Sport

So, you can see I've been working out. This is on the new side for me. I'm pretty uncoordinated and have never been good at sports.

My parents were actually anti-sports. I think in their youths they had problems with bullying and the entitlement and aggression that success in athletics can bring people if they aren't careful or trained properly. I understand that. It's probably happened to everyone at some time in their life. I think my parents might have gone a little too far in the opposite direction. They never said "No! You can't play volleyball!" They just didn't encourage athletics. I did play volleyball in high school. I was even pretty not that terrible at it. I was MVP my JV year. I have a silver plate to commemorate it. Go me!

I've gone through fitness phases in the past though. Fencing club in college (hi John!), aerobics in the late 80s. I started running in 2000 but let it slide for a while.

Then came the hard times and the mid-life crisis. I wanted to get fit and strong so I'd have stamina for what Life brings. So far so good. I'm enjoying it. This morning I was trying to figure out what my sport could be.

This sounds really lame but I decided that Life is my sport. I'm not trying to minimize life by saying it's a sport. I'm not trying to see it as less dimensional. Life is everyone's sport. It's the multi-dimensional obstacle course we all engage with every day. Our team mates are everyone, whether we (or they) know it or see it that way or not. We're all playing together. I don't mean playing like a fun game, I mean engaging with our surroundings in an attempt to triumph over them.

At this time I don't think my efforts to train need to be more directed than that. Life is a perfectly acceptable sport.

What am I saying??? Life is THE  sport. Everything else is just a mini-game.

I'm Telling You About My Gym Bag

I use a retro '70s era gym bag.

Contemporary gym bags might be more ergonomic and better designed but look at the locker I use:

My shoes don't even fit in there side by side if I don't flip one around, toe to heel, to optimize space. I wonder if the men's lockers are wider? I'm on the larger side for a woman but most men are bigger than I am.

I am LOVING going to the gym. I work with a trainer once a week and she KICKS MY ASS. It feels great. I feel euphoric after wearing myself the hell out. I can barely walk (carrying the ten tons of crap I haul around - sweaty gym clothes weigh more too) to the T afterwards but I feel FANTASTIC.

One of my favorite things is being able to shower at work. They have clean towels there you can use. I don't know how I'd fit a towel in that gym bag along with my other stuff. 

I've never been athletic and was completely unfamiliar with the ins and outs of gym-going and locker room etiquette. I'm feeling less self-conscious now. I go to the sleepy, old locker room where you'll maybe see two other people at a time. There I can be dorky in peace and figure out how to manage at my own pace.

I'm still not sure about nudity though. After art school nudity isn't a big deal to me. So many naked people in art school.  I'd never sit on anything without pants on of course, but standing without clothes in the women's locker room doesn't bother me. I guess some people get weirded-out by ever seeing someone else naked outside the bedroom. Hell, we all have bodies, people.

Why am I telling you this? Maybe I shouldn't. I have a cold today and I'm kind of out of it. 

Now What?

I should have gone to bed already.

Things got really bonkers crazy last Wednesday. Something kind of big and unexpected happened. Not necessarily important, just unexpected and time and thought consuming. My plans have gone off the rails again.

You know how I'd been looking forward to having my normal, non-Christmas time back so I could live my life and do my stuff? How my plan was to try to keep myself sane? Well it kind of didn't work. I felt pretty depressed. I had time to do the things I was looking forward to doing, but I didn't enjoy them.*

Now all this weird stuff has sprung up (which I'll probably end up explaining later) and I'm pressed for time again and I've had to put off some of the things I've been wanting to do. But now I'M EXCITED. I'm not depressed. My mind is occupied by something that seems urgent but is probably less important than some of the other things I need to think about.

It makes me wonder if I somehow became chemically dependent on intense emotion and stress over the last year (or so.) I learned to manage and expect a certain level of emotional effort and when that slacked my system couldn't handle it. I felt depressed because I didn't have anything concrete to fight. Is that possible? That I wasn't depressed, I was just having trouble readjusting to a less intense level of emotional demand?

I don't know. A lot has happened that I do need to recover from. I could just really need to heal from our recent losses. Maybe having time to think meant having time to face those losses without distraction. Maybe now I'm excited because what's happening is exciting. Maybe it's simple, not twisted. Maybe this is a glimpse of a new and more fun future? I can't tell.

My mind is too blown by surprise and I can't tell what's happening.

So now there's this big explosion of intense activity and I feel vital again. I wonder if this is something akin to compulsive shopping - treating a problem with the wrong medicine, getting a distracting shot of excitement that won't help in the long term? I feel less crazy now but I wonder if it's just that my head is more accustomed to this heightened level of stimulation?

Maybe I should not think about it too much and just enjoy not feeling crappy. That is an option.

*Some of the things I thought would encourage a good attitude: regular exercise, healthy eating, keeping a reasonable schedule, getting enough sleep, having enough time to myself, giving myself treats when I felt like it, getting up to Vermont to be with nature, seeing friends when I could. I was doing that. I still felt lousy.

Okay, I didn't have the balance quite where I wanted it but it was close. It wasn't far off. Feeling crappy in spite of that made me wonder if it's even possible to intentionally effect one's mood. I felt like I was doing all the right things and my moods were still completely arbitrary. I didn't even want the treats.

So now I have a mood tracker notebook. I'm tracking barometric pressure, weather forecast, everything I eat and drink and when, physical activity, general activities (everything I do throughout the day) mood changes. Did I leave anything out? We'll see where that all gets me.

Migraine In Process

I get migraines. I'm writing with one now. There could easily be typos. I can't really see reliably. Mostly I can't think reliably.

Everyone knows that migraines hurt. By God, yes they do. The most aggravating thing about them for me is that they steal your brain.

I'm lucky in that I don't get them often - just four to six times a year I guess - and that I can mediate them by taking a few Advil the minute I know one is coming on. The fact that I get a warning is lucky too because not every migraineur gets a warning. I get what they call a halo - a visual effect that I can best describe as jagged, jangly colored bars of light that sort of fizz around my field of vision in a curved line. Really hard to explain. Maybe I can draw it someday. And animate it, because it moves. And it prevents me from seeing.

You know, I'm not going to re-read this as I go because that is too difficult and painful. I'm going to come back after this thing has passed and make visible edits to make sure you understand my meaning.

So my first tip off that I'm getting a migraine is that I can't see all of whatever it is I'm looking at. Faces work best. They're usually big enough with a familiar, regular pattern so it's easy to notice that the pattern is messed up. Then I close my eyes to double check. If I see a sparkly area with my eyes shut then I know I need to find my Advil.

Of course if you're going to take three Advil at one time you'd better do it with some food in you. This is where things can get tricky. If you have a banana hanging around that's perfect. Banana then Advil and then you can find something else to pad your stomach.

I didn't have a banana today so, first challenge, I had to use my hobbled brain to think of something else quick to eat. This is where the brain stealing comes in. I settled on a bagel. Then I had to think for a bit on how you prepare a bagel. Oh yeah, you cut it in half. How do you do that? You find a knife. Where are the knives? Oh yeah, they're over there. Cutting board. Okay.

Wait, this is taking too long. You need to find something more immediate. I cut the bagel and put in toaster oven. I still want the bagel.

Oh, yeah - I also have a croissant. I could have the croissant. Non-brain-stolen me would have just seen and chosen the croissant right away. See what I mean?

So while the bagel toasts I jam down the croissant. I would have liked to enjoy the croissant more while it was going down but time is short. If I don't take the Advil soon enough I can't avoid the migraine and then the sh!t really hits the fan.

Croissant down, I need to find my Advil. Oh.

There's none in the drawer where we usually keep it. That's okay, there's some in my purse. I never leave home without Advil or earplugs (longtime rock wife) Where is my purse? Uhm... Okay found the purse. What am I looking for now? Grey bag with pillbox in it. Oh yeah. Where's the grey bag? Got it. Where's the pillbox? Rummage, rummage. Got that. ADVIL!!!! Ta-dahhh! I down three and I can relax a little now.

Coffee helps with migraines and I have some already made. I want to warm it up in the microwave. How do I work this microwave again? It's different than the one at work and the one in Cambridge and it's different from pretty much every microwave oven there ever was because they all have completely different control panels. So I stare at the keypad on the microwave for a while until by chance I notice that the last person who used it left a perfect 36 seconds of coffee reheating time on the timer. Yay! I can just hit "start." Phew.

You know, this thinking thing kind of hurts. It literally feels uncomfortable in my brain to have to think.

All of that accomplished I can get on with making the rest of my breakfast. It no longer matters how efficiently I do that, what logic problems I fail while attempting it, because I've taken my Advil and that's the only thing I can really do to help the situation.

Because I've taken my Advil in time I won't get the pounding head, the pain of which makes me want to run out into the road in front of a logging truck. I won't puke my guts out. My arms won't go numb and curl up (I don't know why they curl up - it's really weird) I won't feel like I'm probably going to die in the next hour or so. It's even possible that I won't need to sleep away then next eight hours.

Hell, I'm typing right now. That's very impressive. I feel pleased with my reasoning abilities too. I can't prepare a bagel but I can construct a paragraph. Go me! I can't go back and re-read what I've written but I think it's going pretty well as written. I'm fixing the typos that spellcheck shows me as I go. Looking up at the big wads of text above that I've already written is overwhelming though. My brain won't go there.

At this point the halo is gone and I can mostly see everything. It's a little overwhelming to see anything though. It's like the aperture to my brain is too big and there's too much light and everything is too big to fit and it's stretching the inside of my head uncomfortably. I will probably have to go to sleep until I get over that.

Migraines make it really hard to concentrate on reading a line of text so reading is out. T.V. is out. Crosswords are out. Exercise is out (jiggles the achy head), using tools is out, doing anything that requires any kind of accuracy or concentration is out. DO NOT TRY TO BALANCE THE CHECKBOOK. That would be a laugh. Video games are waaay out. No looking at moving things on a screen! Bad! There's too much light everywhere. I might as well go to bed because otherwise I'll just have to sit here and do nothing at all with my eyes shut.

I get migraines when I relax. I had big plans for today. Big, helpful plans that I was excited about. I stocked up on food so I wouldn't have to think about what I was going to eat. (Why didn't I get bananas?) I was going to catch up on some business that I'd fallen behind on. I was going to make myself a checklist to help me evaluate each week whether I'm staying on track to stay sane and to reach my goals. (One of my goals is to determine what my goals are.)

This morning is lost. Good for nothing (though I like my blog post, I think) If I go back to sleep for a few hours I might feel well enough and get enough brain power back to be able to work on the checklist. Maybe I can do the business stuff early tomorrow morning or later tomorrow evening.

There is a temptation to blame myself for getting migraines. There's a temptation to think, "if you didn't let things get so bad that you got so stressed, if you were better at time management and set more realistic expectations for yourself, if you could just stay reasonably relaxed all the time, then this wouldn't happen. You wouldn't lose this time you fought so hard to find. You wouldn't need to fight for your time." Well I did the best I could. I don't see how I could have done anything differently. I just have to get through this and move on when it's over.

I'm trying to figure out a way to do things differently and I think I'm really close. A lot of things go into triggering migraines. Actually, I bet the barometric pressure today has a lot to do with it. Everyone has stress in their life. Everyone stores it in their body and manifests it differently. That's part of being alive. Even plants deal with stress. So I'm not taking on the blame.

I will take a nap though.

California Brunch

Brunch dessert

They have fancy sand here

California Breakfast

We're at my mom's house and boy, is her house full of great food. My breakfast has Uncle Sam cereal and yogurt under all that fruit. I could eat like that in New England too but it's much harder to come by fresh fruit of this quality there. 

Food-wise I've been just barely getting by lately. I just buy the least possible stuff to feed my face healthfully. Pretty much all I buy at the market is kale (or Brussels sprouts or broccoli) dried beans, eggs and bread.

(What's the deal with this Oxford comma thing? My school was all hoity-toity, self satisfied about not using one. I distinctly remember my teacher's exposition on it. I don't remember which teacher it was so maybe I'm making it all up. "Ultimately it doesn't matter which way you choose to do it as long as you are consistent. We do not use one here at NCS." That's how I remember it.

I have very strong memories of learning punctuation. It must have been very important to me. I rember being very confused about commas and latching with relief on the takeaway: when in doubt, leave it out. I have a lot of doubt. I don't always leave it out.)

Two parenthetical paragraphs. Who am I? Mini David Foster Wallace?

Anyway, we were talking about food. I also buy bourbon and pickles but that should be obvious from some of my recent posts. (Looks like I should also be stocking up on matches, if you catch my drift.)

Maybe I'd buy a better variety of more interesting foods if I was concentrating on life's joys. I've really been focusing on the duties lately. It's fine. I'm healthy. I'm getting a lot done. I'm learning a lot which is something that is very important to me. I'm even enjoying myself when I can. It's a low-key satisfaction-with-being-relatively-competent-as-an-adult kind of enjoyment. Sounds fun, huh? Well it's different and I like variety.

I don't feel quite ready yet to go back to variety in my food buying habits yet. Grief brings out austerity in me I guess. I'm still finding my way through this landscape of absent things. I feel like I need to focus and not distract myself with strawberries. Chocolate and booze (in moderation - I'm a middle-aged lady and can't process the sauce like I used to) are okay though. Chocolate is actually a necessity.

For now I'm on vacation at Mom's and I'm so happy to take advantage of what she's provided. Thanks Mom!

Control Your Punctuation, Maybe?

And another thing:

I was thinking about this while I was on the treadmill today trying to harness my mind into thinking about something useful while my body was busy doing something I wasn't especially comfortable thinking about: (double colons! Triple "thinkings!" That can't be good...) I was thinking* about resolutions and goals for the upcoming months. Like sticking to a budget and being tidier. It occurred to me that my resolutions and goals tend to be about me controlling myself.

Whoa Nellie! Control yourself! It's a slippery slope! Better watch it or you'll wipe out! As usual!

It occurred to me that maybe that wasn't such a good idea. Maybe it would be more fair, more reasonable if you're going to tighten up somewhere, to loosen up somewhere else? But where can a goofball like me afford to loosen up? I do not know. I'll have to think about it. Anybody have any thoughts?


*Another one!

You Cannot See

Today is the kind of day where you're walking down the street and your glasses channel the wind directly into your eye. Your eye then shoots out a stream of tears. You close said eye to disengage the tears (and to keep the wind out of it) and it immediately freezes shut. Yeah!

Breakfast

Traditionally it's steak and eggs.

Nothing Special Please

Things that are making me very happy right now: 

1) This week has nothing fancy and nothing special going on in it. I am SO excited about that. No parties, no events, no eating out.

2) It's going to rain tomorrow. Why does the prospect of rain make me happy? I don't know. Maybe because it won't be nine degrees out? It's likely to become a horrible mess what with all the snow that's already piled up out there (especially since it looks like it is going to be nine degrees the day after tomorrow.)  I'm not going to over-think it. If something wants to make me feel happy, I'm letting it.

Okay, I just remembered that the closing party for our show at the gallery was postponed (due to a snow storm) from two nights ago to this Friday. Something at least special - if not fancy - will be occurring this week. Sigh. I won't let it get me down. I just want my life back. I have things to figure out and by gum, I'm gonna do that! I have four ordinary days in a row to work with...

I am also rather pleased with my Grumpy Cat weather app.

All That And A Little Champagne

I'll admit it: I'm down in the dumps today. To my mind (and sense of superstition) that's not a good way to kick off a new year.

I tend to dress with symbolism. Here are the symbols I've chosen to help me out today:

The new "bralette" I found myself yesterday. It's day-glo green, not that you can tell from the photo.

My Charlie button, to honor my friend who I love, and my whammo earrings to give me strength and remind me of my goddess of a sister-in-law who gave them to me. It's nice to know someone like that has your back.

I've also got a selection of deep pink lipsticks and these:

(Photo taken on a moving train) for extra oomph.

All that and a little champagne and I'll probably make it through.

Girl Talk

A meaningless post of limited interest to anyone who isn't me. Just something I want to "get off my chest." HA HA HA! 'Cause it's about BRAS!

Okay, I guess I did lose A LOT of weight, particularly in the boob region because I don't have any anymore. No boobs. Now all my bras are huge and empty and crinkle like raisins under my clothes. I want to get rid of them all. Do people want secondhand bras? Maybe newer ones. I'll probably just toss 'em.

Anyway, I don't have (or don't want to spend) the time it takes to figure out what size I am now. Still, I'm old and saggy and vain enough to not want to go without. Gotta do something. 

I suppose I could get by with bikini tops until I feel like going through the rigamarole of solving my saggy mosquito bite problem. Maybe I could find myself some piña colada scented perfume and pretend I'm on vacation! So long, midwinter blahs!

It's hard for me to imagine getting midwinter blahs when I'm so excited to have my regular, not-Christmas, life back. I have projects I'm working on. I have experiments to do. My big goal over the next three months is to see if I can keep myself reasonably sane. 

My theory is that everything runs more smoothly if I'm sane. That sounds obvious. Think of all the undermining behaviors one gets up to when one is stressed out and feels constantly harried. Stress eating, impulse buying, watching too much T.V., otherwise self-medicating. It boils down to precious resource wasting: money, time, energy. If I can stay sane just look at all the everything I'll save.

But it can be hard to prioritize sanity. It's amazing how easy it is to put aside the simple things that keep me sane (like having enough time to myself or getting enough sleep) for accommodating other people.

It's going to be a big project. I will have to concentrate. I'll have to stick to my guns. I'm interested to see how it works out. So how could I develop midwinter blahs? I'm sure I'll manage. Everyone does.

Bikini tops under sweaters and fleece and down. Why not? It doesn't hurt to try. I love experiments.