Team Servo

Today was the initial weigh in and the official start of our Biggest Loser "competition" at work. When I read the first email about it a couple of weeks ago I started snickering and rolling my eyes. But, in the back of my head I was thinking, "I've been somewhat preoccupied recently with thoughts of eating more vegetables, limiting sugar, trying to get some exercise, and all that. Maybe...? Nah! But maybe..." And then they mentioned money. It wasn't so much the opportunity to win one of the prizes for individual or team weight loss. It was the announcement that 12 weeks after the end of the 12-week main program participants will be weighed to see how much weight loss they have maintained, and the company will pay $5 for each pound we have kept off AND $5 per pound for any additional weight lost. That was the critical factor. One of my friends was already interested in forming a team, so we convinced another friend to join us (since the minimum team size was three people) and then spent about 3 days trying to decide on a name. And thus "Team Servo" was born.

I have no idea what strategies other people will be using, and quite frankly, I don't care. I've spent almost my entire life --at least 30 years, if not more-- dealing with my fat body. That's a lot of self-reflection, a lot of tested willpower, a lot of calorie counting, a lot of food measuring, and most importantly, a lot of learning from experience. So there are certain things I already know about what I can and can't handle that no one can change by blowing sunshine up my ass.

*I know that weighing and measuring food diligently, counting calories, and recording everything that goes into my mouth creates obsessive thoughts about food. It becomes something that stays on my mind all day, every day. This preoccupation with food also encourages a focus on deprivation, and I tend to end up craving things I normally wouldn't even think about simply because I "can't have them." This happens every. single. time.

*There will be absolutely NO invoking of the phrase "I can't eat that." There will be NO mention or discussion of "being on a diet." Everyone is "on" a diet. Your diet is whatever you consume. Where your diet falls on the spectrum of Unnaturally Healthy to Suicidally Unhealthy varies widely, so the challenge is to move it to a more reasonable point on the Healthy end.

*I have learned enough to know what is and isn't a reasonable portion, and would rather focus thoughts of food on finding delicious new ways to prepare vegetables, drinking more water and getting my caffeine from unsweetened tea, basing meals on lower-fat proteins, etc. while reducing the portion sizes of less-healthy foods and limiting the number and serving sizes of indulgences. This is the key challenge for many reasons:

1. I really don't like vegetables that much without cheese sauce, Ranch dressing, or a crunchy fried breading, and my mouth often has the gustatory equivalent of an orgasm when given fats and carbs.
2. I am one of those people whose body doesn't know when to stop eating until it is too late. I've made some progress on this in the past and this is another chance to increase my level of "mindfulness" regarding the relationship between my brain, my mouth, and my stomach. I tend to eat with my mouth, meaning I let my taste buds make the decisions. My mouth believes that if one bite tastes that good, 30 bites will taste 30 times as good, and more of a good thing is always better. I need to stop listening to my mouth and let my brain and my stomach get a word in before it's too late. I also need to find mouth-wateringly delicious ways to prepare healthy foods.
3. Preparing these healthy menu items that taste awesome, especially vegetables, generally requires time and effort, neither of which I have enough of when I get home from work (or before work, or during work). By the time I get home, Tim is generally about ready to gnaw his own hands off. Add that to the fact that we have about 3 hours until bedtime (if I don't have to work late or run errands after work) and the race is on to get ourselves fed in enough time to digest dinner. This is also a factor in trying to find time for exercise, which is the other part of my "strategy."

Quite probably an even greater challenge than eating better is finding the time and energy to exercise. My favorite activity throughout childhood was reading. I did some active playing, bike riding, walking around the neighborhood, etc. But I tended to prefer more sedentary activities. Even with my pretend play I preferred laying on the floor making Fisher Price Little People talk to one another or continuously changing my Barbies' outfits to actually pretending to be something myself and bouncing around actually "doing" something. As much as I loved sitting around, though, I always managed to get in a certain level of activity even if it was just out of necessity: walking to and from school, riding my bike to campus, keeping up with kids I was taking care of, even just standing around at the front desk of the Law Library was more activity than sitting all day.

And all that incidental activity makes a huge difference when compared to doing nothing but sitting all day. Every job I ever had until this one required some degree of lifting, carrying, crouching, walking, pushing, and standing. This job, however, requires sitting for 8 hours every day, and also requires sitting in a car for 2 hours a day. That's 10 full hours of sitting. Sure I get two 15 minute breaks, and I take 30 minutes for lunch. But lunch is for eating and is not negotiable. Breaks--well, that depends upon the weather and how much I need the mental health break of hanging out with my friends. Sacrificing what little social time I have in my daily life has it's own negative repercussions.

So, where do and how do I fit in the exercise? Because, I actually want to do this. I just can't figure out how. I already get up between 4 and 4:30 to get ready for work. Getting up earlier is out of the question. I usually get home between 4:30 and 5. From about April until about October, the first order of business after getting home is to check "the garden" (meaning the entire area of front, back, and both side yards). I usually don't even get into the house until after 5. There's the whole dinner issue, and we have our nightly ritual Doctor Who episode, and then the race against the clock is on since my goal is to start getting ready for bed by 8. What can I do in that remaining hour or two that I would even want to do?

And how long do I have to wait after eating? The Mayo Clinic website recommends allowing 2-3 hours between a small meal and exercise, so even assuming that my dinners are small I don't have enough time according to their guidelines.

Okay, so I ignore the possibility of diverting too much blood flow from digestion and I exercise anyway. What can I do that I would enjoy enough to keep doing it? And that I would enjoy enough to not feel like I was sacrificing a large chunk of what precious little free time I have during the average day?

I love bike riding, but I'm not sure where I could ride that traffic wouldn't be a problem. And of course, I would have to buy a bicycle. And figure out where to store it during the 6 months of the year it's too snowy and/or cold to ride.

I really want to do yoga, but I'm not sure I can find a class that fits into my schedule. Or my budget, since any form of exercise pretty much has to cost me, um, absolutely nothing. Which is another reason the bike is more or less out.

There's the high quality treadmill I spent $1500 on as soon as we moved into the house that I haven't used for a couple of years. And there's the reason why I haven't used it, namely that the only place we can make it fit is a corner of the dining room where I am looking at a wall. If we could fit it in the library where the tv is, or in the sunroom where I could watch the sun set or where we could put the tv, or if we could put it in the part of the dining room that would allow me to look into the sunroom.... We've discussed all of these options multiple times and decided we didn't like everything that would have to change to make it work. But, it is at least one option to reconsider, I guess.

There's always walking around the neighborhood. Which always sounds like a good idea, and is probably one of the best options. Again, for the 6 months or less out of the year when it's both light enough and weather-friendly to do so. This is pretty much the only viable option I can come up with besides figuring out how to make the treadmill more appealing.

My other idea is to rig up a way to make it possible for me to work standing up in my cubicle. It's not "exercise," but it's absolutely better than sitting all day in lots of ways. I took some measurements today, and it shouldn't be too difficult. What I have in mind should even allow me to switch back and forth between sitting and standing within just a minute or two. I was hoping to scour the house tonight in the hopes of finding the right materials and to be able to try it tomorrow. But instead I'm up past my bedtime writing, and haven't accomplished jack in terms of either exercising or adapting my cubicle. So now I'm crabby, and this was supposed to be a positive, inspiring entry. I better go while there's still some chance of salvaging my mood. Sorry if there are any typos--I'm not even previewing this one.

Achoo

So, allergies. Huh. Somehow when you pay someone to perform medical tests to tell you officially what you sort of knew anyway, it suddenly makes things seem more serious --or at least encourages you to start taking things more seriously. It turns out I'm allergic to ragweed, trees, mixed weeds, mixed molds, phoma mold, cats, dogs, mixed animals, dust mites, and highly allergic to dust.

Now I have to decide what to change and how. I essentially have 3 choices, or some combination thereof. I can either a) use $30 a month of my HRA money to use Flonase for the foreseeable future, with additional allergy pills and eyedrops on a fairly regular basis to control the acute attacks, b) suck up the rest of my HRA money in short order (and then have to start actually paying some of my medical expenses out of pocket) so I can start doing allergy shots for 4-5 years, or c) spend a buttload of money on a new air purifier, new vacuum cleaner, dust mite casings, etc. AND start cleaning regularly and changing the sheets every couple of weeks. That's like, 4-6 times more often than I do now. And it's a lot more laundry. And we're talking way, way, way more cleaning than I do now. With a mask. And trying to convince the cats that after 11 years they can no longer sleep next to me in bed. And keeping the windows closed most of the months of the year that it's finally warm enough to have them open.

So, essentially, the "allergen avoidance" route means adopting a new lifestyle completely antithetical to my current mode of existence. I'm not thrilled about that prospect.

On the other hand, I'm not thrilled about being reliant on pharmaceuticals for the rest of my life in order to function.

And while I generally like the idea of using drugs to improve the functioning of my own immune system by using the shots, I'm not necessarily thrilled about the expense (and time for all those appointments) of doing this for 5 years, especially since it doesn't guarantee I'll be "cured" for the rest of my life.

In all this, I'm remembering that my dentist told me I must have an incredible immune system to have gone 11 years without any dental care and still have strong, healthy teeth. Hmmmm.

And speaking of teeth, I was waiting to figure out where the allergy issue was going so I could move on to making decisions about getting my now-partially-erupted wisdom tooth removed and getting new glasses, since it's been about 3-4 years since I got my eyes checked and got these glasses. Oh, yeah, and Gytha needs to go to the vet sooner or later about her bald spot. I'm glad I didn't go ahead and place my Bluestone Perennials order last night.

~sigh~

~SIGH~

And I still haven't bought a sun light for my seasonal depression issues. Which I was seriously regretting a week or so ago.

~sigh~

Most of this has to do with money, and how I don't have enough to just do everything. I've got this much money that I need to stretch out to tttttttttt    hhhhhhhhhhhhh   iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii   ssssssssssssss much. Granted (hahahaha, if only) we should get a decent tax refund that can go to paying off things like a new vacuum cleaner. But that was already supposed to pay down my credit cards and replace my depleted savings account.

~SIGH~

If only writing about things actually made them better...

"This is My Country"

I've been thinking about politics a lot lately. Okay, always. I like politics, but it (they?) drive me crazy and make my life miserable. I'd be a much happier person if I didn't care about Big Things, but I honestly haven't the faintest idea how anyone can NOT care about Big Things.

Specifically, my recent focus has been on a) the Republican Presidential candidates and b) the OWS Movement.

(First, let me preface anything that follows by admitting that I have actually read and/or watched very little of the "news" available out there. For instance, I can't handle watching videos of police/protestors conflicts.  It would give me a more informed perspective, but I suspect it would also make me exceptionally angry and depressed and increase my feelings of futility and hopelessness. I also tend not to read every "article" I see links for that are on liberal-leaning websites. I would probably agree with them, but I'm not looking for polemical material. Which is why I don't read stuff from notably right-wing sources, either. I try to save my reading time for select items that I hope will provide intelligent insight and/or actual information. I want data, facts, numbers, and/or well-reasoned arguments that consider all aspects of the issue. And that makes up a fairly small percentage of "news" I come across.)

I don't remember what prompted this train of thought while I was at work the other day, but it occurred to me that too many people are failing to understand the gravity of the American Presidency.

The President of the United States needs to be smart: both intellectually and practically. This person needs to be confident. This person needs to have ideas for the future, but a good grasp of reality. This person needs to be able to communicate well with our own citizens as well as people in other countries. This person needs to know what the hell is going on in the world, to be able to weigh pros and cons of issues, and to be able to make sacrifices and compromises when necessary. This person needs to be capable of making short-term and long-term policy decisions based on good judgment and also needs to be able to make sound decisions quickly in the face of crises.

Quite frankly, I don't think there is a single Republican candidate capable of fulfilling all those requirements. The U.S. President should not just be the most prominent talking head spewing the rhetoric of one political party's machine. S/He should definitely not have gained office by being the biggest windbag who complains the loudest and slings the most mud. Having adamant ideological opinions doesn't make you qualified. Having the strongest opinions on policy issues is not all it takes to make you World Leader material. In fact, I think having excessively strong opinions with no ability or desire to listen to the other side makes a candidate for any political office dangerous in addition to being useless.

...........

While the Republican candidates just annoy me with their almost complete lack of any redeeming qualities, the Occupy Wall Street movement is more fraught with difficulties for me because it calls into question my own redeeming qualities. It highlights the rifts I already struggle with between what I have and what I want, between how I live and what I believe. In my mind I cheer the struggles of those who are rallying together and risking their safety to make a statement that America needs another revolution. But I still get up every day, feeling like tired crap, then churn through gasoline and fight with traffic to go to a corporate job at a company I don't respect so I can spend more money than I earn on things that make my life either easier or more pleasant. I am eating up the Earth in an attempt to enjoy life, and it isn't working.

But how realistic are my other choices at this point? I'm already hopelessly entwined in the consumer system, with $60k of student loan debt, lots of credit card debt, and an upside-down mortgage thanks to the revaluation of our house last year that dropped it's value by something like 30% in just 2 years. If I were to quit work to have the time and energy to use my life for a better purpose, the effect on our finances and credit ratings would be catastrophic, and I would be miserable. (I have a whole separate post in the works regarding poverty, money, etc.)

I am where I am for a lot of reasons, and there are a lot of people who envy where I am. I've had a lot of advantages and luck in my life that enabled me to make the decisions I made. I know this. I also realize there are decisions I could make that would bring me into better alignment with what I believe without destroying my life.  I can take small steps, make gradual changes. But I'm 1000 times better at planning than doing, and I never seem to simultaneously have both the time and the energy to work on figuring out what to do, let alone setting any plans in motion.

So, the Occupy Movement has a) increased my ability to see and appreciate my blessings and my privileges, and b) made me realize that getting other people closer to where I am is more important than me getting closer to the 1%. Just because any reforms, changes, and improvements might not directly benefit me personally doesn't mean they aren't worthwhile. What makes them worthwhile is their effectiveness in improving the lives of people who have less than me. Which is a lot of people. A lot.

At its simplest, the Occupy Movement makes me feel guilty that I'm not living my own principles while at the same time giving me hope that maybe enough people have finally been pushed too far and aren't going to back down until our country makes some serious changes in it's attitude and resulting government policies. Hopefully in the near future both me and my country will be on a road to a better way of living.

Thanks, But No Thanks

I was just reading a blog about women focusing on their strengths and good points rather than being down on themselves. I won't refer to it by name because I'm just using it as an example of the myriad books, blogs, etc. which are written for the purpose of reassuring women that they are not failures and their lives don't have to suck. Why women in particular are so down on themselves I'm not sure, but apparently we are and so this sort of self-helpy thing sounds positive on the surface. But then you read the bio for the authoress of said book, blog, etc.:

Super Successful Sexy Lady is a bilingual attorney who has survived cancer, traveled to Africa to do charity work, and now somehow makes $250,000 a year while providing free legal services to the poor, running marathons, maintaining an organic farm, raising three genius children, and enjoying her perfect marriage to her husband of 20 years who also makes a quarter of a million dollars a year. Oh, and she also has time to write this book, blog, etc. while traveling between her three homes in New York City, Connecticut, and the Bahamas.

But none of these things are necessary in order to be a happy, healthy and good person, she claims. All women can find the satisfaction/success/happiness/self-confidence/inner peace/strength she has.

Which is, of course, why you also see so many books, blogs, etc. on happiness and/or self-confidence and/or blending a successful career with perfect motherhood which are written by single moms with no college education who are living below the poverty line. Right?

I call Bullshit.

The very women who represent the pinnacle of overachieving womanhood are the ones writing the books, blogs, etc. which tell us to stop expecting ourselves to become overachieving women. These women reassure you that no matter what you do, as long as you are trying to be a good mom, you are one, which is potentially bullshit to begin with, but on top of that, they assume that every adult woman is a mother as well. What about those of us still struggling with our decisions not to have children or inabilities to have them? They also often assume that you are working on, have achieved, or gave up a professional career, but what about those of us who got fired? Were laid off because of the economy? Have only worked minimum wage or "unskilled" jobs? Are on disability or otherwise can't work?

Similarly, the kind of people who push you to think positive 24/7 are the kind of people who haven't struggled with chronic and serious depression or other mental illnesses and/or are not prone to philosophical crises and bouts of existential angst. They usually come by their upbeat and cheerful personalities naturally. And if you're reading advice from someone who was once in their own mental abyss and managed to find their way out, they now assume that their method or experience will serve as a guide for everyone else. I really do hate it when someone says: If I could do it, so can you.

This too is Bullshit.

No two people on this entire planet are exactly the same. That doesn't stop us from comparing ourselves to one another and wanting what other people have. It does, however, make it very hard for any given person to give any other person useful advice. The best people to turn to are those you already have something in common with. My friends and family know me, and I know them. We come from the same backgrounds or have shared the same experiences or have some common interests or have compatible personalities already. So when we turn to one another for guidance, support, reassurance, and advice there are already certain connections between us that make what we say and do at least more palatable and probably more appropriate to our personal situations.

I'm not saying that all self-help books or positive thinking blogs are worthless. I'm just saying that when someone who represents everything I always thought I should be tells me to be happy with who I am or when someone who has the life I want tells me to be happy what I have, my gut reaction is to want to punch them in the face.

Of chickens and libraries and life

For the past couple of years I've been struggling with the idea that I'd like to be a farmer. Don't laugh. Okay, go ahead. It is sort of funny. But, I am serious. I've read numerous articles in Organic Gardening, Martha Stewart Living, and even the local newspaper about raising chickens or heritage animal breeds, or about people who have given up the 9-to-5-grind for the honest, wholesome work of raising organic crops, and they grab me by the insides and pull hard. I believe that small-scale local farming, especially organic farming, is environmentally necessary, economically beneficial, nutritionally superior, and even morally imperative. The idea calls to me in part because of my love of gardening. I want an excuse to stay home and work outside, and to have enough work to keep me busy if I were to stay home all day. I want it to be meaningful and productive work. I want to spend my time with plants and animals. I want to get up and look out at vast fields at sunrise, to smell hay, to make my own composted manure, to eat fresh eggs from my chickens, to have a barn with animals of some kind in it. My heart wants to be a farmer, while my mind and my body scream, "Are you freaking kidding, Girlfriend?!" because there are certain realities which my farm fantasies ignore, like animal pests and diseases, and the intense labor and long hours required. 

Because you see, I am an intensely lazy person --physically, at least. I always have been. I liked bike riding as a child, but not too fast or too far or uphill. I didn't really like playing games that required running, like kickball or tag. I was sort of jealous of people who could do gymnastics, so I was proud when I could muster enough courage to be able to pull myself up on a bar and hang upside down. But I don't know if I ever did manage to cross those sets of parallel monkey bars on fancy swing sets. If I could do one or two I was usually pretty happy with myself.

I preferred indoor activities. I liked playing pretend and drawing and coloring and painting and jigsaw puzzles and writing and more than anything else in the world: reading. What I remember most was playing house, playing librarian, playing teacher, and reading, reading, reading, reading. I LOVED going to any library. Even as a child I loved the hushed solemnity and the smell of all those books. I wanted to quietly browse for hours and pick out dozens of books to take home and read or reread. I loved searching in the card catalog and writing down call numbers. My favorite was the towering Morris Library on the SIUC campus, filled with not just rooms but FLOORS full of books. When I was somewhere between 5 and 7 and my dad was in grad school, he would take me with him. In awe, I would follow him up the wide, echoing stairwell, and then settle myself on a high stool at the tall tables near the card catalog to use the little tiny pencils and scrap cards for notes as I pretended I was doing some sort of important library work. I would sometimes look through the card catalogs there at the incomprehensible titles, or browse through the shelves of academic tomes and wonder if someday any of those books would be interesting.

And now I profile those books for a living. My 7-to-5-daily-grind involves working for a corporate business that sells those books to the very same library that enchanted me as a child. I hate working for a corporate business. This is not what I ever wanted to do. I wanted to be a writer or a teacher or a librarian, and instead I became a teacher, got fired, had already indebted myself for the rest of my life getting a master's degree to be a teacher so I couldn't afford to go back to grad school to become a librarian, and managed to land my current job out of luck and desperation. In some ways, it is the best job I've ever had. In other ways, not so much.

One major drawback is that I don't feel like I'm making a difference in the world. As a babysitter and then a nanny and then an early childhood teacher I was helping to raise interesting, loving, fascinating children. At the law library, well, the law library was a fun job because I was working at a library and socializing and/or flirting like a mad fiend. But I was helping people in a variety of ways, and learning about library work at the same time. It was that experience which impressed my current employers when I applied for my job. But now? Now I commute 2 heart-shriveling hours a day to essentially churn out sales for a company that doesn't pay me what I think I ought to be making for the amount of intelligence I bring to the job. It doesn't even make good use of my intelligence, and it doesn't allow for much variation in my duties, so I get bored and frustrated frequently. And there's no moral compensation that at least the world is a better place because I do what I do. This is not the adult life I had planned.

It wouldn't be accurate to claim that I was a really happy child. I was a precocious, opinionated, backtalking, quick-to-anger little girl who was always right and was obsessed with fairness, but who also had bouts of debilitating shyness and often thought she was unlovable and unloved. I did know that many people loved me and many people liked me. I did know that despite the fact that I could be a horrid brat, there were still many people who thought I was funny and admired my intelligence and talents. And I wasn't a morose child. I just lived in my head more than many people probably do, and I never felt quite normal. But that was okay, because someday I was going to grow up and life was going to be everything I wanted. Not that I would necessarily be rich and/or famous, just very well off in every way doing something fulfilling and sort of impressive.

I've come so far away from those visions of childhood, and it makes me sad. I still have most of the character flaws and the same frustrations with the world, but I've lost so much of the ability to enjoy myself which balanced things out. I've been out of school for 8 years, and I feel like my brain is rotting away. I don't have time to read for hours on end. I don't go to libraries anymore. I don't paint or draw or color. I don't write except for these entries. I don't even have a bicycle anymore. I don't play. Everything is about responsibilities and worrying and doing the unpleasant things that have to get done, or avoiding doing them by doing something else that is really sort of a waste of time, like sitting on the couch in front of a movie. Okay, I spend a lot of time on garden fantasizing and planning, but I could get away with spending a lot less time on that so that I would have time for other things.

But this goes back to me being an essentially lazy person who lives predominantly inside her own head. Some people work full time, maintain the small farm where they live, write books on the side, and still find time to raise a family, go to church, and do volunteer work. And some of those people even do it with less money than we make. I have NO CLUE AT ALL how these people do half of that, let alone all of it. And quite frankly, I'm not sure I want to know how they do it. Or at least, I'm not sure I could ever truly understand how they do it. I still have big ideas and big hopes, only now they tend to be about throwing in the consumer towel and forging a simpler life with honest, back-breaking work and sacrifice. But I don't honestly think that would make me happy, either. Just where is the soul-fulfillment that I seek? Does it require a massive change or can I find it within the conditions which already circumscribe my life? Can I even break the habits causing the problems in my current life? How? And when?

Will I ever own chickens? Will I find time to go to libraries once again and revel in the experience of just being there? Will I stop spending all my time and money on plants? Will I ever use my watercolor paints I've ambitiously kept around for at least 10 years now? Will I ever write a book or even a post more than 3 other people read? Will I ever again look to the future with more excitement than aversion? Will I ever stop writing this post and go to bed??