In which this post is, like, totally ILLUSTRATED.
I lost two pounds last week, in spite of that four-slices-of-pizza debacle. I lost no inches, though, because of all of those damned squats and crunches and push-ups and shit. Nine weeks to go to achieve my goal weight.
So naturally, yesterday Adam sent me some Swedish Fish. They’re delicious superfruity fish-shaped gummi wonderfulness. They’re also 150 kcal per serving, so I am ignoring them as we speak:
Last night I went to an afterhours party at a friend’s house. She has a cat that will walk into a plastic grocery bag and let you carry her around:
I found it to be so hilarious I carried that cat all over the house. In a bag! LOLz!
This morning I took Bindu to her annual check-up. They poked her with a needle and her rabies cert is good until 2013. She has some tumors the vet thought were not fatty lipomas, but since her overall health is good for her age, I don’t think I’ll worry about them. She pants a lot, she’s nearly deaf, and she’s always rubbing her face on the floor like it itches, but she also eats well, has lovely ears and teeth, wants to go on walks, and runs up and down my bedroom stairs all day long: pretty good shape for a 13- or 14-year-old dog. I might get a basic blood panel done next month, just for the hell of it, but the vet thought she seemed fine overall.
We stopped at the store on the way home, and although I did find fava beans (yay! ful meddames!) I didn’t buy any garlic. Ooops. I made freakin’ awesome delish chickpea curry for lunch, though:
I realize that today is Tuesday, but there’s a nice disco-y Monday Morning Mix for you, if you want!
In which there’s a YouTube video. Sorry.
Okay, I’m obsessed with this track right now. It’s musical brain crack, as far as my musical brain is concerned.
This is only the second time I’ve ever embedded a YouTube video here ever (and the first time the video was of me). So it’s not like I do this very often, since verily I don’t like blogs full of YouTube videos, and even then I kinda feel bad about it.
Anyway, the day before yesterday a friend linked to this from Facebook and for some weird reason I actually went and watched it. I’d downloaded the track from iTunes within minutes and have played it 23 times so far. I’ve watched the vid at least half a dozen times. It’s just so freakin’ wonderful.
Behold! Tightrope by Janelle Monáe ft. Big Boi:
Groovy choreography, great voice, great beat, fantastic costumes, weird freaky hair – it’s just freakin’ AWESOME. (Apparently the track is part of a concept album about androids, even. Can I get a hell yeah?)
In which I talk about stuff that was never before interesting to me: exercising, dieting, and not smoking.
I haven’t smoked since March 29th – twelve days ago, now. I can breathe, my tongue isn’t covered with slime when I wake up in the morning, I don’t clear my throat elevendy-hundred times a day, and I’ve saved at least $50.
I now go most of the day without even thinking about smoking. I can hang out in a bar and not have a nic fit for significant stretches of time. (Last time I went to the Peony I thought about smoking thrice, and only distantly: upon entry and exit past the ashtray by the door, and when the guy sitting next to me go up to go out to smoke.) I can drive without having huge nic fits, and I don’t ache for a smoke after meals. I even managed to go to a gas station and air up a bike tire without wanting to go inside and pick up a pack of smokes!
Blah blah blah, you get it: I’m quit. I doubt I’ll ever smoke again. I’ve gotten through the sucky part of quitting, I’m already reaping the health benefits of being a non-smoker, and I think I have my mind in the right place because I honestly don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. I don’t even want to smoke. Sure, I dug it while it lasted (ALL TWENTY-FIVE FUCKING YEARS WORTH OF IT), but it’s just not the fun awesome sexxxay thing it used to be. I’m over it.
I stood outside with the smokers between sets last weekend and wasn’t even miserable. I did have a couple of nic fits, but they were nothing a little 2mg Nicorette couldn’t handle. (Okay, that’s not true. I totally had a wicked mood swing and snapped at someone, but it passed and I DIDN’T SMOKE.)
In other news, my little strength-training program – crunches, squats, and pushups – is having interesting effects. I still don’t LIKE exercise, not really, but it doesn’t suck as much as it always has for the whole rest of my life. I attribute the change to being free for the first time ever of carbon monoxide poisoning. I always felt weak and icky and pissed off after exercise before, and thought all those annoying sporty people were fucking lying about their post-exercise clarity and peacefulness; now, while I’m not yet ready to say “I feel good” after a work out, at least I no longer actively feel bad.
Apparently I build muscle really fast, too. My new-found muscle tone just makes me hyper-aware of the uncomfortable and unnecessary amount of fat I have layered on top of it. I’ve decided I want to drop 20 pounds by the end of June. Since I’m freshly conversant with the whole suckage of self-denial, I went straight from quitting smoking into dieting. Instead of jonesing for smokes, I’ve switched to jonesing for food. Fucking YAY!
Plentiful, ubiquitous, high-fat, high-calorie, First World freakin’ food. It’s just so easy to get.
I’ll tell you what: quitting hard drugs is much easier than dieting, because hard drugs aren’t available EVERY SINGLE FUCKING PLACE YOU GO. It takes a strong will just to run a simple errand when you’re dieting because there’s a fast food joint every twenty feet. You can buy 1,350 kcals in a drive-thru for three bucks in four minutes! It’s insane!
Belonging to a rich culture in a rich era is a bitch, am I right? I’m not spending resources trying to obtain things… I’m spending resources trying to avoid them. It’s weird. I have to decide to make things harder; I can drive everywhere and buy cheap, high-fat, high-calorie food when I get there. Trying to walk places and eat well is like swimming against the current.
It’ll be interesting to see what sort of adaptations come out of this richness and sedentary-ness. Will we evolve digestive tracts that ignore most of the nutrients thrown into them? Will they shorten, so the food’s not in there as long?
Just a thought.
In which I spent all day in my fucking room.
I worked out, I surfed intensely and endlessly for nothing, I folded some laundry and didn’t fold some other laundry. Except I did go out – I walked my dog. Twice. She’s old. Like, 13 or 14 old. We didn’t walk very fast.
I made lentil soup, like, totally without a culinary net if you will, just throwing stuff in the pot willy-nilly. It came out fucking brilliant. So brilliant I put the recipe on the Internet. Soup is so my bitch. I obsessed about the food I didn’t eat. Dieting is like a form of voluntary insanity. I used to think it required discipline but now I think that you just have to go fucking nuts to not eat all the awesome food you have access to. The body just wants to eat good stuff all the time. It’s hard-wired to eat good stuff all the time. It’s like it wants to make up for the past ten thousand years of not having constant 24/7 access to chile rellenos and walnuts and falafel pitas and goat’s milk fucking brie.
I didn’t really think much about getting a job, but there was like this sort of sub-thought pulse in my head that implied over and over like a mantra that I ought to be doing something with myself, as if it were in any way possible to be both alive and not doing anything. Pshaw. I mean, like, my best unemployed friend, the drummer in my band? Even he got a fucking job this week. People have jobs. Or jobs have people. Either way, at least a job provides fodder: one can always either bitch about work or fume about not being able to bitch about work. Did you dig that awesome colon back there? I totally use punctuation like an employed person, don’t you think?
Thing is, I don’t want a job. I want income. I feel like this is a riddle I must solve and I suck at riddles so I just feel lazy and common about it. I have all this time right now and I should be producing something awesome but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what that something is. Maybe this life of mine is creatively barren. I can’t gestate anything bigger than 3000 words at a time but if you give me nine years I can give you a blog chockablock full of unrelated styles and aborted directions totally full of the win. Oh yes I can. Just call me in 2019! You have my number.
Every time G’ma leaves the house she turns the kitchen radio on to this easy listening jazz station out of the Tricities and holy fuck I’m sure he’s a nice guy but Kenny G is the worst sax player of all time and I cannot figure out how he ever got famous. Was it the hair? Because I really think that the prettier you are, the more likely the world is to forgive you for being juuuuuust slightly less good than you fucking ought to be at blowing that shiny horn. In addition there’s a new Simply Red song built on top of Hall & Oates’ I Can’t Go For That and both times I’ve heard it I have felt weird, like the 80’s were riding a bicycle over my musical grave.
The guy at the Zen lecture I went to last Friday told us to listen, to listen intently and with our whole selves, as if to hear a pin drop. He didn’t have any pins but we listened anyway.
This entry was an exercise in writing somewhat like this guy.
In which I’m obsessed with age-appropriate things: food, weight, and exercise. Gawd.
I rewarded myself for a week of smoke-free living by buying some groovy skins from DecalGirl. I found a 30% off code so I got three: one for my netbook, one for my cell phone, and a new one for the Kindle. I cannot wait for them to arrive! Squee!
Yes. I just said squee about expensive, fairly useless pieces of sticky vinyl. Cut the irony with a knife!
After seeing a picture of myself on Facebook from last Saturday’s gig (I had three chins), I decided it would be appropriate to add dieting to my health and exercise thing. My goal is to shed around twenty pounds by the end of June. I figure I can do two pounds a week; we’ll see if that’s true. I’m using the distressingly upbeat, cute, and cheerful SparkPeople web site to track all my weight loss deets.
Today’s breakfast (egg and cheese on toast with tea) was 391 calories. Lunch was avocado maki with miso and came in at around 400 calories. Check out the cuteness:
No, the image is not reversed. I’m left-handed, so my utensils always point off to the left like that.
This leaves me with five or six hundred calories left for dinner (which is still TBD because I haven’t gone shopping yet). I’ll probably eat refried beans and cheese or something similarly protein-y and fiber-y.
I did 109 squats today, 137 crunches, and 25 push-ups. I still don’t enjoy exercise for its own sake; this is entirely a results-focused endeavor. Bah.
My God, this is a boring entry! I’m sorry. (Keef told me to write a post about social networking. Maybe I’ll do just that, to see if my mind still works.)
There’s a new Monday Morning Mix here.
In other news, an edited-for-print version of this post will be in the local paper tomorrow.
Um, yeah.
Anyway.
In which I’m being very good and deserve lots of presents.
I haven’t had a cigarette in five days.
When I go out at night and everyone steps outside to smoke, I have a 4mg nicotine lozenge. Most of the rest of the time, I just ride it out.
The NRT literature suggests that I ingest a steady-but-decreasing amount of nicotine, but my intake has always been uneven and I don’t want to take all that nicotine when I normally wouldn’t be taking it in the first place. So this approach, this crisis-management approach, it’s working for me. Quitting is far more about the head space than about the nicotine, anyway.
Today I did 121 sit-ups and 18 push-ups. Shortly I’ll be doing 110 squats. (My ass is totally gonna hurt.)
This evening I’m going to see a lecture on Zen Buddhism at Whitman college with my friend Lannie. After that I’ll probably go see Feedback play at Barnaby’s and get my dance on.
Tomorrow night I’ll be joining Coyote Kings at Ice Harbor Brewing in the Tri-cities for the UnTapped Blues Festival launch party. Yay!
I don’t have a job, but I don’t really care about that beyond desiring more income to spend on plane tickets. I don’t really have a life plan, but I do have friends, clear lungs, a roof over my head, and a gig tomorrow night!
In which I complain. Again!
You know what’s weird?
Sometimes I go to my favorite bar, order a drink, and stick my nose in a book.
I know, right?
I have, over the years, had people pick fights with me while I read in a bar. I’ve had people physically take my book away from me until the bartender told them to give it back. I’ve had to change seats to avoid getting picked on. People even say mean things to me when I’m reading.
Last week, for instance, when I was at the Peony (reading Mountains Beyond Mountains, an AMAZING book that you must all read IMMEDIATELY), someone actually said me, “I hate that. I hate that you’re reading! It’s stupid that you’re reading.”
You HATE that I’m READING? Can I get a WTF, here?
But, for all that, overt harassment is statistically rare. More people ignore me than mess with me. The thing that bugs me the most is the subtle harassment, invariably in the form of the following question:
“Whatcha readin’?”
Oh, GOD.
Continue reading »
In which there’s a barely organized ramble to get you up to date.
Health
I relaunched “Operation: Quit Smoking” on the 25th. It sucks and I hate it.
All I want to do is eat and sleep and never go anywhere or do anything that reminds me of smoking, because nic fits suck, but of course that’s unreasonable. I was miserable between sets at Saturday’s gig because every cell in my body wanted to go outside and smoke, and no the nicotine gum didn’t help AT ALL.
Seriously, though, in spite of my words my attitude is pretty good… I just want to complain because quitting is hard. Here are my notes on the process. There’s a link to my daily diary if you’re interested in that level of detail.
Did I mention that it SUCKS? Good. Because I hate it! Rar!
Help
My band has entered into a contest to play at the Crossroads blues festival in Chicago this September. It’s all very exciting.
If you could, please click here, register for an account, and vote for us. Every day, if you can. I totally want to go play blues in Chicago for my birthday!
Other
I’ve seen the Wolf a few times since we broke up, and he’s been totally cool about it. I’m both grateful and relieved.
Want to add some music to your library? Apropos of nothing, I posted a lovely mix here this morning. Have at it!
The Curse™ has arrived.
I still don’t have a job.
It’s totally spring here.
In which I do a little brain dump about relationships, the Wolf, and responsibility.
So, I did that most horrible of things: I broke up with somebody via text.
The Wolf is a nice guy, of course, but he… well. Let me put it this way: I can only tick off four items from this list of 30 things I’ve determined are true for me about potential partners. So it would never have worked out anyway, and I needed to stop it before he got any more involved. It was my duty as a decent human being to dump his ass sooner rather than later.
I don’t even want a boyfriend, and I can’t figure out how a few hot and friendly make-out sessions garnered me one. We went from barely knowing each other to saying “Love you, babe,” in the space of a few days, and the next thing I knew I was being introduced as his girlfriend. Suddenly the entire entourage thought we were practically engaged, I had a bunch of new friends I wanted to keep, thank you very much, and his nephew kept telling me that his uncle had “never been happier.”
Scylla and Charybdis. How do I get myself in these situations?
He was sending me anywhere from 3 to 20 texts a day, everything from silly observations to poetry to not-so-subtle demands for attention and compliance with his idea of the shape and size of the relationship. Since the majority of them didn’t require a response, I didn’t send one. Making me complicit, I see now, in his idea of how involved we were.
He’s a musician and he’s got great hair and he’s romantic. He’s generous, he’s intelligent, he’s loyal, and he’s really good at Jeopardy! and crossword puzzles: that’s what he’s got going for him. Against him is pretty much everything else: no job, no car, what appears to be a fairly uneven temper, bad diet, no exercise, significant baggage, too much TV and not enough reading. He’s never heard of Maharishi or Amma, and he doesn’t even know how to use a computer.
It’s not like I have a job or a car, either, I’m just describing those things symptomatically. The relationship, such as it was, was incapable of going anywhere. All we did was bar hop, go to the occasional afterhours poker game, and make out sometimes in his driveway. I’d told him I didn’t want anything else, but he kept offering me new levels of commitment and fidelity I wasn’t interested in. He had even begun to work on being jealous and protective. He told me he loved me all the time. He made some comment once about growing old together. He was in deeper than I was, and I had to end it.
The last time we’d been out together we’d had a bit of a tiff about the frequency, or rather lack thereof, of my texts to him. He claimed there were entire days when I didn’t respond to any of his texts. I said, “Bullshit. There’s never been a day since we started hanging out when you haven’t received at least one text from me.” He suggested that we pull out our phones and prove it, and I told him he was acting like a twelve-year-old.
“Dude,” I said, “first of all, you’re wrong. Second of all, the facts in this instance aren’t as relevant as the underlying emotionality, which is what I’m more interested in. I’ve told you repeatedly that I don’t want a relationship, because I don’t want to owe anybody anything. You said you understood the parameters, and now you’re giving me this quasi-ultimatum that I must text you daily and tell you I love you? Are you hearing yourself?” He backpedaled immediately and retracted nearly everything he’d said up to that point that evening, but his willingness to accommodate me irritated me even more. We remained an item, though, when I dropped him off and went home.
Gawd. What a coward I am. Are you counting these, my many flaws?
Continue reading »
In which Naughty made me do it.
This picture was taken in 2005 by my university friend Aimée in Patty‘s apartment in Manhattan:
The purpose of the gathering was a vocal rehearsal for my friend Barbara‘s a capella project. She writes the most amazing modern madrigals in her head; they’re literally a joy to sing. I met her when she spent a couple of years in Iowa and learned and performed her a capella material with her there. I was super stoked when she called me to come to New York to sing.
Two days after the picture was taken, an album was recorded at Live Wire, but the choir was too big and the energy too low and the recordings weren’t really usable. (It happens that way sometimes; you can’t order people to be brilliant just because you’re burning money on studio time.) Barbara’s dreams of a complete, professionally-recorded album of her a capella material remain unfulfilled, as far as I know.
Here’s Sweet True Love from that session. (I have a solo at the end; it starts at 3:59.) I remember that I loved getting a solo and singing in a pro studio, but also that I was starving, so I called the second take good and went to join the rest of the choir at dinner break as fast as my little legs would carry me.
I *heart* New York.
Rules:
1. Go to your first photo file and pick the 10th photo in it.
2. Tell the story behind the photo.
3. Tag 5 other people to do likewise.
I tag:
– anyone interested in doing this!
VSCO
Instagram has become unusable crap, so please click the icon below to see my latest pics.
4 random books from my Library!
