Damn Ladies, You Awesome

Although it would make a much better story, I didn't throw up or cry or drop dead at the race this morning. As a matter of fact, I think it went quite well. I didn't get a lot of sleep last night because I stayed with my running buddy H (who is also running the half marathon with me) and at least two of her neighbors decided to have loud, outdoor parties to mark the occasion. I would have been tired this morning anyway because we had to get up at 6am, but I don't think the less than 4 hours of sleep I got helped the situation any.

Once we got out to race site, though, excitement took over and I perked up. If you're not aware, the Susan G. Komen races raise money for breast cancer research and prevention. There were women everywhere wearing fancy pink shirts that said things like "The Cureinators: Hasta la Vista, Cancer!" and women who had written "ta" on the back of each calf so that when they ran it flashed "ta-ta" over and over again. Breast cancer survivors got to wear special hot pink shirts, and whenever one crossed the finish line her name would be announced. It was fantastic.

There were three separate 5k runs this morning, and we ran in the women's-only recreational race, thinking it would be empowering to our inner Wonder Women. It totally was, and I got choked up countless times. From the personalized shirts, to the "In memory of" and "In celebration of" placards that people were wearing, to the volunteers on the sidelines holding signs saying things like "Fight like a girl" and "You're almost, almost there." One lady who lived along the route was on her porch with a stereo blaring "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" and dancing along. There were several churches along the route, too, and outside one of them was a whole damn ladies' choir singing "We Are Family." Every time we passed people cheering for us I would pick up the pace (even if it was just briefly), so that they'd know they weren't cheering in vain. I didn't stop running once, even though coming up the hill toward the end I seriously wanted to. I highly recommend the experience to any one, even if you just walk. It was the best thing I've done with a Saturday morning in months.

Once we were all done (and had a nap), we went out to lunch and window-shopped around town a little bit. We visited the running store because we were high on our accomplishment and we wanted to show people what real champions look like. To celebrate my new life as someone who does nothing but run and spend money, I bought this:


That, in case you can't tell, is a hot pink, skull-and-crossbones-themed headband. It symbolizes that I am both fashionable and the finest slow-motion runner on the high seas.

So, to wrap up: Remember your breast health, ladies! Monthly self-exams, yearly exams by your doctor, and regular mammograms starting when you're 40 years old. Engage in these preventative measures, and I promise that tomorrow I'll do my best to talk about something other than running.

Fat and Fitness, Love and Hate

You know how sometimes you stumble upon something interesting on the internet, and it links to something else interesting, which links to something else... and then 2 hours later you come to your senses and now you're an expert on some completely unexpected topic? Of course you do. And as one of the distinguished few who holds a black belt in Time-Wasting, it happens to me all the time. The most recent journey I took along the well-worn side paths of the internet is one I been thinking about a lot, so I wanted to share it with you.

It all started with a post by Black Hockey Jesus, who has run at least a mile every day since January 1st of this year. At the risk of oversimplifying, the gist of his post was that if a person is overweight or obese, they shouldn't waste their time trying to achieve "fat acceptance." Instead, he or she should muster the "courage to change," because no one will ever be proud to weigh 300 lbs, nor should they be. BHJ believes that his disgust with himself is what motivated him to change his life, and his post seemed to suggest that others should also try to harness the energy of their self-hate and use it to power an ambitious fitness regimen.

While I don't fully agree with that standpoint, I found that in the comments on the post, many people did. Some even commended him for having the courage to state the unpleasant truth. Someone speculated that if a woman had written the same post, it would have resulted in a much more vitriolic free-for-all. BHJ agreed and referred to this post, which was written by a female fitness blogger named Kristen, who I had never read before. That post (the second stop on my tour of the internet) didn't say quite the same thing as BHJ's. Kristen did say, however, that she didn't buy the argument that anyone was genetically predisposed to being a certain size. She seems to feel that anyone can be fit provided they put in the work, and anyone that isn't putting in the work is just making excuses not to do something that they unquestionably ought to be doing.

From that post I bounced to this one by Swistle (who was also new to me), in which she "came out" as a plus-size woman. Swistle's post itself was, in my opinion, kind of uplifting. But once someone in the comments started criticizing Sundry (perhaps my favorite blogger) for joining the "religion of fitness," it all devolved into the same old genetics versus laziness debate.

Finally, at the end of my journey, I found Shapely Prose, which is a very well-written blog about feminism and fat acceptance, among other things. The stance at SP is that genetics do play a part in determining a person's size, that diets don't work, that exercise (not weight) determines one's health and fitness level, and that people should practice an approach to diet and exercise that emphasizes Health at Every Size.

So, now that you know what I know (and have been subjected to more links than you could possibly get through in a month), allow me to share my take on all this. From where I'm sitting, the subtext of a lot of this back and forth is that the people on the side of fat acceptance are saying, "This is just who I am" while the people on the side of concentrated fitness efforts are saying "It's hard, but I did it and so can you. If you're not fit it's because you don't want it badly enough to work as hard as I do." The fitness people are offended that fat people are discounting all of their hard work and chalking the results up to genetics; the fat people are offended that the fitness people judge them as lazy and unambitious. As far as I can tell, people on both sides are pissed because they feel as though they're being judged by people who really don't know anything about them.

What's interesting is that a lot of these arguments, when not read carefully, can lead the reader to think in terms of a false dichotomy, wherein you either a) love yourself and accept your imperfections and are therefore doomed to languish in mediocrity and obesity, or b) hate yourself for your imperfections and use that self-hate as motivation to work really REALLY hard for self-improvement.

I simply don't believe that these are our only options. For instance, the worst case scenarios are the people who truly do hate themselves because of their alleged faults, but don't find this hate to be a source of motivation for self-improvement. For some, self-hate isn't motivating at all; it's a reason to give up entirely. On the other hand, it's also possible to truly love yourself while simultaneously working to better yourself. I think that ultimately, the sincere belief that you are a valuable person who deserves good things in life can be a far more powerful impetus for change than any amount of self-loathing.

I want to point out, too, that when I say "better yourself," I'm not necessarily talking about losing weight. In my opinion, this isn't just about fat or fitness or obesity or health or however you choose to refer to it. In fact, it almost seems laughable that so many people are yelling at each other on the internet about calories and exercise, when the ways of thinking I've outlined here are really related to everything we do.

Instead of focusing exclusively on fat acceptance, as if the only people that need to worry about acceptance are fat people who've tried everything else, I think it would be far more useful if everyone focused on simple acceptance, period. Acceptance of ourselves as we are, and acceptance of others as they are. I think that rather than dooming you to mediocrity, self-acceptance makes it possible for you to work with what you've been given and make something beautiful from it. If you love yourself for who you are now, you're working for happiness now, as opposed to working tirelessly toward some abstract future in which you'll be thin/successful/awesome enough to deserve love.

And as for accepting others? I think it's really our only option. After all, is there any way you could ever truly understand the factors contributing to someone else's decisions? And whether someone chooses to work out 7 days a week or weigh 300lbs or live somewhere in between, do their personal choices really affect you at all?

I Don't Even Know Why I Feel I Have to Share This

Speaking of things I do instead of working, I posted a comment on LiteralDan's blog today about how I have to use the bathroom about 90 times a day. But it just occurred to me that maybe part of the reason for that is the fact that I'm always in a hurry to get out of the bathroom. There are a wide variety of things I'd rather do than hanging out in the bathroom waiting for my bladder to empty, so I'm usually sitting there with the TP ready, mentally rushing it, "Come on, bladder! We don't have all day!"

So, you know, maybe I don't give my bladder enough time to do its thing, and that's why I always feel like I have to go to bathroom AGAIN after only about 10 minutes. On the other hand, maybe I have a UTI. Dammit, I'm not going to the doctor again for at least 6 months, so this will have to wait.

You may be thinking that devoting an entire blog post to the frequency of my trips to the bathroom was a poor choice. But I think that you should just be grateful that I didn't figure out some way to include pictures, like I did with my wrist cyst.

But I Like the Smell of Irish Spring

Ok, I was just reading the comments on a post over at the bloggess, and everyone over there was talking about their neuroses and phobias and compulsions, and while I have a lot of weird hangups, I think that there is one thing that I have got to FINALLY get off my chest and out in the open. It's time.

I'm just going to take a deep breath, and put it out there.

I hate soap.

People, I am so serious right now. Please don't walk away while I'm vulnerable. I'm not sure when or how this began. I think it has something to do with a) the way it dries out my skin and b) how slippery and ICKY it feels. Now, don't get me wrong, I bathe, I wash, ok? It's really only bar soap that we're talking about here. I thought that once I became an adult, I could use shower gel for the rest of my life and never have to worry about this again. But then I dated a guy that thought he knew what was best for me better than I did, and believed that shower gel was not real soap, and did not get you as clean as bar soap would, and refused to use my shower gel when he stayed at my place. And because I was young and stupid and thought he knew more than me and wanted him to stop implying that I was dirty, I bought bar soap. And I can use it, ok? BUT. This my personal procedure for the use of bar soap:

1) Have loofah, at the ready, in right hand.
2) Pick up soap, CAREFULLY, with left hand.
2b) God help you if you get soap under your fingernails.
3) Hold soap carefully in dead center of left hand, avoiding pruny fingertips and fingernails.
4) While holding soap stationary, rub loofah vigorously over it, working up a good lather.
5) Return soap quickly but CAREFULLY to its place.
5b) Don't you dare drop that soap! If you drop it, how will you pick it up without letting it touch your fingertips or fingernails? It will have to sit in the bottom of the tub until your boyfriend comes over.

The more quickly you can get this done and get the soap out of your hands, the more points you get. So, see? I can use bar soap, provided I am given the freedom to work within my very rigid soap-use guidelines. And by the way, NO, there is nothing wrong with using a damn loofah. You may be able to convince me that shower gel doesn't get you as clean as bar soap (even though that is a DAMN lie), but you are not going to convince me that the loofah is also somehow a liability. Plus, the bottom line is: if the only way for me to get clean is for me to actually HOLD SOAP IN MY HAND for an extended period of time, the time it takes me to clean my entire body, then by God, the water better be extra-germ-killing hot that day, because I'm damn sure not touching that soap.

(In case you were wondering, it is permissible for me to touch a dry bar of soap with dry hands. Hey! I could even carve it into something, if you like!)

You know, now that I'm reflecting on it, the issue probably has more to do with the increased sensitivity of my pruny hands than it does with the soap itself. This all goes back to my childhood, when I still took baths under the supervision of my mom, and would demand her to dry my hands off with a "kwof" each and every time they got wet. True, we were fighting a losing battle, since I was sitting in a tub full of water at the time. But what can I say? I was precocious, and my mother is a saint. Anyway, the point is that even when soap is not an issue, the pruniness still upsets me. Because of this, the shower has rules, much like Fight Club, except it's not a club, it's my private insanity:
1) You do not touch things unnecessarily with the pruny hands
2) You do not touch one pruny body part with another (hands touching each other, hands touching feet)
3) You must moisturize your legs as soon as you exit the shower, whether or not you have shaved them (this has the added benefit of moisturizing your hands, also)
4) You must put on socks as soon as you exit the shower, so that you don't have to think about how pruny and dry and gross and sensitive your feet are
5) If you have just taken a shower and your hands have not yet plumped up to their usual level of elasticity, don't you dare touch me
6) OMFG GET THE SOAP AWAY FROM MY PRUNY HANDS AND FEET.

Also, because you're obviously riveted by all this talk about how insane I am (and what's one more numbered list?), here are a few other textures/things that upset me irrationally:
1) Bananas
2) Pears
3) Socks bunched up in my shoes
4) Underwear
5) Too-tight pants
6) The sound of metal scraping against metal (You People that cut your steak by putting the knife in-between the tines of your fork? You are on notice.)
7) Wet food from the sink
8) Certain types of textured plastic

So, I have 2 questions for you: Does anybody out there share some of these problems? And if you're a guy, do you too have some kind of vendetta against shower gel and loofahs?

My Body is a Wonderland

When I was young, my parents purchased some helpful reference books from some traveling encyclopedia salesman. One of these was a big book of medical facts - symptoms, treatments, etc. The BEST part about this book was the large appendix in the back that had flowchart after flowchart, to better enable those of us at home to indulge in hypochondriac hysteria. I loved these flowcharts. Anytime anything even remotely unusual happened with my body, I would haul out the Big Medical Book and diagnose myself with some terrible disease, often cancer. Then I would go to my parents and explain to them that I had cancer, and desperately needed to see a doctor immediately. This went on until my parents disappeared the Big Medical Book, and my flowcharting was put to an end. This was, of course, long before I knew that the internet could help me to diagnose myself with cancer in half the time, and with snazzier graphics.

These days, I am just as much of a hypochondriac, but with the charming twist that I refuse to go to the doctor. I don't really want the attention of a doctor, because that requires time and money and sitting in God-forsaken waiting rooms and extremely boring examining rooms for hours and hours. No, I want the attention of my friends and family, who I can reach with a simple phone call. Over the past year, this has led to a lot of conversations between Lee and I that go something like this...

J: "My armpits really itch."
L: "Still? Haven't they been itching for, like, a month now?"
J: "Yeah... maybe it's some kind of infection."
L: "Maybe you should go to the doctor."
J: "No, I don't think so."

Lee has become so accustomed to this that now the conversation is truncated: "My armpits itch." "Well, I'd tell you to go to the doctor, but we both know that you won't, so I guess you'll just have to deal with it." This kind of conversation, by the way, is much less gratifying than the kind where people love you and feel sorry for you. Mine is a very difficult life.

Sadly, the "itchy armpits" symptom that I mentioned above is not something that I made up for comedic effect, but is rather an actual problem that I've been coping with for some time. Lee thought this was kind of funny, and suggested that maybe I had athlete's foot in my armpit, and that I should go to the doctor since, after all, it had been bothering me for a couple of months. I suggested that maybe if we continued to ignore it, it would go away. After I had spent a lot of time ignoring the itchy armpits, some kind of weird lump showed up on my left wrist. Since I could still move my hand, I deduced that my wrist was not broken, and that this was a condition that could also be ignored, thank goodness. But then a coworker told me that a friend of hers had had a similar lump on her jawline, and that turned out to be cancer. Now that I am older, cancer seems far less glamorous than it did in the old flowchart days, so a few weeks ago I decided to shut up and go to the doctor.

Before I tell you about my doctor's visit, though, I want you to look at this gross wrist lump. Because I just want you to appreciate what I'm dealing with over here.




Ok, so through the magic of the written word, I'll skip the waiting around nonsense and just tell you what the doctor told me. (Man, aren't you lucky!) The thing on my wrist, according to a professional, is a ganglion cyst. It's completely non-threatening and non-cancery, and not a problem, except it kinda hurts when I do push-ups. So, once a year, I have to worry about that. If I want, I can have it drained or something, but I can also leave it alone. Choices! I'm thinking that with the phrase "have it drained," this post just crossed into grossness, but maybe that already happened back when I posted those pictures. Anyway, the official reason for the picture is to tell you that I was not shocked at all by this diagnosis, because I had already figured it out myself, through the magic of google. Here, go look at this wikipedia page and tell me that my picture doesn't represent a textbook ganglion cyst. (Or, you know, don't go look, if you're already grossed out enough.)

What's that you say? What about my itchy armpits?? Well, I'll tell you!

The doctor said that it looked like I had what's called "a fungal situation." (Doctor-speak, what can you do.) He told me that he could prescribe me some cream to put on it, or that I could just go to Wal-Mart and get some of this:



You know what that stuff is generally used for, right? ATHLETE'S FOOT. So, yes, I have athlete's foot in my armpits.... or, more accurately, I have athlete's armpit. Which is doubly funny when you consider the fact that none of my body parts are particularly athletic, least of all my armpit. But I'm guessing that my armpit decided after several months of a gym membership that it would just go ahead and BE ATHLETIC, DAMMIT, and then maybe the rest of my body parts would jump on board. But now I'm no less a spaz, I'm just a spaz with itchy armpits. Thanks, armpits. Really, that was swell of you.

Anyway, the point (well, one of the points) of this 90-page post is to tell you that ha! I don't need to go to the doctor ever again! I spent an hour and a $15 copay to find out what google and my boyfriend had already told me for FREE. So take that, healthcare system! You just can't beat a girl that mastered flowcharts before the age of 10.

More on Healthy Eating Habits

Remember that time I drank a whole thing of Spicy V8 Juice in one sitting?

I just ate almost 16 oz of (low fat!) cottage cheese.

Good news! I won't need any calcium for a couple of days!

How to Get Scurvy!

Because I often consider my life to be one long, absurd, performance art piece, I feel compelled to share with the world a detailed list of everything I ate yesterday. Something you should know first, though: It's been a couple of weeks since I actually went officially "Grocery Shopping" - you know, with forethought and a list and a cart and all that - and when I stopped in the grocery store earlier this week, I was in a hurry and craving cereal. Now, without further ado, revel in my healthy eating habits...

Breakfast
2 bowls of Frosted Flakes (Harris Teeter brand, with Skim Milk!)

Snack
1 cup of Swiss Miss No Sugar Added Instant Hot Cocoa

Lunch (foraged from downstairs vending machines)
1 can of Diet Pepsi
100 Grand candy bar
(By the way, does anyone else wish that 100 Grands were bigger? Why did that vending machine charge me the same amount for the 100 Grand as they would for a gigantic Snickers bar, and then give me just two tiny little morsels? Nevertheless, they were delicious morsels.)

Dinner
2 bowls of Frosted Flakes (again)

Snack
1 giant can of pineapple chunks
(eaten after I realized, damn, I'm kind of hungry, probably because I've only eaten about 1,000 calories of pure, delicious, refined sugar today)

I guess technically all that pineapple should ward off the scurvy for a little longer, but damn. I only tell you all this so that whenever you start to feel envious of my glamorous life, you'll remember that I'm probably right this minute sitting on my broken metal Wal-Mart futon and eating another bowl of Frosted Flakes.

P.S. Does this make it sound like I'm unhappy? Because I'm so not. Let me be clear: I freaking LOVE cereal.
P.P.S. Anybody want to trade me a decent couch for a broken futon? There's a whole half of it that you can still sit on without falling through!