Rebirth

I did something that I thought I would never do: I made a New Year's Resolution. In February. It's a typical one.

This year, I said to myself, I'm really going to start thinking about my weight and what I can do to become a healthier person. 

I've never made a "real" New Year's Resolution before, especially as late as February first. I've always long forgotten about them and settled into a state of complacency with comfort food and general winter lethargy that comes with Post-Christmas snow and cold. While warmth worshipers are counting the days until the Equinox and the buds on the trees, I'm relishing in the general hibernation that comes with January, February and early March. With this state of mind, I must say that the state of my pants cutting off my circulation became a clear reality. I bought some new pants with a bit of shame and resignation, and told no one that I'd graduated into another size of plus.

I didn't tell my therapist, which went against my general rule of sharing everything with her. I felt like the grade-schooler that hid and ate crackers out of my parents' eyes or the teen that made a sandwich and then secretly fed it to the dog while harboring a case of anorexia that lead to rapid weight loss between my junior and senior year of high school. Everyone was so proud of the weight that I'd lost then. What an accomplishment, they said. The weight crept back on, and the difficulties crept back up: the back aches, the knee aches, the trouble climbing the stairs without being winded, the inability to find clothes that fit my frame...the list goes on ad nauseum. Now weighing more than I'd ever weighed in my life, the "secret" was clearly out in every photo, scale, and shirt I tried.

I read a book in January, "The Four Agreements," by don Miguel Ruiz. Each Agreement is simple and succinct:

1. Be Impeccable With Your Word
2. Don't Take Anything Personally
3. Don't Make Assumptions
4. Always Do Your Best

Each Agreement, too, weighed heavy on my heart as I tried to incorporate them into my everyday life. Each stuck with me and still does, but...Always Do Your Best. What was my best?

What I was doing with my life wasn't my best.

With this realization, came what seemed like a chance to change my life. I guess it's so much more than a resolution, but a complete paradigm shift that started with my relationship with food and exercise. It also became a very public shift that added a sense of accountability that I'd never had before. I decided to stop living to eat and start eating to live. I made the decision to move my body and really...fight for my life.

It's only been a month, but the changes are great and my body is really starting to catch up with my mind and for once, I feel like I can do this. I can stop making excuses and share my thinly-veiled secrets.

My paradigm can be reborn.

Traditionally Yours

Recently, apparently, there's been a lot of news surrounding a possible name change for the Washington Redskins football team after both President Obama and Bob Costas have made public statements about how racially offensive the name was to Native Americans. Honestly, I had to read up on this phenomena because NPR had their fall member campaign this last week and they've been a little less-than-informative with their breaking-news coverage. Don't scold me either, I've donated to NPR...I've got a window cling to prove it.

I didn't even realize that the Washington Redskins were even still a thing. Not only am I not a football fan, I also live in Pittsburgh, so lord knows that football journalists in this town bleed black and gold or they're run out of town by pitchfork-wielding yinzers. But still, that level of racially offensive nickname went out with the slow-talking, pelt wearing "Kemosabe" of the fifties western television show, right? I guess with Johnny Depp (of all people) green-lighting that kind of racism in the summer flop "The Lone Ranger," I should know that anything is possible.  How did I come to all of this now, miles behind everyone else? I got a text today from my husband with his coworkers' reaction to the Redskins debacle,

"It's those goddamned pussy-ass liberals that are ruining this country!"

My first reaction was to think that changing the name of a football team doesn't ruin America does it? No one can possibly think that! But alas, my reading set me straight: the term Redskins is a "tradition." The term traditional in America could easily be interchanged with patriotic for many citizens, despite the fact that these terms are nowhere near the same. I'd say that indoor plumbing isn't necessarily traditionally American, but we still seem to have really embraced it over the last few decades. Miley Cyrus isn't exactly the kind of woman that Susan B. Anthony was talking about when she fought for women's suffrage, but it seems that a lot of Americans can't get enough of the skank. Tradition is a two-way street, America.

It's weird how we've progressed as a society to a point where we're completely disconnected from our food, our land, and our sense of personal morality, but we're certain that the way that things used to be are much better than the way things are now. We simply must use the newest cell phone on the market and we pay someone to let us park our car in a garage, but we're certain that those racially and socially oppressive and offensive nicknames are totally legit by claiming their status as traditional in American lexicon. To say that they weren't would just leave you subject to your own offensive and oppressive slur...that of the "pussy-ass liberal."

I don't consider myself tied to any particular political group as I'm too apathetic and cynical to really care about our "government," but even I'm slightly charged to turn a mirror upon the face of American traditionalism/patriotism and demand to know where in the history books it was ever, "The Polarized States of America?" Where was it ever intended to be what once was should always be?

It is by its very definition that American is the land of progression, whether it be through Washington's plea for Americans not to be pulled down by any political party (well, we fucked that up), Dr. King's racially tolerant rhetoric (we fucked that up, too), or even Lee Greenwood's shitty song about being an American because at least he knows he's free. Feh.

The Washington Redskins. The Atlanta Braves. The Notre Dame Fighting Irish. All of these fall under the label of offensive monikers seen as traditional by the eye of an angry and threatened beholders. Beholders that love the newest Hemi in their truck, the newest reality show on TLC or the best factory-farmed hamburger their hard-earned money can buy.

Progression is a blame game when it can no longer be sustained by a polarized country. That's not what this is really about though...it's about football.

Fall Calls for Pie Day!

So yesterday was Pie Day. I think that the majority of people that read this blog are also friends with me on Facebook, so they've seen the official Pie Day photo:

 Please stand back from the glow of Pie Day, because its radiance may burn you. 

Pie Day consisted of making pie crusts, cutting up vegetables for chicken pot pie (the best food in the world), making copious amounts of pumpkin filling for one GIANT pumpkin pie, and of course eating pie and drinking too much black coffee. I don't have a pie and coffee tattoo for nothing kids:

To be truthful, I have a pie and coffee tattoo because I love "Twin Peaks," pie, and coffee, but for the intent and purpose of this blog post as well as those that don't know of the show, this is just a bangin' representation of my love affair with the pastry and filling arts.

The first day of Autumn seems like the perfect time to celebrate a day like this, but it was totally accidental. My husband and my parents were bringing in wood for the furnace, and I'm MUCH too fragile to do something like that, so I was in charge of the pie crusts and beginning to make pot pie. I was wearing a sweater, it was slightly brisk and there were big and fluffy autumn clouds in the sky that replaced the haze of the humid summer sun. It was the perfect time to fire up the oven and bring back the pie-making season from it's sticky-summer hiatus. I hadn't made crusts in a while, so I felt a little rusty, but by batch two, I could easily have made a dozen more batches. I read somewhere that decent bakers are born and not made, but I feel like with this recipe the former doesn't always have to be the case (thankfully for the rest of us that must get by with our Grams' recipes and a nanobyte of their talent and patience). 

My Gram gave me her love for pie and all things tasty, some skill with which to create these tasty things, and she gave me her figure (gee thanks, lady.) Something else she gave me, though, was a pie crust recipe that cannot be beat by anything that I've ever seen. The woman lived by this recipe and it's ability to create a pie crust that will not get tough no matter how much you handle the dough. It's genius. It's divinely-inspired. It might be slightly satanic (okay...it's not), but it's also the secret to any pie that I've ever made in my life. The fillings are the fillings, but the crust...honey chile, that's what makes a pie more than pudding or stewed fruit. 

If I share this recipe, you have to promise to use it. No excuses and don't argue with the directions. 

"Fool"Proof Pie Crust

4 Cups Flour

1 3/4 cup Crisco (regular or butter flavored...if you like butter, use the butter flavored)

2 teaspoons salt

1 Tablespoon sugar 

1 Tablespoon vinegar

1 egg

1/2 Cup cold water

Mix together the flour, salt and sugar. Cut in Crisco until crumbly (use a pastry blender if you're averse to getting your hands dirty, but I've been watching way too much "Two Fat Ladies," lately and I want to do everything by hand). In a separate bowl, whisk egg, then add vinegar and water and mix together. Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients and mix until you get a big ole pastry ball. Flatten it out and cut into four equal parts, then make those parts into pastry patties. Freeze for a heck of a long time...or at least chill in the fridge for half an hour before using. The waiting is the hardest part...Tom Petty said so.

There you have it. Make your own "Damn Fine" Pie Day. 

Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ: The Smiths' 10 Funniest Lyrics.

A Buzzfeed Community member posted the 10 funniest Smiths' lyrics on September 12. I read it. I laughed and I tsk'ed at the lack of some obviously devilishly funny lyrics that were left off the list. Buzzfeed has a weird way of being so hilarious at times and being so completely off the mark at others that I wonder if there are any kind of checks and balances to the writing. If no, how do I get a job there?

I felt it only my natural right to post my thoughts on the Smiths' (or is the Smiths's? I don't like the idea of it grammatically being the SMITHSES...ugh, but I also don't like the idea of not putting anything there. There has to be something there, right? These are the things that keep me up at night. That and all of the psychopharmaceuticals).

Without further psychobabble or ado, here are my funniest Smiths' (Smiths's) lyrics in no particular order:

1. "I didn't realize that you wrote poetry. I didn't realize you wrote such really awful poetry." from Frankly, Mr. Shankly, which by itself...could fill a list of ten hilarious lyrics. I have special meaning with this one...because there are so many bad poets out there that fancy themselves deep and mysterious when really they're just, "flatulent pain in the ass(es)."

2. "Hand in glove. The sun shines out of our behinds. No, it's not like any other love, this one is different because it's us." from Hand in Glove. Maybe there's a double-entendre here that I'm missing, but I find that most couples feel this way about their relationships in the very beginning and Morrissey is poking fun at how nauseating it can really be.

3. "A scanty bit of a thing with a decorative ring that wouldn't cover the head of a goose. As Rose collects the money in the canister, who comes sliding down the banister, but Vicar in a tutu. It's not strange. He just wants to live his life this way."  from Vicar in a Tutu. How this did not make the list is beyond me. It's about a cross-dressing Vicar for Chrissakes.

4. "This is the last night of the fair, and the grease in the hair of a speedway operator is all a tremulous heart requires.  A schoolgirl is denied, she said : "How quickly would I die if I jumped from the top of the parachutes ?" from Rusholme Ruffians (one of my favorites). This is a bit darker, but just as amusing...the seriousness of the teenager and her unrequited love. 

5. "...And when I'm lying in bed. I think about life and I think about death, and neither one particularly appeals to me." from Nowhere fast. There are a lot of darkly funny lyrics in this ("I am a man of means, of slender means."), but I really enjoy Morrissey being able to poke fun at his own "meh," and I think that that's what a lot of Morrissey critics miss. He made fun of himself as much as he did everyone else. 

6. "I've come to wish you an unhappy birthday (x2). 'Cause you're evil and you lie and if you should die I may feel slightly sad, (but I won't cry.)" from Unhappy Birthday. How many people can admit that they've never felt this way about someone in their life. Don't even try it.

7. " I don't dream about anyone...except myself." from William, It was Really Nothing. Classic Morrissey.

8. "I was looking for a job and then I found a job. And Heaven knows I'm miserable now!" from Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now. This is another song that has tons of funny lyrics, but I find this one to be the most charmingly clever...or rather, is it that I find this one to be the most relevant?

9. "Keats and Yates are on your side, while Wilde is on mine." from Cemetary Gates. This is another lovely song that isn't necessarily funny, but this is such a cheeky line. What exactly are you trying to say, Morrissey, hmmm?

10. "Past the Pub who saps your body, and the church who'll snatch your money."  from The Queen is Dead. This is a bitter, bitter line, but so true and so clever. 

Morrissey's solo stuff is full of really clever lines as well, but that's another post for another time when I'm feeling especially energetic. 

Ta!

Dreamin' : American Style

When Dustin was in Iraq, he got paid on the 10th of every month. It was hard, at first, to only get paid once a month and honestly I hated the 9th more than any day of the month. After a while, though, it was easy to fall into a routine of paying the bills on the 10th, putting so much into the savings account (a laughable thought now) and knowing that I had so many dollars until the 10th rolled around again. I grew to love that routine. I grew to cherish my ability to make it work to the point where the 9th became my most loved day of the month, because there was still plenty of money left to live, or to put away, or to possibly spend on something frivolous (what?!).
After 18 months of Dustin's contract in Iraq, we had amassed some wares that we had only dreamed of: a car that actually ran, bedroom furniture that wasn't broken and older than me, a digital camera from this decade, a basic-level e-reader, and a mediocre laptop that allowed Dustin to stay in touch with me from the desert and prevented him from completely going batshit crazy whilst confined to a base in the middle of a war-torn country. These things aren't luxuries to most people, but when I get up every morning and see a new wardrobe in my bedroom, I'm still slightly amazed that I was fiscally able and actually allowed to go to a store, pick out what I wanted, and buy it with cash that I had in my checking account. Since I struck out on my own with Dustin, I was sure that something as seemingly small as this would be for other people, as if Ikea was a place for us to buy candles and lingonberries, but nothing else. This is the stuff of which American dreams are made, right?
These are not crazy credit purchases like my the people my age are making: houses that are too large for their families with mortgages that they can barely afford, cars that are shiny status symbols with names like Audi, Saab or Acura, and clothes and bedding from Pottery Barn and Jack and Jill for their toddlers that are too young to know the difference (or care) between items from these overpriced chain boutiques and those that came from the Salvation Army's half-price day (the greatest day of the week, by the way). I felt a little smug about my own sense of restraint at my age: about paying our credit cards (fixtures of time when money was completely gone) down instead of racking them up, paying over on my student loan bills so that maybe I could have them paid off before I retired, working full-time at a temp job that I hated when I didn't technically "need," to because money was okay for once.

I felt like a real adult singing, "you're going to make it after all!"

When Dustin got home from Iraq, he was on unemployment for a decent amount of time, but it was okay. The savings was there, he made as much as one could make on unemployment and we were living modestly and even managed to pay off one of Dustin's student loans in this time (hooray!). Then Dustin got a job with a company that repairs large pieces of equipment for an hourly sum that was laughable to someone with his skill and experience. It was okay, though, they assured him, it wouldn't always be like this and they could see him rising through the ranks of the company, and let's face it, no one was beating down the door to give him a job that paid what he deserved. I got hired on full-time at my temp job and got a "raise," that made our pays about equal. We lived, but I could feel myself drilling down, down and further down into the seemingly endless depths of depression (a result of a job that I loathed) that only a fierce cocktail of psychopharmaceuticals rescue me from. I had doctor's co-pays, hospital bills, pharmacy co-pay after co-pay and the 70% of nothing that comes from a three week stint of Short-Term Disability. The first weeks of this year were a mess...a mess that I'm not sure we'll ever recover from.

The late winter was rough but the summer seems to be rougher. The savings is low now, a result of buying groceries, paying credit card bills, and having a fussy feline that needed 1,000 dollars worth of medical care and now requires prescription food and a eagle-eye to make sure that he doesn't die.I got a new job within my company, but it pays less when you factor in all of the overtime I'm not working. But I should be glad, right? My time is so valuable that I should cherish not working thirteen hour days and crying at my desk, RIGHT?!

Let's face reality: my time has become increasingly less valuable as these hot months roll on and by back-to-school, I may be hocking school shoes or bookbags three nights a week at some crappy retail job to compensate. Who needs sleep anyway?

Maybe I should've bought a bunch of things that I couldn't afford so that at least I'd have the things to fall back on instead of having a stack of bills that have a decent chunk taken from them, but are nowhere near paid-off. Maybe my age group has it all right: buy now, figure it out later and leave the debt for your toddlers.

Maybe I shouldn't have treated myself to that makeup two years ago.

The choices that I have to make now for Dustin and I are those that two people that make well above minimum wage should never have to make. How long can I go without that prescription? What happens if we consistently eat carbohydrates because they're cheaper than vegetables and fruit? That medical procedure isn't absolutely necessary, is it? I'm more inclined to believe that this really is the stuff of which American Dreams are made.

Girl, Be Not Proud

Today I did something that I'm not proud of (that is, besides ending this sentence in a preposition).

I was in the company bathroom and a woman right beside me had deodorant lines completely marking the sides of her perfectly pressed black skirt, like little wispy roads. No one had told her. I could tell. She went about washing her hands and drying them complacently without a care in the world as to the marring of her suit. This smart suit with black hose, black patent pumps and a crispy white shirt. A bob-do settled atop her middle-aged head with a smartness (again) that comes with many years of hassling with ponytails and long locks. She was just. so. smart.

Too smart.

Just looking at her face filled me with a rage that comes with seeing someone just too smug for their own good. A flood of thoughts raced through my mind in two seconds and deduced themselves into one action: I didn't tell her.

I didn't tell her.

I'm not proud. I should've taken the high road (cliche alert!) and whispered in her ear. I should've gone to her woman-to-woman and told her about her accidental faux pas. I should've "helped a sister out," but I didn't, and I'm sorry for it now.

Why do we, as human beings, look at a person and think that we know everything of their existence within one second? Why are we so mean? Strike that...why was I so mean?

Twenty-First Century Jokes

A lazy Sunday afternoon watching a Futurama marathon comprised of episodes I’ve seen fifty times isn’t exactly the most productive way to spend a day, BUT there’s no shame in my game, yo.

During the commercials, the trailer for, “Identity Theft,” appeared before for me for the first time. The basic premise is that a businessman’s identity (Jason Bateman) is stolen by a harmless-looking woman (Melissa McCarthy of “Mike and Molly,” fame) and shenanigans and chicanery ensue.  Anyone who hasn’t been in a coma for the last few years knows that, “Mike and Molly,” and thusly Melissa McCarthy have been the target of ill-placed fame for being a show about “two fatties in love.” In fact, one journalist thought it her place to tell everyone in the world about how disgusting it was that a show like this would portray fat people being happy enough with themselves to love someone else. 

Anyway, there's a spot in the trailer where the beautifully lithe dancer-looking girlfriend (you know, she doesn't look quite White, Black, Latino, Indian or Asian, but she's "hot," and totally sweet in a messy bun and leggings) compares McCarthy's character to a hobbit and Bateman so sassily quips, "I'm goin' after Bilbo." Et tu, McCarthy and Bateman? Another fat joke? Another wacky comedy at the expense of the fat lady? 

I know that Krusty the Clown has made a career out of this kind of thing for Simpsons fans everywhere, but fat jokes are about as hilarious and cutting-edge as the flapping dickie or the The Three Stooges eye poke. Not only are they not funny because I'm fat, they're not funny in spite of the fact that I'm fat. 

Fat jokes have become the easiest way to criticize someone's physical appearance without being seen as cruel or shallow. In fact, fat jokes have often been laid on the line as a way to "help," fat people realize that they're in the middle of a medical crisis. A newscaster in Minnesota or Wisconsin or somewhere cold and snowy got made an amazing rebuttal to a "concerned viewer," that thought that she was setting a bad example for her female viewers. It is my hope that women like Jennifer can stay as classy and respectful as she has in her rebuttal instead of lowering herself to the level of the redundant funny fat lady laughing with the bullies. It's no place to be, Melissa McCarthy.

The next time I see a girl wearing high heels, I'll remember to call her a disgusting street-walking prostitute out of concern for her foot health. I mean why not? It's the same thing. 

Fat jokes don't hurt just the fat lady, they hurt the fat lady's husband/wife/partner, her children, her family and her friends. Fat jokes will usually get an eye roll from any fat lady that's confident enough in herself to realize how base and stupid they are, but fat jokes will invoke shame from those that aren't strong enough to see through to the heart of their maker. 

Do you want to show a fat person some concern? Befriend them. Get to know their story and encourage whatever path to good health they may travel. Give a little love. 

"It's so easy to laugh. It's so easy to hate. It takes strength to be gentle and kind."