Month: January 2011

Paleo Schmaleo

A lot of people at CrossFit are into eating “paleo”—that is, no processed stuff, low-carb, etc. Indeed, a bunch of them periodically do this 30-day program called Whole30, which is super strict:

  • meat
  • vegetables
  • nuts & seeds
  • a little fruit
  • no dairy
  • no grains
  • no sugar
  • no alcohol
  • no legumes
  • no potatoes or other “nightshades”

Now, I get it. I mean, hunter-gatherers didn’t pluck their daily rations from the Cinnabon tree; they didn’t follow roaming herds of Auntie Anne’s Jumbo Pretzel Dogs. I also understand that humans are the only mammals that drink milk after infancy and the only mammals that drink the milk of another animal (rare exceptions excluded). And I’m clear that refined sugar is bad for you for many, many reasons.

But legumes? Really? I guess I just have a hard time believing that something that grows out of the ground could be that terrible for you.

Before you’re all, “Cocaine grows out of the ground!”, just stop. I’m not eating dehydrated garbanzo beans that are then re-hydrated and smashed into paste. Oh wait. That would be hummus, right? OK, well, they’re not mixed with kerosene and sulfuric acid and acetone and I’m not snorting them and, yes, I looked up cocaine processing. By the way, did you know that the Eloria Noyesi moth larva feeds exclusively on coca plants? You’re thinking what I’m thinking, right? That’s probably one productive fucking larva.

I digress.

One of the CrossFit coaches said that what she had assumed was arthritis her whole life disappeared when she did Whole30, and my joints are redonk, so I’ve been considering trying it.

Of course, it would be difficult for me considering my food issues. On the Whole30 website, they say, “Don’t you dare tell us this is hard. Giving up heroin is hard.” Clearly that statement was written by somebody who’d never experienced an eating disorder. Food is my heroin. So imagine you’re addicted to heroin and you want to quit, but you can’t go cold turkey because you have to shoot up at least three times a day to live. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you “trying to recover from a compulsive eating disorder”.

In addition, I might’ve mentioned that I can’t really cook. That would make the program difficult.

Plus there are some foods, which I consider healthy, that would be traumatic to give up.

Really just one food: peanut butter.

But the Whole30 people effuse, “You don’t need peanut butter! There’s an alternative. A delicious alternative. It’s called Sunbutter. It’s so delicious you’ll never want to go back to peanut butter.”

Lies.

That shit is nasty.

So until I learn to cook and find a real alternative to peanut butter, Whole30 schmole30.

I’m an “Athlete”

CrossFit Durham linked my blog to their website. They listed me under Athlete Blogs….hahahahahahakljakjahahahakljl;ahsh! (cough)

I am so not an athlete. Indeed, today I thought I was going to die during the last round of the WOD. Stupid box jumps. After every three or four jumps (and there were twenty in each round…along with ten wall balls and ten knees-to-elbows knees-to-somewhere-around-my-navel…five rounds! Great googly moogly!), I collapsed onto my knees with my face against the box. I finished in about twice the time everybody else took. Granted, I was having an asthma attack, but I still felt like a weakling.

When my sister and I were training to walk a marathon the first time, she bought us both Nike shirts that just had the swoosh and the word ATHLETE on them. We wore them ironically, of course, but we worried that others would think we sincerely imagined ourselves bad-asses. Wa said she kept meaning to take a Sharpie and put quotation marks around it.

That being said, remember my hissy fit (OK, hissy fitS) about people telling me I’ve lost weight? The hissy fits I had because, when they tell me that, I’ve never actually lost weight? Well, I guess I have because people keep saying it.

I don’t see it on the scale, but then again I don’t weigh myself much. I don’t feel it in my clothes, but with my ghetto ass, it takes a lot to feel a difference. I remember back that one time I did lose weight, people would chirp, “Ten pounds is a pants size!” I lost 25 pounds and barely went from a 16 to a 14. (For you dudes, that’s one pants size.)

Anywhoodle, I am definitely getting harder, better, faster, stronger.

But I’m not an athlete.

Signing off,

Amy the “Athlete”

New Theme! New Theme!

What do you think? It’s shmancy, no? The only thing is I don’t know how to change that box that says “About Me: Go to WordPress admin page -> Technical Speech Settings to change this text.”

I went to the admin page, and I found Technical Speech Settings, but my computer hacking skillz are limited to clicking buttons that say “Change This Text”. Alas, no button.

Bobby! Baaaaaahhhhhhhbby! Heeeeeelllllllllp me!

Bathtub Personality Disorder

Do you see it?

That's right: I caulked my bathtub. I'm a caulker. I caulk things.

Speaking of which, it’s my experience that every bathtub has a quirk.

Maybe the hot and cold faucets are on the wrong sides or turn backwards. Those are the special ed bathtubs.

Perhaps the water pressure is comparable to an eye dropper. Alternately, in the case of my great uncle’s house, it’ll blast your sins away (my sister’s words). Those bathtubs have boundary issues.

I can’t remember where, but I once used a shower where the faucet-to-shower-head mechanism was not a stopper or a switch; it was a ring around the opening of the spigot. You know, where the water comes out? Well, to make the water go up through the shower, you reached down and yanked on this metal ring. That bathtub needed to be different. That was a non-conformist bathtub (but it struck me as a little desperate, you know?).

Anyway, my current bathtub quirk is that, approximately 90 seconds after you’ve pulled up the thingy to relay the water through the shower, the spigot starts to whine.

“Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.”

I have to thwack down the stopper and yank it back up, and for the rest of the shower, we’re fine, the spigot and I. My bathtub likes to complain and get smacked around a little bit.

What’s your bathtub’s quirk?

Varna Chameleon

We create these caste systems in our heads, I think. At least I do.

I went to elementary school in a district with K-8s only, no middle schools or junior highs. At ninth grade, hundreds of kids from the eight schools spread throughout the county would funnel into Watauga High School in Boone.

The hierarchy of elementary schools was thus (based entirely on my perceptions and opinions):

  1. Hardin Park. It was right there in the middle of Boone. Full of Appalachian State faculty’s kids, townies. They didn’t have to drive ten miles to the mall.
  2. Valle Crucis. They must’ve put something in the water because they raised some OH MY GOD TOTALLY CUTE boys, particularly Antoine (swoon) who played on my brother’s soccer team, the Strikers (fanning self).
  3. Blowing Rock. Rich-people town. The kids who went to Blowing Rock would be getting cars for their sixteenth birthdays, and not an ’83 Subaru GL station wagon that was concave on both sides and cultivating a serious case of rust, and you’ll share that with your siblings, you’re welcome.
  4. Parkway.
  5. Green Valley. Parkway and Green Valley were interchangeable. They were on the other side of the county, and I didn’t know anything about them. But they had to be better than…
  6. Cove Creek. That’s where I went. Ten miles west of Boone in tobacco country. The only reason Cove Creek was above numbers 7 and 8 was because we had a dope-ass gym, left over from the days when our elementary was a high school.
  7. Mabel.
  8. Bethel. Again, Mabel and Bethel were interchangeable. Both considered Total Bumfuck.

So imagine my confusion when my brother went off to WHS and promptly asked Melany Johnson, who had gone to Hardin Park, to the Homecoming dance.

I was like, whoa. Can you—I mean, can you do that?

It didn’t matter that my siblings and I were faculty brats and my mom was a—gasp!—Unitarian Universalist, so we probably had way more in common with Hardin Parkers than with the kids at Cove Creek. It still blew my little mind.

Which was then rendered FUBAR when Melany Johnson said yes.

Let me insert that, looking back, the Cove Creek kids were awesome—except the ones who told us we were going to hell because we weren’t members of Brushy Fork Baptist, they sucked—and I’m still friends with some of them today. I’m just trying to illustrate the way I created this everybody-OK–nearly-everybody-is-better-than-me paradigm.

Well, I still do that. The one I had unconsciously developed about my gym is “I can’t talk to people who are fitter than me”. Which means…everybody. Because everybody’s fitter than me.

But my caste system keeps getting wrecked because people at my gym keep commenting, and emailing, and coming up to me and saying, “I read your blog, and oh my gosh, we have so much in common!”

I love it.

“Guns Don’t Kill People”

In response to Saturday’s shooting in Arizona, I posted the following on Facebook:

The fact of the matter is, it would be damn near impossible to walk into a Safeway and kill six people and wound eleven others *with a knife*. Guns do kill people.

My friend Joe responded with a link to a story from last May about a Chinese man who murdered eight people, including his family and neighbors, with a knife. The circumstances are different, and the story doesn’t indicate how long it took him to commit the eight murders (my guess is much longer than the hail of bullets that took out so many in AZ), but I pushed farther.

Me: All right, Joe. How about 33 like at Virginia Tech?

Friend Suzanne responded: how about box cutting knives that brought down 4 planes and two buildings. killed way more than 33. fact is, people kill people and it doesnt matter what the tool is that they use.

I get her point (and yes, people will commit violent acts regardless of what’s in their arsenals), but I feel like it lacks nuance. First off, does anyone really think it was the box cutters that allowed 19 Islamist extremists to commit the 9/11 atrocities? I said: Box cutters didn’t bring down those planes. A lifetime of indoctrination, years of planning, and the element of surprise did.

Moreover, let’s add up all the victims of gun violence and compare it to all the victims of knife violence and 9/11 put together. I’m guessing the former will tip the balance.

Mostly, I wanted to make this point: I don’t think *nobody* should have guns, but why did this mentally unstable man have access to semi-automatics?

Jessie helped me make my argument—that it does matter what the tool is that they use: guns make it ridiculously easy for insane people to take out a lot of people at once. Eliminating them won’t eliminate people on people violence but it will drastically cut down.

Joe replied: If someone were exercising their right to carry a handgun, that dude would have been stopped sooner. God knows I NEVER leave the house without mine.

And here’s the thing about Joe. He’s a work of human bad-assery. (Seriously, insert “Shaft” soundtrack here.) He has spent his adult life learning to use weapons effectively, for work and for pleasure. He goes spearfishing, for god’s sake. That’s fishing but with a spear.

So I told him: I know, Joe. And believe me, of all the people that carry guns, you’re the guy I want to have one. But you’re, like, special-trained, secret service dude. Most people who pack are about as skillful with a gun as I am with a stove, but at least the only person I’m endangering with my cooking is me.

I really don’t believe in the elimination of guns. I don’t. But I mean, do people in Arizona have to take a driving test before they can get behind the wheel of a car? Why don’t they have to pass some sort of assessment of skills and, more importantly, mental health before they stick a Glock in their pants and go to Safeway?

What do I know though? Seriously, I don’t know. Are gun tests the answer? If not, what is?