It’s amazing how much cleaning I can get done when I’m having last-minute company. In half an hour, I tidied the desk, wiped down the kitchen, cleaned the bathroom, took out the recycling, and swept and skated on Clorox wipes. Even changed the sheets! Rowr.
Just kidding.
Not about the sheets. About the getting some.
There’s a billboard on 85 that says, Every 28 minutes, an NC teen gets pregnant. Every time I drive by it, I think, “Man, those teens are getting so much more action than I am.”
Very special skin. It makes me want to kick Mother Nature in the nuts.
As I’ve mentioned, in my teen years, I took meds and smeared creams all over my face. And it helped. Some.
It wasn’t only break-outs, though. Just generally ickiness. Remember those Saturday Night Live “Delta Delta Delta” sketches? In one, the sorority sisters meet a new rushee, and after she leaves, the girls are talking shit about her. Pretty sure it’s Roseanne Barr who says, “Could her pores have been any bigger?” I can’t tell you how aware of my gigantic pores I became in that moment.
My skin got better as I got older. Never beautiful. But tolerable. Zits, yes, but persistent acne? No. Painful blemishes, yes, but eh, I could deal. Especially if it meant not giving up sugar, which those bastards Joe and Terry Graedon told me to do.
Then a few months ago, I started breaking out worse than ever. Like, pimples in the crease of my neck. On my jawline. On that bone behind my ears? On my eyelidsareyoufuckingkiddingme?
I thought, Maybe it’s my face wash, so I tried different ones. No change. Detergent? Went back to Arm & Hammer. No dice. My shampoo or conditioner? Nope.
I finally asked Facebook for dermatologist recommendations. As soon as I booked an appointment with one, I got to thinking. What had I been doing for the last few months that was different from before?
Well, I had been taking fish oil capsules…? Googled ‘fish oil and acne’, and while a lot of the reviews said fish oil could help get rid of acne, a few people said it made things worse.
I stopped taking fish oil, and my skin indeed started looking better.
I decided to keep my appointment to see the dermatologist anyway because my skin was never perfect, and maybe this could help.
Let me ask you, how long after your appointment do you consider it reasonable to be seen by a doctor? Because 20 minutes, I can tolerate, but 45 minutes makes me want to kick somebody in the nuts.
Moreover, the doc started telling me what we were going to do before she even looked at my skin, and then only for—seriously—less than a second. Two topical prescription medications. $25 for one, $30 the other. Copay: $60.
I’m telling you, if I don’t look like Cate Blanchett after this, somebody’s nuts are getting kicked.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the conversation we had in the comments the other day. You know, about my being judgmental. I’m still a little surprised by Opiner’s reaction. Why did that post in particular offend him so mightily? I felt like that one was kind of a throwaway, actually. I wasn’t thinking horrible thoughts about CaryMale37. I just find unnecessary quotation marks funny. Clearly, I’m not the only one.
Listen, I make joke! (That has to be said with an Eastern European accent.)
I mean, yes, I’m judgmental. But seriously, once I get to know you, I nearly always adore you. I’m going to say 99.64% of the people I get to know? I am almost pathologically admiring of them. I’m arguing a case for their awesomeness inside my head at all times, and they just keep providing me with evidence. (The other 0.36% of the people I meet I think are total douches.)
So, should I judge people I don’t know? Probably not.
Do I do it? Yep.
Is it funny? I think so. Often.
…But I’m coachable. I’ll work on it.
I knew this guy, only peripherally really, when I lived in New York. He was probably in his mid-forties, businessman. At one point, he said to me, “I’ve started looking at all criticism as coaching. Even personal attacks, I just take as something to consider and work on to be more effective with people.”
My Catholic friend Cat frequently listens to a Buddhist podcast. When I told her about remembering what the businessman had said, she mentioned that her podcast monk often says something like: Let everyone be your Buddha. Every person that you meet appears before you to teach you something.
So, from now on, I’ll try to remember to reflect on my judgments of prospective dates.
I’ll probably still make fun of them on the blog, though.
My friend Anna used to tell her students, “Nobody’s good at everything, but everybody‘s good at something.”
And that’s pretty true at CrossFit. Most people excel in one area. They might be good at other things, but they rock it out on one particular lift or skill. You have people like that guy I watched blow through push-ups and box jumps like it was a stroll through the park. There’s my sister-wife who can dead-lift ridiculous weights. Colin climbs on and over stuff like a monkey. Phil can snatch his own body-weight. Erin will run circles around you. So will Paul. (Actually, Paul can do most things. But he’s kind of a freak of nature.)
There’s really nothing that I excel at at CrossFit. People don’t point to me as an example of how to do anything in the gym.
In the gym.
Did you get that part?
Because last Wednesday, a bunch of us CrossFitters went rollerskating. Turns out, I’m kind of a bad-ass in the rink. I had no idea I could skate like that!
Could it be my secret fantasy is not a pipe dream, after all?
At the gas station this evening, I saw a person of indeterminate gender who looked like the adult child of
and
Anybody want to come over and sit next to my bed with a shotgun?
Like 95% of females in this country, I have spent a really stupid number of hours of my life fretting about what number would show up when I stepped on a scale. But about eight years ago, when I decided to seek treatment for my food addiction, I started by buying two books, one called Overcoming Overeating and the other, When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies. In them, the authors said, Do NOT weigh yourself; throw out your scale. And I did. I didn’t weight myself for years. When I went to the doctor’s office, I would close my eyes and tell the nurse not to say my weight out loud. I still don’t weigh myself. I don’t own a scale. I only know approximately how much I weigh.
Here’s the thing, I like measurable results. I like to see data about how I’ve improved. Or not. I think it can be really motivational. But only when there’s no mental illness involved in your outcomes.
Because, for a compulsive overeater/food addict/emotional eater/what-have-you, the absolute worst thing you can do is focus on your weight. If you’re trying to heal yourself from obsessive thoughts about food, weighing yourself adds a whole new level of crazy. I know this first-hand. When I used to go on diets, I would think about nothing but food, I would gorge myself on food I hated because it was low in Points, and I would scheme how to trick the scale—“Maybe if I take off my earrings before I weigh in, I’ll hit my weight goal.”
Now I have a new weight goal. It’s called a PR, and I won’t ever see it by stepping on a scale. A PR is a personal record. As in, you pick up more weight than you ever have before.
You may remember my first attempts at the clean & jerk back in late August. I was lifting about 25 lbs. Well, by December 29, I hit a one-rep max of 73 lbs. I hadn’t tried for a new 1RM since. This week’s Open WOD called for clean & jerks…at 110 lbs. for females. Ha! I knew I wouldn’t be able to C&J 110 lbs., but I figured it was a good time to find my new 1RM. If I hit 88 pounds, I was fixing to be really happy.
I worked up to 73, doing three reps at a time. Cake.
I decided to do one rep at each increment from there on out.
78. Easy.
83. No problem.
88. Fine.
93. Fail.
Coaching from Rich…93. Yep.
95.5. With more coaching from Rich, done.
98. Rich, coaching, got it.
100.5. Fail. Rest. Rich, coaching. Cleaned, and motherfucking jerked.
I tried 103, but I was shot. I did not care. 100.5 pounds! Now I can’t wait to get back in there and lift 103 pounds over my head.
Why I love CrossFit (with a hat tip to friend and awesome athlete, Nelly, and I quote): My “weight goal” is now something that I want to LIFT, as opposed to something I want to BE.
As a kid, a lot of things made me proud of myself. A 102 on a spelling test (I had to get the two Bonus Words to be satisfied), getting the violin solo in orchestra, a blue ribbon at Field Day, making it into the Pioneer Playmakers drama troupe.
But during the course of my adult life, there haven’t been a whole lot of times when I felt like patting myself on the back.
I didn’t feel particularly proud of myself when I got my Master’s. My roommates had to be like, “Uh, Amy, are you going to invite us to your graduation?” I said, “You want to go? Wait, do you think my parents would want to go?”
I bought a house, but I wasn’t brimming with pride on closing day. I just signed a bunch of paper and pay my mortgage on time every month. Woo-frickin-hoo.
I teach children every damn day of the week, but I don’t walk out of my school, going, “I make a difference.” Most days, I’m just glad I haven’t doled out any corporal punishment.
But then I go to CrossFit Durham.
Today the WOD was: alternating 20/18/16/14/12/10/8/6/4/2 burpees and 2/4/6/8/10/12/14/16/18/20 double-unders
My time: 20:52 Rx*
I finished last.
Again.
And most definitely, a spectator would have said less, “What an athlete!” and more, “Wow. That’s…she’s really…trying hard, isn’t she?”
But you know what? I hate burpees, I hate double-unders, and I did ’em anyway. Afterward, I had to lie on the floor, whimpering, and hit my inhaler twice, but I finished.
Why I love CrossFit: I come in dead last and still feel proud of myself. Every time.
*Rx, y’all. I can count on two fingers how many times I’ve done a WOD as prescribed. Today was #2. (My middle finger, as it were. Which I dedicate to burpees everywhere.) Yes, I had to do a single bounce in between each double-under, but I didn’t count attempts, which is considered totally legit to do. No, if a rep was going to count, I was going to jump over that rope.
And jump I did. And burpee I did.
