Ugh, it's that time of year again. Came back from my noontime walk soaked in sweat and red as a beet. I am going to have to start rolling out of bed earlier and walking first thing in the morning if I want to keep the rah-rah-exercise-endorphins going through the face-melting days of summer.

I am going to The Avengers with David tonight, and listen, y'all, chronic illness or no, I don't do movie theaters without snackage, so I calculated the carb content of popcorn by volume (100 cu. in. = 35). Heh. Pizza crust has 2 carbs per square inch, by the way. Diabetes is the most mathematical disease of all.

I need to find a way to tie fabric on my head that's classier than washerwoman kerchief but doesn't look like I'm trying to copy a hijab. (I find them aesthetically gorgeous, but I understand they have a religious and cultural significance that makes "ooh, shiny!" appropriation not very respectful).

I got invited to a showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show next Saturday. It starts at midnight like what I will have to nap all day to make it through. I have an odd desire to dress up, and I have this outfit in my head that I have seen in eighty hundred movies but I can't find a screenshot of online: short-sleeved button-down shirt open over wifebeater, suspenders, fedora. Khaki pants maybe? I can only envision the top half, haha. I hope I can locate my fedora.

soaringdragon42 asks how my meals are going. The answer is ... not great. I think I am having trouble right now because I am actually kicking harmful behaviors for good instead of just subbing in other ways of not dealing with life, so I end up sitting there feeling my feelings, which are no fun to feel. I've been having problems on and off with gastrointestinal distress. And my depression is notably very strong right now, so of course that doesn't help. I am gaining weight steadily, and I have been successful at just keeping my head down and continuing to work on what I can work on, instead of snapping back the other way to try to reverse the trend and just prolonging the obsessions. Either I've risen above my setpoint, and so it will settle back down to something stable when my eating gets reliable, or I'm rising to meet my setpoint, in which case there's no point in expending all the effort to keep an artificially low weight so I might as well just wait for it to stop fluctuating and buy bigger pants. I avoid weight-loss-focused blogs and forums, and keep my nutrition surfing (yeah, that addiction hasn't budged) confined to blogs by people who are weight stable and don't talk about weight loss much if ever. I freak out a lot but I talk myself down a lot, too. Ooh, and I turned down free food yesterday without a mental struggle! I guess in a lot of ways I am doing really well. It's just the actual, proper, sit down and put food in your face part where I'm flailing. Food is stupid.

Pixel, the Worst Cat In The World, had to have incredibly expensive dental surgery BUT they also thought she might have jaw cancer and then the biopsy came back clean as a whistle. So I am so suffused with relief and joy that I do not even care how much she yowls, a state of affairs she is taking full advantage of. Also they shaved her and she looks so hilarious it is just great.

I want a sewing machine.

la la la

I've had the worst mental block lately about talking about myself online. I can't journal; I can't join new communities or start new forum logs. I never did say much about myself on Facebook given that I have so many family members friended, so that's nothing new. But even on what dagnycat522 charmingly calls Message-Board-of-Note, I keep writing entries -- anything from a serious update on my mental health to a toss-off comment about music -- and then deleting them.

I suppose it somewhat extends to talking about myself in real life -- I've been very avoidant of support groups and therapy these past few months, though I've dragged myself in to both recently with good results. I do cry to David nineteen times a day about every little slight or misery, though, so it's not across the board. Poor man.

Oh well. I am posting now. Blah blah blah, ugh, I am looking at this and wondering why anyone would want to read it, and then thinking, "Don't say that! People will think you're fishing for reassurance!" and now I am just going to hit Post before I completely talk myself out of this.

[at a fancy wine tasting]
Ellie: What are they offering at this table?
David: Let's see ... [peers through the crowd] ... ooh! That one is AWESOME!
Ellie: What?
David: It's called Ent Wine!
Ellie: ...
David: ...
Ellie: ...
David: ... oh. "Entwine."
 

The first book in a series should NOT be allowed to end with so many unanswered questions! #TheSecretCountry

(Especially not when your husband has to go to work and can't start reading the next one to you for days.)

*flops about on the floor in agony*
 

Transformers III: [incoherent military yelling]
Rifftrax: I can finish that sentence for you: "Move move move! Go go go!"
Ellie: Wait, are they supposed to move or go?
David: If they move, there will be trouble. But if they go ... it will be double.

--

Transformers III: [bad guy attempts to get military secrets out of hero by threatening his girlfriend]
David: Hon? If we were ever in a situation like that ... I'd let them kill us before I let them kill the Earth. I'm sorry.
Ellie: Trust me, I accepted long ago that if my life depends on someone appealing to your emotions over your logic, I'm worm food.

 

How to Ruin Your Life

Get stuck. Stay in one place your whole life. Always order vanilla even though the menu is four pages long. Become the type of person who sends back lattes. Save up your money for a plasma TV instead of a plane ticket. Talk a lot about things you know nothing about. Have an affair with someone you don’t even find attractive.

Refuse to forget your ex. Make it impossible for yourself to do anything without remembering that you used to do it with them. Hug your knees under the sheets and think about how safe you felt when they held you at night. Remind yourself daily of how empty you feel. Find new ways to make yourself sad.

Get drunk all the time. Consider no Saturday night, national holiday or extended happy hour complete without a vodka-induced breakdown. Graduate college but keep drinking like you’re still in it. Notice that cheap beer tastes watery and stale when you drink it alone but drink it anyway. Look at old Facebook photos wasted and wonder where everyone went.

Never drink. Never do anything that could potentially be “bad” for you. Treat your body like the temple it is and say no to carbs, yes to wheatgrass, go to bed at ten sharp and turn down cake on your birthday. Take fifteen different dietary supplements. Monitor carefully. Succumb to nothing. Miss out on everything.

Compare yourself constantly, to everyone. Allow the standards of image-obsessed, age-obsessed culture to make you feel decrepit at 25. Scroll through skinny girls on Tumblr feeling wistful and inadequate. Pull at the skin on your hipbones, stomach, and underarms in the mirror. Sigh a lot. Sigh all the time.

Don’t fall in love with anyone or anything. Put an impenetrable wall between yourself and other people. Add a fire-breathing dragon and eight yards of barbed wire. Be suspicious of everyone’s motives. Hold grudges long after you’ve forgotten what for.

Fall in love with everyone and everything. Run after the next best thing like it’s a bus you’re perpetually late for. Throw your heart into every other stranger’s hands and be genuinely surprised to be hurt. Refuse to learn. Refuse to ever learn.

- http://milajaroniec.tumblr.com/post/18147884394/how-to-ruin-your-life

This LJ userpic has been rendered obsolete!

*wailing and gnashing of teeth*

 

[watching Parks and Rec]
Leslie: *makes several comments about Ben being small*
Ben: Do you wish I were taller? What's going on?
Leslie: No! You're a man-genius, with a taut, narrow frame like a sexy elf king.
David: I guess it's from being a Tolkien fan, but when I hear "elf" I imagine tall and stately.
Ellie: Like the Valinor?
David: ...
Ellie: They're elves, right?
David: They're not even a they.
Ellie: *laughs for approximately nine minutes straight*

Quick, somebody bring togas back in fashion so I don't have to go shopping for anything but bedsheets
 

He brought me a quesadilla and we polished off the very last bottle of wine left from our wedding reception. We drank and ate and watched 30 Rock and Frasier. We toasted each other and he quoted Teen Mom because he's getting sucked into it the more I get sucked into it, and I laughed and choked on my drink.

Now he's reading me Something Positive comics and hip-hop lyrics.

Today's the 10th anniversary of the Sluggy forums, a place that shaped the course of my life in such fundamental and profound ways I can't begin to imagine what I'd be without it. In twelve days it will be ten years since I signed up and saw that guy named "David L. Watkins" posting all over the place and thought, "Wow, he's funny and smart. I wonder if I should even bother saying anything. I'll never fit in here."

Holy hell, you guys. Things and the way things work out in the end.

Happy Valentine's Day. I love you each and all.

(Aaaaagggghhhh the Eve 6 album with the song I quoted in the post title came out in 2000. And then I died of old age FOREVER.)

The other day, as I was folding laundry, a fragment of a poem popped into my head. It was this poem that I'd had half an idea for, pretty much just a rhythmic first line and a killer final line, and had come back to again and again over the years, noodling with it, trying to fit stuff in the middle and never getting things to gel. I expect everyone who writes poetry has those won't-quite-cook fragments you keep coming back to. This one began something like, "Don't ever date a crazy girl / your friends and family advised" and ended "You'll still be glad you grabbed her sleeve / and kissed her quick on New Year's Eve / the best advice you'll never take" and something something something ending with "mistake." It was a really good line.

Oh, well. I'm sure it's in there somewhere. I coughed up "Menander" today by recalling a LJ post I wrote at least eight years ago; I'm not crossing anything off as forgotten.

Therapist: Here's what I'd like you to think about before our next session -- maybe sometimes what you're using as a solution to a problem is the problem.

Me: *tiny brain explodes*
 

Kittens have paws and say "mew"!

Well, they do.

 

So, I haven't managed to do a food diary yet. Obviously. Blech. I really should. I just keep feeling like I have to report a good, sane, healthy day, or not report at all. Unhelpful thinking, there.

What I am having trouble with lately:
- figuring out hungry and full. I feel like I was doing better at this and now am having more trouble. I seem to have started identifying hungry as "stomach is only 90% full" and full as "stomach is stuffed to 125%+ of comfortable capacity." And it seems to take me way too long to sense if I'm full.
- keeping eating appointments instead of grazing randomly. This is another place where I feel like I'm having so much more trouble. I just start to panic at the end of a meal when all the food is gone. I worry that I "can't" wait until the next appointment. I don't know what I think is going to happen, but I don't want it to happen.
- black-and-white thinking
- good food/bad food dichotomies, which make me want to hurry up and eat all the bad food so I can start being "good"
- weekends

What I am doing well with lately:
- trying to eat when hungry and stop when full, even if I get it wrong
- questioning the emotions that drive my anxiety around food, even if I end up soothing them with food
- questioning whether I really want to eat that particular food or just "something," even if I end up eating just for the sake of eating
- not checking diet/food websites as much, especially at work
- eating the amount I want of something and then stopping, especially when it's a "weird" amount like half a single serving bag
- not grocery shopping for fun/stress relief
- checking my blood sugar and giving myself the right amounts of insulin
- walking regularly
- weekdays

Also I have an appointment with my therapist, whom I have been avoiding for months, in a couple weeks. So there's that.

"The degree of my self-preoccupation is appalling." - Allen Shawn, Wish I Could Be There: Notes From a Phobic Life

As the kids say, GPOY.

Incontrovertible proof: I was not scheduled to be a lector today.

What the lesson said:

I heard a voice saying to me in Aramaic, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads."

What my eye clearly saw, and what my mouth probably would have insisted on reading aloud:

I heard a voice saying to me in Aramaic, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for me to kick you in the gonads."