Category: Call Me Crazy

Wherein I share my particular psychoses. Mostly food stuff, but also other crazies.

Stop It

Here’s the thing about compulsive eating, and if you’re an alcoholic, addict, or other type of self-destructor, you can sing along with the bouncing ball: I swear to god I want to change. I want it so, so bad. I would compromise my morals if I knew that it would take away the impulse to do damage to myself.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I had a conversation on Saturday with a friend of mine that went something like this:

Me: I need to start running, but I’m slower than [our mutual friends who run].

Him: You can keep up with them.

Me: I’m way shorter, and my BMI is way higher.

Him: You can change your BMI.

Me: Well, see, I eat too much.

Him: Do you drink enough water? Water will make you feel full.

Me: Doesn’t matter. I eat when I’m not hungry. I’ve developed some pretty messed-up coping strategies to deal with my emotions.

Him: Well, now that you know that, do you want to continue doing it?

Me: No. I’ve been working on it for about eleven years.

Him: What do you eat during a day?

I recited a list, explained that I eat, for the most part, healthy stuff, but just too much of it because it helps me suppress feelings.

Him: If you take out 350 calories a day—just substitute a big glass of water for one of those snacks—you’ll lose a pound every ten days.

Me: (sigh)

I know this. I know it. I understand the math. I get how calories work. I grasp the concept of energy out versus energy in.

I just can’t stop it. And don’t think I’m not trying. I’ve read books, seen therapists, been in groups, taken skills classes, meditated—shit, I even went to eight sessions of hypnosis. I’m trying. I really, really am.

But some people seem to think this is the solution:

When somebody offers me the “stop it” therapy approach, it actually makes the problem worse. Since that conversation with my friend, I’ve been shoving food in my face like it’s performance art.

And not to blame him; his is a perfectly reasonable solution. I just have an unreasonable reaction to it.

I’d bet most people have something they wish they could just stop doing. Maybe it’s too much food, drugs, sex, gambling, surfing the internet, or watching TV. Maybe it’s being passive-aggressive or getting themselves into unhealthy relationships. Maybe it’s sniping at their significant other. Something that they know is bad for themselves and their relationships but they just feel compelled to do.

I guess, if you don’t have any self-destructive behaviors, there’s no way you could empathize with the struggle of someone who does. But if you don’t have any self-destructive behaviors, then god love ya. Be thankful. And when it comes to offering advice to those with addictions or compulsions, kindly just stop it.

P.S. This post is dedicated my friend, M, who shares my struggle and was told today by another male friend of ours to stop it.

The Foster Chronicles: Tulip, Week 2, Days 1-3

Day 1

Tulip goes to a mobile spay & neuter clinic a couple miles from my house. I pick her up after work. The vet tech tells me she doesn’t have mange. My head immediately stops itching. The hair loss on her ears is probably from poor nutrition. Once she’s on a steady diet of good food, it may or may not grow back.

She does have heartworm. :( (Public Service Announcement: Do not search Google Images for ‘heartworm’.) The doctor even found one “in her abdomen”. Tulip will have to go to Greensboro for treatment because there’s a place there that does it way cheaper for the foster organization. She’ll spend the night in the facility and then need to remain calm (read: crated) for six weeks. See, if her heart rate gets raised, she could “develop severe pulmonary thromboembolism”. That is, the dead worms could break off in a big pack and clog her arteries up. Grossest, most horrifying thing ever? Pretty sure yes.

Tulip’s dopey and sweet after her surgery. I actually let Violet and Redford interact with her because she’s so stoned. It mostly goes well, but at one point, when Tulip frog-dogs on the floor and Violet goes to sniff her butt, Tulip rrrrs at her a little bit. Maybe too close to the sensitive parts. I separate the dogs, just to be on the safe side.

Tulip won’t take her pain pills, even when I smear them in peanut butter.

I think about the two-week shutdown, and now the six weeks of keeping her heart rate low. It makes me sad.

I put her in the spare bedroom but don’t have the heart to lock her in her kennel for the night.

Day 2

I have insomnia again. Up at 5:00 after tossing for an hour. I check on Tulip and find she has peed, pooped, and spit up. I clean everything up and offer her breakfast. She’s still dopey and completely uninterested in eating. She drinks some water; that’s a good sign. I lie down with her on the couch. She grunts and squirms for ten minutes, jumps off the couch and spits up the water she drank.

By evening, she still hasn’t even eaten the biscuit I put in her crate when I went out. I try to get her to lick up her peanut buttery pain pills. She slurps at them and spits them out.

I have a visitor after supper. Tulip gives the visitor as much love as is dog-ly possible for an hour.

Then she eats about 1/8 of a cup of food. I rejoice.

Day 3

Still not eating. Still kind of lethargic. But is it possible she’s gotten cuter since I got her? I think so.

In the afternoon, I have another visitor. Again, Tulip pours sugar. Even does a little shnurffly hump-monkey on her. No, Tulip. Shnurffles, yes. Hump-monkey, no.

About 7:00, Tulip and I head to a dog-friendly beer garden to meet my friends. She’s a little nervous, but six people come over at different times and pet her. Sweet as pie. She sees other dogs and strains against the leash, wagging, wagging. She wants to make friends so bad.

So, 90% of my prophylactic eating is to numb feelings, but 10% is to avoid blood-sugar crashes like the one I have when I arrive at the restaurant. I haven’t had any meat all day, which is usually when it happens: I get woozy and sweaty and shaky. I feel like I can barely pick up my water glass.

The food comes, and while I’m palsy-ing fish into my mouth, Tulip’s leash slips away from me, and she heads over to another table to make friends with two dogs she’s been dying to meet. When she gets to the little black and white one, there’s a similar interaction to when she met my dogs. Something like,

Tulip: Hiiiiii! Oh my god, I love you. Do you want to be friends?

Little dog: Ew, scary. Mom! Get it away from me!

Tulip: Oh yeah? Well, fuck you then.

It was literally one second of snarling, nothing injurious, but still. I snatch Tulip away, saying, “Sorry, sorry, sorry!” and take her back to our table. After I get her secured and get a drink of water, I go back to the other dog’s people and say, “I just wanted to say sorry again. She’s my foster dog. She was a cruelty confiscation. I’ve only had her nine days, so I’m still getting to know her quirks. Anyway, my apologies.”

The people give me close-lipped, condescending smiles. I walk away, my face burning.

It was my bad. I probably shouldn’t have had her out yet. But I want her to get socialized, and I want her adoptability to be advertised, and I want people to know that pit bulls are wonderful dogs. And then shit like this happens.

The Foster Chronicles: Tulip, A Photo Album

And My Scramble Games Are Taking Forever to Load

Struggling here at Avid Bruxist headquarters, friends.

I’ve been ordering my amino acids online for maybe a year now in attempt to save a little bit of money. They’re still ridiculously expensive, but they help me. They really help me. Whether it’s the placebo effect or not makes little difference to me at this point.

Last week’s shipment got stolen off my stoop. Or so I’m inferring since the P.O. said they delivered it but it wasn’t there when I got home. (By the way, fuck you, thief.  And haha, I hope you were crossing your fingers that it was an iPod, when all you got was l-tyrosine and mucuna pruriens. Motherfucker.)

I called the company, and they replaced the shipment free. (Note to business owners: Vitacost bought my never-ending loyalty for $65.)

The replacements arrived on Tuesday, but I missed probably eight doses of one of the more important ones. I know it’s important because I’ve tried to reduce the dose before with negative results.

And I don’t feel good.

Probably doesn’t help that I’m stressed out from various first-world problems, e.g., an upcoming storytelling event; the new foster dog (who is a sugar booger, but there are challenges); a persistent cold which could I suppose be a sinus infection at this point; 500 bucks in tree limb removal so my ancient pin oaks don’t drop them and crush my car, which I hate and want to replace but don’t know if I can afford to, now that I’ve given so much money to the tree man.

I know I need to STFU, but I just wanted to let you know, if the blog doesn’t get updated, it’s because my robot-vacuum doesn’t get the corners of the rooms and I have to sweep them! Wah!

Eeyore

After the last StorySLAM I hosted, Jeff and I planned to get together and debrief, but we never got around to it. So a couple days ago, I sent him my thoughts, namely:

  • Even though no host likes to do the “How’s everybody doing tonight?… I said, How’s everybody doing tonight?!” thing, and no audience member enjoys answering the former with a “Wooo” and the latter with a “Woooooooo!“, it serves a purpose. It raises the energy in the room. It gets people feeling. It opens the audience up to the possibility of enthusiasm. So it needs to be done. I needed to give the listeners the space to get excited, early. (They got there. It’s just took a minute.)
  • The evening is about the storytellers. I was so nervous about getting my bits right that I forgot to highlight the people who had put their name in the hat. I would go up, do my piece, get the scores, and announce the next storyteller, which on paper is what I was supposed to do, but at the end of the evening, it felt disjointed, like two separate events, my part and their part. Jeff is very good about listening to a story and, for his next bit, riffing off it, whereas I sit in the front row looking at the storyteller and working up some serious butt-sweat. I can’t possibly pick anything up and run with it because the story is completely drowned out by the freight train that’s barreling through my head. Plus, even if I could quiet the locomotive, I have precisely zero improv chops. I cannot come up with stuff on the fly. The few lines I tried to do off the cuff that night, I flubbed. Thinking about improvising a whole three-minute segment—oh god, I just dry-heaved. So I need to either work on that or figure out another way to showcase the storytellers better.

When we spoke on the phone the next day, Jeff told me about an email he received when he sent out the promotion for the upcoming event. Apparently, a woman wrote something like, “We’re going to try this again. We’ve been there twice when the blond woman [I’m blond apparently?] has hosted, and she made it all about herself. We like it better when you’re hosting.”

Here’s what’s true:

  1. It was only my second time hosting.
  2. Hosting is hard.
  3. I worked my ass off to prepare.
  4. Lots of people told Jeff I did a great job.
  5. Lots of people told me I did a great job.
  6. One woman didn’t like what I did.
  7. Jeff said he disagreed with the woman, thinks I’m awesome, and wants me to host more shows.
  8. This woman and I are saying essentially the same thing, though my view of it is a little more forgiving and generous. (Hers: she made it all about her; mine: I was so goddamn nervous I couldn’t see straight.)

But, man, this kind of thing sends my day right into the shitter. Why does one random woman’s negative opinion trump all the positive?

On My Honor, I Will Try

For some godforsaken reason, I ordered seven boxes of Girl Scout cookies this year. And that simple act blew New Year’s Resolution #5 all to shit. What is it about those damn things? I know people say, “It’s ’cause they’re only available once a year.”

Bullshit.

The kinds I like are

Caramel Delites,
Thin Mints, and
Peanut Butter Patties.

Well, guess what the Keebler elves make and provide to my local Kroger year-round?

Coconut Dreams,
Grasshoppers, and
Peanut Butter Filled cookies.

And guess how much they taste like their Girl Scouty counterparts?

Exactly. They taste exactly like Girl Scout cookies.

So why was I eating five Caramel Delites every afternoon on the way to the gym? And then a half-sleeve of Thin Mints after. Seriously, like I couldn’t have them any day of the damn year.

I don’t know, but I took every last cookie to school yesterday and gave them away to my students. I feel so much better.

A Clean & Jerk Parable

One of my bits when I hosted the Monti StorySLAM on Tuesday (oh yeah, I hosted the Monti StorySLAM again last week) was that Coach Dave kept harassing me about signing up for an Olympic weightlifting meet, and you could all go ahead and wipe that skeptical look off your faces because that didn’t mean this fatty would be trying out for the Olympics. It simply meant a competition of three attempts each at the two Olympic lifts: snatch and clean & jerk.

I hemmed and hawed and made excuses about not having lifting shoes. Then my birthday rolled around, and my family got me

Pendlay Do-wins! Lollipop laces provided by my sister-wife. (Photo by Coach Dave.)

So then I dug my newly-clad heels in about the world’s least flattering garment, the singlet. (Just google ‘singlet’; focus on the athletic ones, not the sparkly ones you see at Pride parades.) Well, then this gym in Cary scheduled a “developmental meet”, which means yes on shoes, not necessarily on singlet.

I still hesitated, but Coach Dave, he’s a wily bastard, and he knows me. He said, “It’ll give you something to blog about.”

I guess some people, when they sign up for a competition, follow some sort of plan to prepare. I went strict on the Pretend It’s Not Happening program. Coach Dave watched some lifts, Coach Phil at CrossFit RTP helped me work on my snatch for an hour and a half [insert punch line] last week, and my buddy Liz gave me some pointers and wrote me out an extensive list of tips on yellow legal paper. Other than that, I just kept CrossFittin’ and whistlin’.

Meanwhile, my support team was rallying. My dad was thinking about driving down the mountain for the meet. My friends were conspiring about a banner. My sister was going to bring her kids. But on Thursday, when I realized I was starting to hyperventilate a little bit about the whole situation, I sent out the following email:

So, with going to Boone last weekend, the stray pit being put to sleep, the StorySLAM, and getting a foster dog, it’s just all too much. I’m still going to go and participate in the meet this weekend, but I’ve decided that no fucks shall be given by me that day. Therefore, I would not mind if you saved—nay, I would encourage you to save—your fucks for giving to some other event which might require given-fucks.

I adore you all,
ame

And that worked. I did not give a fuck. Until Saturday when I walked into the place. It was so quiet in there, and there were people in chairs watching, and the women in the first session (tall, skinny ones; itty-bitty ones; really fit ones) were putting up some big numbers on the board. Like, way more than I could. I mean, I knew calling what I was doing “competing” was fallacious, but I didn’t want to look like a charity case.

At that point, I got all weepy, and poor Coach Phil had to shush me and tell me it was gonna be OK.

The situation was bad. Earlier in the week, I would’ve been satisfied to hit a Personal Record at the meet. Now I had a new goal: not to shit myself on the platform.

I weighed in, 77.2 kg (170 lbs), and rolled around on a foam roll for a while. Coach Phil helped me warm up. My cheering squad did not heed my emailed advice.

Get it? teAMY… Team Amy, but combined. There are multiple advanced degrees in this picture.

Snatches first. There was one woman in my session whose three lifts were all smaller than my opener, so she went. Then I was up. I hit my opener at 33 kg (72.6 lbs) and my second lift at 36 kg (79.2), but I missed my third. I can’t even remember what it was…37? I got it overhead but crumpled underneath.

Several more women (all of them at least 20 pounds lighter than me) went, lifting enormous amounts of weight over their heads.

After that came the clean & jerk. I hit them all: 42 kg (92.4 lbs), 46 kg (101.2 lbs), and 49 kg (107.8 lbs). (Phil had wanted me to do 51 kg (112.2 lbs) because it would’ve been slightly above my PR, and I should’ve listened to him. Those clean & jerks didn’t feel very hard.) Most importantly, I did not shit myself.

Again, the real weightlifters came next and lifted some real weight.

The organizers totaled everything and called up the winners by weight class. As I was the only competitor in the Over 75 kg group,

I won first place in my weight class. (Photo by sister-wife.) 

The lesson, children, is this: Sometimes it pays to be the fatty.

[Ed. note: I feel a follow-up post bubbling in my Broca’s area. But for now, to bed!, for I rise before daybreak.]

I’ll Take My Victories Where I Can Get ‘Em

This reduced-sugar resolution is difficult. I mean, I’m doing it. Not exactly on the schedule I set out, but still going whole days (often two, occaionally three) without dessert. However, I think about it a lot, and sometimes the only thing keeping me off the English toffee is

Trader Joe's Unsweetened, Unsulfured, Dried Pineapple Rings.

Nom nom nom.

I know I should cut the sugar out completely. People say that the cravings would go away. But I just can’t right now. I’m 100% positive I would end up bingeing if I tried to go more than two days. Even one time last week, I was trying to avoid a sweet item, and I ended up eating everything around it. And then it.

But sugar is a poison, and I don’t want to be toxic. Sugar is a drug, and I don’t want to be an addict. That’s why I’m doing this.

Funny thing is (not funny-ha-ha, but funny-makes-me-throw-temper-tantrums-in-my-head), people assume I’m doing it for weight loss. Realized this a couple weeks ago when I talked with another woman about eating two Hershey’s kisses and really savoring them, rather than doing the Lucy in the Chocolate Factory routine I usually do.

Other woman: Well, you’re not worried about the sugar, you’re worried about the calories, and that was only thirty calories, so that’s great.

Me: …No, I’m not worried about the calories. I’m trying to cut down on sugar for its own sake.

‘Cause I don’t do shit to lose weight anymore. I don’t believe I’ll ever be thinner than I am. I’m—what’s the word?—resigned.

Not that I don’t want to be not-fat. I do want to be not-fat. I just have no confidence that I can do—or, I guess, that I can cultivate the willingness to do—what’s required to be not-fat.

Of course, four people in the last few weeks told me how much weight I’ve lost or said I looked skinny. I told them it was because I was wearing a tighter shirt than normal so I was sucking in my gut. Which was true.

Naturally, I haven’t lost weight. I weigh five pounds more than I did when I started CrossFit*. OK, whatever, muscle mass, distribution, toning, blah blah blahdi-fucking-blah. I’m sick of thinking about it.

Point is, I’ve made my bed every day of 2012. That counts for something, right?

*Update: I guess not. When I weighed in at the meet on Saturday, I weighed 170, which is approximately five pounds less than a year and a half ago.

M.O.

My super-friend at the shelter and I were having an email conversation after my meltdown on Sunday, and she said, “I don’t think you’re irrational. I think you’re angry. I wish more people were angry and we could channel it, make it into something productive.” And something in my brain went ding. My modus operandi when I’m angry is to seethe, stew, cast aspersions onto everyone (including myself), and curse the world.

But, by design, anger is a motivating emotion—it can drive us to action; that action can be harmful or productive. Like my friend said, we just have to channel it in a positive direction.

I wondered, what productive actions can I take? My thoughts jumped to this Facebook note from the Coalition to Unchain Dogs, which is enormously powerful (the note and the organization). But I immediately got overwhelmed thinking about “the hard work of relationship building and education”. Made me want to stand in the middle of the living room with my hands on my face, which is my modus operandi when I’m overwhelmed.

I backed up. If I wasn’t emotionally equipped to build relationships and educate people right at this moment, what could I do? I follow Carolina Care Bullies on Facebook. A few days ago, I saw that they had pulled a blue and white pit from a shelter but had to leave her sister behind because they didn’t have a foster family for her.

And I fretted, ate compulsively, and scratched at my face, which is my modus operandi when I’m nervous. Three dogs is so many dogs. What if she didn’t get adopted? What if she didn’t get along with Redford or Violet? Could I afford it?

Then I thought about my friend Kate K. Every year, she makes the same New Year’s Resolution: Say yes.

So I said yes.

I'm picking Buffy up on Saturday.

Maybe that can be my new modus operandi: Say yes, and see what happens.

I Pretend That I’m Not Competitive

That is, I pretend that I’m not competitive when I can’t compete, which is, like, all the time at CrossFit. But I am, in my head, competitive. Sometimes.

Last week, we were supposed to find our new one-rep max for dead-lifts. No way I’m as strong as a couple of my girlfriends, but I hit 248 that day, and I was really proud of myself, first because it was a 35-lb. personal record, and second because my form was really good up through 243. Two forty-eight was ugly, but it still counts.

Usually for all matters CrossFit, I comment on the CrossFit Durham site or Facebook page, but that night, I posted on my own wall:

I feel like even my non-CrossFit friends should know that I dead-lifted 248 pounds tonight.

Status was Liked. Props were conveyed. Yay, me.

But one comment made me go into full-on Ivan Drago mode. It was from my cousin, who said:

Nice work! I did 200 lbs a couple months ago. Not sure what I am at now since I couldn’t go today.

This particular cousin is six months younger than me. We rarely, if ever, see each other these days because she lives on the other side of the country, but we grew up as summertime besties at Grandma‘s house.

And I was always ferociously jealous of her.

She was beautiful and vibrant. Flawless skin. Body that could stop traffic. She laughed at everything, all the time, including herself (something I’ve had to work very hard to learn). Her family went on cruises. Her clothes were just about the coolest, not that I could borrow any of them because I was always half again as large as she was. She grew up, got married, had two ridiculously cute children, and is now a total MILF who goes on Mexican vacations with her hot husband. Both of them do CrossFit out on the west coast.

Now, back up a second: a month ago, the Universe offered me a particularly jarring lesson about being jealous of people. A 40-year-old acquaintance who still got carded when buying beer and her husband who, in a friend’s words, was so handsome you could hardly look at him, well, he committed suicide, and now she gets to raise two kids, one of them with special needs, on her own.

So intellectually I realize that You Just Don’t Know About People, ergo You Shouldn’t Be Jealous, but when my cousin posted that comment, I just thought, “No. You get everything else. You don’t get this one.”

And I immediately started planning my next trip to the gym and my workout regimen because I was not—was not—going to let her dead-lift more than me.

The problem is that there’s no such thing as healthy competition in my disordered brain, and it went, in about six seconds, from “work on dead-lifts” to “eat paleo and lift every day and lose 50 pounds” to “shove Peanut M&Ms in face at kitchen counter”.

A little later, I realized that this competition (a) was decades-old, (b) lived entirely in the real estate of my crazy-ass brain, nowhere else, and (c) made me feel bad.

This is the part of the story where I tell you that this realization lifted a weight off my shoulders. Changed my life’s paradigm. Set me free.

Would that it were. Nope. I’m still petty and shallow and jaundiced.