Broken Ideals

You know, losing weight didn't make me happy.

It sounds weird to say it, and god knows I get shit for it like you wouldn't believe, or maybe you would.

I lost 87 pounds, or thereabouts. And I wanted to think that I didn't have unrealistic expectations. I never thought I'd be hollywoodesque or suddenly beautiful. But I did think, MAYBE, it wasn't a terrible thing to hope I wouldn't hate myself so much.

But I did, and I begin to think, at 40, that's a trick this old dog isn't going to learn. I don't even know that it's possible for me to stop hating myself.

And on top of that, I ended up with problems; unwanted attention.

See, I used to have this neighbor. Bob.

And Bob was a drunken asshole. I don't think I ever saw the man sober. He lived in the apartment diagonal across the hall from us.

One day, I was outside, talking to one of the other neighborhood moms, while we were waiting for our daughters to get home from first grade - they were allowed to walk home from school, but for most of first grade, Darcy wanted me to be outside, waiting for her. Her dad would walk her over to the school sidewalk and let her go the rest of the way on her own. Small independences.

And Debbie was selling something - Pampered Chef stuff, maybe? I don't remember. I was leaning over the picnic table, looking at the brochure she had.

"Hey!" Bob tapped me. I'd like to say he tapped my shoulder, but he didn't. He stabbed me in the lower back/upper ass with his huge, blunt finger. "You look so hot, leanin' over like that, I took a picture." He shows me on his cell phone, this picture of my ass. He's seriously crowding my personal space and this guy is huge - well over six feet tall and probably a good 280 pounds. Like a linebacker who's been drinking too many beers.

"Um... yeah." I straighten up and move a little, trying to get out of his shadow. I don't like people looming over me. It's 2pm and I can already smell cheap beer and sweat.

The phone in his hand rings. "Oh, yeah, hey, yeah, I know, ain't it great... I just came over to tell her. So, you like that ass, huh?" He looks at me. "I texted the pic to my friend."

You did... what? I laugh uncomfortably and move further away; honestly at this point I'm trying to get Debbie between me and him. She's just as uncomfortable.

"Oh, look, she's laughin'," he says. "It's makin' her tits bounce around." He hands me the phone. "He wants to talk to you."

"Yeah, right. You know, I'm waiting for my seven-year-old daughter to get home from first grade." I give Bob a look, but if it impacts him at all, he completely ignores it. I look away from him and start talking to Debbie. Neither of us look at Bob, or the phone, or acknowledge anything else he says. He eventually wanders away.

A few weeks later, my husband goes off to New Jersey for business for a week. And Bob starts rattling the doorknob to my apartment every time he walks by. If the door's unlocked, he opens it.

I start to feel trapped in my own house. I don't like to go out at night to take out the trash and now I NEVER go all the way down to the mailbox after dark.

Thomas gets home, and I tell him what's been going on. A few days later, Debbie asks us if we can take care of her dog for the afternoon, because she's going to be gone all day. "Sure, no problem." It's not. I don't like dogs, but Debbie's isn't too bad.

We're out walking the dog when Bob rides up, drunkenly, on his bicycle.

"That ain't your dog. Did you steal that dog?"

"I don't see that it's any of your concern," Thomas says, handing the leash over to me. "I'd like you to leave my family alone."

"What, asshole?"

"You heard me." I don't know what Bob hears in Thomas's voice, but what I hear is the keys moving from Thomas's pocket to his hand. I look. He's done the Wolverine thing with his keychain; several keys poke out between his fisted knuckles. "You're harassing my wife. Don't talk to us. Don't talk to her."

Bob jumps off his bike and charges him. Thomas stands there, cool and collected. Bob tops him by a good five inches and at least a hundred pounds. I scramble to get my phone out of my pocket.

Bob ended up backing down, no punches thrown. But I thought I was going to be sick.

For this? I lost weight for this? To be treated like this? To garner this sort of attention?

It wasn't the whole reason; I got frustrated by the slow, creeping gains, the constant hunger and irritability.

But Bob scared the hell out of me.

We reported him to the apartment complex - I have serious trust issues with police, too, and I don't... technically being a douche canoe isn't against the law. And I have no faith that a police officer would take me seriously. The manager told him that he wasn't to speak to us, at all, or they'd evict him. One more complaint and he was out - we weren't the only people in the complex who'd complained about him.

I lost weight for this?

And I deserve it!

I don't know if I've particularly talked about this here before, so I'll go ahead and sum up:

One of my core thoughts in relationships goes along these lines: If you can replace the words "But I love him/her" with "But I deserve to be treated like this," then clearly, there are issues with the relationship.

For example: Boyfriend is cheating on girl. She is unhappy, her self-confidence is a wreck. He either promises to change and doesn't, or basically blows her off with a "well, that's just how it is, baby. You can be with me on my terms, or not at all." She complains to me about it. I suggest that she find some backbone, self-respect, and LEAVE HIM. She says "But... but I LOVE HIM." (Translation: "I believe, deep down, that I DESERVE to be treated this way.")

I do, sometimes, give credence to the fact that you can't always control who you love. But I do believe - truly, and firmly - that what you DO about how you feel is UP TO YOU. You might love him. And he is treating you badly. HOWEVER, you control what you decide to do about it. If you decide that staying with him is the best option, that's YOUR CHOICE. No one else is forcing you to stay with him, be treated badly, continue to feel badly about yourself. (because we all know that in that sort of a relationship, the person on the 'being treated shabbily' end of things quickly stops asking 'what's wrong with him/her that she/he treats me this way' and ends up in the world of 'what's wrong with ME that I can't MAKE him/her act right?')

So, that's my core belief. And it applies to more than just boyfriend/girlfriend relationships. It applies to everything.

My father, for instance, tends to question my judgment a LOT. If there's a subject out there, chances are we disagree. And for a long time, we always ended up in nasty, hateful arguments. Seeing him stressed me out so badly that I'd be a wreck for weeks before we had our visit, and fumingly angry for days afterward. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that I had given him power over me, that I gave him the ability to make me crazy, and that I didn't have to do that.

Now, I'll give my father a lot of credit here: we talked about this, and we developed a much better relationship. The key to our relationship is the simple phrase: Do you want to fight about this? If he brings up something I feel strongly about (gay marriage, for instance, is a particularly contentious issue for us.) and it's the middle of Christmas dinner. "Do you want to fight about this?" "Well, no." "All right, then." It's a warning: I'm willing to fight about this issue if you are, but I'd prefer NOT to argue with you about it. We both know the other person isn't going to change their minds, and why disrupt the hell out of Christmas by being mad about stuff we can't do anything about ANYWAY.

I love my father. And I deserve to be treated with respect. He may not appreciate or agree with my beliefs, but he is required to respect my opinions.

And then the particularly hard part: I love myself. And I deserve this!

I deserve to have clothes that help me feel pretty. I deserve to not feel guilty about buying a dress, even if I only "need" to wear it once every few months. I deserve to spend money on myself. I deserve to be fit, and healthy. I deserve the pleasant ache in my shoulders after a yoga workout; I love myself enough to give myself that gift.

I love myself.

And I deserve to treat myself with respect.

My Safe Place

The last few minutes of yoga class are laying on my back, towel over my eyes (the instructor can't change the lighting in the room, something she complains about every single time we do the corpse pose).

"And now, you're going to go to your safe place. Forget about whatever else you have to do. Forget about your concerns. Put them away from your mind. Your safe place. Picture it. Hold fast to that idea."

And I think back, and I grab hold of images of my grandparents' summer house. A tiny two bedroom cabin set on the barest imaginings of a peninsula; one good summer storm away from being an island. The path from the dock is no wider than two feet; a few bridges that cross what might actually not be a damp spot in the trail, but merely a very aggressive bush that holds one side of the land to the other.

I can see the docks. The front deck. The tuffets in the back of the house. (Did you ever wonder what Miss Muffet was sitting on? I don't. I've seen them... they're round domes of moss, almost perfectly round, like a seat cushion. You can pick them up, they're dirt on the bottom, and move them somewhere else, and they'll just continue to do their thing...)

And yet, I'm seeing everything from a bird's eye view. A perspective I've never actually seen these buildings, structures, trees. I don't see any people, although I was never there when there was less than four people in residence, and usually there were more. I've never seen the house from the top, nor peered down at the back yard from the roof.

I can't seem to picture myself there. Not in a deck chair, or lounging on the deck, or swimming in the back bay, or walking in the shallows over to the Point.

It's strange.

But I'm not in my safe place at all.

No one is.

A Little Less than More

I don't think I can begin to explain exactly how much I hate being bipolar.

I rather expect there are worse things to be. And yet, sometimes being bipolar is damned exhausting.

As far as I can tell, I've been in a downswing for going on nine months.

Nine. Months.

I've had good days - even a few good spots... and I've had some really, really bad days. But mostly it's been a long, long cycle of down. Sad. Discouraged. Lazy. (Lazy is such a bad word. And yet I don't have a good word for the immense amounts of I-don't-want-to-do-Fuck-all that seems to come with these bad spells.) Angry. Frustrated. Self-hating.

And I can track right along with it, my weight loss. Or, one should say Weight Gain.

I weighed in last night at WW for the first time in three weeks. I've been skipping meetings. (I never used to do that. Even if we missed a meeting because of a holiday, or illness, I would go in for a weigh in at another time...) I was up almost 7 pounds.

Ok, let me back up and explain that. It's not up 7 pounds in a week... it was "only" one pound this week.

But it's up 7 pounds from where I was when I declared goal... it's up 7 pounds from my lowest weight, which was never as low as I wanted it to be. (I eventually declared goal at 134, with the intent of pushing for 125 anyway.) I managed to get down to 132 before I started this creep. (Creep: the slow, inexorable movement of soil downhill... geology 101, otherwise known as Rocks for Jocks.)

Right now, I'm having another twilight stage. Usually that's a good thing... twilight indicates that I'm coming out of the downphase... I am self-aware. I realize that things haven't been getting done (as an example, I haven't vacuumed the house in something like 2 months... I think the last time was right before my birthday party...) I notice that the house is a wreck and instead of wanting to go back to bed, I want to do something about it.

And yet, these last nine months have been dotted with twilights that have never, ever turned all the way into day.

I look back at the last nine months... and I've done nothing... I'm barely managing to maintain some sort of status quo, and honestly, the status is NOT quo. (The world is a messed up place... and I just need to rule it.)

I don't know.

I really don't. It may be time for me to go back on medication. On the other hand, that means finding a new psychiatrist/psychologist and going through the whole nine yards all over again... which I hate. I hate shrinks. I hate medications. I hate the clear, vivid gray that hangs over everything while I'm on meds.

And it's not as bad as it has been, the last few times I've done a medication regime. I haven't dug myself into debt. I'm not in the middle of several bad, destructive relationships. I'm just... not productive.

I mean, I've done some stuff. I've paid all the bills. I've kept the house in a reasonable state of tolerable-slovenly. I've had social outings (Too many, maybe!). I haven't - mostly - gone off the screaming deep end and bitten anyone's head off. I've done some writing.

And yet, I've run us dangerously close to the red line for money several months in a row. I've gained 7 pounds (I know, someone's going to say that 7 pounds isn't that much, but 7 pounds in 9 months is dangerously close to a dress-size... and it's been a constant gaining... the 7 pounds might be "not much" but I'd prefer it to be "not NORMAL".) I've stopped keeping my lists. (I'm usually a list-maniac... I like to track my daily chores, what I eat, my dinner plans for the week, my grocery lists, what coupons I have, what's on my social calendar, etc etc.) I don't feel connected to my husband. Or my daughter. Or my friends. I don't feel like I've had a meaningful conversation with anyone in the last several months.

I keep worrying that I'm killing my own twilight. That I start coming around and I see everything I've not-done in the last few months and I try so hard to get back to good that I smash my chances at sunshine and just dive back under the cloud cover. It's kept me holding on the ledge, instead of falling over the side.

But really, I'd like to get back on the mountain now.

ok?

That woman who isn't me

Today, I took down most of my old pictures.

I know, some websites and self-image consultants and whatnot tell you to keep out some of your "pre-lifestyle-change" pictures. (I called them my "fat pictures" earlier today and boy did I manage to piss someone off.) That looking at these old pictures of myself, I can see how far I've come, how much different I am now. That these pictures will inspire me to keep up the good work (or, on the flip side of the coin, they'll terrify me into skipping that snack!).

They don't.

All these pictures tend to do is make me sad.

Someone else said to me that we (the before me and after me) were the same person, only the packaging has changed.

I'm not sure that's true.

The old me didn't like to be outside. The old me would rather order her groceries from an online service and pick them up so she didn't have to walk around the grocery store. The old me would do anything - ANYTHING - to avoid physical activity. The old me worried so much about the state of her health that she could barely sleep at night, and yet was so determined not to change that she refused to see a doctor. As if whatever illnesses she had could be avoided just from lack of knowledge. The old me wore the same shabby house dress day in and day out because it was just about the only thing she had that fit and was comfortable. (She wore different clothes when she went "out", but generally avoided going out as much as possible, too.) The old me was uncomfortable in a restaurant booth, the edge of the table constantly buried somewhere deep within folds of fat. The old me once lied, boycotted a store, and blamed a sales clerk when it was actually her fault that she'd knocked an expensive china figure off a shelf with a too-wide hip. (She told everyone that the figure had been broken to start with and the clerk pinned it on me because she picked it up.) The old me was constantly depressed. When her entire batch of friends filled out a "pick words to describe her" experiment, Every Single One of my friends selected "Unhappy" as a descriptor. The old me was constantly overheated and sweaty, using extra-strength deodorant several times a day and still having wet spots under her arms.

The new me is active. The new me gets cranky if she hasn't been out of doors at least a few times a week. The new me is constantly chilly (the new me also has a MUCH LOWER electric bill because she doesn't need it to be 68 inside her apartment during the summer!) The new me has a tan most of the time - and not a "lay around and bake" tan, either, but one that's got several strange lines from wearing different clothing outside. The new me likes clothes shopping. The new me goes to the doctor regularly, is aware of her blood sugar levels, and doesn't avoid the dentist. The new me would rather walk to the 7-11 and get a diet coke as a "treat" than go to the Red Robin and eat a basket of cheese sticks (ok, I'm not sure about that one yet... I'd still rather eat the cheese sticks. the point is, however, that I don't.) The new me is happier. The new me has a lot of active, healthy friends who do active, healthy things. The new me is absurdly excited about her new Wii Fitness game.

So I took down all those old pictures.

Because I don't know that person anymore.

Gravitational Absolutist

I'm not much on organized religion. I don't find the idea of God particularly upsetting, but I've found, unfortunately, a lot upsetting about God's churches. God's okay. People... not so much, sometimes.

And I was That Kid, when I was younger. You know, the annoying little shits who think they're so clever...

"If Adam and Eve were the first people on the earth, and they had two sons, one of whom killed the other, where did Mrs. Cain come from?"

"Could God make a rock so big that He couldn't move it?"

You know... I think it's mandatory that all church groups have one. We're a plague, that way.

Now that I'm older, and especially as a mother, I can see some uses for God. Child, "Why do I have to clean my room?" Me, "God said so, now get it done!"

All kidding aside, I've settled into a sort of comfortable philosophy. "Gravitational Absolutist. Gravity works. All the time. Under all circumstances. Everything else... is up for debate." (No, please don't fill my comments with stuff about Zero Gravity... zero gravity is not, actually, being unacted upon by gravity... any mass - and even light - are affected by gravity, whether we are aware of it or not. Zero gravity means only that we do not feel the effects of earth's gravitational pull. If there was no gravity in space, our planet would not stay in its orbit, as well as many, many other Bad Things.)

Ok, I'm finished discussing physics, you can pay attention again.

A few years back, I saw graffiti on a bathroom wall.

"There is no gravity, the earth just sucks."

For a gravitational absolutist, this sort of sentiment is the blackest heresy.

The earth does not suck.

Even in the deepest despair, there is something worth looking at, admiring, doing, being.

It's not always easy to find. It's usually not easily achievable. But it's definitely there.

I say all this because I am beginning to really HATE maintenance. I don't know why I expected maintenance to be easy... why I thought losing the weight would be the hard part. Why I thought I'd "have it down" by the time I got here.

I haven't.

I don't.

It's not.

(As an aside, I still hate my husband, for whom maintenance has also not been easy, but for a different reason. The bastard can't stop LOSING weight. His goal weight was 175. He now clocks in around 157 - 161 pounds, depending on how many cheeseburgers he ate last week. Now, I know - I even feel this way! Frequently! - that many people say "Oh, that's a problem I'd love to have." Except the thing is, it's still a problem! It's difficult to find pants that fit him, especially since he has such long legs... you try finding 30/34s off the rack! His blood sugar, which used to only bottom out once in a while, does so ALL THE TIME now.)

My goal weight is 134. I bounce back and forth between about 135 and 138. If you're familiar with Weight Watchers and their rules, this means I'm paying for meetings. A lot. Still.

At $12 a week.

That's $12 a week I really could be using for something else.

And I debate, back and forth; am I a failure, because I can't maintain in a 2 pound range? Does it really matter to anything other than my pocket book as long as my jeans still fit? Why am I so freaking hungry all the time? I do try, about every other week or so, to go back to eating 19 points a day in an attempt to lose more weight. And it's just not working for me. Days I eat 19 points, I'm so bleeding hungry that the next day I end up eating 29 points.

Part of it is, I think, that I'm not training for my walk anymore. Walking upwards of 5 hours in a day, plus another 2 or so a week, plus hitting the gym twice a week? I'm not doing that most of the time. If I'm doing "well" then I'm getting in about 90 minutes of exercise a week, which is a significant decrease from last year when I was doing 9 - 12 HOURS of working out weekly. The annoying thing is, just because I'm not working out like I used to doesn't seem to mean my appetite has decreased, like it theoretically should.

Part of it is Thomas... in order to not lose any more weight, he's having to eat out, or get sweet or high-fat treats more regularly. This leads those things to being in the house. Or it leads to a LOT of resentment on my part; he can do it, why can't I? Why can he have four slices of pizza and LOSE two pounds this week, and if I have one slice, I gain weight? It's not fair. I feel like I deserve to be able to have an ice cream. Or a candy bar. Or whatever.

And you know, it's not about deserving.

“Wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair and all the terrible things that happen to us, come because we actually deserve them? So now I take comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the Universe." - Marcus Cole, Babylon 5

I recognize that it's stupid, childish, pointless, and useless to have those thoughts. We're just made differently, and being mad about it isn't helping. Doesn't make it any easier, sometimes. Recognizing that I'm being stupid, childish, pointless, useless (AND FAT!) doesn't make me feel any better either.

The only thing I can do now is decide what I am going to do now. I can't control Thomas's weight loss, or his frigged up metabolism. Where am I going to go with what I know about myself?

I miss the walking, I really do. And I miss training, and feeling like I'm accomplishing something.

So, I think what I am going to do is sign up for a new event. As much as I liked the Komen 3 day last year, the fund-raising for it made me sick to my stomach. So, I don't want to do that again this year. (I may try to do the 3-Day every other year...)

And then my Weight Watcher's Leader was talking about something she was thinking about doing... The Virginia Beach Rock and Roll Half Marathon.

The thing with the 3-day, it was about endurance.

A half marathon, where I have to do all 13.1 miles in 4 hours? That's about speed. My normal walking speed is about 3 miles an hour. I won't be able to walk that slowly if I'm going to complete the half-marathon before it ends. I won't be able to take sit-down breaks every 2 miles or so.

So... I'm going to do that; sign up is by the end of May and will cost me $85.

Gravity works. All the time. Under every possible circumstance. The rest... is open for improvement.

Falling Down

If you asked people about their greatest fears, people come up with some pretty exotic shit.

Snakes. Like how often do you actually get into a situation where there is a snake in your house? Under your pillow? - sorry, had to throw that in there, I have a friend with a really, really funny story involving a nagging wife, a fork and a bad dream.... He tells it better than I do, tho.

Spiders. Ok, spiders are kind of icky - although I am oddly fascinated by them and have tons of pictures on my cellphone of spiders that I've seen in weird places - but logically, we all know that spiders really aren't all that dangerous. In my whole life, I've been bitten by a spider... ONCE.

Of course, the "persons of size" group has a whole other category of fears that generally boil down to public humiliation. Sitting in a chair and having it collapse under you. Not fitting in a booth/roller coaster ride seat/airplane. Knocking over a shelf in a shop.

My fear?

Falling down.

I'm not talking about falling off the theoretical wagon. And I'm not talking about falling off a building kind of thing. I'm talking about tripping over the cat. Losing my balance on the stairs.

Typical, every day sort of tumbles that my child does fifty times a day.

There are a lot of things I can't/won't/don't do because I'm scared of falling. Utterly terrified.

Now, admittedly, my fear has some basis in reality. I've fallen, just walking down the street, and broken my elbow in three places. There was a actually a chip of bone that came OFF and was free-floating. Which could have involved all sorts of expensive and painful surgery if it didn't reattach during the healing process. It did, and I was spared a franken-arm to go with my franken-ankle. But it could have. I've had an arm in a cast for six weeks for walking into a tree. Sprained ankle taking a tumble in a kiddie pool. Two fractured wrists for falling off a horse. That's not to mention all the injuries I've gotten having something fall ON me. (At least I'm not my mother. She's had trees fall on her. MORE THAN ONCE! New joke, if a tree falls in the woods and there's no one around to hear it, will it fall on my mother?)

Part of my easily breakable state is because I took steroids. For years. For asthma complications, steroids are the go-to drug of choice by emergency room doctors. I spent better than nine years being on steroids more often than I was off them. Which did some majorly craptastic things to my bones, my immune system, my weight.

And then there's the part of me that seems to be perpetually clumsy. I have a near-permanent bruise on my left shoulder from my frequent habit of walking into the door frame in the kitchen. I have knocked myself out at least twice coming up under things like cash-register draws and wall-mounted antique telephones. (don't ask.) I am still astonished that my breakfront's door isn't broken (pun intended) from the number of times I've clipped myself on it.

And, honestly, part of it was that I was fat. Being fat, you're more likely to walk into something because there's just not enough room for you. You misjudge how far out your hip is. How far back your butt extends. I used to joke (self-hatingly, but still, joking) that my boobs came into the room a week before the rest of me. And there's all that pounds per square inch FORCE that being fat complicates. Climbing stairs, for instance, puts four pounds of pressure PER POUND that you are, on your knee. At my heaviest weight, that's 880 pounds of pressure I was putting on my knee. Imagine what that weight is like on your bones when you fall down. It takes eight pounds of pressure to break any bone in the human body. (and those are for normal-people bones, not weird old lady butter bones like mine!)

So, why am I talking about this today?

I fell down yesterday.

And not just a simple tripped over one of my daughter's toys fall.

I was outside. Racing my daughter on a scooter (she was running, I was using the scooter...) And I turned the corner too fast and clipped the edge of the sidewalk.

And aside from a slight bruised ego and a wet spot on the knee of my jeans, I was perfectly fine. I didn't even have those long moments where my heart rate is waaay too high and I feel faint and dizzy.

To me, that's impressive.

Takes a Little Time (Sometimes)

Well it may not be over by morning
And Rome wasn't build in a day
You can name that thing a thousand times
And it won't make it go away...

- Takes a little time, Amy Grant

You know, I've figured out my problem.

(I know, I know, I only have one?)

Seriously, y'all, bear with me. I had a bit of an epiphany the other day.

When I started all this, over two years ago now, I kept trying to remind myself that Happy wasn't guaranteed. I could get thin, and all that would mean is that I was thin. It doesn't mean I'm pretty. Or smart. Or confident. All it would mean is that I was thin. (er).

And still, I got here (no, I still don't really think I'm thin... I'm working on it. I'm definitely thinner. Normal-sized.) and expected to be happier. I expected to feel more confident, more energetic, sexier. Something.

And it still seems to be the same old me. Slightly older. A bit more fashion-conscious. (ok, and I've discovered something odd about myself. I like... shopping for shoes. And clothes. And hair accessories. Um... ok? This is me? Since when?) Now, I realize, going back and re-reading this blog, and other things I've written, done and said... that I am more confident. I am happier. But it was such a little bit at a time, I didn't really notice it was happening.

But see, here's the thing....

I'm stubborn. My dad likes to call it tenacity, but you may as well just call a spade a spade. It's pure bull-headedness.

I have not yet failed to accomplish anything I wanted to accomplish.

I wanted to quit smoking, and I did it. I started smoking when I was ten. years. old. Smoked on and off for 17 years. And quit. Cold turkey. Haven't picked up a cigarette in 12 years. Don't intend to ever do so again.

I wanted to lose weight. And I did it. You've all seen that.

I wanted to walk sixty miles. And I did that, too.

I wanted to organize my house, get my housework accomplished, and generally not feel like a slob. Mission accomplished.

So my problem?

I keep wondering why I haven't fixed everything else.

If I can do anything I set my mind to, why can't I do everything I set my mind to? Why, for that matter, can't I set my mind more often?

When I spell it out like that, even I can see how ridiculous it is.

Also... what the hell am I unhappy about? HONESTLY?

I have a wonderful husband (and I hate saying that, because it never sounds honest.... it sounds like a prelude to my saying "but..." And yet, it's true. He's pretty damn wonderful.) My child is not me, and that's ok. She's good at math, and has sticky points with reading. But she's very well behaved, enthusiastic about stuff in general, positively cheerful most of the time, and not particularly whiny. I get along with my parents, mostly. I love my step-parents. Most of the time. I'm friends with my relations, after seventeen years of NOT being friends with them. I even like some of them rather a lot. I get second looks in the grocery store. I've been whistled at in the street. (There needs to be a word for that feeling of being simultaneously creeped out and yet flattered at the same time, there really does.) I have enough money to pay the bills, buy some stuff I want, and yet not have everything I want. (Who really wants to have everything they want? I mean, if you have everything you want, you start wanting really complicated, world-domination sort of issues. And who wants that?) I have good friends. And even beyond my good friends, I have a wide circle of acquaintances. I'm comfortable with my life.

So what's my problem?

Today, I feel pretty damn good, actually. So... not much.

Maybe I should try being more aware of what I have and what I've done than worrying about those things I haven't fixed yet. There's still tomorrow, after all, and tomorrow is another day.

Quitting my Job

Conversation I had today on Twitter:

tisfan Made it to the gym, 35 minutes on the elliptical and now I'm all shaky. No more gym skipping. Bad me!

dragoneyes @tisfan You get points back for going back, tho!

tisfan @dragoneyes well, yes, but if I didn't let the damn wagon get so far ahead of me when I fell off, I wouldn't have to run to catch up.

dragoneyes @tisfan Yah, well, your job is to beat yourself up for your transgressions. My job is to congratulate you for your triumphs

tisfan @dragoneyes my job sucks.

Conversation I had the other day with my husband:

Me, hands on hips, looking around the living room, "This house is a mess! I have been such a slacker recently."

Husband, soothingly, "We've been busy and Darcy's been sick. You've had a lot to do..."

Me, "Yeah, well, nothing says 'I suck' quite as much as a filthy carpet."

Him, "You are SUCH a perfectionist."

Me, harumphing, "You'd think if I was a perfectionist, I'd be better at it!"

Him, "You say that like being a perfectionist is a good thing. You need to say enough, sometimes. You keep striving for something that's not possible. You do your best, and that's enough."

Me, "This isn't my best, though. This isn't even CLOSE to my best."

Him, "This was your best for last week. Next week, you'll have different problems."

It's one of my more aggravating tendencies; this refusal on my part to ever recognize accomplishment.

Pride... is one of those emotions I'm not very familiar with. It's sort of like... I don't know, liking your parents. You know you should, but most days, you just don't feel it. (Ok, when I say "you" I mean me. I don't know how you feel about your parents. Mine and I have a whole separate airplane to ship our baggage.) People see me and they're all "Wow, you've lost so much weight, I bet you're really proud!"

Well, I should be.

But. I'm not.

At all.

I can see, in comparative pictures, how far I've come. And yet... I can also see how much farther I have to go. My house is never clean enough, I'm not thin enough, my writing is never done, my parenting style is somewhat lackadaisical. I don't volunteer enough, I don't keep up with my emails. I don't, I can't, I'm not.

Gyah. Reading it isn't even a wake up call, it just makes me feel even more pathetic.

What does pride feel like? I really don't know.

People compliment me a lot these days, and I've trained myself (mostly) to stop saying "Yeah, but..." I still downplay my accomplishments, and even when I don't, I still don't feel like they're all that. The 3-Day, for instance... it wasn't hard. It wasn't tons of effort. I trained for it, I was ready. I got it done, and that's what I set out to do, but... anyone could do it. (Yes, in my head, I recognize that while many people could do it, quite a lot of people don't. And that's what makes me different.) And still, all I can see is how much more/better I could have done.

My job sucks.

I think I'll quit.

Someone want to give me a severance package?

Not There Yet

About a week ago or so, a group of us went to see Avatar 3D... (If you haven't seen it, you should go. Not for the plot, which is ridiculously Ferngully/Dances with the Wolves/Last Samuri-ish... but because the 3D effects are brilliant. Even if, honestly, I'm getting a little sick and tired of 3D. But that's another story...)

Anyway, somewhat after the movie, me and Leslie were discussing the costuming, and she mentioned that she'd like to dress up like Neytiri.

"You realize she's mostly naked, right?"

"Well, she's wearing those boob-things."

"She doesn't really have boobs."

"Well, really," Leslie continues, "I'd just like to be that comfortable with my body."

Thomas adds, "Hey, I'd like to be that comfortable with her body."

I shrug. "I don't think I would."

I get a pair of blank looks, so I expand. "I mean, I don't want to be that comfortable with her body - " Thomas and I, you must understand, have this semi-joking agreement that if we're ever in a situation where we can't reasonably be expected to be faithful, it will be forgiven. Now, the chances that either of us are EVER going to be in a situation where we've got the opportunity to bang a celebrity are so low, I don't think it's something even my mutant worry brain can latch on to as something to fret over. "Well, seriously... would you be comfortable with YOUR body, next to hers? Would you really want to have sex with that woman, knowing she's perfect and you are... rather less than?"

"I'd like to find out," says Thomas.

"I know I wouldn't be," I said. "It wouldn't matter if Oded Fehr were here this exact moment and wanted to take me to bed. I wouldn't want to. I wouldn't be comfortable enough with myself."

Leslie gives me an exasperated look. "I'd think by that point you'd be enjoying yourself too much to worry about it."

"I'm not in that place yet," I said. "I really wouldn't. Hell, even with Thomas, who was perfectly happy to have sex with me when I was 220 pounds, I worry now, during, what he thinks of how flabby and nasty I look, and I can mostly push it aside, but it's always there. With someone who was perfect... I really don't think I could do it. I wouldn't enjoy myself. It would be mortifying."

"You are weird."

Well, yes. I've been told that before.

0 to 60 in Three Days

Watch this space for updates... there will be some, and I have a ton of stuff I want to say about the Three Day, but right now I'm digging my house out of complete pit-dom (ok, not complete... Thomas DID do dishes while I was gone - much to my shock!) and recovering from the inevitable "I spent 3 days around a bunch of strangers and now I'm sick as all fuck" that happens whenever Thomas takes vacation.

But this is me and my mommy at the Dupont Cheering station on Day Three and has now become my most favoritist picture of myself. Ever.

I am strong.

I am awesome.

I have endurance.

I have hope.

I am a goddess.

Jeans

As if I needed more reasons to hate my body, I got two pieces of information this week that in turns disgust and amuse me.

First, I apparently have no ass.

Second, my thighs aren't big enough.

I went jeans shopping this past week with my friend Leslie. Shopping with Leslie is nothing like shopping with my other girlfriends. While my other girlfriends tend to tell me things are cute, Leslie spent most of her time criticizing. Not so much criticizing me, exactly, but the quality of the clothing, the fit, the color, the prices. She blames this on having a very picky father who insisted on absolutely the best, followed by years of being married to someone who - while he himself might not have had tons of cash, was at least the spoiled child of people with a lot of cash.

So... she's fussy about clothing.

And while I'm an apple, Leslie is a pear. (Well, a pear with an enormous chest.) I don't have a waist, so to speak. And I have absolutely no butt whatsoever. Any jeans that closed around my middle were baggy in the butt.

I had, actually, never noticed this. For me, what's always been more important about jeans fit was how well they reduced the look of my protruding stomach. One of the big problems I've had with my appearance, post weight-loss, is that I don't look thin. I am weighing in around 129-131 pounds (first thing in the morning) and yet I look like a smaller fat person.

"Well, that's unattractive," says Leslie, as I walk out of the fitting room in a pair of Old Navy sweetheart jeans. They're a size 4. SIZE. 4. Damnit.

"What is?" I turn around in the mirror.

"Your jeans... you bag in the butt. And believe me, in jeans, that's the place where you never, ever want to be baggy."

"What are you talking about?" The jeans were pretty damn snug, actually. They fit tight over my stomach and yet didn't spill muffin over the top.

Leslie walked over to the mirror and turned me until I could look at my butt. "Here."

She was right. Just under where my ass would be (if I had one) were a series of creases. I tried on another pair of jeans. And another. And we went to two more shops.

They all do it. Every. Single pair of jeans. Including the ones I was wearing.

I finally ended up getting two pairs of 4s at TJ Maxx anyway... they still bag in the butt, and yet it doesn't seem like there's anything I can do about it. If the jeans fit in the butt, I can't snap them closed (or if I can suck it in hard enough to zip them up, I get terrible muffin top.)

I'd feel even worse about this if it weren't for one consoling factor. Leslie's jeans might be stretched tight across her butt and thighs, but they gap terribly in the waist. No one ever has to wonder what kind of undies she's wearing...

So, I'm not unique, even if I am the only apple in my group of friends. At least my jeans are comfortable, rather than being stretched here and there, and making me worried that someone's going to feel tempted to drop an ice cube down the back of my pants.

Jeans are just Not Made for Women.

On the other hand, there's nothing I can do about my thighs. I already walk so much as to be ridiculous, and having lost 85 pounds, my thighs are measuring in around 18.5 inches at the moment. When I started the whole weight loss thing, my thighs were 27 inches around. I think I'll go ahead and stay in the higher risk category, ok? Ok.

In Another's Eyes

First off, there's still time to enter and win one of two copies of Lose the Diet by Kathy Balland. Please go here and leave a comment, twitter about this contest, link to it on your blog, whatever! Contest will be open until Friday!!


Well, we all know I have Issues.

I don't see myself as I am, and I certainly don't see myself as other people see me.

We also know that I'm a little too cynical to think the I'm ok, you're ok theory of self-esteem improvement actually works, most of the time. You can tell yourself you are lovable and capable as much as you want (or are forced to!) and it doesn't really help all that much. The best way, I've found, to gain self-esteem is to do those things that you think are worthy.

Sit down, look at those things you find admirable in other people. I'm not necessarily talking about Michael Jordan (don't we all wanna be like Mike?) but about the people in your life that you look up to and admire. Because we can't all be basketball players. (Even if Sulu would like that if we were...)

What are the people you admire like? Are they intelligent, witty, or generous? Be careful, while you examine these people: do you actually admire them, or are you jealous? Make a list of the things you admire in the people you've chosen... honest? Or tactful? Kind-hearted?

Now, sit down with your list of traits you find admirable. I admire people who are even-tempered, good with children, generous, determined, and mostly cheerful, with a good dash of sarcastic.

Here are the items you can work on; I admire people who are even-tempered. I... well, let's just say I won't win any awards for being calm in the face of aggravation.

But I can work on it! It's not possible, perhaps, to be perfect, but we can always, always find ways of improving. I'm learning - slowly, and with a great many set-backs - to calm down. To take a few deep breaths. To ask myself if this really matters in the grand scheme of things.

I admire people who go out of their way to make other people's lives better. I may not be wealthy, but I can give to charity. I'm an organ donor. I give blood regularly. I'm doing a 60-mile, 3-day walk in October to raise money for breast cancer awareness, screenings, research, and hopefully one day to find a cure. My daughter and I take trash bags out with us to the playground about once every 3 months and clean trash up in our neighborhood. I donate my gently used clothing and household items to the Salvation Army. I click here. And here. And here. And here. Every day.

Sometimes it helps to see yourself through someone else's eyes. It's not always easy; there's sometimes the nagging suspicion that someone is telling you what you want to hear... but when you get an honest opinion - or sometimes for me, it's even just seeing a list of my accomplishments; what does it look like to someone else...

Here's what some friends had to say about me recently... and the thing is... nothing here isn't true. It's just... wow, when you put it all together like that, maybe I am, actually, pretty damn nifty...

One of my best friends, Jeanne, sent this email out to her family and friends (who are not also my family and friends, since we do have a load of friends in common) and bcc'd me on it...

My best friend will be participating in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day Walk for the Cure in Washington, DC in October.

That's a 60 mile walk for someone who was a half-a-pack-a-day smoker 12 years ago (until she quit cold turkey). Who was told after her ankle was shattered in a car wreck 8 years ago that she'd never walk again without a cane (today, she can step-run like Rocky Balboa). Who was in the "high-risk pregnancy" category 5 years ago because of weight-related complications and asthma (which she has since controlled). Who was borderline diabetic 2 years ago because of her weight (she joined Weight Watchers in Jan. 2008 and has lost over 80 pounds to date; her husband, who joined to support her, has lost over 90).

She has a beautiful 5-year-old daughter, and a close family history of breast cancer-- both her aunt and her grandmother were survivors. Her mother's breast cancer diagnosis in late 2007 was her personal wake-up call to improve her life and her health, for her own good and that of her family. Now she's done it, and in October, she means to give back in her mother's honor. She's up to walking 18 miles on the weekend, and she's working out extensively during the week to prep for the Walk.

Unfortunately, unlike a standard walk-a-thon where you simply raise as much as you can, the Susan G. Komen Foundation sets a minimum fundraising goal of $2300 that you must meet in order to be allowed to walk in the 3-Day (any donations short of the goal will still be accepted). She is only about halfway to her goal. She's an amazing person, it's a great cause, and she really, really wants to be able to walk.

Please help.

Well.

It does sound sort of impressive, doesn't it? When you lump it all together like that. I tend to see things all microscopic. I have problems - doesn't everyone? - but my problems are like a bunch of tiny rocks. If I hold them in my hand and put them out at arm's length, they look fairly minor. But I don't. I bring them up close to my face and study them. I know them intimately. Try it. Take a small rock, less than an inch across, and hold it up as close to your eye as you can (and still be able to focus on the rock! Don't poke your eye out!) Now, you can see the rock really well, right? But the problem here is that you can't see much aside from the rock. The rest of your life is blurry, out of focus, and blocked off because you're looking too closely at a stupid, little rock.

One of the people I admire (and, I confess, am somewhat jealous of) had this to say to me recently:

I chuckle every time I think what the "college Lynn" would say if she saw you now. It is silly to say that you make me proud as I have nothing to do with any of the things you have done. Yet your hard work has inspired me to work on making things better for me. Good luck on your walk!

How nifty is that? Someone that I admire is admiring me right back... interesting.

I may not be where I want to be, and I may not yet be who I want to be. Neither am I who I was, and neither am I incapable of change.

Perfection and true happiness may be unattainable (and I reserve the right to doubt) but we can always improve, we can always become better, and we can always be happier.

I think these are things worth striving for.

And I think, sometimes, I need to sit down and look over just how far I've come.

Vanity, thy name is Weight Loss

Thursday, I gathered together with a bunch of my girlfriends (all of us are on Weight Watchers... I'm such a trend-setter... Not entirely true, Leigh was doing Weight Watcher's before any of us, but she'd gotten to lifetime, then had a bunch of Real Life fall on her head and she quit, regained some of the weight, etc etc. Anyway... Thomas and I started Weight Watchers in January '08, Jeanne picked it up... April of that year? Carol in October... and I'm not quite sure when Leigh went back, but she's back at her goal weight... in our group of friends, we've relocated something like over 300 pounds...) There I go with those long asides again... sheesh! Anyway, the four of us (me, Jeanne, Carol, and Leigh) went clothes shopping at some of the trendy little shops up in Newtown.

Actually most of the shops there aren't terribly trendy, they just look trendy when behind the brick and class look of Newtown.

Carol's high school reunion is coming up soon and she needed a dress. I was in dire need of a few more pairs of shorts to get me through the summer, because honestly, three pairs wasn't cutting it, particularly when two of those pairs were bright pink and bright blue. There's only so many times I can wear the same clothes in a row before someone notices. Jeanne was short a few pairs of work-pants, and could have used another pair of jeans. I don't know if Leigh needed anything particular (she was a last minute addition because we didn't know earlier if she was going to get the time off from work) but wanted to hang out anyway.

We hit Anne Taylor first, where I immediately pounced on the saleslady. "I need your help," says I. I was wearing those grey-brown and white flowered pants that I got from Old Navy a few weeks back and a black top. The two items of clothing didn't clash, exactly, but it was the only top I had that even remotely went with the pants. "I need a top to go with these."

She took me around the shop and we looked at tops. (As a note, clothing salesladies are almost inevitably thrilled about weight loss... they can smell a commission a mile away and nothing says "new clothes" like 85 pounds gone...) We looked at various neutral shades, most of which were "not quite..." We looked at several different white shirts which they either didn't have my size or were too floofy for me. (I just don't tend to look good - in my opinon - in those 'romantic, feminine' styles. Probably because if I have too much froof on a shirt, I'll end up fidgeting with it. Or I won't iron it.) And then we found the perfect top. It was a white tank with some brown-grey crochet lacing around the collar. The lacing was almost the exact same shade as the background on my pants. Seriously, they looked like they were made to go together, it was that perfect.

After we found the Perfect Shirt, she insisted on showing me a bunch of other shirts, pants, shorts, skirts, dresses... anything she could think of that I might possibly buy (I did mention that salespeople can smell a commission, right?) and I ended up picking up a black and white flowered sundress. I probably wouldn't have gotten it - it looked in danger of falling right off my chest - until Leigh came up behind me and adjusted the straps. I hadn't actually realized the straps were adjustable.

Then we crossed the road to Lane Bryant, where Carol discovered to her glee, they had absolutely nothing that fit her right anymore. Their lowest size is a 14/16 and all the 14/16 dresses were just too big. We found one pantsuit/jumpsuit thing that looked really good on her, but she was going to need like $20 worth of tailoring to make it fit. (The hem of the pants part needed to come up a good 2 inches, and the elastic around the bust was going to need to be replaced with some elastic that actually had a good grip. The top looked great, but was threatening to fall down the instant she took a too-bouncy step.) She did still fit in their jeans from there, so she got a pair of those, and (I think) a wooden chunky bracelet.

Jeane, on the other hand, who hates jeans... tried on a few pairs of the Lane Bryant jeans, and declared them terrible. I'm not sure they are, but they certainly are confusing. The sizes are all wonked - they retooled the sizes so that they start at 1, which is equalish to your size 14 in other stores, and go up from there - and then they come in three color-cuts. Red, blue, and yellow. (Not that the jeans are anything but blue and dark blue, but red is like extra butt and thighs, yellow is for extra tummy, etc.) So, while I think the jeans are quite excellent, you do sort of have to try on a red one, blue two, and yellow three, frequently, before you figure out what your size combo is. If you're not happy wearing jeans in the first place, the style-size-cut thing can be a bit intimidating. When I first bought pairs of the new styles (I only ever actually bought one pair, since I was on my way out of Lane Bryant shops just as the new jeans were coming in) I had a saleslady assist me with what sizes and cut she thought I should be in.

We left there and headed over to Old Navy, where I managed to score a sale or two. Technically, just one sale, but since I bought two pairs of shorts... I have figured out the 4/6 thing. Some of my shorts are 6s and some are 4s, and I couldn't figure out for a while WHY I could wear a 4 in some styles and not in others. It turns out that it's where the waist lays. If it's a high-waisted piece (ie, the snap fastens over or around my navel) I can wear a size 4. If the snap goes 1 inch below my navel (mid-waist) or around my hips (low waist) then I need a 6. It's not that I can't fasten a size four at a mid or lower, but I muffin-top over them. Yuck. I'm still working on tightening up my abs, but I may never get any better than this.

Carol and Jeane were both very excited to realize that they could, actually, shop at Old Navy. (Unlike me, where I spent a while in the Lane Bryant sort of nostaligically fondling the clothing that was never going to fit me again... I know a lot of prior fat girls bid a cheerful fair-the-well to Lane Bryant, but I always felt... comfortable there. For me, being in a fancy boutique is intimidating. Lane Bryant feels like home...) Jeane found a few pairs of pants, Carol got a very cute top and some tanks, and some very nice water bottles. (Which reminds me, YOU got a DEAL, girlfriend. I saw those exact same water bottles in Target on Friday for $17 a piece!!)

After that (we did shop til we dropped!) we headed down the street to J Jills, which was going out of buiness. Prices were marked down, down, down, and then 70% off after that!

Which meant I picked up a pair of silk pants ($6), a linen jacket ($9) and a really nice wool-cotten blend sweater ($11). If I'd bought them not on sale... the three items would have run me over $300. Nice.

We were all so enabling each other to spend money...

Seriously.

"Oh, that looks SO CUTE! You MUST buy it!"

I'm quite sure the saleswomen in the various shops were delighted to see us. I know I spent at least $100 total, the others similiar amounts or more...

You know, when I used to go shopping, it was this rapid, horrible event.

Run into the store, pick one or two things that weren't horribly colored. Often I didn't even try them on in the shop. Honestly. I would rather deal with the hassle of taking something back for an exchange than risk crying myself sick in the dressing room. (Also, I hated taking off my clothes in front of three mirrors. I mean, seriously. With bad lightening. So not like I ever looked good, but did we really need to go through all that?)

Now I go into the dressing room with anywhere between 8 and 10 items, try on a bunch of stuff, come out of the dressing room to look at it, solicit opinions, feel how it moves when I move, etc. We spent all afternoon trying on clothes.

And honestly, I couldn't have imagined a better afternoon.

Sushi. Shopping. Chocolate.

Fantastic.

(As a note, despite not tracking and massively eating out all week while Jeane was in town, I apparently managed to get in enough activity points - the children's museam especially was a LOT of activity!! - I managed to drop weight this week... down 1.6. I'm back to less than 5 pounds til goal...)

Almost Famous

I had a first yesterday.

I went in (again, I still don't understand what is up with my Wii Fit, which told me I was down about a pound for the week...) and weighed in. Up .8 pounds.

I was completely unfazed.

There were a ton (pardon the pun) of excuses for it; I just started my period, I ate high fat and salt content food the night before, and I had skipped my Long Walk for the weekend because of an annoying on and off coughing thing I have going on. Bwjenn, if you gave me your cold over the internet... well... I'll just have to figure out how you did that, because I'd really like to transport other things over the web...) But I didn't bother to state them. Obviously, I knew them, but it was like, not important.

The weight is coming off.

I feel good.

I'm getting, a bit, to feel like I look good. (Next time you see me, real-life, remind me to show off my arm. My word, I have muscles! /Flex)

So, you know, that's cool.

Also, some other cool stuff - blog related - has happened recently... I'm going to be hosting a virtual book tour for Kathy Balland's book Lose the Diet; Transform your body by connecting with your soul. I'll even have an extra signed copy for some lucky reader, so keep your eyes on this spot. I'm not sure of the exact date, but I'll let ya know!

And this article came out on MSNBC. That's me in that first paragraph there. (Yes, Kellylyn is my "real" first name. Isn't it AWFUL? Somebody should slap my mom. Really.)

Finally, I puffyheart my friend Geoff. I don't know why my head can know something, and even my husband/best friend/weight loss leader can know and tell me things, and I just DON'T LISTEN. Here's your stupid sign, seriously. But I've been following Geoff's food plan for almost three weeks now, and I feel SO MUCH better it's just unbelievable.

So, I'm going to leave you all on this note (again with the puns!)

This ain't a song for the brokenhearted
No silent prayer for the faith departed
And I ain't gonna be just a face in the crowd
You're gonna hear my voice when I shout it out loud

It's my life
It's now or never
I ain't gonna live forever
I just wanna live while I'm alive
- It's My Life, Bon Jovi

Get Rich Quick (Count Your Blessings)

I got 99 problems but a bitch ain't one
- Jay-Z

I spend a lot of time complaining, I know. So I thought I'd spend a little while reiterating the things in my life that I'm happy about.

- I don't have more debt than I can pay down.

- I don't have more house than I can afford.

- I don't have a retirement investment account that's lost a great deal of value over the last few years. (We just started ours recently, so while I don't think we're all that prepared for retirement, we haven't had the stress of watching our money being thrown into a hole...)

- My child is mostly a joy. (She has her days, don't we all? But mostly she's good-natured and quiet - quiet is really, really important to me!)

- I get along with my parents. Mostly.

- No one in my immediate family is sick.

- I have a frequent, fulfilling and satisfying sex life. (I've been learning recently among women my age, this is a rarity and I should treasure it. And believe me, I do.)

- I am confident that my husband loves me.

- I am confident that my child loves me.

- My husband is a wonderful father.

- Most of the time, I don't feel like a bad parent.

- I have not ever been ashamed to show off my arms in public. (Michelle Obama aside, I don't think my arms are unattractive, and it's never occurred to me not to wear tank tops.)

- I love my cell phone. (It's a silly thing to be grateful for, I know, but I really can't tell you how much joy I get out of playing with my little high-tech toys...)

- My husband no longer works 12 hour shifts, weekend nights.

- I have lots of friends, and I honestly love all of them.

- I'm not yet 40. I'm not still 22.

- I still enjoy stupid action flicks and disney/pixar movies.

- I have 7,368 songs stored on my computer. I love music.

- I will never wear that stupid housedress again.

- I never have to go to high school, and no one expects me to attend a high school reunion.

- I still love all the artwork in my house.

- I own more than 400 movies, tv shows, and other dvds. I love having a great variety of movies to watch.

- I love my new silk sheets; even if my husband doesn't like the color. (they're sort of melted caramel colored. He thinks they don't go with our blue comforter.)

- I never have to iron a shirt. (My husband does his own ironing. It is one household task that I refuse to absorb and refuse to feel guilty about.)

- Putting a guildmate on Ignore has greatly improved my quality of raiding.

- I have confidence in my own intelligence.

- I am a great cribbage player.

- My house is mostly clean, and certainly is cleaner more regularly than it's ever been before in my adult life.

- I don't have to work in corporate America. I have three friends that remind me on a regular basis that this is SUCH a good thing.

- Three days later, I love my new haircut.

- I can wear high heels. And do.

- I no longer feel squashed getting into a restaurant booth.

- I take for granted that I can accomplish 30 minutes on an elliptical. (In fact, the other day, I did 65 minutes on the cross-trainer.)

- I take for granted that I can leave the house without my inhaler.

- Let me repeat those. I TAKE FOR GRANTED that I can accomplish 30 minutes on an elliptical. I TAKE FOR GRANTED that I can leave the house without my inhaler.

- I can run down stairs.

- I have made up with aunts and cousins that I've been estranged with for more than seventeen years.

- I no longer loathe summer. (I do recognize that it's hot. But this is no longer a problem for me. I don't mind sweating. I don't feel oppressed by the heat.)

- I have accepted responsibility for those problems that are my own problems. I am gradually letting go of those things which are not my responsibility.

- I love Flylady. I love my control journal (That's what SHE said!)

- We live less than 5 miles from everything we need; grocery store, husband's work, hospital, mall, movie theater.

- Our apartment complex has a fitness center.

- We're locked into our rent-rate for the next two years.

- I have a turtle and she is healthy and well-adapted to being in a terrarium. She does a few simple tricks (eats out of my hand and follows my finger around)

- I may not always love my neighbors, but at least I've never seen the police covering each other before changing into an apartment, guns drawn (this happened at the last place I lived.)

- We have not had a particularly bad hurricane in about six years.

- It's been over 16 years since the last time I had an affair outside my relationship; I don't miss the lying, cheating, worrying, and generally feeling like scum about it.

- I've finished taking care of my dental problems.

I do not want what I have not got
- Sinead O'Conner

The Ballet

So, Thomas took me to the ballet this weekend; it was sort of combination birthday/mother's day gift.

I haven't been to the ballet in a long time; not since my best friend in high school died. (She fell asleep at the wheel graduation night and drove her car off an overpass. She hadn't been drinking or anything, she was just worn out. And as she was a brilliant, witty, friendly, pretty and talented sort, the whole event went to cement my opinion of the general completely unfair nature of the universe...) Anyway, Tracy used to be a ballet dancer and we (my mother and I) went from time to time to see her in various performances...

A few weeks ago, I was paging through the paper - have I mentioned I subscribed to the paper in an attempt to start being more frugal by clipping coupons? Thus far, it's been a good investment. In three weeks (the paper costs me $10 a month) I've clipped over $18 worth of coupons; and not coupons that I have to stretch to use, either, but ones that are stuff I would have bought anyway - (Ok, that was a very long aside...) Anyway, I was thumbing through the paper and there was an advert for Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet.

Further investigation (Small bit of trivia about me; I am a russophile. I love all things Russian - well, except politics - decorations, art, music, history, culture. Love it. I minored in Russian History in college sort of by accident. I was just taking classes that I was interested in and my advisor pointed out that all I needed was one speciality history class in a field aside from Russian Studies and I'd have a history minor already completed. My primary professor who taught most of my Russian Studies classes was enomoured of me, said he'd seldom met someone who understood Russian culture as well as I did, and I was the only student in the last decade to whom he'd awarded an A+ on a term paper. This did not, I might add, endear me to my classmates.) yielded the information that this would be one of the first performances of Prokofiev's intended ballet.

"Living people can dance; the dead cannot." This was the rather utilitarian explation offered by the freat 20th centure composer Sergei Prokofiev as to what possed him to alter the fate of literature's most celbrated loves, Romeo and Juliet.¹

Simon Morrison, a professor at Princeton University and famed musicologist, discovered in 2003 that Prokofiev's original score included different music and a surprisingly happy ending. Stalin-era censors edited out twenty minutes of music, thickened the orchestration and restored the tragic ending, resulting in a performance that was almost unrecognizable from Prokofiev's opus.

The Virginia Arts Festival is one of the few openings for this new ballet; a master's dream restored. In fact, the performance we saw actually preceeds the ballet opening in New York. For me, this was a once in a lifetime opportunity...

So, I asked Thomas, "If I wanted to go see the ballet, what might you say?"

Thomas frowned for a moment, then shrugged. "I've not been to a ballet since I was in high school, when my sister used to dance. I've no idea if I like it or not. Sure, we can go."

So, we went.

As I'm not a professional reviewer or familiar enough with the ballet to accurately describe the performance, I won't. I'll simply say I enjoyed it immensely, and Thomas's comment was "It wasn't the worst thing I've ever done, and the music was good." That's hopeful enough that I might be able to persuade him to do this once or twice a year.

Also, I got to dress up, and that was good.

This is my new dress; a size 6!! My shoes, while they do match the dress nicely, were unfortunately, a half-size too large, and made walking a bit dicey... why did no one tell me that losing 80 pounds would make it so that I lost two complete shoe sizes? I'm now wearing a seven, and all my old shoes are 9s. (Fortunately, I wasn't much into shoes when I couldn't wear heels, so I didn't have to replace too many pairs... in fact, I own more shoes NOW than I did a year ago...)

In any case, I had a good night... I felt pretty and thin for the entire evening, even after the dancers came on stage. And we were very, very close to the stage, so I got a very good look at how thin they were, and while they might be more muscular than I am, I don't really think that Juliet was all that much smaller than I am.

I found myself playing the Fattest Woman in the Room game again, but it was oddly different. I wasn't the fattest, nor was I the thinnest. And strangely enough, it didn't matter. I felt pretty, I looked pretty, and that was all that was important to me.



1. Leona Baker, Romeo and Juliet, Alive and Dancing

The Cycle of Flation

This was my day, yesterday.

Start with an empty balloon. Stretch it out. Flick it across the room a few times at your friend. Blow it up. Tie a knot in the end and bat it around like a ball. Then, when it's floating gracefully across the room, BANG! The cat jumps up, sinks his claws into it and splodo... and instead of a cheap, pretty toy, you've got a bunch of shapeless scraps of plastic and a terrified cat.

Things started out sort of eh. My daughter woke me up; I got up, set her up with a wii game and attempted to go back to bed for a while (I'd stayed up pretty late the night before finishing off the sparkly vampire romance novel series... ) but that didn't work out so well, as Tuesday (did I tell you that if being clumsy was a crime, I'd be incarcerated for the rest of my life?? I didn't? Oh, well, anyway...) I fell over on Tuesday and nearly killed myself, managed to avoid death by concrete block to the head at the cost of one completely scraped toe and another one that... well, sort of hurt. Yesterday, the sort of hurt blossomed into a massive bruise under my toenail. Quite ugly, and for whatever reason, rather excessively painful. Resting the toe on the mattress? Hurts. Allowing the blankets to rest on the toe? Hurts. The only really comfortable place for my foot is uncomfortable for the rest of me. So, I got out of bed.

But my weight is doing well; according to the Wii Fit, I've lost about two and a half pounds this week. (Most of last week's gain, I'm convinced, was water weight.)

I finally got around to making up my mind about the 200 squat challenge. (The same guy who does the pushup program has a 200 sit up and 200 squat program as well...) It took me so long to decide to do it because I really, really hate squats. Not so much while I'm doing them; they're really not all that hard individually; and not the next day; I'm only a little sore the next day. But the third day? Oh, ow.

So I cleared some space and began with my squats. I had decided my personal challenge to myself was to do at least 36. That would put me squarely in the Very Good category... room for improvement, but certainly no slackard. (Keeping in mind that I've never done more than ten or twenty squats in a row, and these usually make my legs pretty sore, you can see where I might not want to aim higher than 36, right?)

But it was so easy... thirty came... and went.

And forty.

And fifty.

Around sixty I started mentally joking with myself that it wasn't much of a challenge if I finished the whole 200 today, but wouldn't that be impressive?

At sixty-five, Darcy started 1) talking to me (or more exactly, asking questions. If you know anything about five year olds it's that they are not actually physically capable of ending a sentence without a question mark. Even if they're saying something like "I have to go to the bathroom?" They want/crave/need/require/are possessed by demons to demand an answer of some sort. Even if it's just "well, for God's sake, go to the bathroom, then!") and 2) getting in the way. She'd stand just in front of me so that I'd have to shift my arms just slightly so that I wouldn't bonk her in the eye with my finger. And as soon as I'd figure out how not to do that, she'd move again. (And no, telling her to go away would have just ensured that instead of standing there, being in the way, she'd grab onto my leg and start crying and asking me if I still liked her... she's been a little insecure recently. Exasperating as that is, I didn't think getting into that particular little cycle again was going to be conducive to getting my squats done.)

So, I'm doing squats, dodging a five year old, and attempting to answer questions like "What are you doing?" "Squats." "Why a squats?" "Because I'm exercising." "Why are you exercising?" "Because it's good for me." "Why is it good for me?" "Well, it's not good for you, honey, you're not doing them, are you?" "I don't know." "Doesn't look like you are to me." "Why doesn't look to you?" (I am really. Really. Epically. Looking forward to her going off to school in the fall... oh yes. I am.)

And... because I'm talking, working out, the door is open and there's a breeze coming in from the porch... I managed to inhale a piece of dust. At 70, I start coughing. I try a few more squats, hoping I can get my breathing under control, but...

Nope. Not happening.

So... 72 squats.

Ok, that's not bad, really. Twice as good as my personal goal. I'm vaguely disappointed, however, because I think I could have done more, if I hadn't started coughing.

My babysitter came over about an hour after that and I headed off to the gym. For the first time since I got sick, I got a full workout in. 30 minutes on the elliptical, bicep curls, tricep lifts, rowing, chest presses, chair dips, crunches, stretches, walking. (Also, I walked 1/4 of a mile while carrying a 14 pound plastic jug of cat litter! That's got to count for at least a bit more...)

After my workout, I headed over to the drugstore to pick up a soda (yes, I still drink them... just only like 1-2 times a week...) batteries (the wii fit has been complaining about dead batteries for a few days now. I need to get a charging station for both the wii motes and the fit board...) and cat litter.

I'm feeling pretty good about myself; it feels good to be pleasantly wrung out and sweaty from my workout. I have those little twitches in my muscles that tell me I did good. My asthma has - at least for the time being - taken itself off to the back of the room, instead of sitting right up there in the first row waving its arms around like that idiot in Welcome Back, Kotter.

"How was your workout?" the cashier asks me. I'm on fairly good chatty terms with most of the people who work at the drug store. They see me a couple times a week.

"Oh, good, good," I said, grinning. "I did 72 squats today."

The cashier blinks. "Oh. I do 150 everyday."

BANG!

There goes my balloon.

Well, don't I feel pathetic.

Pop It!

One of my gaming friends came into town to spend a few days; she flew in Saturday afternoon and left yesterday. We had a pretty good time, I think. She came walking with me on Sunday, and while she didn't last the whole 9 miles, I think she did a lot better than she thought she was capable of doing. Of course, I felt like a wretch when I found out she'd gotten a blister. I think nine miles is a good way into being prepped for this walk I'm doing in October. (Subtle Reminder; If you haven't taken a few minutes to read through my donation site and make a small pledge, please take a few minutes to do so, if you can. Every little bit helps!!)

Because I am a madwoman, we decided to go out kite-flying Sunday afternoon, and the gods of the parkinglots were definately not on our side, as we ended up parked right next to the steepest path up the hill. Which, of course, we went straight up! But it was fun, and Leslie met us there, and Toby showed up later at our house. We talked, watched a movie, and I cooked dinner for five adults...

Although after the last couple of weeks have been so busy, I was definitely at MFQ (Maximum Fun Quotient) before my friend finally left... I will forever be excessively grateful to Leslie for dragging her off to a country music concert Monday night which gave me a few hours being alone in my house to get my head back on straight.

Monday, I weighed in; we'll see if I'm past this plateau or not... I was down 1.2 pounds! yay! That puts me 4.2 pounds away from being "normal" weight and less than 20 pounds from my goal. (My Wii Fit tells me I'm like 2 pounds away from being normal weight, but I get to weigh in on the Fit first thing in the morning, without clothes.)

Yesterday, I had another meeting with my personal trainer. Oh my god, the woman is trying to murder me! (Seriously! She was throwing 8 pound medicine balls at my HEAD! More on that in just a minute...)

She said she could tell that I'd actually been doing my "homework" assignments; that I was loads steadier and faster than I was at our first session. I don't know about that, but I had done the assignments, and I'd also been using the elliptical instead of the stationary bike at her suggestion. I always have a little trouble with the elliptical until I get my rhythym down, and then if I have to take a drink of water, I have to get it back.

She did institute a "rule" during our workouts that I think will be good for me.

Absolutely no self-bashing. Any self-bashing results in my having to do 20 reps of something I particularly don't like. Yesterday it was side-crunches. Every time I made an excuse, snarked about my lack of balance, rolled my eyes or otherwise made a criticism, I had to stop what I was doing, grab a 10 pound weight and do 10 side crunches on each side. Of course, then I had to go right back to what I was doing before I started snarking in the first place.

Her code phrase to tell me I'd done it again was "Pop it!" "Pop out those crunches!" "Your body is stronger than you give it credit for being!"

Ok, so I probably did a few more sets of those than, really, I want to admit.

I think this will be good for me. I'm awfully hard on myself; to the point that I often go looking for more things to criticize. Some of my friends tag me on it from time to time, if I'm being exceptionally self-hating, but for the most part, it's considered a personality trait and they just let me get on with it. (That's ok. I don't yell at a friend of mine who's got some anger management issues, and I don't prod at the one who needs to grow some damn backbone, just once in a while!)

We did some crazy-planks (I don't know what else to call them...) that she was impressed with. The first was a regular plank, but balanced on one leg, with the other straight and up behind me as far as I could get it.

"That's really good," she said. "Most people sort of suck at planks."

Hah. I like planks. I love the way they feel, and I love trying to see if I can hold it just a little bit longer. Also, I can plank longer than my husband, and as it's one of the few areas in fitness that I vastly outshine him (also, determination. He might be better, faster, stronger, but it doesn't matter a damn, because I'm the one who's doing it regularly.) I practice. A lot.

Then we did side planks with a yoga-arm movement. First I held the arm straight up, looked up at my fingertips, then dipped the same arm into the gap between the mat and my planked up ribs... and again and again and again.

For cardio between sculpting excersizes, we did burpees in sets of 10. After a while, I really started complaining about these. They're painful and I always feel very awkward and unsteady doing anything that involves a lot of jumping around.

"So, what can you do?" she asks me, her hands on her hips.

"Pushups. I can do pushups." I lifted my chin.

"Are you sure?"

God, I hate being told what I can't do. Why I can say what I can't do and turn around and get hostile about someone else telling me I can't do it, I don't think I'll ever understand, but it's nonetheless true.

"Yes." I hissed the word out.

"Care to challenge me on that? If you can do more pushups than I can, I won't make you do any more burpees today."

"All right."

I didn't do as many as I'd wanted, but then, by that point, I'd been working out for 45 minutes or so (if I'd been really clever, I'd have realized that there were only so many more sets of burpees she could have made me do anyway...) but I made a good show and pushed out 57 of them. Then I got to take a quick break and let her do her set. She did 53 of them. I admit to getting a bit tense when she passed 45, and in all honesty, I expect she let me beat her. On the other hand, it still made me feel smug and obnoxious and self-confident for a while.

We finished up the session with these completely unreal crunches.

I sat on the weight bench and she threw an 8 pound medicine ball at me. I caught it, then rolled back and crunched up, then threw the ball back to her. Sometimes while I was in the down position, she'd yell out "Twist!" at which point I was to dip the ball from side to side before sitting back up. I was supposed to do this as fast as possible; a trick that made me exceptionally nervous, as catching and throwing aren't things I've practiced much and I entertained truly gruesome images of taking an 8 pound ball to the face, a picture that included broken glasses and a smashed nose.

That, however, didn't happen, and she swapped balls out on me from time to time; going from a 2 pound ball to a 10 pound ball and back. Finally I caught one ball, rolled back and couldn't pull back up again, and we were done.

I've got homework again.

I'm supposed to practice the burpees twice this week; do at least 4 sets in an hour work-out period. I'm also supposed to work on jumping in general; she suggested with a jumprope, or if I couldn't get one, to just bounce as if I had a jumprope. If I can afford it, she'd like me to buy some resistance bands with handles and do some of the rowing excercises and stretches. And she thinks I need to get some 5 and 8 pound hand weights.

On the way back home, I stopped at the Rite Aid to get myself a diet coke. Leaving the store, I walked right by a group of construction workers who are digging large holes behind the Rite Aid's parking lot.

One of them whistled at me.

I grinned the rest of the walk home.

Goalie

Last week, I firmly stated to my friends: "I am going to do 100 pushups this weekend, because I am SO DONE with this challenge."

While in truth, doing my pushup training didn't really take loads of time (I could do my sets in about 10 - 15 minutes... perhaps the reason why it took me 10 weeks instead of 6 to complete the course is that I tended to take longer breaks than the 45 - 90 seconds between sets... in fact, from time to time, I've been known to take ten minutes between one set and the other if Darcy wanted juice, or I was feeling particularly wiped out...) it was tiring. It seemed to me that I was always either just doing pushups or feeling sore from doing pushups. Three days a week were dedicated to the training sets and one day a week was dedicated to the assessment test.

Problem: Working the same muscles two days in a row.

Somehow that just didn't seem right to me. In the information about the pushup challenge, it specifically says not to train on consecutive days. And yet, there are only seven days in a week, so when, exactly, was I supposed to fit in my assessment? It occurred to me that I could just skip around; which is to say, I could do pushups for week one on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, assess on Sunday. Then Week Two, I could Pushup on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, assess on Monday. Week Three... wow, that got confusing fast, didn't it? I was pretty sure that two weeks of that and I would be writing it off as a bad job because I'd never be able to remember what week or day I was on, and was I pushing up today, or... nevermind.

Solution: What I ended up doing was pushing up on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, assessing on Sunday, and hoping that I wasn't too wiped out on Monday.

Problem: Monday's sets were the hardest of the week.

The first set of the week were comprised of four long sets and then one "as many as you can, minimum " Whereas the rest of the weeks' sets were 7 or 8 sets of smaller numbers, and then one set of "as many as you can, minimum "

Solution: I took longer in between sets to rebuild my strength. I also utilized what would probably be considered a "cheat". If I was too tired to finish all (40, 44, 36, however many there were in that set), I pushed all the way up (essentially into a downward dog position) and stretched my back out before continuing with the set. I found doing a downward dog in the middle of a set gave me some more energy to continue with the set without actually "resting".

Problem: I have a bone spur or calcium deposit in my right wrist.

This makes pushups particularly unpleasant, as it's difficult for me to bend my wrist all the way flat. On the plus side, my doctor told me that continuing to do pushups and other excercises that stretch that area will help "grind down" the spur.

Solution: On days when I really couldn't bear it, I did knuckle pushups. These are harder. So mostly, I just endured. On the plus side, the pain in my wrist is almost entirely gone, even though the bump isn't.

Problem: Now what?

See, this is the thing... the pushup challenge gave me a... something else. When my weight loss stalled out (and it has been completely crappy this year... I'll lose okay for a couple weeks, then I plateau for a few weeks, then I lose ok... my average weekly loss has been .6 pounds. At that rate, it'll take me almost as long to lose 30 pounds as it did to lose 65 pounds. And really, every week, my average gets worse... it's quite depressing really.) I had something else to point to. The pushup challenge was something I did every week, and even when I didn't improve much, I did improve. Every single week I was doing more pushups than I had the week before.

The other thing was, unlike my weight, the pushups were something I could directly affect, control, and practice. The old adage about eat less, move more and you will lose the weight. Well, everyone who's been trying to lose weight for any length of time can tell you that sometimes that shit just don't work that way. It'd be nice if it did. It really would. Seriously.

I'm eating around 1,200 - 1,400 calories a day, my BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) is like 1,407 (that's the number of calories I'd burn just laying around in bed all day.) Therefore, if biology was chemistry, even if I did nothing else, I'd lose weight eating what I eat. (Not much weight, admittedly... an approximate savings of 100 calories a day, it would take me 5 weeks to lose a pound...) But you know, if you've been following me along at all, that I don't lay around in bed all day.

Three days a week, I'm in the gym for at least 90 minutes a clip, burning between 400 and 600 calories, plus I clean my apartment every day, plus walks outside, plus errands and other running (well, walking) about. According to my tracker, NOT counting my housekeeping, I burn between 1,700 and 3,300 extra calories per week for working out, I should be losing between .8 and 1.3 pounds per week. Which, as we can all see, I have not been.

Pushups, however, didn't work in the same way that weight loss does. (Or, more exactly, the pushups worked in the way I wish weight loss did.) The harder I worked on the pushup challenge, the more pushups I could do.

And it gave me something else. Something to point at and say "I done good."

My weight loss is stalled out, and has been for the last three weeks. And really, all things considered, it's been sort of crap since the beginning of the year. My measurements haven't budged in the last month. (For that matter, my right arm measurements haven't moved in the last 7 months...)

But the pushups were good. I could feel impressed with myself about the pushups.

And now... I need something new.