A Perfect Body

I've got a perfect body, but sometimes I forget
I've got a perfect body, cause my eyelashes catch my sweat
- Regina Spektor

I've been having a hard time with my body lately. I've been trying to lose about 10lbs ever since the holidays, and I haven't been having much luck. Technically, I've already lost these 10lbs about 3 times in as many years, which makes their repeated return even more frustrating. In any case, losing them again has been difficult because the cold weather has destroyed my willingness to leave the house for exercise, and also I have a moral obligation to eat all of the chocolate in North Carolina.

I blame my dissatisfaction with my body on the fact that it's currently 10lbs larger than my arbitrary ideal, but in fact wasn't happy with my body even at my thinnest. My "thinnest" wasn't particularly slim, of course, but it was a perfectly average, acceptable weight, and probably fully 20lbs less than what I weigh now. But at the time I lamented my full hips, my thick thighs, and strong calves. I wasn't petite and top-heavy, and I considered it a serious injustice. (This was in high school, when most things were injustices.) When I look at photos from that time, I want to slap that girl. At this point in my life I don't even aspire to be that thin again, because I think it would be too difficult to maintain. That was probably a major high point in my physical history, and I wasted it. I should have been enjoying myself! I should have worn a bikini everywhere! I should have been taking nude photos every day and showing them to strangers!

Obviously, the irony is that a woman in her mid-30s, or 40s, or 50s, or anyone whose just had her first child, or really any number of people, could look at me now and think how ridiculous it is for a childless woman in her late-20s with a perfectly average body type to be lamenting "the good old days." They have a point. Sometimes when I'm standing in front of a mirror, scrutinizing the line between my eyebrows that comes from constantly judging stupid people, I try to imagine what I'll look like when I'm 80, and remind myself that some day I'll look back fondly on the time when I only had one slight wrinkle.

I also try to remind myself to stop making this face so much.

Likewise, I recently read a piece that was written by a gorgeous woman who had suffered a medical event that left her face substantially changed. She's beautiful in a different way now, but were I in her position I assume there would be days when I would miss the way I once looked, or the ways I used to express myself with my face. (Yes, even that hateful expression up there is something for which to be thankful.) It seems silly to nitpick over superficial things like acne and laugh lines when could suddenly find yourself faced with a much more deeply frustrating situation. And barring a medical catastrophe, that's what happens gradually as we age, anyway.

It's not just a matter of how much worse it could be. It's true that I could weigh 400lbs, or be 80 years old, or have a debilitating disease. It's also true that, regardless of your point of comparison, I have so much to be thankful for and excited about. Yesterday, I ran outside for the first time since early January. I always feel beautiful after I've been running. Not "pretty," not even necessarily "attractive," given that my face is usually beet-red, my hair sweat-soaked and in disarray, and my scent decidedly rustic. Nevertheless, I feel beautiful. The ache in my legs reminds me of their strength, and the rhythm of my lungs and heart are evidence of my vim and vigor, I suppose.

It's good to remember that I can run. I can jump. I can eat spicy food and chew gum. I can wear mascara, and put my hair in a pony tail. I can stand on my tiptoes and reach objects on high shelves. I can crochet, and paint bookshelves. There's a lot of joy to be had with almost any body, if we really look at what we've got and stop comparing it to some past or future ideal self.

Well, would you look at that. I've talked myself into a state of inspiration. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go put on a bikini and run through town. Locals, you have 20 minutes to don your sunglasses.

Rest Assured I Draw the Line at Fans of Jersey Shore

I'm sitting in the coffee shop, doing an experiment. At the table next to me are two students, presumably business students, based on their conversation. I'm not sure if they're undergraduates or grad students. As you get older, does it perpetually become more difficult to tell how old people are? Because that's what's happening to me.

One of the students is a girl / woman, who I immediately disliked. She's cute, wearing a Harvard sweatshirt, fitted jeans, Ugg boots. She has a luxurious, large Louis Vuitton handbag sitting by her chair, which probably cost someone more than $500.

Did I mention I'm supposed to be doing homework here?

I spend a lot of time disliking people, and then feeling guilty about it. I aspire to be loving, accepting, unaffected by the faults and failures of others. In reality, I find myself annoyed by the success and happiness of people that don't seem to "deserve" it, or maybe more accurately don't seem to have "earned" it. Who knows what I mean by "deserving" or "earning" something? Deep down, I suspect that it has something to do with achieving success by behaving in a way that doesn't come naturally to me. There are probably times when my disdain is totally justified, but I can't tell the difference between reasonable dislike, and dislike that's a symptom of my insecurities. Maybe there is no difference.

When the sight of this girl struck the well-worn chord of antipathy within me, I resolved that I was going to like her. Even if the effort gave me a stroke, I would die liking her. And although she doesn't know it, in the past hour we have developed a deeply complex relationship.

I've learned that she prefers Ireland to Spain, because everyone in Ireland speaks English, so it's more comfortable. My response?

I accept you.

She revealed that she is currently leasing "a coupe," although I don't know what make it is.

No worries, high-maintenance friend, I accept you.

She'll be spending her Spring Break in Dubai.

... With gritted teeth, I accept your Sex and the City-inspired vacation, and by extension, you.

It's an interesting exercise, rummaging through an angry tangle of judgment to find at least one golden thread of affection for this girl I know nothing about. Well, nothing more than a dozen pieces of information that would normally make me want to get away from her as quickly as possible. I'm not sure what the point of this exercise was, but it's comforting to know that my heart may not be a lump of coal, after all. Or hell, maybe it is - but even coal can be warm if you use it correctly.

I Imagine it Only Gets Worse if You Have Children

Over the last several weeks, I've argued with both my Dad and my Mom. (One argument apiece, because I love them equally.) It's not my favorite thing to do.

Arguing with my parents is unpleasant for a variety of reasons. For example, there's the reminder that they can be just as flawed and infuriating as any other human being, and the unsettling realization that they might not like everything about me, either. The biggest problem I have with it, thought, is the unexpected empathy I feel.

When I argue with my parents, it often becomes something like an out-of-body experience. At first, I'm just trying to win, making my point as clearly and emphatically as I can. After awhile, though, my Mom or my Dad will say something that sounds eerily familiar, and suddenly I'm floating away and watching the whole thing from the outside. I start to identify with my parent, and - DAMMIT - even empathize with them. We're too much alike, so even when I think they're wrong, I can understand exactly how they came to their (totally incorrect) standpoint. We've got the same kinds of crazy, so of course I understand perfectly how it works.

Then I'll hear myself responding with outrage, and my perspective splits again. I find myself identifying with everyone who's ever had the misfortune of arguing with me. I'm not saying every argument I've ever been in was due to my inherited instability. (Or even that all of my crazy was inherited. Some of this was home-grown, you know.) It's just that when I'm on the receiving side of it, I intensely regret all the times I've acted that way to other people.

In short, I hate arguing with my parents because it's the best possible way to be reminded that not only did I inherit many of their virtues, I also inherited a lot of their faults. Plus, it's creepy hearing your own nutjob logic come out of someone else's mouth, and then wondering how many times in the past you've used it on people who might have actually had a good point. Basically, arguing with your parents is a great way to spend the next month or so questioning your individuality and biting your tongue.

Centipedes and Irrationality

I am seriously disturbed by centipedes and millipedes. The deviation from 2 legs to something more strange is the justification for many people's fears. Some people get upset by the lack of legs (snakes), others draw the line at 8 legs (spiders). My bar is quite a bit higher, but it exists. I am also seriously disturbed by the thought that one day everyone important to me will decide they've made a dire mistake in associating with me, and immediately depart my life, leaving me to die alone.

There was a centipede in my shower today. Technically, on the ceiling above my shower. If you were to ask me on any given Thursday what I'd most like to do upon encountering a centipede, I would be extremely unlikely to say "take off all my clothes and stand close to it for awhile." But I really wanted to take a shower.

Mindfulness and meditation experts teach that instead of engaging our thoughts as they go whizzing through our minds, we should merely acknowledge them and carry on. Like clouds floating through the sky, or waves seen from the bottom of the ocean. Those are the most common analogies.

When presented with a centipede, my options are limited. I can't do battle with them, because they might jump on me and invade my personal cone of serenity with their many legs and turn me into a raving lunatic. It was tempting to let the presence of the centipede and its excessive legs run me out of my own bathroom and send me to work dirty and unhappy. Instead, I showered anyway. As I stood there, with no walls or clothing to protect me, I would turn from time to time to check the status of the centipede. Mostly it stayed in the same place, right over my head and slightly to the left. It didn't actually do anything, because centipedes (at least the kind in the U.S.) can't actually hurt me.

I know the thought can't hurt me, but sometimes when I imagine disappointing someone important to me, I lose the ability to walk through doors. The thought scurries all over my brain with a million evil legs, and I am overcome. My life stops.

By the end of my shower, the centipede and I were comfortable companions. I was happy to leave him (her?), but I didn't have to run. If I hadn't sat down to write this all out, I'd have forgotten about it by now.

Shower with it, sit with it, it's all beginning to seem the same to me. We have a million opportunities to be courageous in a day.

Why I Abandoned My Quest for Omniscience

I used to be a big believer in the importance of knowing THE TRUTH. It always seemed very important to me to know the truth about things, particularly other people's feelings and opinions about me. Because I am super self-absorbed, apparently. I wanted to know things like, Do my friends secretly think my haircut is stupid? Does my boyfriend really think I'm the prettiest girl in the world? Does my mom think I'm obnoxious? I felt very strongly that I would rather know THE TRUTH and be miserable, than be misled and deluded and happy. (I also felt that most constantly happy people were probably happy because they were too stupid to know better.) Unfortunately, my strongly-held convictions were based on two faulty assumptions:

1) That people have absolute feelings and opinions that are unchanging and completely knowable.
2) That my happiness should in some way be dependent on the feelings and opinions of others.

I don't really believe those things anymore, for a lot of reasons. One big reason for my change in philosophy was the end of a 4-year-long, mostly disastrous relationship. A lot of my happiness at the time depended on what my boyfriend thought of me, and when the relationship imploded for the final time, all I wanted was validation. I was basically OK with the fact that the relationship was over, but it had ended badly enough that I wasn't sure if he had ever actually loved me. I felt that I needed to know whether he had or not; it felt like everything hinged on that fact. If he had never loved me, then the last 4 years of my life had been a waste and I should be appropriately miserable and ashamed. If he had loved me at some point, then that made everything OK. Until I knew THE TRUTH, I couldn't let it go.

Unfortunately, there were some serious obstacles between me and THE TRUTH. For one, I had vowed (in a quite dramatic fashion, as is my way) never to speak to my ex-boyfriend again. For another, even if I broke my promise and asked him directly, there was no guarantee that he would answer the question honestly. During our relationship he had lied to me about a wide variety of things, and would change his mind often and abruptly. He could also be pretty manipulative. So it was possible that even if he never loved me, he would lie and say he did in an attempt to earn my forgiveness. Or if he had loved me, he might lie and say he didn't in an attempt to hurt me. And I'd never know for sure if he was telling me the truth.

This puzzle drove me crazy for quite awhile. Finally, after a lot of obsessing, I was forced to accept a simple fact:

There is no objective way for me to know, without a doubt, the true thoughts, feelings, and opinions of another person. There is no knowable TRUTH when it comes to someone else's inner life.

Once I accepted that fact, I was immediately faced with another problem. If my happiness depended upon knowing THE TRUTH about my last relationship, and there was no way for me to know THE TRUTH, then how was I supposed to know how to feel? Briefly, I considered the possibility of floating through the rest of my life in an emotional limbo. If anyone asked me how I was doing, I'd say, "Well, I'm either completely worthless or I'm doing alright - the answer is locked in my ex-boyfriend's head." I ultimately rejected that idea as being potentially off-putting to future acquaintances. Then I considered just assuming the worst (that he'd never loved me), in accordance with Neurotics' Rule #547, and just feeling shitty about myself for the rest of my life. I had to reject that possibility as well, because it seemed like it would require a lot of energy, and was probably unsustainable. Finally, I settled on a solution that had quite possibly never occurred to me before.

I could just say fuck it and be happy anyway.

My self-esteem, self-image, happiness, all that, didn't have to depend on other people! I didn't have to have all the facts, all the time! I could choose to be happy just because! I was on the verge of alerting the news media about my discovery when I realized that this was probably what the constantly happy people had realized ages ago. I'll be honest, for a moment I contemplated punching all those people in the face. "Let's see you choose to be happy after I give you a black eye, sucka!" In the end, though, I decided to put my new knowledge to use and just get over it.

So now instead of constantly searching for the THE TRUTH upon which to base my happiness, I live by these two rules instead:

1) Don't ask questions you don't want to know the answer to.
2) Don't let your happiness depend on anyone else; they're all liars anyway.

Also, rainbows and puppy dogs or whatever.

I Refuse to Resolve, and End Up Resolving not to Refuse

Not that anyone asked, but I'm not really making New Year's resolutions this year. I believe it was a year or two ago that I began to think about how making small goals throughout the year might be more productive than making one-time resolutions. For awhile I was doing monthly personal goals, and that was kind of fun, actually. I don't know if I'll commit to doing that again this year, just because I get so caught up in school and other responsibilities, but I do know that making big New Year's resolutions isn't really for me. From my experience it seems like it's just a lot simpler and more effective for me to set individual, concrete challenges and carry those out. For instance, I'm thinking mostly of the running goals I pursued this past year.

That being said, I realized today that if I were going to shoot for an overarching lifestyle change this year it would be to say yes to myself more often. This thought came to me partly from that video about embracing vulnerability that I posted earlier this week, and partly from the knowledge that I am constantly having great ideas... and then talking myself out of them. I'm not sure what it is, really, other than an extremely bad habit. Whatever the reason, I do it about 30 times a day.

Maybe I'll throw a potluck at my place! ... No, it's a lot of work, and it would be hard to find a good time for everyone to come, and what if nobody wanted to come?

I'd like to print out some pictures for my desk at work ... No, it will take forever to find good ones, and then I'll have to go the store, and then it'll cost money. Plus, what if my officemate thinks the pictures are silly?

I should call that friend from high school ... No, what if she's mad at me for forgetting to congratulate her after her wedding? What would I say to her? I'll just wait and see if she gets in touch with me first.

I'm going to join this running group! ... No, they're all probably faster than me and running in the cold weather is probably too hard. I'll just try to run on my own when it's warmer.

When I see it in print like that, it seems pretty clear that I talk myself out of things because I'm doubting myself. I suppose I could focus on "believing in me!", but that's a little too amorphous to be a good goal, I think. Plus, I don't want to think of myself as a downtrodden children's hockey team in need of a pep talk from Emilio Estevez. It's more uplifting to think of myself as an adventurous ringleader in simply needs followers. From now on, whenever I think of something that requires me to be spontaneous or adventurous or even... vulnerable?, instead of hearing a sad trombone in response, I hope to hear a spunky and unquestioning sidekick.

Take up scrapbooking? Yes!

Drive to the beach at the drop of a hat? I'll get the keys!

Start a cheetah rescue in my walk-in closet? Best idea you've ever had, boss! Here, put on this chain-mail cheetah-wranglin suit!

Me and my crew of enthusiastic yes-men (who I imagine as a cross between Dobby the house-elf and Victorian-era English street-children) will take the world by storm!

(By the way, speaking of "self-doubt" and "believing in myself," have you seen this commercial? It's my FAVORITE.)



(GEICO, I eagerly await my endorsement check.)

I'm Still Hoping to Get a Doctor's Note Validating This as a Legitimate Medical Condition

Although I am now officially 25 years old, I continue to have the sleeping habits of an unsupervised 12-year-old on summer vacation. I routinely stay up past midnight for no apparent reason, and often take hours-long naps as soon as I get home in the evenings. Most of the people close to me are aware of these habits, and they all think it is HAHA HILARIOUS to joke about how I can't get anywhere on time in the morning, which is not even true, thankyouverymuch. If you want me to arrive on time, you just have to plan your event after 10 am. Otherwise, you should be aware that there is about a 75% chance that I'm going to be late.

Anyway, I've been thinking about it, and I've come up with a few potential explanations for why my sleep schedule is so erratic. It could be any one of these things, but I suspect that it's probably a combination of all three of them...

Reason #1: I just like to be up late at night. To me, there's something mystical about being up late at night, and I've liked it ever since I was a little kid. Even though it scared me a little, I used stay up well into the night reading, the only person awake in my house. I liked to imagine that my bed, ensconced in lamplight, was an island adrift in a sea of peace and solitude and darkness. Being awake late at night, when most other people are asleep, makes me feel both completely independent from and inextricably connected to everyone else in the world. Our differences are greatly attenuated when we're unconscious, and unconscious people can't exert their will upon each other. There's freedom and unity in the dead of night.

Reason #2: I simply don't understand the connection between the time I go to bed at night and the time I'll have to get up the next morning. This is related to the fantastical way I have of thinking about the nighttime. While intellectually I understand that one day blends into the next and that getting up early means I should go to bed early, I think that somewhere deep down I really believe that the amount of sleep I get is somehow a constant, and that whatever I do late at night doesn't really count as yesterday or tomorrow. I have been proven wrong on this point repeatedly, most recently last night when I stayed up until 3 am reading, even though I had to get up at 7:30 and go to work. And yet I persist behaving as though the time after the sun goes down is actually time spent in the Twilight Zone, completely unrelated to how I spend daylight hours.

Reason #3: Procrastination. I firmly believe that the best possible way to accomplish anything is to put it off for as long as possible. I think that my poor sleeping habits might be a natural extension of my tendency toward procrastination. It starts with procrastinating homework, then procrastinating running and phone calls and showering, and suddenly you're procrastinating the start of an entire day. Because part of me believes that if I don't sleep, tomorrow won't come, and thus staying up late is a way to prevent tomorrow from ever arriving. If late-night is timeless, I don't have any responsibilities, and if tomorrow doesn't come, I'll NEVER have any responsibilities. It's clearly a win-win.

... At least, it seems like a brilliant strategy while I'm reading and playing video games until 4 am. But 3 hours later when my alarm is going off and I'm forced to trudge to work and write a grant proposal with only the vaguest remaining grasp of the English language, suddenly it doesn't seem so smart. But what can I do? Twelve hours later the sun goes down, and I'm whisked off into responsibility-free solitude, once again.

Data Whore

Ever the dedicated social scientist, I've found that one of the most rewarding parts of running is the sweet, sweet data it produces. I have a fancy-pants sports watch that lets me keep track of my pace and my time and my time for each mile, and more than once I have managed to work up the motivation to get out the door and run simply by thinking about the satisfaction I'd feel when I got home and entered the data into my spreadsheet.

It's OK, I'll wait while you chuckle at my insanity. Is my spreadsheet any less ridiculous if I say that I only keep track of the ones that are over 5 miles? No? Alright then.

This is the kind of illness that could hypothetically lead someone to make an Excel spreadsheet to track how they're spending their time at work, in order to determine how guilty they ought to feel about their shameless internet addiction. (The answer, hypothetically? Very guilty.) (Also, if someone has a problem with procrastination at work, maybe their first response shouldn't be to make a completely un-work-related spreadsheet. But I digress.)

My compulsion to analyze everything for patterns and meaning extends to just about everything, to the extent that I often find myself mentally composing poetic meditations on the similarities between autumn leaves and adolescence, or whatever. Sometimes the "meaning" behind things is obvious to the point of being cliche, while on the other hand sometimes a thing just is what it is. But what really drives me crazy is when something seems like it must hold a deeper meaning that I just can't put into words.

For instance. I've been running off and on for a long time, and usually when I start back up again I get really bad blood blisters, which are gross and I'm sorry I brought it up. But blisters, when left alone, heal up and turn into calluses over time, and eventually my feet don't hurt nearly as much because they're protected by the calluses. Of course, after awhile the calluses start to wear away and then eventually I'm back down to unblemished, unprotected, youthful skin. And generally the cycle starts again. Since today was the day that I reached that point - the clean skin starting-over point - and I was scheduled to run 5 miles, I thought about this blister-callus-recovery cycle all day long. I really feel like it must be a metaphor for something, but I can't figure out what, and it's driving me a little crazy, like a word on the tip of my tongue, or a familiar fact abruptly forgotten. And then this afternoon, a new wrinkle: I finished my run and I gingerly removed my socks to find... no new blisters. Skin that was sore and red, and a little blistery in places, but not nearly the disaster I expected.

So I just don't know. I feel like I should be able to spin this pattern into a great metaphor for some aspect of life, but it's not coming to me. Either I'm losing my touch, or sometimes a foot is just a foot, even for an analytical Excel wizard.

OW MY LEGS, Plus Deep Thoughts

I know you're probably sick of hearing about running, but I just ran 6 miles (for the first time ever!) and it's the most impressive thing I've accomplished today, so I have no choice but to tell you about it. Although I don't exactly recommend it, it wasn't nearly as miserable as it could have been. On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being "merely exhausted" and 10 being "this is a fate worse than death," I finished up at about a 6.5, which is roughly equivalent to "I'd like to sit down now and never stand up again, please."

I generally do my longer runs on this really nice flat, paved trail not too far away. The trail is about 6 miles long (supposedly, I haven't covered it all yet) and it's marked every quarter-mile so you get the satisfaction of seeing your distance tick by as you go. The best part about the trail, in my opinion, is that when I reach the marker for one quarter-mile from the finish line, I can actually SEE the next marker, the one where I get to stop and walk and never run again, amen. I cannot overemphasize the rush I get from being able to see the finish while I run that last miserable quarter-mile. It's like the difference between lifting a car because a guy in a bar dared you to, and lifting a car because your baby IS TRAPPED UNDER THE REAR WHEEL OMG SAVE HIM NOW!

Even though I didn't drop dead this time, I really needed that extra push today, because things started to get kind of hazy during the last mile and a half. I could tell I was really getting tired when I realized that in addition to being sore and out of breath, even my thoughts were incoherent. It was like the kind of stuff you think about right before you fall asleep, like you're riding a camel backward through the desert while reading an old copy of Esquire when suddenly a flamingo flags you down and asks for a ride and zzzzzz..... Except I didn't have the pleasure of falling asleep, I just waited to see whether my feet would keep moving even if I happened to completely lose touch with reality. The good news is that life started making sense again when I finally stopped.

I think the best thing I've gotten from this whole experience so far is a much broader idea of what I can withstand. I stopped and walked a couple times today, for 3 or 4 minutes at a time, and if I had given myself the choice I probably would have walked the last mile or two. But every time I forced my feet to start again, and found that somehow I had the ability to keep going for a little while longer. When I put it that way, it makes it sound kind of like I have some kind of amazing willpower, but I really don't. Anyone who's ever seen my behavior in the presence of Oreos knows this.

In reality, I think it's just one example of what any person can do, and it applies to much more than running. In almost any situation where we think we're at our limit, we can make the decision to bear it for one more step, one more moment, one more breath. And if we make it through that one, we can do it again.

There's this thing that happens occasionally where I think I'm as tired as I can possibly be but I keep running anyway, and then suddenly my whole body starts to tingle. The feeling itself isn't really pleasant or unpleasant, and the first time it happened I was vaguely unsettled, waiting to see if a light were about to appear to guide me home. I have no idea what the scientific explanation for it is; in all likelihood it's the feeling of three years being taken off the end of my life. Nevertheless, I like to think of it as my brain just throwing up its hands and resolving to just stop registering pain altogether, since I seem to be hellbent on ignoring it anyway. I'm beginning to believe that you can short-circuit your brain like that in any situation that seems unbearable. Maybe by choosing to accept it and keep going anyway, you adapt, and suddenly your mind justs stop protesting.

So. In your face, brain! Now who's in charge??

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?

Pulling Ourselves Up By Stepping On Others

At the beginning of the month of February, I set a goal for myself: to stop vocally criticizing other people. Then I spent the rest of the month trying to figure out why it was so hard to follow through on that goal. Obviously I knew from the beginning that I had a 'problem' with criticizing people, otherwise I wouldn't have made it a goal to stop doing it. I just wasn't prepared for how often the issue would come up day to day. I kept finding myself about to criticize someone, then stopping myself, then deciding to go ahead and say it anyway because 'this one doesn't count.'

That sounds like I was just rationalizing bad behavior, I know, but hear me out. Does it count if I'm commiserating with classmates about how I've been disappointed by a professor's teaching style? Does it count if I'm telling a friend about what a difficult time another friend has been giving me lately? What, exactly, had I meant when I made such a broad goal?

I wanted to come back here and post about how hard it was, but I couldn't because I couldn't even put my finger on what the problem was. I felt like I instinctively understood the difference between 'ok' criticism and 'bad' criticism, but I couldn't put the distinction into words.

Then, sometime last week, I happened upon a blog post called Why Being Good Sucks at obeymyblog.com* and suddenly everything made sense. You can go read the whole post if you like, but the part that's really relevant is this passage:

"If you consider yourself a “good” person, then that means other people must be “bad.” Not you. Never.

In an effort to prop yourself up as “good,” you will attempt to call out and crucify others who you believe contain the very “bad” qualities you deny in yourself. You will create enemies, point fingers, blame others and get mad. If along the way, other people join you, you can all call yourselves good and others bad – solidified in self-righteousness and in your total denial of ever doing anything bad or wrong."

When I first read it, I thought, "Yeah, that!" That's the problem! That's the reason I'm sometimes filled with guilt after I get done with a particularly satisfying rant about someone else's faults. It's not necessarily the nature or the accuracy of what I'm saying, it's my motivation in saying it. Because I've noticed that a lot of the people I most vehemently criticize are people that... how do I say this? *DEEP BREATH*

...They're people I'm scared of. They're people that intimidate me, or that I envy, or that I believe think they're better than me, which we all know is probably just The Crazy projecting itself onto others. When I find faults in those people, I shout it from the rooftops, and then I feel better about myself. Ha, I think, who's the better person NOW? But of course the joy of establishing myself as superior is immediately followed by overwhelming shame. "Good" people don't spend their time tearing other people down behind their backs. I know this. And if I have to disparage other people to make myself feel better, I'm not a good person at all. I'm just a dirty bully.

I don't want to paint myself as a monster here. I spend plenty of time doing things other than pointing out other people's faults. I have hobbies! I read books! But I think any time spent engaged in petty criticism is too much time. I'm not convinced that I did a great job meeting my personal goal for February, but I have gained some insight into why I keep doing something that invariably makes me feel like dirt. I'm hoping that in the future I can take this information and use it constructively. If I feel compelled to take someone down a notch, maybe instead I'll take a minute to ask myself: Why do I find this person so threatening in the first place? Isn't there something more productive I can do to address my own issues, instead of distracting myself by acting like a character in Mean Girls? I'd like to think so, at least. I'll let you know how it goes.

*I think I found the link to this post on twitter, through Zen Habits, which I sometimes read. With regard to Obey My Blog, I've only read the one post, so I can't yet vouch for the quality of the rest of the blog one way or another.

P.S. I know I need to come up with a goal for March, but I haven't decided on it yet, so I'll have to get back to you in the next couple of days. If you stop by and you have any suggestions, holler!

Choices

Forgive me while I philosophize for a moment...

I've been thinking a lot lately about some of the personal qualities most revered by our culture. Specifically: confidence, faith, and courage. Confidence in particular is one that I've thought a lot about over the past several years. Self-confidence has always seemed to me to have a kind of mystical, paradoxical quality to it. I've looked sometimes at those people with remarkable self-confidence and thought how impressive it was, how lucky they were to have such intrinsic, unshakable belief in themselves. The more I think about it, though, the more convinced I am that it's not luck, and it's not intrinsic. Beliefs aren't based on luck, and they're not in-born; they're based on choice, to a certain extent. The difference between a person with self-confidence and a person without is not that the person with self-confidence was born under a lucky star. The difference is that a person with self-confidence chooses to stand up and say, "I believe I am a worthwhile person, and I will not be passed by, denigrated, or ignored. I will demand the most from life, because I deserve it, and I will reach for my dreams, because I can accomplish anything." On the other hand, a person without self-confidence often acquiesces to being overlooked, abused, and undervalued. Self-confidence, so highly revered, is really nothing more than choosing to believe in yourself.

Faith is similar, I think. By faith I mean seemingly unassailable fundamental beliefs in forces greater than ourselves. Forces like Love, or God, or the Laws of Karma. I think when it comes down to it, every individual with strong faith has at some level simply chosen to believe and to live accordingly.

Courage, too, is just another matter of choice. Those without courage see frightening obstacles before them and decide that it would be best to accept failure as inevitable before circumstance proves it conclusively. Courageous individuals simply choose to ignore their fear and try. Of course, all of these things are tied together. I'm sure that when you have self-confidence and faith in something transcendent, making the choice to behave courageously becomes much easier.

Confidence, faith, and courage. Each one boils down to a choice, to taking that first heart-stopping step resolutely forward and saying, I am, I believe, and I will. Knowing that, how can we choose not to believe, or not to act? What excuse do we have not to be amazing?

I Dream of Driving

For as long as I can remember, even when I was young and had absolutely no experience behind the wheel of a car, I've had dreams about driving. As a child, I usually dreamt that there was a crisis that could only be handled by me, and only by driving somewhere. My brother would be hurt and I'd have to get him to the hospital right away, but of course I didn't know anything about driving, so it would be a harrowing, doomed journey. The pedals were always too far away, or there were too many of them, or I couldn't see out the window, or I didn't know where I was going and I'd keep driving by the same place over and over again, running out of time.

Once I got older and driving itself wasn't such a daunting task, the road became the problem. There's a section of mountain highway that exists only in my mind, but I know it as well as I know the road by the house where I grew up. The drive always starts out stressful, yet manageable: narrow, winding roads over which my car travels just fast enough to give me the sensation that I'm hanging on by a thread. But eventually I come around a curve and I see a river valley spread before me, and the road forks into even narrower halves and I follow one fork as I catapult out into the open over the hugest river I've ever seen, so wide that the other side isn't even in sight. The road is high over the water, and inconceivably narrow and curvy, so that it bears more resemblance to an unregulated roller coaster track than any highway that exists in reality, and no matter how badly I want to be able to slow down the car continues screaming forward until inevitably it blows through the barrier and out over the water. I feel equal parts terror, relief, and exhilaration, having reached the inevitable conclusion of my journey, careening weightlessly toward the surface of the river.

Recently, I've started having a new dream about driving. In the dream, I'm not particularly concerned about where I'm going, so I don't remember much about the road I'm on. The difficulty lies in the fact that I'm attempting to drive the car from the passenger seat. You can probably imagine how much it sucks, trying to wedge my foot over the middle console and blindly onto the necessary pedal, maneuvering the wheel from the side with my left arm. It's difficult to slow the car down and I keep over-steering, running from the yellow line on one side of the road to the curb on the other.

I'm not someone who believes that every dream is significant. Sometimes a dream about eating an ice cream cone just means it's July and you've watched too many Dairy Queen commercials. But when your subconscious insists on placing you in the same hypothetical situation night after night, you have to wonder if it's not trying to teach you a lesson. It's terrifying and frustrating and infuriating, finding myself in these situations that I can't seem to change or prevent, and yet being burdened with a single-minded desire to take control. Again and again I try to influence the path of speeding cars on perilous roads, and again and again I'm lost, I fail, I'm unable to really even see where I'm going because of all the effort required to wrench the car away from the course that it's on.

Maybe my subconscious wants me to know that it's time to get my insistent hands off of engines that are, for whatever reason, rigged to go 80 miles an hour right off the side of a bridge. Maybe it's time to accept the fact that there are some crises that I cannot single-handedly avert, and some cars that are determined to crash no matter how desperately I pull at the wheel. Maybe it's time I stop trying to drive, and just. rest.

A Different Kind of Death

(Before anyone gets too alarmed, I should say that I wrote this a couple of weeks ago and it doesn't really accurately reflect my current feelings, but I'm posting it now because I have serious writer's block and I don't have anything else interesting to share. Enjoy my melodramatic ramblings!)

Sometimes when someone dies, it's kind of OK. People say things like, "At least now her suffering is over" or "He's finally gone on to a better place." I think a little bit of what people feel in those situations is relief. When you wait so long for the end, the waiting can become more scary than the death. When it finally comes, it feels like you're reliving something that's already happened, because in a way, you are. Part of your mind has been running over and over the possibility of death for days, or weeks, or even months, already. Even though it hurts, it's nice to let that part of yourself collapse and rest at last, secure in the knowledge that the worst has finally happened. You can give yourself permission to move on, to start rebuilding. Things can only get better from there.

On the other hand, some deaths come on like a tsunami, like an Escalade merging into your living room. Those are the ones that leave people slack-jawed and wide-eyed, exclaiming in disbelief about how young and healthy the deceased was, as if the fact will somehow undo reality. I've never lived through something like that, but I've been close to people who experienced it, and I can imagine it. I can imagine how the knowledge of your loss sinks in slowly, one mundane moment at a time, and you find yourself thinking inane thoughts like, He'll never make fun of my movie choices again. He'll never drink another milkshake. He'll never tell another terrible joke. After enough of those tiny epiphanies build up, maybe the force of it finally hits you, like the sonic boom that comes after a jet passes overhead - an echo more powerful than the event itself. That's the scary time. That's the time to fear. When the concept passes from being abstract and curious and instead becomes viscerally, horrifyingly real.

Obviously, losing someone to death is more painful than losing them in other ways. But losing someone, even in a divorce or a break-up or because they moved to a distant island with no phone or internet, always involves a grieving process. The dissolution of a relationship can fall along the same scale as death: from an end that was long-expected and practically a relief, to one that feels painfully premature. An example of the former would be the relationship I was in before I was with Lee. By the time it was over, I was relieved that he had finally crossed a line that made it impossible for me to make any more excuses for him, that at last I could move forward and look for something as good as I deserved. We had sucked every bit of the marrow out of that relationship, and then beaten the shit out of each other with the bones. On the other hand, with Lee I feel like the end came too soon. Maybe it's better to end a relationship before you're thoroughly broken down and disgusted with each other, but I hate the feeling that there was still... more, is the only word I can think of. But that's just how I feel. Maybe while I'm mourning the loss of a young marathon runner, struck down in the prime of his life, Lee feels more like he's finally said goodbye to his 90-year-old grandmother after a long battle with Extremely Painful and Drawn-Out Disease.

I wonder if it's really always more difficult to lose someone to death. After death, a person lives on primarily in your memory. If you like, you're free to mold that memory into whatever is most comforting to you. You can talk to the person, pray to them, imagine that they look down upon you benevolently, that they're proud of you. You can believe that every painful word that ever passed between you is forgiven, that they would still be here with you if they could, and that wherever they are, they are thinking of you with affection. But when a relationship ends, well. In that case, reality is what it is. You don't have the same luxury of converting your memory of that person into some abstract spiritual idea. In that case, the ghost carries on, with infinite potential to stymie any attempts at establishing meaning or closure. If you're like me, constantly in search of The Absolute Set-in-Stone Truth, that could potentially drive you insane. Sure, you can tell yourself comforting things, but how do you know?? It's so easy to torture yourself with split-screen visions of painfully incongruous images: you, feeling miserable while your ex-boyfriend has an enthusiastic threesome with two Scandinavian models. Or you, drinking cheap beer alone while your ex-girlfriend is happily riding a tandem bike with a devastatingly handsome rugby player. It may be unlikely, but it's not entirely impossible. You seldom have to worry about those kinds of things when someone dies.

The scariest part is wondering how long it will be before the grieving process is over and the experience goes from being "the most traumatic thing that's happened to me recently" to being "one of the many life experiences that has proven my ability to overcome adversity and which has also put me on the path to meeting my extremely handsome and successful Doctor-Lawyer-Revolutionary husband." They say that it takes half the time you were with someone to completely get over them, which means I have roughly a year to go before I'm completely in the clear. Worse than that, it also means that I really only JUST finished getting over my LAST boyfriend. And really, when you put it that way, the bottom line is this:

Fuck.

Bummers and Buddhism

I haven't posted in the past couple of days because I'm in a little bit of a rough spot and it's making it difficult to write. I know that one of my favorite things about reading other people's blogs, the really good blogs, is the author's ability to express even their pain and hardship in a way that makes it accesible to everyone, and provides a cathartic experience for both the author and the reader. Unfortunately, whenever I try to write about tough subjects, or share my darker emotions, I don't feel like I'm able to find that rewarding balance between expressing my feelings in an artful way, and just whining like a tween who got lost on her way to myspace. On top of which, this particular situation I'm in is a transitional sort of situation, where I just sit around in limbo, waiting to find out whether things are going to go the way I expected them to, or if my life is going to change in a pretty big way. I have trouble throwing my angst up all over the internet when it could turn out that everything is fine, and then I'll have to just kind of blush and say, "Oh, uhh... never mind!" On the other hand, it's hard for me to think about much else, so you can see my dilemma: write posts that are boring and depressing and possibly pointless, or write nothing at all.

However, in dealing with all this, I've had some thoughts that might be useful to other people, so I thought I might share those here. One of the aspects of life I have the most difficulty with is the fact that I can't control it. I can't control other people, I can't control whether my car breaks down, I can't even control how many of these nectarines will go bad before I get a chance to eat them. Whenever I'm faced with really important things that are out of my control, I have a tendency to panic. My mind goes into overdrive, trying to come up with some way, any way, that I can make sure things turn out the way I want them to. Usually this starts out simply, and then devolves into a series of increasingly desperate and unhelpful plans of action. I might think, Oh no, what if my parents die young? How can I prevent this? Ok, I'll just calmly suggest to them that they ought to stop smoking and take better care of themselves.... but what if they ignore me? Alright then, I'll just come over and steal all their cigarettes and throw them away.... but they'll probably just buy more. Fine, I'll just have to quit my job and move in with them, so that I can monitor them 24 hours a day. And if that doesn't work, I'll threaten to cut myself if they don't stop smoking.

This process, as you might have guessed, requires a lot of mental energy and is entirely unhelpful. Sometimes, I put an end to it all by just saying to myself, "EVERYTHING IS UNDER CONTROL." But that's lying to myself, really, because there's no way I could have everything under my control, at all times, and the fact that I have to convince myself of that in order to sleep easy is problematic.

I don't think that I'm alone in feeling this way sometimes. But the fact that I am not the Supreme Decider of How Things Will Be, although unfortunate, is something that will never change, so getting worked up about it is like starting a letter-writing campaign to make it so that the Amazon River now flows through my backyard, rather than through 9 countries in South America.

From a Buddhist perspective (based on my very limited reading)*, unhappiness and suffering is caused by attachment to things: other people and places, our hopes and dreams, our own bodies. Attachment would be fine if we could ensure that the things we're attached to always do what we want, but obviously we can't do that. So we get our happiness inextricably wrapped up in things that are inconstant, things that we cannot guarantee will always behave the way we like, or turn out the way we hope. Things we can't control. And so we're repeatedly frustrated, hurt, and disappointed by these things we hold so dear. Buddhist practice incorporates a variety of ways to avoid this; simply avoiding attachment to things is the obvious option. But the thing I've been thinking about lately is equanimity.

*Full disclosure: I'm about to talk about things I learned from a book all about touchy-feely hippie nonsense that was recommended to me by my Mental Health Professional, so if you want to write me off as a new age nut job and go have yourself a chocolate milkshake instead I TOTALLY UNDERSTAND.

The idea I have of equanimity is one I got from Sharon Salzberg's book, which I think I've mentioned before. Based on her description, equanimity is an understanding that you cannot control anything outside of yourself, and an acceptance of all the things that happen that are outside of your control. So, you love people, you treat them with generosity and kindness, you hope for good things, you do your best to ensure that good things happen, but always with an awareness of the fact that you're not in control, and bad shit is going to occur from time to time. Or at least, that's my understanding based on my limited reading on the subject.

This way of looking at things is something I've been trying to focus on over the past couple of weeks, while I wait patiently (ok, not always so patiently) to find out whether my immediate future will be what I imagined it to be (not that it makes any sense for me to try to imagine the future in the first place) or if it will be something very different. In an effort to keep myself calm and sane, I have to keep reminding myself that there's no use in spending every hour of every day trying to come up with some way to make things turn out the way I want, because I've done what I can, and the rest is out of my control. In the book I was just talking about, the author suggests a meditation meant to cultivate equanimity. It involves focusing on a few key ideas, which I've paraphrased here:

May I accept things as they are.
May I be undisturbed by the coming and going of people, places, and things in my life.
Although I wish for the happiness of others, may I remember that I cannot make their decisions for them.

Although I haven't really been doing much focused meditating lately, I've found that just repeating those phrases can help keep me calm and my mind clear. I can stop struggling to 'make things ok,' and just stay grounded in the knowledge that all that scrambling for control is wasted effort. All I can really do is wait to see what happens, and accept whatever comes my way.

I apologize if this has been insanely boring for you, but I thought that if it's helped me, there might be other people out there that needed to hear it too.

Perfect People

"To avoid situations in which you might make mistakes may be the biggest mistake of all."
- Peter McWilliams

For awhile in high school I had a crush on a guy, 'Mitchell,' who was 2 years younger than me. We didn't have a whole lot in common, but he laughed at my jokes, which is right up there with 'Buy me cookies' on the list of Ways to Win Me Over. He ended up getting adopted into my group of friends, and we all spent a lot of good times together, doing marching band things, eating mexican food, and having big co-ed sleepovers at each other's houses. The sleepovers weren't ever illicit or anything, it was just easier to all crash at one person's house after hanging out all evening. However, one night me and Mitchell somehow ended up by ourselves while everyone else was in another room. We were just goofing off, wrestling, tickle-fighting, and doing whatever else goofy teenagers do when they're flirting. It would have been an excellent opportunity for one of us to put the moves on the other, but it just didn't happen. Later, I very casually hinted at the fact that we totally should have made out, and why didn't we? He said, "Well I knew you weren't going to make a move because you're the type of person that won't do anything unless you can be smooth about it."

I never had any reason to think that Mitchell was a particularly insightful person, but in this case his assessment was disturbingly apt. At the time, I would rather have missed the opportunity than go for it and face the consequences of 'failure,' whatever that might have been. I recognized that maybe this wasn't the best attitude for me to have, but on the other hand, his comment had kind of implied that I was "smooth," so obviously it was working, right? Still, to be honest, it was a little disheartening that my secret strategy was perhaps so obvious that even a self-absorbed high school freshman could see it.

It's frustrating that my approach to life hasn't changed much since that damn Mitchell made his unusually astute observation in high school. I wouldn't ordinarily refer to myself as a 'perfectionist,' because to me perfectionists are people that clean tile grout with toothbrushes, or obsess over getting the placement of every period and comma in an assignment just right, or insist on making all of their food from scratch, even if that means they have to churn butter. But in a way, I am a perfectionist. A really efficient perfectionist. I, too, have very high expectations for myself, and would like to do everything I do perfectly. But unlike less astute perfectionists, I realize that there's no way I can do everything perfectly. So I've resolved to just not even bother doing things that I don't have a reasonable chance of doing really well. And just like that, problem solved, I'm perfect!

I know what you're wondering, and yes, being perfect is really pretty great, and you should totally give it a try. You get free box seats at sporting events, you never have to wait for a dinner table, people are constantly taking their shirts off and throwing themselves at you, and bartenders are required to give you complimentary shots. The only problem is that this approach to life sort of limits you a little. For example, if you get home from work and you're a little tired, you won't be allowed to go to the gym, because you wouldn't be able to give it your all, and Perfect People don't half-ass their workouts, they stay at home. Also, you can't ever try anything you've never done before, because you'll probably make some mistakes, and Perfect People don't make mistakes. And of course, as we learned at the beginning of this post, you can never ever make the first move in a relationship, because you might screw it up or get rejected, and I think we all know that Perfect People never get rejected.

Now that I think it through, though, being 'perfect' is actually kind of a pain in the ass, in spite of all of the (completely imaginary) perks that come with it. Before you adopt this lifestyle, I'm going to look into what it takes to be 'whatever the hell I feel like,' and then I'll get back to you.

FINE, Here's Some Miscellany

EVEN THOUGH no one attempted to help me answer the burning questions I posed last week, I still feel guilty for not posting anything here this week. So, to help you through the dry spell, here's some things...

Senior year of undergrad, I knew I had achieved maximum burn-out because at least once a day I would look up and declare, often to an empty room, "I'm going to drop out of school." Understandably, today I was alarmed to find myself thinking, "I'm quitting my job." What's really sad is that my job isn't all that difficult... I'm just a crybaby.

On a vaguely related note, I learned the other day that even though I've never been the Pep Rally/School Spirit/Rah Rah type, I will still question our friendship if you insult my alma mater, dammit. It's that deeply-ingrained loyalty of mine.

Finally, here's a pretty sweet comic (found at xkcd.com) that I wanted to share with you. I'd like for it to serve as my belated New Year's Resolution:
Til next time!

Whistle While You Work

I'll confess: I can be a bit hedonistic sometimes. I have some alcoholics in my family, and I like to think that they're to blame. I'm pretty sure that the same gene that causes an "addictive personality" is probably also linked to a general "more is more" approach to life. This is one of the reasons that I often find myself thinking things like, "If watching an episode of House while playing on the internet is fun, I bet watching an entire SEASON of House will be even better!" Or, "Why sleep for 8 hours when you can get away with 12?" Or, "I could eat a few mini Reese's cups each day, but why do that when I can eat the whole bag now nomnomnom?" I don't mean to give you the wrong impression - I have self control, I deny myself sometimes, but I'm trying to explain why, after 2 weeks of vacation (give or take) I found myself thinking, "Just another three days, that's all I need. I cannot possibly go back to work when I could be spending an additional three days sleeping and eating all day and watching TV and playing video games all night."

Of course, the problem with this approach to life is that there is often also pleasure to be found in hard work. It's taken me an unusually long time to truly accept this fact, but it helps a lot when it comes time rein in my inner three-toed Sloth. Nevertheless, I was pleasantly surprised to find that once I returned to work this week, I kind of... actually enjoyed it? Which is doubly awesome considering I expected to be miserable having to come back from a great time with family and friends and presents and food. So, here's to productivity! And responsibility! And hard work!

... On the other hand, I wasn't thinking about the joys of hard work last night when I skipped the gym and watched 4 episodes of House.

Holiday Roundup

Hey there, remember me? I know posting's been a little sparse lately, but you know I love you, right? It's just that I saw so many other people on the internet writing about their Christmases and their New Year's resolutions and I started to feel intimidated because I didn't have anything to say. I got stage fright, you know how it is. You believe me, don't you?

Ok, fine, I admit it. I was partying without you. But I'm here to redeem myself with a ridiculously long post* about the holidays! Hooray!

*Although really, aren't all my posts ridiculously long?

Alright, Christmas first. I spent Christmas at my parents' house, and I've already sort of told you about this, but it's obvious you weren't listening, so I'll repeat it: good food (crab legs!), playing Spore all night, quality time with my brother, presents and things. I think the best Christmas present I got was a brand new kickass digital camera with 18x ZOOM OH MAN THE THINGS I PLAN TO ZOOM IN ON. You'll recall I requested a new camera here on my blog, thus this is proof that The Internet performs miracles. By filling my parents with the Holy Digital Spirit and working through them to enact Its will. In the name of Firefox, amen.

New Year's. The second half of my holiday was spent in Cherry Grove, SC with Lee's family. Some people raised their eyebrows at me when I said I was going to the beach for New Year's, as if I didn't know it was cold there, too, but did I mention that I got to go for free? When the trip is free, you go where you're told. (Also, did I already thank Lee's family? Thanks! They don't read this - thank God - but I'm sure they heard me anyway.) We were only there for 3 days, but it was a great time. I'm incredibly lucky that I get along so well with my significant other's family, and also that they had the entire first season of True Blood on DVD.

True Blood. I do not get HBO, but now I wish I did. I spent most of last week and this past weekend watching this show and I was totally sucked in. Lee was all, "mutter mutter romance novel grumble handsome vampires," but I think he enjoyed at least 10 minutes of the 9 hours he spent watching it with me. Confidential to Sam Trammel (pictured at right): I could be convinced to have your babies in an emergency. Call me.

2008. It was a good year. I have a lot to be thankful for. I'm 84% less crazy, I'm feeling really happy at my job, I have awesome coworkers, and I'm a year and a half into the best relationship I've ever been in. High five, 2008. You're alright.

2009. Alright y'all, let's get real. Part of the reason I've put off posting for the past couple of days is because I've felt obligated to come up with some really thoughtful, profound resolutions for the upcoming year. The funny thing is, I don't normally make too big of a deal out of the New Year. There's just something about writing your thoughts on the internet and pretending that someone is going to read them that makes you feel like you have to come up with something deep. But I'm thinking that I'm pretty happy with how I handled 2008, so I guess my main resolution for next year is to keep up the good work: try not to backslide into the crazy, keep going to the gym and being healthy, keep being kind to myself, don't beat myself up when I fail to be perfect.

The only new resolution I have I stole from a magazine. I think it was Glamour (I was reading it at the gym) that had an article about how you can make a big difference simply by making a small change and sticking with it every day. They had a woman who did pushups every day, one who wore red lipstick every day, so on and so forth. So, I think my resolution for 2009 is to approach my problems that way. If I'm unhappy with something in my life, I'm going to come up with something small that I can do consistently, rather than trying to overhaul an entire set of habits. So there's my resolution: make manageable resolutions throughout the year, rather than ambitious ones right now.

Oh, by the way: Happy January 6th!

Ho Hum

I don't mean to end NaBloPoMo on a lame note, but I'm a little out of sorts today. We found out first thing this morning that a family friend died last night. He was diagnosed with cancer only a month or two ago, and we knew then that he may not have a long time to live. Nevertheless, I'm a little thrown off for a couple of reasons. For one, he wasn't "old." He was maybe a decade older than my parents. For another, he was the kind of person whose personality took up a whole room. He wasn't someone that I could easily imagine being ill or sick or weak or anything like that. And for finally, I've always had this idea that when people are diagnosed with some serious disease, they usually hang on for quite awhile after that. There's an awful lot that doctors can do to slow a natural decline and give people as much time as possible. When they said he may only have 3 months to live, I assumed that that must be a conservative estimate, that we'd all have plenty of time to become accustomed to the idea, an for him to get everything wrapped up. Obviously, I was terribly wrong, and so I was probably more shocked than I should have been when we got the news today.

Even though I'm well-aware that I'm still young and naive and so on and so forth, I'm always a little surprised when I learn something new about life, one of those indisputable truths that my elders probably already know well. Cliches like, "College is one of the best times of your life," and "There are plenty of fish in the sea." And now I have another one to add to it: People can and will die, whenever Fate decides, whether any of us are ready for it or not. How utterly ridiculous that truth looks when it's printed flatly on a computer screen, in impotent words that can't do it justice.

Thanks for allowing me this silly, overly dramatic moment. Tomorrow: back to frivolity!