All about MEEEEEE!

Not like every post isn't anyway, but this one's even a bit more so than usual. I have been Getting Fit, you guys.

Kind of. What had happened was, moving back to the US wreaked havoc on my body. The ready availability of massive quantities of delicious fatty foods combined with living with my parents for nine months meant that I put on a size and a half. It was Not Good.

It was an interesting study of how much impact food has on my body, I will say that. From when I started at my current job in July, I have had free access to a gym and have been going 2-4 times a week since then. I also saw a trainer at another gym for three months, but gave that up when I moved for reasons of cash deprivation. But nothing I was doing was making much of a difference; or rather, it wasn't helping me lose any weight - god knows how much more I'd have put on if I hadn't been making those efforts. The weight gain was entirely down to the change in my diet.

Before leaving Sydney, I wouldn't have said that I eat especially healthily. I do cook a lot, mostly from scratch, and I'm pretty good about cooking with veggies or having salad; but I traditionally eat a lot of starchy, carby goodness as well: pasta, bread, noodles, dumplings, oh my god I'm going to cry. And while my sweet tooth isn't my biggest problem, I will snack on whatever's in the house. Basically, with food as with everything, I have no impulse control.

Moving back Stateside has made me reevaluate. Yeah, I eat a lot of stuff I shouldn't, but my day-to-day cooking and eating habits are streaks ahead of how people tend to be here. I don't want to get all 'Supersize Me' on you; it's not new territory. I'll say only that it is *amazing* to me how hard it is to get my hands on good-quality fresh food. I live in the middle of a populous residential area in the city, and it just... like, fruit and veg shops don't exist, and small markets don't waste space or money on perishables, so supermarkets are the ONLY place to get fruit and veg right now. In the spring, the weekly farmers' markets will start up again and there are a couple within reach, but for now it's so limited. And people here have become used to living like that, and a lot of times don't want to - or aren't able to - put the work in to accessing fresh food, let alone preparing it. Why would you when you can get two huge pizzas to feed your family of four for the same or less than it would cost you to buy and prepare real food for them? I'm not being facetious; if I were a working parent, the temptation to save myself the time and energy involved in shopping and cooking would be strong. Hell, I only have myself to look after and it's still hard to beat back most nights.

I realised pretty quickly after I moved to Dorchester that I was starting to lose weight, and this was clearly due to the change back to my preferred eating habits: oatmeal with fruit for brekkie; homemade food for lunch; few prepared/packaged foods; more vegetables, etc. I also found that I wasn't buying bread or pasta in the amounts I usually would, which meant that a huge component of my starch overintake was cut out. I've barely touched butter or cheese, and I've had no sweets around. I've had ice cream once since Christmas.

And the thing is, I don't really miss those things. Much. There was a day a couple of weeks ago when I'd have pushed my own mother into a snowbank and left her there for a whopper with onion rings, and the last few days I've had to tell myself out loud to keep walking past the pizza places. And having just mentioned butter, all I want now is a huge pile of hot, crunchy toast. Of course. But apart from those very intense moments, it's actually fine. It's good. I've been lunching on Sophie's Magic Veggie Soup for the last few weeks, and loving it; I'm cooking a lot of casseroles and stews in my amazing Colombian clay dish (and speaking of magic, this thing... I swear, I could throw a pile of old newspaper in it, simmer for three hours, and end up with a dream of a meal); I'm playing with food again and loving it.

This has spurred me to rededicate myself to the gym. I'm going 4-6 days a week now, and have been since before Christmas. I've actually fixed my work schedule for this semester so that I can take a 2-hour lunch break every day (except Thursday) and go to the gym then, because the gym doesn't open early enough for me to go before work and if I leave it to after I just won't bother. It's not what I'd call fun, but I'm hitting the awesome point where I'm really starting to see a difference and that's encouraging me to keep at it. Today, for example, I noticed that my ass is moving back up my body and I'm starting to be able to see muscles under the mess that is my thighs, and that was all I needed to go a bit harder. I'm now into jeans that are two sizes smaller than what I had been wearing, and while they're still not *quite* as comfy as I'd like, the size up has become unflatteringly baggy so the smaller ones it is, and in a few more weeks I expect that they'll be fitting perfectly. Ideally I'd like to come down another size before US summer, and I think that's achievable if I keep this up. Mind you, Sydney's likely to bump me back up - you can't eat laksa and pies every day for three weeks without feeling some effects - but I'm okay with that. I'll fix it.

Of course, all this having been said, you-all might not notice any difference in me when I get there because as I said, the bulk of what I've got rid of so far is what I put on since I moved. But that shouldn't stop you telling me I look great. :)


XOXO

Things I can't.

1) The Patriots. My gridiron team bombed out of the playoffs in the most... augh. It's more than a week later and I still feel like I died inside. I had to get whiskey drunk, y'all. (Actually, in a text from that night I described myself as 'whiskety drunk', which I think is probably more accurate.)


2) The weather. You lot might be besieged with floods and locusts and rains of blood or whatever, but it is fucking cold here. And that's not just my unacclimatised ass complaining: in the last 24 hours we have hit temperatures lower than Boston has seen in about a decade. Like, in the negative Fahrenheits. This morning the five-minute walk from the train to work reduced me to tears. I was wearing a big wool coat with a hood, a wool scarf, a warm sweater with a huge cowl neck, a thermal shirt, a singlet, heavy jeans, huge thick socks, sneakers, and gloves. But halfway there my legs were burning - burning - from the cold. When I went back out a few minutes later to walk another five minutes to the gym, I put my yoga pants on under my jeans; and while I took them off once I was settled back in my office, I will be putting them back on when I go home. One of the major local channels described today's weather on their website as 'ridiculous cold'. I swear I'm not making that up.


3) The weather, some more. We have also been getting record snowfalls. I've had one snow day a week at work for the last three weeks, and am likely to have at least one more this week thanks to the rain/snow/ice storm scheduled to hit us Tuesday-Thursday. (By which I mean all of those days. Not sometime between Tuesday and Thursday. All three days. Really.)

Now, I know that some of you will look at that and say it should be exciting and fun. And you know what? Yes, snow can be really pretty when it's fresh and you're watching from somewhere warm. But at the risk of shattering some illusions, let me tell you that that is not the whole picture.

Snow is messy. It gets everywhere and is hard to clear away completely to make safe paths for walking or driving. What's left behind turns to nasty wet slush that gets into your shoes and socks and pants, or more dangerously freezes and tries to kill you. The sand that the city and residents put down to melt the snow gets all over the snowbanks, which adds a texture effect to piles already discoloured by pollution and dogs. Snow is heavy to shovel and hard to to walk through, until it gets packed-down and becomes impossible to shovel and hard to walk over. And while getting snow days is exciting and fun when it happens, what are you meant to do when the Mayor and the Governor are telling people it's too dangerous to be on the roads, but your work is open anyway? Because that happened to me last week too, and you know what? It's a shit decision to have to make, and one that people here have to make far too often. I'm lucky that I work at a college and as
such am more likely to have classes (and therefore work) canceled, but most people don't have that luxury and it's fucking dangerous. And don't even get me started on the mess that happens when schools get the day off but their parents have to work.

It's not that nice. It's really, really not.

*****

Lest I sound overly grim, though, I will add that I've had a lovely 24 hours courtesy of A Certain Chef who took me out for fancy drinks and fancy food at fancy places last night. Still can't quite shake the feeling that something's missing, but I'm putting the time in to work it out. I'm well aware that what's missing might just end up being 'the crazy', and while I will say it's kind of boring without the crazy, it's also kind of nice. We'll see how sensible I end up being.

Another Open Letter to The Lawyer

So you finally 'fessed up: she's now your girlfriend. I'm not sure when this happened, though I strongly suspect a bit of overlap between when the two of you agreed to that and the last time (or two or three) you left bite marks on my shoulder; but I asked and I'm glad I did, even though I pretty much knew the answer.

And I think it's the right decision for you. I don't know that I'm convinced she's right for you, but you have a ton of history with her and if nothing else you need to work out if it's going to work out or not. More than that, you need to be willing to let someone in. It's been too long. And while she's not necessarily your forever-and-ever, I don't think she's going to do you damage, and for now that may be enough.

It's the right thing for me too. I need clear lines and our whole (small-'r') relationship has been blurred edges. That was never going to change without the influence of some external force - hell, it was barely 48 hours from our 'break-up' to the next time we slept together - and now that force is here, and a not-so-small piece of me is relieved. Also, the less you're in the picture, the more open I am to a certain lovely Chef who treats me like gold and really seems to care about me. She doesn't bait me, she doesn't make fun of the weird way I talk, she doesn't get annoyed with my bouts of homesickness. She calls me a foreigner because she's dated one of those before and the way I feel about Australia reminds her of that. I like that she understands that about me. She says nice things to me and does nice things for me. She likes me the way I am.

But I'll miss you. Not that we won't be friends now - obviously we will. We are. But it will be different. I'll miss the will-we/won't-we charge in the air. I'll miss the way you'd stand just a bit too close to me. I'll miss both of us tasting mint chocolate-chip when we kiss, even though we had eaten nothing remotely sweet or minty. I'll miss spending hours in bed with you doing crosswords and cuddling your dog whom I love so much it hurts. I'll miss the weird chemical spell we seem to cast on the world. And fuck, I'll miss the biting. That's going to be the hardest to avoid: no one does it like you do, and no one lets you do it like I do. We know that's the point of mutual weakness. Oh temptation.

So don't get close enough to me to smell my hair or my perfume; don't wear that shirt I helped you pick out just before Christmas (and if you do, don't tell me you wore it for me); stay far away from me when I'm at the stove. In exchange, I'll be a good girl because trying like fuck to be the good girl is my ground state. I won't show too much skin when you're around; I'll step away if you step too close; I'll make sure at least one of us stays sober enough to have a conscience.

You've told me that you don't want to hear much about my love life, not yet; that's fine because I don't want to hear much about yours yet either. I want awesomeness for you and you want it for me, and we weren't going to have it with each other so it'll have to be with other people. That's as much as we need to know for now. We'll negotiate the tricky path until it's not tricky anymore; there will come a time when I can hang with you and yours and you can hang with me and mine, and I hope for all of our sakes that that time will come quickly but in the meantime we'll cut each other a lot of slack and wait it out.

But I'll probably cry about it a little. I know you hate it when I cry, so don't worry, I won't let you see it. But it'll probably happen. Because while the bad with you was... bad, the good with you was good like nothing I'd ever felt before, and although I figured out weeks ago that the latter wasn't worth the former I still can't help but wish, just a little bit in a tiny corner of my heart, that we could have made it work. We could have had something brilliant together if we weren't both so broken in such similar ways. But we are, and the time has come to be smarter about ourselves and kinder to each other.

I love you, fucker. Now go on, get out of here.


XOXO

Omigod, you guys.

I just saw a set by the girl I'm going to marry. Meet: Kim Ann Foxman.

And you guys? She's a fuck-off DJ. And tiny. And awkward. And even more gorgeous in person. And I luuuuuurrrrrrrvvvvvvvve her so much it hurts!!!

Somebody please make this happen. All the gays know each other, right? We must cross over with her somehow.

XOXO I LOVE YOU KIM ANN!!!1!!!!1!!

Who's awesome? Yeah she is.

In between working 18 jobs, cat-wrangling, and trying to unpick the snarl of yarn that passes for my mind most days, Caitlin does the hard yards over on Twitter, using her IR-trained brain to analyse why people kill each other all over the damn place. We should all be following her. Who said so? Just the well-known and highly respected Blogs of War, for a start: her feed, @Caidid, made their 'People You Should Be Following on Twitter in 2011' list - as a result of which, she is now being followed by this guy. Really.

XOXO

Not with a bang, but with a thud.

NYE, Caritas Carney Hospital, Dorchester, MA. Hey 2010, do you really need to get in one last dig before you sweep out the door?

[sigh.] Apparently yes, because if you were listening carefully around 8:00 p.m. local time you might have heard me crashing to the hardwood floor of a Dorchester apartment. I was the victim of an orthostatic syncope, which is I-paid-a-lot-of-money-for-these-letters-after-my-name for 'head rush'. What was tricky was that I was unconscious for... awhile... and then my blood pressure wouldn't stabilise, so the EMTs called by Flattie Karen's overly-cautious nurse girlfriend decided I had to go to the ER. They found nothing wrong with me, of course, because there's nothing actually wrong with me, so they did what they do in hospitals when they can't figure out what else to do: hook you up to a litre of saline and give you a pregnancy test. (Spoiler: I'm not.)

And that's where I stayed, alone, until about 11:30 p.m.; at which point I returned home, babbled inarticulately at a roomful of people I mostly didn't know, wandered into my room, and fell asleep face-down in my clothes. It kind of was the perfect end to that year.

Don't think for a second, though, that I didn't enjoy myself. There are certain bizarre situations in which I excel, and left to my own devices in the ER? That's about six of them. I made friends, you guys. Of course I did. I made friends with the nurse who kept complimenting my hair, and with the registrar who told me I had 'tiny, pretty feet', and with the doctor who conducted my neuro assessment in the following fashion: 'Okay, follow my finger: look up look down look right you have beautiful eyes look left'.

I swear I'm not making this up.

So yes, that was my NYE. A rather different kind of night than I had expected, but equally eventful in its way. I'm happy to say that there have been no lasting ill effects. I personally suspect that I'm fighting off a virus because I've been kind of rundown and also because it's Boston in winter, so everyone's always fighting off something. Nothing to worry about, anyway, just a typical Brain Scan Moment (hi, Marie!).

In other news, I have had a major achievement today: I have suddenly worked out how to do a full kneeling backbend, which is a belly dancing trick I've been trying to get for, seriously, years. I don't know why all of a sudden it worked, but it did. Which is how it seems to go with belly dancing, for me at least: I'll work and work and work and get frustrated and give up and try again and work and work and work and get frustrated and lather rinse repeat, and then one day I'll do exactly the same thing in exactly the same way except this time, I get it right. And then I just keep getting it right.

Let me try to explain what today's trick entails:

1. Kneel down.
2. Lean back.
3. Keep leaning back until your shoulders hit the ground.
4. Get back up.
5. Don't cripple yourself.

That's what I've learned to do. It looks like this and it feels like... well, it feels like awesome, but I don't have a good picture for that. But I'm way past psyched about it. It's really kind of a big deal, definitely not something every dancer can do; it's cool enough that Zehara's going to change the new troupe choreography to incorporate it. I'm... yeah, I'm excited about it.

And speaking of photos, here are a few from the dagger performance. The makeup looks a bit OTT because I'd done it for stage but the camera zoomed, so ignore the warpaint effect and pay attention to the fuck-off chainmail instead. In that last one, that's my final pose and I'm doing the Bruce Lee 'bring it' gesture. I have the best ridiculous hobby, you guys.

XOXO