Wherein I divulge too much information.
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.
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.
I hate clothes shopping. I mean it—I loathe it. I despise it. Just thinking about it makes me put a hand to my forehead and stagger to my fainting couch. And it’s for one reason, and one reason only. Not really. It’s for every reason, but for one huge, major reason.
Pants.
Shirts, I can buy. I don’t love doing it, but it’s one of those chores that just makes life a little easier in the long run. Thinking about all the no-shirt-no-service establishments to which I’m given entrée makes buying shirts tolerable.
Shoes, fine. I have a hierarchy when it comes to shoes: comfort > cost > cuteness. I’ll pay a lot of money for a comfortable pair of shoes. Whether my feet look cute in them is the least important part of the formula. I dig clogs, and I dig flip-flops. You will never find me out on a Friday night in FMPs. Maybe if I lost half my body weight, but would you want to walk around with 170 pounds of pressure funneled into your smooshed-up toes? I thought not. Whatever, shoe shopping is not the problem.
Dresses are all right. I mean, how often do I have to buy a dress? And I can actually look cute in a dress…I just tried to find photographic evidence, but the only full-body shot I could come up with was this:
You’ll have to take my word for it, I can look really cute in a dress. (Sidenote: that flowery, flowy dress up there, I bought that in, like, ’99. No shit. Wore it to my friend Dan’s wedding in October of last year. Probably gonna wear it to your wedding when you invite me.)
Of course, with dresses there’s the chub-rub issue. Chubby girls require
or
to avoid shredding the insides of their thighs when they walk. But again, how often do I wear a dress? I’m gonna go with twice a year. An average of two people I know get married every year.
Which brings me to pants. First of all, finding pants that fit my ghetto ass requires a tenacity usually found only in the honey badger. Second, remember the chub-rub? Well, that continues with pants, but fortunately, or un-, there’s fabric in between the frictional bodies. Fortunately, because there’s no angry rash. Unfortunately, because I will abrade the living shit out of the inner-thigh part of a pair of jeans. Seriously, if you were stranded on a desert island, you wouldn’t need matches or even two sticks to rub together. All you’d need is me, a pair of size-14 corduroys, and an up-tempo song on your iPod. I would start walking and blaze that motherfucker up.
Now about two years ago, I found a pair of jeans at Marshall’s—Donna Karan jeans (she’s a designer!)—and they fit, and even the social worker at my old school (female, straight, sort of uptight) said, “Wow, Amy, those jeans make your bottom look so cute!” I loved those jeans from the moment I bought them.
Well
Yep, that’s my fingers sticking through the gaping hole in my DKNYs. But I wasn’t done with those pantaloons yet. Who knew when the next time was that I’d find such a prize. I decided to patch that hole. What could it take? A little fabric, some thread, a little elbow grease.
Fuck. I have to go buy some pants.
I have a few lurkers who flat-out refuse to comment on the blog but send me emails about my posts. Today I got an email from a friend, which essentially said, “Toothbrush?…I call bullshit.”
People. Everything I write on here is true. I mean, I exaggerate a bit sometimes if it makes for funny. (My mom emailed me a couple weeks ago and said, “You’re too young to be having these bladder problems, especially since you’ve never had a baby! Go get it checked out!” And I had to tell her that I don’t pee my pants on a regular basis.)
(I totally did pee my pants that time when I was babysitting though.)
But I was not carrying a dildo in my backpack in that elevator. I will neither confirm nor deny my possession of such objects, but really? I emailed back, “Why would I have taken a vibrator to my sister’s house in Boston?”
She responded, “Because you lived in the living room and had no privacy.”
Touché.
But still. No. It was my Crest SpinBrush. Right hand to Jesus.
I lived in a doorman building in Manhattan for two years. Before you get too impressed, I’ll clarify. My building was in Hell’s Kitchen, right at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. And I lived in the living room of a one-bedroom apartment. For two years. In the living room.
That’s neither here nor there actually. I just sometimes marvel at that fact.
One Sunday evening, I stepped into the elevator on the way up to my apartment. I had spent the weekend in Boston with my sister, so I was carrying a backpack with my overnight items in it. The only other passenger was male, a little older than me, and cute. I gave him a half-smile and averted my eyes. (You may not be able to tell from this blog, but I can be quite shy.)
As I turned around to face the door, something behind me started buzzing. At first, I ignored it. I figured it was the elevator shifting gears or something. But the noise continued, so I turned around to take a look. As I moved, the sound moved with me. Bzzzzzzz. Cute Man looked meaningfully at my backpack, raised an eyebrow, and gave a slow blink.
My chest tightened as I realized my electric toothbrush must somehow have turned itself on. I threw the bag down, unzipping it furiously in the hopes that Cute Man could get a glimpse of it and we could have a little chuckle together.
I was still digging through my dirty clothes as the elevator bounced to a stand-still at his floor and he sauntered off. It was everything I could do not to shout, “It’s not a vibrator!”
Future elevator rides with Cute Man involved no eye contact. Or breathing.
Age thirty-five is better than 25 for many reasons.
One, my mid-twenties were rife with binge-eating and obsessive food thoughts and body hatred. I still have the thoughts and the hatred but with less frequency and intensity, and I have left the bingeing behind me.
Two, at 25, I still thought that just because I was good at something meant I should be doing it for a living. I kept saying to myself, “Ack! I don’t like this sales job either. I should get a different sales job.” Took me a long time to realize that it was the sales part, not the job part, that was making me miserable.
Three (and this is related to two), I’m getting better at determining cause and effect. That horrible gas and cramping? Yeah, don’t eat dairy, Ame. That crushing fatigue? You’re a glutard.
So, overall, my fourth decade is superior to my third.
There are lots of things about getting older, however, that don’t work for me. I have previously cataloged them. I’m getting gray hair and crows’ feet. (Yet I still get zits.) If I sit on the floor for more than five minutes, I have to kinda work out my knees—which snap, crackle, pop—before I stand up. I’m still pathologically incapable of finding an appropriate mate.
The thing that has caused me the most distress, in this journey toward the geriatric, is the urgency with which I now have to pee. A decade ago, I never woke up in the middle of the night. Now, it’s twice, thrice, even frice sometimes. During the day, I used to notice a gentle pressure in my bladder and know that I’d need to find a bathroom in the next hour or two. Today, it’s no pressure…no pressure…and then ABSOLUTELY NON-NEGOTIABLE.
Last night, I learned a little lesson. In case my cause/effect analysis goes on the fritz, I’m writing myself a little note here for reference.
Dear Amy, If, when babysitting, you’re playing Ghost in the Graveyard outside in the crisp February air after dark, and you are the Ghost, and you hide behind the composter, and the kids find you and scream at the top of their lungs, you will pee a little bit in your pants.