Some Pig

All Worked Up

When last we left our intrepid heroine (me), I was lying on the table at the physical therapist's office, getting my back and hip joint stretched out to work on some nerve damage.  I was pleasantly surprised to find the visit consisted of gentle stretches and mobility work.  Being no greenhorn to PT, I was expecting something more involved, with the distinct possibility of those activities being uncomfortable and/or boring.  Heartened by my initial experience, I went off to today's appointment light of heart and only slightly gimpy of step, dressed in the shirt I wore to work, a pair of capris, and sandals.

Well.

The physical therapist greeted me with, "Nice to see you!  Let's start warming up on the bike!"

Cue the "you lose" music (you know - womp, womp, wooooommmmp). 

Can you believe, I went to physical therapy and they expected me to, you know, exert myself!  In my regular, non-work-out clothes!  Worse yet, I had to do multiple sets of the same exercises, exercises that resulted in me sweating - sweating into clothes I had no intention of getting sweat stained to start with, including my very best non-work-out bra, the heavy-duty one with the cushy straps and the extra lining so that it doesn't matter what I wear, I never have to worry about horrifying the students (or my coworkers, for that matter), or providing them with coming-of-age moments in the middle of a discussion about Jacksonian democracy.  Sweat!  In my bra!  Oh, the humanity.

Then, to add insult to injury, the exercises I had to do were straight outta Jane Fonda's Workout Record, which I last completed when I was in college and people still had record players.  Really, haven't we advanced a long way from leg lifts, people?  Meanwhile the very nice PT guy, who is totally oblivious to my complete and utter disgust with the whole sweating-in-non-workout-clothes situation, is going on about blah blah core strength yada yada blood flow blahbitty musculature blah.  Which translates as, "you have all the flexibility and muscle tone of a turnip."  And I had to do so. many. reps. of EVERYTHING.  Think of the most boring thing you can think of to do in the world - flossing teeth, reading audit compliance reports, watching paint dry, whatever - and now think about doing it for three sets of 30 reps each.  Uh.  Muh.  Gaaahd.  And to make it worse, they had the TV tuned to the Food Network, so while I was doing modified crunches on a slant board with a Bosu ball, Guy Fieri was driving around the country to taste-test the country's 300 best BBQ joints, all with sides and dessert.  Somehow I'm not quite sure that an outfit dedicated to helping restore people to health and fitness should be broadcasting images of pulled pork, slow-cooked short ribs, and peach dumplings.  All I know is that by the time my appointment was over, if there had been a rib shack within smelling distance of that office, I'd've broken down the door to get to it.

Finally - finally - I got to stop doing front leg lifts and side leg lifts and other side leg lifts and other other side leg lifts and move on to the good stuff, which is when I lie there inert while things are done to me and I don't have to count to 30 in my head a jillion times over.   I proudly recounted how I had managed to do my (supposedly daily) floor exercises twice - TWICE! - in the intervening week, which is something of a small miracle given the fact that the events I predicted earlier came to pass (namely, being swarmed by various curious member of every species we house under our roof). The PT guy was very diplomatic about it all.  "That's ... good," he said, somewhat halfheartedly, probably choking on his desire to add, "IF YOU WANT TO WIND UP PARALYZED AND IN PAIN FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE BECAUSE YOU'RE TOO EFFING LAZY TO FIND TEN MINUTES TO STRETCH OUT YOUR BACK, YOU MORON."  I for one appreciate the gesture.

Meanwhile, I have to go back again next week (yes!  I know!  Like, it wasn't fixed already or something!), and I am bound and determined that I will be dressed appropriately next time.  And by "appropriately" I mean, "in striped leotards and leg warmers a la Jane Fonda in 1985," because, dammit, if I have to work out like the Jane Fonda record, I wanna LOOK like the Jane Fonda record.  So there.

Nerve-ous

Well, I finally made it to my physical therapy appointment today - the one I had to make for my sprained @ss.  Just getting there was a complex logistical operation, something akin to passing a camel through the eye of a needle, involving dance class drop-off, visits to the neighbor, tag-teaming coverage with the hubs, and serial dinner plans.  And I only have to go eight more times!  (*headdesk*)

This appointment was just an evaluation and intake visit.  I was feeling a little sheepish, since most of the pain and symptoms have gone away for the most part, so I felt like maybe I was overreacting just a smidge.  I mean, I fell on my @ss, I went boom, the end; wouldn't a little Tylenol and an ice pack make it all better?  The nice physical therapist was putting me through my paces, bending knees and testing reflexes and the like, and with the exception of a twinge or two, nothing felt out of the ordinary.  In the middle of the polite patter about so-what-do-you-do, kids and job and isn't-it-a-nice-day arglebargle, I felt compelled to apologize.  "Really, I did fall down," I said, by way of explanation.  "Oh, no," he responded, his pleasant demeanor changing instantaneously to all business, "there's definitely damage there."  Those words, I have to say, did not make me feel any better, although at least I no longer felt guilty for wasting their time.

Cutting to the chase, when I landed on my not-inconsiderable tushie, I jammed my pelvis into my spine and did... something... to a nerve.  Which has a specific name.  As does the part of the back I jammed; what, do I look like I was ever interested in going premed???  I assure you, one go-round of dissecting frogs brought it home to me that I was not.  So after a lengthy explanation that I could not recount now if my life depended upon it, the nice PT guy had me lie down on the examination table with my legs bent, after which he straddled the table and HEY NOW WHAT GEE HMM WHERE EXACTLY NOW HEY WHOA JUST A MINUTE THERE because I may talk a good fight, but the reality is that ever since the night the hubs turned his slate-blue eyes on me lo these twelve years ago, I have not been (nor have wanted to be) in that close physical proximity to any other man and THAT FREAKED ME OUT, YO.  And I have *no* idea what the proper etiquette is when a man who is not your husband is grabbing the back of your legs to stretch out the compressed nerve in your back.  Are you supposed to look him in the eye?  Up at the ceiling?  I settled for a gaze off into the middle distance while conversing as if nothing was bothering me, but I still am not sure what I should do.  Maybe Martha Stewart will know?

So after ten minutes of intense awkwardness, he let me off with instructions NOT to stretch my leg out completely if I can avoid it, and a back-stretching exercise that I'm supposed to do on the floor.  Clearly that exercise was developed by a single person with only a goldfish for a pet, because I noticed that the directions say nothing about what to do if you're constantly interrupted by a face-licking dog, two hungry cats who consider any stationary human to be a legitimate target for pestering, one daughter practicing her interrogation skills for a future career with MOSSAD, and another daughter who wants to mimic everything her elders do that occurs at her level.  Those could be the longest ten minutes of my day.  I wonder if I can double up on those pain meds they gave me at the hospital?  I think I'm gonna need it.

Q. E. D.

You can make a really, really, ridiculously yummy "reverse Oreo" by putting Nutella between two Girl Scout shortbread cookies.

The above should go a long way toward explaining the whole, "no, I really can't just cut back a little and enjoy myself in moderation" problem I had trying to convince people I really needed that detox diet. 

Yeah.  I did.

Detox Digest, Day Whattheflockever

1.  Believe it or not, I am still semisortakinda on this detox diet I started way back when.  And, no, I didn't think I'd get this far either.

2.  I feel GREAT.  Much better than I did before I started.  Which does not mean that I won't make a beeline for the first DuDo's I see next Saturday for a big, sweet, sugary, flour-y coffee roll, despite the fact that not eating sugar clearly makes a difference  in how I feel.  Because cognotive dissonance, I has it.

3.  True confessions time:  I am not as totally detoxed as I was.  I just could not hack life without coffee.  Could.  Not.  Do it.  But now, instead of pouring a GIANT travel mug full of coffee, drinking half of it before leaving the house, then refilling it to the tippy-top and drinking all of that too, I am having just ONE regular-sized mug of coffee when I leave the house and savoring it a little more.  Plus, after going off coffee for awhile, the buzz I catch off one regular cup is TWICE as strong as the buzz I used to get from my 2+ cups earlier!  WINNING.

4.  Also, I bought a loaf of this sprouted-grain bread from the Ezekiel bakery so I could have a slice of toast in the morning.  There were only so many times I could look eggs in the eye every morning without having some kind of toast with it.  My trainer says that the sprouted-grain bread is okay because blah blah proteins yadda activated blah blah gluten blahbitty blah.  I dunno, I stopped listening after awhile.  I will say, the Ezekiel bread is very satisfying, but nothing to cheer about compared to Warren's lovely pillowy homemade bread. You know what would make it taste a LOT better?  JAM.  Or Nutella.  Or any number of other, non-detox-approved items.

5.  According to this Dax Moy person, you're supposed to shed caboodles of weight on this diet because you are just oozing healthfulness and that nasty fat flees at the very thought of your purified self.  Well, not so much in my case.  I've lost a little puffiness around the gut and my squishy thighs seem somewhat less so, but otherwise, I seem about the same.  Since the primary goal of this endeavor was to feel better, that's not necessarily a dealbreaker -- but secretly, yeah, I was hoping I'd drop about ten pounds and come out of this looking smoking hot. 

5a.  I have come to the conclusion that when you're a middle-aged woman, unless you are Kelly Ripa, it's going to be harder to lose weight no matter what regime you try.

5b.  Of course, part of that lack of weight loss could be because I haven't been as 1000% stringent about following the absolutely-no-processed-foods tenet.  There's been the items mentioned above, of course, as well as some bottled vinaigrette dressing for my lunch salads, plus the melted chocolate ice cream I licked off the ice-cream scoop the other day.

5c. There is absolutely NOTHING as boring as listening to people talk about their diets, is there?

6.  So after this Saturday, when I officially end this diet, then what?  Good question.  Clearly, I need to keep a rein on my sugar consumption, and the white starches have to be kept to a minimum as well.  I can't go back to the eat-whatever-you-want approach I was on, but I don't want to be on this don't-eat-anything-you-like path forever, either.  So I'm going to have to do all those boring, adult things like be aware of what I eat, limit the foods I know aren't good for me to a few times a week, and boring boring boring snore.  See 5c above.  Anyway, there are going to have to be rules.  Like sticking to more fruits and vegetables and fewer bread-y carbs.  Wine and dessert are occasional treats, not staples of my diet.  Fill in your own sensible, mature, responsible guideline here.  Blerg.

7.  If Crazylainetrain doesn't hurry up and invent the circus-peanuts-and-mango-slices-with-chili-sauce diet, I may have to do it for her. 

8. And now I promise, no more dietary talk.  Unless, of course, I drop that ten pounds and want to brag endlessly about what a MILF I've morphed into.  But don't worry - based on trends, I think we're all safe from that.

Detox Digest, Day Two

So I did it.  I went a whole ding-dong day without caffeine, and without sugar, chocolate, alcohol, dairy, and pretty much anything else that goes by the name of "foodstuffs".  I am an empty vessel of bodily purity cleansed from end to end.

Funny what a well-timed stomach virus can do!

I know this probably isn't the case, since it's based on my own wackadoo reasoning and not on anything that counts as "science" or "knowledge," but I can't help connecting my new healthy-living pledge with the sudden onset of that stomach bug.  Maybe we've evolved over the years to tolerate all these nasty dietary toxins because they help us suppress all the environmental toxins out there.  Maybe I am doing myself a disservice by ridding myself of what is actually a highly sophisticated counter-defense system against illness, thus leaving myself vulnerable to a whole panoply of bugs and bacteria!  Maybe the best thing I could do for my health is to go to DuDo's right now for a large coffee, cream and two sugars, and what the hell, make it a coconut coffee while you're at it!

Or maybe I'm just an expert at rationalizing doing what I want to do anyway.

*Sigh*.  Okay, I'll make it a mint tea.  BUT I DON'T HAVE TO LIKE IT.

Coming Clean

After a winter of excessive eating and drinking and general slugitude all around, I have come to the realization that I look and feel awful.  Basically, I look like this guy, minus the moustache and happy expression (at least, I *think* my face is minus the moustache, although with my increasingly crappy eyesight, I could be sprouting a whole crop of middle-aged whiskers and never know it - which may be why Mother Nature gives us the gift of crappy eyesight in middle age, lest we have a clear view of the aging process).  So a friend and I have agreed to try the Dax Moy detox diet. 

Now, I can imagine there are those of you among my readership who think going on a detox diet is an unnecessarily radical step.  "Why not just cut back on certain foods and exercise a bit more," you may wonder, as you sip your tea in  your impeccably organized home office while your two-point-five perfectly behaved children quietly complete their homework at the specially designed homework station you pulled together in your spare time (wait... when did the imaginary reader in my head morph into Martha Stewart?  I dunno.).  Anywhat, the reason I don't take the moderation-in-all-things approach is because ... I can't.  It is just not in my nature.  For example, the first thing I like to do when I get up at oh-dark-thirty in the godforsaken morning is make me a big ole pot of nice, strong coffee.  And then I pour myself a big ole travel mug of coffee and fancy it up with dollop (read: glug)  of cream and a spoonful of sugar or two.  I drink that coffee while I strap on my armor and gird my loins get ready for my day, and then I refill my big ole travel mug with even more coffee and cream and sugar to start Caffeination:  The Sequel.  And I know me.  I've had a lotta years on this planet to get to know me (What?  Twenty seven is a lot!).  One thing I have learned about me in those twenty-seven years is that I don't do "cutting down."   What I do is start off by thinking I'm going to cut down, and then incrementally creep right back to where I was: "Well, if I just refill my mug halfway instead of all the way, then I'm really cutting back by at least a quarter of what I usually drink, but since I didn't fill my first cup all the way to the top that counts, so that means I can refill my mug a little bit over halfway..."  In other words, I am basically binary.  There's on, off, and no middle ground in between.

So the first stage of this detox program requires cutting out alcohol, caffeine, sugar, and chocolate - or as I like to call them, "reasons for living".  Warren has greeted these plans with equal parts concern ("Hm.  I feel guilty not doing this with you.") and alarm ("This doesn't mean I have to give up coffee, does it?"), but has promised his unwavering support (probably because he doesn't actually have to do anything differently).   My closest coworkers, on the other hand, could be problematic.  After I announced the no-caffeine component of this regime, one of them stood in my doorway and took a long drink from his coffee with an exaggerated ssssccchhhhluuuurp.  And if he does that to me at the same time tomorrow, I will not be responsible for my actions.  Now if you will excuse me, there is no point detoxifying if there aren't any toxins in your system, and I have some ground to cover before my forty days of deprivation and despair embracing a healthier lifestyle.  Hey, if Noah could live in an ark with a crowd of unhousebroken critters and his whole fam damily for forty days and nights, surely I can keep my mitts off the mini-Snickers for just as long.  Right?  RIGHT????

*sigh* At least there should be some good blog fodder in this.

Another Fortune Prematurely Lost

As I mentioned in one of my recent posts (which, really, if you want to see it, just scroll down a bit - hey, if you're too lazy to do a little scrolling, well then, I'm too lazy to link to it here), we spent last week on the road.  This entailed eating out.  A lot.  And when you're on the road, with two small children, in a hurry to get from point A to point B before the books on CD run out and someone has to go potty again and someone else is tired of the first someone breathing too loudly and everyone who's not the driver starts asking"are we there yet" eleventy-jillion times, well, one tends  to grab the first dining option that comes to hand.  Which means one eats out at a lot of the kind of place where they ask if you'd like fries with that.  And if you're me, the answer to that is usually, why yes I would like fries with that, please and thank you and may I have some extra salt packets too? 

All of this is well and good while one is on vacation, but eventually one has to come home and pay the piper.  After my week of gourmand debauchery, I noticed myself feeling a little bloated and dyspeptic around the edges.  Reluctantly, I dragged myself to the gym for an extra workout, whereupon I endured the lasting ramifications of each and every single one of those damned french fries.  I could feel my heart working overtime as it tried to force the greasy sludge formerly known as my blood supply through my veins.  Seriously, if I had to give a blood transfusion right now, they'd have to let the grease separate and congeal first before putting it in the centrifuge (or whatever it is they do to blood; who do I look like to you, Slim Goodbody?!?). 

This sorry experience put the kibosh on one of my cherished get-rich-quick-without-really-doing-anything schemes.  This is where I become a gazillionaire by doing something mindlessly simple and repetitive, like coming up with a quack diet or creating a best-selling series of kids' books a la the Rainbow Fairies.  I had this idea that I was going to create and market the first-ever French Fry Diet, a diet predicated upon eating massive quantities of greasy, starchy, salty foods  and then washing them down with chocolate milkshakes.  Unfortunately, the waistband on my skirts and my experience at the gym prove that, while the French Fry Diet is ridiculously simple to follow and easy to stick to, it has the definite drawback of not helping its followers lose weight and become more fit.  And so another dream died a little more with each labored breath I took. 

Ain't Got No Sense

"I have a theory that everyone has one sense that's more developed than the others," my coworker posited one day at lunchtime.  We were spend our lunch hour twenty-five minutes engaged in the kind of general-bull-sessions-cum-chitchat-fests so needed to keep one's sanity around the adolescent masses.

"I agree," my other coworker agreed promptly.  "What's yours?"

"Smell," said Coworker #1. " I can be sitting across the room, and Saintly* can be holding the baby, and I'll tell her that he just took a leak in his diaper." (*Saintly is not his wife's name, but it should be.) "What about you?"

"I have an incredibly sensitive sense of touch," Coworker #2 responded.  We nodded, unsurprised.  Coworker #2 is notorious for hating physical contact, particularly when taken unaware.  So deeply ingrained is her dislike, those of us who know her well wince reflectively whenever hugging occurs anywhere in her general vicinity.  "I used to hate certain sweaters or pieces of clothing because of the way they felt."

They turned to me.  "So what's yours?" they asked. 

I pondered the options:

Sight?  Not hardly.  My vision is, as far as the optometrist can tell, somewhere around 20/800 - as in, I see at 20 feet what other people can see 800 feet away.  My eyesight is now officially so bad, it can't be corrected to exactly 20/20 anymore.

Smell?  I had a notoriously prissy roommate once who used to follow me around, complaining about how I'd left a wet washcloth in the bathroom that got mildew-y.  I constantly have to ask Warren to sniff-test deli meat that seemed marginally acceptable to my schnozzer, but causes him to flinch as soon as I open the ziploc bag. 

Taste?  See "smell," above.

Hearing?  I used to annoy the same roommate mentioned above because I was constantly asking her to repeat herself, since I couldn't hear what she was saying.  Our apartment had three rooms.  At most, we could get about twenty feet away from one another. 

Feeling?  I once walked around Liverpool for several hours, my thumb bleeding where a shard of glass had sliced deep into my cuticle, and I didn't notice until I saw spots of blood spattered all over the base of a statue of the Fab Four. 

That's when I realized:  I have absolutely no business being alive.  By rights, I should have died long ago from one of any number of causes.  The opportunities for me to meet my demise are myriad:  I could be hit by a bus and I'd neither see nor hear it coming.  I wouldn't feel the poisonous scorpion poised for the killing strike on my jugular.  Rotten meat, wayward anvils dropping from the sky, runaway locomotives, noxious gas clouds, ptomaine poisoning, speeding bullets, all lie in wait for one of my poor sensory skills.  And from an evolutionary standpoint, perhaps that would have been for the best.  After all, even if I survived all those environmental challenges, I'm sure I'd be quickly run down and devoured by the first sabertoothed tiger who tried chasing my fat, slow, flat-footed self.

Huh.  Go figure.  I'm a living argument against Darwinian selection.

Devastating News

I have terrible, horrible, no good, very bad news.

So y'all know I'm trying to stave off the worst of the middle-aged spread, right?  I've groused about it often enough that I feel justified in not linking to previous posts, as I have only the time span of one "Clifford" video to get this post written.  DO YOUR OWN DAMN RESEARCH, YOU LAZY BUMS!

Excuse me.  I'm a little emotional right now.

Anywhat, last week something got hold of my brain - alien space probe, perhaps - and possessed me to give up desserts for the week.   I made no other changes to my diet; I just ignored what few goodies we had in the house and didn't replace them as we ran out.  I had one tiny episode of backsliding involving a few chocolate drops and a brief run-in with a jar of Stonewall Kitchen's Dark Chocolate Caramel Sea Salt chocolate sauce, but other than that, I was as abstemious as a nun (okay, I'd eaten most of that jar of chocolate sauce already, but otherwise I was amazingly self-disciplined).    I know I have a sweet tooth, and I figured this was as good a method as any to see if giving up sweets would make any difference. 

Here's the bad news:

It definitely made a difference.  As in, I have been unable to get to the gym for the past two weeks, which ordinarily would leave me feeling and looking a little pudgetacular around the edges.  But after a week of not eating sweets and  not stuffing my gob in general after dinner was over, I looked the same as if I hadn't had to skip my usual exercise.  My clothes fit well.  My stomach wasn't bloated.  My face did not look as though inside every middle-aged woman, there's a Donald Trump trying to get out.

There's only one possible reaction to such news:

This is TERRIBLE!  It's AWFUL!  It's the WORST POSSIBLE THING THAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED!

Do you have ANY idea how long I have been talking myself into believing that my dessert habit ISN'T the major cause of my lard-assedness?  Do you have even the slightest sense of how much I love, love love love all things sugary and buttery and chocolaty, particularly when all three of those ingredients are combined and served alongside an ice-cold glass of fresh milk???  And now here I have concrete, undeniable evidence that if I want to keep my weight under control, it's as easy as - gah! - keeping my big ole pie hole SHUT, and NOT PUTTING ANY PIE IN IT??!?!  Why do they even call it PIE hole, anyway, if you're not supposed to put a big wedge of warm, oozy, cinnamon-y apple pie in it on a regular basis???  What the hell is that???

I was just recovering from that blow to my hopes when stoopid old Weight Watchers got in on the deal with this news.  They're revising their entire program so that people are allowed unlimited fruits and vegetables, as long as said fruit and veg are consumed raw, instead of as God and nature intended them, which is swaddled in butter and enrobed in pastry (or Durkee's fried onion rings and cream of mushroom soup, whatever the case may be).  So not only did my limited, no-control-group, too-many-unregulated-variables little experiment confirm this, but the nation's largest diet-focused business enterprise confirmed it, too: 

Desserts...make you fat.

If you need me, I'll be sobbing quietly in a corner of the pantry, clutching an empty pie plate to my breast.

I'm Showing My Age

How am I revealing my advanced years?  First, I staggered my way through a four-mile road race.  Don't worry, I didn't actually run the damn thing. Once upon a time I looked down upon the kind of people who walked in road races, only to find myself lapped over and over en route to the finish line by middle-aged ladies cheerfully jabbering away as they strode past my twelve-minute-mile-ing, side-cramp-having self.  I have long since resigned myself to the fact that watching me run is akin to watching sausages being made or a car crashing into a telephone pole:  It's painful to watch as a bystander, sure, but it's far more painful to be involved as a participant. 

Once I finished the race (And please, race organizers, please don't insist that the finish-line announcer cheerfully announce my name over the loudspeaker while the official finish-line photographer snaps my picture next to the clock showing a finish time of over an hour for a FOUR MILE ROAD RACE.  I feel enough like Rosie Ruiz at these things as it is.) (And if you don't know who Rosie Ruiz is, you've just proven my title to be more than apt.), I found myself in the finish-area bullpen surrounded - nay, swarmed - by male pulchritude of every size and flavor.  There were semi-demi-hippie dudes with long hair and Tibetan-calligraphy tattoos next to barely legal shirtless Abercrombie preppies with formidably chiseled abs, side by each with silver foxes in hard-core marathoner gear. Seriously, ladies, I don't care how averse you are to physical exertion, if you are just looking for an opportunity to ogle the opposite sex shamelessly, just go to a road race and hang out around the finish line. 

Then I spotted something that really caught my attention.  "I'll see you at home," I told my sister, making a beeline across the parking lot, "I'm going to go check this out!"

What caught my eye in the middle of this parade of testosterone-laden delightfulness?  It was the sight of the "Open" sign in front of the junk store adjacent to the parking lot, where I found a small milk-glass vase last year for fifty cents.  FIFTY CENTS!  Jeez, I gave them a dollar for it because I couldn't find the owner and couldn't be bothered to get change!  And I do loves me some milk glass, particularly the hobnail kind, but not the really thin and cheap-looking stuff; it has to be a thick, opaque white milk glass that's not too frilly and maiden-auntie looking, because I'm looking for something to complement the pair of candlesticks and the two small vases I already have, and - See what I mean?  I might as well just make up a t-shirt that says, "FORGET IT, BOYS.  I'M MIDDLE AGED."  Just point me in the direction of your milk glass and I'll be happy as a pig in poop!