in another place; there wasn't the transition time with the big sky above me. I love walking. Thank God it's back.

2) Trader Joe's has fennel bulbs for about $1.50. This is half the price of what they have at Jewel. As a result, we're getting fennel as a regular part of our foodage. Guys, I LOVE FENNEL.

3) My Hub has inhaled so much information on nutrition and exercise that he is now operating as the resident health guru among his friends, and several of them have started cleaning up their lifestyles because he talks so much about this stuff. I'm so proud of him. He's come so far after his shaky, nervous start when he was very tense about everything, and he looks amazing.

4) Frozen berries, particularly blueberries, are a good treat for sugar-free me. I accidentally made the best fruit salad ever: pomegranate seeds, oranges (I peeled the segments, because they were pretty tough; ah, winter), and mixed frozen berries tossed in and left to thaw and leak their juices all over. Ate the whole thing at our Superbowl party and had no regrets.

5) The elliptical machine is my friend. We must make a run to the gym directly after work today, because we are apparently due for a big sloppy snowstorm this evening. (Oh joy. Well, at least we're not in New York with the 11 feet of snow.) I throw on my Shuffle and rock out. It is all good, and oh lord can I feel the muscles it's working.

6) My Hub is determined to get us both new mp3 players for our anniversary. Not iPods, but something along that functionality. He's been all over the internet checking out reviews. Looks like I might get a new workout boost soon-- yay!

The Stacked Deck Strikes Again, or, another WW rant

2007-02-12T07:33:00.000-06:00

I am good at many things, but shutting up is not one of them. I'm trying. I'm aware that there's a real danger of coming off as a smug know-it-all, and/or like I think I'm a superior life-form and everybody else is weak or stupid or ignorant or whatever. I know this. So I'm trying to shut up where I can.

In some cases, I bite my tongue bloody and then come online to post anonymously about it. Not a great thing, but an improvement over my usual.

The thing about dieting and the whole healthy lifestyle phenonemon is that it's intensely personal. There's a huge amount of faith involved, and any time you've got something that is more faith than science, it comes packaged with a lot of insecurities. For many people-- myself definitely included-- getting started on a program like this is a desperation move, and it's not cool to suggest to someone that the lifeline they're clinging to-- the one bit of hope that they can dig themselves out of this hole-- may be flawed and could break at any time. It's a tricky subject, to say the least.

I've got a friend on Weight Watchers who has just dropped her Points level, is hungry all the time, and has hit a plateau. I'm not going to say anything along these lines to her, not yet, because-- as my Hub puts it-- you've gotta let someone spin their wheels for a while before saying, "Here is a shovel, here is a bucket of gravel; these things might help." In the meantime, I'm posting here.

For the record, Weight Watchers is not bad. As far as diets go, it's the best of its kind, a species with a more evolved brain and opposable thumbs that is much smarter and more supportive than the pea-brained dinosaurs lumbering around in the same vicinity. Weight Watchers makes an effort to get you used to sensible portion sizes, they've got a lot of great tools for tracking your intake, you get a ton of support, you're kept accountable; all of these are good things. They keep making evolutionary gains, too, with their Core program stressing good foods for the main stuff you eat, and apparently a new effort to customize the FlexPoints system to take into account age and activity levels instead of only height and weight. They do try to talk a lot about activity and exercise. Again, all good things.

The point at which Weight Watchers falls short (and to my eyes starts looking like the orangatan dancing around in The Jungle Book, singing "I Wanna Be Like You" with a background mantra of "this is a lifestyle, this is a lifestyle") is the thing that limits its evolution: it is centered around eating less and registering less mass on the scale. No matter what else they change, these two things remain key, and that's where the deck is stacked against us. What we want, what we envision when we think of ourselves as thin, is a healthy, sleek body that doesn't jiggle, and a metabolism that can handle more than 1200-1500 calories a day of healthy food. What we get out of a diet-and-scale program is a smaller body, but a high body-fat percentage for the size, a tendency to be cold all the time, and a metabolism that will toss us back into gaining mode if we dare eat more than 1000 calories a day. It's frustrating, to say the least.

This is the thing that infuriates me, every time, about Weight Watchers. It's so earnest, and so sensible compared to other diet-and-scale programs, and it's such a supportive baby-step program, and dammit, I want so much for it to work. If you could take all the sensible, supportive, easy-to-digest parts of Weight Watchers and center it around exercise (muscle-building exercise in particular, not just cardio) supplemented by a sensible diet (with more stress on lean protein and good carbs and good fat, not just low-fat/high-fiber), in order to lower body-fat percentage, that would be so, so much better.

I realize that people don't want to exercise. I know. I do. And I know that Weight Watchers does try to encourage people to exercise. I also know that Weight Watchers is brilliant at getting people to incorporate new things into their lives, and that people will work the hardest on the things that Weight Watchers stresses the most. Currently, this means that people work the hardest on tracking their food and praying to the great god Weigh-In that they'll show a loss for the week-- two things that, while useful, can't give you long-term success alone. All I'm saying is to make it a tripod approach: build muscle, eat a sensible diet (like their Core system), and concentrate on body-fat-percentage as a measure of success, rather than pounds lost-- a weekly weigh-in would, of course, still be a nice way to keep accountability, but celebrate and give awards for BF% lowered, not pounds lost.

I know. Pipe dream. They're not going to change, and all I can really hope for is that people use WW as an introductory class and move on to more advanced stuff. Lots of people do that. It's the people that don't that I'm frustrated for, the ones who get stuck as a result of this stacked deck and think that it's all their fault and that they're just going to be fat forever. ARGH.

This is what happens when I can't exercise

2007-02-09T13:47:00.000-06:00

In the interests of healing my stupid shoulder, a one-week break was taken from any and all gym activity, along with anti-inflammatory meds (er, Advil) and regular icing of my shoulder. Ice, rest, and Advil are my heavy hitters where inflammation are concerned, and since it was determined that my shoulder injury was likely inflamed bursae and not a muscle pull or tear, I have been smacking down the inflammation ever since.

A week ago, it was still painful if I accidentally forgot and slung my purse over my right shoulder instead of my left. This week, it's only mildly annoying. MUCH BETTER. And as such, I'm back to the gym.

Still no weights, still no yoga. I can do cardio without jolting my shoulder painfully, though, so that's what I'm sticking with. Elliptical machine, mostly. I bring my mostly-working iPod (it may be time for a new Shuffle, because this thing has the hiccups) and rock out. It's soothing. And, considering that a lack of exercise PLUS limited amounts of walking (have you seen the weather report for Chicago? it's been too cold to go outside without wearing your own HOUSE for over a week, man) PLUS having a Superbowl party which resulted in having too much carby food around the house means... hellooo, extra two pounds on my ass. Ah, well. I'll fix it.

I've been analyzing my evening habits, and mostly they fall into the please-God-make-my-brain-numb activities. TV is dangerous, because it matches up with mindless eating, and with this much crap in the house it's just no good. Surfing the 'net, playing a video game, or reading are all alternatives, but for the most part I've figured out that I'm fine doing something as long as I don't have to think. So, in order to improve my at-home productivity, I will have to a) figure out how to make more things fall into that brainless category, and/or b) figure out why I seem to require brainlessness behavior in order to relax.

My dad, I know, relaxes by doing things. Building things, in particular. After his day job, he goes and builds houses and room additions for people, and this is his way of kicking back. I know that I used to write for relaxation, but I seem to lose the knack of relaxing with it on a regular basis, so... clearly, I need to relax.

Again, I think that part of being able to do and relax at the same time is to have had enough sleep, because when I haven't had enough sleep, NOTHING is relaxing.

So. Get enough sleep. Learn to relax. Look longingly at the yoga classes.

Gonna have to face it, I'm addicted to tea

2007-01-17T11:39:00.000-06:00

I have traded my sugar and caffiene addictions for a decaf tea addiction, it seems. Folks, I am officially in love with Stash's Decaf Vanilla Nut Creme. I am considering buying 100 g loose-leaf online, which would be a good deal except for the fact that shipping costs $4.95 for some reason. Apparently this is to encourage me to purchase more than one thing, because it's still $4.95 shipping if I buy two.

Other problem: I was telling myself that I was going to save my pin money this paycheck, since there wasn't anything in particular I wanted to buy. A few months' worth of this and I'll have enough to buy a new laptop, which is looming large in my future as my 4-year-old one keeps getting more and more unstable. So I'm torn between being stingy, and having tea.

Fuck it. I can wait a while for tea. I'm going on a grocery run this weekend and I'll pick some more up then, and I can squeeze in a loose-leaf order on my next paycheck. If there's another habit I need to break, I'm pretty sure it's the habit of getting all MUST BUY THING NOW and rushing headlong into purchases.

The shoulder is limping towards healing; it doesn't hurt that much anymore, and I've been avoiding any movement that might irk it. I've been doing the little rehab exercises for it. I'm hoping that in another week or so I might be able to do yoga again. Knock on wood. More research must be done. My Hub wants me to go to the doctor; I, on the other hand, am thinking that since it's not hurting much anymore, and since everything I've read tells me that the doctor will essentially tell me to rest it, ice it, and rehab it... and, most importantly (don't you just love our medical system?), I don't want to end up having a test done that sounds like a good idea at the time but ends up not being covered by insurance and costing me another $300.

Grr.

The thing is, the threat of making me go to the doctor is actually making me act sane about my injury this time, so that's a good thing. I'm absolutely not going to push this. I do not like pain, and I do not like being hurt, and while normally my "I don't like being hurt" thing means that I get impatient with my injuries and push through them, this time I'm thinking that impatient would be bad.

Impatient always means bad. I have to stop flipping out.

Oh, good news: I did actually get to writing last night, all set up in my little cubbyhole in the bedroom. Quiet, no interruptions, no distractions, all good. I'm pretty happy about that.

For want of a shoulder a kingdom was lost

2007-01-16T07:52:00.000-06:00

So, it's about as official as it can get without an actual doctor's appointment (our new insurance cards for the year have not arrived yet): I've tweaked my right rotator cuff something fierce. I got all excited about the new gym and even though I knew my shoulder had been being weird, I plunged in anyway.

Folks, this was dumb. I've spent the past several days re-working the way I deal with everything from putting on my coat to reaching for toilet paper. I've discovered that until further notice, I shouldn't be driving because turning the steering wheel hurts my shoulder, too. I've been learning the ways of getting things off higher shelves one-handed. Lesson learned: when shoulder hurts, do not attempt to work through the pain. PAIN GETS WORSE.

This is depressing. No yoga, no yogalates, no more personal training; for the time being I'm stuck doing all lower-body stuff. Worse, I'm limited in my choices of lower-body stuff, because I can't use barbells or dumbbells, and I can't support myself on all fours. SON OF A BITCH. I've grudgingly gone back to the machines, doing leg presses and calf raises and whatnot, and daily cardio on machines that do not use "the arms on (my) upper body" (as the wacky recumbant bike put it). Cardio is good; it supposedly gets blood flowing to the injury and helps things heal. We shall see. In the meantime, I'm grumpy. I want want want to be plunging headfirst into yoga and such, and to train with weights, and I am DENIED. This sucks.

I have not been eating the best. Still going without sugar and desserts, but all weekend I was craving stupid crunchy foods like chips and popcorn; I'm not sure why. Maybe I'm PMSing. I ate a fast-food meal from Wendy's and spent the rest of the day feeling nasty and bloated. Ick. No more of that.

My Hub is not helping on the food front, as he is on a bulking diet. Getting him to eat his vegetables is, shall we say, difficult; he's tired of eating so he tries to get as many calories per food as he can, without diving off the deep end into truly horrible foods. I've got him eating sweet potatoes on a regular basis, at least (cubed, roasted; God's perfect food), which means he's getting some nutrition besides protein. And I've converted him to spelt. It could be worse, you know?

Still sad. I'm doing my little exercises that are supposed to keep me from getting frozen shoulder, and once things stop hurting I guess I get to start rehabbing the damn shoulder with light weights. In the meantime, I am bereft of yoga. Waaaah!