Life At 40

Technically, I’m only 41 days into the age of 40, but this (at least from what I hear) is the year it all starts to fall downhill. I’ve also heard that the eyes are the first to go: that usually at this age, folks start to need to wear reading glasses or have some adjustment to their eyes. I hope and pray that mine don’t get any weaker. I’m already sight-challenged as it is; my range of clear vision extends just to my arm’s length. To need reading glasses would only be to add insult to injury and would in all honesty, probably qualify me for a Seeing Eye dog. Needing reading glasses would mean that I would have to get bifocals. And I don’t care how sophisticated they have made the lenses; the result is still the same: your eyes end up looking freakishly big.

40 is also the age where I need to watch my weight more carefully, and also decide to do something to get rid of the extra little person that I have gotten used to carrying for the past five years. I am not talking about my son (who is only 2), but about those extra pounds that I once heard were the equivalent of carrying another person. Right now my person is probably about the size of a gangly 12-year-old who’s going through growing pains. This is the heaviest I have been. Ever.

The weight factor is important because I have a family history of absolutely everything. Seriously, my ancestors on both sides gave me a load of things to worry about later on in life: diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, mental disorders, stroke, aneurisms, muscular dystrophy, and possibly some other life-threatening problem that just hadn’t been diagnosed when my ancestors died from it. And most of these factors are directly correlated to how much weight is packed on.

So it’s time to get serious about undoing all the damage I’ve done over the dinner table. It’s a whole lot easier to add than it is to subtract. Five years ago, I’d developed all these great fastidious habits that aided me in my weight lose journey, and I’d made such great progress. But five years is a long time, and it’s going to be an even longer road to get back to many of those positive habits. The only I can say that I have cultivated well is my commitment to drinking lots and lots and LOTS of water, as I talked about in my “Waterlogged” blog earlier this year. So now I guess it’s time to concentrate on formulating the next good habit.

Celebrating the 40 Milestone

I’ve come to the realization that I may be having a hard time with 40. As proof of this hard time, let me just say, I originally started this blog on 9/11. Then I retooled it again two weeks ago with a few updates, but still didn’t get it finished. Since three is supposedly an inherently lucky number, I’m trying again, and maybe this time, it will get posted before the end of the day. Last month, I embarked upon a major milestone--the marking of another decade. I turned 40 years old.

Initially, I was leading up to my own massive celebration that was to start 40 days prior to the big day. The idea was to give myself a series of small gifts, not only material things, but time well spent with others, before the big day hit. However, the death of my grandmother, who lived to see the grand age of 100, obliterated the celebration. She will be another blog altogether, just because she deserves that kind of tribute.

But because of her death, my celebration was toned down to just a couple of smaller events.

On the 5th of September, the hubby and I went on a karaoke cruise. Interestingly enough, I had purchased the tickets to this cruise at the beginning of August, and then totally forgot about them until 3pm that afternoon. After a mad scramble, Shanda babysat Ayden and we were off. And we had a great time; I even ran into one of my colleagues who was also celebrating early.

The next week, I stayed with my usual tradition. No birthday celebration would be complete without mentioning the Musketeers and the little brother. This year, I had to celebrate with them in turn instead of together. They were both at Jaspers, but one was on 40-Eve, with my DBBF and the other was a week later. We will rectify that next week for the next birthday.

On the actual day, I took off work. My hubby and son surprised me in the morning with roses. It was so cute when Ayden walked down the hall with a dozen white roses in his hand and said, “Here mommy!” After they left, I crawled back into the bed, woke up late, and got dressed to go meet the DBBF for round 2. The plan was to get up, and recreate the new habit of working out at the gym, possibly throw in a pedicure, spend a little time with my daddy, then have lunch with the DBBF, but that agenda changed. We ended up having a 4-hour lunch which consisted mainly of Milagro margaritas (note to self: find Milagro tequila) and appetizers. Then that evening, my hubby and I attended the open house at my son’s new daycare center. After that, my hubby and I came home, where there was a cake waiting for me. (I have no idea how these items remained in my home without my knowledge.)

Friday, I took off again. My mother-in-law dropped off a cake from my brother-in-law before I left the house. I finally managed to go the salon and get my toes done, where I read my Kindle and had a glass of wine there. Then in the evening, I enjoyed a nice quiet spaghetti dinner with my hubby and son with chocolate cake for dessert.

Saturday, I held class then went to a free makeover with Shanda and Michelle in Waldorf. After that, we went to the Applebees down the street and threw back a few. And as a cap to the evening, we went to a fight party, where my husband managed to produce yet another cake. I tried to leave most of it at the host’s home, but they have been so healthy that no one eats it, so we had a portion of another cake to bring home.

Overall, even though the birthday had to be toned down, I had a good time. Welcome to 40.

The Warm-Up

On her second album, Beautifully Human: Words and Sounds, Volume 2, Jill Scott has an introductory track called “Warm Up,” which is just a layering of sounds that a vocalist might use to limber up his or her vocal cords. It’s only a little over a minute long, and serves an introduction to the whole album. In a way, I guess this what this piece serves as because it’s my way of getting ready for the challenge that lies ahead. Next month, I’m starting the National Novel Writing Month (called “NaNoWriMo” for short) Challenge. The challenge is simple: construct a novel by submitting word counts every day for the month of November, culminating in at least 50,000 words by the end of the month. As such, I figured that I needed as much encouragement as I could get. So I invited a few more friends to my writing Facebook page to help in the encouragement.

There are those who’ve read my writing before and who have been hounding me to finish one book—just one. And I have to thank these people for their undying patience and faith in my ability to do so. And those of you reading this for the first time may be asking the same question I’ve received from those supporters: “What’s taking you so long?”

My first and most substantial answer (to everything really) is that life gets in the way. When I’m not writing it, I’m living it. I get caught up in the absolute busyness of life. And that makes the way I want to express the story change. In the past few years, some of my largest challenges were completing my Master’s degree, where I HAD to write daily on topics that were not my choice; marrying, moving, and having a kid, all within a two-year span; and teaching, where I get the opportunity to help others hone their craft. Most recently, the part of life that deals with loss has affected me profoundly, to where I’m just bouncing back out of the thick haze of grief. Somewhere in all that, the writer in me got lost.

The other substantial reason is fear mixed with a heavy dose of insecurity. Writing, while wonderfully cathartic most of the time, is also the process of baring one’s soul—turning a body inside out and exposing sinew and self to the world. Even though I write relatable characters based on people I’ve encountered—to the point where some of my friends see themselves as my characters—deep down, all those characters I create are facets of me: my thoughts, my aspirations, my anxieties.

On one level, I’m already feeling self-conscious. Compound that with the niggling thought that I’ve always had about my writing. There are millions of writers out there, those who are alive, and those who have left a living legacy. Who am I to add my voice to the symphony? It’s really only been in recent years that I’ve broadened my audience to beyond that of my best friend and allowed a couple more people to read my writing, even though technically anyone out there can read my blog. I feel grateful that when I do get the courage to expand my audience (usually at the pace of about one person per year), they display positive reactions to my writing, usually with the request for more. And this helps to validate my confidence a little. Ironically, as I was composing this piece, an Op-Ed piece from The New York Times popped up on the Facebook newsfeed called “The Op-Ed and You.” The line that attracted me to it provided the answer to the question I posed above: “there’s never too much good writing in the world.” To add to the answer, I saw another newsfeed from Good Morning America about The Waltons 30-year reunion, which just happened to be an inspiration for one of my favorite pieces I wrote as a freshman in college.

That’s why I write, and that’s why I teach writing. I believe in the power of words, and how they can transform an ordinary event into a powerful experience.

I hope you’ll continue to follow me as I venture out and take that leap of faith that will make me finish.

The Unseen Gray Hair

This blog is about aging. But as I was thinking about a title, I realized I wanted to shy away from using a boring or typical title like “The Signs of Aging,” or “You Know You’re Old When” (seriously, that’s the best I could come up with so far). But then I decided that I actually wanted you to read today’s blog, especially since I haven’t made a guest appearance on my own site since May.

Let me start off with this interesting anecdote so that you will know where I’m going with this (or at least follow along my rabbit-hole journey). A few weeks ago, I received a cryptic text as I was sitting in my car during lunch: “Hey! I’m depressed.” This was completed with a smiley face emoticon, so I knew it was serious, especially since this person rarely ever initiates texts with me; we now relegate our communication to friendly ribbing on Facebook.

Out of bemused concern, I replied to his text. Then impatient person that I am, when my depressed pal didn’t reply quickly enough, I called, only to repeat my text: “Hey! Whassa matter?”

His reply: “I found a gray hair—down there.”

I was as sensitive as I could be as I guffawed loudly in my car—at least the windows were up. But even through my laughter, I was now bemused and weirdly flattered, although I’m not entirely certain that I shouldn’t be insulted…but that’s another topic for another entry in the wonderfully distant future. It’s easy enough to guess the reason for my bemusement: who does that!? Hence, the flattery that even after all these years, this man would feel comfortable enough to relate that story to me...well, I won’t dwell on that either.

But I will say that I did promise him that he would be included in my next blog which, as you see, is a few weeks from its intended deadline. To add to his private admission, he nicely posted another sign of aging very publicly on Facebook, so I perhaps don’t have to feel flattered because this man has no real issue with full disclosure. The subject of his Facebook post: the prostate exam. To paraphrase, he lamented that he wasn’t even offered a movie and some popcorn by the doctor who…well, I hope you what goes on in prostate exams.

But our ridiculous conversations via text and Facebook spurred me to pursue a topic I’d been meaning to discuss for time anyway, and you guessed it: I mean some obscure signs that old age is creeping up.

My grandma always said that we adults once and children twice. Here’s the way I see it: I figure that the average biological age of adulthood starts at around 15 and ends somewhere around the mid-40s, give or take a few years on either end. How did I come up with this answer? The beginning of adulthood has to be somewhere around a post-puberty age, when voices change, hair starts growing in place other than the head, and when there’s a general idea about the height of a person. True, many boys tend to still be growing by this age, but this would only support my theory in terms of saying that men have a shorter span of adulthood than women (guys, please limit your disagreement posts to 100 words or less). Regardless of the actual age, in adulthood, people enjoy relative freedom: the future is just some vague distance away. We’re in control of our own destiny and for the most part, barring any over imbibing, all of over bodily functions.

But after 40, or even more accurately, approaching 40, things start to unravel. Muscles start to weaken, joints and cartilage both expand and get less pliable, and fluids start to dry up. All of this works in conjunction to turn that once virile adult body into a non-coordinated mass of skeleton and loose tissue. And depending on how much or little a person exercises, the process progresses either slowly or at a rapid clip.

The first signs are gentle. Maybe you notice that you can’t read words as closely as you once could, and you find yourself extending your arm back a little. But the sign that gets me is the change in bathroom habits. Once upon a time in adulthood, you find you could hold in your urine a little longer before you got to the destination (yes, it all comes back to the bathroom with me) and when you got there, you knew that you were in there for number 1 and number 1 only. However, what I’ve discovered is that muscles weaken around your bladder (in men it’s around the prostate and in women the Kegels) and that when you do get to your destination, you can sometimes be surprised about the bodily function that occurs. In the past year, I’ve noticed that my bathroom trips are most like Forrest Gump’s description of chocolates, or at the risk of being totally vulgar, you just never know when you’re going to get a chocolate-colored surprise. This is especially mollifying to me as a person who is skeptical at best about frequenting public bathrooms (those who’ve read my “Potty People In the House” know that I have my own particular bathroom issues and they’ve only exacerbated over the years). I’m confronting with the fact that foods that I used to be able to easily digest now send my system on a Rebel Yell roller coaster ride that results in a quick unanticipated disappearance.

It is not at all a comforting thought to know that I am once again entering my childhood state, although this time in reverse chronological order. One day, I’ll delve into a more serious adaptation of what this state is, but for now I’ll just leave you with this.

That same guy referenced at the beginning of this entry posted a pic with a two-year gap, and had on the same shoes, and possibly the same hat. Talk about a sign of getting old. Maybe he’s turning into that Texas gym teacher who wore practically the same outfit every year for picture day for forty years.

The Reinvention of Porn

Caught your attention, didn’t it? Yes, this is me making a racy entry…about the word porn. So for those of you who clicked on this entry in the hopes that I would be talking about the latest and greatest out in the valley, you have come to wrong place. This is merely a word nerd’s blog.

So, yesterday was a gorgeous day, and I don’t know what it is…well, scratch that, I do know what it is about a hot day that automatically makes me think of good food. First of all, I am a self-proclaimed foodie. If you were to look at my Pinterest page, you will see at least five or six boards dedicated to food, and one lowly board dedicated to fitness--it only has about six pins in it, as opposed to the 30+ pins I have in each of the food boards (30 being my conservative number: it’s probably double that). I even have one whole board dedicated to only desserts!

We’ll talk more about Pinterest at a later date. What I have is a typical case of what psychologists call association. Association is a learned behavior, and at a young age, growing up down the country with a large extended family that liked to gather at major holidays, one of my main associations is that on warm days that started to signify the start of summer, my grandfather would fire up his hand-made pit barbecue (it was a small brick structure). So to me warm weather has always been synonymous with a good grilled burger, or as I’ve grown up, a great steak.

Usually at work, I’m stuck back here in my windowless hovel, blissfully or painfully unaware of what the weather is outside. But yesterday, I made it out of doors (only because I had to go get an incomplete form filled out for final grading (BTW classes are over so I can dedicate my life to more mundane busyness, the topic of the next blog entry). But I made it out into the sunshine and it was a gorgeous day—the ones that only appear at the beginning and end of summer. The trees are freshly green, the sun was shining with nary a cloud to mar its imperfection, the humidity was low and there was a slight breeze wafting gently and making the trees whisper: It was the poetry of nature.

Amazingly, I am able to recall all this beauty retrospectively because at the time, I was merely bustling between buildings trying to get that paperwork completed in the 11th hour. The warmth of the weather seeped into my consciousness though, because when I returned back to my office, I found myself thinking about a nice juicy steak or burger.

And here’s where the original topic of this blog comes in. In my thoughts of that nice juicy steak or burger led me to the internet, where I just started typing in the URLs to various local restaurants and checking out their menus, drooling over the succulent pictures. Soon I had engaged in conversations with a few of my co-workers and realized I was watching food porn!

And today, as I look back at my activity yesterday, I contemplated how the word porn has been co-opted from its seedy, taboo, negative connotation into a whole new category that describes anything done to an extreme. I’m constantly telling my students about the mutability of the English language, and this word is a prime example of what I mean.

So as a word nerd, I looked the word up. The actual definition now, according to dictionary.com, is any type of media (“television shows, articles, photographs, etc.,”) “thought to create or satisfy an excessive desire for something, especially something luxurious.” And the sample definition was, “the irresistible appeal of food porn.” Look at how this word has morphed into something totally different than its original intent. Everyone pretty much knows that the word “porn” is the shortened version of “porno,” which in and of itself is a shortened version of “pornography.” The word and the practice of pornography are both pretty old, the word being coined around 1840, somewhere around the Renaissance era. Most people are familiar with the suffix –graphy which just refers to something that is recorded, either with words or pictures (think of other words like biography [literally the recorded account of a life] or photography). Porno- comes from the Greek word for harlot. Amazingly enough though, the shortened version of the word didn’t gain real recognition until the 1960s. No surprise there: in the era of free love, why not co-opt and expand those taboo definitions. The words “nigger” and “queer” underwent similar metamorphoses. The dictionary points out two very distinct characteristics, the first of which is perhaps a bit archaic and the second which has been transmuted (sort of). The first characteristic is the phrase “especially those having little or no artistic merit.” Not only would those in the porn industry object to this definition, but those who now have those expanded the definition beyond the second characteristic, “designed to stimulate sexual excitement,” and translate it into any stimulated excitement (ie. drooling over a web picture of a burger) could also say that what they experience isn’t looking at something vulgar and grotesque, but lavishing upon the beauty of something they love.

And even though that love of beauty is acknowledged, tacking the word porn onto anything gives it a pseudo-negative connotation. While we most of the time are rather open about our obsession, we also carry a small corner of secret shame or even guilt that maybe we shouldn’t like this thing quite so much. Words like obsession or addiction are peppered into our porn language. Even the word foodie was morphed from the drug addicted equivalent, “junkie.”

None of this truer than in the food porn industry that has popped up. Media have taken over the idea that food is a passion for many people. It’s not just Julia Child anymore, but food competition shows and entire networks dedicated to food, with shows ranging from meals to economize time or money to hedonistic Dionysian treks across the globe for “The best, biggest, or unique [insert food here].” I daresay the food porn industry has grown larger than its sexual counterpart, bringing new meaning to the colloquialism “do fries go with that shake?”

To coin a lyric of George Michael, “What do you call pornography?”

The Setback that Became a Setup

I was unintentionally inspired by one my students to scribble up this post. She was hoping for some writing assignments from me and I suggested, as I so often do to students (that reminds me of yet another task I need to complete), that she start a journal. One of these days, I will even pre-purchase little mini-journals for my class. I even gave her the link to my blog so that she could see an example of an online journal. Sadly, I had to give her the caveat not to laugh since I didn’t have a recent entry. And as there were supposed to be weekly entries, not justly monthly so that I can get back on my goal of writing and completing my novel this year, I figured I should give it the ol’ college try once again.

If you’ve read the April 15 entry “The Unsatirical Me,” you essentially know what I’ve been dealing with for the past few months. The good news is that since that health care plan meeting, my father has rapidly improved and returned to the land of lucidity. In addition, I adapted some organizational techniques that have helped me feel like I have some measure of control over things (which as we know is merely a cognitive illusion, but allow me to delude myself). The organizational techniques are lists: a list of the various costs associated with my father’s everyday recovering functions and of those items that I need to apply for various programs, from veterans’ benefits to cemetery plots; and a list of all the different tasks that I’ve accomplished to give me an idea of items that I need to follow up on. Managing my dad’s life has become a bit of a full-time job for me, where I wake up almost every morning asking myself, “What do I have to do for Dad today?” I have become a fulltime caregiver, and as I say to others, it is a role I was born to inhabit.

Why say this? Long story short, my grandmother was a missionary in church, and she always talked about service to others. She kept me well-informed and frankly, grounded. It is due to her guidance that I can sit here and type this today with barely any resentment or malice toward the hand I was dealt. I accept it and embrace it. Recently, my mother-in-law gave me a gem of knowledge: “instead of asking to be removed from a situation, ask for the capacity to handle more.” And more we shall receive.

Inevitably, we as children become caregivers sooner or later. Our parents get older, and as my grandmother said, “We are adults once and children twice.” I’ve faced some of my sooner in having to deal with my mother’s illness as a young child and having to confront a solution as an early adult, regardless of how temporary that solution became. I’ve watched my aunt struggle and ultimately succumb to an illness, and I’ve seen my grandmother, who’s lived to 100 and outlived 7 of her kids, slowly whittle away. But she’s still here.

Now, in my soon-to-be forties, I am confronting a much different issue with my father, watching him decline rather rapidly for a man who’s less than 70. This is with a full-time job, a part-time job, a husband, a house, and a 2-year-old son. And with thoughts of my mother and grandmother never far from my mind, not to mention a sibling, sister-in-law, mother-in-law, brother-in-law, and nieces to think about, there’s always a lot on my mind. Mind you, these six folks that I mentioned are not really my direct responsibility, but the physical, mental, and financial health of any and all of them directly impacts me. One niece, the one by blood is graduating from high school this year, and as my only niece, she is part of my responsibility. I‘ll admit, I feel like one of those lairds of old, where the head of family held that responsibility for their entire clan. As this branch of Floyd and Cooper, it is a responsibility my husband and I bear, because he is the eldest of his siblings, and because I am the more stable of mine.

I will happily admit that Sunday, I took a day off from being care giver. I was at my grandmother’s house, and had a good time just kind of relaxing and not worrying about what I have to do for Dad, or anyone else, save my son, who was with me. The relaxing part is that my mom takes it upon herself to do almost the entire side entrees and the desserts, asking only that one person provide the main meat and another person a secondary meat. I usually get saddled with the (not-so-great) burden of providing drinks. So essentially, it’s a day of relaxation until cleanup, and since there are usually a number of hands on hand, cleanup doesn’t take long.

Shaking It Up

Now that I’ve gained some clarity by writing about my problem (see my last post), I now feel I can return (at least partially) back to me. For the past month, almost all those healthy habits I have talked about have been thrown out the window. I sporadically still sprinkle food with flaxseed, and try to remember to drink copious amounts of water, but the truth of the matter is that it’s enough to remember to iron my clothes some days, much less keep healthy habits. Luckily, this lapse in habits has not caused me to regain those five pounds I worked so hard to lose, so I am encouraged to least try to get back on track.

My latest ally in the War on Weight is the smoothie/shake option. At the beginning of the year, two people in my office invested into the Nutri-Bullet shake maker, replete with the booklet. And while I struggled to remove five pounds, in about a month, they had managed to lose twice as much apiece.

In theory, this shake idea seems great, and at times, I’m almost tempted to give and try it out. But in practice, I know that the fifty-dollar investment will be a fad, because I have neither the time nor the inclination (mostly the latter), to go to the store every week or two days to buy all the fresh ingredients, toss them in a blender and take them out of the house each morning. To put it plainly, I suffer from an acute bout of kitchen laziness. After I get home from work, my closest aspiration to vegetation is to become a vegetable, preferably the couch-potato sort, or if you want a green leafy, to “lie like broccoli” ala Pretty Woman. Maybe this will change as the semester ends and I am no longer going to work six days a week and coming home after ten on Mondays and Wednesdays, but for right now, making a shake from scratch is not my idea of fun.

But I still like the idea of the shake and the whole liquid diet formula. The end result of the smoothie is a portable convenience for the busy lifestyle, which I undoubtedly have in spades this semester. It is for this reason that I keep six-packs of V-8, both veggie and fruit, in my self-made pantry at work, and the reason that I have invested both in Special K protein shakes and Naked Fruit Juices. I can grab and go, still get my nutrients, and not feel quite as run-down during the course of the day.

For instance, I am trying the Naked Green Machine; it was $4.99 for a 32-ounce bottle. Of course, you do not drink the full bottle in one sitting but I have drunk it throughout the course of the day, and I have to tell you, man I feel full! I did actually eat today as well, but not enough to explain feeling stuffed. I can tell that the juice had a lot to do with it. And while I still feel slightly sleepy from the beatdown the allergy season has been giving me, along with the nightly torture of not sleeping that my son has been giving me, I have every confidence that I’ll make it through the rest of the evening relatively well.

The Unsatirical Me

Writing is more than entertaining to me: it’s cathartic. I usually use this blog as way to just share funny experiences, but today I’m going a different route and just allowing myself to unburden what’s been distracting me for the past month or so. Unfortunately for you, my readers, this story may not have the satirical wit that you’re used to reading from me.

Where to start? I guess with just the plain truth. I am, by all accounts, one of the luckiest and unluckiest progeny there is. Both my parents suffer from psychological problems. This is of course, the unlucky part. The lucky part is that I personally have not suffered from any psychological disorder. This is not to say that I have not been affected by it at all. I believe that many aspects of my personality are a result of my upbringing with my mom and her condition. There are other lucky parts as well. Even though both had different mental disorders (my mom is diagnosed as schizophrenic and my dad is considered bipolar), neither are harmful to others, and neither are suicidal. Having researched this as much as I have, I have seen cases where the people who suffer from these diseases are much worse. The other lucky part is that for the most part, both of my parents are functional. I say for the most part, because each should be dependent on medication. What I’ve found out is that my mother can function without it, but that my father cannot.

This leads me to one of the major reasons I have felt like I was in some kind of heavy fog for the past month and a half. My father lapsed into one of his “spells” at the end of February. This is of course disturbing because it is the second such spell in the span of a year. Prior to this, my father had not had an episode in over ten years, thanks to a strict routine, and due diligence on the part of both his psychiatrist and me. What I’ve learned in the past two years is that rapid change is not conducive to my father’s health. To explain it simply, rapid change causes anxiety, and anxiety causes a chemical imbalance. And let’s face it: my dad, like me, has undergone a rapid change in the past three years.

You know my changes: kid, house, husband. Dad’s changes have been going from being my bestie to just my dad. In addition, he moved from his apartment to essentially a room in a basement. While he is no longer responsible for paying that many bills, he is also no longer head of household, and moreso a tenant in our home than he ever was in the apartment. He lost his job, partly because the new owner of the station was putting him through rapid unnecessary changes in the hopes that he would quit or trip up and get fired. The latter ended up happening, and it triggered his first episode at the end of 2011 and into the next year, causing him to miss the first Christmas in the house and Ayden’s first birthday party.

As is and was always the case after Dad’s return, it takes me a bit of time to rewarm up to him. I find myself looking at him strangely, wondering if he’s fully recovered. This was the case when he returned in 2012 after such a long time without a bout, especially since it took an extraordinarily long time for him to recover. But he did, and our relationship improved.

Enter this year: a week after attending my grandma’s 100th birthday party, he started to decline. By Friday, I was packing him in a car and trucking him off to the hospital for another stay. I thought that this would be another semi-routine stay. I could not have been more wrong. My dad had a medical scare while he was there. Whether it was due to the hospital’s neglect, I cannot say, but my father was transferred from the psych ward to the 9th floor because of a kidney infection, then down to the 4th floor cardiac unit after coding due to low blood pressure, then to the fifth floor before being released to a nursing home for rehabilitation. After all this, the original problem he went in for was not resolved, and on top of that, my dad had to start dialysis treatment, something we knew was going to happen in the distant future, but that brought into immediate relief with his last hospital stay.

He is currently still in this rehabilitation center, and they have not done anything to help his psychological state, other than to give him an incorrect diagnosis. This of course is pissing me off because first of all, I feel like my hands are tied since his psychiatrist won’t come out there and since he is not fully medically stable, and since no one from the psych team seems willing to talk to me. I feel that if I don’t keep rolling and pushing and needling and showing my face (and sometimes my ass) to these folks that what I need to happen will not get done and that my dad will end up rotting away in this facility.

I have a Care Plan Meeting with a team of professionals from the hospital. I have every intention of showing up with my own Care Management Team: my aunt and uncles, who have been instrumental by being my ears and eyes when I don’t make it over there.

Just the Flax Ma’am

Once again, I’m writing about those healthy habits I’m trying to incorporate in my latest War of the Weight. By the way, so far I have conquered five pounds, thanks I’m sure to the Nike + Workouts. I am now on Week 4 and am no longer vehemently talking back to Alex after every set. Yay me!

Today’s topic is flaxseed. I have to give credit where credit is due One of my friends posted an article on Facebook on how to get rid of belly fat. Personally, my answer for him was to give up the beer, but a man has to have some vices, doesn’t he? But anyway, I took the time to read his article post from my phone, and one of the suggestions was to incorporate flax seed into your diet. I’d vaguely heard this somewhere before (probably Dr. Oz), but after I read the article, the suggestion to use flaxseed started popping up everywhere, and I actually started noticing this fibrous grain.

Admittedly, when I started this entry, I didn’t know very much about the stuff, so I had to take a brief break and hit the Wikipedia page for some quick knowledge. Turns out flax is one of the oldest grains out there, and its fibers are used in making linen. In addition to being an edible grain, it is also used in wood finishing products and some paints. With its various uses, no wonder it is useful as an industrial sweeper of your colon.

I also read up on its shelf life—which is a good thing since I found out it can go rancid. This is a pretty crucial piece of information to know, especially since you are almost forced to buy this stuff in bulk in 20-ounce containers at the health food stores. No, sadly, flaxseed does not come in small spice-sized containers where you can sprinkle it across your food like a salt shaker. The reason for this could be that the recommended dosage for the product is 1-3 teaspoons per day. And at $10 per container, you want to make sure that it hasn’t gone bad. The problem is that I wouldn’t have any clue how to visually tell this.

As I’ve noted in a previous blog, (“Funny Bunches of Oats” on 2/25/2013) some flaxseed resembles little black bugs. This is what I’m assuming is referred to as brown flaxseed. There is also a yellow type, and there’s really not much differentiation about which one may be healthier. And there are actually a few ways you can ingest flaxseed: either whole (the little black bugs or the yellow ones which resemble sesame), ground (which resembles a kind of coarse corn meal), or oil (drops or pills). I went with the ground, as I am not found of seeds or nuts.

The best equivalent for flaxseed is probably comparing it to Metamucil, without the benefit of the orange or lemonade flavor. The truth is flaxseed does not have any flavor to it at all. As such, it is relatively easy to hide in foods. And that is exactly what I’ve been doing. Ever since I purchased it, I’ve been subtly using it in the foods my family consumes. And so far they are none the wiser (my husband has yet to subscribe to my blog so it will remain a well-kept secret for a little while). I started gingerly by just adding a teaspoon to Cream of Wheat, but eventually I got bolder and more creative, adding the full dosage in dips, sauces, as breading for my chicken parmesan, and as a binder for my cheese mix in my lasagna. And I’ve not only fed it to my family, but to friends as well. So in essence, I am surreptitiously getting everyone a little healthier. My evil master plan is to next year make the grand announcement that I’m going to be adding flaxseed to all our meals and listen to the grown folks complain that they don’t want any of that stuff in their meals. Then BAM! I’ll spring on the fact that I’ve been doing it for a year and watch their faces drop to the ground.

Week of Weird

By all accounts, the past few days have been odd and unusual to say the least. Unfortunately, this series of odd, unusual, and unrelated events is culminating into a ridiculously odd manic Monday for me, in which I feel like I’m doing a whole lot, and not accomplishing much of anything. I suppose if I really wanted to be accurate, the strange events began a couple of Wednesdays ago, when the Washington Metropolitan area was shut down by snow. I use the term snow loosely in this instance because while I was assaulted with big ugly flakes at my home, my job received rain. I pinpoint this particular Wednesday because the school’s closing kept my students from turning in their rough drafts (apparently it kept them from doing them too, but I digress). Since this was an accelerated class that was due to end the following Wednesday, the weather screwed up all the deadlines. And since it was an accelerated class, there was NO wiggle room. So my students ended up having to turn in two essays and take a final exam on the same night. To their credit, they accepted their fate without too much grumbling.

Fast forward to the following Wednesday. Almost everyone took the exam, and most people turned in papers. Usually on exam night, I stay until the bitter end to give students the last possible minute to turn in their papers. On this particular night, I neglected to do so, and as Murphy’s Law would have it, this is the night a student slipped a paper under the classroom door. Thursday, I go to the OB/GYN for my checkup (which is a blog in and of itself), return home and just take a nap until it was time to go get my son. Friday, I end up talking to my sister-in-law for the better part of TWO HOURS during the course of the day, but other than preparing to visit my niece in Atlanta and helping her with her senior class trip, nothing else adventurous happened.

Then comes Saturday. It’s starts off normally enough; I drag my tired tail out of bed to get ready for my Saturday morning class. Strangely enough, I had all my materials ready. The elevator was out, so I had to truck it up the stairs to the third floor (which is actually six flights of twelve stairs). Luckily, I had time to catch my breath before anyone arrived. Everything’s goes fine in class, in spite of the fact that there is no internet connectivity for my class, which usually happens at least once a semester. I even manage to get a lot of grading done for the lit. class. I finish my office hours, gather my stuff, and go downstairs. I’m getting in my car when I realize that I do not have my purse, so I end up climbing three flights again to go back into my part-time office to retrieve it.

Having settled in my car again, I make three calls, all to besties. I find that it's easier to converse with people on the commute home. My third call to my youngest godson’s mother went something like this:
Her: You still going? You want to meet at my house at 3?
Me: Huh? I was just calling to see how you were.
Her: We’re supposed to be meeting for a play date today. You know--going to the Children's Museum. Only we’re not going there anymore. We’re going to the National Aquarium and everyone’s meeting at my house.
Me: Oh, okay. For real, I had forgotten that we were supposed to do anything. I’ll try to get there by 3. [It was 1:50 at this point.]
Her: Okay, my cousins and one of my cousin’s friends are coming and [our other friend] is coming too. So we have a larger play date.
Me: So what’s the address to the museum?
Her: Oh, I don’t know where it is, but you can just follow us when you get here.

I get home and my son is taking a nap. In defense of his father, since I didn’t know we were going anywhere, he didn’t know we were going anywhere, so our son didn’t have his hair cut, nor was he bathed our dressed to go out. I ended up leaving my home at 3:10 and naturally, no one waited for me. Luckily, I did get a text with the address and made it there on my own. For those of you who don’t have a clue, parking is a nightmare downtown. Whenever I go on excursions like this, I prefer the Metro Park ‘n’ Ride. While I got there in record time, using Google Maps GPS because I have this phobia and habit of getting lost in DC, I spent at least a half an hour looking for a parking spot because I refused to pay the $13-15 for the parking garages. My perseverance and block stalking paid off because I ended up getting a parking space right in front of the Federal Triangle Metro station, which admittedly was two blocks away, but there is a shortcut by walking through the Ronald Reagan Building (if you don’t mind going through a security checkpoint).

The entire time I talked to first one, then the other of my two girlfriends, both of whom I met at Olive Garden. We often go to karaoke together as well. One was doing the same thing as me, and stalking around for a parking space, while the other (whose idea it was in the first place) was lost…with a GPS! She ended up in northeast DC instead of northwest and had to backtrack. I had gotten out of my car and was walking DC with my young son, making our way to the Aquarium. It was overcast, and of course plop! Down comes a fat raindrop, followed by another, and another, so that by the time we see the Aquarium sign, there is a small steady rain falling. When we’re about 20 yards away, I get another phone call: “The museum is closing.” Wow, so no one managed to actually get the museum’s hours before making the plan? As I’m on the phone now debating on how quickly we can get inside, I see my friend’s cousins and think that I am joining a class field trip. I see three adults, and 7? 8? 12? kids in tow. They had arrived first to the disappointing news, and had the same idea as me to head into the Reagan building. Mind you, none of us had umbrellas. As we’re cramming our way in to get dry, my girlfriends suggest we drive to Applebees on the other side of DC to go eat with what I’m gathering is a small army of people under twelve. By this time, I and the major herd had made it into the lobby and we were all in full protest mode about driving to Applebees when DC offered so much variety. But in the interest of saving money and not wasting food, I suggested we at least venture to somewhere nicer in Alexandria where we could have a nice dine-in option. Hops was the followed suggestion and we made our way over there.

In spite of the fact that we actually didn’t do anything but go out to eat with a bunch of kids (all total, we sat at a table for 22), we did have a good time. Hops has great food for kids and adults at a very reasonable price, so everyone walked away satisfied.

And that was Saturday. On Sunday, my mother-in-law called me to borrow some Vanilla. This was a good thing because I wanted her to come over and watch Ayden later that evening so that I could go dry some clothes. Our dryer is on the fritz and manages to toss clothes around without actually drying them. We’ve called and gotten it serviced once at the cost of $100 and we weren’t trying to continue to invest in making another service call just yet. Since my husband is finishing his last class for his Masters’, he had gone to work, so he couldn’t watch Ayden. Turns out that just yet turned into ever because my husband called and said we’re buying a washer dryer today. I did convince him that we only needed the dryer right away and that the washing machine was fine for right now. I’d been investigating dryers the week before and already had one saved, so online I went and placed the order. It’s going to be delivered Tuesday. In the meantime, my hubby came home around 7pm and took two bags for himself and one for me, just to get us through the week.

Also that day, I attempted to finish grading my papers for the lit. class and just turn in the grades. The problem with that is that I had students who had missing work. Besides that one student with the missing research paper, I had at least four others who had missing assignments. Two I had to fail because on top of missing papers, they missed a good portion of the course by either not showing up or showing up extremely late or leaving extremely early, so they were missing participation and quiz grades. The other two attended every class and really put effort in, even though they knew the workload was more than expected. One had taken literature the prior semester. The other had taken me for two prior semesters. I find that I am incredibly sympathetic toward those I feel are trying, perhaps even to my detriment. Because here I am today, patiently waiting for three students to send me what I need not to fail them. One student was at work and called me back; one student has her phone going straight to voicemail and didn’t respond to my message yesterday; and the student who slipped her paper under my door has yet to respond. As to not hold the other students up, I went ahead and put their grades in, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to hear from both my department secretary and Admissions and Records about my missing grades because technically, I only have a 48-hour window before I have to turn in final grades.

Other events of that day: I decided to cook lasagna for dinner, and I spilled a quarter of a bowl of cheese on the floor, to which my son said mess, and helped me clean up by eating leftover shreds from the kitchen floor. I guess it was a good thing I’d spilled the cheese because as I was blending it—a mix of cheddar, Parmesan, mozzarella and romano—I was wondering what I was going to do with the leftover. Moot point once I spilled it.

But by far, the most interesting incident happened at around 5am this morning. I managed to get locked in my own bathroom! Okay, lemme explain, before (or while) you’re cracking up into gales of laughter. When we bought our house two years ago, the inspector put in the report that the door sticks because of a hinge. When we moved in, for security reasons, we changed all the locks, and for aesthetic reasons, most of the knobs. Somewhere along the line, we forgot to account for the laundry room door, the master bedroom closet door, and the master bathroom doorknob. And we just left them as is. A few months ago, my husband and I noticed that the knob was sticking. And we acknowledged to one another that we were going to have to fix it before it became truly problematic. As you can tell, we did nothing more than repeatedly make that comment, even as the sticking became more frequent. Our solution: not to close the door all the way. This morning at five, our son woke up and in turn, made sure we both knew he was up. So I go to the bathroom, and wisely do not close it all the way. Don’t ask me how I managed to do this, but on my exit of the bathroom, I manage to go back in and somehow close the door completely. Grabbing the knob, I twist once, twice, thrice, seven times to no avail. Lamely, I have to knock on the door and wait for my husband to do the same twists, again to no avail. He then has to go to the hall closet for a screwdriver and disengage the knob. Yet the straight piece that bends in when you close the door (I just Googled it and found out that piece is called a deadlatch) was still stuck. Apparently, the little brass round knobs are not terrible expensive because the deadlatch is constructed mostly of plastic, which my husband had to break in several pieces before he could remove the entire knob. We now have a nice gaping hole in our bathroom door, which will hopefully soon see the proper knob as replacement.

The whole Saturday playdate and this morning’s lock-in incident of course meant that I forgot one very crucial item I needed for tonight, and that is my flash drive that contains my syllabus. The good news is that on Friday, I had photocopied almost all the first day materials I needed for tonight, so the only thing that was missing is my syllabus. Of course, I had not placed an alternate copy on Blackboard and had no backup copy available (note to self: copy some materials to hard drive at work). But again luck was with me as I remembered I had sent a PDF copy of this semester’s Saturday class syllabus to one of our department secretaries for copying. Of course, I couldn’t remember which of the five secretaries I had sent it to, but I was able to sort it by attachment and search the approximate January date. I opened the PDF file, copied the syllabus into a Word file, reformatted for some consistency, and had to leave off the calendar (whew, that sounded like a lot of work!) but in the end, desired result achieved, and I at least have something they can read along with as I lecture. Not a bad recovery if I do say so myself.

Now if only those students would hurry up and get their things in!

The Originally Re-Duplicated Blog “Toxic Shock Syndrome”

Apparently, I liked this blog so much, it had been reincarnated a few times, so bear with me if you’ve read it before. Read it again if you like because in order to make it available, I had to copy it from a Note Pad file and then remove all the line break quotation marks and old HTML formatting script. But really, it was no trouble. I’ve also included a few new notations [in brackets like this]. I also did some minor tweaking of the original to satisfy my English students who might complain about my habit of switching to second person, something I constantly tell them NOT to do.

Originally Re-posted on 1/7/2010 with the title “Retro Thursdays: Favorite Blogs”

There are some of you that may think that this blogging/writing thing is new, but in fact the only thing that’s new is the fact that I’m posting it on FB for a little added exposure. So for those of you new to reading my material, and for those of you who just plain missed it, today I’m going to institute a new feature to my blog, and that is sharing some of my older material, which will include reposting some older blogs. Don’t worry—I won’t torture you with recycled material every day, just on Thursdays for now, and this probably won’t be indefinite, but we’ll see. My reason for doing this is twofold: one, it gives me a chance to walk down memory lane, and two it means I don’t have to drag you with me. This new blog site makes it difficult to pick and choose which blogs you wish to read and since I’ve been doing this blogging thing a long time (around 6 years from my closest estimate). For the sake of clarity, we’ll just call these blogs Retro Thursdays; the majority of them have come from my Yahoo! Blog site, but there are others that have been scattered here and there throughout the cyber universe.

But enough talk, here’s my first repost and apparently it’s one of my favorites because I actually reposted part of it in the past. [I am nothing if not consistent.]

For those of you who don’t know by now, I have a strange fascination with writing either on the subject of menstruation (and all the symptoms associated with it), or the bathroom. When I say the bathroom, I don’t mean the standard run-of-the-mill-doing-what-you’re-supposed-to-be in there, but the social etiquette deviants. As an example, let me include for you one of my pieces that I submitted for syndication (of course I have not yet been picked up yet, but keep hope alive people!). [Seriously, still…keep hope alive.]

For your reading pleasure:

Toxic Shock Syndrome ([originally composed] Summer 2007) [It’s hard to believe this building has undergone a renovation and a separate bathroom renovation, and I can still manage to have the same set of issues.]

No, I’m not referring to that small print that’s included on Tampon boxes (I offer my automatic apology to any guys reading this since I know that any reference to that “woman thing” makes you turn away in disgust. But here’s a hint: we do too [even when we are handling our own woman thing]!)

What I am instead referring specifically to is my reaction to people who insist on using their cell phone in a public restroom. The other day, I happened to be casually handling my business, when in the next stall, I heard the telltale sign of someone checking their voicemail. The worst part of it was that she had the voicemail on speaker. While I understand that we all have busy lives, couldn’t she have found a more appropriate time to check her messages? Perhaps after she washed her hands and got out of the bathroom?

The voicemail girl isn’t the only potty faux pas I’ve come across; there was the woman who decided to have a full-fledged conversation in the adjoining stall, and then there’s the person who decided to skip the waiting period and eat while in the stall (that’s a completely separate issue that I refuse to further address [especially in light of how disgusting I told you our bathroom can be]).

As for the conversations, isn’t there a point where a person has to consider this a severe breach of both bathroom and cell phone etiquette? This applies not only to the person on the other end of the phone, who has to endure multiple toilet flushes, but for that unsuspecting person in the next stall who knows there’s someone else in the bathroom besides the person that has similar business.

I don’t know about you, but personally, I am by no means a fan of public facilities anyway. The presence of another person in what’s supposed to be a place of sanctuary often subjects me to all kinds of restroom paranoia. Without getting into too many details, I will say that how much time I spend in the stall, as well as what kind of noises can be heard from my stall are thoughts that occur to me when other people are in the restroom. I also take no pleasure in anyone else’s auditory performances, which for some odd reason also seem to echo in bathrooms. The logical part of me knows that the other person is not in the adjoining stall with a stopwatch, or even worried about my business when she is tending to her own. It, however, does not prevent me from attempting to rush through my necessary roughness as splash free as plausible.

After all, it is rude to interrupt someone on the phone.

Waterlogged

Probably one of my most ambivalent habits that I have adopted over the years is the habit of increasing my water intake. When I first moved from my rural environment to the city, drinking water was difficult because I was used to true spring water, literally from underground springs, not the treated stuff I was subjected to here. But I made an adjustment by switching to bottled water and investing in a filtered water pitcher at home. Once again, my water drinking was back on, although not to the capacity it is now.

Of course, I’ve always know the benefits of water. My 100-year-old grandma is a living testament to the power of water; she frequently told us growing up that she always starts her day with it. I’ve always found over the years that the more I drink water, the less shiny my face becomes during the day, and the less likely I am to get any acne issue. In addition, sufficient water keeps your muscles and joints lubricated in a sense, where you aren’t as sore after working out. Of course, it’s also good for your kidneys and your bladder, and the more colorless your urine is, the more likely all those internal organs are functioning properly. In fact, I’ve found that if don’t drink the proper amount of water, my sides where my kidneys are located will start to ache.

Last year, I even found out from listening to The Yolanda Adams Morning Show that the more water you drink, the more it increases weight loss by eventually flushing out the fat cells, making them in effect skinnier. So in an effort test that theory, I started drinking copious amounts of water. With the increased intake of water, I also feel the increased output. On a proper hydration day, my bladder is better than a cuckoo clock, and I find myself going to the restroom almost every hour to the minute. This is where my use of the word ambivalent comes in, not because I have an ambivalent relationship with water—I happen to like drinking it cold, room temperature, or hot—but because I feel ambivalent about the immediate after-effects of water, and that is the need to go to the bathroom more frequently.

When I am at work, I would love to have the physical attributes of a camel—able to drink large amounts of water without going to the bathroom. Do I have that ever present phobia of public restrooms that claims others? Not especially. In fact, I think there’s something rather comforting in the anonymity of a public restroom.

I do, however, have a very specific problem with our public restroom here at my job. For those of you who don’t know, I work at a public community college. I’ve come to the foregone conclusion that we have some of the nastiest female creatures here. Or at the very least, some of the nastiest creatures of the female species inhabit our restrooms.

I understand that women frequently don’t sit on the toilet in public restrooms because of some phobia that our butt cheeks will touch the place where some unknown person’s butt cheeks have been. I get that. And some clever inventor also understood that phobia and invented the disposable toilet seat cover. Why, oh why then is it that I can go to a restroom for women and find all manner of misfiring? I would love to assume that this misfiring comes from standing over the toilet in straddle position and aiming long distance into the bowl. To me, this seems to create more problems with the whole idea of backsplash ricocheting onto our clothing and ourselves. Women are not anatomically built like men, who can aim their pee away from them.

The whole misfire phenomenon is bad enough with number 1, but the day I saw number 2 splattered on the wall was the tipping point. I’ve even suggested that we be allowed to put some additional signage, complete with illustrations—a stick figure with boobs and an anatomically correct toilet would suffice—and arrows that lead to use of the preposition IN, not ON, or AROUND. So far, the facilities management folks have only laughed at my proposal.

As a result of wanting to avoid the restroom, I wait until almost the last possible moment before doing The River Dance. Sometimes this backfires when my favorite stall (the oversized handicapped) has some sort of filth. Then I’m forced to squeeze into the smaller ones. On the rarest of occasions, all three are foul. By then, it’s oftentimes too late to change my mind and go upstairs to the private staff restrooms, so I’m usually faced with the dilemma of having to foot flush, or worst case scenario, wipe up someone else’s pee (I refuse to even contemplate messing with anyone else’s number 2).

I even have other problems with public restrooms that far supersede this post. I’ll post that later as it was previous post from years past.

After all that, I take back my statement. I most definitely have a phobia. I don’t think I’ll drink my water until I get home this evening.

What I Really Need

Okay, so I missed yesterday’s deadline, but in my defense 1) I gave you two last week and 2) we had this REALLY huge March snowstorm that shut down the entire Washington Metropolitan area. Okay, okay, so the storm wasn’t HUGE in all areas. In fact, as one Facebook colleague noted, some areas only got rain or slush. For my area, there was snow coverage. Big fat wet flakes fell until about one o’clock where I live. And to be quite honest, it wasn’t an attractive snow. I wanted to take a picture of my back yard, but the snow fell so unevenly that the left half of the yard was covered in this pretty picturesque Robert Frost poem substance, while the right side seemed to fight back against the snow and show its craggy existence (who knew that I would get to use one of the words from a Scottish romance novel for my backyard). So the scene overall kept me from whipping out the camera-phone. Now that I laid bare my very good excuse for not posting yesterday, I’ll most on to today’s post. Back to talking more about my health and my weight loss quest. Currently, I am sitting here eating my oatmeal (the subject of my last complaint) with the knowledge that all the dieting in the world does me no good without the one thing I need. What I need can be summed up in one simple word: exercise. I know this for several reasons. Let’s just start with the most recent: the newly re-turned over leaf. I have spent months of scarfing down oatmeal and increasing my water intake, only to NOT GAIN any weight. The bad news is with just the food routine, I’m not losing any either. Four months ago, I decided to get moving again; while my summer two-evening a week boot camp had increased my flexibility, not being able to go anymore was no excuse for not re-incorporating any form of physical activity. Even though my mind decided four months ago, my body didn’t engage in the conversation until two weeks ago when I started working out to the Xbox 360’s Nike Fit Challenge Game. I had originally purchased the Xbox 360 Kinect for my husband as a Christmas present, and one of the purchase options came with the Nike Fit game. Great idea! I thought. Maybe this is something we can eventually do together! So I bought the system, game and all, and the game remained unopened until that fateful day two weeks ago. It was a Saturday, and I was uncommonly restless after coming home from teaching class. My son and I went down to the basement, and I started cleaning up to Usher’s videos. Then the cleaning became dancing, and the idea came to me that I needed to do some coordinated movement. And the forgotten game came to mind. On went the console and here’s where the real story begins. The Nike Fit game is designed to be completely interactive. Gamers, or fitness nuts, get their choice of either a female or male virtual trainer. After some ridiculous time spent Googling, I’ve managed to come up with some back story on the actual people these trainers are modeled on. The lady trainer is Marie Purvis and according to her Website “Not Your Mom’s Workout,” she’s a trainer extraordinaire who specializes in training overweight women (her words for real). The guy’s name is Alex Molden and he’s apparently a former NFL player. I chose Alex because I can much more readily accept a man barking orders at me over his feminine counterpart. He introduced himself to me, but since his virtual form has been torturing literal me, I had long since forgotten his name. And apparently, most gamers choose the trainer of the opposite sex (I read a few reviews too). One of the first problems I encountered with this was how to position the Kinect portion of the game so that I would have more room to jump around, or even be “seen” by the sensor. In the end, I had to put the Kinect sensor on the edge of the television screen. The entire time you’re playing the—dare I call it a game?—Nike fit, you are inundated by the typical video racing game music, nothing actually catchy like the Usher I was listening to earlier. Since this is a Kinect model, the screen “reads” your body image. As if mirrors or pictures weren’t bad enough, you get see yourself pixelated on the television as blue (or sometimes orange or white) blob—at least that’s how I saw myself. And for it to be a blob, it’s surprisingly accurate, while I couldn’t quite see any cellulite dimples, I could tell EXACTLY how round my midsection was (really, it was like looking in a virtual fun mirror). Then Alex took me through a rigorous workout that I was soon to find out was only the assessment of EXACTLY out of shape I was (and according to my virtual blob the shape was a very large oval). Alex then came up with a regimen and had me commit to three days (his virtual self is kind of cute so he talked me into it). This commitment was for three days a week: Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday for 19, 23, and 19 minutes respectively. And that Sunday he was referring to was the next day! But I figured sure I could commit to 19 minutes. This was, of course, a total setup. What Alex fails to mention is that those 19 minutes don’t actually include the warm up or the cool down. What he also fails to mention is that some the exercises aren’t merely time based but form based: if you don’t do the exercise correctly, you are literally stuck in his virtual workout until you complete something that resembles what he is demonstrating. Finally, one of dear ol’ Alex’s biggest omissions is that his workouts are kick-ass workouts. Granted, the Candi of five or six years ago would not have had as much trouble with the paces that were being set, but the Candi of TODAY has been talking back to virtual Alex about his grueling workout while flailing through at least half of them. He starts off by demonstrating the exercise in proper form. My virtual blob is only blue when I’m in the right position; until then, I turn some type of toxic orange. After I’ve adjusted, the drills begin: • High knee jumps: This is like jogging in place, only you have to pretend that you are a Clydesdale. I usually do well for about 15 of the 20 seconds until start feeling my entire body try to reach my knees: stomach, boobs, etc. • Jumping jacks: about the only exercise I can pull off for the entire time. The only problem is that my arms get cut off during the jump and Alex chastises me about my form. • Side hurdles: I have to jump sideways over two in the direction of the arrows. The major problem with this is that the left jumping space is occupied partially by my couch. The other problem is the jumping high enough with my feet together. I constantly hear the thump of not jumping high enough. In the end, Alex has adjusted me to one hurdle. • Leg confusion (not really called that but the result is the same): Apparently Alex does not yet realize that I do not have the required coordination for this exercise which is composed of lunges followed by squats, followed by jumping lunges and jumping squats, all in 20 seconds. • Bounce around on one leg in a square (again, (not really called that but by this time I’m just staring at Alex with slack-jawed disbelief): By the time I’ve balanced on one leg, the exercise is over. • Split decision: Virtual panes of glass are put up in different arrangements and your task is to avoid hitting them. I can barely manage to avoid bumping into walls in reality, so when I heard the first tell-tale glass shatter on screen, I knew I was in for it. • Dodgeball: Apparently, you do not know that I was traumatized by this sport in elementary, grade, and high school. So when I see a bunch of balls zooming at me on a screen, I tend to freeze up. It doesn’t matter that the red bull’s eye on the screen is supposed to help you find where the next ball is aimed; I apparently can only walk into them. • Mountain climbers: Really Alex? Getting into plank position is hard enough, and you expect me to actually MOVE after I get there? • Any drill that requires me to get on the floor: immediately sabotaged by my son who finds this is the perfect moment to play jungle gym with me in the lead role of gym. He has crawled under my plank, bounced on my leg lifts, and rolled over when I’m on my side. Screen blob me stays orange most of the time. These are only examples of a few, and to his credit, Alex tries to keep it interesting with occasional encouragements: “Way to adjust your form”; “You nailed that one”; and “You’ve reached your personal best.” The personal best is easy when I progress from zero to one. When I do something better in that Pavlovian way, my blob turns white. At the end of the drills, Alex even has the nerve to actually ask me to repeat some of his drills, and at this point, the screen prompts you to either say “Let’s Do It” or “I’m Done.” Usually, my screen choices usually stay up with that music looping over and over again as I catch my breath long enough to actually scream “I’m Done!” The one time I did “Let’s Do It,” I truly learned to appreciate that 48-hour interval in between workouts, because my knees let me know their true feelings the morning after the extra doing. Overall, I do see myself improving: I can now cross my legs and touch my toes without falling over (I seriously did one time), I managed to not get hit by three dodgeballs one time, and I hear less glass shattering during split decision. Best of all, I managed to lose five pounds.

The Choice Is Yours

I previously decided that I would post blogs once a week on Wednesdays. This a good proposition to make sure that I don’t fall behind on my blogging. But I’ve decided that I’m not going to impose a limit on myself. At the bare minimum, I’ll submit by Wednesday, but if I find that by Wednesday, I have something else to say, then I’ll just post twice—or three times, or however often I feel like it. While I’ll always keep in mind that imaginary audience of fans that I soon hope to develop (who are more than likely just to be friends when I decide I’m ready to share the permalink with them), blogging is cathartic. As I tell my students, any story comes from a writer’s need to share something. And today, I’m feeling particularly needy. Today I started work off kilter. I was almost a half hour late. And I could sit here and play the blame game with a hundred different reasons as to why I was late: • My husband turned the light off in the bedroom so I overslept. • Traffic was backed up on the beltway. • I was stuck at two cycles of the same light when I got off the beltway. • I got stuck behind a school bus that made four different stops. • I got stuck behind a slow dump truck. I could even come up with excuses that are focused on me: • I cooked a large meal and then worked out too late last night and was tired. • I had to stop for gas. • I was already late and had to stop for my usual morning coffee and run back into my car to grab my wallet. But the truth of the matter was that I made a choice. I made an entirely conscious choice this morning NOT to get up at 6:15, or 6:25, 6:35, or three other times my snooze button went off with my phone. In fact, my active choice was to remain in bed. My husband was gone, my son was sleeping peacefully beside me, and that bed just felt good. Not just good, but DAMN good. And so I made the choice to not get up until 7:10, the time when I am normally dressed and prepping my son to get to get dressed. As a result, all those other chain reactions (bullets 2-5 in the first list) happened. Sure I did have to stop for gas this morning; stopping last night in all that ridiculous weather was not an option for me. Normally, when things are out of my control, I say “oh well” and chalk it up to the Lord making me avoid some calamity or horrendous accident. And that very well may have been it, but today I don’t think that was it at least not by itself. Because I do have control of two things: my body and my mind. And today they dictated my actions in a negative way, keeping me doing one of the things I am supposed to do, and that is to be to work on time. I remember spending the weekend with my mom and grandma recently and turning on the TV to this television evangelist who’s featured in Virginia on Sunday mornings. He was dressed in khakis and a button-down shirt and was completely casual on this stage set that you would think was for a comedian or a play. He was so interesting that I ended up watching his sermons back to back. And his final one was a question: “Are you taking responsibility for your life, really?” The “really” was emphasized with a pause, and he used the story of Adam and Even explaining to Lord why they’d eaten the apple. Adam said Eve told him to do it, and Eve said the serpent told her to do it. The evangelist’s point was that neither of them took responsibility for what they did, and as a result, all the generations after them to this very day are inherently separated from the face of God. My goal is to get closer.

Devotion and Motivation

Two things. First, sorry that I skipped last week, but my entire household caught some kind of bug. No, I was not entirely impervious to it as I usually am and ended up feeling a little rundown, what with the holiday weekend, my grandmother’s 100th birthday party, my son getting sick at the beginning of the week (I now know that seeing and feeling beans that are thrown up are among the grossest two things ever) and my husband getting the same virus at the end of the week. I will definitely endeavor to at least complete two blogs so that I can release one immediately and time release the other, or at least stay one week ahead to kind of buffer this kind of mistake from happening again. After all, I won’t continue to have a somewhat steady, if imaginary at this point, readership if I can’t manage to maintain a current blog. I can’t have you depending on my “Unchained Thoughts” megablog or shortly lived “More Unchained Thoughts.” Second, I know that the next series of blogs was supposed to be about those habits I have changed/cultivated toward being a better me, but two more pressing themes came up. Today, in an effort to stamp down my work email into a more manageable beast, I endeavored to clean out my inbox. This in and of itself is a monumental feat because besides the fact that I have twenty plus emails respectively from The Chronicle of Higher Education, Dictionary Word of the Day, and my spiritual Word of the Day, navigating through Outlook, while seemingly more organized than GroupWise, is proving more difficult. Outlook doesn’t have the same sense of comfort (a sign of getting old is often being uncomfortable with change), but in my defense the college has had Groupwise almost as long as I’ve had a desktop computer at work. Today, I was determined to slay some of my email dragons. I now have only 262 pieces of mail in my inbox, which pales in comparison to the 1000 plus that I’m sure I have in my Yahoo! account. However, I do have two gmail accounts that I manage to keep rather clutter free (less than 20 in the inbox). It’s part of one of my yearly goals of de-cluttering my environment and the sub-goal of completing something almost every day. Last week, with my family’s illnesses, I barely completed anything with the exception of two books. It’s almost the end of February, and it’s time to kick it up a notch in the area of goal fulfillment. But back to the point of today’s blog. While I was rummaging through my email, I kept coming across two definitive themes. The first was to keep the romance alive in my marriage. And truth be told, the romance should not even be anywhere but with us. But I think last week’s illness left something more than fatigue; it left a void because while he was sick and I was nursemaid to our son, we weren’t communicating. And one of the things that my husband loves to try to drill into my brain is the fact that communication is key to any strong healthy relationship. So today’s theme was just to imbibe a little impromptu love note into my husband’s day to say that I appreciate him. It all started with coming across one that he had written me back in November that was in my inbox. I saved it to a more permanent locale on my flash drive. Then I finally opened the presidential inauguration slide show. I’m telling you nothing is more inspiring than seeing the genuine love that our president and first lady share. Even though they were in a crowded ballroom and their pictures were being taken to share with the world, they were in their own private bubble of love when they shared that dance. Next, I came across a bunch of emails from The Nest that thematically talked about 15 things to do before having kids, activities couples could do together, and how to keep the relationship fresh. I’m happy to say that we did accomplish a lot of those 15 things prior to Ayden. I’m still considering what kind of activity we can do together (while I would love to do cycling, the reality is that the lazy sport of bowling was more our speed), even though at some point exercise will be involve. As for keeping it fresh, one of the suggestions was a love note placed inconspicuously for your mate to find. After that, I listened to a Yolanda Adams Morning Show Point of Power segment that talked about the roles in marriage. And finally, the inspiration for what I could do came from my husband himself. He called to ask me if I had any notebook paper. A few minutes later I came up with the idea of writing a love note and slipping it in between the pages for him to discover at some future time, whether that’s at his meeting today or some other day. I like the fact that it was handwritten, and I realized that this note was one of the few times he’s actually seen a lot of my handwriting, so this can and will not be the last time I write my husband a handwritten note. Hmmm…maybe a week’s worth of notes my do the trick, especially in light of the fact that he has not found the first and still brought me a nice huge lunch. The second theme for the day was fitness, which really is tying into the theme that I’m working toward. This weekend I started the Nike Fit program that is under the auspicious moniker of “game” for Xbox 360. And let me tell you, nothing lets you know how out of shape you are more than seeing a digitized outline version of yourself on screen. Add to that the fact that you’re in workout gear, and you really (or at least I really) look humungous. Saturday, I started with the fit test, where this handsome avatar motivated (and I use that term loosely) me to push as hard I can to see where my fitness level was. After his “assessment,” he gave this mini-pep talk about making a small commitment to three days a week, with a 19/23/19-minute schedule that consisted of two days (19 minutes) of cardio and one day of strengthening. And it’s set with the short-term goal of one month (four weeks). Realistically, I know it doesn’t happen overnight: I’m not going to wake up skinny tomorrow, and that I didn’t get this fat quickly, so taking it off won’t be fast either, and that I have to start thinking of this program and any other regimen that I set up as a long-term commitment to be better and stay better. But my mind’s eye is saying, “Come on fat! Melt off! Shouldn’t I have lost a pound after a month and a half of cutting calories and two days of jumping around in my basement?” Unfortunately, it is my scale who has given me an emphatic no. Again, good old realism is saying, you know it’s not so much the pounds but how your body feels and how your clothes start to fit. But that mind’s eye is shouting for realism to shut up and show some results. Which finally leads me to today’s other theme inspiration. First I came across a Washington Post “Lean and Fit” segment that I’m subscribed to. I only read these sporadically, and usually just for the recipes. But today I read the full article about the 50-fitness guru who wrote a book that combines the physical and spiritual health and motivation. Naturally, as a book nook, I located her book on Amazon, read a few pages, and added it to my Wish List. This spiritually holistic approach goes right in line with one of my other goals for the year of reading the Bible in One year. The biggest message I received from this is to keep your motivation going strong and not give. No, the journey will not be easy, but it will be worth it. To reinforce this, I also opened up a life coach blog email that I again seldom read or let sit in my inbox until I feel compelled to just delete it. But this time, I opened and read it, and what do you know, it was the same message of keeping up motivation by starting small habits one at a time and mastering that before moving onto a new one. The life coach even quoted the very fitness guru I had read about this morning. These two messages are further affirmation that I am on the right track with life in general. Now I promise that my next blogs WILL tell you those small habits that I’m mastering.

Funny Bunches of Oats

After much much ado, here is my first blog dedicated to the habit changing that I’ve been doing as of late as promised. I think one of the reasons I keep hesitating with this blog is that oatmeal is so BORING. But it has become my most necessary of evil. These blogs will not necessarily be in the order in which they occurred but more by the lifestyle impact they may have had. Some will be grouped together, while others will have entire monologues dedicated to them, like this one. Even though I have a title for this blog already, if I had to give a subtitle, it would be My Ode to Oats, or more accurately My Odiousness to Oatmeal. In fairy tales and fables, it is known by an almost pleasant name, porridge. To me, it is no fairytale food and should be known by its corporal punishment moniker in nightmarish tales: gruel. I will fully admit that I have never been fond of oatmeal in its most natural form that I was introduced to by Quaker. As a child, my mother boiled the oats in water which enhances its gruel-like texture. I would find that no matter how much sugar I dumped into the offensive glob that sat in front of me, it would never make me desire to eat it. I would cringe whenever my mom went to the store and pick the serious old man in the black brimmed hat over the smiling guy in the white chef’s hat that symbolized Cream of Wheat, which I love. Now there was a guy with credibility to my young eyes—he had on a chef’s hat for goodness sake! How much could a man dressed like a minister know about really good food? Aren’t they more interested in abstaining from the pleasurable pursuits in life? The invention of the Quaker Apples-n-Cinnamon instant oatmeal packet slightly adjusted my thinking as a youth because it was something quick and easy that I could fix for myself (without the microwave oven).Therefore, that flavor and only that flavor, helped me to steadily ingest oatmeal (once my mom found something you liked, she stayed with it. For most of my adult life, I have studiously avoided oatmeal like it was gruel. I’m a habitual breakfast skipper, so it was easy to shun old fashioned oats. Even when I did break my fast with a morning meal, I either went to the no-cook convenience of cereal, or the polar opposite of a full breakfast that included pancakes, eggs, and breakfast meat. Clearly, I was not worried about cholesterol. I’m still not worried about cholesterol to this day, but I was slowly reintroduced to the concept of eating it by my son of all people. He LOVES oatmeal, and so we buy the instant packs in bulk and send some to the babysitter. When I decided to embark upon my newest battle (see “I De-Clare War”) I kept hearing from various sources that it was good option to promote weight loss. In truth, the flavor of oatmeal isn’t that bad, but as is often said on Food Network, we eat with our eyes, and the primary problem with oatmeal is that it just doesn’t look good (unless it’s shaped into a cookie). I’ve even ventured outside of the apples and cinnamon into maple and brown sugar and the other one that tastes exactly like maple and brown sugar (I think Quaker calls it cinnamon and brown sugar). The only flavor that I have lingering animosity toward is plain oatmeal. What I’ve done to make it more palatable was to add fresh blueberries or bananas, but even that has not been enough to disguise the gruel-like taste. Then, in an effort to help reduce my oatmeal animosity since every time I made a bowl, I would make a sarcastic comment about it, my coworker suggested I try a different type of oatmeal. She even nicely gave me a few packets to try before I buy. My first thought upon opening the package was why are these oat flakes so HUGE? In fact, I think my exact thought process was why does this oatmeal look so oaty? (Okay, I know oaty is not a real word but it should be.) This oatmeal also happens to have flaxseed already in it, which in whole form, as my other co-worker pointed out, resembles small black beetles, giving you the illusion that the oatmeal has gone bad. (Flaxseed will be a future topic of discussion). Surprisingly, however, this healthier oatmeal tasted just a good as the Quaker I thought at the time. I tried maple and brown sugar and even pomegranate, which I thought would be disgusting, but was again, rather tasty. It turns out that ironically, this more healthy for you oatmeal, called Good Oats is actually better than Quaker. After a week, I returned to Quaker and found myself disappointed with the tiny undistinguishable oat flakes and dust that Quaker had to offer. So while I will continue (at least for the meantime) to buy Quaker for Ayden, I have decided to fully commit to more adult oatflakes. And I may not even complain about them as vocally.

I De-clare War

There’s an oft-used cliché about struggling with weight. Well for this year I have decide to wage an all-out UFC, gladiator-style, take-no-prisoners, last-man-standing war. Admittedly, the battles have been occurring for years, with resurges of war as I went through various diet and exercise stages. In addition, the weight has indeed tipped the scale (excuse the pun) in its favor for the past five years in light of the added schoolwork, relationship, teaching, home, marriage, baby, and the just general busyness that causes the lapse in healthy habits. At first it was the cessation of exercise, then the stopping for something quick to eat on the way to class. After that it was the stages of dating where we went out to eat. Surprisingly, I stayed at my healthiest during my pregnancy out of the fear of gaining too much weight. But ironically, it was postpartum that I gained the most weight since I was no longer on dietary restriction. Almost since the moment of Ayden’s birth up until May of last year, fat had won out over fit. Last year’s catalyst to retake on The Battle of the Bulging Butt and Gut was brought on by none other than my impending wedding day. Realistically, I knew that I wasn't going to shed massive poundage before the big day, but I could at least become the best me I could be. I ended up joining my job’s fitness boot camp on Monday and Wednesday evenings after work. In addition I ended up reincorporating some old habits back into into my daily routine, along with some new ones. The next few blogs will be dedicated to those habits that I've picked up. By the time my wedding came around, I hadn't lost but five pounds which I promptly regained on the honeymoon. But all was not lost since I lost ten after returning from the honeymoon. Go figure. I have yet to add exercise back into my routine, but I do at least plan to work on that next. That ten pounds that I lost from the previous remained steady without the exercise. so while I'm complaining about not losing ONE SINGLE pound this year, I suppose the bright side is that I haven't gained one or more either.

The Envelope, the Drawer, and the Ladle

“It amazes me the amount of time that can be wasted doing totally stupid but suddenly necessary tasks.” This was my Facebook status of a few moments ago. It’s actually a shame that my first blog after so many weeks should be about this, especially since I have a few really great topics lined up for the next few days. But this waste of my time was so monumentally stupid that it suddenly became blognotable, which, now that I think about it, is an excellent title for my new blog series that I just thought to create about a moment ago. It started with an envelope and drawer and ends oddly enough, with a ladle. (Kind of C.S. Lewis-like in the title. Notice?) It’s tax season and my new husband and I have been debating over whether to file separately or jointly. So this week, I’ve been running numbers for my separate tax return to maximize my refund. Yesterday, my hubby found out that he would be ineligible to claim if we file separately. As divine interventions would have it, a colleague of ours whom I found knows an old friend of mine came and my husband asked her casually if she filed separately or jointly. This colleague said something wonderfully profound: “we are supposed to be one.” This implies in all things, even taxes. Hit with that fresh perspective, I am prepared to forge ahead with the joint returns. My hubby had brought me his paperwork early in the morning with the caveat to not lose it. I scoffed and said that of course I wouldn’t. It remained in an envelope on my desk for the majority of the day until I was considering leaving the office for an extended period. This is the part of the story starts my spiral into absurdity. I (haphazardly I admit) tossed the envelope in my bottom desk drawer and quickly closed it. The problem with that brilliant move is that the envelope wasn’t completely IN the drawer, but resting on top of it. When I closed the drawer, the envelope who plausible disappeared I had scoffed at was nicely jammed behind the desk drawer. Of course this drawer couldn’t be one of those nifty removable drawers. No, these drawer casters are solidly bolted, so all I could do was say a four-letter invective as I tried to reach my hand between the small 11/2 inch-gap in the drawer. There had to be a solution, so I looked around my office for something I could use to dislodge it. First came the wooden ruler. Then went the wooden ruler as it slipped out of my fingertips into the same spot as the envelope. Spotting nothing else in my desk area, I made my way to our office kitchen where I checked the drawers for some utensils. You can see where I’m going with this now, can’t you? I found a serving fork and a ladle and tried the ladle first. I lost the ladle to the drawer even faster than I did the ruler. So at this point, I had three objects stuck behind the desk drawer and my last ray of hope was the serving fork. The good news is that I managed to get the object that started all this mess out relatively quickly by using the fork to slide it under the drawer. Then miraculously, the ruler came out of the bottom with the same ease. But the ladle…that was a different story. At first, I was tempted to just leave and get back to it another day, but if I’d been able to close the drawer, it probably would have been shoved to the back forever. Besides, the drawer wouldn’t close. After numerous tries, I did somehow manage to dislodge it using both the fork and my index finger and doing an awkward Operation (board game) shimmy up the side gap in the drawer. Total time wasted: almost a half hour.