Hold that thought.... and the mayo

(Warning: this post is probably not going to be PC. I am going to put it in the least offensive terms I can come up with, but it may still not help... Nevertheless, I have to post this, because it is a valuable lesson for myself, and I want to remember it.)

I recently returned to a thought I'd had years ago. It relates back to my need to revamp my eating habits in order to get myself into better physical shape. And in order to get my point across, I must tell an anecdote or two.

I have had, over the years, several good friends who were quite a bit overweight. Two of those particular friends and I got into the habit of going to diners all the time, being in our late teens/early twenties, and living in a place with nothing to do and nowhere to go except movie theatres and diners. At the diner, they would typically not order much, but it would be something like mozzerella sticks, or cheese fries, or fried ravioli. I, on the other hand, not overweight, would habitually order a bare, plain hamburger (no fries, cheese, bacon, etc.) and a tossed salad. I would also forego ketchup for a little salt and pepper on my burger. They not only thought I was weird, but they laughed at me and made fun of me for ordering what I did every time.

Since then, I have often wondered if they ever made the connection between our respective weights and our respective eating habits (at least at diners).

The other day, twenty pounds heavier, I was standing in the school cafeteria and saw a girl who was quite overweight, the bottom of whose shirt did not even nearly meet the top of her jeans. I won't go into detail, but let me suffice to say that it was not the sort of thing one wants to see in public. Then I noticed that she was holding a Haagen-Dazs ice cream bar. While making note of that, a squat, older woman, almost wider than she was tall, walked between me and the ice cream bar girl, holding a tray with nothing but two large pieces of pizza on it. After that, I got to my seat with my little box of Indian food and sat down facing a very large man, who had the remnants of a container of french fries on his table, and in the clear plastic carry-out container, the bottom was completely smeared with what looked to have been an exorbitant amount of ketchup.

Here's what scared me: with the ketchup man I couldn't identify (blech!), but with the pizza woman and the ice cream bar girl, I could. I've been continually telling myself that I'm so stressed out, I work so hard, that I deserve such-and-such a treat, all the time, whether it's pizza, ice cream, croissants, Reese's Pieces, or a cappucino-chocolate-chip muffin. But then I complain about how I feel tired, how my clothes don't fit right anymore, yadda yadda. So I made the connection once again, an important connection that I had completely forgotten. If you want to be thin, you have to eat like you're thin.

Obviously, there are more complicated factors that go into everything. Not everyone who eats cheese fries or ketchup will be fat. It's very easy to oversimplify. But I know I need to return to that simple grain of truth, which I at least believe holds true for me, to get one part of my life back on track.

(BTW, I got to the gym again on Thursday, and I have felt pretty great since then. The Izer noted the day afterward that I was still "bouncing around." It was cool. No change in my weight since last time, tho... not counting the gain of a half pound or so... :o/ Gotta start putting all this into practice, faithfully.)

B&S, I will love you always, anyways.

I got an e-mail this week saying that Belle and Sebastian were going to be playing a special, one-up concert of their old, mid-90's album (not to mention the fact that it's their BEST album), If You're Feeling Sinister, live in London on 9/25. Mind you, they're my favorite band, but I've not yet been able to see them live. One sticking point is that I don't really like their current stuff, which is what I'd mostly expect to hear when I see them in concert. So this was the perfect opportunity to step back in time and hear those classic B&S songs I missed.

I concocted a whole fantasy, nay, it was more than a fantasy, it was a plan -- about going to England for about five days, hitting the concert in London, and then renting bikes and traversing the countryside the rest of the time, biking to Oxford, staying at quaint hostels, a whole low-budget, but lovely, shebang. I even found round-trip plane tickets for a mere $236 each. The Izer was totally willing to go along, and gave me the go-ahead to count him into these plans, when...

I just checked to find the concert sold out. I could cry. No B&S, no Sinister, no bikes and rolling green hills. I'll have to find a way to make up for this. JetBlue just established service from NYC to Portland, OR. Maybe I'll go there and see the Decemberists in their hometown (a place I'd love to see, anyway).

DONE!!!

Yesterday, my music advisor signed off on my music minor. It is DONE. It felt so good to finally be finished with a part of my degree, especially in this mood of academic burnout I'm in. DONE, done, DONE!!!

Now, this summer, I'll knock out the last two of my general education requirement courses, and that leaves me just one or two more necessary courses for the fall! Then it is really fini.

The Hangover, The Desperation

This was one hell of a week. Illness, fever, stress, near-nervous breakdown, an inordinate amount of work, all leading up to a big-ass party at my house last night. The party went pretty well, but no-one I personally invited showed. I tell myself I shouldn't let it bother me, but it does. What's wrong with me that people don't care to return my phone calls or follow up on their maybe's or probably's? This time I didn't even invite anyone whom I already knew to be a flake that way.

Which leads me back to another story which still is the source of some worriment on my part. I went out on a limb and consciously tried to develop a friendship with a girl last fall. (Since I have no real-life girlfriends, pathetic as that may sound.) She seemed interested enough -- she initiated the exchange of phone numbers, etc., etc. We hung out once or twice, talked on the phone a little, and IM'd. We got along really well. But then we both got busy, the semester break ensued, and when we got back, I invited her to a dinner party. We played voicemail tag. She definitely wanted to come. I left her two messages in order to try and iron out the details so she could come. She never called back. Not even afterward, to apologize for having had something else important come up. Nothing. I was so insulted, I had dreams about it. I didn't know what to do, whether to try and initiate contact again or not. I decided against it. Now when I see her at school, I pretend not to, and just slip by, looking the other way.

It makes me feel so defeated to give up like that, but the fact that I am desperate for friends at times makes me feel incredibly paranoid about appearing desperate, so I get all weird and self-conscious, and trying to make new friends feels like trying to ask out a junior-high-school crush.

I don't know where this is leading, and I have no answers for myself, except that I can't give up, or else I will become just like the direct forebearers of my genes.

"That" time of the month?

Back on that night when I was in Borders looking at yoga books, I happened to read a phrase in a "Yoga for Women" book, on a page about yoga to do on *ahem* "that" week. It said that since your body is doing a sort of physcial "out with the old" routine, that psychologically you are in a similar frame of mind. Now, mind you, I'd normally regard that sort of statement as utter poppycock (ha! I daresay I've never used that word before), and perhaps I did at the time, but I made a sort of mental note of it, with a small "hm..." next to it.

Well, "that" week came for me, and I found myself tackling my bedroom closet. This wasn't just any closet, however. This was a closet that had been menacing me for months, throwing boxes and other packaging materials at my head whenever I dared open its door, swallowing all the things I wanted to find in a cavernous bin at the bottom, and coercing my shoes to trip up my access to the vacuum cleaner. Not to mention all the clothes hung at embarassingly rakish angles. Needless to say, I had been merely throwing back at it whatever it pummeled me with, sometimes repeatedly in a single setting, and then shirking away with fear in my heart. And when I needed something from the bottom bin, I resigned myself to the knowledge that it was in there, but that I would never find it. But no, not this particular weekend. I took to that closet with a fearless vengeance rarely seen. Once I was done, it was the closet that was shirking in orderly obedience.

Fast forward another four weeks or so, to this past week. I had been letting various errand materials, general junk, and stuff that was downright trash build up in my car for several months, once I'd gotten over my "oh my god, this is my new-old car, the first I can really call my own, so I have to keep it immaculately" phase. And I never seemed to have time to clean it up. But this week, it started to bug me, really bug me, to the point where I did all the errands I was avoiding, just for the sake of getting the damned stuff out of my car. (That included going to the post office to mail a package, the Goodwill drop box AND the dry cleaners.) I also picked up all the garbage inside and neatened up the other stuff I couldn't immediately get rid of.

And the point? Well, this also happened to be "that" time of the month. All I can say is that I guess I ought to plan for what else needs purging a month from now (although maybe it's more of a "when (and where and upon what) the mood strikes" sort of thing). And maybe those foo-foo new-agey yoga types aren't all bullshitting when they make broad, generalized statements like that. Hm...