Project Heather

2012-02-25T21:08:00.000-08:00

Last night I was out until 4am. This is not a sentence that regularly crosses my lips, and on the rare occasions when it does, a new Harry Potter midnight release generally plays a part. But nope, last night I was drinking jack and coke and rocking out to a punk band in Santa Barbara, without a Horcrux in sight. And you know what? I am no longer 25. Just in case I had any doubts, I have been made acutely aware today that 25 was a full decade ago. You know what else? Crazy people sure do love me. I must be wearing some kind of perfume: eau de crazy. I'm not surprised anymore when random people will come up to me in the grocery store and start telling me all their crazy stories. That happens regularly enough that I expect it now. But I don't expect it to happen at a punk concert, when I'm half drunk.

So the fun starts off when we're waiting outside for the Velvet Rose to open. Doors for Lagwagon open at 8, the poster says. It's 8:30. No open doors. And I'm freezing my trendy butt off, getting crotchety and frustrated because in my day, when a poster said the doors would open at 8, the doors would open at 8, dammit. And we'd walk to school in the snow, uphill both ways.

A homeless guy walks past the line of us, asking if anyone has a quarter. When someone gives him a quarter, he then take a play out of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying and tries to flip it for a profit. Only he must have missed a few days of that lesson because his offer isn't at all favorable to himself. He offers $2 to anyone for a cigarette. It goes from, "does anybody have a quarter," to "i'll give anybody $2 for one cigarette." The 7-11 was selling packs for like $4, so if he could have saved up a bit more, he'd have been able to really be set, but I guess that's how the rich get richer and the poor get lung cancer.

Anyway, so the doors open at 9, and I immediately hit the bar. It's been a long time since I've been drunk, what with trying to get preggo, and having a husband who goes to AA. He's going to drive home, he's cool with me drinking, so jack and coke it is. Only thing is, I forgot that I'm not 25 anymore. There was a time when I could pound those things. But my head started spinning on the first sip. Well, I'm a cheap date, I think to myself, and follow my hubby up to the balcony, staggering along the way, marveling at how the disco balls are so shiny.

You know what one of my favorite things to do is? Ok, before I say, you have to promise not to judge me. Because I don't get out much. So humor me.

One of my favorite things in the world is peeing when I'm drunk.

You know why?

Because:

1) You're generally in a club where there is loud music, and you go into the bathroom and it's nice and quiet, though you can still hear muffled club noise.

2) You sit down on the seat and everything slows down for a second. It was all spinny before, and now it's just like, "woah. I'm in my own little cubicle, and it's all in slow motion."

3) Generally it's warmer in the bathrooms.

4) There's usually makeup in club bathrooms, and it's fun to play with makeup when you're drunk.

Ok, so I had my fun drunk-bathroom time, and I'm standing on the balcony watching the bands, when this crazy lady comes up and asks me if it's ok to smoke pot up on the balcony. Then she says, "well, not legally, I mean, but do you think it's ok?" I tell her that the security guards have been coming around every 10 minutes or so, so if she can do it quick, she's probably ok. She says, "ok. Do you have any?" I didn't, much to her disappointment.

Then I turn around and some older guy wearing a Lagwagon shirt is going around asking everybody who they're there to see. Everybody looks at him like he's nuts, because he's wearing a freaking Lagwagon shirt, but we humor him. "Lagwagon," we say. He goes on to the next person. Then he circles back around and pokes me on the shoulder. "I'll give you $20 for your chair." There had been a bar stool behind me, which I wasn't using. I was like, "you can just take it," because I feel weird selling stuff that's not mine. "I don't take anything for free," he says, and pushes a $20 bill into my hand.

Damn, I just sold something that wasn't mine in the first place. I wonder if this is how Mitt Romney feels when he leverages companies he doesn't own, and then sells them for a profit to pay his investors. Man, I should be a hedge fund manager, I think. I clearly have a knack for it. Anyway, his $20 bought me another round of drinks, and I spent the next hour spacing out.

Then my Drunk Inner Nerd came out.

When I went to my Sr Prom, it happened to be timed to be the week before all the AP tests, right? So I thought nothing of having a bunch of flashcards stashed in my beaded clutch to study during the down times, like waiting in line to get pictures taken, right? Makes perfect sense to me.

So I'm always prepared with a book or flashcards or anything else that will make my Inner Nerd happy. I leaned against the back wall, pulled up my kindle app, and read The Spectator, a British news and politics magazine. Specifically, I read an article on Rupert Murdoch's new Sunday newspaper he just started; the Sunday Sun. And I read about the LibDem/Tory coalition government falling apart. In a club, with really loud punk music blaring. You know how people say that when you get drunk you just become more like who you really are, because your inhibitions are down? Well, I clearly am one hell of a nerd, then.

Oh, and then I started postulating on the social implications of a mosh pit; the primal urges that a mosh pit satisfied, and what type of person is drawn to a mosh pit in general. I wasn't talking to anybody in particular. I was just talking about it to whoever would listen.

Then, because I'm not 25 anymore, I start to pass out. I nap right there, leaning on J's shoulder. I'm going to start a new trend. Napping in clubs. You know how in New York there was that restaurant called Bed that served you dinner on a bed? I'm going to start a new club: Nap. For people over 30. It will feature live music by bands popular when we were teenagers, and after every few songs, the mosh pit will be replaced by a big comfy bed with lots of pillows and comforters. Girls will remove their uncomfortable shoes, and you will be able to buy pajamas if you want. Everyone will curl up and cuddle with each other for 20 minutes while the bartenders clean up and restock the bar; and the band, seeing as how they are older too, will join in and we'll all nap together. Then we'll get back up, the girls will have fun time in the bathroom while the boys buy us drinks, the mosh pit will resume, and everyone will play and dance and rock out for another 20 minutes. We'll do this until approximately 1am, because no one should be up after 1am, unless they have insomnia.

Oh, and I'm so proud of myself because I avoided the greasy pizza they were serving to all the drunk people, though I pined and longed for it all night. It looked so disgusting, the ex-frozen pizza swirling around under the heat lamp, the cheap cheese glooping up and dripping down the sides, the grease wanting to be shot directly into my veins to soak up the alcohol. But I stayed strong, and just ate a Power Bar on the way home. Yay for willpower, even in the face of total impairment.

Two Highlights from the Brit Awards

2012-02-22T19:01:00.000-08:00

Last night the 02 Arena hosted the Brit Awards, the UK version of the Grammy's, and two things need to be pointed out:

1) Host James Cordon (he's famous for playing Smithy on Gavin and Stacey, and I totally love him) cut off Adele in the middle of her acceptance speech for Album of the Year so the Blur could play. She gave the crowd the middle finger. MIA gave everyone the middle finger at the superbowl halftime show, and you'd think that the world was ending from the reaction. I haven't heard much about Adele yet, but maybe nobody pays any attention to the Brit Awards. Anyway, why would you cut off Adele for Blur? When was the last time they won any awards? Like, 2000? I was still getting carded when I bought cigarettes. Which I didn't do that often, but, you know, I was trying to be all Bridget Jones and everything. True story: I really did buy Silk Cut cigarettes because it was the brand that Bridget smoked. It didn't last long. Unlike coffee, I never could get used to the taste.

2) This song beat out Adele for Song of the Year. Apparently they're the UK version of Big Time Rush, but not nearly as good (says the girl secretly harboring a crush on Kendall)

An awesome way to spend a Saturday

2012-02-16T16:33:00.001-08:00

Last Saturday I was in San Francisco singing the choruses of the St. Matthew Passion.

If you don't know it, you must start this video while you finish the rest of this post:

It's awesome stuff! Really gets the blood pumping.

Every year the American Bach Soloists put on a free choral workshop. They always pick music that has something to do with their current season (they're doing the St. Matthew Passion at the end of February), you sign up in advance, they email you the music, and then you get to spend six hours singing Bach in a gorgeous church with 250 other people. Their Director/Founder is awesome, PLUS he's from Pennsylvania (like me), so I bonded with him talking about pretzels. What more can you ask for?

The organ of the church where we sang

Also, I have to give a shoutout to my 4square app because it helped me find a really good sandwich place in Little Saigon. And the tips even warned me that the proprietors didn't speak much English. Another win for social media!

And you know what I love? I love that the San Jose airport has a meditation room. Every airport needs a meditation room, as I first discovered last spring when I was in a rental car shuttle in Oakland and saw a baby who was exactly the same age that Baby T would have been, and when I got off that shuttle at the airport, all I wanted to do was go somewhere quiet to cry, away from the Auntie Anne's and the magazine stores. I went to the end of the airport, to the furthest gate, buried my head under my jacket, and cried until it was time to board the plane. I thought then that every airport needs a quiet place for people, and San Jose has one. Even though it's a little further from my office than Oakland, I'm going to fly there from now on. Plus, you can get to the car rental area without having to take a bus now. Rock on, San Jose.

Hey, I'm starting my weight loss journey again. I kind of hit a plateau and quit there for a little bit, but not anymore. We're taking a little more time off before we try to get pregnant, and I'm going to use that time to lose another 20 pounds. I was reading Fitness magazine yesterday, and there was this bit about how, if you spread out small treats, you don't feel the need to binge. That makes sense to me, I think. Then I read the example: "have a few squares of dark chocolate every other day, to stay satisfied," they say. Seriously? How big are these squares?? You think a few damn squares of dark chocolate every other day are going to keep me from going on a binge? My God. Who are these people who are satisfied with a few squares of dark chocolate every other day, and what do I have to do to become one? Do people like that even exist? Or is it an urban myth, perpetuated by Fitness Magazine, to make me feel bad about myself because I gotsta have me my Skinny Cow ice cream sandwiches? Seriously, do a few squares of dark chocolate every other day even count as a sweet? Isn't that, like, your daily requirement of dark chocolate antioxidants?

Anyway, I'm down 1.4 pounds so far this week. Go me. Yay cabbage. The other day my afternoon snack was beets. I'm not kidding. Beets. But then I step on the scale and it's down 1.4 pounds, and I think, Ok, I can sacrifice some cake for beets, I suppose.

2012-02-05T21:03:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading The Information Diet, which I think I mentioned before - it's all about how we need to stop ingesting the equivalent of twinkies into our brains, and spend more time on the stuff that's important to us. I can happily report that I haven't looked at The Huffington Post all week, nor have I watched The Daily Show. I miss it a little bit - I do have a crush on Jon Stewart - but it's nice to have time to listen to the podcasts I love, read the magazines I enjoy, and not get all riled up about politics. I also started using Rescue Time, which is a bit of software that sits in the background analyzing the sites you spend time on, seeing where you lose productive time. So I can't sneak little breaks checking out the new Jason Wu collection at Target without Rescue Time noticing. It's a little creepy to be honest, so I might not use it forever, but it's definitely nice to be able to get a reality check on my attention span.

I haven't been as good about meditation lately. It seems so difficult to set aside 20 minutes to just sit and do nothing. Yet I know it's important. I know the difference it makes for people, and could make for me. So I keep trying. Eventually it will become second nature. Like the oil pulling I do every morning. I know it sounds crazy and new agey, but I haven't been sick at all yet this winter, and normally I come down with every cold that passes through the neighborhood, so I'm stoked about that.

This week I'm going up to my office in San Mateo, but the highlight will be Saturday, when I go to the American Bach Soloist's choral workshop in San Francisco. A full day of singing the choruses from the St Matthew Passion. Ahhhhh, bliss....

It's been a while since I posted a Funny Local News video, and when I searched for one on youtube, I found this one, from LA's ABC 7, filmed in a Target parking lot in Fontana, which is, coincidentally, the Target I most often go to. I park in that parking lot! It's a good thing the rogue carts don't get my car. Man, if you only watched local news, you would be forgiven for being afraid of your own shadow. If you're ever looking for something to be afraid of, watch local news. They'll make sure you know about some new killer disease or rogue shopping cart that you should watch out for.

Cutting out information junk food

2012-01-31T21:14:00.000-08:00

Last week I heard a story on NPR about a new book, The Information Diet, that was about how we all are suffering from information-obesity. The parallel was drawn that the same thing that happened to food in the past century is happening to information. Food used to be scarce, lots of people were growing it themselves, and calories were expensive. Now we have "food scientists" who have figured out how to make things called twinkies and ho-ho's that have "best if used by" dates up to 2 years from now.

And calories have become cheap. But with that, calories have become figuratively cheap. They're crap. The same thing is happening to information. We have tons of it. Everywhere. We're swimming in it. Actually, sometimes we feel like we're drowning in it. There are books published about how to deal with it, thus giving us more information to take in. It's freaking everywhere. But it's largely junk. The difference between Fox News and the Huffington Post really isn't that great. It's just junk that's made up to confirm the beliefs that the readers already have.

I spend my time wondering how to keep up with everything I'm interested in. How do I keep up with all the blogs, the tweets, the podcasts, the tv shows (speaking of which, I just discovered Portlandia...where the hell have I been, right?), not to mention the books and new albums (and old albums). There just isn't enough time in the day to keep up with it all, as well as answer work emails and hold down a job.

Oh, but there is. On an average day, I probably spend at least an hour putzing around on the Huffington Post. A few stories here in the morning, a video or two mid-morning, getting lost in a web of links at lunch... it adds up. Plus, I watch The Daily Show religiously. But seriously, what am I getting out of it? Is that the stuff I really care about? Yeah, it's fun to laugh at Republicans, and watch people doing stupid things on youtube, but seriously, is it making me smarter? Is it adding value to my life? When I'm done, do I think, "man, that was a good way to spend a few minutes of my life that I'll never get back"?

No. I do not.

And so, I am on the information diet. I am giving up the sugar-equivalent of information, and sticking to the stuff I really care about. Like the Madeleine Brand show. I love her. And Planet Money. And the St. Matthew Passion. You know, the important stuff in life.

I'm thinking that it's going to make a huge difference in my quest to achieve more mindfulness in life. Because anything that sucks that much time away from you can't be mindfulness-approved.

Paris: All Style, No Substance

2012-01-15T21:37:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday I went to Paris for the day. Mainly because it sounds really neat to say, "I went to Paris for the day." When you're based in London, it's easy to do that.

I had been in Paris when I was 13 on a family vacation with my parents. I had this idea that Paris was insanely romantic. I envisioned my teenaged self (wearing my Batman shirt and bad pink lipstick) falling in love with a Parisian boy who would play the accordion and tell me that he'd meet me on the top of the Eiffel Tower. He'd wear a beret and carry a baguette, too. I didn't have a romantic rendezvous, but I blame that on the fact that I was with my parents. And being thirteen didn't help. I wouldn't have known a romantic rendezvous if it hit me in the face.

So I went back last Saturday. J went to Amsterdam for the weekend to see a friend of his. I'd been to Amsterdam before, and not being a fan of tulips or legal marijuana, and having already been to Anne Frank's house, I passed. He needed a weekend with the boys, and I needed a weekend on a train. I had been thinking about going to Italy, but I really wanted a nice long train trip, so Eurostar it was.

I arrived at the Nord station excited to see some glamour, and some elegant skinny moms with their elegant and well behaved offspring.

Instead, an old lady poked me in the ribs and asked me for three euros.

(I was subsequently poked in the ribs six times, though the amount of euros requested varied each time)

Then a smug guy on a bike honked his bike-bell at me. Apparently I was standing in the bike lane.

Oh, and then a guy whistled at me, asked me for directions, and when I tried to say something like "non parle Francais..." he blew smoke in my face.

Good God, I thought. These people are as smug as the ones in San Francisco. And at least San Francisco has the water and sunshine. What does Paris have?

I ventured off to find out, guidebook in hand. Surely there would be some style. People carrying original Louis Vuitton bags and not the cheap knock-offs I see all the time. Women walking around in four inch stiletto heels as comfortably as if they were in Dr. Scholl's. After all, the women in London are pretty glamorous, and they have nothing on Paris, right? And I do love Amelie. Really, I do. That traveling gnome is awesome.

Now, I want to be clear that I'm aware of the fact that the time I spent there was about the equivalent of judging London by arriving at King's Cross and walking down to Trafalgar Square on Tottenham Court Road. I can't judge an entire city by one road. But maybe I can? I mean, in London, that journey would take you close to Bloomsbury, the publishing and literary capital. You'd go very near Soho. You'd see St. Martin in the Fields, and the National Gallery. You'd see a lot of life.

I saw an Office Depot.

No shit, I seriously saw an Office Depot.

I saw Notre Dame, walked around the South Bank, saw Pont Neuf (a major landmark, the oldest bridge in the city, which, incidentally, was missing the "f" on the sign. Stay classy, Paris.) and ate outside at an outdoor cafe. I considered buying some makeup at a giant Yves Rocher store, but didn't once I saw the check-out line. And I marveled at some fashion faux pas, including:

- skin tight turquoise jeans paired with a sheepskin coat and purple uggs. Really?

- prostitutes wearing fur coats, and little else. Seriously, can't Peta step in and do something about that? Give the prostitutes some faux fur?

- a tan mini-skirt, forest-green tights, and shiny black stiletto boots.

The list went on. I also saw a fair few mustaches. On women.

Oh, and I have I mentioned how loud Paris is? Everyone honks their freaking horns all...the...time. There was some bicycle rally going on, and this guy must have just set his horn on "auto-annoy" because it did not stop. Where was he going to go? There were three hundred bicycles in front of him, rallying, in French. What point did the horn serve? Did making my lunch that much less pleasurable really do much for him?

So it had been 22 years since I'd been to Paris, and if you can't tell from this post, I don't really mind if it's another 22 years before I go back.

And women of the UK (and the US): please get over your inferiority complex about French women. It's like it's this made-up fairy tale that we've all bought into - that French women are more beautiful, and that Paris is more romantic. They aren't, and it's not.

Case in point:

awesome outfits

Only Paris can make eating at KFC outside look romantic: it's a perfect example:
you're outside, having a romantic dinner, but you're eating crap.

When I go to Paris, I like to get Used Jeans

Me and Notre Dame

This is what you get when you order a ham and cheese sandwich in Paris.
Coronary surgery included, thanks to the socialist government.

In case you were wondering, this is the Trendy Shop

French Subway: in Paris, calling cheap cheese "fromage" makes it cool

Happy New Year's!

2012-01-01T15:28:00.000-08:00

Well, I guess you all thought I disappeared off the face of the earth there for a while, huh? Nope, I'm still here. And, in Reproductive News, I'm still not pregnant.

But on to other topics.

First, November was NaNoWriMo, which necessitated me spending all my writing time on my novel, which, incidentally, I really love. I've taken a month away from it now, but I'm going to go back to it with a fresh view this month to start the editing process. This is the fourth year I've done NaNoWriMo, and this is the first time I have really loved my book.

Then came Thanksgiving, with maternal visits, and lots of turkey. Same thing you did, probably.

THEN I was up in San Francisco for a week.

And FINALLY the good stuff: we've been in London since mid December. Back in September my boss agreed to let me try out working here during a slow time of year, so that I could potentially spend a lot more time here, in the land that tickles my soul. I work California hours, I transferred my phones over, and thanks to Skype, I see my boss more often now than I do when I'm at home.

With my work schedule I start work at about 4pm, which gives me my days to go exploring, wander on the Hampstead Heath, etc. I had Christmas here, which was brilliant, and of course, New Year's. The last time I celebrated Christmas in the UK was ten years ago. It feels lovely to be back, with mince pies, and a full celebration of the 12 Days of Christmas (attention Target: if you're going to put up Christmas decorations on November 1, at least have the decency to leave them up the full Twelve Days of Christmas! Oh, that's right, that interferes with your desire to start selling Valentine's. Grrrr.).

I've been so busy living this amazing life, I haven't had much time to think about it, journal, blog, etc. But I will try to do better, if for no other reason than to document the awesomeness that is my life right now. I don't have a baby, but I do have England, so, you know, small victories.

Have you made any New Year's Resolutions?

I'm still working on mine, but they include:

1) Continuing to lose weight and get healthier.

2) Switch to mostly vegetarian foods. Mostly because the cruelty to animals in the dairy industry, especially, simply horrifies me. I feel like a hypocrite, saying I care about animals, and then supporting industries that force female cows to keep having calves so they continue to lactate, and then "dispose" of those calves. It makes me feel dirty when I think about it, and when I do eat dairy, I'm going to research it to make sure it's from a cruelty-free farm.

3) Practice transcendental meditation, which I was taught last week, at least once a day, regularly.

4) Read the entire King James Bible. I missed doing it on the 400th anniversary year, but anyone who says they care about literature NEEDS to read the King James Bible, if only for the literary influences. Even Christopher Hitchens (rest in peace) adored the King James Bible. I'm ashamed that I've not read it completely.

5) Edit and self-publish my book.

Which leaves very little time for Skyrim, but I'm going to try to squeeze that in there, as I can...

And, the usual, complete the Damn Artists Way.

Seriously, I need to do it. I'm driving myself crazy with my lame excuses for not. Which leads me to my final one:

Give Up Being Lame.

Happy 2012...

What are YOU going to do with your extra hour...

2011-11-06T11:54:00.000-08:00

We got our first snow of the season this weekend. Which means that I'm burning a lot of these candles I got from Target. I used to follow a blog, Slave To Target, where this girl would write about all her favorite things at Target (where there are so many Favorite Things to choose from) and I was a huge fan. But she stopped writing it over 2 years ago, which made me sad. So in the spirit of continuing to pay homage to Target, I'm going to start chronicling my own favorite things that go in my red cart. Which brings me to these soy candles. They come in yummy fall flavors - I have Autumn Harvest going in the bathroom right now, as I watch the snow coming down.

I'm kind of blown away that Thanksgiving is less than three weeks away. So I've gotta burn up all the fall candles I have because come December I'll be wanting to burn the peppermint-vanilla flavors of these soy candles I saw at the store the other day.

So we get an extra hour today. What are you going to do with it? Here are some options I'm considering:

1. Cleaning my sink to the point where FlyLady would be happy.

2. Watching that Brian Greene Nova special about the cosmos, which I believe must be a similar feeling to dropping acid. I've never dropped acid, so I can't say for sure, but the feeling of my head exploding, and not knowing which way is up and what color is purple must be similar to what it's like to do a lot of drugs...

3. Getting way ahead in my NaNoWriMo word count.

4. Organizing all my towels.

5. Getting caught up on The Artist's Way.

6. Organizing my spices.

7. Organizing the cupboard above the refrigerator, which has four years worth of junk falling out of it.

8. Playing Oblivion in preparation for Skyrim coming out on Friday (speaking of which, Skyrim Looks Awesome!)

9. Ripping a bunch of CD's.

10. Reading one or two of the magazines that are cluttering up my desk. I bought a Nook Color a few months ago for the sole reason of reading magazines on it so that my magazine clutter would go away, but I'm still working my way through what's left over... And I have a Kindle Fire on pre-order, and I already have a kindle from last year, so if anyone has any question about which ereader to buy, I'm up on the goodness and not-so-goodness of each of them...

Where in the world did Heather go?

2011-11-01T22:08:00.000-07:00

Did she fall off the face of the planet? Nope. She didn't have another miscarriage did she? Nope. Is she perhaps pregnant, and nauseated all the time? Not so lucky. Did her house fall down on her and break all her internet devices and fall mugs? Nope. Is she just lazy? b-i-n-g-o.

Here's a round up of what I did in October, followed by the plans for a kick-ass November that I'm going to have.

In October I:
-walked an average of 18 miles a week, for a total of about 72. Dang, I walked the equivalent of going from my house to the beach. If I'm healthy enough (read: if I'm not knocked up to the point of being unable to do so) I'm going to do a half-marathon in Pasadena in January. I'm not even going to try to run it. I shall slow-pokey walk past the Rose Bowl and Cal Tech, taking in all the scenery. But I'm going to go 13.1 miles in one go.

-went on a pregnancy-loss-remembrance walk, which was sad.
-mourned the year anniversary of losing our baby. The upshot? We got cards with gift cards in them for our favorite restaurants. People rock.

- celebrated our five year wedding anniversary by moving furniture around. Oh, and we got more cards and gift cards. If anybody wants to go to Chili's, I can treat. No, I'm just kidding. I'm keeping all that molten lava chocolate cake goodness for myself.

- thought I was pregnant, which would have been kind of miraculous since it was only our first month trying, but still, I figured that I could use some good luck in the fertility area, so why not? Then I found out I wasn't pregnant, and got pissed off. This current cycle has gone all funny and weird, so I'm especially pissed off at my body at the moment.

- rode public transportation in San Francisco. So this old lady comes on to the bart train and starts waving her jacket around, holding her nose, and thanking the doors for opening and letting her on. Man, sometimes I really miss riding public transportation regularly. One time I remember this one guy kept silently trying to feel me up on the bus - this was when I was like 23 or something - and I reached over and grabbed him in his special man-place, really quick-like, and twisted my hand around, hard. He screamed like a little girl and called me a bitch. I was like, "too true, motherf*cker," and put my disc-man back on with its Tori Amos CD. After that, nobody sat down next to me for the rest of the ride. I was stoked. More place to put my bag.

- bought both a new/used couch and chair set from a lady in Temecula AND a new stove from Sears. Man, my appliance/furniture quotient just got raised by like 75%. As an aside, it led to another Yay Craigslist experience.

- lined up a petsitter for a month in December/January. Why would I need a petsitter for a month in December/January, you ask? Because my boss is totally forward thinking and appreciates the beauty of Skype, and is letting me work in the UK for a whole month. Which means that I also bought tickets to London, and am now trying to figure out how to fit a month's worth of life into one suitcase. Thank God for my Kindle.

So. November. Here's what's cooking this month:

-NaNoWriMo. The working title of my novel (after only Day 1, mind you) is Grief and Hedonism. It's sort of autobiographical, but only in that I wanted to write about the aftermath of miscarriage. It's kind of like Chick-Lit meets Grief-Lit. I guess a lot of it is stuff I've thought about doing this past year, but was too sensible to actually do. So I'm letting my characters do it, and seeing how it plays out.

- Thanksgiving, which always kicks ass in my house cuz it's my favorite holiday. I love everything about Thanksgiving. It's the perfect holiday. Food, vacation time, naps, good-smelling-houses, and no stress of having to send cards, give presents, yada yada. Actually, I don't know why I stress about sending cards. I haven't sent cards since 1997. Plus, you can listen to carols out in the open. Myself, I am a closet carol listener. I start around August, as soon as the air starts to get a little chilly and begins to hint that fall is coming. Now that I'm in a choir again, I am spending my fall singing lots of Christmas music, which makes my soul happy. But around Thanksgiving, you can start to come out of the closet and listen to carols out in the open.

- I'm going on a retreat at a benedictine monastary, which should be peaceful and inspirational.

- Losing more weight and getting new clothes. I've been stuck at this damn plateau for like four months, and I'm officially busting through it this month. Then, when the sales start after Thanksgiving, I'm getting myself some new clothes. I've been wearing the same jeans twice a week since July. I'm seriously sick of them.

- The Artists Way. I've still been doing it. Just in my own farting-around kind of way. The Artists Way Heather's Way.

- Weekend triple-walks around the lake, to get ready for this marathon. That's 9 miles. It's a hike. I've done it once so far, and it took about 2 hours and 15 minutes. And man, I was stiff afterwards. But at least that's a good justification for a bubblebath.

Happy November, everyone.

hard time of year

2011-10-05T21:45:00.000-07:00

Wednesday a year ago we bought the big-ass jeep from a guy up in the Antelope Valley. We wanted a jeep because I was due in February, and we were afraid of getting snowed in. I had just hit 20 weeks. It was all downhill from here. On the way home J drove the jeep, and I drove my car. I was still feeling sick. I had been sick for four or five days. I was a little worried because I felt weird, but I had never been pregnant before. I didn't know what pregnant felt like.

On the way home we stopped at Charlie Brown Farms, a place we'd found when we went up to see the poppy reserves for the first time. J had a burger or chicken sandwich. I just had a hot chocolate because I wasn't feeling so well. I listened to music thinking about creating a birthing playlist. I wanted to have music close to me when I gave birth, and I was starting to organize my music into different types of playlists - the "new age zen" stuff for if I needed to relax, the "upbeat shake your booty" stuff if I needed energy.

The next day it was rainy and cloudy, but I went outside to take pictures of the jeep to send to my dad. J took the back seats out and hung out in the giant part in back for a while - I read a book while he read the owners manual - and we talked about the camping trips we'd take with our little Baby T.

Then the next day was Friday. We went out on a Date Night. I was feeling good. We went to Carrows. I wore my maternity jeans, and a red long sleeved tshirt that said "Baby makes the Belly go Round." I put a sweater on because I was still getting chills. I went to old navy and bought some long sleeved tshirts and yoga pants because I was going to be headed to England the next week, and I needed some more warm clothes.

Saturday J's friend came over and helped install the ladder up to my girly nook in the attic. I put up some Halloween decorations.

Sunday I remember because Tony Stewart won the Nascar race in Fontana. We had tickets to go - there was a deal where, if you bought tickets to the Epicenter rock festival two weeks before, where we saw Blink-182, you got the Nascar tickets free. We thought about going, but I was a little nervous. I still wasn't feeling well, and I wanted to get well for my trip to England that Wednesday. I told J he could go on his own, but he didn't want to. Tony won. Tony has been J's favorite driver since before I knew him. He's never seen him win in person. He was bummed, and I felt kind of like a killjoy for keeping him from going. But I brushed it off. I was pregnant. There were more important things than Nascar races.

Oh, and J felt the baby kick for the first time that day. He still isn't positive he felt a kick, but he did. He says he felt "something" and I know it was a kick.

Monday I still wasn't well, but I started making up a packing list for England. I told Sandor that I wasn't feeling great and was going to need to rest a lot while I was there. I did my laundry and rested and drank juice and ate salad. I remember the juice - Hansen's apple cranberry. I must have had five gallons of it during the two weeks I was sick. I can't drink it anymore. Plus juice is full of sugar, anyway.

Tuesday morning I checked into my flight for the next day, but I was still feeling like crap. At 11am I told J that I couldn't go to England feeling like this. If anything happened, I said, I would never be able to forgive myself.

I did a google search to see how you could get out of flights you bought on Priceline, and a bunch of former Priceline workers said that the way to do it was claim you had a miscarriage. That seemed really obscene to me, so I called them and was just honest. They let me cancel the trip and just pay a $250 fee. I wasn't thrilled about the fee, but it was better than simply eating the entire flight. I told the guy who helped me how I had read on the internet that if you claim to have a miscarriage, Priceline will refund your money. I told him I couldn't do that because I was 21 weeks pregnant, and that would be a terrible thing. He said that he hoped karma didn't bite people in the ass who did that.

I called Sandor and Anna Louisa and told them I couldn't come because I was still so sick and was worried. They were disappointed, but understood.

By 1pm I was feeling bad - backache, gassy, etc. J was at an AA meeting and I asked him to pick up lunch for us on his way home. Plus juice. Always that damned apple cranberry juice.

At 3 I put a chicken in the oven for dinner.

By 4 I was having full on contractions, but didn't know it. I called the doctor. He said to come in the next day.

At 5 I realized the pain was coming in waves, like the doctor had asked me an hour before, but I hadn't known then whether it was coming in waves - I just hadn't noticed. He said to come in right away.

I got dressed and told J we needed to go in. I was peeing before we left, and my water broke. Only I didn't know it at the time. I just knew there was blood. Lots of it. And that wasn't good. The doctor told us to go to the nearest ER.

By 6:30 I was in the hospital room seeing my boy on an ultrasound, still alive and kicking, but not able to live without the fluids.

At 7 J kissed my belly and we said goodbye to Baby T while he was still alive and could hear us.

By midnight it was over.

I ovulated last week. If I'm pregnant, I'll find out next week sometime. Even if you time everything right, there's still only a 25% chance each month that a fertilized egg will make it. So I'm not getting my hopes up that it will take this first month of trying. And hope isn't even the right word. After losing two (count 'em, two) babies, I'm not so much hoping to be pregnant. I'm hoping to have a child, to not have my only experience in the labor and delivery room be when I lost my son; and in order to do that, you need to get pregnant. And so I will brave being pregnant, with all the fear and angst that goes along with that.

I miss you Baby T. So much. Even after a year, I still ache for you.

More of The Artists Way

2011-10-02T22:04:00.000-07:00

Ok guys, so I know I've been crappy at blogging lately. But, you see, there's just been so much living going on in my life, that I'm having a hard time finding the time to blog about it. Which is a good thing, really.

First off, I joined a choir. A good choir, not an old-lady-church-choir (no offense to old-lady-church-choirs). For almost three hours a week I get to bask in the bliss of Vivaldi, and it's awesome.

Second, I'm doing The Artists Way again. Despite my best efforts, some day I'm going to finish this damn book. I've had it since 1996. Seriously. 1996. But I'm slogging through it. This week's main task is Reading Deprivation. No reading all week. But since the book dates from 1992, before the internet and email was really a big thing, I'm changing the rules a little bit. The whole point of the exercise is to clear out all the extraneous noise and chatter in your head, and give you room to create something. Julia Cameron says that many blocked creatives are voracious readers because they use other people's words and creations to numb themselves and distract themselves from what they would really like to create. That struck a chord with me, since I am a voracious reader myself, and it's probably for those reasons.

But not reading at all? What about my work email? And what about my audiobooks on my walk around the lake. Are they ok?

I found this post with updated rules for the Week 4 task in the 21st Century, and I'm going to try to abide by them. I'm also going to avoid TV. I will allow myself my audiobooks while I'm at the lake walking. I will allow myself work email, but not on a steady stream, the way it generally is now. I will check it three times a day, and respond then as needed. I won't waste time on facebook/twitter reading stupid posts conjecturing the status of the Kutcher/Moore relationship. I will not go to the Huffington Post. I won't watch The Daily Show.

I will, however, write in my journal, work on my book, and go on my Artist Date.

The only thing I'm worried about is that I'm meant to have Jury Duty on Tuesday. Ok, so listen, Tuesday has to be a giveaway day for me. Jury duty trumps Julia Cameron, no? What would I do if I didn't read? Sit and talk to people, I guess. Write.

Good grief. Ok, I will attempt to do my best to avoid reading this week, even with Jury Duty. But I have to realign my whole sense of purpose now - I had been looking forward to spending the day reading in a nice quiet spot. But now I will have to look forward to spending the day talking to new people, looking at the wall, and listening to the voice inside my head. Maybe I should just write out my inner conversation all day...

I don't know. We'll see how this goes. I'm skeptical.

Welcome to Fall (also, the Way Marketers Get Me)

2011-09-25T21:22:00.000-07:00

Hey everybody! I haven't blogged in FOREVER. I suck at blogging sometimes. If you wondered where I went, not to worry, I'm still here. And it's fall, so I'm happy. Fall has always been my favorite season. Actually, I'm especially happy that I'm happy this year because we lost Baby T in the fall, and I was worried that I'd be miserable, associating it with the loss. But it's going ok.

So I came home from Target the other day with, among other things, a fall-looking mug. When J asks me why the hell I bought a mug when we have, like, 50 of them collecting dust, I responded thusly.

Target sells this mug for $1.99. And you might think that it's just a cheap mug, right? But you would be wrong. Because let me tell you. I'm going to dig out the espresso machine that I put away when it got warm, and I'm going to make myself white chocolate mochas and pumpkin spice lattes, and what I will do is wake up early, and drink my coffee in this mug, holding it in my hands and feeling the comfort and warmth of it, and listen to Telemann while I read thoughtful magazines like the Atlantic and the New Yorker, and do my Artists Way Morning Pages, and look out the window and think what a lovely day it is, and a cat will snuggle at my feet. I will feel calm and contented, and I will have a productive, amazing, kick@ss day. And it will all be because of the $1.99 mug. This isn't just a mug. This is autumn crispness and meditative mornings and kick-butt days. All for $1.99. I mean, seriously, how could you expect me to turn that down?

To which he replied that he couldn't expect me to turn it down, and by all means, I should consider getting a second one the next time I'm there.

So, thanks to Target, my table in the mornings looks like this. Candle: $5.99. Mug: $1.99. White Chocolate Mocha ingredients: $2.00. Tablecloth: $9.99. Autumn Bliss: Priceless.

My 9-11 Remembrance: The Last Carefree Emails

2011-09-11T00:57:00.000-07:00

I was living in London on September 11, 2001. And so I got wind of what was happening in New York after lunch. I had spent the morning sparring over email with Nick and Paul - twin brothers I had met through the choir we started. We had a good time poking fun at each other, planning a Thanksgiving visit back to the US, poking fun at my boss (Lynne Franks, who was supposedly the inspiration for the show Absolutely Fabulous, and thinking about lunch (I went to Muji on Carnaby Street and bought some pens that lunchtime).

It's weird to read these emails and think back on a time when I could innocently make a joke about how being considered an American was worse than being considered an idiot. In a few hours, that kind of talk would become unpatriotic and borderline-treasonous.

I had to leave London a few months after 9/11 because they cracked down a lot harder on visas, and people like me, who were on questionable student visas, suddenly found ourselves a bit stuck. But that's a small price to pay. London isn't going anywhere.

It's odd for me to look back on this email thread and see the end of an era in real time. It's a poor remembrance, but it's a remembrance nonetheless.

---------------------------------------- Message History----------------------------------------

From: Heather Anne Buettner on 11/09/2001

09:49

ZE8To: Nick Bland/DMGCON/DMG UK/DeuBa@DMGUK cc:

Subject: send me names

please.

thank you.

hope you're feeling better today.

xxh

-------

on 11/9/01, Nick Bland wrote:

will do - let me get a report out and over they'll come . . . . .

Nick Bland

------------------------------------------------------------------
Legal Entity Cost Controlling
Front Office Reporting and Planning
Deutsche Bank London
Tel: +44 (20)754-7025
Email: Website: http://lon.costcon

-------------

From: Heather Anne Buettner on 11/09/2001 09:57 ZE8

To: Nick Bland/DMGCON/DMG UK/DeuBa@DMGUK
cc:
Subject: Re: send me names
you rocketh most mightily.

------------------------------

on 11/9/01 5:59 pm, Nick Bland wrote:

i know . . .Paul & I want champers on the flight over with lunch! Mwa!

Nick Bland
------------------------------------------------------------------

Legal Entity Cost Controlling
Front Office Reporting and Planning
Deutsche Bank London
Tel: +44 (20)754-7025
Email:

------------------------------------------------

From: Heather Anne Buettner on 11/09/2001 10:10
ZE8

To: Nick Bland/DMGCON/DMG UK/DeuBa@DMGUK

cc:
Subject: Re: send me names

what's a champer? Am I meant tounderstand what that means?

Talk English for goodness sake.

Mwa

-------------------

on 11/9/01, Nick Bland wrote:

champers = champagne

dur you're soo stoopid!

Nick Bland

---------------

Legal Entity Cost Controlling
Front Office Reporting and Planning
Deutsche Bank London
Tel: +44 (20)754-7025
Email:

------------------------------------

From: Heather Anne Buettner on11/09/2001 10:29

ZE8

To: Nick Bland/DMGCON/DMGUK/DeuBa@DMG UK

cc:

Subject: Re: send me names

Dur, like how the hell am I supposed to understand your secretlanguage?

Geez.

I'm not going to let you have champers. You'll be all tipsy before we

even land. No wait, that'sme.

I'm going to sit in the middle and take turns sleeping on each ofyou so

you

each get equal amounts of Heather Drool on your shirts. I bet you can't

wait!

-----Original Message-----

From: Nick Bland [mailto:]
Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2001 11:32 AM
To: Heather Anne Buettner
Cc: paul.bland@charrington.co.uk
Subject: Re: send me names

mmmm nice

Nick Bland

---------------

Legal Entity Cost Controlling
Front Office Reporting and Planning
Deutsche Bank London
Tel: +44 (20)754-7025
Email:

--------------------------

on 11/9/01 6:13 pm, Paul Bland wrote:

Mmm heather drool - nice !!!! C'mon Heather you work with Lynn Franks!!!

Champers is an Ab fab-ism - which planet have you been living on ??

-------------------------

From: Heather Anne Buettner [mailto:heather@seedfusion.com]
Sent: 11 September 2001
To: Paul Bland; 'Nick Bland Subject: Re: Gucci, Armani, La Croix, Names Names Names !!!!

God, the two of you...sheesh.

If you would stop forwarding on my emails to third parties (even if he IS

your brother) and send me the email list, I would be most appreciative, Nick!

Idon't WATCH Ab-Fab, Paul - I WORK with her, I don't NEED to watch it.

It's my LIFE, 'kay?

I'm in a foul mood because I forget how to get to the place where I'm meant

to be singing tonight and the lady isn't answering my email. I thought I
had it saved. Fuck and buggers.

Now get back to work, the two of you... xxxxxxxxxxxxxh

---------------------------------

on 11/9/01, Paul Bland wrote:

Isn't 'sheesh' a type of kebab ?????

---------------------------

no,that's shish. Sheesh is a noise you makewhen you're exasperated by nitpicky boys.

whatare you both doing on saturday night? Proms in the park. Let's go!

-------------------------

on 11/9/01 1:44 pm, Paul Bland wrote:

Heather - you're not an idiot, you're American and you should be proud !!

Anyway, both you must sort out your e-mail disclamers/siggys - they make the message

sooo truncated !!!

---------------------

From: Heather Anne Buettner [mailto:heather@seedfusion.com]

Sent: 11 September 2001

To: Paul Bland; 'Nick Bland'

Subject: Re: Gucci, Armani, La Croix, Names Names Names !!!!

Nick -see what I mean... he thinks I'm American. American. Which is worse than beingan idiot, don't you think? You reallyknow how to charm a girl, Paul.

And Idon't put my siggy on, or disclaimers. It's Nick.

Sowhat are you both doing for lunch?

--------------------------

on 11/9/01, Nick Bland wrote:

Paul - I think you mean protracted, truncated is the opposite

Heather - nothing much wrong with your heritage, you should be proud of your

history, all c.100 years of it.

look no siggy!

Ps no can do proms in tha park. . . doing a concert in Kent

-----------------------

on 11/9/01, Paul Bland at wrote:

Fuck off Nick !

Heather would you like to send a profanity to my bastard brother ?

-------------------

From: Heather Anne Buettner [mailto:heather@seedfusion.com]

Sent: 11 September 2001

To: Paul Bland; 'Nick Bland'

Subject: Re: Gucci, Armani, La Croix, Names Names Names !!!!

hey - language children...

still,ok. fuck off nick.

and by the way, I'm not so sure the Indians (excuse me, Native Americans) would be happy with you neglecting them from our heritage!

typingw/ one hand as other has sandwich in it!

-----------------

on 11/9/01, Nick Bland wrote:

Go to www.cnn.com

there's a picture of what has been reported as a plane crashing into the world

trade centre in New York.

______________________________________

From: Heather Anne Buettner [mailto:heather@seedfusion.com]

Sent: 11 September 2001

To: Paul Bland; 'Nick Bland'

Subject: Re: Gucci, Armani, La Croix, Names Names Names !!!!

I can't see it.

--------------------------------------

on 11/9/01, Nick Bland wrote:

ohh you 2 are soo predictable . . .did you get my last mail re plane crashes
in the World trade Centre. . . .apparently there is more than one . . . sounds like a suicide mission to me. . . .

-------------------------------------------

From: Heather Anne Buettner [mailto:heather@seedfusion.com]

Sent: 11 September 2001

To: Paul Bland; 'Nick Bland'

Subject: Re: Gucci, Armani, La Croix, Names Names Names !!!!

Andthere was also just a bomb in the Pentagon in Washington

weirdshit going on in New York.

NICKare you EVER going to send me those names????

--------------------------

on 11/9/01, Nick Bland wrote:

they've evacuated canary wharf given what has happened. . . .

-------------------------------

From: Heather Anne Buettner [mailto:heather@seedfusion.com]

Sent: 11 September 2001

To: Paul Bland; 'Nick Bland'

Subject: Re: Gucci, Armani, La Croix, Names Names Names !!!!

are you going?

---------------------------------------------

on 11/9/01 , Nick Bland wrote:

No, they won't evacuate central London.

ps this is making me feel really sick. . .

hope you're okay. . . .

------------------------------------

From: Heather Anne Buettner [mailto:heather@seedfusion.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2001 8:51 AM

To: paul bland
Subject: good grief

why are people so awful?

--------------------------------------

-----------

on 11/9/01, Paul Bland wrote:

Iknow ! Lloyd's and around there has been evacuated ! I'm trying to call
you - are you OK ?

From: Heather Anne Buettner [mailto:heather@seedfusion.com]

Sent: 11 September 2001

To: Paul Bland; 'Nick Bland'

Subject: Re: Gucci, Armani, La Croix, Names Names Names !!!!

on the phone to parents - call 020 7287 6519 -that's lily's line

The Top Things Making Me Grumpy Today

2011-09-06T22:34:00.000-07:00

1. Oliver on Project Runway. I really can't tolerate the fake accent any longer. I've put up with it for like 6 episodes already. Get it off my tv!

2. The fact that we haven't gone to the post office in like 2 weeks, and there was a nasty note in the mailbox when I went today saying I had to call a main office number to get my mail. I'm afraid to call it because I don't want them to yell at me for not emptying my mailbox regularly. I might make J, but I'm grumpy with him tonight, too.

3. My inbox in general and Groupon in particular. Listen Groupon, you were cool 18 months or so ago when I first found you, and you didn't spam me thirteen times a day. Can't you, you know, ask me some survey questions to find out that I'm really not going to be interested in a chemical peal in Redondo Beach for 60% off? I'd take the survey to get targeted emails from you. I really would. But I'm pretty much on the verge of marking you spam for now, cuz of all this crap you send me. And now google's getting in on it. If I have to listen to one more ad for Google Deals on my Pandora station, I'm going to knock somebody's head off.

4. Fresh and Easy. I love you F&E, I really do. When I heard that Tesco's in the UK was going to do a US store, I got really excited. And now that you sell McVities chocolate biscuits and Hobnobs, I'm even more of a fan. But this thing you do of not completely sealing the chicken in the plastic wrap, so that even though the date says Sept 7, it goes bad early because it's been getting air all weekend...that has just got to go. Could you try to be less ghetto in your meat packaging, please?

5. Barack Obama. Google "Obama + Cave". Or, if you're a liberal like me, don't. It will just get your blood pressure going. I'm donating money to Stephen Colbert's ColbertPAC this year because I can't tolerate giving Obama any more money for him to just use to, you know, destroy EPA regulations and refuse to raise taxes on the wealthy. Hillary Clinton's 3AM Phone Call ad is sadly starting to ring true.

Three Day Weekends are fun, but I'm just feeling grumpy now.

I'm a podcasting fool

2011-09-05T00:37:00.000-07:00

I'm up late, having just done another episode of the Renaissance English History Podcast, cuz that's how I roll on a three day weekend. You can subscribe in itunes, or listen online (just click the EnglandCast tab). Cuz you know you need to know lots of stuff about 16th Century English Art in 10 minutes or less...

And I made these homemade potato chips today. I'm not really sure that they count as, you know, chips. But they're made with potatoes, oil, salt and pepper. So they ain't Doritos...

And since I'm punchy, and today my 32 year old husband tells me that when he grows up he wants to be a guitar player for Big Time Rush, it's time for Funny Local News: Arachnophobia Edition. Love how the woman tries to take charge. Leave it to a woman to try to keep stuff moving along. Bunch of stupid frat boys acting like ten year olds while the woman tries to do her job.

What the hell CAN I Eat - Fake Food Edition

2011-09-03T23:09:00.000-07:00

We all know I'm on a Noble Quest to Eat Better, right? One of the biggest things I'm noticing on my Journey is how little Actual Food there is in the grocery store. I read Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food when it first came out a few years ago (his axiom for health: Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants) and I thought, "yeah, that makes sense, we don't really eat a lot of real food."

But see, I thought that meant stuff like Dorito's or macaroni and cheese. I figured that, you know, yogurt, for example, was a real food.

I'm learning that I've been way off in jumping to that conclusion.

I've become an obsessive label-reader, and here's what I'm learning:

All those yummy General Foods International instant coffee that I love to mix with cold milk in a blender to make a pseudo-frappuccino? Not really food.

I was reading the label of my Hill's Brothers mocha mix, and I noticed that it's loaded to the brim with phosphates. Whereas my Starbucks Via instant coffee is simply coffee, cane sugar, and dried milk. I put on my Sherlock Holmes hat and asked myself, "what are these phosphates, and are they bad for me?"

It doesn't seem very cut and dry. The International Food Additives Council publishes a list of phosphates used in food, and why they're there. They're in loads of foods. Everything from cake mixes to soy milk. Apparently they are often used to prevent clumping (like in my instant coffee or the aforementioned cake mix).

The FDA lists them as "Generally Recognized as Safe." And they're approved for use in the EU. So it looks like they're ok, except possibly for people with kidney problems.

But still, here's the thing. So much of what we're eating isn't actually food. It's edible food-like substances that are engineered by food scientists. The plus side of this is that we get a lot of great food, very easily. Just add water, and you've got creamy coffee. They allow us to have an enormous range of food in our refrigerator that we don't even really need to cook ourselves. I'm sure it's made food less expensive. But the downside is that I'm loading my body up with chemicals. Coffee is not supposed to have a non-caking agent in it.

Is this sustainable?

Take my Fiber One bars. They're touted as being pretty healthy, right? They taste like granola and chocolate, and they have 11 grams of fiber. But they have Yellow Number 6 in them, which can cause tumors on the kidney, can mess with your chromosomes, and is banned in Norway.

Yellow Number 6 is approved in the US. Maybe Norway is overreacting. Or maybe not. Cigarettes are still legal, after all. Maybe in fifty years we'll all be aghast at the amount of food chemicals that we put into our bodies.

And I ask you, why the hell does a granola bar need to have Yellow Number 6 in it in the first place?

So the next phase of my Eating Better Quest is to get rid of as many of these chemicals as I can. Tomorrow I'm going to make my own potato chips, and I might even start making my own bread, because seriously, why is there high fructose corn syrup in bread? Of all the stupid things...

I'm gonna take this "no additives and chemicals" thing to the next level. For thousands of years people ate without this kind of crap in their food, and honestly, I think it's still too early to call it safe. So I'm out. I'm getting off the chemical train.

I'm glad I'm finding all this out now, before I get pregnant again. Because it takes time and effort to make your own bread and it's good to get in the habit now. Dammit, I'm committed to having a kitchen with real food in it, and not something that was created in a laboratory.

I shall report back on the chips, as well as other chemicals I'm finding in my new obsessive-label-reading experiment.

Project Happiness: Carnival Rides

2011-08-28T20:37:00.001-07:00

So my town has a carnival this weekend every year called Mountaineer Days (cuz we're in the mountains - clever!). There are slurpee-drinking contests from 7-11, pie eating contests, salsa dancing contests, and lots of fair-rides.

I haven't ridden fair-rides in almost 10 years. The last time I can clearly remember riding one was the giant swings in 2002. I didn't ride anything else though. Just the swings. And the last time I can remember riding carnival rides before then was somewhere around 1996. So it's been a while.

Last year was the first year of the carnival, and we went but I couldn't ride anything because I was pregnant. I remember thinking that maybe we'd come back with our six month old the next year, and go on the kiddie rides together.

Well, we all know how that turned out. (Cue tiny violins)

So we went back last night and rocked those rides. We were like little kids, going on everything. We went on the ferris wheel. We rocked the obstacle-course thing where you climb up ropes and slide down big slides. We went on the giant swings. We went on something called the Scrambler that made my head explode. We did it all. And then we staggered back to the car in the dark, looking quite drunk, and nearly passing out.

Good times were had by all.

And maybe next year we'll be closer to going on the kiddie rides with a little one. On that subject, I saw my OB this week, and he gave us the go-ahead to start trying again whenever we want. We're going to give it another month or so and start again around October. We might be pregnant by Christmas. I'm taking my basal body temperature, getting the ovulation predictor kits, starting my prenatals, going light on caffeine, and all of that good stuff so that when it takes we'll be all ready. Folic Acid is my friend. It's hard not to be scared, but I am taking comfort in the fact that I'm in a very different place than I was last year. I'm healthier and stronger, and I have my angels there to watch over us. Plus I have a nose piercing and purple hair. Miscarriages can't screw around with girls who have purple hair. It's a scientific fact.

Secret Salon

2011-08-24T22:09:00.000-07:00

A summer project I've been working on has been to organize all my digital pictures. I've got nearly 10 years worth of unnamed files, that supposedly represent some of the greatest times in my life, but I've got them everywhere, in no order. So every day I sort through a folder or two, and I can start to see a very faint light at the end of the clutter tunnel.

Today I found this picture. It's somewhere near Hemet, down the 15 freeway, in some nowhere ghetto-fabulous strip mall. I remember being there. I think we were on a road trip and had to pee and this was the only place that looked promising. I asked J, "why the hell did I take a picture of a ghetto strip mall?"

And he says, "because it's the trendiest salon in the world. It's so trendy, it's got no door."

It's like a secret society. You've gotta know the password, and they let you in through the quickie-mart. I bet you go through a check-cashing place on your way, too.

But seriously. I give you Trend Setters Salon. It's so trendy, you can't get in.

Technology Glee Meltdown

2011-08-23T17:08:00.001-07:00

OMG you guys...I'm at the airport blogging...with my new wireless bluetooth keyboard on my phone. I am seriously going to faint from the goodness of this. I can actually type. With keys. It makes me tactile-happy. That is all.

What the hell CAN I Eat?

2011-08-22T11:02:00.000-07:00

I'm going to start a new segment on my blog, called What the hell CAN I Eat? because there is seriously, like, nothing that is edible in the grocery store.

I've long been a proponent of shopping on the perimeter of the grocery store, even when I wasn't actively trying to lose weight and be healthy. The stuff down the middle aisles, aside from some of the baking ingredients, and the occasional bit of rice or pasta, is largely chemical-filled junk.

But I'm paying even more attention now because we're getting ready to start trying to get me pregnant again, and as I get healthier, I realize how much further I have to go, and how much more feeling-awesome there is waiting for me. I've started using agave in my tea instead of sugar. I switched to the "natural" coffee creamer (milk, sugar, cream, and vanilla). I eat a lot of veggies. I'm doing the whole oil-pulling thing.

I am trying desperately to get off of diet coke right now. I've read enough about aspartame to know that it's no good. It can screw up your fertility, make you gain weight, probably causes cancer, and lots of other bad stuff. I've been drinking it for nearly 20 years. I did quit at one point, for Lent a few years ago, but I went back to it after we lost Baby T, and have been off the wagon since.

So I think it's probably ok to give up diet soda, and I won't have to worry about aspartame, right? I go to Whole Foods, see they have stevia-sweetened soda, order a 24 pack on Amazon and sign up to have it delivered every month. I think I'm doing good, right? I'm gonna get rid of aspartame, and be super-healthy.

Now, I enjoy snacking on yogurt. And I'll admit, I'm a sucker for those Yoplait ads that show the lady talking on the phone about how she's eating red velvet cake and still losing weight while her hubby goes foraging through the fridge and only sees yogurt.

Plus, they're usually the cheapest yogurts at the store. 10 for $6. It's a deal.

They look innocuous enough. Pretty innocent. It's just yogurt, right?

Till you look on the back, and not only does it have Yellow #6, which is a carcinogen (and has been banned in several European countries), but it also has aspartame. What the hell CAN I eat???

Looks like after I finish this batch, I'll just be getting the all-natural stuff. Which really sucks because I like the raspberry cheesecake flavor a lot. But, you know, not enough to stay addicted to aspartame for.

Stay tuned for my next installment, where I find out that my fiber bars will also give me cancer! Who knew the grocery store was such a frigging death trap.

the present

2011-08-17T00:20:00.000-07:00

After having seen Joshua Bell last week, I was reminded why I was totally crushing on him in 2001. But that's not what this is about. That's just the prologue. It just explains why I've been reading a lot of stuff on the interwebs about him. And I came across something I have to share.

In 2007 the Washington Post did a study. The study consisted of taking Joshua Bell, one of the world's greatest violinists, had him play some amazing (and amazingly difficult) classical music in a Washington DC Metro stop at rush hour. They dressed him up in normal street clothes, put a baseball cap on him, threw a few dollars and change into his violin case, and waited to see who would notice.

This is what happened:

At first, the Washington Post was worried about crowd control. In a city as sophisticated as DC, they thought, someone would surely notice him. Flashbulbs would go off. Things would escalate. The National Guard would arrive. There would be teargas.

Over 11000 people passed right by him in the 45 minutes he played. One person recognized him. She wasn't a violinist, and she didn't know classical music that well, but she had been at a previous concert of his.

The Washington Post interviewed people afterwards about whether they noticed him, whether they stopped, and why. The article is a fascinating study in psychology. The Post wrote down names and numbers of people who were willing to talk with them about "their commute" for an article. Later on, when reporters called the commuters, they asked whether anything interesting had happened that morning. One man said that he had seen a superb violinist, but he hadn't recognized Joshua Bell, even though he was a fan.

The reporters told the commuters what had actually happened, and why they were actually being interviewed, and most of them were disappointed that they hadn't realized just who they were walking past.

One man remembers all the lottery numbers he played that day, but he can't remember that he was 4 feet away from a virtuoso. One guy took no notice of him at all because he had earbuds in, listening to his ipod.

"For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly, we get our news from sources that think as we already do. And with iPods, we hear what we already know; we program our own playlists.

The song that Calvin Myint was listening to was "Just Like Heaven," by the British rock band The Cure. It's a terrific song, actually. The meaning is a little opaque, and the Web is filled with earnest efforts to deconstruct it. Many are far-fetched, but some are right on point: It's about a tragic emotional disconnect. A man has found the woman of his dreams but can't express the depth of his feeling for her until she's gone. It's about failing to see the beauty of what's plainly in front of your eyes."

I'm fascinated by this experiment. Not just because of all the normal lessons (ie, pay attention to what's going on around you because you never know what you're going to see) but all the subtle stuff. The preparation that went into the experiment, and the things that were going on in the heads of the people who stopped (and didn't stop).

When I was younger, I used to annoy my dad by asking him why he bought what he did. He got a new toothbrush, and I was fascinated by what it was that made him decide on the one he finally got. I mean, if you look in the toothbrush aisle, there are, like, at least 50 you can choose from. I wanted to know what it was about the one he chose that made it the one. Was it the price? The color? The bristles? What?! He never would answer me. He'd just say, "I liked it." Yes, but *why*?

This article starts probing that part of people's brains to find out why they did or didn't stop and listen. Why they did or didn't give money. It's blowing my mind.

If I saw Joshua Bell play in a metro station, I'd totally faint. I'm going to have to keep a lookout now that I know he's prone to such antics. But I wonder what else I could miss because I'm so busy watching out for Joshua Bell. I could miss something equally amazing. Oh man, it's too late to be thinking about all this. It's making my head spin.

The lesson, I guess, is that you pay attention to what's in front of you, because that's all there is, really, to pay attention to.

New Renaissance English History Podcast

2011-08-14T20:20:00.000-07:00

If you click on over to that EnglandCast tab, you will see that after a looooong hiatus, I finally did a new Renaissance English History Podcast. This was spurred on by a listener who emailed me at work, and I checked the stats on the podcast, and dontcha know, each episode has had about 25k downloads. Yep, that's right. The same amount of people download my EnglandCast as lived in Washington DC in the mid-19th century. Pretty sweet.

the best facebook posting ever

2011-08-11T13:32:00.000-07:00

Ten years ago, I saw Joshua Bell at the Wigmore Hall in London when my violin teacher Mark was playing the bassoon in a quintet with him. I know, it's all very confusing. Along the way, I got lost, and talked to a friendly-looking man, Oliver, asking him if he could tell me where the Wigmore Hall was. Turns out, he was going there too, and we became instant friends, even more so when he stepped in a puddle and splashed my shoes. Or maybe I splashed him. I forget, but I remember someone had splashed someone else. There was definitely splashing involved.

Oliver and I exchanged numbers, and met up several times within the next few weeks, and he became one of my bestest friends. After the concert, I went to Wagamama's with Mark, and sat across the table from Joshua Bell, and watched him slurp noodles. I've never seen someone look so good while they slurp udon.

So fast forward six years, and Oliver is in Santa Monica visiting his cousin, and I'm supposed to go see him, but something happens and I lame-flake-out on him. I think I was tired, or something equally inexcusable. Oliver and I stop facebooking, and stop chatting, and that's just it. We both feel weird, and I feel ashamed, and as far as we're both concerned, that's it, friendship over.

Today I posted on facebook that I'm going to see Joshua Bell tonight at the Hollywood Bowl, and how it's crazy that it was 10 years ago that I first saw him when Mark was playing, and that's the night I met Oliver. Not three minutes later, an IM comes up from Oliver, and he's apologizing, and I'm apologizing, and we're both apologizing, and before you know it, we've set up a time to skype this weekend. We're each going to have a glass of wine, and pretend that we're in a wine bar in London (he's in Thailand now, and I'm in California), and we're going to have a good old-fashioned gossip.

I'm so excited. Yay for fabulous facebook posts. And Yay for Joshua Bell being the restorer of friendships. I had to email him to tell him about the byproduct of his musical career. I hope it makes him smile.

In Which I get New Agey

2011-08-09T21:41:00.000-07:00

Ok, you guys, so it's been a big couple of days. I got purple hair extensions, and librarian-chic glasses. Combined with my nose piercing, I look punk-geek. It's my new thing. Now I just need the wardrobe to keep up with it. It's hard to look punk-geek with clothes from Old Navy. But I'm still wearing the same old stuff because I'm at another weight plateau. It's ok, though. I'm gonna bust through it, and do back-to-school clothes shopping, even though I'm not going back to school.

punkgeek w/purple hair

However, I am still keeping up my Italian, in case you've been wondering. I've even joined livemocha to find other Italian people to be friends with, so they can practice English, and I can practice Italian. I tried posting on craigslist in Rome and Florence, but the only people who seemed to use it much were Americans looking for places to stay, so I wasn't counting on getting many responses. We're planning a trip to the UK this fall, and I really want to go to Italy while I'm over there, just to order a cappuccino in Italian.

AND I went to BlogHer in San Diego on Saturday. It was a lesson in expectations. I HAD been expecting to hang out with other punkgeek girly bloggers like me. Instead, it was full of 3500 Mommy Bloggers. Just what Heather needed. A day with freaking Mommy Bloggers. Yuck. I had to leave the final keynote, with Ricki Fucking Lake waxing poetic about her new project, a documentary on natural childbirth. And all the mommies looking enraptured. Oh yes, do tell us more about a water birth, Ms Lake! Please, do another talk show, and become the Oprah of water births!

(I might feel differently about this whole thing once I actually manage to carry a child to term...but for now, puke)

That being said, I did learn some stuff, and got some ideas and inspiration. Stay tuned for the product of my inspiration, which I'll be talking about in the next few weeks, as I get it up and running. Oooh. Excitement. I can tell everyone is waiting with baited breath!

(oh, and the funniest part was in the exhibits area. There were a lot of household brands wanting to attract the mommy bloggers with free samples that they would review on their mommy blogs. And lots of baby products, there for the same reason. I did score two tubes of mascara from CVS, some high-heel foot insoles from Dr. Scholls, a bunch of toothpaste from Arm and Hammer, and a tempur-pedic lumbar pillow. But the best, and I mean best, was a sex-toy company. If you checked into their booth on 4square, they gave you a free vibrator - a $75 value. The highlight was seeing this gay guy engaging in conversation with the sales reps about the available shapes, which weren't to his liking. It was, beyond a doubt, the most surreal moment I've had in a long time. Standing in a soulless convention center watching a guy dissect sex-toy design flaws while surrounded by thousands of women wearing their babies in little snuggly things on their shoulders discussing lactation. It almost made my head explode.)

But the big thing for the week is Oil Pulling. Yep, you read that right. Oil Pulling. It sounds more new-agey than it actually is. My friend Sandor started doing it back in November, swears by it, and has me doing it now, too. Essentially, you take some oil - not the kind you put in your car, but almost any other kind - and you swish it around in your mouth for 20 minutes a day. This is supposed to cure diseases and make you feel awesome. Some people say it's because there's a vein under your tongue that is a fast highway for all the toxins to get sucked up. But I read this book, which essentially says that the reason it works isn't because of any weird thing having to do with veins or anything like that. It's because swooshing oil around in your mouth for 20 minutes a day gets your mouth insanely clean, and since your mouth tends to be a massive breeding ground for bacteria, if you get it insanely clean, it frees up your immune system to work on other things in your body, like, say, arthritis.

So I got some vegetable oil and stuck a tablespoon of it in my mouth, and went to work swooshing (it's called "pulling" because you're pulling the oil through your teeth, though the new-agey contingent calls it that because it's pulling the toxins from your body). Then, after 20 minutes, I spat it out in the trash and rinsed my mouth out really well. And I have to say, a week into it, something is happening. The first thing I notice is how clean my mouth is. My teeth are whiter, and yesterday I almost left the house without brushing them in the morning because my mouth felt so clean.

I've only been doing it a week, and nothing miraculous has happened to me yet (well, I do notice that my skin seems to be getting better - the bags under my eyes aren't as dark, for example, and I haven't been sleeping any more) except I feel like I have a crazy clean mouth. Sandor has done it since November, and didn't get sick all winter, even living in dirty London, so I don't know. There might be something to it. Ask me in a month - it seems like 30 days is about what it takes for people to really be fully detoxed. Anyway, it's a funny way to spend the morning...

Thinking outside the Church Paradigm

2011-08-07T21:11:00.000-07:00

So I was going to blog about other stuff tonight (like my purple hair extensions, my weekend at BlogHer, or the fact that I managed to cook a recipe that actually looked like the picture in the magazine tonight) but then we watched Curiosity on the Discovery channel, and I had to write out some thoughts.

For an hour (minus commercials) Stephen Hawking, who is unarguably one of the greatest scientific minds in history, argued why God doesn't have to exist for our universe to have been created. He was able to use quantum physics to explain how sometimes particles just appear for no reason and with no cause. So that put an end to the idea that there had to be a cause to create the universe. Then he explained how time stops in black holes, and since the universe was essentially a black hole at the time of the big bang, there was no time. So since there was no time before the universe, there must not be a God to create the universe because there was no time for God to do the creating.

So. Couple of things.

First, I get so annoyed with people thinking that God has to look a certain way. He's God, people (I'm using the masculine just because it's quick and easy. I don't think God has a gender). God isn't really something that our human brains, no matter how awesome they are, can grasp.

It's like saying, "I have black cats who sometimes pee on the carpet. Therefore, Mozart was a bad composer." Your first response is, quite rightly, "huh?" How does one prove the other?

There was no time before the Big Bang, therefore God doesn't exist? How? I don't get it?

Maybe the traditional paradigm of a benevolent God watching over us, guiding our every action, can be proven wrong; but nobody has believed in Thor for a while either, but it doesn't mean that there's no God. Just because one society's interpretation of God evolves, and beliefs fall by the wayside when and if they are disproved - that doesn't mean that there's no God.

Here are two big things I believe in, that I don't believe are disproved by the fact that there was no time before the Big Bang:

1) The Butterfly Effect. When I do good in the world, somehow, that makes a difference beyond my sphere. It might somehow cause someone else in Africa to do good, too. Similarly, when I sit on my ass watching four episodes of The Daily Show at once, it has an effect beyond my small world.

2) Energy can neither be created or destroyed. You can't kill energy. The energy in all of us will continue to exist, albeit probably in other forms, after we die.

These two thoughts, to me, show that we are all bound to each other in ways we don't understand, for eternity. My actions influence you. The energy that comprises you will go on forever. And has been going on since the beginning of time. We all started out from the same speck of matter at the time of the Big Bang, and we are inextricably linked now. I am you, and you are me.

Maybe there's a whole different paradigm of God that needs to be discovered. Since we all came from the same particles of mass and energy, maybe that spark that ignited the Big Bang lives on in each of us. Maybe we are all, collectively, God. Maybe it's our collective consciousness that shapes the world. Maybe that's what Jesus meant when He said, "Behold, the Kingdom of God is within you." (Luke 17:21).

Ok, so the brilliant Dr. Hawking can prove that there was not a linear time (as we know it) before the Big Bang at which point God could have created the Universe. And He probably isn't sitting up in the clouds watching us, checking to see if we're being good or bad, with a list, like Santa Clause.

But that has never been my view of God. Well, ok, maybe for about two years when I was going through a teenage rebellion phase - not having been raised in a church, I rebelled by becoming a fundamentalist for about a year.

My understanding of God has always been more fluid, a relationship to the cosmos that is both more complicated and more simple than anything I learned about in my Methodist church. Something deeply personal and immediate, within me right now, that also links me with every particle of dust in the universe. My understanding of God is about being part of something bigger than me; not for the salvation of my soul, but to be connected to humanity, to every living thing that has ever lived and ever will live.

Dr. Hawking wasn't able to disprove that belief. In fact, if anything, he solidified it more than ever. I wish he could have expanded his view of God outside the proverbial box, but I suppose it's what he grew up with, and people hang on to that stuff for a long time - even as he spent time trying to disprove it, he was demonstrating that there was something that needed to be disproved - a dark matter paradox, indeed.

Swoon Time

2011-08-03T10:28:00.000-07:00

So I unabashedly nurture a serious crush on Mark Hoppus, right? Blink 182 is one of my favorite bands, and he is one of my favorite people-in-a-band. It's completely platonic, though. I secretly want for J and I to be best friends with him and his wife. I imagine long afternoons with the four of us walking around London, where they just moved, eating noodles at Wagamama's, walking on the Heath with him making witty comments on demand about EastEnders while his wife Skye and I talk about fashion, yoga, and managing our work-life balances.

Of course, that would probably necessitate me being an entirely different person (the kind of person who talks about fashion, yoga, and managing a work-life balance, for example). But still, the dream lives on.

And it got a serious boost when Mark Hoppus accepted my GoodReads friend request. Now there's another thing we can all do together! We can hang out at Waterstones in Picadilly! Mark Hoppus is a nerd too! I love it!

Geek that I am, I had to take a screenshot of me on the top of Mark Hoppus' friends list. I'm such a nerd.

The feral cats outside

2011-08-01T21:40:00.000-07:00

Last weekend the Outdoor Kitty brought us a mouse.

I was kind of grossed out, but he was so proud that it was hard to stay mad for long.

I think this was his way of adopting us formally, and now he's become a fixture on our deck. We're planning on making a really awesome outdoor shed/cage for some of our cats who are having bathroom issues this month and we will probably add this little guy to the mix. I mean, if a kitten brings you a mouse, who are you to turn down that kind of love?

Tonight one of the feral cats is in a cage in our bathtub. He is going to get fixed and vaccinated tomorrow, and will probably spend the night in there again tomorrow, and then will get released back into the wild on Wednesday. Maybe he'll fight less with less testosterone. The last time we captured a cat and then released him, he hardly came back at all afterwards; I think he was afraid that it was going to happen to him again. So who knows how much we'll see of him in the future, but I'll rest easy knowing that the likelihood of little kittens being brought into the world is lower with one less testosteroned cat roaming the streets.

I don't have much to say otherwise. I went up to the Bay Area today for three hours. Enough time for a meeting, a stop at Yumi Yogurt in San Mateo, and lunch at Subway. Then back on a plane and home again. I woke up at 4:45 and I'm tired. But I did spend the hour long flight home doing the crossword, which made me feel proud that I exercised my brain. Then I managed to walk around the lake, which made me proud that I exercised my body. And now I'm going to go to bed and dream about cats.

In which I put a Hole in my Face

2011-07-27T20:08:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday evening at about 6:30, I called J from San Francisco and asked him to guess what I'd just done. "Do I have to?" he says. "Yes, you have to," I say.

So he says, "I don't know. Got arrested." "Nope," respond I, "what have I been wanting to do for ages and ages, but haven't because I'm lame and afraid of pain?"

"You seriously got your nose pierced?"

I did. And I now have a sparkly blue gem in my nose, and I LOVE IT. Seriously, I love it. I can't stop looking at it.

And I had the best nose piercing experience ever. I'm positive of it.

Right at the end of the day, I mentioned to somebody in my office that I really wanted to get my nose pierced. She told me I should totally do it, because I have the nose for it. "I do, don't I?" I say. We walk over to Josh, who has lots of piercings, and I ask him where I could go to get my nose pierced. The person who does his piercings is in the city, he says, and I'm feeling kind of lazy and don't really fancy a drive up the 101 in rush hour traffic. I'd already done that for the Bach Festival two nights in a row.

So Josh tells me what to look for in a piercest (is that the word?) and I go on to yelp, and find a place really close to my hotel. They have lots of good reviews, so I call them up. "I want to get my nose pierced, but I'm really chicken, and sixteen years ago I got my eyebrows waxed and fainted and woke up in an ambulance, so I'm totally scared," I say. The girl is super-sweet and tells me to come in and check it out, and she'll explain the process to me, and then I can decide.

Along the way, I listen to the punk rock station, which is playing Avenged Sevenfold, and is totally pumping me up. I'm gonna do this thing, I think. I really am. I'm gonna get my nose pierced. I'm sick of walking around thinking how I really want to get a nose piercing, and not doing it. My lameness is literally driving me crazy. Either do it, or stop saying you want to do it, say I. Either way, make up your mind.

I park the car, walk in, and a big tattoo'd guy asks me if I'm lost, cuz I look like I could be. "I want to get my nose pierced," I say. "But I'm chicken." He responds by telling me that he's chicken too, and rings a buzzer, and within two minutes, a sweet twentysomething girl comes bouncing up the steps. "Oh, I talked to you before! It'll be fine. We'll take good care of you."

I go downstairs where the girls' cousin is hanging out as well, and they tell me that they'll let me lay down so I don't faint, they get me water, and she explains the piercing process to me. First off, they put a little doohicky (technical term) behind your nose so that the needle doesn't go through into more skin if it slips. Then they insert a hollow needle. Then they put the jewelry through that, and bend it up against the inside of your nostril. All told, the process will take less than 2 minutes, I'm told. Probably less than a minute. I agree, pick out my jewelry, and lay my head down.

The doohicky is placed inside my nostril.

Then the needles come out. She places them all right by my head so she won't even have to reach for them, thus shaving off an additional ten seconds. She tells me to take a deep breath, which I do. I ask if there's some drugs she can give me, and there aren't, of course, but the reason she gave me as to why I wouldn't want to be on drugs was really great. "You're participating in an ancient ritual," she says. "People have been doing this for thousands of years. You want to be present. It's special."

She's right, of course, and I'm glad to have it pointed out to me. So I take the breath, and as she inserts the needle she tells me to let it out. My eyes watered a bit, but seriously, it wasn't really any worse than getting blood drawn. I sat up, drank some water, she cleaned it a lot, told me what to do to take care of it, gives me her cell number in case I have problems. I sit for another five minutes or so, until I realize that I'm not going to pass out, go upstairs and hand them $50, and ten minutes later I was at Trader Joe's buying an Odwalla juice.

Now it's almost a week later, and I can't even feel it. Every once in a while I brush against it, or accidentally go over it when I'm washing my face, and I feel icky for a second, but that's it. I'm so glad I finally did it, and I know that I was waiting to find the perfect place and the perfect person to do it, and I had the perfect experience.

And now, without further ado, here are the pictures. So awesome. I'm in love with my nose piercing.

The Music Wayback Machine: 1999

2011-07-24T00:12:00.000-07:00

I've been playing around on Spotify, using the Billboard charts to make playlists of different years. Here's one from one of my favorite years, 1999, when I was 23: http://open.spotify.com/user/hteysko/playlist/46OKyZBEVMvR3fY2QtBWX0

Let me tell you about the coolness of my life at 23.

First off, in the spring of that year, I broke up with my longtime boyfriend Mark. We wound up breaking up several times before it finally took. He was a good guy, I'm sure he still is. It's just that, you know, I was 23 and I'd known him since I was 19, and life is too short to not spend your 20's doing crazy stuff that will make your grandkids cringe someday.

So that summer I moved to LA and lived in Koreatown, at 426 S. New Hampshire Ave, in this cool art-deco building from the 20's. It's where I spent the year before moving to London when I was 24, and that year will always be one of my favorites. My apartment had a fold-in-the-wall murphy bed, big windows with bars on (I'd hang plants from them), and a tiny kitchen with a tall ceiling. I was too broke to have a mattress when I first moved there, but after I found a job at a headhunting firm in LA, I saved up, and around October I had enough for a mattress.

On the day it was delivered, I woke up early and rode the bus (oh yeah, I didn't have a car) to the kmart on third (where The Grove is now) and bought a full bed set with a comforter, that I still sleep with to this day. I waited in the lobby for the mattress because my building was so ghetto that none of the buzzers worked. And once it was delivered, I walked to the Chinese place on the corner and got dinner, made up the bed, and spent the evening watching football and eating dinner in bed. Life was blissful.

(Here's a funny story - in the summer of 2005, before I met J, I went on a blind date with a guy who lived in that same building. It was too random for words. There are thousands of apartment buildings in LA and I wind up on a blind date with a guy who lives in the one I lived in five years before? Too strange. It kind of creeped me out, but I still went upstairs to his apartment anyway because I just had to get inside the building and see whether they'd changed the carpet. Plus he had a cute cat and I'm a sucker for cute cats.)

So anyway, there I am in my little studio apartment (which I really adored. I've never had an apartment I loved as much as that place) with the fold in the wall bed, and a mini-refrigerator because the big one that came with the place didn't work, and the building management never fixed it. Since I didn't have a car, I walked around with a fold-up grandma cart and took the bus to Trader Joe's, and I learned how to cook chicken.

There was an earthquake that fall that was strong enough to wake me up in the middle of the night. I was dreaming that a monster was shaking the bars on my windows, and I was pissed off at him for that. Then I woke up and realized it was an earthquake and ran to the doorway, but by then it was over. I woke my parents in Pennsylvania up in the middle of the night, though, to tell them I was ok in case it was on the news or something. They weren't impressed.

Blink 182 got popular with What's My Age Again, which coincidentally had lyrics in it about being 23, which I took as some kind of sign. Of what, I'm not sure.

I went on a couple of Very Bad Dates. With one guy, we had a good first date, and then he wanted me to come out and see him the next night, but it was late, and I was going to have to take, like, four buses to get to the Valley, and I was lazy and didn't care that much, so I wound up not going and falling asleep without calling him instead. He freaked out and called the police, reporting me missing, and they came banging on my door at 4am. Listen, I'm sorry I stood you up, whatever your name was, and I guess it was sweet of you to not want me to be dead somewhere, but had the thought not occurred to you that I was standing you up? Really?

Speaking of dating, I was so bad at it, that when a guy didn't call me back after I'd left him like, five messages, I assumed that he must have lost my number and I called him at work to give it to him. Seriously. Such a bad move. I'm glad that somewhere along the line I finally learned how to play it cool and not wear my heart on my sleeve. So that six years later, when J and I were on our third or fourth date, he was talking to somebody else and referred to me as his girlfriend, and I completely ignored it. And then a couple of hours later, at the end of the date, I quickly said, "I'm glad you called me your girlfriend," and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, and then walked out the door. It was the smoothest move I've ever pulled off, and he said that it was one of the things that officially hooked him.

And now, just an hour ago, he burped in my ear. I asked him why he did something so gross, and he said, "so your brain could smell my dinner."

We sure know how to be classy.

Magic notebooks and Early Music

2011-07-21T00:25:00.000-07:00

In the summer of 2002, I was set up with a guy who slept with a ferret in his bed. I didn't know that before I met him, but as soon as I found out, it was the only thing I could think about, and kind of grossed me out. I feel like a hypocrite because I sleep with cats in my bed, and both species lick their butts, but cats have the advantage of being cute, and not being ferrets.

Anyway, two things about my long introductory date (he lived in Ohio and I drove out over Labor Day weekend) have stayed with me.

First, he was (and still is, I might add) the only guy who ever surprised me with a carpet of rose petals. Now that I'm 35 and jaded, it makes me think it was a nice trick he uses on all the new girls he meets, but at the time it was the most romantic thing I'd ever seen, and made me feel like I was in a soap opera.

Second, he introduced me to engrish.com, a probably-offensive, not politically correct (but utterly hilarious) website that makes fun of the English translations on Asian products. For example, this Christmas card:

Have you "done" a nice boy & girl? Really?

Oh, you can have hours of fun looking at engrish.com.

So this week I'm up in San Mateo at my office, and I was going into the city tonight because the San Francisco Bach Festival is going on, and I can't pass up an opportunity to hear some Telemann played on original instruments. I'm a geek like that.

I decide to utilize my yelp app and find a stationary store nearby, because it's been a long time since I've gone on a pen-binge, and I'm due for one; and anyway, I had an hour to kill before the concert, and what better way is there to kill an hour than to look at pens?

So I am led to a Japanese shopping mall that has both the Japanese equivalent of a Barnes and Noble (two stories, lots of browsing) and a massive stationary store. My Japanese twin nearly exploded with glee.

I got a crapload of pens I don't need:

but the things I want to share particularly, are the engrish notebooks.

This one reads: Choose! Not be a consumer, but be a smart consumer. If current consumption would expand and a variety of floras & faunas would be extinct, human beings would be next!

Holy shit, that puts the fear of God in me. What am I supposed to do if, say, I'm a kid taking notes in class, and suddenly the realization hits me that the entire human race could be destroyed because my friends didn't buy the right notebook and the floras and faunas were all going to be extinct. That's a panic attack just waiting to happen right there, that is.

This little beauty says, Comedian? Please have a wonderful time with this notebook. The story of pleasant animals.

So hang on, what if I'm not a comedian? Can I still have a wonderful time with the notebook, or do I need to have a crappy time with it? And what if I don't write the story of pleasant animals in it? What if I don't even like animals, much less think they're pleasant? What then? Do I need to get another notebook? Will this one explode?

But seriously, anything can be funny if you take two mice, draw some bow-ties on them, stick a microphone in front, and make it look like they're doing stand up at The Comedy Store. You could have written anything up there on top, and I wouldn't care because I'm so enchanted by the Jerry Seinfeld mice.

Keeping up the trend of using cute animals, we have this furry little thing, with a caption that reads, A pleasant memory and beautiful scenery. There are a lot of unforgettable things in everyday life. and at the bottom we have, I write an important thing, and do not let's finish. A way of writing seems to be for freedom and oneself.

WTF? Is that supposed to even mean anything? The unforgettable things in everyday life, I get. That's fine. Cute kitten, unforgettable every day life...I'm with all of that. But what the hell is that last part? I write an important thing and do not let's finish? In a metaphysical way, it sort of reminds me of an 8am Philosophy 101 class I took as a freshman in college. While the professor talked about Socrates and riddles, I tried to memorize all the Presidents. It gets so murky after the Civil War. Does anybody know who James K Polk even was? Who gets elected with a name like that? I think he's a Made Up President, just to give kids more names to remember.

Finally, this one is my favorite. Note Book personal. Most advanced quality gives best writing features and gives satisfaction to you. Ok, first, what are these advanced writing features? It looks like a normal narrow-ruled notebook to me. Does it make my coffee for me? Does more paper appear when you run out? How can paper have advanced writing features? And I'm wondering whether maybe somebody ought to send one to Mick Jagger, too?

Buh-dump...bing!

PotterGeek

2011-07-15T22:08:00.000-07:00

Happy Harry Potter Day everyone!

Last night saw me chugging coffee at 11pm, and only half-wondering whether the nearly-full moon was significant for Harry and his search for Horcruxes.

We joined the throngs of Gryffindor geeks at the Edwards Cinema at the Ontario Mills mall, arriving in what we assumed would be more than enough time (11:30 for a 12:10 show). Man, did we underestimate the dedication and punctuality of Harry Potter fans. Clearly a bit of Hermione had rubbed off on them. The place was packed, and we had to park miles away (well, not really, but it seemed like it). When we proudly presented our ticket to the ticket-taker, he told us that our auditorium had already been seated. So it was the front row for us. But that was ok, because we didn't have to hear many people talking, and it felt like we had the whole place to ourselves.

My favorite part of the night was seeing how excited everyone was. At 12:05, the chanting started. "haRRY. haRRY." When the movie started, the auditorium erupted in cheers. And given that this was Part 2, and the action started nearly right away, the cheering only continued. Harry gets the next Horcrux: Massive Cheers. Harry goes to Hogwarts: Massive Cheers. The loudest cheering of the night, though, was reserved for the unlikely hero, Neville Longbottom. Honestly, it was almost as if the audience didn't know exactly what was going to happen at every moment, and was actually caught off guard a time or two. One movie-addition was the Hermione/Ron kiss in the Chamber of Secrets where they've gone off to retrieve a basilisk fang. The screenwriter did well to add that.

The battle scenes were epic. When the professors all went outside to start putting up protective enchantments around the school, I got goosebumps. When Voldemort's first attacks were repelled by the spells, we all forgot the story for a moment, and hoped against hope that the enchantments would hold him back, and somehow the school would remain unscathed. And Alan Rickman's Severus Snape was amazing. The whole thing was a feast for the senses, and I left supremely satisfied, which was a change after Part 1, which was just a disappointment. I'm so glad to see the series go out on a high note.

It does make me sad that I won't ever go to a midnight Harry Potter opening again. No more rushing home from the bookstore at 2am with my new copy in hand, ready to stay up all night reading. No more waiting to see how the movie will translate the story.

For now, though, I'm looking forward to Pottermore, JK Rowling's new site, launching this fall, which supposedly will include new Harry Potter fiction. I remain hopeful that there are still some stories at Hogwarts still waiting to be told, and there might still be some 3am reading sessions yet to come.

Harry Mania

2011-07-15T21:41:00.001-07:00

Dementors around Hogwarts

is this worth being fat for?

2011-07-13T19:52:00.000-07:00

In case you're wondering about how my weight-loss experiment is going, I'm down 24 pounds from when I started on March 8, and 30 pounds from where I was when I was pregnant in February. I hit a little plateau in June - I think it happens from time to time. The month of June was basically a non-starter for me. I didn't lose a pound. I guess it was to be expected with all my travel and not keeping a regular schedule. One thing that I've found is really necessary for me to lose weight is having a regular routine. I'm a creature of habit, and I wind up eating a lot of chocolate when my habits get messed up.

So anyway, the past week or so, I've been implementing a new strategy. Every time I want to eat something, I ask myself, "is this worth being fat for?" Generally the answer is a resounding "no."

There are some foods that it might be worth being fat for. Sbarro pizza is one of those foods. Man, I love that stuff. I haven't had it in years, but I crave it regularly.

But on the whole, there really aren't many foods that it would be worth being fat for.

Another fun question that takes it up a notch is, "is this worth dying an early death of diabetes for?"

I don't know that even Sbarro pizza could justify an early death.

I'm currently having two problems that need to be filed in the "problems you shouldn't complain about having," folder.

First, my clothes don't fit. I really don't want to go out and buy more, at least until I drop another 10 pounds or so, but it might be a necessity because I'm getting sick of wearing the same two pairs of jeans and sundress. What I might do is wait until late August, and get myself a whole new wardrobe then, and pretend that I'm a kid and it's Back to School time. That'd be fun. I could get new notebooks, too, because Lord knows there's a shortage of paper in my house (i'm being facetious. I currently own over 60 blank notebooks, because blank notebooks call to me like cocaine calls to a hedge fund manager).

The second is that I now have wrinkles. Around my mouth and my eyes. They just appeared, out of nowhere. Talk about annoying. I guess I'll take it though. I'm sick of looking like a baby-faced-cherub anyway.

I guess that's it for now. Tomorrow is Harry Potter Day, and I'm trying to reread all the books and rewatch all the movies before seeing the final movie. It's a bit melancholy - no new Harry Potter books, or movies, ever again. So I'm making the most of this final Harry Potter Day. J thinks I'm a nerd, but the Gryffindor colors are still going to decorate the house. I don't care. If he gets too annoying, I've been practicing my Stupify spell.

My Day in Numbers

2011-07-10T00:08:00.000-07:00

J has been away this weekend doing some sort of bachelor-party-manly-camping-rafting trip, and I'm home with the cats having Girl Time. So here's what Girl Time looks like, in Numbers.

8: The number of episodes in The Kennedy's miniseries. Also, coincidentally, the number of episodes that I watched last night, while laying on the couch not cooking dinner and not caring about the house getting messy.

2: The number of dreams I had last night about living in the White House and dating RFK.

3: Miles around our lake, which I walked around this morning. I've been trying to do that 5 times a week.

2: The number of Diet Cokes I drank today. I'm supposed to be off soda, but I figure that J is having a weekend filled with debauchery, so I can drink some nasty aspartame-laced-infertility-causing diet coke.

3: The number of Harry Potter movies I watched today in preparation for the big midnight IMAX showing on Thursday night.

2: The number of walls in my home office that are now painted a lovely shade of bright green called Summerland. That number should be all 4 after tomorrow. It's nice and zen, and as an added bonus, it will be a cheerful gender-neutral color when this room gets changed into a nursery - when we finally manage to have a baby. (sad, but kind of funny - though not ha-ha funny - story: the other night I was talking to J about names for the next baby when I'm pregnant with it. Baby T and Mustard Seed are already taken, and I asked him if he had anything he wanted to call it. He said he wanted to call it, "i hope it lives." Cue tiny violins now).

27: The square inches of my arms and legs that are covered in green paint. I'm kind of clumsy and like to back into walls covered with wet paint a lot.

35: The number of books that I decided are going to Goodwill and/or the Yard Sale Pile, and have been relocated from my home office to the living room floor.

3: The number of Tylenol I took for my back, which kind of hurts after the painting.

8: The number of mayorships I have on 4square now that some punk took away my mayorship of the 7-11 this morning. Dammit, I'm going to go on a slurpee diet to get that mayorship back.

1: The number of sticks I peed on this morning because I've been feeling really nauseated and thought I might be pregnant. It was negative, but this is ok because I'm still not ready. The game is on again in September. But right now, it's still the Summer of Heather.

2: the number of pounds I've lost this week, after having hit a somewhat discouraging plateau the past few weeks.

87: the number of emails in my work inbox this morning.

5: the number of emails in my work inbox tonight. I'll knock those suckers out tomorrow for sure and start the week on an empty inbox.

Ok kids, I'm off to sleep for 8 hours now and cuddle with 3 or 4 cats. Here's a funny cat story - whenever J's away, I sleep on his side of the bed. And the cats love to cuddle with him, so they all come under the blankets and start to get all comfy, and then realize it's me, and get really confused. It's my way of tricking them into giving me more love.

Who needs camping when you've got Google Plus?

2011-07-06T19:07:00.000-07:00

My husband and I are such web geeks. I first caught wind of the whole Google Plus thing a few weeks ago and have been yammering for an invite all over facebook. Finally a friend of hubby's offered them up, and he was all nonchalant like it was no big deal. Once I explained it to him, he became increasingly excited. So we spent the weekend checking our gmail to see whether our invitations had arrived yet. We need to get out more.

He randomly checked his email while we were eating dinner tonight, and bam! the invitations had arrived. Sweet! So we promptly turned off the tv, turned away from our food, grabbed our laptops, and got to profile-making. So if any of you are on google plus, please add me. We'll spark each other. It beats the old facebook "poke," no?

And below is a picture of our camping spot over the weekend. Some things I had forgotten about camping (since it's been 20 years since I've gone):

1. bugs. I don't like them.

2. tents are hot.

3. People are loud over the holiday weekend.

So, that being said, we're going to go camping again when it's cooler and less crowded. Still, King's Canyon is beautiful - John Muir said it was the second most beautiful place in the world after Yosemite, and while I'm not sure I would say it's more beautiful than the train ride from London to Cambridge, for example, it's still pretty gorgeous.

Back to Nature

2011-07-01T15:03:00.000-07:00

Hey Kids! I'm getting ready for a big old-fashioned Camping Trip. I'm going to be like the girls in The Parent Trap and make nice with the bears, and be Nature Girl for the weekend.

Here's the backstory:

For our wedding, J and I weren't really sure what all to put on our registry. We already lived together (don't tell my parents), and we didn't need a lot of stuff. So we put fun things on like Guitar Hero, for example (we actually spent almost our entire wedding night playing guitar hero, eating Thai food, and taking naps, which was super-fun) and Camping Gear. So for the past almost-five years we have been the proud owners of a huge 8 person tent, a camping stove (with two burners!), a propane lantern, some nifty pots and pans, a queen sized air mattress, and sleeping bags.

We haven't gone anywhere with all this stuff yet, though. We did set up the tent twice - once in our old apartment, and once two years ago on our deck. But the stove and lantern remained unopened, and waiting patiently for the time when we would take them out and use them.

Since this summer we're all about getting out into our gorgeous state, we decided that this weekend would be a camping weekend. So this afternoon I'm stopping for good camping food, and then tomorrow we're going to head out to sleep under the stars. If we like it, next week we'll reserve more spots at other campgrounds around CA for the rest of the summer. If we hate it, we'll stick the gear on Craigslist.

I'll post pictures, but in the meantime, happy long weekend everyone. Stay bug-free.

How to Not Annoy Me when You're Taking Your Kids on Vacation

2011-06-28T20:39:00.000-07:00

So it's the Summer Vacation Season again, kids, which means that I, like most people who travel a fair amount for business rather than pleasure, will be spending more time in the airport fuming at stupid people and counting down the days until school starts and we can get our quiet, hurried, peaceful security lines back.

Having just completed two trips this month that challenged my ability to stay zen in the face of supreme annoyances, I have compiled a list of Things To Not Do In Order To Avoid Pissing Me (and any other business travelers) Off.

Please study and remember these before you take the kids off to Disneyland this summer. There will be a test, in the form of the number of sighs that come from the be-suited, briefcased person behind you. Less than three, and you're doing ok. Between 5 and 10, we won't kill you. Over 10, and you are officially on the Business Travelers Family Horror List and we reserve the right to roll our eyes at you, repeatedly.

1) Just because you CAN get 2 free bags plus a carry on plus a personal item on Southwest doesn't mean that you HAVE to. I CAN jump off a bridge. Doesn't mean it's a good idea. Listen, you don't need all that shit you're taking. I can guarantee that in two weeks you'll glance at those cute little outfits that you never wore and wonder why you lugged them along. Why do overpackers like you piss off people like me? Because you clog up all the walkways with your carts and your luggage spilling out over it, and you stop in the middle of the walkway to readjust your straps and pile up your bags again, and your crap gets in my way. You take forever in the dropoff areas lugging your bags out of the car. I'm in a hurry. You might not be, but I am. So please, when you think you're done packing, go through your suitcase and remove half of everything, and repack. You will take up less space, you will move faster, and you won't annoy me.

2) Follow the signs. When you're on an escalator or moving walkway, and it says "stand to the right, walk on the left," do that. Again, I'm rushing. I'm trying to get to my appointment and get home so I can spend some time with my husband on our deck. Follow the directions and we'll get along ok. Make me squeeze through you, walk over your luggage, or correct your kid, and you're toast. I will plow right over you. I swear to God I will.

3) Speaking of your kids, be responsible for them. When you're in an airport, you're in a place where, nine months of the year, the vast majority of the people who are there are doing business. They're making phone calls, skyping Hong Kong, etc. I get it that you have a right to be there - that's why there are tiny chairs and play areas. But for the love of God, don't give your kids a gallon of coke so they're bouncing off the walls while I'm trying to read the Financial Times. Just because you think it's cute that they walk up to strangers and try to undo their shoelaces, that doesn't mean everybody else thinks it's cute, ok? I don't want to have to slug your kid. Don't give me a reason to.

3B) Equally annoying are those parents who scream at their children for no reason. Don't be a dick to your kids in the presence of a hundred and fifty people on your plane. You'll just look like an asshole and make us all uncomfortable.

4) Now is not the time to study the menu at Starbucks and ask the barista what the difference is between an Americano and a Frappuccino. Do that at your neighborhood Starbucks at 11am on a Wednesday. Not when there's a line of people behind you, all of whom are rushing for a flight and are itching for some caffeine so they can prepare for their meetings.

4B) Don't act surprised when you get charged $5 for a cup of coffee. It's annoying and reminds those of us who do this all the time how much of our lives and money we've wasted overpaying for stale grease sandwiches in crappy airports.

5) Be prepared. Be prepared for the security lines. Pack your liquids in a handy spot so you don't have to stop and hold the line up while you go through a suitcase full of socks to find your ziploc baggie. Watch what other people in the line in front of you. For example, if you're behind 20 people, and they're all getting out their ID and boarding passes, and showing them to the nice TSA officer, that means that you will probably have to do that, too. Don't be all surprised when you get up there and he asks to see it. You saw this one coming a mile away.

6) Don't act retarded. This means: don't try to be cute and cut in line in the security line because you're a single man traveling with no luggage when you clearly haven't traveled post 9/11 and don't know that you have to take off your belt, keys, phone, shoes, dignity, etc., and you wind up holding us all up because you were too cool to wait while I lugged my suitcase up on the belt (oh, and if you're a man, and you offer to help women with their bags, this act of chivalry goes a long way to avoid us blogging about what an asshole you are after you pull a cute stunt like that).

7) Don't act all freaked out. It's really not that scary. You're stressing us all out with all your nerves. Listen, bags usually don't get lost. If there are enough of you on a late flight, the connecting flight is probably going to wait for you. If they don't, you'll get the next one. If there isn't a next one, they'll put you up in a hotel and give you food vouchers. It's really not that bad. Be cool, remember you're on vacation, and leave your stressy energy at home.

Thank you. I feel better now.

I voodoo, do you voodoo?

2011-06-25T22:25:00.000-07:00

So I'm in New Orleans which is known for a couple of things - music, alcohol, girls flashing themselves for beads, parties, food, and...voodoo. There is voodoo stuff everywhere in this town. Palm Readers all over Jackson Square, outside of the big churches. It's all intermingled with organized religion, and nobody seems to take it too seriously.

I decided to jump in and get a reading done at the most touristy-looking place of all. Marie Laveau's House of Voodoo. I decided it was a sign that I should go there when I saw one solitary newspaper article up on the wall about the store, and it was how the woman who owned it had some kind of magic spoon (not to be confused with the magic beans that the magic spoon stirs) that, when women ate soup with it (or something), helped them get pregnant (no shit. Where do I sign up?). I went in, said I'd never had a reading done before, and didn't say much else.

The first thing that the reader said was that my son and daughter loved me very much. WTF? I don't have a son and daughter, I say. No, you do, she says. I see them here. It's the biggest thing in the spirit world that I see about you right now. It's the biggest message. Your son and your daughter are devoted to you. Then she shuffles her cards, sees a 9 of diamonds, and says, "oh, your son and daughter you lost this past year. Saturn's orbit sure has been a bitch to you this time around."

That's some creepy shit right there, folks. I always said it. F*ck Saturn. What has Saturn ever done for me? Now it all makes sense. Stupid Saturn.

(A side note on my opinion of all things occult-like: I posted once before when I talked about the tarot cards, this stuff doesn't scare me. It's the spirit world, and to me it's the same place where the angels are, and some people are in touch with it, and some people are able to share their gift, and being all freaked out and thinking of them as "witches" seems so medieval to me. I just don't like to give the Devil that much power, you know? Evil feeds off of the power you give it. If you just take things as gifts and accept them, and don't make it all "evil", things work out a lot better in the end. I mean, five hundred years ago the priests used to read rune stones to predict the gender of the king's children. It's all relative. Thus endeth the lesson.)

Anyway, back to my reading.

She also said that my son - Baby T - is going to come back to me, but it might not be as a natural child I carry. I'm apparently going to have three children. One I will carry, one will be adopted, and she couldn't tell on the third. The jury's still out on what my ovaries will accomplish.

She said she could tell that my partner was going to come into his own skin sometime soon and in the next few years would start a business or do something that would really amaze me and make me super-proud. Sweet.

Apparently the worst of everything is over. Again, this is because Saturn's orbit is receding. Stupid planet and its stupid orbit.

What else...

Oh, she said that J is so crazy in love with me. She said she rarely sees people with partners as crazy in love with them as my partner is with me. Awwww. Bless.

She picked up on travel and wanting to live abroad, and before I even mentioned anything about it, she said that I would live in many places and many countries and my children would grow up speaking many languages. I asked how that was going to happen, and she said that a close male with brown hair and brown eyes was going to be instrumental in having it come to fruition. She thought it was Jonathan, but he doesn't have brown hair and brown eyes. Sandor in London, I'm looking at you for that, ok? Make it so, Number One.

Oh, and I have four guardian angels. I wonder whether they're anybody famous. I can just see it. Beethoven, Henry VIII, Heidegger and my grandma are all sitting around having tea, planning how to protect me from Saturn. Henry VIII wants to chop some of its rings off. Beethoven wants to scream at it. And Heidegger wants to question whether it exists at all, and if naming it Saturn gives it too much power in my life. And my Grandma wants to chill out and try to appease Saturn.

Anyway, that was my psychic reading in a nutshell. I spent the rest of the evening wandering around listening to music. All in all, not a bad way to spend an evening.

2011-06-24T22:42:00.000-07:00

In the world of Small Things That Make You Happy: I've finally got my Girly/Dido station on Pandora exactly to my liking. It's taken nearly three years of tweaking, but I realized tonight that I didn't click "dislike" once in nearly two hours of listening. I am happily bopping around now listening to The Cranberries, and remembering college, and thinking that maybe I have a paper due tomorrow, but then realizing that I don't, and then I feel relieved.

So something new I did today was wear my sunglasses inside, all day. I am having a hard time this weekend, if you hadn't noticed from yesterday's post, and I didn't really feel like facing people. When I went into the convention center, I was hit in the face with 25,000 shiny happy people/librarians, and I wanted to hide from all the festivities. Plus, there was free food, and nothing gets librarians on city-budgets excited like free food. I was early for my first meeting, and wanted to sit somewhere quiet and read, but I couldn't get away from it all, so I decided to put in my headphones, and put on my sunglasses, and it really was like being in my own little cocoon of a world. I had Bob Seger on (Roll me Away is one of the greatest road-trip songs ever) reminding me that I've been running against the wind, and the world was a nice shade of muted pastel blue, and no one smiled an annoying bright smile at me, and I didn't care how aloof I looked. Damn, it was fun.

The only funny thing was when I accidentally walked into a wall because, in all my aloofness, I wasn't paying attention. Whatever. I'm a klutz, but I'm an aloof klutz.

Seriously, I'm going to do this Sunglasses Inside thing all the time when I don't feel like facing people. It's such a good trick, I don't know why I didn't think of it before.

The only other time I've work sunglasses a lot (other than, you know, like in the car driving, and on the beach, and obvious stuff like that) was when I was 17 on a school trip in Europe, and I discovered alcohol. There were a whole bunch of us from different schools and I made friends with this guy Craig, who was gorgeous. He was subsequently my "date" to the senior prom. "date" being in "quotes" because he was gay. But he was from another school, and pretended that he was my boyfriend really well, and picked me up in a red porsche, so I was stoked. Besides, I'm a nerd and spent most of the prom studying my flashcards for all my AP tests that were going on the next week. Yep, you read that right. In my tiny little beaded purse, I had stashed a set of flashcards on the French Revolution, and an extra lipstick. I rock like that.

Anyway, Craig was gorgeous. And there was this other gorgeous girl - I forget her name, but let's call her Kristen, because in my high school Kristen's were all really pretty. So Kristen was tall and model-gorgeous, and I think she didn't realize that Craig was gay, but she probably figured that they should be together because the two gorgeous people are always together, right? But Craig had already told me he was gay, and he and I spent all the bus-rides sitting together listening to Andrew Lloyd Weber soundtracks, so we were already tight. So Gorgeous Girl - Kristen - was super-friendly with me, cuz I think she thought maybe I would somehow be an "in" to Craig. So it was the three of us, together. The two model-gorgeous people and me, drinking champagne with diet coke (yes, you read that right. Champagne with diet coke. Don't ask).

Actually, I might just be inventing all that in my head. The motive, I mean. I just know that it was model-Kristen and Craig and me and I was really drunk for the first time in my life, and discovering the deliciousness of being slightly out of your head, and then having bloodshot eyes the next morning.

Hence the sunglasses, which never came off, the entire trip.

Speaking of being drunk, you know what one of my favorite feelings in the world is? You know when you're out at a club, and you get really drunk, and the music is throbbing and pulsing, and you're dancing, and you're sweating, and you're laughing and giddy, and the room is sort of spinning, but it's all kind of fun and crazy, and only slightly woozy? And then you go to the bathroom. And you're in the stall and you're peeing, and for the first time it's like, kind of quiet, except you can still hear the beat thumping around, and you're like, "Ahhhh, this peeing feels really good. Man, I'm hungry. What's going on? Did I just make out with that guy out there? What was his name? Or was it a girl? Huh? Who's calling me? What phone number is this written on my hand? Damn, I'm still peeing. Oh man, this is taking forever. I'm just going to rest my head against the wall here..."

I LOVE that feeling. Like, totally love it. I'd go out clubbing every night (if it wasn't so tiring - seeing as how I'm not 23 anymore) just to get the peeing-while-drunk feeling.

This has been random, hasn't it?

Same Sh*t Different Year

2011-06-23T22:02:00.000-07:00

I'm moody today. I'll tell you why. Because I'm at the American Library Association's annual conference in New Orleans, which happens every year around this time. Last year it was in Washington DC. And I had found out I was pregnant about 10 days beforehand. I was trudging to the Safeway near the convention center to get Good Food since there was a little life inside of me, and was thus avoiding Convention Center Food, which basically sucks all around. I was still all excited. Reading the What To Expect When You're Expecting book, highlighter in hand, post-it stickies marking every relevant page. Thinking about how the next year, we'd all drive to ALA because we'd have a 4 month old, and I've been on enough flights with 4-month-olds that I wouldn't want to inflict that on anyone. Stupid planning. Stupid What to Expect book. They don't tell you to expect that your heart is going to be literally torn apart. They don't tell you to expect to have emotional mood swings even 8 months later. They don't tell you that you'll burst into tears doing the most mundane stuff like picking out raspberries in the grocery store. They don't tell you crap. Everybody knows to expect morning sickness. Duh.

In addition to the fact that, since last year I have lost two, count 'em, two babies, I'm also reminded of my friend Jim Buescher. Jim Buescher was my bestest friend from the time I was about 12. He went to a different school - Penn Manor whilst I went to Pequea Valley - but we met in drama classes at the Fulton Opera House in downtown Lancaster (a mysterious place which, to a country bumpkin like me, was brimming with sophisticated things like coffee houses called The Monks Tunic, and convenience stores you could walk to. Imagine that. Walking! Like on a sidewalk! Slurping your slusheee. Amazing!).

My name then was Heather Buettner and he was Jim Buescher, so we were only separated by a very few letters in the alphabet. He was worldly and knew all about Paul Simon's albums post-Garfunkel and pre-Graceland (when he wrote deeply poetic songs like "When Numbers Get Serious" and before he became a plastic surgery disaster). After the SAT's one Saturday afternoon we were driving along a back country road and he started driving in the oncoming lane and saying, "Look! We're in England!" And he taught me how to say a French phrase, which, roughly translated meant: "I like to frolic with gay soldiers in New Orleans." Only he didn't tell me what it meant, and I wandered all around the French-speaking part of Switzerland on a choir trip one summer thinking I was asking people where the bathrooms were.

Anyway, I'm in New Orleans now for the first time (which, coincidentally, got me the jetsetters badge on 4square today, thank you very much) and Jim Buescher is...wait for it...passed on. Like my (count-'em) two babies. He died in a car accident last summer. I found out about it while I was at an OB appointment. That's some dramatic foreshadowing if I've ever seen any.

So here I am in New Orleans and I want so desperately to call him up and say, "J'aime jouer avec les soldats gais à la Nouvelle-Orléans" only he's not there. And I want so desperately to hold my baby boy, only he's not here. In a town that's been descended upon by 25,000 librarians, you'd think somebody would effing be here. But nope. Nobody's here. It's a ghost town.

I've gotta go to bed. Oh, and I'm sick, too. To the couple who sat next to me on the plane from Vegas: sorry for all the hacking, folks. I hope you had purell handy. I tried not to breathe on you.

I'm gonna go cry my little shrinking self to sleep now. Cue tiny violins.

2011-06-15T21:09:00.000-07:00

Hi there people... Long Time No Blog! Man, I've been busy. We went back home to Amish country Pennsylvania for five blissful days of being social with the folks who've known me since I was in diapers, which was actually exhausting. Man, we are so totally unsocial out here. I'm out of practice. It was nonstop social-butterfly-ness. My throat got sore and I ran out of things to talk about. Except with my dad. Have you ever noticed how, when you go home, even if you're 35 like me, you suddenly revert to being a 13 year old again around your parents? Maybe it goes away once you have kids of your own (which I am supposed to know about, but don't yet...ahem, cue tiny violins) or maybe it's just me, but I found all kinds of shit to argue about with my dad.

Like so:

1) Britney Spears' music is not terrible, and there were plenty of bubblegum bands in the 50's. Isn't that where the term came from in the first place. They weren't all The Platters. For every Fatz Domino singing about Blueberry Hill, there were probably a dozen Britney Spears-alikes of cookie cutter harmonies.

Let's check.

Hang on, that might be wrong. I googled top songs of 1957, and they're all actually kind of good. I mean, I'm not going to go clubbing to them, but even a promising one called "Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu" had some funkiness. That was the only one on the list that I hadn't heard before, or didn't know, and I expected it to be lousy (a word that reminds me of 1957 in an 'aww, gee, Mrs. Cleaver, can't Wally come double date to the soda shop with us?' kind of way). In my defense. the lyrics are pretty hit-me-baby-one-more-time awful:

I wanna squeeze her but I'm way too low
I would be runnin' but my feets too slow
Young man rhythm's got a hold of me too
I got the rockin' pneumonia and the boogie woogie flu

Maybe I just appreciate all kinds of music, so it's a bad argument to have. And really, Brit's music has gotten a lot better in the past few years. At least, her producers have. I really like her new album. Really.

So whatever. That one's a tie.

2) Posting on Facebook does NOT mean that the police have access to your bank account. My dad is a privacy freak. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that he grew up in post-WW2 East Germany, but his biggest fear is Big Brother. He hates cameras on the street. He hates facebook. He hates the GPS on phones. He hates gun laws. He hates helmet laws.

My dad needs to join the Michigan Militia.

Are they even around anymore?

Google break... cue Jeopardy Music...

Yep, they are, claiming that they're Homeland Defense, with a page on their website devoted to Militia Babes. Stay classy, Michigan. Stay classy.

So yeah, my dad. He's got something going on with the whole privacy thing, and it's hella freaky. But good fodder for arguments.

3) The 50's were NOT the greatest decade ever known to man, it was NOT the most innocent time, kids these days AREN'T really that much more stupid, and perceptions are all relative.

4) Building the mosque at ground zero isn't insulting. My dad claims it's the same as a mass murderer building a shrine to Jeffrey Dahmer outside one of his victim's home. J pointed out, quite reasonably (despite the steam that was coming out of his ears) that my dad had just compared God to Jeffrey Dahmer. Things got weird after that.

Yep, good times and good arguments were had by all, except my stepmom and husband, who had to listen to us bicker like we did when I was 14.

But I'm back and getting caught up now, and I'm still learning Italian and I'm still losing weight (though it's getting much harder these days) and that's the update. Eventually I'll get back on a regular schedule.

Teysko Out.

Memorial Day Weekend

2011-05-31T22:46:00.000-07:00

If you could pack up the perfect Memorial Day weekend into a nice little box, I was carrying that box in my pocket all weekend.

A few weeks ago when I was in Sacramento, I had a little epiphany about California. On the first floor of the State Capital, each county has a little glass diorama-like display case where they can put pictures highlighting their county. I was walking along looking at these show-and-tell displays, and I became really depressed because there is so much beauty, just in our one little state, and I have a feeling I'm never going to see it all. Eventually I will leave California, and I won't have seen all of Placer County. Or Humboldt County. Or Shasta. Lots of places. So J and I have decided to become tourists in our own state. It's quite fitting with my New Stuff Project anyway, and it will be fun to see how many state parks we can visit.

So this weekend we headed up to Hearst Castle, the "ranch" of William Randolph Hearst, which he filled with Renaissance paintings, tapestries, Greek ruins and statues, and Roman mosaics. Apparently after the two world wars, ancient European stuff was on the market super-cheap to raise money for rebuilding, so you could have a swimming pool like this:

After we oohed and aahed at the artwork and mosaics, we checked out the little town of Cambria, about fifteen minutes south of the castle, along the central coast. We communed with a sea lion - well, he didn't commune, so much, but we had fun watching him try to bust open the shell he had so he could eat the yummy goodies inside, and I tried to get the perfect picture of the waves crashing on the rocks. After waiting for about half an hour, I finally got this one:

We ate dinner, and after waiting for the necessary 30 minutes, I went swimming in the outdoor heated pool, which I had to myself since it was freezing. That reminds me of a family vacation we took to Kent State when I was a kid (I don't know why we were visiting Kent State. My parents were never big hippies, so I'm not sure whether we were paying homage to something, or just picking out random places to visit. If you don't know why Kent State is important, by the way, you're a young whippersnapper, and you need to go wikipedia it). We stayed in a hotel with a sign advertising Family Rates and Heated Pool, only someone was clever and switched the P and the T, so it read Family RaPes, Heated tool. Funny.

We proceeded to spend the next day hanging out on the beach, climbing on rocks, and playing with the sea lions, after which we started the drive home, stopping along the way in Solvang, which has to be the kitchiest town I've ever seen. And considering I grew up in Amish country, with towns like Intercourse and Bird-in-hand advertising buggy rides, quilts and drive-through covered bridges, that's saying a lot. Apparently a bunch of Danish people settled Solvang, and they were seriously into windmills. The entire town looks like something out of every stereotypical picture of the Netherlands you've ever imagined, but worse. I felt like Don Quixote caught in a nightmare of windmills, wooden shoes, and chocolate.

I did have a funny moment, though. We were eating lunch and I overheard a girl who was waitressing complain to her friend about all the tourists in Solvang, and how she avoids going there unless she's working. It reminded me of how much I used to hate on tourists in Pennsylvania. I even had a bumper sticker that read, "Since there's a tourist season, why can't we shoot them?" I hated how they refused to pass the Amish buggies on back roads. I hated how slow they drove. I hated that when I was a kid they used to stop on the road when I was outside playing and ask me if I was Amish. I avoided Intercourse, Strasburg and Bird-in-Hand like the plague. And yet, here I was, 20 years later, in the kitchiest, cheesiest tourist trap I've ever seen, having a nice salad, sitting outside, and admiring the "cuteness" of it all. I wondered whether, in 20 years, that girl might take a family vacation to Intercourse and pay to ride in an "authentic" Amish buggy. That made me wonder whether there's this weird time/space continuum of tourist-trap survivors that visit each others' towns every 20 years. It did my head in, so we skedaddled out of there, avoiding all the families on group-bicycles and people shopping for tulips, and headed out, stopping at the Santa Inez mission, just to add some Imperialist history to our trip.

No trip through California is complete without a trip to a Mission, just to wallow in some forced guilt about smallpox. We wallowed, laughed smugly at the whitewashed descriptive signs (ie, "in 1860 the Indians were forced out of the town that was built for them 40 years before, and were given the reservation area surrounding the mission." Oh, the things that are left unsaid in that paragraph!) and got back in the car and left, using our gangsta-radar to find the only ghetto street in all of Santa Barbara to stop for gas. The place looked like it could have been on 87th and Vermont, yet it was a block from the beach in one of the swankiest towns in the country. It was kind of fun wondering whether I'd be killed while using the bathroom. Driving back along the coast, we saw a school (swarm? group? parade?) of dolphins jumping all around, which was super-cool, and reminded me again just how gorgeous this state is.

So now we're back up the mountain, and I'm frustrated because my new Droid Charge gets, like, zero reception in my house. That's what happens when you live 5000 feet up in a forest of redwoods, I guess. If anybody's trying to call me, I'm having fun playing with my kickass phone, which seems to be able to do everything except actually take calls. Tradeoffs, I guess.

Getting Fit Project Update: Halfway There!

2011-05-25T14:05:00.000-07:00

I officially started my Lifestyle Adjustment on March 8 with the goal of losing 40 pounds by August (five months from then). We're about halfway through now, and this morning, I officially hit the 20 pound mark. Woot for me! How that looks in real life: I lost 3 inches from my waist, 2 inches from my hips, an inch from each thigh and an inch from my bust. That's 8 inches from the areas that I measure. All the Boat Clothes I bought before our cruise in March are too big, which needs to be filed in the "Good Problems to Have" folder.

I'm finding it slower going now, but I expected that. Your body eventually gets used to the new food regimen, and will adapt to it. So I need to switch things up - eat often, to keep my metabolism going, for example. And I read that up to 70% of your metabolism is determined by how much water you drink, so I'm drinking loads of water these days - at least two liters a day. I pee all the time, but after being pregnant, I'm kind of used to that.

And I'm still hungry. Seriously, I've said it before and I'll say it again. All those people who say you can lose weight without being hungry are absolute liars. I'm perpetually hungry. But I'm getting used to it, and I don't go to bed thinking I'm going to die overnight if I don't eat a big bowl of cereal before I go to sleep anymore. I'm eating about 1800 calories/day which generally includes at least one really big spinach salad for dinner. If it were up to me, I'd be eating 3000 calories a day, half of that made up of cake and icing.

The thing that's worth it, though? I went up to the attic on Sunday and got down a box of clothes I haven't been able to wear since 2004, and most of them fit.

The big downside? I'm noticing fine lines in my cheeks now, which I suppose have always been there but I didn't notice because of the extra weight. So now I get to buy anti-wrinkle cream. Sigh.

It's a Reward Day though, and my 10 Pound Reward this round is a new phone. I'm getting myself down to the Verizon store quick-like. New gadgets and old clothes are totally worth being hungry for!

Fun with Lyrics

2011-05-23T20:15:00.000-07:00

Saturday Night Live is a highlight of my TV week anyway, but when Justin Timberlake hosts it, it becomes a highlight of my TV year (thank God the Rapture didn't happen on Saturday, so we didn't miss this!). So yesterday we watched SNL, and laughed our asses off to the Digital Short, featuring The Golden Rule, which we all know as, "it's not gay, when it's in a threeway." It postulates, of course, that whatever two guys do together doesn't count if there's a girl with them. Good to know.

Later on in the evening I was singing the song to myself, only I mis-sang, and the words came out, "it's not gay, if it's on a freeway." The implication then would be that anything two guys do together while stuck in rush hour traffic on the five north in, say, Whittier, wouldn't count. But as soon as you exit off on to surface streets, it becomes gay. Two things I just can't pass up with this line of thought: First, it's an additional justification for having a carpool: not only do you get to drive faster, but you also can indulge in random gay treats; and second, just make sure you check the timing on your GPS because as soon as you exit, the gay activities have to cease.

All night long we were having fun putting our own lyrical spin on the song. It's not gay if it's in a doorway, for example. Or a causeway, but I'm not really sure what a causeway is. Driveway also rhymes, which brings new meaning to National Public Radio's famous Driveway Moments...

You could substitute "runway", but that would be logistically difficult since most of the time spent on the runway involves wearing your seatbelt, making any gay activity strategically difficult. Also, it brings airports to mind. Let's have fun with word association: airport in the context of a gay song = a homophobic conservative senator in Minneapolis tapping his shoe in the men's room. I'd rather not go there in my mind, so scratch that and strike it from the record.

Jonathan just reminded me not to forget to use Runway as Catwalk, which makes a lot more sense. You see a lot of freaky stuff on high fashion runways, and I can imagine that it would take a lot to phase anyone on a fashion runway. That being said, models always look so serious, intimidating, and devoid of personality, so I'm not so sure that you'd even want to engage in much gay activity on a runway. But maybe that's just me.

Any day of the week rhymes, so if you're feeling a need to justify random gay activities you can remember the old axiom: "it's not gay, if it's monday (substitute your day of the week here)."

And finally, MMA, which fits on several levels. Two sweaty half naked muscled guys rolling around on a mat looks pretty gay in the first place, so it's a good reminder that "it's not gay, if it's MMA."

We have the best dinner table conversation, my hubby and I.

In Which I Get Political

2011-05-20T21:34:00.000-07:00

In case you don't live in California, the economic malaise we're in has hit libraries disproportionately, with some losing up to 75% of their funding in the past few years. Given the fact that many more people are using the library than ever (in over 70% of towns the library is the only place where you can get free internet, for example), this is a bad thing.

So I hightailed it up to Sacramento on Wednesday for the California Library Association's Legislative Day, where I met with my Assemblyman and Senator to talk about how important libraries are. There were two highlights of the day. First, I found out that the State Capitol has a decent cafeteria in the basement with a good salad bar. Second, we had a read-in on the east lawn. I've never been to a read-in before. It was kind of like a sit-in, only with quiet librarians who didn't make any demands, and read a lot. It was kind of like the quiet-non-confrontational-person's sit-in.

Oh, and the third highlight is that the Sacramento airport has a massage-bar, and for $30 I got a half-hour massage from a giant Russian man who beat me up, and I loved it.

Man, I made a political difference AND got my shoulders to relax all in the same day. Leg Day rocks.

Local News: Not Knowing The Camera's On You Edition

2011-05-17T16:31:00.000-07:00

The quality of this video is bad since they taped their TV, but man, is it funny.

It's been a while since I trawled around Local News, and I forgot how hilarious it is!

Week Four of Doing New Things: I Review The Landmark Forum

2011-05-16T23:06:00.000-07:00

I just had my mind blown this weekend, people. Seriously. Like blown out of the water. As my New Thing of the Week, I reviewed the Landmark Forum. It counts as a New Thing because it's a much different program than it was when I originally did it, as a snot-nosed 19 year old in 1996.

In case you haven't heard of Landmark, it's a three day inquiry in what it means to be human, as in the ontology of being human. Ontology is the study of the nature of being, what constitutes reality (going all the way back to the Greeks) and for three days you sit in a room, in a hard chair, and you consider your humanity.

One of the most basic concepts in the Forum that you get in the very first session is the distinction between what has happened, and what we humans make it mean. It's very basic stuff if you think about it. An obvious example is how, if five people see the same car accident, you'll get at least five different interpretations of what happened. Our lives are essentially made up of interpretations. Things happen, and we interpret those events into our own meanings (and different people interpret things in different ways, obviously).

The problem comes when we forget that we made up those interpretations, and we live our lives as if they're reality. They're not. When I was 10 and my dad looked at my report card and said, "B+, why isn't that an A?" he wasn't saying that I was a disappointment to him. I just made that up. He might have been saying, "you're so smart, I really want you to live up to your potential." I made up an interpretation, and then I lived my life like that was reality.

One of the biggest things I got from that conversation, on Friday morning, was that I made up a story when I was in 6th grade that I was weird. There was a new girl at my school - Ashley Grovesner - and she arrived and, for whatever reason, said some things that could be interpreted as "mean". People laughed, and I sat alone at lunch. Those are the "facts" in terms of what happened. What I made that mean was that I was different, that I didn't belong, and society could go screw itself. And ever since then I've lived a life where I take pride in being "different."

It's a very strong part of my identity, and I'm very attached to that part of myself. I am someone who does crazy things. I drive across the country by myself when I'm 19. I move to England. I have 9 cats. I win $5000 Target gift cards. I lose babies.

But the problem is that I live my life from the decision of a 12 year old.

Like that 12 year old even knew what was going on anyway. Maybe Ashley Grovesner was jealous of me. Maybe she was jealous of how much I belonged. She had her own issues that would have led her to be a bitch in a new school, right? But I continue to live my life from the decision of a 12 year old, and to this day, if I'm at a conference and it's lunch time, I pretend to be really busy and stand outside the banquet making phone calls so that I don't have to go up to someone and ask to sit at their table.

Maybe it would be fun to try on that I could belong in the world, and see what happened. Maybe I could sit with strangers at lunch, and talk to people, and not be afraid of them, because maybe they're all just as afraid of me as I am of them.

What's really funny is when we take these stories we've made up and we look for evidence of them. You know how you can find anything that you're looking for? Like when you get pregnant and suddenly everyone around you is pregnant? Or when you buy a blue pick up truck, and suddenly all you see are blue pick up trucks? We've all had that happen to us. It's because we're suddenly looking for those things - we're aware of them - and so we find the blue pick up trucks that drove past us before without us ever knowing about it.

But we do the same things with our stories. For example, one time, years ago, I thought I deserved a raise at work. I asked for a raise, and was told no. In that moment, I made up that my boss didn't like me. So then I looked for evidence of it. I noticed how I got crappy schedules. I noticed how she looked at me weird. I noticed how she was constantly reminding me to clock in, and always insisted that I had my bag checked to make sure I wasn't stealing anything before I left work. Suddenly I have all this evidence. Then I talk about it with people. "Hey, you guys, isn't she a bitch? She hates me." And I get people to agree with me. Which is more evidence. And of course I can't stay at that job, right? Because my boss hates me. So I quit the job.

The thing is, I made it all up. All that happened was that she said I couldn't have a raise. Hell, for all I know, they weren't allowed to give out raises then. Maybe there was a raise-freeze. Maybe I hadn't worked there long enough. Maybe her boyfriend had just broken up with her, or she just got in a car accident. I have no idea why she said no, but it probably wasn't because she hated me.

So I cost myself a job because of a story I made up.

But everybody does it. It's what we do in life. We live our lives as if we are in reality, but we so aren't. We couldn't recognize reality if it came up and kicked us in the ass. Well, we can actually, if we do the Forum. This stuff is so ingrained in who we are, in our identities, that we need something radical - like three days with 100 other people sitting on hard chairs - to kick that shit out of our systems, and free us up to invent something new with our lives, not based on what we think we know about life.

I did the Forum when I was 19 and I credit it for making me the person I am in life. I have participated on-and-off over the past 16 years, doing lots of Landmark programs, and stepping away when I thought that was a good idea, too. But this was the first time I reviewed the Forum, and I had my mind blown again. I had forgotten how powerful this stuff is. Most of the people in my life have done Landmark, so I take it for granted that people can separate out what happened from their interpretation of what happened. I forgot that most humans will go their entire lives without questioning that their interpretation of the world is the Truth. That's why wars happen. That's why fights happen and families break up. Everybody thinks their interpretation is right, and they will fight for that to the death. If the world could get the simple distinction of making up stories, there could be world peace. And that's just from Friday morning. You get two and a half more days of that stuff. It's nuts. People get their lives out of this course. They forgive their parents. They are finally honest with their spouses about resentments they've been carrying for years. They fall in love with themselves.

The main thing I got in terms of my pregnancy losses is how wrapped up I've been in the drama of it all. I replay it all in my head day after day. I obsess over the drama of it all. But that winds up being a dishonor to my babies, because I get them all wrapped up in my drama. Grief is natural. Replaying the events over and over, six months on, isn't. That's drama, and it doesn't do anything to honor my babies. Now I can just be with my grief, and have my babies near me, and not have to obsess about all the drama. And that's a powerful freedom.

Are there other ways to this self-knowledge? Sure there are. There's therapy sessions at $100/hour and you usually go for years, for one. There's books, but most people never do anything with the stuff they read in books. If that wasn't the case, then everybody who read The Secret when Oprah first talked about it would be millionaires now.

Nope, for my money I'm a fan of the Forum.

In Which I Probably Offend People From Oakland...

2011-05-10T14:51:00.000-07:00

I'm still happy these days...despite the best efforts of Mother's Day and my 35th Birthday (note to any childless people nearly 35: Do Not, I repeat, DO NOT Google: having children after 35. You will not be happy with the results. Apparently, if I even manage to conceive now - and apparently that's a big if - my future child will be born with three heads. I'm ignoring Google)

I was really ok about the weekend until Friday afternoon when I was returning my rental car at the Oakland airport, and hopped on the little jitney bus to go to the terminal, and there, on the seat next to me, was a baby that was about 8 weeks old. Baby T would be about 10 weeks old now. I really wanted Oakland to have a chapel where I could go and cry. Lots of airports do have chapels. I see them. I've never gone in, but I see the signs. Oakland doesn't. Smug prepsters who are too cool hiding behind their ipads to need to go to a chapel. Grrrrr. So I found a quiet spot, curled around my suitcase, covered my head with my jacket, and sobbed for 15 minutes.

And then I got a frappuccino, because really, I deserved a damn frappuccino.

(which begs a whole other entry about the idea that food could somehow make the situation better, and my thought process that would lead me to believe that since I was sad, I somehow concluded that I deserved sugar and caffeine...but in fairness to me, I did get the sugar free syrup, and only drank half...still, the thought process is what it is)

That being said, before the baby-sighting threw me into the abyss, I spent Thursday evening at the Piedmont Springs spa in Oakland. It was part of my Project Happiness: Trying New Things. So let me tell you about the hot tubs at the Piedmont Springs.

Actually, first I should tell you about hot tubs in general. Public ones, that is. When I was 19 I drove across the country for Spring Break in my 1987 Oldsmobile, by myself, on an ill-advised man-chasing trip. It was 1995: the early, heady days of CompuServe, and it turned into a bad scene pretty quickly. Me, being stubborn and overly dramatic, thought that it would be a cool gesture to steep myself in heartbreak and visit said man's hometown. While I was hanging out in Contra Costa County, I met up with another friend, who was also made via CompuServe, and he took me to the Albany Pools and Spas, where they have these giant wine-vats converted into hot tubs. They're all outside, in private rooms with the roof open, fairy lights hanging everywhere, and I was smitten with this magic place where one could rent a hot tub for $15 an hour, and sit in it.

So, fast forward to me now, living in California, with an office in San Mateo, allowing me to go up to the Bay Area pretty much whenever I want, which is kickass cool (because I love San Francisco, but it's too frigging expensive). So I've been back to the place in Albany several times, and it's just as awesome as I remembered it. But then, people in my office recommended this place in Piedmont, which supposedly takes the awesomeness to the next level.

Last week, as part of my Trying New Things Every Week project, I rented myself a hot tub at Piedmont Springs. So I got to spend a couple of hours here:

Pretty sweet, eh? The only thing about it is that I don't really think I'm a fan of Piedmont in general. I'd been there before once to visit a stationary store (yes, on my trips to different places, I like to do things like visit new stationary stores. I'm sorry. It's me.) and I get the distinct vibe that Piedmont thinks it's a hipster town, with hipster guys wearing man-purses filled with gadgets, riding their expensive bicycles, and smugly drinking their Peet's coffee, making lists in their heads of all the ways they are a superior man. There are outdoor cafes, lots of independent shops, small-town atmosphere.

Frankly, I found it boring. I'd be much more of a fan of Oakland if, instead of taking pride in these little hipster scenes, they took pride in what was authentic to them - their hip hop and blues music history, for example.

I've never been a fan of the whole Northern-California-Superiority-Complex anyway, but I live in Southern California, so I would say that.

Smug Alert
Tags: SOUTH
PARK more...

My Six Degrees with the Royal Wedding

2011-05-03T22:34:00.000-07:00

There are plenty of other blogs out there that are gushing about Kate's dress, and Wills' handsomeness, so I'm not going to do that. What I'm going to do is share with you my three, albeit very faint, connections to the Royal Wedding.

1. Westminster Abbey. Ok, so I know that it's been there for a thousand years, so plenty of people have a connection via Westminster Abbey, but not all of them like mine. I'm one of the relatively few people through the ages who have actually attended regular services there. I had my own seat in the choir at the weekday 5pm Evensong services, and everything. And man, would I feel smug, walking up on Sunday afternoons at 2:45, breezing past all the American tourists, and having the Priest recognize me, and move aside to let me in. Then I'd, you know, look at the chair where all the monarchs since William the Conquerer had been crowned, and I wouldn't feel quite so smug anymore.

2. Grace, the Ear-Covering Bridesmaid: So my friend Anna Louisa posted on Facebook that she went to school with Grace's mom, and was saluting her for raising such a self-expressed daughter. Therefore, by my calculation, I'm like 3 degrees away from Prince William. Anna Louisa - Grace's mom - Prince William (who is Grace's Godfather).

3. John Rutter (who composed the Anthem that the Abbey Dean commissioned for the wedding, This is the Day): In case you've never heard of him before now, he's a brilliant choral composer, based in Cambridge, I think. I'm pretty sure I've posted music of his before, because I just adore him. And I got the chance to be a groupie to him in 2001 when I went to the Association of British Choral Director's annual meeting (three days of singing and conducting! Be still my heart!). He was going to be doing a clinic, and I ran into him in a hallway. Literally. I had my head down in the program, trying to figure out where I was going, and I think he had his head down, probably composing something. I was groupie-speechless and managed a quick, "I love your work" before scurrying along, kicking myself for not thinking of anything more clever to say.

On the topic of John Rutter, you've gotta check out his Requiem. It's all on youtube in parts, posted by @MonteverdiChor. I'm posting the Angus Dei and The Lord is My Shepherd here. It's juicy. Me likey.

In Which I get Zen with The Shit

2011-05-02T22:01:00.000-07:00

What can I say, you guys. It's Monday. Justice may have been done by getting Bin Laden (and I'm not so sure about that, anyway, given that I really don't feel much safer now that we're at an elevated threat level) but The Donald still refuses to do the Right thing and get rid of Star, so I'm still waiting for Celebrity Apprentice justice. The other night I stayed up until 4:30 to watch the Kate become a princess, not because I care so much about them (though, really, I've fallen under their spell lately) but because of all the great views of central London.

The thing I want to share, though, is this amazing artist on etsy that a friend shared with me, The Midnight Orange. She makes beautiful clay sculptures for mama's like me. Like this necklace. I got mine in the mail today.

I can't look at her shop for too long, though, because I start to cry. Cuz she has stuff like this (called, appropriately, Empty But For Love):

So it's been over six months since we lost Baby T, and I've been grieving pretty hard lately. I think part of it is that there was so much going on in the first few months after it happened, and I never had time to just grieve. You deal with hospital crap, and recovery, and then we started working on getting pregnant again right away, so I was temping and reading Taking Charge of Your Fertility, and then I got pregnant in three cycles, and then I was freaking out about that baby, and then I lost that baby, and then there was more hospital crap, and then we went away, and now there's just...nothing. The hospital bills have even slowed down now. There's just an office that should be a nursery, and two drawers of gender-neutral baby clothes that I bought in a lot on ebay when I hit 18 weeks and thought I should start preparing. No 3am feedings. No gurgling baby snuggling next to me. No crying. No diapers (we had decided on cloth diapers - we're both cheap, and green!). Just more of the same.

Mother's Day is coming up and the support group I go to is having a Mother's Day Tea on Saturday (which also, incidentally, happens to be my 35th birthday) for mama's of babies who aren't here anymore. I waffle between really looking forward to it, and dreading it. I haven't gone to the support group since I lost the second baby. There's just too much sadness. Too much heartache. I hate it. I want to be around happiness.

But sometimes, when you're sitting in shit, the best thing to do is quit looking around hoping that the shit turns into purple marshmallows, and just accept that you're sitting in shit, and in order to get out of the shit, you need to stand up and actually walk through the shit. Thus, perhaps getting splashed by even more shit in the process, but eventually getting to the other side of the shit. It doesn't work to pretend the shit is anything other than shit, which is what I was doing before. Oh look! I'll get pregnant right away! It will all be ok! A second baby will make it all better! Nope, darlin', you're still stuck in shit.

So I'm getting zen with the shit, accepting the shit, not trying to deny the shit, and hopefully, by not trying to fight back against the shit, I will be able to flow through the shit, to the other side.

I just typed shit like sixteen times. Whatever, I'm swimming in it, so I'm getting used to it.

Getting Fit Project Update

2011-04-26T10:56:00.000-07:00

So it's a Tuesday, which means it's a Weigh-In Day. I kind of fell off the wagon two weeks ago when I was on my second cruise with my mom. Also, things had been going really well for the first few weeks, and now it appears to be slowing down a little bit. I think that's normal - your body starts to get used to the new level of food you're giving it, etc. But anyway, this is the 7th week that I've been on this Lifestyle Adjustment, and if I had been losing 2 pounds per week, I would be down 14 pounds now. Which I didn't make this week. But dammit, I'm close. I'm down a total of 13.6 pounds. So....half-yay?

I'm going to have a brainstorm to think how I can kick it in gear again. I've been getting a little lazy with keeping my food journal and measuring food. So I'm going to think about things I can do to jump-start the plan again, so I don't get into a rut. I'm thinking about adding more exercise (I currently work out aerobically 4 days a week or so, and do situps and pushups almost every day - I could up it to 5 days and then 6) or getting rid of some more calories - I've been hovering around 1900 most days, and could drop another 100 out easily enough.

In terms of what 13.6 pounds looks like in real-life - I've lost 5.5 inches total from the four places I measure (hips, waist, thigh, bust) and can just about fit into my pre-pregnancy Gap jeans (I actually can fit them, if I don't care much about breathing). A pair of trousers I bought on March 10 are loose on me now, which is funny because I almost bought the next size up because they were slightly tight when I bought them.

So, we're plugging along, but I need to figure out how to take it to the next level now. This is where it gets tough - any sustained weight loss happens over the course of months, and it's hard to stay motivated to keep it all fresh and new during those months. I bought a dress a size smaller than I normally wear, and have been trying it on every week, and can just about fit into it now. That's pretty good motivation. But I've got to figure out some other ways to keep it new. So that's the Conundrum of the Week. I'll let you know what I come up with.

Things I'm Giving to the Thrift Store: The "Check in My Bag" Edition

2011-04-25T21:41:00.000-07:00

On August 22 2005, I had my first date with J. Two weeks later, when things were still all new and unsettled, we were going to go to the Fontana raceway for the Nascar races on both Saturday (the Busch league race) and Sunday (the big race). J came over to my place the night before and we went bowling with some of my friends. This was a pivotal night for several reasons. First, it was the last time J drank. Second, it was the first, and last, time I saw J seriously drunk. Third, he tried to make out with me in the frozen aisle at Ralph's when we went to pick up snacks to take along to Nascar after the bowling adventure. He was all drunk and silly, hanging on to me and saying things like, "You're not my chick. You're my Woman," real serious-like. Fourth, he was completely hung over all weekend, and realized that if he wanted to keep me, he was going to have to quit drinking - thus, it was the last time he drank.

The other funny thing about that night was the fact that a second guy showed up who I was sort of crushing on at the same time, and J could pick up on it, so he challenged the guy to a bowling duel, and broke a score of 200, his best ever. I just sat there and watched, amused.

So how this relates to the bag is: earlier on in the evening, before the drinking and bowling duels started, he was going to play a video game or something, and asked me if I had any change. I was in mid-bowl, and I told him to check in my wallet, in my bag. So he reached under the seat, grabbed my bag, and looked inside, all natural-like. This is a pretty big step in any relationship - especially with an only-child-protective-of-my-space kind of person like me. The fact that it felt totally natural to have him digging around amidst my makeup and tampons kind of freaked me out, but was proof of how natural it was to have that kind of closeness with him.

I stopped using the bag a week or so after the Nascar race, but kept it for the sentimental value. It's been through several rounds of cuts, and has survived every one, but the time has come for this sentimental gem to go. But before getting rid of it, we decided to stage a re-enactment of the Inaugural Bag-Rooting Session.

The bag is now at the thirft store, but this picture will live on in cyberspace forever, commemorating the momentous occasion.

In Which I Become Heather of Arabia

2011-04-24T20:11:00.000-07:00

A few months ago J randomly read an article on the internet about Singing Dunes - sand dunes that make noises as the wind blows them. They're really rare - there are only two dozen or so places in the world where they exist - the conditions have to be really specific - certain humidity, conditions of the sand, size of the sand, etc. One place where those conditions come together perfectly are the Kelso Dunes in The Middle of Nowhere, SoCal. You drive up the 15 to Barstow, then pick up the 40, go 70 miles west, and turn off to the north, drive down a dirt road for five miles, and then hike for three miles.

When J first heard about them, it became a Thing Between Us because it was August, I was preggo, and I thought that the fact that he thought I could do something like that while preggo meant he was insensitive and not very thoughtful. I milked it as a martyr for several weeks.

So anyway, we're looking for new fun things to do, and decided to head out there yesterday.

Oh my God, it was seriously hard core. I did not think I was going to make it to the top. The highest dune is 700 feet high. That's like a 70 story building. But the kicker is, you hike for over two miles in the sand. You know, like, the stuff that you sink into, and then falls away as you try to climb up. Can you imagine climbing a 70 story building, over the course of 2 and a half miles, in the desert, in the hot sun, in the sand? Man, it was tough. We had to take breaks every 100 to 200 steps. Well, I did. J could have done it easily, I'm sure. But he patiently waited while I took a break, and even made shade for me with his shirt. Awww, bless.

I tried walking in footsteps that were already there thinking it would make it easier.

I know it's hard to see, but there are people sliding down the main dune - they look like little ants! Sooo steep.

But the reward for getting to the top is that you can slide down the dunes on your butt, and make them sing. They make this pulsing vibrating noise that's kind of a cross between a jet engine and whale sounds. It was so strange. The whole dune-mountain vibrates with it. Nuts!

But man, I'm SORE today. Not just sore, but pretty much exhausted. We spent the day cooking an Easter turkey and taking turkey-induced naps. The weather was pretty crappy - cold, wet, rainy, foggy - so it kind of felt like Thanksgiving, only falling asleep to baseball instead of football, and eating lemon-meringue pie instead of pumpkin pie.

This whole Doing New Things experiment is such fun. It's almost giving me enough to think about so that I don't dwell on the card we got from the hospital sending us their thoughts on the 6-month anniversary of losing our baby boy. Which, when I opened it in the post office the other day, made me break down and cry. Right there at the high tables next to the giant recycling bin.

Sigh. Two steps forward, one step back. Onward and upward.

Two Funny Mexican Stores: AKA Same Same But Different

2011-04-22T16:05:00.000-07:00

Two funny stores in Ensenada I had to take pictures of and share.

There's a pink berry in the logo, but nope, this is not pinkberry. This is sweetberry. With a pink berry logo. Never to be confused with a pinkberry logo. That space means everything.

Gap's Kids. For when you Fell Into The Gap and then procreated WITH the Gap. Gross, but it's the only logical explanation I can come up with.

Dude, new subject. I am such a sucker for email marketing. I had a friend Stacey in the UK - she was American, but lived in London like me, and she used to call me a Marketing Person's Wet Dream. That's because I'd always fall for the 3 for 2 deals at the bookstores and at Boots. She'd say, "yes, you got 3 for 2, but you didn't even want one!" Then she'd shake her head at me and tell me she had oceanfront property in Florida I could buy. Another fond memory I have of Stacey is going to TGI Fridays in Leicester Square with her once, where we drank all the free refills of soda we could get in before exploding, and munched on ice until our mouths were numb.

Anyway, I'm a sucker for email marketing because I got my email saying it's Clinique Bonus Time and I am so totally off to Macy's. I really don't need the little bonus size of Dramatically Different Moisturizing Lotion, and I have an entire collection of Clinique makeup bags that I never use but don't want to get rid of because, as my mom says, "you never know". Never know what? Never know when I'm going to need a cheap plastic freebie makeup bag when I've got plenty of good ones? Still, there might be a situation someday where I'm desperate for this makeup bag, and I will be grateful I have it, right? So I'm hoofing it off to Macy's to get me some Crap I Don't Need, and I'm doing it with style.

Weekend! Yay!

Italiano Day Deux

2011-04-21T20:49:00.000-07:00

I threw in some French there, just to keep you on your toes...

So, in my Quest to Start New Things, this week I am dusting off my Rosetta Stone Italiano Levels 1, 2 and 3 programs that I got from the Amazon Vine program a year ago.

So here's how my desk looked last night

notice my fancy hole-puncher in the background?

As you can clearly see, I'm totally, like, ready. I installed Level 1 and, after having spent about two hours on it over two days, can now say words like:

run (corro)
egg (uovo)
eat (mangia)
drink (beve)
bread (pane)
sandwich (panini)
bicycle (bicciclete, which I like, because you get to say the word "bitch" for fun)
car (machina)
cat (gatto)
dog (cane)
cooking (cucina)
reading (legge)
writing (scrive)
rice (riso)
apple (mela)

I also know the difference between
he: lui
she: lei
they: loro

Thus enabling me to say simple things like :
Lui legge
Loro cucinano
Lei beve caffe
una bambina mangia riso e mela

I could so totally order coffee, milk, an egg, an apple, and rise in Italy now.

I'm off to a flying start. Seriously, I haven't had this much fun in a long time. I've been spending an hour a day on the course, and it just flies by - not at all like those 43 minutes of painful high school German reciting verb conjugations. Ich bin. Du bist. Er/Sie/Es ist. Let me stick my Stift in my Augen jetzt! No offense Frau Miller. You were awesome. It was just kind of dull, that's all. And Italian words are so much fun to say. It's so musical. Like the whole language is one big symphony. I love it. I'm so freaking glad I dusted off this Rosetta Stone thing-a-ma-bob. Week One of Trying New Things is definitely off to a good start!

Oh, if you're curious about the old man on my desktop in the picture above, it's David Starkey, a brilliant British historian who gives me goosebumps. It's a screenshot from the Monarchy series that was on ITV a few years ago, and now graces my home regularly thanks to Netflix streaming. J was teasing me about how much I was watching it, saying I most likely had a crush on said Mr. Starkey (which would be funny, cuz in addition to being, like, old enough to be my grandpa, he's gay). So I grabbed a screenshot and made it my desktop, so now if J ever uses my computer, he gets to stare at the object of my crush as well. It's one of those random things that makes marriage fun.

The Lighter Side of Jesus

2011-04-20T09:49:00.000-07:00

We all know that Facebook is a serious time-suck, right? And sometimes I loathe the day that I first created an account. But today I realized the reason that Facebook was invented: so that I could reconnect with a high school friend on religious matters, share some fellowship, and share our faith journeys. I haven't written as much as I would have liked to about God in this blog. And today, catching up with my friend on items spiritual, I got to really think about what I believe, and why, and it was really soothing to my soul.

So Lynda and I were never close friends, but we did hang out from time to time. I went to Bible Study with her once. We got seriously lost on a trip to find a Goodwill in 11th grade, and wound up practically in Philadelphia. Good times. I had always had this idea that she was conservative, as were the vast majority of the people I went to school with - at least those who fashioned themselves as Christians - and I never thought about it again until she started posting links to really awesome faith blogs lately - sites like Dirty Sexy Ministry. Sex is not a word I associate with Ministry, though it might well be - some older translations of the Bible don't have Mary being a virgin, for example. That was apparently added to square Jesus' birth with the Old Testament prophesies. Or so some research has shown.

In the spirit of Easter, I want to share with you my own faith journey, as I did with Lynda today. It's messy and sometimes incoherent, but I want to share it so that people who might have experienced similar histories with the Church can see other possibilities for worship, and having a relationship with Jesus, which is what it comes down to for me.

So I was raised in Lancaster County, which, seeing as it's Amish Country, is pretty conservative. Any given Sunday saw people protesting along the main drag with Abortion Kills Children signs. The general consensus among the liberal people regarding gay people was to "hate the sin, love the sinner." Those were the liberals. Most people thought it was inhumane.

But my home wasn't very religious. My dad had Bertrand Russell books around, though I don't think he ever read them. My mom grew up being forced to go to church, and, while she would put me in Vacation Bible School, she had no desire to traipse our family off to church every Sunday.

So when I went through my teenage rebellion I - wait for it - was baptised. You know, with submersion and everything. At once point I owned sixteen Bibles in various niche forms - the Student Bible, the Bible for Stressed Teens, the Your Parents Are Getting Divorced Bible. The New Testament on Tape. I was a Bible Hoarder. I rocked out to Petra's This Means War. I went to Bible Studies. I went to Youth Group. Along with Michael W Smith, I wondered why people wore their crosses of gold, and wanted to remind them what it stood for.

When my dad started dating my stepmom, I worried for his soul. She didn't go to church, and I really didn't want the Devil working through her to lure him to an eternity of hellfire.

I was pretty annoying.

There was a lot of "can't" in this version of religion. There were so many things that you couldn't do, or else you'd get thrown into the hellfire. You couldn't have hormones. You couldn't dance. A lot of women couldn't wear trousers. You couldn't watch Saturday Night Live. You couldn't vote Democratic. You could only be friends with gay people if you made it clear that you hated their sinful ways. I tried very hard to mold myself into this person, thinking it was the only way to God (ever notice how so many sects think they're the only way to God? Like God is small enough to be hijacked by one congregation, right? And like human brains have the capacity to truly understand God in the first place, right?). I had Bible-verse bumper stickers. I had one that said, "if God wanted us to be permissive, He would have given us the Ten Suggestions." I had a Jesus-Fish. Damn, I was putting on a good act.

But then I went to college, I learned about other Gospels that weren't included in the Bible, I learned about how humans chose which books went into the Bible, I learned about wrong translations...and those Bertrand Russell books got dusted off, and I became a strong un-Christian. Also, I was living in sin with my boyfriend, so I figured that kind of put me out of the running for the whole getting-into-heaven thing.

When I moved to England, I spent a lot of time in churches. That's where the Renaissance choral music is, with the acoustics that it was originally written for, and I worked near Westminster Abbey, so every afternoon saw me hoofing it past Whitehall to the Abbey, where I'd sit through Evensong service enraptured. Sunday was Church Day, and saw me starting off at St. Paul's and working my way west.

My friends thought I was a huge Christian, and I would argue against them. No, don't lump me in with those people. I am NOT like that. I am NOT judgmental. I am NOT someone who thinks they have the monopoly on the Truth. I am Not someone who believes in Truth-with-a-capital-T anyway. No No No.

Finally, my Australian friend Paul turned me on to John Shelby Spong, who I have mentioned here before. I bought Why Christianity Must Change Or Die and it blew. me. away. Here was an ordained priest who had ordained women and gay people. And gay women for that matter. Here was a priest who openly questioned the literalness of the Bible. Here was a priest who even had doubts about the Resurrection? Holy Batman, maybe there WAS room in the tent for a questioner like me?

I did the Alpha Course, and realized that I had one big major hangup with Christianity. Sin. I don't believe in it. Didn't then, don't now.

Now bear with me while I explain this.

When I tell many Christians that I don't believe in sin as we understand it, they think that I'm all in favor of murder and stealing and crazy adultery and free drugs and having us all live in one big hippie commune. I'm not. But I think you need to differentiate between something that is sinful, and something that just doesn't work for society.

To me, the Ten Commandments are evidence that a society was maturing and growing modern. Just about every mature faith and society has a version of the Ten Commandments. Because you know what? Society works when people don't go around killing each other, stealing each other's cows, and coveting each other's shit. Societies where you can covet and steal and murder all willy-nilly don't work. Breaking a Commandment isn't a sin. It's just something that doesn't work within the boundaries and structure of our society, and so there need to be consequences for that. Stop making it so much heavier than it is, please. It's a code of ethics that helps a society grow and be more productive, and if you don't abide by it, you get taken out of society in one way or another. It's really very simple.

In less obvious sins, like lying or adultery, I see it as a matter of keeping your word. Shakespeare said, "To thine own self be true," and when you lie, or break your vow, you're simply not being true to yourself as your word. And it just makes life hard. Now you've got to keep your lies straight. Who did you tell what lie to, and if they meet up with this person, is it going to come out? It's hard! Suddenly you're lying to your spouse and keeping secrets and worrying that your secrets will be exposed, and I would imagine that it's just messy.

I'm a big believer in keeping life simple. Doing a lot of lying makes life complicated, and to me, it's the main reason for living an honest and transparent life. Not because you're going to go to hell if you don't.

Finally, the idea of sin and evil, to me, is an easy out. You messed up? Well, the Devil was clearly working on you. Personal Responsibility be damned. You couldn't help it! You were tempted and gave in. You're human, born into sin. Of course you messed up and slept with your nanny/lied to your constituents/laundered money/etc. We all do it from time to time, right? And sin is sin, right?

I don't buy it. And you're not going to convince me otherwise. It's an excuse and it makes me cringe.

Now here's where it gets tricky for me.

If I don't believe in Sin (with a capital S, referring to the Sin that most conservative Christians are referring to), then it's hard for me to believe in a Savior to take that Sin from me through His sacrifice.

So while I've never had a problem believing in the miracles, the walking on water, the feeding all the people on, like, a saltine, the curing of the sick...I have a hard time accepting a personal Savior who is saving me from Sin I don't believe I have.

I shared this with our priest at church and she kind of looked at me like I was silly. I was avoiding having a relationship with Jesus because I wasn't sure that I believed in the kind of Sin that people say He died for? Well how stupid was that. Here's this awesome spirit who just wants to hang out with me and be friends, and I'm all, "no, because you've been corrupted into this thing that I can't buy into, so I'm not going to be friends." That's pretty ridiculous. It's not Jesus' fault that all his great preaching has been butchered and politicized over two thousand years.

Here's how I've finally squared it for myself:

I think of sin as anything that separates you from God. To me, God isn't a man sitting in the clouds. Yes, I know we were made in His image, but that verse has been used and abused over the years to justify the rape of our planet, and the abuse of animals and other wonderful creations of God, and I don't read it the same way. I think it's referring to our spirit. And don't go quoting stuff at me. I've already read it. Unless you're reading the original Hebrew, and you're a Hebrew scholar and you know exactly what the person who was writing it at the time they were writing it, you're not going to convince me. You know the game Whisper Down the Lane? That's what I think about my NIV translation. I like the King James version better, but even so, it's still a political hot mess (James I needed to solidify his reign with all the plots going on around him - ie the Gunpowder Plot, etc, and so there is a huge emphasis on the just power of rulers, the importance of rule in society, etc. See Christopher Hitchens' article in the recent Vanity Fair for more on this).

Ok, where was I? Oh, God, sin, right.

So the first thing is, I see God as this universal energy or chi that flows within all living things - me, my cats, the trees, etc - it connects us all to each other, to the world, to eternity, to all that ever was, and all that ever will be. It is universal unconditional love. When I sit on the bed cuddling my cats, I am literally communing with God, because I am appreciating Creation, Life, and Love.

Humans do things to separate themselves from God. We do big things like commit genocides. And we do little things, like litter and stomp all over Creation. We ignore the homeless people. We pretend bigotry doesn't matter. Then we justify our actions. We commit the ultimate affront to God by quoting words that were inspired by Him to say that it's ok. That we can destroy the earth because He gave it to us. That we can throw things at women walking into Planned Parenthood because they're sinners. And somehow, we know this. Somehow, all the knowledge in the vast universe has been giving to a chosen few, and those few vilify the "other" and claim to have the Truth.

All of this pulls us further away from God. Jesus said that the greatest commandment was to love your neighbor as yourself. When we commit these actions that pull us further away from each other, when we look out for our own selfish interests before those of the people down the street, when we destroy the gifts that we have been given...that pulls us away from God, away from each other, away from Life and Unconditional Love. We react to threats with war. We don't seek to understand the people - the other human creations of God - with whom we share the planet. We sit by and elect politicians who authorize bombings and destruction. We sit by and let it happen, and some of us justify it. And to me, that separation from others and from God...that's sin.

That's what Jesus was pointing out. He said that everyone - even tax collectors and prostitutes - can have a relationship directly with God, without needing to sacrifice a goat first, or do any of the things that the Old Testament said you needed to do. He was the ultimate threat to the Establishment. And He died for that. He died to show me the unconditional love that God has for us. He died to show me that every creature on earth is loved by God. He died to show me how to be close to God, how to have a relationship with God, how to be part of God. He died to show me just how far humans will go to separate themselves from the Divine.

Thus, He died for my sin.

Whether you believe in the Resurrection or not, whether you're a fan of Jesus or not, whether you're religious or not, in this season of rebirth and renewal, I urge you all to take a moment to get in touch with your own Divinity and to celebrate being part of creation today. Hug a cat. Hug a dog. Hug a tree. Hug yourself. Hug God, however you see him/her/it.

Happy Holy Week, everyone.

The Happiness Project: Take Two

2011-04-19T10:53:00.000-07:00

I spent the weekend on yet another cruise - you'd think it was a regular habit with how much I've been on the Carnival Paradise lately - but it was a random coincidence of my mom visiting, and us trying to think of something fun to do with the weekend, and concluding that a boat ride to Mexico would be a jolly way to spend the time.

The special treat for me (having lost 10 pounds) was a Spa Day on the ship. I got some serious work done on my hair. Jonathan isn't quite sure who I am at the moment. I'm pretty much blond, for one thing. And I have bangs (or "fringe" as they're apparently known in the UK).

But I came to a conclusion. The conclusion I came to is that this whole Time Off To Heal project is only going to be successful if I actually make an effort to make it happen. I can't just sit around staring at my naval and expect for the happiness to suddenly flood over me. Like most things in life, I need to actually DO something about it.

So this is my plan.

First, one of the things that makes me really happy in life is doing new things. I love, for example, being lost. Whatever part of the brain is working when you're lost in a strange place, trying to navigate your way back to familiar territory just loves being tickled. I got really lost in Ensenada on Saturday, and I loved it. I loved getting to the corner of a street and not knowing which way to go, just puttering along listening to my music on my phone and taking in the smells and sights. I stopped for tacos at a street stand. I don't know much Spanish, but I knew enough to say, "dos tacos carne asada y diet coke." And life was good. I knew enough to finally ask for directions via playing charades, and made a group of men laugh at my shenanigans. And life was good. After I finally found my way back to the main tourist drag, and the ship, I was totally worn out (my pedometer said I had walked about eight miles) but I had good stories to tell at dinner that night, and I was happy.

When you're a kid, you get new stuff all the time. But as you grow up and leave school, and settle into habits and everyday life, you stop being bombarded with newness as much. And that makes me sad.

So, given the fact that the thing that makes me the most content and the most happy is discovering new things, I have decided to make it an Official Project, which I will blog about, and report on.

Here's how it will work.

Baby Teysko had been gestating for 21 weeks when we lost him. So for the next 21 weeks, in his honor, I will do something new every week. These things will range from simple (try a new recipe) to slightly-more-complicated (go to a new country).

The 21 week period will end on September 13. It is my intention that by that time I will be in a much different place, both physically (having lost at least another 30 pounds, for a total of 40) and mentally (having, you know, experienced all this happy newness). So I will be able to start working on getting pregnant again from a place of grace and peace, and not from a place of worry and freaking out.

I will be looking for suggestions of things to try, places to go, and Newness to discover, so if you have any, please send them. I don't care how crazy or off the wall they might be. Just keep in mind that I'm a little bit afraid of heights, so I won't be base jumping any time soon.

This is my new project, and I'm going to jump into it, and I will stick to it and not be sidetracked in my ADD. Every week, one new thing. This is going to be fun!

This week, I'm going to actually go through the Rosetta Stone Italian lessons that I received through the Amazon Vine program a year ago, and never looked at beyond using them for 10 minutes to write a review. I'm going to go through them for an hour a day, and see how it goes. I might stick to it after this week and actually wind up learning Italian out of this project. How fun!

Save CJ Fam

2011-04-06T20:57:00.000-07:00

So I always spend part of every afternoon dealing with my self-diagnosed ADD and indulging in Internet Crap. And because I'm friends with a 13 year old boy on Facebook (Mars, my cousin through my stepmother) I stay hip on what the kids these days are doing. So I've been hip to Rebecca Black for a few weeks now, because he keeps posting the video and commenting about how much he hates it (thus increasing her youtube views to an even more astronomical number).

In case you've been hanging out on a boat for the past month, Rebecca Black is a client of Ark Music Factory, a company that, for $2000, will write you a pop song, make you a video, and raise your hopes of becoming a pop star via the internet, however they won't pay for your years of therapy once you realize that you probably won't become the next Britney Spears. She sings a terrible song called "Friday," the only unique feature of which is how she pronounces it with three syllables (Fri-eee-day). Well, that's not entirely true. The other unique feature of this song is its ability to get inside your brain and eat all the other music you've been listening to all day, and then it will repeat itself over and over again until you want to stick your head on an anvil and knock yourself silly.

In last week's InfoMania, Sergio did a White Hot Top Five dedicated to the other stars (aka kids with rich parents) of the Ark Music catalog. They were all Disney-wannabees, with the exception of CJ Fam, a firecracker 4'1" 53-pound (according to her profile on the Actors Pages, which, creepily features a picture of her posing at the beach in a bathing suit) blond-haired Annie lookalike who strikes me as being about as annoying as the giant splinter I got caught under my thumbnail when I was cleaning the deck the other morning.

But since she's only, like, 8, I blame her parents. Probably her overbearing mom who always wanted to be a star herself, but wound up getting pregnant and marrying her high school boyfriend and staying in Dumbf*ck, Nebraska until she had a midlife crisis and packed her youngest daughter, and greatest hope for stardom into the Ford and drove to LA where, rather than prostitute herself and her Baby Girl on Sunset and Highland, she decided to sign her up with ARK instead.

Actually I made all that up. I think she's from Florida.

But I do think her mom is to blame because when you click on her youtube profile, the first link is a montage featuring the Beatles' Help to get her "fans" (aka 6 year old girls who shouldn't be on the internet in the first place anyway) riled up to view her videos as many times as Rebecca Black's, in a "Showdown" so that she can get signed by Ryan Seacrest, too.

Listen Overbearing Mom: I could ignore the fact that you let your Baby Girl sing Lady Gaga songs with lyrics about being too drunk to text while she's dressed like a hooker. I could ignore the fact that you are pitting her against Rebecca Black in a weird Showdown that evokes images of John Wayne and fake gun battles, thus creating a scarcity conversation in her developing brain so she'll probably be super-competitive with everybody her whole life ("There's not enough success for everyone, and Rebecca Black is getting it, that tramp, so therefore we need to have a Showdown"). I can even forgive you trying to vicariously live your dream through your daughter, and turning her into a little brat that everybody's going to want to beat up and no guy will ask to the prom, in ten years, because she's so annoying.

Even though children's services might come knocking at your door, I can even overlook you allowing your 8 year old to be eroticized in a world of internet porn (see above-mentioned bathing suit photo, and this gem):

It's no worse than pageant moms do all over the country.

But. I. Can. NOT. Forgive. The. Blasphemic. Use. Of. The. Beatles. In. Supporting. This. Endeavor.

When will the madness end? Can't Yoko Ono sue somebody over this?

Remember like 13 years ago when we were all up in arms over Britney Spears looking too hot in her first video? I know, our precious little CJ Fam wasn't even born yet, and her super-hit, the oxymoronically-named single, "Ordinary Popstar" (I refuse to link to it because I don't want to contribute to the Rebecca Black Showdown) was still years away from being conceived, but I remember that time. I remember people freaking out over Brit wearing a Catholic uniform and doing some dirty-dancing moves next to a locker, which, incidentally looks like the dancing they did in movies from the 50's compared to what our CJ is doing.

My dad likes to say that things in the 50's were better, and more innocent. And I'm always like, "yeah, Dad, you're just looking at the past through rose-colored glasses. It wasn't so great if you were black. Or a woman. Or, you know, not Beaver Cleaver or Donna Reed." We've had arguments about this since I was 16. But I'm starting to think that my dad could be right. Maybe we are going down the slippery slope. Maybe pole-dancing in gym class is coming next?

(Then again, even being Beaver Cleaver wasn't able to save Jerry Mathers from looking like a dope all his life, which is really apropos of nothing, but needs to be said because I found this picture):

So, maybe Eddie Haskell should win a couple of rounds, you know? Just to even things out. Make The Beav look a little less dopey/strung out.

And maybe it wasn't the end of the world when Brit did her thing with her pigtails flying around.

But this CJ Fam thing, it's just out of control. If it can help her get back to being an Ordinary Girl (and not an Ordinary Popstar) then I will continue to click Rebecca Black's video day and night, bravely facing the teasing of my husband for continuing to sing the offending song even when I know it gives him a migraine, and I will selflessly help her decide whether she wants to party in the front or the back seat on the weekend, and do whatever I can so that she wins this Showdown, and CJ Fam can get back to school and maybe get some guidance counselling or some education in something other than Being a Pop Star 101. Because Rebecca Black doesn't strike me as a crazy chick whose life will be destroyed if she gets some early success. I'm worried that if CJ Fam gets big-time attention, she'll wind up being the next Lindsay Lohan, only worse because Lindsay Lohan is really talented and it still couldn't save her.

And lastly, will somebody please kill whatever it is that keeps attacking her legs in her video?

Thank you.

2011-04-06T09:29:00.000-07:00

More proof that people from Pennsylvania are awesome (it's the whole Quaker thing). Garfunkel and Oats, my new favorite girl duo, singing a song that I wish would have existed when I was in the dating world.

Getting Fit Project Update

2011-04-05T11:01:00.000-07:00

Today has been four weeks since I started my "Lifestyle Adjustment" - I have to call it that because, as Dr J pointed out, "diets" aren't sustainable, whereas Lifestyle Adjustments are.

I have been taking my measurements every two weeks, and would be due to take them today, but I'm going to wait until Thursday, which is a month, to see where things are then. In the meantime, I met my weight goal. Yippeee! I wasn't sure how that was going to work out, given the fact that last week I was regularly eating two desserts at each meal (though limiting myself to three bites, thank you very much). Still, I've lost over 8 pounds, I'm still on target to meet my 40 pound goal by August; and my jeans, which I couldn't button when I was pregnant the last time, keep falling down. Crazy.

Here's what I'm learning so far:

First, it really does get easier. A month ago, I couldn't fathom the idea of going to bed hungry. I mean, intellectually I knew that I wasn't going to starve overnight. But still, the idea of going to bed on an empty stomach seemed so foreign. What was the point of a bedtime snack, then? Of course you had to have a bowl of cereal or a nice big hot chocolate before you went to bed. It helped you sleep better, right?

The first few days of this Lifestyle Adjustment were so hard because I had to get used to being hungry. I've said this before, and I will continue to say it. If you're going to lose weight, you will be hungry at first. Anyone who says you won't be is a liar. I was averaging around 2800 calories a day. Now I'm down around 1800 a day. You don't just lose 1000 calories and not miss it.

I think that's why I was never able to sustain a weight loss before - I wasn't embracing the hunger, and would quit after the first couple of days. As soon as I got hungry, I would eat. That is a normal human response to hunger, but in my case, my idea of hunger was so twisted and unsustainable, I was reacting to habit more than actual physical sensation. It takes time to learn new habits, and I'm still not there - I doubt I ever will be - that's the thing about addictions of all kinds, you never really get over them. You just learn how to live with them, and not let them run your life. But four weeks into it, I'm at a point now where I can be ok with hunger, as long as I'm getting the nutrients my body needs.

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine, telling him about how much I obsess about food, and he said that he believed it was good that I had such a love of food, because it's a natural part of life, and I should be able to enjoy it and really love it. But that's where the distinction comes in. I don't love food. If I truly loved food, I would enjoy cooking it, watching the colors blend together, tasting all the flavors, and I would take hours to eat a really good dinner. I don't do that. If woofing down a bowl of spaghetti in less than five minutes was an Olympic sport, I would be a gold medalist.

It's the difference between love and obsession. A stalker doesn't love the person he's stalking. He's just obsessed with her. It's the very same thing. Just because I've been obsessed with food doesn't mean I love it. It's the opposite, actually. If I really loved it, I would savor it. I would recognize its goodness, how it nourishes me, and I wouldn't abuse it. No, there's a huge difference between loving food and obsessing over food.

I'd like to get to the point where I can have a healthy, loving relationship with food. Recognizing the problem is the first step, they say, so I guess I'm on my way.

Now, by next week I should have lost 10 pounds, and my reward for that is I get a full-on Spa Day. Cut, color, highlights, massage, facial, the WORKS. While the scale number alone would be reward enough, I'm definitely glad to have an extra incentive.

...in which I come back from a cruise having actually lost weight...

2011-04-04T11:00:00.000-07:00

...but have a seriously nasty sunburn on my nose, which has only been exacerbated by the breathe-right strips I wear when I sleep.

That being said, I did lose a pound whilst on the cruise, even when surrounded by chocolate of every kind. I took the stairs everywhere - the only times I took the elevator were when we arrived and left with our bags. There were 76 steps from our deck to the lido deck, so every day we were doing that several times, at the very least. That's not counting the extras up to the track, etc.

I told myself I could eat anything, but only three bites of everything, unless it was salad or fish. That seemed to work out pretty well.

I walked at least two miles on the track every day.

And finally, I took my scale along. When the ship was moving, the numbers were all over the map - I couldn't get a decent reading at all - but at least it gave me a reason to not eat the entire chocolate melting cake at dinner, knowing that I would be stepping on the scale in the morning.

All the fresh air, relaxation, and good food was soul-warming. Though I did have a breakdown the second night. I haven't been in a place with that many happy and drunk people for a very long time, definitely not since I lost the babies. I felt terribly alone, like I was the only person there who was going through something. I know that's not true, but it's hard not to feel like you're on your own grief-island when the hairy chest contest is going on.

So J told me I should share with people, at least at our dinner table. I hadn't wanted to say anything because I was afraid it would bring down the mood. But that night, when they were all talking about shore excursions, and asking us what we'd be doing at the stop the next day, I said, "we're not really here to sightsee. We're here to get away and chill out because I lost two pregnancies in the past five months." And for a second everyone was quiet and didn't know what to say. But then one of the girls said she was so sorry, and another one agreed that if she were us, she wouldn't care about any of it either, and she'd just relax on the boat, too. And then the mood got back to normal, and I felt understood, so it was worth it.

It's good to be home, but I highly recommend sea air for anyone trying to get over something. It cleanses a layer of grimy sadness right off, no scrubbing required.

Nine Years Ago Today...

2011-03-27T10:38:00.000-07:00

...I started a blog, or a weblog, as it was called then. Blogger wasn't owned by Google yet. If you wanted to make a nice background, you had to actually program the style sheet yourself. People didn't really use "widgets" yet, and "gadgets" were still the things my dad bought in the camera stores around Times Square. When you updated your blog, it stayed on the Blogspot home screen for a good five minutes, because there were so few being updated.

I thought I was going to lead a bohemian Henry Miller type of life, only I'd be Anais Nin, and I'd fall in love with Henry Miller types of men, and lead a nomadic life, dependent on just my notebooks and my ipod. I was still madly in love with an Unsuitable Man whose biggest assets were that he oozed charm and had a beautiful voice, but I had worked it out by then that nothing was going to happen with him, so I dated lots of other Unsuitable Men (I found them in the personals section of Nerve.com), and then would give a play-by-play recap of each date on my blog afterwards. I got a lot of readership from teenage boys.

Here's my first entry (a brief warning: I'm 25 in this post. So, you know, keep that in mind):

-----

Wednesday, March 27:

I'm about as happy as I can be right now. It's Easter, so the stores are packed with Marshmallow Chicks, and there's really nothing better for the soul than marshmallow fluff with a thick coating of sugar. At least not when it's raining and miserable outside. I have become quite zen about my relationship to marshmallow chicks in my wise mid-twenties. I guess that's about as good a way as any to start off a weblog - sort of like starting a new journal.

When I was a kid I used to start each new journal with all my stats - parents' names and occupations, favourite colour, favourite New Kid on the Block, best friend... But then I found that most of my Hello Kitty journal would be filled with my personal statistics, and I was constantly writing them over and over, so then I just started numbering my journals and keeping them in order so I wouldn't have to rewrite my biog each time...

So I could start this weblog by telling you about myself. Stuff you might want to know, like how old I am (25), where I live (everywhere...don't ask...wherever iTunes is, is home), my favourite dead composer (Poulenc), favourite live composer (Arvo Part), or whether I'm in love at the moment (I'm happily not - happily because I was in love with someone who didn't love me back for two years...ahem, no names mentioned...g... Before that I was unhappily cohabitating for four years. So this is the first time in a long time where I'm happily into myself.)

But I assume that if you came here early enough to be reading these first few weeks' worth of posts, you know me, or you know NomadChick. So there's not really a lot I can say here other than telling you that this space is reserved for my own travel tales and daily adventures - while it's linked to NomadChick.com, and is part of the website, it's really the place to see what sorts of scrapes I got myself into lately...go ahead, laugh at me...I'm sort of used to it...

So I'll tell you about my infatuation with Marshmallow chicks. I don't think they sell them in England. At least I didn't see them. But that's not the point. The point is that I used to be addicted to the creamy sweet gooieness of Marshmallow chicks from the time they'd enter the store (just after Valentine's day) to the after-Easter sales. I used to panic in April wondering what on earth I'd do for ten months without them, and I'd spend my allowance on a hundred packs at 12 cents each at the KMart sales. But then I'd get really sick of them by May. And I'd forget about them for another year and then be overjoyed at the first sighting in February.

See, this is where I've become zen-like...I've realised that the secret to true happiness lies in the cycles of Marshmallow chicks...to enjoy it when you have it, not force it longer than it naturally lasts, and not get attached to it because, though it's sad when the Marshmallow Chicks leave the store, if you go outside everyday and play in the sunshine and have a lot of love in your life, suddenly a year will go by and the army of Chicks are back at WalMart and the cycle goes on...

Impressive, eh?

-----

Just the other day I drooled over Marshmallow Chicks in Target, but I was strong and walked away, because of the whole dropping-pounds thing. And besides, now they make them all year round - you can bite the head off of a marshmallow santa - so I'm not missing them too much.

Little Earthquakes

2011-03-25T17:12:00.000-07:00

I've been listening to a lot of madrigals lately. When I was a senior in high school, I got my first CD player for Christmas, and a $50 gift certificate to Coconuts, which was next door to Borders, where I worked. I bought a bunch of classical Naxos CD's because I could get more with the gift certificate (not knowing that ten years later I would run a portion of their digital sales and skype with their President on a regular basis...weird). The one disc that I spent the full $13 on (it was 1993/94. Discs were like $12.99 then) was the Madrigal History Tour by the King's Singers. A madrigal tour of Renaissance Europe. Too many fa-la-la's to count. I loved it!

I've been listening to that disc a lot lately - I've been trying to get all of my discs burned onto my computer so I can stick the physical CD's up in the attic, or even give them away (taking the simplicity movement to the next level) and I got hooked on it again.

Tomkins' Too Much I once Lamented kind of sums up how I've felt this week. Melancholy, but still hopeful for the future, in a morbid sort of way. I know this song is about love, and giving up on the unrequited version thereof, but it's applicable any time you know you're miserable, but want to just hold on to it a little wee bit longer because it's become such a big part of you, and you don't know who you are without it..

I'm still doing pretty well, but having to give the pup back to a terrible owner, and worrying about her with all the snow we've had, has kind of thrown me a little bit. One thing I've noticed is how easily I'm thrown in general.

Which brings me to the title of this blog post - the Tori Amos song, which I love.
"Oh, these little earthquakes, here we go again...oh these little earthquakes, doesn't take much to rip us into pieces..."

I would like to be someone for whom it takes more than a lost dog (no matter how great the dog) to rip into pieces.

I'm getting there, one step at a time, I guess. I've made up a list of ten lovely things I'm going to do for myself tonight, none of which involve food. Well, one involves wine, but just one glass, so that's ok. And we'll spend the weekend cleaning up from all the storms, and then on Monday, we shall head to Long Beach to get on a boat, upon which I shall spend my time reading, napping, swimming, napping, reading, swimming, napping and maybe some more reading.

My favorite albums this week

2011-03-24T13:05:00.000-07:00

I listen to a lot of music, and I realize that I don't write much about it. I regularly try to listen to at least one new album every day.

My musical day usually starts with me listening to ClassicFM first thing in the morning. I like that I get to hear the afternoon traffic on the A40 while I'm in my morning shower. It makes me feel like they come from the future.

Then by the time they get to the evening full works concert, I shift over to Napster.

This week I'm digging on:

The Tudors Soundtrack. In 1992 I was pretty much addicted to the Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves score for the same reasons I like this one so much, almost 20 years later. I like it because it's atmospheric, evocative, and moody, like a soundtrack should be, but also because it brings in so many of the elements of the music from Henry's time without being overtly obvious- the dancing melodies, and the hints of polyphonic harmonies that were becoming so popular in the early 16th century, but with a modern interpretation and modern instruments and production. I highly recommend listening to An Historic Love first, before anything else. It will seriously make you wish that Henry and Anne hadn't worked out the way they did.

Adele: 21. I first fell in love with Adele two years ago when 19 was on eMusic (don't even get me started on the hot mess that eMusic has become these days), and Chasing Pavements was one of their editor's picks. I love how she sounds like all of the greatest women in jazz - she channels Billie Holiday and Etta James like a pro - and both her voice, and her lyrics are ridiculously mature for someone so young. This new album is already in the running for Album of the Year, and it hasn't even been out for three weeks yet. Sometimes, as with Mumford and Sons, pop music gets it right, and I'm not one of those music snobs who refuses to listen to anything the "Establishment" likes - if the pop world gets it right, then so much the better for them, and everyone who gets to be introduced to Adele.

Gallicantus: Dialogues of Sorrow. In 1612 King James' son Henry died of typhoid, and this album is a collection of the grief recorded in music. Gallicantus is an early music vocal group, supported on this album by the lute. Grammophone called it an "outstanding disc" and they were right to do so - the voices are clear, the harmonies are lush, and you can almost touch the sadness, it's so real. This is a recording that every early music fan should have, and if you're not already familiar with the world of Early Music, it is a fine introduction. There's nothing more I can say that isn't already summed up in the Amazon review: "...the singing is indeed exquisite in absolutely every way one can judge it. Each individual voice was incredibly attuned to the words and the meaning thereof."

On how I'm pretty much convinced that God is screwing with me

2011-03-23T21:13:00.000-07:00

You know the book of Job? The one where God and the Devil are hanging out and the Devil says, "well sure, all your followers love you because you're good to them. If you took away all of their happiness, I bet they would curse you." And God says, "no, that's not true, because my followers like to receive abuse from their God, and they'd still be totally down with worshiping me" (kind of like battered women who refused to press charges against their abusers, right?) So God picks Job out randomly, kills his wife and kids, covers him with boils, takes his money, makes life miserable, and Job refuses to curse God. Thus, God wins the bet, gets to say "nanny nanny boo boo" to the Devil, and Job gets to Pass Go, collect $200, get a new wife, new kids, and new life. Because wives and kids are totally replaceable, right?

If you can't tell, I'm not a fan of this book. To be honest, I'm not a fan of the Old Testament in general, and this book in particular. People say, "oh, it shows Job's loyalty to God, and how even when you're miserable, God is still looking out for you." I say that's pretty much bullsh*t. This book shows God being petty, engaging in debate with the Devil, stooping to his level, and playing games with His most loyal worshipers. If a kid is getting teased in school, most parents will tell the kid to ignore the meanie, to rise above their behavior, to be the better person. Job shows that even God winds up getting caught by the need to prove Himself right from time to time, and I don't like it.

(Religiously, I'm a fan of Jesus. If we all lived by what Jesus actually said, the words he told us to live by, we could all be closer to God and each other, no matter what religion we are. I'm really not down with anyone who tries to get in the middle of my relationship with Jesus, and that includes other Biblical writers. Like Paul. I'm not down with Paul trying to tell me how to live my life. Jesus said He was the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Not Paul. Jesus said to turn the other cheek, to make peace, to treat prostitutes and tax collectors with kindness and love. I can easily and happily have a relationship with Jesus. Anything else is, frankly, superfluous, in my non-theological opinion. On that note, I'm a big fan of John Shelby Spong, who wrote the books Why Christianity Must Change or Die, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, and lots of other juicy morsels for liberal Christians like me to chew on. I like him in part because he makes me feel conservative, which is a pretty rare thing.)

But I digress.

So we found the pups last Wednesday. By Friday no one had claimed them yet, and the tan one ran away. The black one was still with us, laying on the deck, being really great. We woke up to her barking in the middle of the night on Friday night, and it had started sleeting/hailing/being a general mess. We cleaned the cats out of the bedroom and brought her in, where she was so incredibly chill and mellow. Saturday we open the door and let everyone meet each other. It was a cat/dog love fest. Seriously. Everyone was so happy. Still no one claimed her. By Sunday we're thinking we might want to keep her, and it would actually work out. Legally we're obligated to give it five days before finding a new home for her, so I figure she's ours by Monday.

Monday the owner emails. After googling for a while, I find out she's a school librarian in the same district where one of my organization's Board members is based - weird small world. She's been out of town on a family emergency. When I ask why no tags, she says that the dog chokes herself with the tags on the deck. But then when I ask where the dog would have gone during the storm (we got a foot of snow Sunday night), she says the dog is indoor. So which is it? Indoor, where the tag wouldn't matter, or outdoor? And besides, why don't you get a freaking chip? She says her petsitter has been frantically looking for the dog, but if that's the case, why hadn't we been called before? We posted flyers, we posted online, we called the vets. Why would you wait for six freaking days? What kind of petsitter is that?

It's all just too fishy.

The humane society called her and reamed her out for letting her dog get out, and she got really aggressive with them. Frankly, I don't like anyone who gets aggressive with the humane society.

So the long and short of it is that we gave the dog back to a crappy owner who didn't even care enough about a dog she's had for thirteen years to get a chip in the dog's ear so that she doesn't get lost. That pup deserves a better owner than her, and she doesn't deserve that dog. That's all I can say about that.

I don't know how the humane society gives back animals to crappy owners all the time. It broke my heart giving this one back. I don't know how you do it time and time again.

So the reason why God is screwing with me in all of this is that after we gave her back, I said to J that it was clear that God didn't want me to take care of anything right now. He takes away my first baby at 21 weeks. He takes away my second baby. Now he's taken away this dog who is clearly being taken care of by a negligent owner. I would have been thrilled to give the dog back if the owner had shown a little gratitude for us taking her in; had, say, offered to reimburse us for the food we bought, or even said, "wow, thanks for taking her to the vet to see if she was chipped, and you're right, that's a really good idea," or said anything that made me think she gave a damn about the dog other than, "we've had her for thirteen years."

J says, "no, it's the opposite. God sent us the dog to care for because He knew a snowstorm was coming, and He knew that she would have frozen, so He sent her to us to take care of during the storm."

And that really set me off. Because it's a joke. The negligent owner couldn't have called on Wednesday or Thursday or Friday or Saturday when I wasn't attached to the dog, could she? No, she emails on Monday, when we're already snoozing by the fire with each other, and she's laying on her back with her feet up inviting me to rub my face in her belly.

The second miscarriage couldn't have happened the entire weekend when I was spotting and was sure that I was miscarrying. Noooo. That would have been too easy. We need to take Heather to the doctor first and do an ultrasound and let her see a heartbeat first so she relaxes a little and thinks it will all be ok. Then we'll have the miscarriage happen the very next day. Yep, because otherwise it would have made too much sense, right?

I am so ready for our cruise. I'm pissed off, and that's all there is to that.

Getting Fit Project Update

2011-03-22T21:01:00.000-07:00

It's Tuesday, which in my new Fitness Project is Goal Day. That means it's weigh-in day (though I weigh myself every day anyway), and if I make my goal, I get a reward (this week it's a loooong backrub from my hubby). Every other week I take my measurements - I don't expect to see a lot of change in just 14 days, but it keeps it present for me, otherwise it would just slip away into the dark recesses of my brain where random Monty Python quotes and facts about the French Revolution are collecting dust.

So, the results are in. I lost another 2.2 pounds this week, bringing the total to just about 4.5 pounds in 2 weeks. I lost half an inch from my waist and hips, each.

On Saturday, I had a long heart-to-heart with hubby about food, and it was so clear how similar the addictions to food and alcohol are. One example is my utter conviction that any occasion is more special if you have food. For him it was alcohol. I mean, if you're going to do something nice, why not do it with food, right? When we go to England, I have a whole list of food I need to eat, otherwise I feel like I'm really missing out on something. I need to get Muller rice (I love that stuff). I need to eat chocolate mini-rolls from Marks and Spencer (I also love them). I absolutely have to drink at least two Cafe Nero hot chocolates a day. I mean, what's the point of wandering around Soho if you're not doing it with a hot chocolate in your hand, right? I can't imagine going to England and NOT eating Cadbury chocolate, or those Belgian waffle things that they sell in little individual packs in the grocery store. It's almost like there'd be no point.

But that's just ridiculous. The point of England is Evensong services, and train rides, and walks by the Cam, and wandering around in Bath, and getting lost in Whitby. The point of England is most definitely NOT chocolate mini-rolls from Marks and Spencer. I can see having one or two things that are your special foods that you look forward to when you travel somewhere. J loves the 7-up in England because it's not as sugary as here. To me, that seems normal. If I only had the mini-rolls, that would be ok. Or just the Cafe Nero hot chocolates. That would be understandable.

The problem is when everything revolves around food. I plan where I'm going to eat, what I'm going to eat, what I'll drink with what I eat, how I feel when I'm eating it.... which kind of talks and walks like an addiction.

So I guess I'll check out Overeaters Anonymous. I really don't want to. I went a few years ago - well, eight years ago - and I had a really bad attitude because everyone there seemed like they were fat and ate too much and had problems, and I sat there all holier than thou, thinking I was different. Who am I kidding...I still think I'm different. But one thing that J taught me is that all the alcoholics think that they're different, too. He's convinced that he's the one person who can handle alcohol, and everybody else has a problem. But he sees that everyone thinks that - the more you think you're different, the more the same you are.

The other thing I'm learning is how to take things one day at a time. Not even one day - one minute. If I'm not pigging out in this moment, then that's a good thing. I don't have to worry about how to get to 40 pounds, or 50 pounds or 70 pounds. I don't have to worry about how I'm going to go on a cruise and not completely lose all this progress I've made (the answer is, I'm taking my scale with me...hey maybe I'll weigh less at sea...who knows). I just have to worry about this moment, right now. And then this next moment. And so on. Eventually you get to where you need to be, one moment at a time, right?

I had my follow-up appointment after the D&C today. I love my doctor. I just love him. I wish I had a little miniature version of him that we could keep around the house, telling me random stories about when he bought his first CD player in the mid 1980's, and only had three CD's for it. He was at a meeting about high risk pregnancies during the time I was miscarrying three weeks ago, and he said he'd been thinking about me when they were talking about treatments for inflammations, and thinking about what he would do with me when we got to the point where I lost Baby T. Then he comes back, and finds out that I, as he put it, "got into trouble." But he's super-excited for me to try again because of all these new treatments he's learning about. I'm now Dr. J's guinea pig, I guess.

Anyway, I told him that we're on a full-scale assault against fat, and we talked about my plan of attack. He was totally supportive, but wanted to make sure I wasn't doing some crazy crash diet, and I assured him that I was trying to eat 1600-1800 calories a day. And he said words that will be forever etched in my brain as a defense against the BMI calculators and height-weight charts I used to study when I was a kid. He said, "I think more like 1800 calories a day for you. You're not short. And you have a big frame with a lot of muscle. We'll lose the padding around the frame, but that frame's not going anywhere."

Praise the Lord, and Big-Boned Girls Unite!!!

Things that Piss Me Off

2011-03-18T15:01:00.000-07:00

You know what would seriously piss me off? If I was living in Japan, and eight days ago I was doing fine, living my life, shooting the shit, and then the next day, bam, I lose my house and all my possessions in an earthquake and tsunami, and then, let's say I look at a newspaper, and I see this headline:

Japan Raises Nuclear Crisis Warning Level Retroactively

But really, what are you supposed to do with that? Retroactively stay inside? Retroactively dust off your hair? Retroactively do something?

What a clusterf*ck. There's nothing else to say about that.

Ann Coulter just wrote a column saying that radiation is good for you. Is she getting a little upset that Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman are suddenly gracing conservative pin-up posters, and she's feeling a little left out, so she has to up the crazy ante to get some attention?

Found this online at a blog called The Final Thread, which is pretty conservative, but still funny

Two things:

First, I love how she says that this new science saying radiation is good for you gets no attention from the press, but then quotes articles in the New York Times...I guess that's not press. But actually, maybe it's not, since she's usually so disparaging of the liberal-leaning New York Times. Except when it serves her purposes. Seriously, I can't follow the circular logic.

Second, you know it's bad when Bill O'Reilly thinks you're a nutjob.

Lost Pups

2011-03-17T09:58:00.000-07:00

I don't know how many local people in my mountains area read this blog, but I'm thinking at least a few, since I have my gig writing for the Rim of the World website. So if you're local, this applies to you. These two pups were running around our street yesterday, and when Jonathan called to them to get off the street, they trotted right up our steps and plopped themselves on our deck, and haven't left yet. They're clearly cared for, but there are no phone numbers on either of their collars (grrrrr), so we can't call the owners.

We called the vets and humane society, posted on ROTW, and will post flyers at the post office and grocery store. If you know these dogs, can you please email me? They're scared and frightened - I'm guessing last night may have been one of the first times they slept outside because they were freaked out at everything. And the black one is getting old and has a bit of a limp, and you can see cataracts developing already. We put a bunch of blankets out, so they're comfy, and we bought food, so their bellies are full. But I'm really not interested in becoming a dog owner right now, as sweet as they are, so I want to find their owners asap!

And people, please, if you have dogs, put your phone number on their collars! Even if they're indoor - you just never know if there's an emergency (ie a fire or earthquake) and they get separated from you...well...not having a number on their collars pretty much guarantees you won't see them again unless people like us take them in. And frankly, they barked so much last night (to which our neighbors can also attest) that I didn't get a lot of sleep, and was pretty tempted to just shoo them off the deck by 2am. The only thing that quieted them is that Jonathan, channeling St. Francis, went and slept outside on the deck with them for three hours. And I don't think he's going to want to do that again tonight.

So please, for the peace and quiet of the neighborhood, as well as the well-being of these girls, somebody please tell me that you know these pups and can get me the phone number of their owners!!!

Sociology behind MTV reality shows

2011-03-16T17:17:00.000-07:00

I have two new favorite TV shows. First off is Celebrity Apprentice, which I started watching last year, and am already addicted to this year, after only two episodes. Though I was seriously upset after this past episode. Dionne Warwick is a nutjob, and should have gone home, in my humble opinion. I'm predicting a John Rich win, just because I think he's smart, and playing sly already. And with the level of crazy on the women's team, I think all the men can coast for a little while.

My other favorite show is Bully Beatdown on MTV, which I randomly came across, and couldn't switch away. People who are being bullied send in tapes of their bully treatment, and then they ask the bullies if they would be willing to fight a professional MMA fighter for the chance to win $10,000. The caveat? If they lose, the money goes to the kid they bullied. I've only watched a handful of shows so far, but I like it for several reasons.

First, the bullies look like serious tools. It makes bullying look like the most dumbass thing a person could do.

Second, the MMA fighters are always there fighting for the little guys, so it portrays these tough MMA guys as being really supportive of the bullied kids.

Third, the bully always talks a big game, and always winds up losing, thus looking like even more of a tool.

Fourth, I find it a fascinating study into the human psyche. You know how in the days of the Romans there were gladiator fights and duels where they'd pair a human against a bear and stuff like that? And then how later, punishments were always designed to humiliate people, which was such a big thing because the societal unit was so much stronger when people didn't travel, and you lived your entire life in one town and were known by the town, relied on the town for protection, etc.

From the simplest punishment of putting people into stocks so that their fellow townsmen would see their crime and throw rotten tomatoes at them, to the final act of torture bestowed upon those headed for hangings - to be carried publicly through the streets tied to a cart, in full view of everyone, so that the entire town could beat you, or throw things at you, etc., punishments always had this level of humiliation in their design. And we look at that now and tend to think how inhumane those kinds of things were, and how we're so advanced now because we do civilized things like private electric chair executions, or whatever they do now.

But when they announce the Bully and he comes into the ring, the crowd goes absolutely nuts. They boo, and make fists, and scream and yell and go crazy. They're rabid. Which makes me think that there's something deeply ingrained in the human psyche that we feel this need to inflict group humiliation on people who have hurt us, or others. Even though we live very independent lives now, and don't reside in small villages where we depend on each other for our very lives, the idea of being part of a group, and wanting to banish the bad people out of that group, is a basic instinct.

I think I'm going a little deeper into the show than they probably intend for people to go, but it's still fascinating to watch. Oh, and the Bully usually winds up looking like such a dumbass that he winds up apologizing to the kid he bullied, which is kind of heartwarming.

Getting Fit Project Update

2011-03-15T11:38:00.000-07:00

Ok, so it's no secret that I'm a Big Girl. I've always been a Big Girl, and I've never really had a problem with it. I like to exercise, and I have lower blood pressure than my hubby, even though I weigh about 80 pounds more than him. I always joke about how I'm in great health, except I just like to eat chocolate too much.

But that's actually a lie.

The truth of the matter is that I've been yo-yo dieting since I was about 13. Over the course of all that dieting, I must have lost well over a hundred pounds, but then they come back, plus more. I've actually had a secret weight-loss blog going on for a couple of years, on and off (mostly off), which has lots of followers and everything. The idea of putting it out there for the people who know me to read - well, that scares the crap out of me. But I'm experimenting with doing things differently, and this is definitely different.

After I lost Baby T and started blogging about that, people told me how open and vulnerable I was, and I would think what a lie that was. Blogging about losing my baby wasn't hard. Blogging about how I thought it was my fault because I'm overweight...that's hard.

Now, having lost another baby, I'm seriously sick of feeling like it's my fault for being chubby (oh heck, if we're really being honest, let's just call a spade a spade. It's not "zaftig" or "pleasingly plump" or any of those endearing names that my hubby calls it. It's fat. Capital F. Capital A. Capital T. F-A-T.).

Given the fact that we're taking a break from the whole Project Pregnancy for at least 6 months, I figure that this time is a gift for me to learn how to take wonderful care of myself, and the biggest part of that is learning how to eat well; learning how to use food as the fuel that it was meant to be, and not as a friend-substitute, or an alternative to a good massage when I'm stressed out.

So this six months is it for me. I'm looking at this time as a gift from my babies to me, to get myself in the best shape of my post-college life, so that when I get pregnant again, I'll already be that much further ahead in being able to take care of myself.

I'm not ready to post actual numbers yet...maybe at some point I'll do that, but not yet. Let's just say that if I were to get back to my super-healthiest college-weight, I'd have to lose about 80 to 90 pounds. Looking at that number freaks me out, so I'm not going to focus on it at all. I'm going to focus on being healthy one day at a time, one meal at a time, and if that leads to a weight loss of a pound or two a week, then that's a great target.

So here's what I've started doing this past week to reach that healthy goal:

First, I am weighing myself every day because I've found in my previous weight-loss attempts, that, at least at the beginning, I have to make weight-loss the number one priority for me, and keep it at the front of my mind. One way to do that is to weigh myself every day. I know the experts say that once a week is when you'll see results, and if you do it much more than that you could get discouraged, but this is one area where I really know what works for me - if I don't presence that weight for myself every morning, it goes right out the window. And then the weighing-in day comes, and I'm all, "oh, hey, am I supposed to be losing weight? Wow, I forgot. Bummer." Facing the scale every day takes some of the significance and scariness out of it for me.

Second, I am keeping a food diary. But it's more than a food diary. Every morning I write my weight, and the top five reasons I wan to lose weight. Again, this presences it for me. Otherwise I tend to forget why it's important - it's amazing how quickly stuff like this just goes right out of my head - until I'm at Target buying Breathe-Right strips and eating a pretzel, and I think, "Oh, yeah, I wanted to lose weight so I don't snore as much... bummer..." Then I write down everything I eat as I eat it. At the bottom I keep track of my water, and the exercise I've done. And then at the end of the day I put my thoughts about the day, ie, "I should have had a snack before dinner so I didn't eat such a huge bowl of pasta," or, "I'm proud of myself for eating a salad at lunch." And finally, at the very bottom, I write something nice I did for myself that day. This is important to me, because it shows me that rewards and happiness don't just come from cupcakes. It allows me to build up an arsenal of treats that don't involve calories, so that the next time I'm bored/sad/lonely and I feel like eating an apple pie, I can say, "oh, hey, that time I played with flowers made me really happy. Maybe I should do that instead." And thus, the pie-crisis may be avoided.

Third, I'm drinking craploads of water. Nothing in it. No flavor. Just plain, boring water. I pretty much hate it. I can't see myself ever drinking water for fun, but who knows.

Fourth, I'm embracing hunger. I'm pretty much convinced that the people who say you can lose weight without being hungry are all liars. You don't go from eating 2700 calories a day to eating 1800 calories a day and not feel any hunger. You just don't, I don't care how much fiber and protein you stick in your diet. I'm going down slowly. As in, last week I averaged around 2400 calories a day, and this week, I'm going to try to keep it under 2200. Eventually I'll get it down to around 1700 or 1800, but I need to work into that.

The fifth thing I'm doing is taking my measurements every two weeks. Well, I took them last tuesday, and I'm going to take them next tuesday. I figure I won't see much in the way of change every two weeks, but again, it's a way of keeping it at the top of my mind. If I only did it once a month, I'd probably forget all about it in between. And if I did it every week, that would just be redundant. So I figure every two weeks is a good compromise.

The sixth thing I'm doing is structuring a rewards system. Every ten pounds gets a reward, with bigger rewards as we go up and get to 40 and 50 pounds. I'm not sure what the rewards are yet, but I'm going to think of good things, for sure.

So how did I do the first week? I lost two pounds, thank you. I'm hoping that I can keep the pace of 1-2 pounds a week, which they say is the healthiest pace to lose weight. I'd love to say, "oh, I'll lose ten pounds before our cruise," but that's just setting myself up for failure, which then triggers a cupcake-crisis. The first goal I'd like to reach is to lose 40 pounds by mid-August (well, 38 after the 2 pound loss this week). After that, I'll reevaluate and come up with a new goal, but for right now, 40 pounds looks reachable, and not-too-scary.

I'm going to report back on this a lot, because it will give me motivation to keep going. That's another thing that I've found is important to losing weight - having a check-in structure to keep you accountable. So this blog is my new weight-loss accountability tool.

Scary, but if it works, it'll be worth it.

The Season of Heather

2011-03-14T16:49:00.000-07:00

If you have to grieve, I highly recommend Springtime as the best season in which to do so. All the renewal, the world getting lighter, and birds singing, the snow melting...all of it reminding you that life goes on, and that you will get strong again. October is a pretty nasty time to start grieving...the world getting darker, things dying all around you, it's getting cold, the nights are long.

We're in the season of Lent, which is supposed to be marked by quiet thoughtfulness, meditation, and reflection. But I think I'm a liturgical season ahead, because I'm not feeling very quietly reflective at the moment. I'm ready for the Resurrection, and the daffodils and celebration. I've had enough of all this sadness. I'm sick of it.

So, in a spirit that I'm pretty sure God will understand, I'm giving up being miserable for Lent. I've spent five months being wound-up and miserable, and I think I could use a 40 day break.

But I'm not just saying this willy-nilly. I'm serious about it. I'm taking actions that will forward my commitment to non-misery. I'm quietly and thoughtfully throwing off all the darkness that's been following me around for the past five months.

J and I have decided that we're not going to try to get pregnant again until the fall. So, in true George Costanza fashion, I am declaring this: The Season of Heather.

We're both on a cleaning-spree, which has already led to two trips to the thrift store, with another one planned tomorrow (they're closed Monday or it would have been today). The bookshelves are dust free. And I'm completely caught up on laundry.

Since last Tuesday, when I started keeping count, I've exercised five times. I've been averaging six glasses of water a day. And I even plucked my eyebrows again today, twice in as many weeks. My hair is cut well and highlighted, and every day we're doing small chores around the house so that when the weekend comes, I don't spend six hours on Saturday catching up on housework, like I've always done in the past.

I'm eating at least one big salad a day, and I've got flowers all around me. I've started The Artist's Way again, and I've learned how to make the most amazing iced mocha's with my blender and espresso machine, which I can drink because I'm not pregnant. And I've even booked the petsitter for our cruise already, and didn't wait until the last minute and then stress about it, like I've done in the past.

I think God will be ok with me throwing off misery for Lent, as long as I'm really taking it on, and not just doing it to say I'm giving something up, but it doesn't really mean anything.

Artist Dates at the Flower Market

2011-03-12T19:45:00.000-08:00

If I had another life, I'd totally open a flower shop. I could definitely get myself out of bed at 5:45 a couple of times a week if it meant I got to play with flowers all the time. The LA Flower Market is the most awesome place on the planet, and the best place for an Artist's Way Artist Date...

Wrigley came out on the deck to lay in the sun and play with the flowers.

Thousands of orchids...

Row upon row of gerber daisies

Lots of roses

What $35 at the Flower Market will get you

With which you can make lots of arrangements

A day with lots of flowers is a Good Day