Let’s just get this out of the way. I KNOW that any blog written in this last month before the presidential election should be a strongly and effectively worded essay about Sarah Palin and the danger she poses to our country and to feminism but FUCK I don’t write stuff like that. Luckily just about every OTHER (democratic/sane) female blogger out there seems to be tackling this issue like it is JT O’Sullivan (see – my first instinct is a sports metaphor – feminist writing is just not my thing) so I feel fairly comfortable going on my own little tirade about MILK DUDS.
Specifically about spending $80 so my personal trainer could spend our ENTIRE session explaining to me I shouldn’t eat Milk Duds.
Lemme back up a bit.
I started working out with a personal trainer about a month ago. I was finally (due to an, “oh by the way your mother left you some money when she died NINE MONTHS AGO” inheritance) able to afford to start training at Diakadi Body. (DIAKADI: Do It And Kick Ass Doing It! I know, I try not to think about the name either) a top end personal training facility. It has all the equipment/resources of a gym but you can only work out there IF you are having a session with a personal trainer. And only the best trainers qualify to work there.
So when I sent Diakadi an e-mail saying “I want to lose weight, get in shape and strengthen my back so I can quit re-re-re-re aggravating my back injury” they sent me a list of trainers who were also trained in things like massage and physical therapy, I met with a few of them (one of them, a woman, hugged me *shudder*) and decided to work with Shane.
WHO I LIKE. He’s no BS. He pushes me. He really knows what he’s doing. If something we do does aggravate my back he’s able to stop and treat the area with acupressure right there on the spot. He seems to get that I’m working pretty much as hard as I can. I committed to 4 training sessions a week (an hour of training with him followed by 30 minutes of cardio) plus walking on my days off and watching my diet.
AND KEEPING A FOOD DIARY.
Which of course started less than a week before Kevin ended up down the street from my house at UCSF Medical Center having brain surgery and my house became the default way station for friends and family who don’t live in SF.
And I’d barely gotten the sheets washed before it was time to pack up our ensembles and approximately 700 accoutrements for a weekend down in Gilroy at the Ren Faire.
This last weekend was the first chance John and I have had a chance to just sit down for a while and catch our breath. And in the last four weeks I went from, well, pretty much a life of TOTAL leisure to working out, eating right and having a LOT of other stuff going on. And I’ve been pretty proud of myself because I haven’t gone off the rails and been like, “fuck it I want a quarter pounder with cheese NOW! And some fucking fries dammit!”
So today was the day we had scheduled to go over my eating habits (something I had been told would take about 20 minutes) and he pulled out the pages of my food diary which he had scrawled all over. And I literally had to EXPLAIN to him that, yes, I know Milk Duds are BAD but I only had a handful of them at the movies, which is the only place I EVER eat them and NO, I don’t normally eat at Panda Express but we were stuck at the hospital for hours and the food options there are VERY limited and the guy having brain surgery wanted Panda Express so that is what we fucking ATE (I didn’t say “fucking” but I thought it).
I felt like I could have saved myself the better part of an HOUR if I had just printed out the BAD FOODS in red ink to indicate I knew they were BAD.
And really, other than half a hamburger at a BBQ I went to, that’s pretty much all the bad food there WAS on my list. No soda. No pasta. No garlic bread. No wine. No ice cream. No fast food. I’ve been SO good for the most part that having something like “handful of milk duds” pointed out like it was a habit that needed to be broken just really pissed me off. I actually said to him, “do you see Milk Duds written anywhere else on any of these other pages?”
The most frustrating thing was that he hadn’t even looked at the last week (my first really normal one since I started this process) and when he did look at it, today; it pretty much got a gold star. But by the time we got to THAT he was already running late for his next session so he bailed and I did extra cardio to try and compensate for the fact that I hadn’t WORKED OUT and then went home.
Also he wants me to make shakes at home with Protein powder and honestly, I don’t see that happening.
Also, the fact that Sarah Palin could end up our vice president (much less ACTUAL president) is so terrifying it makes my stomach hurt but I don’t know what to DO about it.
Vote for Obama and eat all the Milk Duds you want. Oh and if you take out a mortgage don’t get an ARM. Those are bad. Worse than Mild Duds.
- Related Link: http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/09/30/palin_pity/
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Almost the last nail in the coffin
At the moment, I am wondering if I’m ever going to get excited about any holiday ever again.
Holidays have always been my thing. I decorate. The outside of the house (our neighbors used to drive by our cottage every holiday to see what I’d done to it… it was just one more fun quirky Petaluma thing) AND the inside. I have boxes, large boxes, for each holiday. Valentine’s Day, Saint Patrick’s Day, Easter, Fourth of July, Two Halloween boxes, Thanksgiving and of course well over a dozen Christmas boxes if you count the Dickens Houses. So far this year I haven’t opened any of them. Nor have I sent cards marking the occasions which usually, if you are at all on my list of people who love me/are used to my eccentricities, you got a card. Decorated with matching themed stickers.
Of course the first three (Valentines, Saint Patrick’s and Easter) happened when I was still pretty deep in my grieving fugue and my total lack of desire to spread hearts or green teddy bears or bunnies around didn’t surprise me. And I only have a 4th of July box because we held family BBQ’s at our house a few times. But this summer if someone had brought it up I would have bet money that I’d be pulling the Halloween box out right on schedule (next to Christmas Halloween is my favorite). It contains several beloved stuffed animals and a truly COOL little Dickens scene my parents bought for John. It is now October 17th and the box is still in the garage. And I am pretty sure it is staying there.
Heck, I have no idea what I am going to BE for Halloween this year and that is something I’ve been known to start planning IN JULY. No exaggeration. But this year I had no inspirational ideas. Hell, if John’s band wasn’t playing a Halloween gig on Halloween I probably wouldn’t dress up at all. Those shirts with all the costumes where you just check a box that says like MUMMY or BLACK CAT? I am so feeling that right now.
What I am not feeling is the excitement that usually has built up fairly well by now.
So the question is: how much of this is because at least a 3rd of all the stuff in each holiday box came from my mother? She loved decorating for holidays too (Easter was her favorite because it was all pastels. Jesus had nothing to do with it but man did she love a really good Easter bunny). I totally inherited that from her and then, being my silly extravagant self, took it to the next level. Every year we sent each other the best Easter bunny we could find.
And then there’s the fact that for her all holiday decorating came to an abrupt end right before Easter the year she died. She was admitted into the hospital the day before my yearly Easter package arrived and when I visited in June I noticed it was still sitting unopened in a corner. I had my dad open it and tried to get him to throw out the chocolate but he insisted on putting them in the fridge so mom could have it when she got better. She never got better and she never came home. After she died I finally convinced him to throw it away. The little ducky and bunny I sent with the chocolate are still sitting, now covered with dust, on the corner of the end table.
I do know that I still have residual “my mom’s funeral was on my birthday” issues. I have no more desire to celebrate it this year than I did last year. People really tried to “just do something later” to make up for it but I had zero interest. I think I’ll just turn 37 again again. I don’t even want gifts or really to even acknowledge it. I wonder how many years that will take to wear off? Luckily I think I can pull off being 37 for several more years if I need to. Thank god for years of faithful sunscreen wearing.
And lastly, I can just see Christmas peeking over the horizon. The only reason our house got decorated for Christmas last year was that we put everything up the weekend before my mom died.
If it was just me I think I could get into the spirit of it for John’s sake, but now there’s John’s mom to factor into the equation. After cruising along pretty well for so long that we maybe got a bit too used to it, the cancer seems to finally really sinking its teeth into her. It is possible she won’t see Christmas. Just that thought doesn’t really inspire holiday cheer. I have no idea how John will react. To say we’re wired differently is a drastic understatement. I have no idea if he’ll want all the colorful decorations up anyway to try and keep normality and cheer us up or if he’ll join me in the “aw fuck it…” corner. It would be truly weird not to decorate for Christmas. We’re actually going down to visit her next weekend so I guess I’ll have a better idea of where things stand soon enough.
I do know one thing… if I do decide I just want to get rid of all my holiday crap it is going to make for one seriously weird yard sale.
Friday, October 17, 2008
In the future there will be flying cars AND drive-thru liposuction
So, after 20 solid years of looking forward to NOT attending my 20-year high school reunion, it turns out I’m going.
Damn it
Before I even graduated from high school I was already looking forward to not attending any future reunions. I can remember lying on my bed, Walkman on, Depeche Mode playing, and thinking with great pleasure about never attending another official event with my schoolmates. I was confident that I wouldn’t care one teeny bit more about my graduating class in 1998 than I had when I graduated. And I was right.
I actually enjoyed blowing off the calls about my 10-year reunion from The Susans (the people I’d always assumed would end up organizing our reunions? Were spot on the actual people who ended up organizing both our 10th and 20th reunions. No lie.). Politely thanking them for calling me but no thanks, I would not be attending. Around 2003 I did pay to join Classmates.com for a year so I could get the e-mail addresses of the three people I really cared about that I’d lost contact with. And then I let my membership lapse.
And then I really didn’t think about it again. Other than how fabulous my ass used to be, and how it fun it was to run around kissing all the boys, I’m just not that nostalgic about high school. Then this spring My Favorite Twin started talking about wanting to fly out from Alabama and go to our 20th reunion. He really wanted to go. Having been popular and voted “Best Dressed” our senior year there are, quite understandably, people he wants to see again. So while I told him that I was not going to the actual reunion, I would drive down to Bakersfield to see HIM. Totally worth it and much easier than flying all the way to ALABAMA. So over the summer we’d been planning that. While a trip to Bakersfield is never something I look forward to I was really excited about getting to spend time with My Favorite Twin.
And then a totally unforeseen and unrelated event occurred a couple of weeks ago. It turns out that My Compatriot In Silliness, someone I’d thought had been one of my friends for over 20 years… uh… wasn’t. Apparently she had been pretending to have fun with me, pretending to like the gifts I sent and all around faking most of what I thought our friendship was, all out of fear that if she didn’t there would be horrible repercussions. Her words: “horrible repercussions”. She then included a long list of what had been, for me, fond memories and broke down how each time I thought we were enjoying ourselves and each other (many times while doing something silly) she was actually faking it as hard as she could in order to meet my endless sucking unreasonable need for my friends to enjoy my company. She seemed to think that by telling me all this it would strengthen our friendship in the future. No really. In short she totally yanked the rug of friendship out from under my clueless and not entirely steady feet and I landed on my emotional ASS going, “OW… that really HURT…what the FUCK just happened?”
(Yeah I know, not my best metaphor, roll with me)
So, since she’d pulled this little trick via e-mail I broke my own rule about NEVER forwarding other people’s e-mail and sent it to the three people in my world who have known both of us for a long time. I didn’t do it out of spite. I did it because I couldn’t stop crying and I needed to know if I really was a horrible demanding inflexible monster whose punishments for the slightest infractions really were that terrifying.
Luckily for me the vote was unanimously “She’s nuts, you are so NOT the devil, what the fuck?”
So I wrote back to her essentially saying “Hope you feel better now that you’ve gotten that off your chest because we are SO not friends anymore. Because that? Is so not what friendship is. Maybe you should get some therapy. PS Thanks for doing this less than a year after my mother died, bitch.” Okay, I didn’t include that last sentence but I really wanted to.
I’m sure you’re all wondering how this has anything to do with my reunion. I’m getting there.
Like a lot of people who have never really had the love and support of their officially designated nuclear family I’ve built a family out of my friends. I started doing this in high school. I don’t make friends easily. I’m weird and I don’t really like people which can be a bit limiting. The friends I do make, I tend to hold onto. For decades. And as time passes and people change and grow and I change and grow I work very hard to make sure the friendship evolves to accommodate these changes. And I am usually pretty good at it. And tenacious. I’ve had friendships that have had rocky YEARS and still managed to survive. But My (former) Compatriot In Silliness literally burned our friendship to the ground leaving nothing, metaphorically speaking, but ashes. You know on the internet there will be pictures after a major fire where a house was burned to the ground but the only reason you know that is from the caption because looking at the photo all you can see is charred black lumps? That’s pretty much how I felt.
So a couple of days after all of this happened I was talking to a friend of mine and I can’t remember what I said to prompt his comment but he said, “Just because she sucks doesn’t make the rest of us BETTER friends.”
And I said “Oh no, in my head, it totally DOES make you better friends”
And for me, it really does. Picture my heart as a sort of pie chart that is made out of nine different-sized slices. A few of them are really big, some are thinner slivers. Now remove one of the largest slices. Now divide the percentage of that slice by 8 and evenly distribute that amount to each remaining slice. See how they all got fatter? Everyone who hadn’t been pretending to like me and lying to my face for years automatically became a BETTER friend as far as my heart was concerned. And for a few days I really did feel this conscious increased affection for all the people in my life who had not just ripped my heart out.
So My Favorite Twin, who I was already feeling pretty mushy towards because he was one of the people to read the letter of destruction and say “Dude, I always thought she was a kind of crazy but that was just NUTS” picked that moment to ask me to attend the reunion with him. He didn’t beg, because he has a rule about no longer begging me for things, but he came VERRRY close.
Here’s a short transcript of my capitulation, “fuck, FUCK, I don’t want to… but… FUCK… I really don’t want to go… I SO don’t want to go… fuck… crap…DAMMIT! Okay. Okay I will go because I love you SLIGHTLY more than I don’t want to go, but only a very tiny amount. Fuck.”
So I pinged The Susans to get confirmation that no, my kidnapping date-rapist ex-boyfriend wouldn’t be attending (I just really don’t want to be in a room with him, you know, ever) and then I RSVP’d.
So there you have it. If My Favorite Twin hadn’t gotten that extra push of goodwill from his newly increased slice of my heart I probably would have been able to hold out. But I couldn’t. Because all of the sudden something that I used to take for granted -- my friends really like me –now means more to me.
So to my reunion I shall go. If I’d known I was going to have to go I would have stopped eating carbs in like, February, but oh well. The 37-year-old woman I am totally doesn’t care. The 17-year-old girl the popular people tormented REALLY doesn’t want to give them the pleasure of seeing I’m no longer a size five. I was tempted to just stop eating completely between now and THE EVENT (Oct 11th) but I’d probably just get dizzy and fall down and hurt myself.
So instead I’ll just accomplish whatever is “reasonable” with my trainer, buy a fabulous dress and shoes or boots for the event and go. I rented a suite for My Favorite Twin and I and a town car (NOT a limo) and driver for us as well. While the only good thing I can say about the accursed event is at least they have the sense to hold it somewhere that sells alcohol I will be damned if I get arrested for drunk driving in my home town after my reunion. Because this is SO not the call I want to make, “Hey Dad… yeah, it’s me… uh yeah I’m actually in town… um… for my high school reunion… I was going to call you but things got so busy and um… I need a favor? Is there anyway you can come down to the courthouse and bail me out?”
Just No. I will take a big ole pass on that and since My Favorite Twin felt that he himself might need a drink or two to cope, and his wife would have a bitch of a time bailing his ass out from Alabama, we’re getting a driver.
Next Up: THE CRUEL UNDERWEAR. Because as much as I work out and don’t eat between now and then it will never be ENOUGH so I am doomed to slinking into Nordstrom and buying some horribly constricting device to make me look another five pounds thinner. I’m sure just trying those things ON will warrant another entry.
- Related Link: http://highlandhigh1988.com/
Damn it
Before I even graduated from high school I was already looking forward to not attending any future reunions. I can remember lying on my bed, Walkman on, Depeche Mode playing, and thinking with great pleasure about never attending another official event with my schoolmates. I was confident that I wouldn’t care one teeny bit more about my graduating class in 1998 than I had when I graduated. And I was right.
I actually enjoyed blowing off the calls about my 10-year reunion from The Susans (the people I’d always assumed would end up organizing our reunions? Were spot on the actual people who ended up organizing both our 10th and 20th reunions. No lie.). Politely thanking them for calling me but no thanks, I would not be attending. Around 2003 I did pay to join Classmates.com for a year so I could get the e-mail addresses of the three people I really cared about that I’d lost contact with. And then I let my membership lapse.
And then I really didn’t think about it again. Other than how fabulous my ass used to be, and how it fun it was to run around kissing all the boys, I’m just not that nostalgic about high school. Then this spring My Favorite Twin started talking about wanting to fly out from Alabama and go to our 20th reunion. He really wanted to go. Having been popular and voted “Best Dressed” our senior year there are, quite understandably, people he wants to see again. So while I told him that I was not going to the actual reunion, I would drive down to Bakersfield to see HIM. Totally worth it and much easier than flying all the way to ALABAMA. So over the summer we’d been planning that. While a trip to Bakersfield is never something I look forward to I was really excited about getting to spend time with My Favorite Twin.
And then a totally unforeseen and unrelated event occurred a couple of weeks ago. It turns out that My Compatriot In Silliness, someone I’d thought had been one of my friends for over 20 years… uh… wasn’t. Apparently she had been pretending to have fun with me, pretending to like the gifts I sent and all around faking most of what I thought our friendship was, all out of fear that if she didn’t there would be horrible repercussions. Her words: “horrible repercussions”. She then included a long list of what had been, for me, fond memories and broke down how each time I thought we were enjoying ourselves and each other (many times while doing something silly) she was actually faking it as hard as she could in order to meet my endless sucking unreasonable need for my friends to enjoy my company. She seemed to think that by telling me all this it would strengthen our friendship in the future. No really. In short she totally yanked the rug of friendship out from under my clueless and not entirely steady feet and I landed on my emotional ASS going, “OW… that really HURT…what the FUCK just happened?”
(Yeah I know, not my best metaphor, roll with me)
So, since she’d pulled this little trick via e-mail I broke my own rule about NEVER forwarding other people’s e-mail and sent it to the three people in my world who have known both of us for a long time. I didn’t do it out of spite. I did it because I couldn’t stop crying and I needed to know if I really was a horrible demanding inflexible monster whose punishments for the slightest infractions really were that terrifying.
Luckily for me the vote was unanimously “She’s nuts, you are so NOT the devil, what the fuck?”
So I wrote back to her essentially saying “Hope you feel better now that you’ve gotten that off your chest because we are SO not friends anymore. Because that? Is so not what friendship is. Maybe you should get some therapy. PS Thanks for doing this less than a year after my mother died, bitch.” Okay, I didn’t include that last sentence but I really wanted to.
I’m sure you’re all wondering how this has anything to do with my reunion. I’m getting there.
Like a lot of people who have never really had the love and support of their officially designated nuclear family I’ve built a family out of my friends. I started doing this in high school. I don’t make friends easily. I’m weird and I don’t really like people which can be a bit limiting. The friends I do make, I tend to hold onto. For decades. And as time passes and people change and grow and I change and grow I work very hard to make sure the friendship evolves to accommodate these changes. And I am usually pretty good at it. And tenacious. I’ve had friendships that have had rocky YEARS and still managed to survive. But My (former) Compatriot In Silliness literally burned our friendship to the ground leaving nothing, metaphorically speaking, but ashes. You know on the internet there will be pictures after a major fire where a house was burned to the ground but the only reason you know that is from the caption because looking at the photo all you can see is charred black lumps? That’s pretty much how I felt.
 |
| Pretty much what my heart felt like. |
And I said “Oh no, in my head, it totally DOES make you better friends”
And for me, it really does. Picture my heart as a sort of pie chart that is made out of nine different-sized slices. A few of them are really big, some are thinner slivers. Now remove one of the largest slices. Now divide the percentage of that slice by 8 and evenly distribute that amount to each remaining slice. See how they all got fatter? Everyone who hadn’t been pretending to like me and lying to my face for years automatically became a BETTER friend as far as my heart was concerned. And for a few days I really did feel this conscious increased affection for all the people in my life who had not just ripped my heart out.
So My Favorite Twin, who I was already feeling pretty mushy towards because he was one of the people to read the letter of destruction and say “Dude, I always thought she was a kind of crazy but that was just NUTS” picked that moment to ask me to attend the reunion with him. He didn’t beg, because he has a rule about no longer begging me for things, but he came VERRRY close.
Here’s a short transcript of my capitulation, “fuck, FUCK, I don’t want to… but… FUCK… I really don’t want to go… I SO don’t want to go… fuck… crap…DAMMIT! Okay. Okay I will go because I love you SLIGHTLY more than I don’t want to go, but only a very tiny amount. Fuck.”
So I pinged The Susans to get confirmation that no, my kidnapping date-rapist ex-boyfriend wouldn’t be attending (I just really don’t want to be in a room with him, you know, ever) and then I RSVP’d.
So there you have it. If My Favorite Twin hadn’t gotten that extra push of goodwill from his newly increased slice of my heart I probably would have been able to hold out. But I couldn’t. Because all of the sudden something that I used to take for granted -- my friends really like me –now means more to me.
So to my reunion I shall go. If I’d known I was going to have to go I would have stopped eating carbs in like, February, but oh well. The 37-year-old woman I am totally doesn’t care. The 17-year-old girl the popular people tormented REALLY doesn’t want to give them the pleasure of seeing I’m no longer a size five. I was tempted to just stop eating completely between now and THE EVENT (Oct 11th) but I’d probably just get dizzy and fall down and hurt myself.
So instead I’ll just accomplish whatever is “reasonable” with my trainer, buy a fabulous dress and shoes or boots for the event and go. I rented a suite for My Favorite Twin and I and a town car (NOT a limo) and driver for us as well. While the only good thing I can say about the accursed event is at least they have the sense to hold it somewhere that sells alcohol I will be damned if I get arrested for drunk driving in my home town after my reunion. Because this is SO not the call I want to make, “Hey Dad… yeah, it’s me… uh yeah I’m actually in town… um… for my high school reunion… I was going to call you but things got so busy and um… I need a favor? Is there anyway you can come down to the courthouse and bail me out?”
Just No. I will take a big ole pass on that and since My Favorite Twin felt that he himself might need a drink or two to cope, and his wife would have a bitch of a time bailing his ass out from Alabama, we’re getting a driver.
Next Up: THE CRUEL UNDERWEAR. Because as much as I work out and don’t eat between now and then it will never be ENOUGH so I am doomed to slinking into Nordstrom and buying some horribly constricting device to make me look another five pounds thinner. I’m sure just trying those things ON will warrant another entry.
- Related Link: http://highlandhigh1988.com/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)