I wish I could be as cool as you...

Oh, I am so not a cool kid.

Thursday night. Here I sit. Cheap desk. Cheap white wine - Simply Naked Pinot Grigio. Notebook, paper, and purple pen. Laptop. And loads of books. Poetry, philosophy, books on writing, books on names, books on tarot, books on depression. This is what I choose to be closest to me.

Cat scratching at the door. But I've locked her out because in here is my world of fantasy and there's no room for tigers like her. I only have room for loud music and words. Piles and oodles and heaps of words. Glorious words. Melodramatic words. Poignant words. Enthusiastic and insane words.

So, no, I'm not cool. I'm not at the club. I don't have a roomful of friends laughing at something I just said. I'm not drinking beer in a bar and watching the ball game. (Though I do have the updates flashing on my phone!)

Instead, I'm the slave to a vulpine muse. I'm tethered to a lighthouse full of people only I've met. And I'm happy.

So, so happy.

Solutions (Update #1)

Remember how I said I wanted to lose 40 pounds by my next birthday? Well, progress has been... progressing.

Tell me more.

Let's review the past few weeks, shall we?

Now that the boy and I are all moved in to our new place and I've gotten used to commuting two hours a day, I have been trying to focus more on my new fitness goals. It's difficult, but not quite as difficult as I thought it might be. Reason number one for that might be that I decided to give myself some rewards to work toward. More about these later.

My wonderful mother also sent me a FitBit Ultra! This little device is an amazing resource. Wear it during the day and it tracks how many steps you take, how many flights of stairs you walk up, how many calories you've burned, and how many miles you've walked. Wear it at night and it will tell you how long you slept and how many times you woke up during the night (a.k.a. how much you really slept). The Ultra model even gives you personalized messages (No donut!) as well as working as a clock and giving you a progress bar during the day to let you know how active you've been.It keeps all of this information so you can review it by day, by week, and by month. The FitBit has been a great motivator for walking a bit more than normal... Taking stairs instead of escalators... Get to bed earlier... I love it and can't recommend it more, although it is a tad bit pricey.



I've been keeping a food journal as well. Writing down every bite I eat, and as much of what I can drink that I remember. (Honestly, it's harder than you think to remember every glass of water.) I started out doing this on my phone with the FitBit app and the MyFitnessPal app - both of which will count the calories of food you enter. This has proved a bit too cumbersome for my tastes however and I have switched to using my aforementioned Star Wars moleskine. Another great motivator for leaving food on my plate and not reaching for the cookies I know are in the cupboard. It's also been a good place to keep track of my various moods, headaches, and work outs. I'm starting to see a serious relationship between how active I am and how good I feel. And I've noticed that starting my day with protein usually goes a lot smoother than starting it with carbs. Innnnnnteressting.

Today I discovered a local rail trail. Since it rained like the dickens this morning (and work got canceled) I went to check it out and ended up walking three miles through beautiful woods both rural and urban. Even shared a few nice words with a cute elderly couple. It was glorious! I think I'll start walking it every day. Maybe bring my bike down. Eventually start running on it. Tomorrow I'll go check out the other half and see if it's just as good.

If my scale can be believed, I've lost at least one pound so far. That's one down and many to go. My first reward comes when my scale reliably puts me below 170 every time. I'm going to post a separate page to keep track of my progress and rewards. Feel free to drop by with any input and/or encouragement!

So happy with myself today!

Progress (or, rather, lack thereof)

Holy dairy cows, the past couple weeks (read: two months) have been crazy.

I went through the whole moving process - that took about a month total of looking for a place, signing a lease, packing, moving, and now we're still in the process of settling in. I've given up two hours of my days to driving back and forth from work which is just fun.  

And I'm still struggling to write. I've been journaling a lot more... though not in my usual detail or with any of my usual - a-hem - flair. And obviously I've been neglectful of this blog (as well as two others). It's an uphill battle as they say.

At least I'm up in New Hampshire for the weekend. Wonderful family times can't be beat. Good for recharging, etc. I need it after this week in particular. I got stung by a bee for the first time in about twenty years. No anaphylactic shock, but my finger did swell up to a glorious size for three days. Cue me going into a Benadryl induced coma and losing a bunch of time. No writing. No working. No exercise. Zero progress - unless you count healing insect damage.

My motivation for everything in still high, though I feel pretty frustrated. I've been quite good about keeping my food and fitness journal (it's a Star Wars moleskine that I titled "How to Become a Jedi Like Luke Skywalker"). I've been writing something... almost every day. Even when it's only 100 words. And I've been thinking about my writing almost non-stop. I pulled out a couple of old books: How to Write A Damn Good Novel by James Frey and Bird By Bird by Annie Lamott.

They both, of course, have sections addressing the problem of writer's block. Typical stuff, but good to hear. It happens to everyone, blah blah. Don't let it stop you, blah blah. If you're a writer, you'll figure out a a way through it, blah blah. Mostly it's a matter of hitting your head on the keyboard until something falls out.

Anyway, that's what's up with me for now. What up with all of you? Any of you who stop by and read this at point or another, that is....

Solutions

Let's talk about something serious.

Ever since I graduated college, I feel as though I've been on a bit of a downward spiral in terms of my health.

I've always had (what I consider) stupid-weird health problems. I have anxiety-related nausea that can be crippling. I have poor blood circulation. My feet are flat. My eyesight, especially in the dark, is much less than perfect. I get migraines. I am prone to random bouts of depression. Two winters ago, I had vertigo for three weeks. Stupid-weird problems. I can deal with all of them with various degrees of success, but there is one issue that I absolutely refuse to put up with anymore.

My weight.

Looking at my BMI right now, I'm definitely on the dangerous side of overweight where you don't want to cross into the next territory. This number aside (which, after all, is just a number) for the past two years I have been feeling the awful effects of being overweight. I'm tired more often. My clothes don't fit. I hate how I look in pictures. I feel bloated. I have regular digestive issues that I had never had to deal with before. Etc etc. This is the first time in my life (since I was maybe 12 or 13) that I don't like the way I look, and I tend to go out of my way to avoid facing that fact.

The worst part of all of this is, of course, that it's entirely within my control and of my own doing. I mean, for the first year or so that my metabolism evened out from its post-teenagery blaze, maybe I could have a pass for figuring out what my new normal is. But now that it's two or three years past that? No more excuses. This is now a matter of self-control.

So here it is. I want to lose forty pounds by the time I turn 26 next March. I think this is a pretty reasonable goal. And I'm going to do it smart. Focus on eliminating the bad parts of my diet (Wendy's, I am looking at you!), and adding in a hell of a lot more exercise. That's my biggest problem, I think. I eat relatively well most of the time - though I could use a lesson in portion control. But I do not go out and sweat my ass off nearly often enough. I have blamed this on my job for a long time (which is peculiarly exhausting), but I don't want to do that anymore. There really is no excuse in this century with all of the infinite resources at our fingertips for not doing something about a weight issue if you have an issue with it!

Our new apartment complex has a pool - blam! I can do laps and other fun pool things without breaking a sweat. Good for after work too. There's also an awesome rail trail nearby that I can use for walking and running. I want so desperately to be one of those toned women running in a sports bra and compression shorts. I need to take advantage of my yoga and tai chi and bellydance dvds too. I might even give in and buy Zumba for my Wii.

At any rate, I stating all of this here because I want this to be a real and alive goal. I plan on focusing most of my energy on this as soon as we get through our move to western MA. I figure by setting a goal of losing forty pounds by my next birthday... that's August to March. I will be blogging about my progress at least one a month until then. I have all the confidence in the world that I can do this - but obviously I often have trouble adhering to lofty goals. I want this to be something I'm thinking about and trying to do every minute of every day.

Here's to being healthier.

Melancholia

My computer is a less than satisfactory tool right now. The battery is completely dead, so it runs only when plugged in - and with just a little tug,,, beeeeeeooop. Laptop down. Highly annoying. I have been wanting to buy a netbook as my primary writing tool for some time now (like a year or more), but I can't justify the purchase right now when we're about to move. Damn these less than well-paying jobs D and I have!

The past two days have been peculiar. I came home from work on Wednesday with a painful and incredibly itchy welt on the inside of my left knee. Benadryl didn't do anything but knock me out, so we went to the ER around midnight. Docs gave me a diagnosis of cellulitis, but preferred to give me a lon antibiotic regime just in case it's Lyme disease or something else unexplained. It was very painful to walk so I stayed home the past two days. Today things are looking up, swelling going down and redness finally retreating, but I still have a million other itchy bug bites to deal with so I guess I don't begrudge myself some time to recover.

(Though taking time off work is certainly not helping my financial woes.)

My sleep schedule has been all out of whack since the Benadryl/ER. That always leaves me with an odd feeling of unreality. I've also been a reading a book (which is very good) in which one of the main characters seems to be suffering some kind of mental breakdown - and all of the other POV characters have various levels of paranoia and flashbacks to abuse. Spending so much time reading that story has probably not helped my feeling of unreality.

I don't know why, but I definitely slip more into the minds of characters who have some degree of crazy going on. I find it compelling to read, and even more compelling to write. I suppose it might be because all of my darkest moments have consisted of me "losing it" in some way - feeling a slip on the grip of what's real, wondering if I can control my thoughts or actions, watching the world spin around me without me.

Today I'm having that feeling in a disconnected sort of way. Trying to gauge what my reactions to words and experience should be rather than just having them. Spending too much time in meandering thought. It's nothing that I can pin on a particular incident. I don't feel like there's anything I can do to make it stop. I just have to drift through with it until normal feeling floods back in.

Jeez, human brains are weird.

P.S. The book is called All For One by Ryne Douglas Pearson. I'm about 3/4ths of the way done with it, and it's a pretty fantastic little thriller. http://www.amazon.com/All-For-One-ebook/dp/B0044KM16I