open letter

Dear Claire,

I know that you love cheesecake from The Cheesecake Factory. I do too. But next time you eat it, please remember that you will wake up the next morning feeling terrible and drink Diet Coke for breakfast, because you are convinced it is the only thing that won't make you vomit. It will actually just make you feel worse. Remember also, that because you only had Diet Coke for breakfast, you will be hungry and grab a muffin on the way to work. That will also make you feel worse. I'm just looking out for you, Claire.

Love,
Mr. Stomach

the mile run

So, I have started running recently. I am training for a 5k on Halloween in which we dress up as superheroes! It should be awesome and it is a run/walk, so if I really cannot run the 5k, NBD.

This is a huge personal challenge for me because I have NEVER been capable of running like a normal person. I have never been particularly thin, but I was never so heavy that running should have been a huge problem. But it was; my lungs and legs and stomach and head all joined together to create intense discomfort and pain. And death. Remember in school when we had to do the President’s Physical Fitness test in the fall and the spring? And we had to run a mile? I thought of the mile run day as the worst day of my life. And we never had advance warning or practice. One day, I would head into gym class and the teachers would say “Okay, head out to the track, time to run the mile.” All the normal kids would be like “This sucks, I might actually sweat in gym today and have to bring my gym clothes home to be washed for once. Lame.” The running-phobic kids (kid? this may have just been me) would immediately panic and launch into a train of irrational thoughts: “OH MY GOD THE MILE WHAT AM I GOING TO DO???? I didn’t know it was today, I would have broken by ankle, or at least sprained it…or at least pretended! Can I do it now? If I trip going down to the track and claim my ankle hurts, will the gym teachers believe me and let me go to the nurse? What if they make me make it up next gym class? If I sneak into the woods, will they notice? Will I get punished? Is the punishment worse than running the mile?”

Before I knew it, I would be down at the track, on the starting line with all the kids who looked WAY less panicky than I felt, and I would be running. Usually beforehand, I would desperately try to find a buddy of equal or less running stamina so I wouldn’t be dragging my dying body alone for the last 3 laps (out of 4). I usually failed at this endeavor; I’d run like ¼ (or maybe a ¼ of a lap?) of a mile, die a little, and try to get my buddy to walk with me. My buddy would leave me and I would be on my own.

Eventually, the gym teachers would just wave me in after 12 minutes because that was the point where you failed that portion of the Fitness Test. It was humiliating and painful. One time I ran the mile in 8 minutes or so, but only because I skipped a lap and the gym teacher didn’t notice. It feels good to finally come clean. After my freshman year of high school, I made my mom write me a note excusing me from the mile because I had exercise-induced asthma. The gym teachers usually told me I needed a note from a doctor, but excuse me anyways because it wasn’t worth their effort to argue.

Anyways, I have been running for a few weeks now and I am noticing serious improvement. In fact, on Tuesday I ran for an entire mile (I forgot my stopwatch) and last night I ran a mile again in …. TEN MINUTES! I know this isn’t a good mile time, but for me this is a REALLY BIG DEAL. Just running the entire mile in any amount of time is an accomplishment and I feel so proud of myself. I stagger into the apartment after running and feel like screaming “I AM KING OF RUNNING! NO ONE IS MORE AWESOME THAN ME!!!!” (Sometimes I actually do scream this.)

Gym teachers, you would be so proud of me now.

There are many reasons I am like a two year old:

1. I don't do well on very little sleep.
2. I melt down when I am hungry.
3. I freak out when people yell at me.
4. I have to go to the bathroom a lot.

Sometimes these things combine to create a perfect storm of tears, rage or both. Like this past weekend. We embarked on an adventure to my uncle's ski/lake house early Saturday morning intending to spend Saturday at the lake and Sunday at Water Country (Water Country...have some fun!). Aside from Saturday being a little colder than we would have liked, it was good times.

So Saturday night, we all go to bed around 12, psyched for our Water Country adventure the next morning. Somebody, however, wanted to stay up all night to talk: Mr. Stomach. Mr. Stomach apparently did not like the combination of chicken, bratwurst and smores we had eaten earlier and wanted to stay up all night to talk about it. It went something like this:

Mr. Stomach: BLURGLE BLURGLE GRRRRRRRR BLURGLE
Me: Are you okay?
Mr. Stomach: GRRRRRUMBLEEE BLAAAAAAAH MEEEEEEHHHHHH
Me: Please stop.

Mr. Stomach was super chatty all night. That, combined with the really uncomfortable bed, led to me being awake practically all night long.

The next morning, I was feeling better, ready to go on some water slides. We head out in two cars (boys car and girls car, natch), without breakfast, intending to stop at a Dunkin Donuts on the way. I had printed directions and the boys were following the girls car, which I was driving. So we stop and I park, ready to go in and avoid the long drive through line and the lazy lazy boys are like "why would you go in? DRIVE THROUGH!" I'm thinking "I kinda have to pee, but I can hold it" and get back in line for the drive through. Of course, it takes forever.

So I get to the speaker and try to order my food, KCo's food and KRiz's coffee . As soon as I open my mouth to order, I hear someone (Ryan) in the boys car yell "Hey, hurry it up!!!" I got flustered and ordered the coffee wrong and thought "Okay, I'm sure that happens all the time, I'll just let them know when I get up to the food window, it will be okay."

It wasn't. Here is what I remember from that exchange:

Me: I'm sorry, I ordered decaf instead of regular.
DD lady: You said decaf, here is decaf."
Me: Yeah, I screwed up, can I reorder it?
DD lady: You ordered this!! She wrote it down on the cup! See here, it says decaf?!
Me: I'm sorry, it was wrong, can I get a new one?
DD lady: What do you want?
Me: Medium iced hazelnut...
DD lady: She wrote down DECAF!
Me: That was wrong...medium iced hazelnut with sweet and low and milk.
DD lady: She wrote down CREAM AND SPLENDA...you didn't want that? THAT'S WHAT YOU SAID! WHAT DO YOU WANT?
Me: I was wrong! I will pay for 2 coffees, I just want to reorder this coffee! IF THIS IS A PROBLEM I WILL GET OUT OF THE DRIVE THROUGH AND COME INSIDE!
[At this point, I am in near hysterics and the DD lady is hanging out of the food window yelling at me]
DD lady: Fine - What do you want?
I'd like a medium iced hazelnut with 3 sweet and lows and milk.
DD lady: How many splendas?
Me: Uhh...3 sweet and lows.
DD lady: How many milks?
Me: .... the normal amount?
DD lady: Fine.

So we get our food and I am flipping out: I am STARVING, I have to pee, I am exhausted and I have just been yelled at by Ryan and by a crazy Dunkin Donuts lady. This is the string of irrational (yet totally rational in my mind at the time) thoughts that followed:

"This is all Ryan's fault. Everything bad that has ever happened in my life, especially the last 10 hours, is all Ryan's fault. I am going to KILL Ryan. At the very least, I am going to punch Ryan. I have never punched anyone before, what if I miss? Ok, maybe I'll just slap him...I've never slapped anyone before either, but it must be easier than punching, right? RIGHT??? Right. Or better yet, I will lose them in rural New Hampshire. They will be stranded! And never get to Water Country! THEY WILL NEVER GET HOME!!! It doesn't matter that they have a GPS in the car, they will be lost forever if they can't follow me! But then I won't get to slap Ryan. HUNGRY HAVE TO PEE TIRED NAP PEE EAT EAT EAT GRRRRRRRR!"

So I eventually calmed down and ate and peed and felt better and forgave Ryan for ruining my life.

Two important things from this experience:
1. I am lucky people put up with me.
2. I will never forget how KRiz likes her coffee at Dunkin Donuts.

*Note: I am not normally a monster. These 4 things, when they occur separately, lead to at most some mean/sad faces and blaming someone else for making me hungry (not for ruining my life). But still, unpleasant.

"Have you met the Awesomes? Marshall, Lily, their son Totally and their daughter Freaking?"

Thank you Katie, for sending me this article. I found it very interesting, as changing my name when I marry is something I have thought a lot about. At this point in my life, I want to keep my last name when I marry, if only because it would be such a pain in the bum to change it. My mom has changed her name 3 times (John to Carrabba, Carrabba to John, John to Sandford) and it was a huge hassle. She still finds things 10 years after the first name change registered to "Mary Carrabba". However, I worry about my future children - whose name would they take? will they be confused about their last name? I would never hyphenate their last name; they would have life of not being able to fit their names on standardized forms.

Although many subjects can send me into a feminist tirade (I'm talking about you, Cosmo), this has never been one of them. To me, it is a tradition the same way a father walking his daughter down the aisle is a tradition and they only have negative implications if you allow them to. Granted, this traditions are rooted in sexist practices, they don't carry the same meaning in today's society. I would also never be offended to be called by my husband's last name if I chose to keep my maiden name.

Some of the statistics were surprising - I was under the impression that keeping your maiden name was on the rise, but also understand that the surveys aren't current or expansive. I am also pleased to live in progressive Massachusetts - "one of the few states that doesn’t require men, and men only, to take the extra step and get a court order to change a last name after marriage."

These two paragraphs in the article really struck a chord with me though:

"While feminism and the equality it brought has become more or less mainstream, it has simultaneously “created anxiety about gender roles,” says Douglas. “There’s emerged a growing pressure to be both feminist and feminine at the same time. Maybe the trend [of taking a husband’s name] is just a little tiny piece of how women are pressured to or want to cling to a tradition that is very tied up with notions of femininity. It may be one of these gestures to traditional femininity that is part of women’s everyday calibration of themselves. We can’t seem to be too manly, because women do get punished for that.” So although women can exercise equality professionally by taking on traditional male roles like breadwinner, CEO, or political leader, they are expected to balance this out by embracing hyper-femininity.

This balancing act shows up in many ways. For instance, women who out-earn their husbands do a larger percentage of the household chores -- a traditional female role -- than do women who earn less than their husbands. In her book, Douglas explores the public drubbing handed out to former US Attorney General Janet Reno, a woman who Douglas says “looked at the masquerade of femininity and said ‘no.’ Women punish very visibly other women who do that -- with humor, so it doesn’t look too sexist.”

Women receive contrasting messages to act feminine at certain times and masculine at others (again, talking about you Cosmo). This article even suggest that being feminine and feminist are mutually exclusive. If feminism is right, is femininity wrong? Or vice versa? I don't think so, but I think some women do. One unfortunate thing about feminism is that the few radical feminists out there are VERY loud and their ideas are the ones associated with being feminist. For example, a few years ago I joked to my roomate at the time "I just came to college to find a man" and she very aggressively chastised me for being anti-feminist...even though it was just a joke. Part of my college experience was learning to separate the scary, bra-burning, anti-male feminism from the everyday feminism that most women agree with (equality!).

The second paragraph is dead on, but I'll leave the conversation about the social pressure to physically conform to gender roles for another day.

I am very susceptible to infomercials.

eff you Cosmo, part deux

I am going to try really hard not to make this entire blog about how much I hate Cosmo (even though I definitely still read it every month), but I can't make any promises. Cosmo obviously does not read my blog and does not understand how I feel about body hair. The magazine is constantly telling me to wax and pluck and shave to attract men, but to make sure I do it in secret. I think body-hair rebels should unite to form a revolution against hair removal! Until then, we'll keep shaving.

I have been considering subscribing to a men's magazine (GQ?) so I can study what men are instructed to do to pick up ladies. But I don't actually know any men who read men's magazines (besides Men's Health - which is not the male equivilent to Cosmo).

eff you, Cosmo

This past semester, I ended up taking some surprisingly awesome classes, as well as some surprisingly awful classes. In my Race, Class and Gender class (surprisingly awesome!) we talked a lot about gender inequality across many different levels and someone brought up an interesting theory: In our society there is an ideal type of person (A) and everyone else (not-A). The not-A tries (or is expected to try) to be like A and generally A is a white male. This is true for women; for example, it is now acceptable for women to wear pants (traditionally male garb) but it is not acceptable for men to wear skirts.

Anyways, over the past few years, I have noticed how sexist Cosmopolitan really is. The magazine's motto is "Fun, Fearless Female" but in reality it is "Sexy, subservient female." The whole point of the magazine is to teach women how to nab a suitable man. They even espouse the above A/not-A theory in respect to dating and relationships. In order to win over and keep a man's affection, women should hide unsexy, female-specific things: pads, tampons, nude underwear, hair removing implements, eyelash curlers (?!), etc. In fact, Cosmo advises you to hide your emotions and "act like one of the guys" to make your man see how awesome you really are. The same magazine tells you to throw back some beers and junk food with your guy and his friends to show how un-girly you are and also that 49% of men surveyed would dump their girlfriend for gaining too much weight.

In reality, this magazine is geared towards high school girls, not adult women. Is this really what we want to teach our young women? Should we hide our undesirable feminine attributes in relationships like we do in society? We're expected to hide our tampons from the world, but if we have to hide them from the people we consider to be our partners, our soul mates, our spouses, how intimate can our relationships really be?

BEST WEEK EVER!

So I work in a very small office located on a residential street and we keep our door open when it's nice out. On Monday, a beautiful golden lab ran into our office to say hello! Yesterday a miniature goldendoodle came in and today the lab came back in! The lab's name is Lulu and she is my new friend. It made the week so much better to have some doggie visitors.

UPDATE:Lulu came to visit again today! (Monday, 6/14) She hung out for a while until her owners wanted her back.

Something that really bothers me is when I'm feeling down or upset about something and someone else reminds me that it could be worse. I remember going through a rough break up (or two...) in high school and my mom told me to stop feeling bad at least I didn't have cancer, like our neighbor. So not only did I feel upset about my own problems but I also felt guilty about feeling upset. There can always be something worse that could happen to you, but your feelings are your feelings, no matter what the cause, and I don't think anyone has the right to invalidate them.

I told my mom that her comment only made me feel worse by adding guilt and anger to my own feelings and she replied that thinking about someone who is worse off than she puts her problems in perspective and reminds her that what's going on isn't really that bad. Is this the case for other people? Am I unusual in this respect? I want the right to have my own feelings, regardless of how silly they seem, and not have them belittled or invalidated.

4 word review of SATC2

Too many harem pants.