"Real" ID

Because anything you're already carrying as identification is apparently fantasy ID.

I'd be laughing if I wasn't so worried about my own personal privacy.

The Department of the Fatherland, also known as the dep't of homeland security, I just can't help it, the name and their activities just remind me too much of the Third Reich, announced on Friday that they're moving ahead with the "Real ID" program.

They want the states to make changes to their driver's registration processes so that illegal immigrants can't get a driver's license, so that a license is nearly "proof" of citizenship.

Hello? We've ALREADY got a document that does that...called a passport, federally issued ID that proves that you're a citizen, is fucking expensive AND a pain in the ass to obtain. You need to prove citizenship in order to get one.

DH has a brand-spanking-new passport, issued last year, that has a computer chip inside it. Now I know that counterfeiters still exist, and a truly talented one could conceivably produce an acceptable facsimile, but what's to say that this "Real ID" program is any less prone to subversion? Nothing.

And then there's the privacy concerns. My Oh-hia-ia driver's license has a magnetic swipe stripe on the back, just like a credit card, which contains all of the information that is printed on the front of the license. When I got pulled over a few weeks ago for speeding, the cop didn't want my car's registration information or anything else, because, he said, "that'll all be on your license." Ulk. There's a scary thought; what else is encoded on there? Who else can access it?

Here's why this worries me:

I guess I hadn't realized that so much info was encoded on that stripe; when I worked as a teller for ye evile bank years and years ago, we could swipe someone's license and print the encoded information on a check as verification of identification. If the check was bad and came back to us, and you had that license info printed on it, you weren't in as much trouble as you would be if you hadn't gotten that information. But what it printed was a string of letters and numbers that was so much mumbo-jumbo. I never had any idea how to translate any of it into information that would actually be useful. But then again, I never needed to. I was only a teller for 6 months (because I hated, despised, and detested being a teller) and I was lucky enough to not ever have the problem of a 'bad' check coming back to me.

Now, I can envision bars, and restaurants carding you and gathering information not just about your age; you can very easily tell by looking at the printed information on an Ohio driver's license if someone is of legal age to drink or not. Minor's licenses are printed with the information vertically, with a red background to the photo. Those of legal age have their information printed horizontally, with a blue background for the photo. So there is no need to swipe the license to verify age.

Department stores, or other places where you write checks could also have the technology needed to swipe that license and gather goddess-only-knows what data about you. Not cool.

Just 17 states have passed legislation opposing the Fatherland's new program. It is very unclear what changes might take place in each state; I'm guessing that Oh-hia-ia, with its existing magnetic stripe, digitized pictures, and holograms that print over top of the address/city/state information, already meets the criteria for the "Real ID" program, and thus there won't be many changes for the state to make. But I'm guessing, and I have absolutely no intention of reading the thousands of pages of guidelines that the Fatherland's secretary issued on Friday.

Sigh. Makes me want to flee north and start singing "Oh Canada."

And here's a problem that they have apparently NOT considered; forcing you to prove citizenship to get a license will only have illegals walking away from the whole licensing procedure; then we'll have a horde of unlicensed, uninsured drivers on the road. Fan-tab-u-los.

C (from a different perspective)

I made a pilgrimage to the eye doctor's recently, because my eyesight is diminishing, and reading "cheater" glasses just aren't doing the trick anymore.

The doc is one that I've seen before; someone I communicate well with. The vision problem that I've been having is that I can't see (well, duh, bright girl, call yourself a writer? Let's try that again.) Unless I really make an effort to focus, everything's gone all blurry. But I've had a hard time explaining that to anyone. I've always had good vision, not a problem seeing anything, near or far. So verbalizing what's wrong has been tough. Fortunately, the doc understood right away, and I've got a fun, funky pair of glasses ordered. In the meantime, he gave me contacts to wear so that I can see on a daily basis.

I hate them.

They're a pain in the ass to put in my eyes, and then I can feel that there's something that doesn't belong in my eye. I can't wait until the glasses get here so I can ditch the damn things. It is nice to see again, though. I'd been unable to spend much time on the computer, especially when I was tired, without the whole world going fuzzy.

On the way home from the doctor's office, I was listening to NPR as usual, and my local NPR affiliate is airing something called "Newslink" which is an English-language program produced in Bonn, Germany by Deutsche Welle Radio. They had a story on about Nicolas Sarkozy (the current French PM, in case you're clueless), or more accurately, the piece was about his current girlfriend, Carla Bruni.

The perspective of the piece was one that just infuriated me; by listing the entirety of Madame Bruni's conquests, the reporter managed to all but come out and say that "the lady is a tramp". I was gnashing my teeth about 3o seconds in to it, and it was made worse by the fact that he was oh-so-careful to point out that the legacy of the male leaders of France have been judged often by their virility or lack thereof; French PM's are just about expected to have a mistress or 3.

Urgh.

How is that just, reasonable? Obviously, unless you don't have more than 3 brain cells to rub together, it is dammed unreasonable. But it seems that it is perfectly acceptable to still bash a woman for the number of her conquests while venerating a man for the same. Are we still in the 1560s?

The really interesting thing, in the end, though, is the vastly different attitude (perspective) that the Europeans have about the whole thing; Sarkozy isn't being bashed for breaking up with his wife, he's being ridiculed mostly for taking up with a woman who has been around. Here, though, on this side of the pond, the problem would be that he had a mistress at all.

Ahh, humanity. Nutbags, the lot of 'em.

Loser

I had one of those days yesterday where I lost absolutely everything I touched. Keys, lost in my giant new briefcase/purse. My phone, usually clipped to my hip; the dress I had on yesterday made that tough, so I'd put it down on a flat surface, and bam, it'd be gone. The headset for my phone, which goes flashy-blinky, so I take it off when I'm talking to someone face to face. I'd take it off, set it down, and then not be able to find it. That shiz makes me nuts, makes me feel like I've lost more of my mind.

But I think I've lost something else, and I think it has a lot to do with the meds. I have a fearsome temper. Really. I know, I express anger about women's issues and politics all the time, but in the world outside of the computer, I have a yelling streak that might surprise you. Or, rather, I should say I *had*. Nothing too much gets me super-pissed off these days. Sure, advancing age makes you mellower, and working with terminally ill children taught me that there is so much that isn't worth getting upset over, but since the dosage for my meds has been adjusted to a level that seems to be working for me, I'm not quick to anger about anything.

I was thinking about this because of something that happened at work. Since I don't talk about work online, I'll just tell you that this boiled down to a clear case of sexism, which is enough to send me into orbit. Two or three years ago, this would have had me storming into the office, and furiously having it out with the person who I saw as the problem. I've never been a violent woman, but I promise that anyone within hearing range would have known exactly what I was upset about, because the volume? I can project that. (Thank you, voice coach!)

Instead, I handled it another way entirely, and I think that there's a chance that there will be a good resolution to a bad problem. Worked out calmly and rationally. Huh. You can do that? In'trustin.

I was offended, and annoyed, but not furious. Couldn't really get worked up over it.

I don't really like knowing that it must be the meds, because nothing else has changed. I got into an...ahem...argument with someone recently, and the day it happened, I hadn't taken my meds. So they're keeping me on a sort-of even keel, not just helping with the depression. Instead of reassuring me, that makes me pretty worried, anxious, again, about are the meds making me a different person? Someone less recognizable as myself, or are they rather helping me to be a better person. I don't know.

I don't think I mind losing the temper. Much. Sometimes a good screaming hissy fit is a good thing, just like every now and then we all need a good cry. But what happens when you don't have that emotional outlet available to you?

Written

After not touching my novel since September, in the last week I've been taking another look at it and trying to do some polishing to what I've already written. I'm still stuck; there's a point where I've glossed over a whole chapter because I'm not sure how/what to write, and last summer I just gave up, moving forward from that point. Which was fine for a while; but now I'm stuck again.

I have the entire story arc worked out, know where I want to go, even have ideas (nebulous, but still) for subsequent adventures featuring my 2 main characters. But I'm struggling to move it forward from where I'm stuck. How to get from x to y, when it isn't a straight line.

I have been thinking about J K Rowling lately, and how she had the idea for the entire HP series whilst on a train. And then she worked on it for more than a decade, all told. I'm not that patient. I want to be done with the story and to be shopping it to editors and publishing houses. Because I've decided that I definitively want it to be published. I've gone from just wanting to write because I didn't like anything I'd picked up to read lately, to vainly wanting to see my name in print, so that when I wander in to a bookstore I find MY BOOK sitting there.

The Very Hot Jews had a post a few weeks ago about how to run for president you've got to be a sociopath. (True dat, no?) When I worked in and around the health care industry, I decided that to become a physician, you had to be one arrogant sonavabitch, male or female, to survive medical school and the internship process. Otherwise the withering criticism of an older doctor or battle-axe nurse would be enough to have you huddled in the corner, whimpering.

Writers, I think, need to spend a whole lot of time living inside their own heads. I didn't stumble upon my story idea while having superfast conversations with my bffs; it came to me in moments of quiet contemplation, all by myself. I am a solitary person and gregarious at the same time, which is a strange dichotomy. I suppose that's a bit of a mystifying statement, but it is true.

I am bored when I'm driving in the car from point A to B if I'm not gabbing on the phone to someone (you SO don't want my mobile phone bill, I promise) but at the same time, I treasure time to myself. I need time alone. I was a pretty solitary kid; you'd find me nestled in the branches of a tree at my parent's first home, reading, more often than running about with the neighborhood kids. The 'rents used to joke that you could set an explosion off next to me while I was reading, and I'd never notice, so lost did I get in other worlds.

When I'm writing, I'm completely immersed in the moment of storytelling. I had to quit last night around 10pm because I had an early meeting today, and it was damn near impossible to sign out of the program and turn off the computer. Now that I've finally got some inspiration back, I don't want to walk away from it.

I carry around a blank book in case something strikes me, a turn of phrase or a description, or something a character might do or say. And I dutifully write it down if I'm not in front of the 'puter. But it takes nearly all my control to not quit whatever else I'm doing to get back in front of the computer and frantically type.

I suppose that's good; but the last time I had such mania for writing, it was the predicator to a backslide in my mental health.

Geez, I need a worry-stone, or a trouble box to stash all of this ridiculous worrying into, so that I can stop worrying and start DOING!

On another note entirely....

How about Hilliary winning in New Hampshire? I'm still fence-sitting. Barak? Hilliary? Barak? Hilliary?

Moon Over Malaga

This is a storytelling post, something that's sort of a new experiment.

Late in the summer last year, my NYC sister came to visit us. Her plane was scheduled to land late on a Friday night, so as soon as we got the call that she had pushed back from the gate at La Guardia Airport, we left my parent's place to pick her up. It takes about the same length of time to drive from the 'rents house to the airport as it does to fly from NYC to Oh-hi-ia.

As we got on the freeway, my mother said to me, "Did you see it? Its beautiful. Behind us."

I had no idea what the hell she was talking about; I imagined at first that she meant an accident behind us on the freeway, which confused me, because when was the last time you saw a beautiful accident? But when I turned around in my seat a gazed out the back window of my dad's very big SUV, I saw an enormous golden moon, hanging low in the sky. I can never see a moon like that without remembering the very first time I went to Europe, and a night that perhaps had a hand in shaping the adult I became.

I was a lucky, lucky kid. We weren't well off, but we didn't want for much either. During my 8th grade year, the school announced a trip to Europe, for a fee, of course. I don't remember why I wanted to go so badly, especially when none of my friends wanted to go. But I talked my parents into the first informational meeting, and they agreed that I could go. I'm sure there were rules about keeping my grades up and various other things tied to actually being able to go on the trip, but time has stolen those recollections away from me.

We left the states via JFK Airport in New York and flew to Madrid, Spain. It was the first time I'd been so far away from home, something I was super-excited about. We spent several days in Madrid before heading south, into Seville, and then Spain's Costa del Sol, and the crown jewel city of Malaga. By the time we got to Malaga, we were used to hotels that weren't fantastic and very odd-seeming food. A pecking order among the 50 or so kids on our bus from schools all across the country had been established. I had made friends with a boy and a girl from Delaware, and even made a few new friends from my own hometown, with kids I'd never speak to at home.

There was a boy; isn't there always? I was 14 during this trip, young, to say the least. I just realized that most of the rest of this post is going to horrify my mother (Hi Mom!) who reads my blog from time to time. Oh well. Now that I am over 30, she can't get angry about such youthful transgressions, right? Right?!?

The boy was 16-ish, maybe 17. He was from Oregon, and I had a huge crush on him. He seemed to like me as well, or at least we enjoyed one another's company during the small amounts of free time we had. This was all pretty platonic, things like sitting together on the bus or checking out a piece of art in a museum after the rest of the group had moved on.

The chaperones from my hometown were particularly vigilant about their charges; we rarely had unsupervised time. When we did, we made absolutely sure that we were up to positively no good whatsoever.

The first night in Malaga, they allowed us to do whatever we wanted, provided that we didn't leave the grounds of our ocean-front hotel, the first and only decent one that we stayed in the whole 2 week trip. That was difficult, riiiight. The hotel had 3 bars, one on a terrace overlooking the beach, and most of us had rooms facing the ocean with balconies that seemed palatial.

Several daring souls left the compound and ran to a grocery store across the way, buying booze, wine, soda and juice to mix the booze with and munchies. We weren't particularly sly most of the time, but no one was caught.

The boy and I had agreed to meet, and I spent some time sitting on the beach with him and some of his schoolmates, having earnest youthful conversation and sharing some Sangria. It grew dark and a huge moon, larger than I had ever seen, rose in the sky and we all watched it silently for a while. It was breathtaking. It seemed as if you could see every crater on the moon with the naked eye.

I couldn't stop looking at it. My new friends poked fun at me for losing the thread of the conversation several times as I gazed at this wonder, teasing me about my inability to hold my liquor. It wasn't the first time I'd ever had a drink (ummmm....yeah, let's not tell that story) but it was the most I'd ever had to drink in one sitting. I felt like the night was full of possibilities, adventure untasted, limitless potential. A high-flying sort of feeling. Was I drunk? I don't think so; if I was, what happened next sobered me up in a hell of a hurry.

Eventually, we all grew tired and the boy and I headed back to the hotel, leaving his friends behind. He took my hand as we walked back to the hotel, and my heart pounded. Proof positive! He liked me too!

I thought that this might be the chance I'd been waiting for. To tell him that I had a crush on him, that I sort of thought the sun rose and set with him. Unfortunately, as soon as we walked back into the hotel, one of my roommates spotted me and came running up to inform me that a third roomie, C, was drunk and we needed to do something about it before the chaperones came by for a 1 AM bed-check.

The boy and I followed my roommate to the elevators, and as it rose to our floor, I had the sensation that my stomach had stayed on the ground floor. Possibilities flew right out the window. I certainly wasn't going to be telling him how cute I thought he was with my roommate in the elevator and a crisis of epic proportion looming on the horizon.

Underage drinking was something that could get you sent home, no ands, ifs, or buts, and anyone who conspired to cover it up was just as liable. We knew that, and yet, we were convinced that we could hide it. When we got to our room, on one of the upper floors, we had a Suge Night moment when my boy pulled a guy off of the drunk girl, someone trying to take tremendous advantage of her. He didn't get tossed off of the balcony, but he sure did leave our room in a heck of a hurry.

My fella left soon after, with a rueful grin that I know was reflected on my own face for lost opportunity.

None of us knew anything about sobering someone up, other than what we'd seen on TV. We had no coffee to pour into her; it was superlate and the bars were closing, plus the moment of the chaperones would come knocking on our door was creeping closer. We'd be in nearly as much trouble for being out of our rooms so close to curfew as we would be for drinking. We thought about trying to put her to bed, but with the rest of us wide awake and still chattering, she wouldn't stay in bed. We sat her in a corner and told her to keep her mouth shut, answering any question they asked her directly with as few words as possible. She was a chatterbox, and we told her that if they asked why she was so quiet, she was to tell them that she was very tired.

I was worried about my own neck too; I'd had plenty of sangria on the beach with the boy and his friends, who had much more liberal chaperones. They were allowed to drink if they wanted. I, on the other hand, stood as large a chance as C did to get sent home. The fact that I was merely buzzed and she was completely shit-faced wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference.

The chaperones admired our view when they came at last to our room, seating themselves on chairs on the balcony. We thought they'd never leave; we all managed to work the fact that we were allll soooo tired into the conversation, but they weren't taking the hint. Amazingly, C kept silent, and no one questioned her. When they left, we all were nearly hysterical with relief.

Age and experience tells me, now, that they knew. They had to. I'll bet they laughed themselves silly on the way back to their own rooms.

But that night was the first time I acted as a caretaker for anyone outside of my own family, a pattern which continues to this day. We bundled C into bed, finally, making sure there was a trash can near her in case she got sick, and I found aspirin or Advil or Tylenol for the headache she was sure to have in the morning.

Parties in high school had me doing more of the same, watching out for friends, keeping a cool head about myself. In Europe, my junior year, I wasn't too worried about consequences. My host parents were OK with me drinking, knowing the kids I ran around with and knowing how little trouble I could really get into in Sweden. When I came home from Sweden, my friends were all horrified at the amount of smoking and drinking I'd done; and then, at some point during the middle of that schoolyear, everyone else discovered drinking too. I worried, I watched. At least until Senior's Week, the week we graduated, when I behaved like any other teen, sure I was immortal, and all of my friends were bullet-proof.

We're all lucky that we're not dead of alcohol poisoning, really.

I continue to be the caretaker. Most of the time, that's OK with me. I wonder, though, if my life would have taken a different course, if I'd be the same adult that I am now, if when informed of C's drunken-ness that night so long ago if I'd said, "Hey, figure it out. Not my problem. The boy and I need to talk. I'll see you later."






Oh, and if you're wondering.....nothing ever happened with the boy. Never so much as kissed him. I don't remember even holding hands with him at any other point during the trip. Never saw him again, either. Obviously, it wasn't meant to be.

Doppel

They say everyone's got a twin. I was either walking down memory lane today, or just doing more people-watching than usual, because I saw them by the hundreds.

First, walking in to the gym, I saw a woman with a young blonde child who was a ringer for my cousin J. She passed away more than two years ago. I stopped in the parking lot, took a deep breath, and looked again. I've had that happen before, where I think I see someone who I know isn't with us anymore, and when I look again, they look nothing like my loved one. This woman could have used J's driver's license and gotten away with it.

I can't help but wonder if that will ever, ever, not hurt as much as it still does. Because I saw her and almost called out, "Hey cuz!" and realized all over again that she's gone. Damn.

Then while working out, I was on a treadmill where you overlook the main entrance from one story above, like you're the eye in the sky. I saw my Swedish Papa who IS still among the living, a duplicate of what he looked like almost 20 years ago. It wasn't him, of course, and I know that, but man, this guy could have passed for him.

What gives?

Brave New World

What a stunner, Barak winning in Iowa. I'm bowled over. I'm still on the fence for who to vote for in the democratic primary in Oh-hia-ia in March, but by then the point might be moot...with all of the states that have shifted around their primary dates to get more attention (don't get me started) Oh-hia-ia's is kinda late.

I desperately want a female president; ergo, my choice should be Hillary, no? Unfortunately, I just don't think she's electable. The conservatives just hate her, even moderate conservatives like my parents. Which does not bode well for her electability. Barak is so charismatic; he's a new face, with I think near Kennedy-like expectations from those who still have hope for the government in this country. (At the moment, that does not include me.)

I like what he's got to say a whole lot. Wow, is he ever a good speaker! But I like her, too. Quite a lot. For crying out loud, Pakistan, PAKISTAN, had a female leader, as did England, and we have not yet. Isn't it time? She's got the experience; I just don't think he has the experience needed, the foreign policy sensitivity, to be president. If he'd waited 10 years...but then perhaps his moment would have passed.

The closer the date creeps to March 4, the less I can afford to sit on the fence. But watching them both in action...I just don't know. I think it is impossible to watch his victory speech in Iowa and not be filled with hope.



But the fact that she IS a woman, and has fought for women's rights for years, plus her experience mean so much to me. Both of them want to move the perception of America back to where it needs to be around the world. They're not so far apart. For me, then, it is ultimately this: Who is more electable? Who can actually win the White House?

Now if they'd join forces, and one would agree to be vice....that would be interesting.

I just don't know if this country is ready to elect a woman, or an African-American. That makes me so very sad.

Cool

The end of 2007 was somewhat typical of the rest of the year for the weather around here. Unseasonably warm, weather that is very unusual for the time of year. Our summer was cooler than usual, which was nice 'cause I detest the heat, but the fall and winter thus far have been much warmer than they ought to be.

Hey, Mr. President? Global Warming? Is real. I'm so not in the mood for politics today.

On New Year's Eve, the temp was in the mid-40s. Weather that we should have at the end of March, or near the middle to end of October. Not in December. And then the next day, New Year's Day, it snowed like a sonavabitch, with high winds, blowing and drifting snow...we were forecast at least 4 inches, but didn't get that much around my home.

I am one of those rare lunatics who LIKES the cold. Yes, really. I'd prefer an inch of snow on the ground to 90+ temperatures. My logic goes something like this...in the winter, you can pile on lots of layers to keep warm, or attempt to keep warm, anyway. In the summer, there's only so much you can take off and not be arrested!

We keep the temp fairly low in the winter in the house, partly to save money, partly because we like it that way, and partly to conserve natural gas. Rarely is the thermostat set higher than 68, and overnight it goes down to I think 62. All I know is that woe betide thee if you get out of bed in the middle of the night, because it is COLD in here. It isn't set that low in the summer (our electric bill would be un-payable) but it is pleasantly cool in here in the summer too.

Like so many other things I see going wrong with the country, the weather's anomalies make me nervous. Will my niece and nephew and greats and grands see true Oh-hia-ia winters? Sledding used to be something that we all did (even my parents) every winter. I don't see kids do that these days. There weren't a lot of crisp, cool fall days last year. Days when you feel like you ought to buy some #2 pencils and new notebooks, drink some apple cider. The temps stayed in the high 60s until nearly November; Auntie H's funeral, held 1 November, was sunny and warm, not a cloud in the sky.

I know I'm mostly preaching to the choir. If you read this blog all the time, chances are high that you agree with my POV mostly always. But.

Recycling and making a conscious effort to reduce our consumption of natural resources are, in my ever-so-humble, about the only way the average person can attempt to assist in slowing the destruction of the planet. Even though I don't plan to have kids, I'd like the next 3 generations to be able to continue to live on this planet. I'm working on doing my share; part of my next paycheck is going to one of these. Composting is something I feel I should have been doing for a long, long time. Cutting down on the amount of waste I contribute is a goal for the year.

Cool, eh?

41:28

The goal? Was to finish the race 1) running 2) on my own two feet and 3) not last. I succeeded in those 3 endeavors, although I did not manage to run the entire 3.1 miles. I walked some of it. I'm disappointed by that, but not deeply so.

I had some pain that I've never had running, and was upset by that. Shin splits, I've had plenty of experience with those, but that wasn't the problem. I developed a....cramp, maybe, for lack of a better term...in my right ankle, near the Achilles tendon, but closer to my ankle bone. It hurt, quite a bit. It developed before the first mile was up, and by the time I was finished with the race, I was limping. And wheezing, but we'll get to that.

This race, as I have explained before, was the one I chose because it was a FLAT course. It was a 2 laps of the fairgrounds it was held on. Before the first lap was done, I was wondering why the fuck I thought I could ever do this; I felt like something was trying to claw its way out of my chest, and right at that moment, I'd have gladly allowed someone to crack my chest with bolt cutters to let it out. Took a while for that to fade, too. I've felt that on the treadmill before, but I've just slowed down or stopped until I could catch my breath.

I say to people all the time: "It ISN'T a race, dude, slow down." But this WAS a race, and I was determined to not finish dead last, so slowing, well, wasn't so much of an option, really. I did walk for a portion of each lap, but I didn't stop, not even once, not even when my left shoe came untied with a mile of the race remaining.

DH took a few pictures, and aren't I the fashion plate in them! Grey stretch pants; a long-sleeved t from a public radio station, a black nylon pullover over the t, an orange-and-blue-and-burgundy striped beanie, a black & white number pinned to my tummy, a timer mechanism strapped to my ankle, two pairs of gloves, one cream, one burgundy (which did NOT match the burgundy in the hat, FYI) a red handkerchief, and a red neck-thingy, which I usually wear skiing. It takes the place of a scarf. Oh, and a jingle bell pinned to my left shoe, and my silver iPod in its black case strapped to my right arm in its usual place. The gloves didn't last past the first mile, and by the end of the race, the hat was off, too. Sharp, lemme tell ya.


The only reason I'm posting this picture is that it is a bit blurry, you can't make out the number on my stomach, and I think that if you don't know me very well, you wouldn't recognize me. I'm enough of a paranoid freak that it probably won't stay attached to the post for more than 24 hours.

I had decided previously to run to a Podrunner mix, one of my current favorites, Radiant Dark. At 166 BPM, it is a bit faster than I can really run, but I really like the music, so that was my choice. Additionally, at always at least an hour long, Podrunner mixes are pretty ideal for a race like this.

I couldn't run without music at all, and crossed the finish line to Eminem's Lose Yourself, from the 8 Mile soundtrack. While I'm not a huge fan of Em's anti-woman lyrics or a lot of his ideology, say whatever you like about the guy, Lose Yourself is hugely inspiring and something that gets me revved every time I listen to it. I had listened to it about 5 times before the race, and when I was thinking that I wasn't going to get across the finish line at all, I turned from the Radiant Dark mix to Lose Yourself, which brought me back up to speed.

I was looking at DJ Steveboy's blog a few hours after the race, and I'm so excited about his newest project; Podrunner Intervals. Click the linky above to read about it yourself, but the idea is to bring beginner runners from couch potato to half-marathon. Release date is Feb 1, 2008, and you bet your bottom dollar that I'll be adding that to my list of podcast subscriptions.

The aftermath of the race is that I hurt. I ache. My legs, that spot on my ankle, my lower back, and the base of each of my shoulder blades. I'm exhausted, have a headache, and it took several hours for asthmatic me to return to normal breathing. For all that, I can't wait to do this again. I'm on a high, one that I don't want to end.

I'll tell you this, too. I don't have plans anytime soon to run in temperatures much warmer than it was here today, about 40F or about 4C. No matter what the outside temp, you still sweat, and I was HOT. Any warmer, and I might've been faint.

Here's the best part. Today, my weight stands at 161, up a few pounds from my 40 lb loss, but I'm blaming that on the holidays and all the parties I've been at the last 2 weeks. It'll drop. The best part is that a year ago this time, I weighed 190, and couldn't walk up a flight of steps without wheezing. What an amazing long way I've come.

Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity
To seize everything you ever wanted

One moment
Would you capture it?

or just let it slip?

~Eminem, Lose Yourself, 8 Mile Soundtrack

Atone

In a holiday greeting, a friend urged me to remember those we lost this year, and celebrate those that are still here. We do that around New Year's. That and make new starts, new resolutions.

Generally, for a reason that remains unknown to me, I tend to think of fall, rather than the new year, as a time for resolutions and changes in habit. Probably just 'cause I like to be contrary, more than any other reason. However, since most of the rest of the world does it now, I'll indulge in a bit of it as well.

I'd like to be able to let go of the guilt that I carry around.

That's my resolution, to feel less guilty about any and everything. There's a website I discovered years ago, I don't know if the domain is still active and I'm not about to check; it was called Catholic Guilt, and it was a porn site.

The name stuck with me, though, making me wonder at the time if the Church created guilt in its practitioners, or if those who practice the religion are just prone naturally to more guilt.

It starts young, this whole guilt thing. It varies from parish to parish, of course, but the sacrament of Confession, a Catholic's FIRST confession, takes place anywhere from 8 to 12 years old. Mine was in the 4th grade, at about 9 years old.

Confession is all about receiving absolution for your sins. Now please tell me; what sins could the average middle class American 9-year-old possibly commit? Lying, fighting with siblings, OK, I'll give you those. I imagine that the priests tasked with hearing those first confessions howl with laughter as soon as they're able....the kids are so nervous, and the sins so petty, I'm sure it is an exercise in hilarity for the most part.

I dutifully made my first confession with the rest of my class, but the strains that became fissures, then cracks and finally breaks in my faith started not long after that first confession.

I was about 12, and playing with a new friend in our neighborhood. I'd gone to school with her for a while, and like most of my suburban schoolmates, she was Catholic like me. Her parent's new house was within walking distance of mine, and we spent a lot of time together in the summers.

"I have to go, I have to get to Confession," I told her one afternoon. The local parish had open time for confessions on Saturdays, and I went from time-to-time.

"Why?" She asked, hugely startled. "I don't believe in Confession. How can a priest grant forgiveness? Only God can do that. Priests are human; forgiveness is divine. I don't believe that they really have the power to grant absolution, do you?"

(Yes, we really talked like that. Bright kids, with big vocabularies...dorks...shoot me.)

"Um, yeah..." I trailed off. She was by far cooler than me during the school year, and I didn't want to seem provincial. "That's what they teach us..."

The more I thought about it, the more I decided she was right. How did saying a few Hail Marys fix some petty wrong that I'd done? God somehow was closer to the priests than the ordinary people? With typical pre-teen sarcasm: What-ev-er! And: plur-eze! That was the end of confession for me. I've never been back.

It is a really nice idea, though. That with a few simple prayers, you can atone for wrongs done, whatever they may be. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way for me.

What guilt am I carrying around? Oh, a few things. I feel guilty that I'm not as good at many things as I think I ought to be. That I'm not perfect, which who knows where I got that idea, I ought to be absolutely perfect at everything I try on the very first attempt. Or that I'm insanely jealous of the lives my sisters are leading, I feel really guilty about that, how jealous I am of them, because it is patently ridiculous. I should be proud of them, happy for them (and I am) and able to leave it at that (but I'm not).

The times that I know peace from this cacophony are only when I'm able to enter into a meditative state of some sort; either during my yoga practice, or when I'm running. Both of those things being times when I can concentrate solely on what I'm doing just that second, and nothing else.

Not even when I'm sleeping does it go away; I had way, way, waaaaay too vivid dreams the other night that I feel very guilty about. And yep, there ARE limits to my over-sharing, because I'm certainly not about to share that one.

So the question remains; how to let go of the guilt? And the only answer I can come up with is to increase the amount of time that I spend running and doing yoga. An answer that I like a whole lot, incidentally.

In my spare time (hahahahahahahaha) next year, I am going to get my certification to teach yoga. As well as apply to several graduate programs, after taking the GRE.

hmmm. perhaps the guilt factor comes from setting expectations far too high, then feeling like I've failed when I fall short.




Nah.




Listening to: Rent soundtrack, Seasons of Love

Well-Read

At my request, my mother-in-law got me a copy of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass as a birthday present.

(Yes, dear readers, even with my best attempts to ignore it, my 33rd birthday has come, and mercifully, gone.)

I read the book quickly, in just a few hours. I must say, I'm utterly mystified. First, over the hype about this being a great book. Terry Brooks is quoted on the back of the paperback as saying, "The Golden Compass is one of the best fantasy/adventure stories that I have read. This is a book no one should miss." With all due respect, I disagree.

Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy it; it was all right. I hate to say this, though...I've honestly read better stories that were written as fanfic. And I don't venture into the fanfic world except under duress.

Next, I'm confused by the fanatics and crisis-mongers who have been screaming about how this book is all about the death of Christianity. Really? 'Cause I just don't see it. He writes about how a super-powerful Catholic Church is a dangerous thing....it ought to come as absolutely no surprise to regular readers that I happen to agree. A Church having power over every facet of society.....hmmmm....isn't that why we believe so strongly in the separation of Church and State? Balanced governance and all that? The founding fathers were deeply religious, deeply Christian religious, folks who nonetheless did not want even their church to have that much power.

To me, it seems more as if Pullman is warning about a return to things like the Spanish Inquisition, or the Salem Witch Trials. Nothing in my upbringing or background suggests to me that we ought to be terrified of what the Church is going to do next, that we should be locking up our children so they aren't snatched by the Church in the dark of night.

Fearing a higher power, and fearing her/his incarnation on earth just aren't the same thing. I know many sects of Christianity teach that we should be god-fearing peoples. Sure, fine, I understand that, even whilst disagreeing with it. (I'll spare you all the feminist rant about how fearing god is just another way the patriarchal society we live in attempts to keep us all obedient to a particular set of...um. Right.) But we ought not fear the place where we worship. Or the leaders of those places. Their power should not be so that we fear to speak against them, or feel that we need to tread lightly around them.

Another idea that he touches on that tugged at my heartstrings more than anything else in the entire story was the fact that children were disappearing, and these children were, in the eyes of those in power, disposable. Poor children, from poverty-stricken homes. Working class kids, Gypsies, homeless children. Take them for your experiments, no-one will notice. They don't matter. Ouch.

I would have not ever picked up this book if it hadn't been for the hysterical e-mails I got on the subject. I would have stuck with the vampire trilogy I've been immersed in for a couple of months {Stephanie Meyers, Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse, all very captivating} or picked up a few other things that are on my more serious list of things to read, like The Kite Runner, or even Eat, Pray, Love, something one of my atheist sisters read and found interesting.

Now if you truly want to lose yourself in another fantasy world, check out Charles deLint, or Melanie Rawn, or Anne McCaffrey, or Tolkien......

More MAJOR kudos to the Armstrongs

Heather and John Armstrong, in case you're living under a rock, are Dooce and Blurb, at www.dooce.com and www.blurbomat.com. Heather had a great depression post the other day, and John wrote a very eloquent and amazing post kind of in response to that, about what it is like to live with someone with depression.

Truly, one of the most difficult things to read that I've ever tried to make my way through.

Not because of my usual bitches about spelling and grammar, but rather because it hurts me to think that this is what my family is going through with me.

Powerful stuff. Again.

Their courage in standing up for those who suffer from mental illness, their sometimes painful honesty, their willingness to share their lives in such an open fashion with the world often simply staggers me.

Wi'chew

I apologize most sincerely for inflicting this upon you, because you will leave this post with an obnoxious pop song stuck in your head.

I'm also putting on my Spinster Aunt Grammar Police hat.

You got me trippin', stumblin' flippin, fumbling
Clumsy cuz I'm fallin in love
You got me slippin, tumbling, sinking, fumbling
Clumsy cuz I'm fallin in love
So in love wit you

That's the chorus to Fergie's latest pop song, Clumsy. I've seen the video twice, randomly surfing the TV channels, and I am hearing the bass line in my head for hours afterward. I like Fergie's music, understand that. But that last line, "so in love wit you" has me all fired up, for a couple of reasons.

First, it is miserable grammar/pronunciation. Folks who don't enunciate make me nuts. "Wit" instead of "with" is really one of my pet peeves. Another one is people who mispronounce the word frustrate, but that's a story for another day. Wit is intelligence. Wit is savvy. W-I-T is not an appropriated shortened form of with. Grrr.

The other reason this irritates me requires a bit of backstory. You already know I'm a music geek. I don't think I've ever talked about my singing here; I no longer sing in public, but to not sing would be to not breathe. I sing all the time. With the iPod. Without the iPod. With the radio. Not with the radio. With the muzak in department stores. At full fortissimo or as quiet as a church mouse. I have a halfway decent voice. I'll never be Maria Callas or Mariah Carey, with their astonishing ranges, but I can carry a tune, and carry it well. From the time I was 12 years old until I left for Sweden at 16, I studied with a vocal coach, in addition to singing in my school's choirs.

My coach had been an opera singer with the Met, once upon a time. She taught me wonderful things about breath support and projecting volume. She was also at considerable pains to teach me how to sing the words 'with you' so it didn't sound like you were singing the word 'chew.' The choir director at school was the same guy from 6th grade all the way through graduation; this was one of his fussy things too. Thanks to both of them, this is something I notice in popular music, and when it is done incorrectly, it makes me grind my teeth. It isn't that hard to do; any singer should know this little trick. All you do is soften the "t" sound, almost as if you were going to drop it off all together, and emphasize the 'you', being careful not to introduce too much of your Midwest twang into it and making it sound like 'yew'. Oh, wait, that Midwest thing would just be me. Anyway.

Fergie-Ferg has a lovely voice, is a talented songstress, and produces extremely entertaining music. This just makes ME nuts, it is a psychosis, I know. The song really sticks with you, which speaks well for it being a major hit for her. And that means that I'll be hearing it everywhere.

If you need me, I'll be over there in the corner in the fetal, rocking and grinding my teeth.

clumsy 'cause I'm fallin' in love..in in love
so in love
wit you

grrrrrrr

The Resources Available

When I worked for the non-profit, for a good long while I was the only employee. This meant several things; one, no one was looking over my shoulder most of the time. Two, there was only so much I could do; I used to say all the time, "I do the best that I can with the resources I have available." 'Resources' usually meaning me, myself and I.

NPR is doing an occasional series about the songwriting process. As a music enthusiast, this interests me a whole lot. On the way home the other day, I listened to this piece, about pop group Georgie James and their dynamic. The reporter, Bob Boilen, used my resources available phrase when he was talking about what he thinks the true test of an artist/creative person is; the ability to use whatever they've got to accomplish the goal at hand.

My new job requires me to be constantly creative; there are, of course, some days when this is effortless, and others when it is quite the struggle. I have been feeling like the job is sucking up all the creativity I've got, leaving none at all for me. And that bums me out, because I haven't worked for more than a minute on my novel since September.

My friend who owns a beauty salon tells me all the time, "You're crafty," because I'm always bringing her things I've made. Cookies, or something else I've baked, endlessly. This time of year, it is bath salts and the coolest thing that I make all year long, solid lotion bars. (I wish I could claim that one as my own idea, but unfortunately, all I do is mess with the kit that they send me, adding a few things.) I always correct her, though and tell her with barely suppressed laughter, "I'm creative, not crafty. Martha Stewart and the people on HGTV are crafty. I'm cooler than that."

A while ago, I wondered on these pages if feeling better, with my depression symptoms easing, was making it more difficult to write. Something that I fear, quite honestly. I now think my fears were well-founded, and that in order to write fiction, and write it well, I need to be in a pretty dark place psychologically. Many of the things that I've discovered on this journey which initially made me uncomfortable are now all right with me. Not being able to write; that isn't OK with me.

It is a big push/pull, though. I am not willing to stop taking the meds in order to boost my creativity. I am not willing to not stop writing. There's a bit of an impasse there. One that I don't know how to fix. Besides not feeling like I'm able to further express what I want to say about my story, I also have absolutely no time for it at all. Last night, I posted my usual Tuesday post at just a few minutes before the calendar flipped over to the next day, because I didn't have time to finish the post during the day. I was working until nearly 10.30.

I don't mind being employed again, that's not it at all. I'm incredibly grateful to be working at all. I know that the fact that I am working has a lot to do with the improvement in my outlook. Not as much as an impact as the meds have, but I felt worse than worthless while I was unemployed. Not unloved, but unlovable. Not that circumstances forced being jobless upon me, but that I was apparently completely undesirable as an employee. Good times, good times.

Me-time is an essential part of who I am. There's a world of difference between alone and lonely. I treasure time to myself; that solitary-ness, the need for solitude, is one of my defining characteristics. Not having time to myself will eventually make me a bit stir-crazy, a little twitchy. More than a bit grumpy, too. It isn't the same sort of c-r-a-z-y as the depression, this is more just being temperamental.

So I feel like my resources are limited. It is partly the season; after work today I'd like to spend some time chatting with a few online friends and writing, but my house is an utter, complete, horrible disaster area, and it needs cleaned desperately. Three loads of laundry await folding, another two need run through the washer and dryer. One of my OCD things is that I have to take the dry cleaning off of wire hangers that the dry cleaner uses and switch the clothes to my nice hangers, and hang them in my closet in very specific order. That needs done, I brought home $150 worth of dry cleaning yesterday. As if all that wasn't enough, because of the holiday season, there are gifts to be wrapped, and still one or two to be purchased. Urgh. Have I mentioned that I'm training for a race that is in 12 days and I have yet to be able to run the entire 5K on the treadmill? Too much to do, too little time.

How to fill the well when it is in danger of running dry?

Contagiousness

Suffering from depression is like living at the bottom of a well. The days slide by, and you hear distant echoes of life above, but you're not there. You feel incredibly alone. Even though you know that there are any number of people who want to pull you back up, you have to do it on your own.

I'm "out" about my depression. It isn't something I'm ashamed of, or embarrassed about. I don't go around introducing myself to new people by saying, "Hi, I'm Lucy and I'm heavily medicated for severe depression!" but if someone asks, I'll be very frank and honest with them about it. I will talk about the meds, the therapy, the therapist, the doc who prescribes the meds, where I think it came from, how I'm doing today or yesterday or how I think I'll be doing next week. Maybe I'm a wee bit too out about it. But I don't care much what some random person, be they friend, family, or stranger thinks about anti-depressants, whether they're good or bad.

You feel so alone when it is at its worst, but you are aware that you're not the only person in history that's ever felt this way. It isn't really possible to find your way out of it just by listening to someone else's experiences; in fact, I think I really couldn't hear them when it was at its worst. I should probably not be surprised at all when I discover that yet another friend or acquaintance or even family member is traveling the same road I am, but I am always surprised.

So many women I know are in the same boat. Inside the computer, outside the computer, in my personal and professional life, we're everywhere. Is it possible that it is gender-related? Or that women are more susceptible to depression than men? I think an argument could be made for it; I know very few men who are having the same trouble as my girlfriends are, but women actually talk about this stuff, men, by and large, don't.

Conspiracy-minded (and admittedly self-centered) as I am, once upon a time, I would have thought that the common denominator among all the women I know who are depressed was me, that somehow I was contagious, and the depression spread outward in ripples from me to everyone around me. Like attracts like, you know. My OCD makes me want to line it up all neatly and find something that makes it all fit neatly into little boxes. Doesn't work like that, but I'd sure like it to.

Right now, where I'm at with it is a relatively good place. I'm dealing all right. I'm even all right with the fact that I'm on meds. At various points during this journey that hasn't been OK, I've wanted to get off them asap. But at the moment, I'm just fine with the fact that I'm on the maximum daily dosage of Wellbutrin XL. It is helping. I don't think I want to be on it for the rest of my life, but at this stage, I'm willing to actually listen to the doctors and seriously consider their advice. Today, anyway. I can really even see a future where I'm not a train wreck.

Hope is an amazing and wonderful thing.

Evolving Tastes

Professional sports aren't my thing. They never have been, and that's OK with me. Football? Meh. Baseball? Meh. Basketball? Meh. NASCAR? Meh.

But then there's hockey. I like hockey; that's due to living in Sweden. I challenge anyone to spend any time at all living in Scandinavia and not become a hockey lover. One ex in Sweden took me to several games of a minor-league team in his home city, and he painstakingly explained the rules to me. So unlike football, which makes little sense to me, I know what's going on down on the ice during a hockey game.

I've been at several hockey games lately, and the team has cheerleaders. Which is laughable, really. Can't have a team without cheerleaders, right? Seems to me that's a pretty uniquely American oddity. Anyway, I think it is a requirement that all hockey arenas must play a few particular songs during the match; The Hey Song, Unbelievable (by EMF), Everybody Dance Now (C+C Music Factory), to name a few. Stuff that I forget about until I hear it played again, which brings it back up into the forefront of my thoughts.

When I got in front of the computer after the most recent hockey game, I started searching iTunes for a few 90s dance hits that I liked back in the day, a few things I was reminded of at the games.

Itunes is a ginormous time-suck, have I ever mentioned that? As bad as the web; maybe for a music addict, worse than the web. C+C Music Factory took me to The Hit Crew, which then led to browsing of the entire dance genre on iTunes, and before I knew it, more than two hours had flown by.

Once upon a time, I adored dance, techno, rave, trip-hop, drum & bass. Isn't it funny how our tastes change over time? At one time, all I listened to was electronica. Stuff that to the uneducated ear is repetitive computer-created crap. I remember another ex, who bitched incessantly about the prevalence of techno in the early 90s. He claimed that any three-year-old with a computer could compose any one of the hits that swept through the European dance club circuits back then; I disagreed vehemently, but because I was a shy little pushover in those days, I kept my mouth shut.

When I was living in Europe, I was spellbound by the DJs in the dance clubs. The way that they'd take songs and blend them together, looping back to the original melody, flowing to the next song, I wondered a lot about how difficult that was, and what you needed to accomplish such amazing technological feats. And how much music each of them must have owned; seemed to me like they had every note of music ever recorded.

As I wandered around iTunes, listening to bits of old techno, a trip(hop) down memory lane, I wondered what had ever happened to my copy of The Prodigy's Experience CD, or the CD-Maxi I had of Das Boot, or anything I owned by The Chemical Brothers. I've never been one to toss music, even when I no longer like it. I own an embarrassing lot of music, and when you add DH's collection in to mine, there's quite a bit there that could be cringe-worthy.

Watching that vid of Das Boot over on YouTube brought back a flood of memories. I thought that the video was frightening back in 1992, showing as it did clips of the epynomous movie which is about a German sinking submarine during WWII. I still find it disturbing, but I also find that I can't sit still while the song is playing, it makes me want to hop up and dance. That's disturbing as well, on some level.

A fangirl friend gave me an mp3 file of Blue (Da Ba Dee) by Eiffel 65; another early-90s hit that I can (and do) listen to over and over.

I like dance music for working out. I hate to admit it; there's so much out there that must be better to listen to. But for motivating me to move faster, there's nothing like something that comes in at over 150 bpm.

There was a while that I wouldn't listen to the tech/electronica/dance at all. Other times, I've cringed about the classic rock in my collection, or been embarrassed that I own opera. These days, I shrug and smile if someone harasses me about something on my iPod or on my computer. It is your problem if you don't like it, not mine. I tell people that my music tastes are just eclectic. Besides downloading a remix of Das Boot, I've also recently snagged Eminem's Lose Yourself, (rap) Men in Hat's Safety Dance, (80s) Pink's I'm not dead album, (Pop/Rock/R&B) Lifehouse's new single, (Rock) an older Finger 11 song (Alternative) that I like....and I'm working on getting my entire CD collection digitized. Yeah, eclectic. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

She can't drive.....55

DH can not be in a vehicle that I'm driving without making some remark about my inability to drive. For the record, I am a good driver. I drive too fast most of the time, but we'll get to that in a second. DH likes to yell and fuss about things like "WATCH THE CURB!!!" and his yelling often makes whatever he thinks the problem is about 50,000 times worse, because the screaming startles me. I have been known to stop the car, turn it off, hand him the keys, and get out, rather than listen to one more second of his kvetching about my driving. It isn't that I'm a bad driver, it is that he's a control freak and does not like being a passenger.

I'm kind of on the defensive about this.

One day this week, I was headed to a meeting with a client, in the county north of my own. A roughly half hour drive, mostly freeway driving.

Can you see the ending here, already?

As I came around a bend on a connector between two freeways, sitting on a huge cement pad between the lanes was a friendly Ohio State Highway Patrol officer. I was driving 72 miles an hour. The speed limit there is 55 miles an hour. He tagged me at 72 only because I slammed on the brakes when I saw him; I thought he was going to pull out in front of me. Otherwise, he'd have probably gotten me for 80.

Oh-hia requires drivers stopped for moving violations to show proof of insurance; I can never find the damn card when I get pulled over. The officer went back to process the paperwork, assuring me that he would, "have me on my way quickly," which made me giggle. I think the point is to NOT be on your way so quickly, no? But of course I couldn't find the current insurance card in the glove box. Cards dating back to 2001 are in there; not any from 2005, 2006, or 2007. Fortunately, he let that slide.

When he handed me the ticket, after explaining how I need to call the court to find out what the fine is and that the fine is due by January 8th, he said, "I'm sorry."

When I had rolled up the window and drove away, I howled with laughter. He's sorry? He's sorry? He's sorry? Hm. If he is so sorry, why'd he give me the ticket? Or was he apologizing for catching me breaking the law? Or perhaps he's sorry that I broke the law. I'm not really sure what he meant, but it struck me as funny.

Here's the painful part. The ticket is going to cost me $114. Oh-hia-ia has a points system for traffic violations; twelve points and YOU'RE OUT! This ticket makes 4 on my license. I had another ticket in January/February of 2006, for driving 42 mph in a school zone, where the speed limit is 20 mph. When I get a ticket, I get a ticket. Your insurance rates are based on your driving record. Adding insult to injury, therefore, is the fact that my insurance rate will go up with this additional ticket. The fine is bad enough, but you continue to pay for it with the increase in insurance. Takes two years for two points to drop off.

There ARE days, even when you're not someone who suffers from depression, when you just ought not get out of bed.

Powerful words

Dooce has a post she wrote yesterday that is incredibly moving. How I wish I wrote about 1/4 as well as she does!! Please check it out, she really clarifies some of the things that I feel about mental illness.

Good for you....and...Tastes Good!

A comment left the other day that jokingly suggested that next on my health kick I was going to start eating bran for breakfast reminded me that I've wanted to share this recipe.

These muffins are delish. "Good" carbs as opposed to bleached, enriched white flour. Natural sugars only, no refined sugars. You have to store them in the fridge 'cause there are no preservatives. I think of them as breakfast food only because of the cereal, but they make good snacks, too. They're very filling. About the only "improvement" that I want to make is to add some protein powder.

I use whey protein in a breakfast/lunch/snack smoothie I make often; (1 cup strawberries, 1 banana, 1/4 c organic low-fat vanilla yogurt, 2 scoops protein powder, blend until desired consistency) but I've never baked with the powder and don't know how it would react with the heat of an oven. Plus, here's a chemistry question; does it still count as protein once all the chemical reactions take place?

I don't like using an 'artificial' protein source, but neither do I like the idea of grinding up some chicken for my smoothie. Likewise raw eggs kinda squick me. Whey powder isn't too terrible on the scale of artificial ick, but the ingredients do list artificial flavors. There's an un-flavoured version, but it adds something, an undercurrent of taste or an aftertaste that I don't care for, so I use the vanilla flavour.

Adapted from The 8-Week Cholesterol Cure

Breakfast Muffins
2-1/4 cups oat-bran cereal, pulverized in the food processor until as fine as sand
1/4 cup coarsely chopped almonds
1/4 cup golden raisins or chopped pitted Medjool dates
1 tbsp baking powder
1/4 cup organic honey
1-1/4 cups skim milk
2 egg whites
2tbsp olive oil
2 mashed bananas

Oven 425F

Combine the cereal, nuts, baking powder and raisins/dates. In a separate bowl, whip the egg, milk, honey, and oil together and blend it into the cereal mixture. Line a muffin tin with paper liners, and fill with batter. Bake 15-20 minutes. They are done when a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out moist but not wet. Store in refrigerator.

This recipe has so many possibilities. Add blueberries (in season) to the muffins instead of or in addition to the bananas. Use a chopped apple; play with the combinations of dates or raisins with other fruit. They freeze well, too.

So, yes, bran for breakfast. :-)

Nuts

The following is an e-mail that I received, copied and pasted word for word. The only thing I've edited is removing the people's names and e-mail addresses, and I've italicized the text so that you know where the lunacy ends and my snarky commentary begins after it.

The woman who sent it to me....well, honestly, I have no idea who she is, or why or how she got my e-mail address. This showed up in the e-mail box that I use for work, and has my real name in it, so obviously she's someone I've given my e-mail address to in the past. Scanning the list of recipients, there are names that I recognize as being locals, although I don't know them personally, so apparently she lives in town.

I want to shoot off an angry response, something along the lines of "Don't assume I share your prejudices," and, "don't EVER send me shit like this again" but there is no point. Whoever she is, she'd probably respond by telling me that she would pray for me. Sigh.



Please forward this to everyone you know, especially those with children. I believe whole heartedly in free speech and people's right to make decisions but I don't believe that movie /publishing companies should be supported on such a venture. What are we telling them as a society IF we SUPPORT this? The movie industry and theaters make a lot of money. Please encourage those you know NOT to SUPPORT any THEATRE that would show this trash.

This was sent to me by a friend who received it from a church staff member. You can read about the movie on the following site:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/compass.asp

As a follower of Jesus Christ, I encourage you not to support this movie and to share this with as many as possible. I encourage you to choose to fill your mind and those of the children in your life with the things of God instead of what the world would have you see and read.

Warning about "The Golden Compass"
Yesterday, I was handed a children's book by a staff member who said, "I think you need to see this." The book is published by Scholastic and is part of a collection of books. The book I was given is called The Golden Compass. This children's book is one of the most alarming things I have ever read. What makes it worse is that a movie based on the book premieres in December. Both the book and the movie introduce atheism to children. The story ends with Adam and Eve killing God.

The movie has been described as "atheism for kids" and is based on the first book of a trilogy entitled "His Dark Materials" written by Phillip Pullman. Pullman is a militant atheist and secular humanist who despises C. S. Lewis and the "Chronicles of Narnia." His motivation for writing this trilogy was specifically to counteract Lewis' symbolisms of Christ portrayed in the Narnia series.

Clearly, Pullman's main objective is to bash Christianity and promote atheism. Pullman left little doubt about his intentions when he said in a 2003 interview, "my books are about killing God." He has even stated that he wants "to kill God in the minds of children." It has been said of Pullman that he is "the writer the atheists would be praying for, if atheists prayed."

While "The Golden Compass" movie itself may seem mild and innocent, the books are a much different story. In the trilogy, a young streetwise girl becomes enmeshed in an epic struggle to ultimately defeat the oppressive forces of a senile God. Another character, an ex- nun, describes Christianity as "a very powerful and convincing mistake." In the final book, characters representing Adam and Eve eventually kill God, who at times is called YAHWEH. Each book in the trilogy gets progressively worse regarding Pullman's hatred of Jesus Christ.
"The Golden Compass" is set to premier December 7, during the Christmas season and will probably be heavily advertised. Promoters hope that unsuspecting parents will take their children to see the movie, that they will enjoy the movie, and that the children will want the books for Christmas. Please boycott the movie and the books. Also, pass this information along to everyone you know. This will help to educate parents, so that they will know the agenda of the movie.

Other valuable information about the movie:


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If you are a parent or grandparent, you need to be aware of the movie The Golden Compass
Movie to be released December 7
Dear Perry,
There is a new movie coming to theaters December 7. You should be forewarned about The Golden Compass. The target audience for the movie is children, and it is being promoted in some schools. The Golden Compass is based on a book trilogy that promotes atheistic views, likely to be reflected in the movie.
For more information on The Golden Compass, click here to read the column by AFA's Rebecca Grace. You might also want to read an article from Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship. Click here for the article.
Forward this to friends and family. Encourage them to sign up for AFA's Action Alerts to stay informed on this issue and other issues of importance. They can sign up by clicking here

Thank you for caring enough to get involved. If you feel our efforts are worthy of support, would you consider making a small tax-deductible contribution? Click here to make a donation.

Sincerely,



Donald E. Wildmon, Founder and Chairman American Family Association
Donate with confidence to AFA

(gifts are tax-deductible)

Question #1:

Have any of these fools actually read the book?

Just like the hysteria over Harry Potter, where fanatics and nutballs were claiming that Harry promotes witchcraft, I'd be willing to bet my entire retirement saving that the folks that are most up in arms about this have not ever cracked the book.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that I haven't read it either. On my travels today, I'm going to pick up a copy.

Question #2:
If you "support freedom of speech" then you can't support it conditionally. Supporting freedom of speech means that you support that which you DON'T agree with as much as supporting that which you do agree with. So you support freedom of speech only when it applies to stuff you agree with?

Question #3:
Don't you want to teach your kids to think for themselves? Allowing them to be exposed to things you disagree with, and explaining your reasons for disagreeing, rational discussion about the topic....hey, isn't that called "learning"?



I met someone the other day who is a practicing Wiccan. She was incredibly serene, and supremely non-judgmental. What a contrast with these crisis-mongers.


Freedom of speech means to me that I support people's rights to write and distribute their horrified missives about a movie that is apparently going to bring about the collapse of Western civilization. (*eye roll*) Just as it is my right to vehemently disagree.

Listening to: Xavier Rudd, the "Good Spirit" album

Ciggy

Once upon a time, I smoked.

Cigarettes, silly, not anything else.

Not a whole lot, you understand, but enough. It started as a "look at me, I'm so tough with my beer and cigarette" thing, and grew into a "well, everyone else does it, so why not." I'm not suggesting that intelligence was ever a factor here.

Shortly before I met DH, however, I quit. I was very ill the summer after I graduated high school, and stuck in bed for most of that summer. When I began to feel better, the first time I went out with friends and lit up a cigarette, I started to hack and cough. I put out that cigarette, and have only had a stray puff here and there in the 14 years since.

It isn't a habit that I miss, most of the time. Every now and then, on a stressful day, I'll walk past smokers outside and think, "ah, that would be nice." Middlesis smokes, but I can never talk her in to giving me a hit off of one of her cigarettes if I'm around her when I'm having a day like that. Which, all things considered, I'm grateful for.

I despise the smell of cigarette smoke. With a burning passion. (No pun intended.) Ex-smokers tend to be the most nazi-like enforcers of "no smoking" signs, which is pretty hilarious and hypocritical, but somehow I think ex-smokers are particularly sensitive to the smell.

About a year after I quit, I was diagnosed with asthma; the decision to either breathe or smoke was a pretty simple one. Its tough to do both if you're an asthmatic, although I do know asthmatics who smoke.

When Oh-hia-ia passed the smoking ban a year or so ago, I was ecstatic. Finally, no more smelling like cigarette smoke after an evening at a bar with friends. No need to strip down in the garage after bar-hopping, lest the smell of the cigs be carried in the house with the clothes. Enforcement of the law isn't perfect; there are still a few places where you can light up and no one will say anything. The state does not have near enough folks to enforce the law; it is the local health departments who are responsible for checking up on restaurants and bars. Which is ridiculous, really, because personally, I'd rather that the health department continue to insure the cleanliness of the area kitchens than play cigarette cop. The law isn't without its flaws.

Over the past two days, I've been smelling cigarette smoke IN my house. Ugh. And double ugh. I can not figure where in the living hell it is coming from. DH, the son of a pretty heavy smoker, despises the smell worse that I do; but he says he can't smell it. Now we already know that I'm mostly out of my mind, but phantom smells? Really?

It is strong enough that it woke me this morning; spraying air-freshner (something I hate to do) only covers it for a short while. Lighting the two aromatherapy diffusers I have hasn't helped much either. One is sitting next to me as I type, filled with a combination of lemon, lavender and cedar essential oils. It isn't helping sitting less than a foot away from me, I still smell the cigarette smoke. And we aren't talking about that first inhale from a cigarette, which could still appeal to me; we're talking about the smell of a week-old overflowing ash tray. I say again: ugh.

I can't open the windows...besides being too cold outside to open the house up, we've plasticized the windows, something we do in the winter to help keep our heating costs down. Even the sliding glass doors have been covered over with a shrink-wrap-esque sort of material. Baking more cookies is out, because I only smell it in the bedroom, which is on the second floor. So that wouldn't help either.

As if I needed more proof I was out of my mind......


On something not exactly related, I have sent in the entry form for my first ever 5K race. It is on New Year's Eve. I choose this race because it is at a location that is entirely flat; and I think it is a good place to start to attain my eventual goal of running in a marathon. What was I just saying about being out of my mind? Just nod and smile at the crazy woman in the corner.

Stress, seasonal or not.

Headache, n. (hed-ake)

The feeling you get when your body responds to stress that you have piled needlessly upon yourself.

When I worked for the olde evile bank, I realized after I'd been there and working full time for a few years that I really didn't like working full time. But, then, who really does? Even when you love your job with all your heart & soul, you'd still rather do things other than work.

I didn't love being unemployed. I was bored, bored, bored most of the time. But neither do I really love working full time. Besides seriously cutting in t the time I've got for my hobbies (ha!!) it also cuts into the time I have for mundane household chores - - - laundry, keeping my house in good order. Things that aren't truly important in the grand scheme of things....not important like having a roof over your head or heat in your house is important, but things that do need done. I, for one, like having clean clothes.

I'm also OCD enough to admit that the sight of dirty dishes in my sink, or too much clutter in my rooms makes me crazy. Twitchingly crazy. When there is nothing at all to do, I'm climbing the walls. Then when I've got too much to do...I'm still climbing the walls.

I love to entertain. And I love my family. So having the holiday celebrations at my home is no big deal. Even having both families, mine and DH's, isn't a problem.

What is a problem is the sum of the whole. Baking. Cleaning the house. Putting up not one but TWO Christmas trees. Buying and wrapping all the presents. Grocery shopping in overcrowded grocery stores for ingredients for party food. Decorating the rest of the house. Sending holiday cards.

So what's done on the list of things to do? The baking. The house is decorated, and the trees are both up. Don't ask me why the hell I do that to myself; one tree should be enough for an agnostic, no? But that is all that is done. The house still needs a stem-to-stern cleaning. None of the shopping is done, and you can't wrap what you haven't purchased. Not one holiday greeting card purchased, addressed, or mailed.

Oh, the holiday cards. Sigh. I'm feeling particularly guilty about that this year. I usually begin looking for something unique and serene in August. I usually get cards imprinted with our names, and a nice little greeting. I have whoever prints them put our return address on the envelopes. I print out the addresses to send them from an excel spreadsheet. THEN I write personal messages inside each one. And then I send them to 4 countries on 2 continents. Why? Well, I really like getting cards. I like hearing from people that I might have lost touch with over the current year.

I guess you could say it is part of the ritual of the season for me.

Please don't ask me to reconcile the fact that I don't believe in a higher power with the fact that I completely love the holiday season. Just add it to the list of things that make me lovably nuts.

I haven't done the annual sending of the cards (yet) this year for a couple of reasons. Laziness has to figure in there somewhere. Then there's the sad fact that when I lost my old job, my PDA lost its memory. I lost everyone's everything. Birthdays, anniversaries, snail-and-e-mail addresses. I sent a pleading mass e-mail to my entire e-mail address book that gmail has saved. Most everyone responded; but I haven't input the data into my new computer yet. And then there's the little detail that I was running out of money right around the time I would normally do my card-ordering, because I had been out of work. Lack of time, too. So holiday cards weren't so high on the list of what was important.

They aren't really moving up the priority list, but the fact that I still haven't done them is adding to my current headache.

I Can See California Sunlight In Your Hair...or why my baby sister is an amazing woman.

I can smell the ocean salt in the air
and I can see you, you're standing there washing your car
and I can see California sun in your hair

Its a winding road
I've been walking for a long time
still don't know
where it goes
and its a long way home
I've been searching for a long time
still have hope
I'm gonna find my way home

~"Winding Road," Bonnie Somerville, Garden State soundtrack

Here's a quick refresher course on Lucy's fam.

I have two sisters, Middlesis and Babysis. Middlesis lives in New York City, Babysis lives in California. I am insanely, irrationally jealous of the lives they're leading. Logic enters into this not at all. And I know that. But they're both doing amazing things.

Babysis has been on a 700 mile bike trip for the past few weeks, with the company that she works for, promoting environmentally responsible living and sustainability. (Can you see why I'm jealous? And why she's so incredibly cool???) They biked from San Francisco to San Diego, along one of the most beautiful stretches of road in the world.

There is a photographer that has traveled with them for portions of this amazing (and slightly insane) journey.

If you have access to it, hop over to my MySpace page, where I've posted two pictures that she has sent the family; one of herself and one of the whole crazy posse.

I am so proud of her; I can barely tell you how much I've realized in about the past six months that she's grown into an amazing person. She is about 9-1/2 years younger than me, so when we were growing up, we weren't all that close. Think about it; when you were 17, did you want to spend time running around with a 7-year-old? Not so much. In my friend's memories, she remains about 11 years old, much like my memories of their younger sibs. Sometimes when I think about her, that's what I think about, too, is the pesky kid she was to me in those days.

With the age difference, we're always going to be at vastly different places in life, looking sometimes at one another across a huge chasm of perspectives that don't match up. Which isn't to say that I can't relate to her, but....it can be tough to see things from her point of view from time-to-time.

One of the really silly things she and do I share is a dumb obsession with celebrity gossip. The first chance she gets to spend some time surfing the 'net, she'll catch up on what Perez and The Superficial and Go Fug Yourself are all talking about. We'll spend at least one afternoon sitting someplace in a cafe sipping chai or lattes and happily gossiping about what Paris and Nicole and Lindsey and Brit-Brit are up to.


The reason for this incredible bit of schmoopiness? She'll be home in a week. I can't wait to see her, to get my hands on her and hug her tight, to spend a few hours chatting about everything and nothing. Yes, she was home for my Auntie H's funeral at the beginning of November, but it was really a drive-by visit, and we were all so distracted with what was going on.

Time. The most precious gift we can give one another.

Candy is Dandy, but Liquor is Quicker

I picked up a piece of candy off of a table at an event, those little generic M&M sort of things, chocolate, candy shell, mint flavor. After I popped it in my mouth, I realized that it was sure to be full to bursting of the sorts of things I usually avoid. High fructose corn syrup. Refined sugar. Artificial flavors. Artificial colors.

Really, the sort of thing I don’t eat at all anymore, not the sort of thing that I just avoid.

And it tasted disgusting. Really bad. Either I had forgotten that I don’t like those, or my taste buds readjusted, or something. If I hadn’t been at a work event, I so would have spit it out. I didn’t eat anything else at the rest of the event. I’ve taken to completely ignoring whatever food is served at holiday events that are catered, because it just isn’t worth it to me to eat it.

I had a similar experience with a Milky Way bar, and a 3 Musketeers. (These episodes were all several weeks apart, I haven't been going around noshing on candy.) I used to eat a lot of candy, all the time. Chocolate, mostly, but anything with sugar was OK. I have recently started to realize something; I was seriously addicted.

When I say addicted, I really mean it. I was addicted not only to food but also to sugar. Food used to really be a problem. I can’t eat just one Oreo cookie. I can’t eat just one French fry, or just one potato chip or just one anything, frankly. I hate to compare it to something as serious as alcoholism, but I think that it is a little bit like that. An alcoholic cannot drink just one beer; I can’t eat just one cookie.

For many obese people, food is a comfort. I don’t know if that was the case for me, I’m sure somewhere that figures in, but I really can finally recognize how self destructive, incredibly self destructive, my relationship with food was.

I still like chocolate. But somehow, I don’t enjoy eating it unless it is chocolate that I can actually understand all of the ingredients on the label. A good case in point for that is the fudge that I made with my niece and nephew last weekend. We used Baker’s chocolate, and there are no mystery ingredients in that stuff. I will eat squares of the semi-sweet to satisfy a chocolate craving. The other ingredients in the fudge were vanilla, marshmallow fluff, sugar, and water. OMG, I had to give it away because I couldn’t leave the stuff alone.

Typical, though, that my taste for chocolate has evolved in to stuff that is more expensive. There's a whole 'nother post in that, about how expensive it is to eat healthy food. Move up the scale, to organic, fair trade produced stuff, and it ties back to what I was ranting about recently; the obesity epidemic. Sugar-filled soda and "juice drinks" are cheap. Oh, you want "not-from-concentrate really from apples" apple juice? That'll be $78.34, please. Alright, I'm exaggerating, but you see my point.

Champagne tastes and a beer budget, of course, that's me.

Terribly unfortunately, however, I haven't lost my taste for booze or wine with my changing taste buds.

Rediscover

My father collects clothes. So much clothing does he own that he has a closet of his own, plus the entirety of a guest room closet and the storage area in their basement also has a rack full of clothes that are his alone.

DH collects movies. At last count, more than 250 films of every genre reside on shelves in our media room. Most on DVD, but some on VHS too. Although opposites attract, and we are opposite in many, many ways (politically, socially...I could go on) but we share some OCD tendencies, and there is an Excel spreadsheet list stored on his laptop and on mine that lists all of the movies. One worksheet has them listed alphabetically by title. The second worksheet lists them by genre.

For me, it is neither clothes nor movies, but music. When I was razzing my father a few weeks ago about the amount of clothing he owns, he took it stoically for a few minutes; then he asked how much music I own. Guilty as charged. The only proper answer to that question is LOTS.

I will listen to almost anything; from hip-hop to opera, alt-country, trip-hop, dance hall, pop, classic rock, folk, bluegrass. About the only thing I don't really like is country, but that's not a hard and fast rule.

I use iTunes to digitally store my music. When I got my new computer, I divided the hard drive, portioning off a section to dedicate to music storage. I keep increasing that section, because it keeps getting too close to being full.

I subscribe to a handful of free podcasts on iTunes, and one that I listen to faithfully is DJ Steveboy's Podrunner. I've written about Steve Boyette before; I discovered him on iTunes by searching for music to run to. Using words like awesome, amazingly talented, and unbelievable don't come close to doing justice to describing him. Subscribing to the podcast on iTunes means that whenever he uploads a new one, I get it automatically whenever I log in to iTunes. And he does these things weekly.

Some of the mixes I like more than others, of course. House and dance hall stuff can be annoying if it isn't your thing. But I have yet to find one that I don't like at all. He categorizes them based on number of beats per minute (bpm) which range from 130 to 170. I tend to use the slower end of the spectrum for my runs, as I'm not a world-class marathoner, but using the high speed ones sometimes kicks up my workout a bit.

I couldn't work out without music. I've been known to leave the gym if I don't have at least headphones with me; most of the cardio machines have headphone jacks so that you can watch TV, and without at least that, I just can't face more than about 3 minutes of cardio. I have forgotten the iPod from time to time, and as long as I can listen to something that is all right, but of course I'd rather have my own music.

I owe DJ Steve a debt of extreme gratitude. (Ooo, he blogs, too.) Without several of his more recent mixes, among them "Radiant Dark," "Beat Cathedral," and "Step Sequencer," I wouldn't have been able to get back in to the groove of running. I skipped about 2 weeks total of the gym as I've settled into the new job, 3 days here, 2 days there. Not going a few times makes it easier to not go at all. But then those numbers on the scale creep up, and I can't stay away from it, no matter how hard it is to drag my ass out of bed to get to the gym in the mornings.

I've claimed throughout this process that I don't like working out. And I don't, really. I don't like to sweat. I don't like being too hot. I don't like my clothes sticking to me when I'm done. I don't like that I think *I* sweat more profusely than other people. I used to say of running, when I was a teenager, "The only good thing about running is when you stop." But I don't really feel that way anymore.

When my time on the elliptical was winding down today, I felt so exhilarated, so energized, that I couldn't believe my time was up. I've been so cautious about running, with the shin splints causing me so much pain. I don't like not being able to run, but neither do I like the idea of stress fractures if I'm not careful. But since I didn't feel "done" today when my time was up on the elliptical, I ran a few times around the track, to the "Beat Cathedral" mix, feeling so strong.

It is so very hard for me to put into words how much 'feeling strong' signifies major change for me. I didn't use to be. Strong, that is. Running a few blocks to catch a bus in NYC would have had me gasping for air like a fish out of water. Carrying baskets of laundry up the stairs in our old apartment building had me heaving and panting. No longer.

In fact, I'm actually considering signing up for several upcoming 5 and 10 K races. I must be out of my mind.

Unnecessary

The weather is ever-changing here in Oh-hia-ia. One of the very few things that I like about living here is that we have four distinct seasons; there's no mistaking summer for winter or vice-versa.

Although the actual date of winter is a few weeks away yet, we've been having a sample of winter's fury over the last few days. The wind, bitter, biting, and at near gale-force over the past few days has blown down power lines and trees. Overnight last night, each time I woke, I was reminded of people interviewed on the news after tornadoes; they always say that it sounds like a train. As it whipped around our home last night, I wondered if we were about to have an out-of-season tornado, because it sounded like a train had taken up residence on tracks that must invisibly circle the house.

And then it started to snow.

All day Monday, the snow was propelled to the ground with such stinging force, were you silly enough to leave any skin exposed, you'd be sorry.

I went to see my hairdresser, and was frozen walking across the parking lot. The salon is near my old place of employment, and for no reason other than self-torture, I drove past the old office.

It was dark, cold, snowing. Really, it couldn't have been more bleak. The signs identifying the place have been removed; I took the sign off of the front of the building myself, back in June. The bigger sign, near the sidewalk, was still there the last time I had been there. I don't know when it was removed, nor where it went. The blinds are all drawn, making the windows look like dead, empty eyes.

There was a time when this action would have sent me into a tailspin of agony, a long bout of self-flagellation, wondering why I couldn't have done something, anything, to save the facility from closing.

I'm mostly past that; circumstances far beyond my control converged into a unique situation that forced the closure. I know that now. I hate it when people tell me that something, "isn't my fault." Own up to your mistakes, take some responsibility for your own actions. But the loss of my old job wasn't my fault.

I'm still not to the point that I think that the loss of my job was a good thing; I can finally view it as an opportunity for a new direction. My new job is taking me on avenues I never expected, an adventure that I'm still not sure I can see the end of.

Needless torture, that walk down memory lane. It is still too painful to remember the good, fun, positive things that happened there. But it hurts a little less than it did a few months ago.

I found some of my old business cards in a bag I hadn't used for a while. Losing a job you love is like experiencing a death of a person, someone you loved. Just when you think that you're mostly over the grief, you stumble across something, like those business cards, that bowls you over and makes you catch your breath, trying to hold in the grief until the moment passes you by. So perhaps voluntarily choosing to drive past the old office was foolish, opening me to more grief needlessly.

To my extreme surprise, in the light of a new day, it isn't painful. But yes, it was unnecessary.

It IS still snowing, and fucking freezing.