Recently in Being Better Category
I'm continually exasperated over this damn blog. It's obvious because I've been ignoring it for the last month after struggling for the past several months with the fucking comments system. I know they don't work but I don't know why and back in the day I could have figured it out. I've trolled through the movabletype forums without much success and so I'm left with that ultimate blog question, is it time to quit? Where I was meeting and linking to new people all the time, now I haven't done a damn thing and I feel like the whole point has sailed for me and I've been left behind. It's so frustrating.
But then I think I've been doing this for eight years, EIGHT YEARS! and I've grown the most wonderful friendships with people I guess I'd never have met otherwise. I wrote some things that I thought were witty and pretty good and then a lot of schlock and dregs of course. I just can't think of not doing and when I try to imagine, I know I'll be right back and then what was the point. So I'm just thinking. I have to divert myself from all my other time-wasters and focus on relearning the MT system to take advantage of the technology that is so different from when I first installed the system way back when.
So I'm just ranting, ranting, ranting. Feh.
I finished my first day of orientation for the new job. I'm completely burnt out on paperwork, forms, and overload on all the web applications we have to use for time, billing, expenses, etc. I'll get it, that's all I keep telling myself. Ended up grabbing some dinner with a co-worker at the big gay sports bar uptown to watch some of the Buckeyes.
I'm having more and more fun taking pictures. I'm completely shocked.
Friday I ended my 12-year run at a large academic medical center in New York City. I started out as a nurse in the ER after moving into the city to live with Jeff and continued through the hospital as a nurse in the cath lab then a research coordinator and then slowly falling into more managerial and administrative jobs. I finished with three years of a directorship under my belt, an MBA, and some great experiences. The thought of leaving made me sick to my stomach...the idea of a sense of belonging, of knowing my environment, of the safety of where I was and what I knew.
But I need more and I need to see what is on the other side of the grassy hill. In my quest for being better this year, I've tried to embrace risk both personally and professionally and so I decided it was time to seek other adventures.
I'm taking two weeks off then jumping head-first into a corporate consulting gig that will have me whirling around the US most of the time. Something so completely different and foreign to anything I've know before but I'm not only thrilled and excited but strangely less anxious and panicked. I take this as a good sign that I'm on the right path.
My main complaint about everything related to myself is that I'm always 3-5 years behind everyone else. Fashion-wise, professionally, emotionally, financially, and usually pop-culturally. Flickr's 365 Day Project where each member takes one self-portrait of themselves and posts it each day for a year has been going on for years on the 'net and Blog but I've only just discovered the greatness of Flickr and these kinds of group projects that much smarter people have not only done but grown so tired of, they've moved on to bigger and better things.
With the impending new job that promises 4-5 days of traveling around the US each week, I'd been thinking that I had a great opportunity to re-infuse this blog's horrifically lagging boredom as well as give me some focus and direction. I think pairing my travelogue with the 365 Day Project makes great sense. I just didn't want to wait until January to start so I'm starting today, inspired by some really great photography on Flickr. Let me be the first to say that I'm under no illusions that I'm a photographer, have any sense of style or composition, or understand the essentials of photography tools to be able to be anything but be another blade of grass in a really big yard. That's my cop-out.
Still, here we go:
My first day on the 365 Day Project
CHARO is the headliner on the first leg of the cruise. The bedazzled "Cuchi Cuchi" t-shirt making has begun. That is all.
UPDATE: Thank God for Bill and his eagle-eyed gayness. I would have been TOTALLY mortified had we spelled the shirts wrong. Good thing I was planning to bring the Bedazzler with us on the ship, though. Thanks a million, Bill.
Even though we're five weeks or so out from the Big Gay Cruise and technically still in full-on workout/losing weight mode (spin class twice a day now), I thought it was finally time to do some before and afters. I still think I can shave off a few pounds with the sesame seed and tic-tac diet but for the most part, I'm where I'm going to be after losing 32 pounds and fitting easily into a size 32-waist and baby-Gap t-shirts. For me, that was about the goal all along though now that the weight is off, I can see getting back from the cruise and working out with weights to bulk up and get me to some rippling hotness.
So this is where I was back in the Fall of last year around this time. Even though I didn't start working out until January of this year and was probably ten pounds heavier than in this picture, I think this about sums up how far afield I'd let myself go.
Me feeding the chipmunks, August 2006
And now this weekend, with my snazzy new square-cut trunk I bought just for the cruise, Jeff snapped this picture then subsequently ravaged me, finding himself completely and surprisingly randy over the junk in my trunk packed into the suit.
Me, July 2007
Fine, mock the suit...but then I put the suit on later that same day and the ravaging happened AGAIN! So of course I've ordered two more.
I finished up my second six-week beginners yoga class with what I considered the penultimate goal of beginning yoga: shirshasana or the headstand. It was quite a surprise to me, as even as late as last week, I wasn't able to haul my fat ass up and vertically stack it over my arms and head. But last night? Bloop and I found my balance and my big fat ass was up. It felt amazing and I even came home and did it again just to show Jeff. So, like, yay me!
This head-standing feat was even more amazing since I've been battling some neck strain this last month that has kept me out of the gym for the most part. I finally decided after some research that I needed to be rolfed and so, last week, I had my first rolfing and had a second one today. I sort of love it. It was painful to almost the point of needed to scoot away from my rofling guy (as if he would have let me), and he had to remind me to breathe through it, but I did and damn, do I feel good. Neck strain is much better (Hey! I can stand on my head.) and just having someone work into the muscles with their elbows was like the most perfect massage. I'm going to finish up with a third session next week and then I'll be done but would definitely recommend it to anyone who likes to man-handled during a massage.
And now a word about my big, fat ass that I was able to haul up and stack over my head. When I first laid out my weight-loss strategy way back in the day, I said that even though my goal was 170, I'd stop at 180 to see where I was. I reached 182 today which is pretty close for me to reassess. Am I Big Gay Cruise ready? Not quite. Even though the changes are even obvious to me, I'm still a little soft around the middle and can stand to get down to 170, I think. All along, it's been better eating behaviors (not dieting!) and exercise with a slow, slow start but then in the last eight weeks the weight has started to really melt off. I'm out of my size 36 jeans and am now swimming in my 34's, but holding off just a bit before I rush out to get my 32's. It's a pretty fantastic feeling, I have to say. To have put some work and effort over the course of time, something I'm not accustomed to doing, and to get some results kinda rocks my world. And Jeff, who is working even harder than I am, has lost an amazing amount of weight. His dedication to making his reality come true before he's 40 has been nothing short of inspiring and has been the fuel behind me getting up every morning to make sure I'm hitting the gym and making the right food choices. Maybe pictures at 170.
While I thought and fantasized about my world tour having something to do with writing a book (whenever I actually get around to, you know, writing something down as opposed to dreaming it up in my head), it seems the first leg of the trip is going to be more work related.
Anyone with an insatiable desire to know more and really understand the Medicare influence in clinical research billing compliance activities should meet me in Chicago at the end of the month where I'll be speaking on said topic. Seriously, how I got to this point is beyond me. I can pretty much tell you I was never sitting in my nursing physiology classes back in the early 90's thinking, "I'm going to really nail down financial regulations and compliance issues related to clinical research". I mean never.
But here I am, practicing my charming, witty voice so I don't bore the crap out of everyone. As one might suspect from the words: Medicare, research, and compliance, this talk has about as much moisture as the Sahara.
The Big Gay Cruise. Big because it spans 17 days from the end of August until mid-September this year. Gay because we've booked ourselves on Atlantis Events Gay Cruise line, and cruise because we're going to be on a Royal Caribbean ship with 2000 other homos. Big Gay Cruise. Pretty self explanatory.
Jeff's turning 40 this fall and we've been planning on doing something big for several years though we weren't sure what, exactly. He's always mentioned wanting to go to Greece and over the years, several people have mentioned putting a trip together out of southern Spain and heading towards Greece. Then, after taking several cruises and finding that cruising totally fits our lifestyle, we started hunting Mediterranean cruises that fit us. Someone suggested taking a gay cruise which initially we ruled out because has anyone seen the brochures for those cruises? Abs! Abs! Abs! And then some Pecs! Who needs that kind of pressure? But more people discounted the brochures as nothing more than gay marketing and assured us that gay cruises are fun and fantastic from start to finish. We started hunting around and found two possible cruises for us on Atlantis Events: The Spain, Italy, and Greece cruise or the Greece, Turkey, Venice cruise. What to do? How do we decide?
We didn't have to decide on one or the other. In a rare flash of inspiration and folly, I suggested to Jeff about putting the two cruises together in one, fantastic, mega trip since the two cruises sail back to back and the first ends where second begins. What could be more amazing? The idea was quickly crushed though because of work responsibilities and other assorted details and my heart was broken. I could just see how amazing this trip could have been but Jeff had ruled it out and so, moping, I resumed my search for something practical and within our time constraints.
But the seed had been planted and in a few weeks, Jeff and managed to rearrange his schedule and get the necessary time off and the trip was ON! We booked it in January and immediately started going to the gym with lofty goals of many pounds to lose, abs to find, and pecs to build. And now the research begins for all the stops: Barcelona, Valencia, Ibiza, Florence, Rome, Santorini, Athens, Mykonos, Rhodes, Kusadasi, Istanbul, Corfu, Split, and Venice in 17 days on a big ship with 2000 raging homosexuals. Woohoo!
It's no secret that I often go off and try to get healthy, usually by adjusting my diet some how. In the past few years, I've gone from a comfortable upper 190'slbs in weight to my all time max over my holiday vacation this past December, at 208lbs. I've been suffering through squeezing into my size 34-waist jeans for some time, always hoping I'd find that elusive 35-inch pair and finally, since Christmas, had to wear a secret pair of 36-inch jeans that I'd bought for emergencies when I just couldn't breathe in my 34's. But at 208lbs, that's just too much and the trend of putting on a few pounds and inches ever year needs to stop and according to the Body Mass Index which is a more accurate portrayal of healthy weight, I'm solidly in the overweight category. I'm not bitching that I'm fat, just that I am completely out of shape and heading towards the middle-age spread when I'm not even middle age.
Enter in the Big Gay Mega Cruise Jeff and I are taking to the Mediterranean in the fall and we have a problem. Neither Jeff nor I feel like we can be around 2000 'mo's and feel comfortable with our current body image. So we set some goals for ourselves and off we went. Now we're both on a healthy, realistic eating program (I'm following the Abs Diet recommendations which I love) and have good work out routines. I haven't been in a gym for over a decade so my weak little arms and legs are getting worked within an inch of their life along with doing regular ab routines and then swimming or biking on my off days in between weight training days.
So my goal is to go from 208lbs to 170lbs by 8/24/2007 or a total of 38lbs in just under 30 weeks. I'm not really focused entirely on the weight as I'd like to fit comfortably into a 30-32in waist jean to be really, really happy. We've been doing our eating and workout routine now for two weeks, hence the post here (because as we all know, I'm a good starter but a horrible, horrible finisher) and having lost the first five pounds so far, I'm well on my way to meeting my goal by early May which is great. This year, I'm going to be swimsuit ready in time to actually use the swimsuit.
I mean to take the big, flabby gut pics before I first started so I could show the before and after but those are going to happen this weekend which I'll post up to keep myself motivated. Nothing like a little embarrassing gut shot to keep me on track.
Let's just say I'm involved. I've been wanting to do this for years, thought I would need to drop out of my MBA last year to live the dream (then though WAY better of it), and have been secretly plotting and waiting for it this year.
Seriously, I have no clue what I'm going to write about (and even if I told you, I'm pretty sure that isn't what I would end up with) but I've been reading my motivational books on writing and my favorite fiction to get me prepped so I'll be ready.
So having had enough of enough and some trips coming up in September (Indy, Vegas, San Francisco, Portsmouth, OH!), I decided it was time to drop this tire I'm carrying around. To my credit, I've been working the Abs Diet eating plan for the last year and I while I haven't put any weight on, I've been holding steady at about 200lbs the whole time and feeling just better overall. Every so often, there is a crappy string of too much fast food for dinner, but on the whole, my diet has gotten much better. Healthy breakfasts of oatmeal and yogurt, smaller meals more often, and an overall balanced approach of moderation. But still, that damn tire. I'm sure it has something to do with my lack of exercise and that I'm 36 and all those excuses.
But no more...I've decide that to get to my ultimate goal weight of 175 lbs (which is my target BMI weight for my height), some drastic changes need to be made, at least in the short term to "reset" myself. So this week, I started several things: reduced calorie intake to under 1300 calories, almost 500 less each day than normal, increasing my water intake throughout the day, I'm back to walking between the apartment and work so 5.5 miles one way is good for about 400 calories and if I can get both ways in, so much the better. I've also dramatically reduced my carb intake for the short term. It's basically the Atkins Induction phase which I'll do for about a month and should be good for some major weight and inches loss. Of course I know the problem with Atkins is putting all the weight back on after the induction phase is over, but I'll continue back on the Abs Diet plan afterwards and be more conscientious about no fast food and moderating the rest of my "bad carbs" while working to increase my raw veggies and healthful power shakes.
Anyway, I don't believe in such deprivation for so long and really do think moderation is the best course, but I also think that I need some motivation and that is dropping from a 34 back down to a 32 waist and maybe losing my tire. Besides, I'm going to be out in SF during the Folsom Street Fair and I might want to take my shirt off. Doh!
My scanning abilities are about as great as my beginner watercolor stabs so I had to resort to taking pictures of some of my sketches the camera, thereby degrading the quality of the sketch that much more. But because I've been all penis and vagina about my watercolor classes, I thought I'd share. Remember, I'm a BEGINNER. Patience and understanding would be appreciated.
God, I'm wearing a pedometer now. I should just have the shit kicked out of me by middle-school bullies and be forced to give them my lunch money.
Even though my class doesn't end until next Tuesday, I'm unofficially finished with my MBA program. It ended at lunch today with the uneventful, unrecognized, unceremonial pressing of "submit" to send my rather large, boring strategy project and accompanying slide presentation to my professor. I would say had I been told at the beginning of this course six weeks ago that I'd be doing 75% of the project in Harrisburg while my father-in-law was busy dying, I would have said you're full of shit. But that's what happened and I was still able to do it. It has less to do with me and more to do with having enough people around me and encouraging me to take a few hours each day and just get through it. I'm exhausted and emotionally wrung out, but I'm done. AND, it's not half-assed, which was my fall-back excuse if things didn't work out.
I will say that for all the work and bitching and complaining and crying, for all the hype of sending out this last project and finishing the program, I'm very low-key and ambivalent about it right now. I'm just not one who responds well to the spotlight, preferring to just move into the next, better thing. My graduate degree is significant to me, but I'm not one for jumping up and down, no matter what I say sometimes. In lieu of celebratory calisthenics, I did run sorta crazy over at Amazon and bought a shit load of things I've been eyeing for some time:
Hell: A Novel
Urgent 2nd Class : Creating Curious Collage, Dubious Documents, and Other Art from Ephemera
Doctors and Nurses : A Novel
The Hypochondriac's Pocket Guide to Horrible Diseases You Probably Already Have
Don't Tell Me the Truth About Love
Star Wars: Empire at War [CD]
I Am Not Myself These Days : A Memoir (P.S.)
The Thin Place : A Novel
Case Histories : A Novel
The Secret Supper
The Cell
Dead Beat
The Itty Bitty Kitchen Handbook : Everything You Need to Know About Setting Up and Cooking in the Most Ridiculously Small Kitchen in the World
And now I have nothing to do but lay around on the porch and enjoy my free time. I’m totally in love with not being in school, already.
I submitted the first part of my five part "thesis" last night. I'm now 1/5th done with five weeks to go. Thesis is in quotes because I feel I'm dissing those who have had a thesis as a major component of their graduate or doctorate work. I fully realize one doesn't write a thesis in six weeks but it is just a bit bigger than a book report on Romeo & Juliet so I'm good with thesis in quotes. It's actually more of a strategic management overview of expanding the scope of research at my institution.
Fuck it, I'm just adding dollars to my Annoying Bucket every day just to be able to say things like that.
Apparently I've managed to pull the wool over the eyes of my finance professor one more time and low and behold, "A". I'm not gloating, I'm just saying. The fact that I got an A in a finance class is simply ridiculous. Yay me.
Anyone who knows me know I have a secret facination and obession and lust for bears. The irony is that I'm about has hairless as you can get, must to my dismay. That being said, I'm trying once again to create living art (and continuing my lazy days from vacation) so I'm trying to grow out facial hair. It is never really successful but I've committed to keeping it for a month as the Facialhair for Dummies website suggests so we'll see where it goes from there.
Just like all my New Years before, the resolution is to simply be better. With school in full swing this past year, I confess to being more selfish then better though I did try to put extra effort into not completely falling into boring MBA traps all the time. Jeff could have gotten more dirty monkey love but I'm putting together a short- and long-term strategic plan to rectify that issue. I could have reached out more to friends and family but on the whole, I don't think anyone dropped from my list and infact, I connected with a few new people albeit online.
But school is done in March this year, and then I have the rest of my days to focus on being better, being MUCH better where I can swing it. I look forward to being better to everyone in my life.
A happy and healthy 2006 to everyone.
Hey, guess what? I'm in graduate school! Ta-DA! Of course the whole decline and destruction of the blog has been mostly due to my otherwise engaging academic pursuits which, for anyone who’ll give me half a second, already knew. Believe me, I'm as bored and annoyed dropping it into every conversation as everyone is hearing it. Unfortunately, I do nothing else so it is all I have to talk about.
That being said, I'm coming to the end. I'm starting down the path of my final three classes and will be done in the early Spring which, as far as I'm concerned, isn't nearly quick enough. I mean, at the end of winter, does anyone really ever say, "wow, that was the QUICKEST winter EVER"? No, everyone simply wants to shoot themselves in February because it’s been the longest fucking winter on record and not even good drugs can hold off the creeping insidiousness of Seasonal Affective Disorder. But I'm sure it's a jolly ding-dong time to be in the final mad dash of a graduate degree. You know how graduating seniors feel in those final months before May? They're totally worthless piles of non-productive anxiety and excitement. That's about where I am right now, faced with two major upcoming holidays and a long, cold, snowy season. I'm thrilled, let me tell you.
But I'm also weirdly smart and only recently figured out that my consecutive six-week classes need not necessarily be consecutive so starting next week, I'm overlapping the first week of my upcoming classes (typically slow with the general getting teams formed, understanding the syllabus, and scheduling out the term projects) with my last week of the current class (typically slow with no participating requirements, discussion questions, and final touches on projects and papers). Had I been doing this from the beginning, I'd have been done in October. But hope springs eternal by this overlapping, I'm shaving off three weeks of school, getting me done in March instead of April. I may melt my tiny brain in the process but by God, I'll be done in March and that is all that matters.
I was greeted yesterday morning with the news that I would be promoted to director of my office effective immediately with what could not be considered an insignificant raise. I was at almost this exact point last year when a previous director had left and I was asked to take the acting directorship until a replacement could be found. At that time, just a few weeks into starting my MBA, I envisioned apocalyptic scenarios of outright hostile backstabbing, professional suicide, and dookie getting smeared on anything I tried to do. This time around, those things haven't exactly changed but for whatever reason, I'm completely confident I can handle it or at the very least, realize that if I can't, I'm not going to be hunted and brought irrevocably down, never to work again. How in the hell did I get here?
I don't seem like this person but apparently I am. I still feel rather seventeen, gangly, and clueless to this whole "professional responsibility" thing but whatever the disconnect, this is where I'm at and I'm willing to give it a run for its money. The Dean who anointed me yesterday morning gave me these words of support, "You've always known what you needed to do and you deferred to other people. Now's the time for you to stand up and do it without reservation." It was a little less spiritual then it sounds but it did have that sense of cracking a crop across my trained thoroughbred thighs so the intent isn't lost on me. Of course I'm moving my favorite office-bulletin board affirmation to the director’s office down the hall, the one that starts out,
A major concern for INTPs is the haunting sense of impending failure. They spend considerable time second-guessing themselves.
But then of course right underneath, I've added my all-time favorite, get-your-head-out-of-your-ass affirmation from Eleanor Roosevelt,
You must do the thing you think you cannot do
So they kind of balance or if nothing else, they allow me, the Fence-Sitter, to have a good view of the edge of impending oblivion while at the same time, the vision of righteous accomplishment. It's a good line to be straddling right now.
Ten years ago today I was 24, 25-pounds thinner, and was thinking about what I was going to wear to my first circuit party and how nervous I was to be the mid-western transplant in the middle of big, bad New York City. As it turns out, life changed forever in that big, dark backroom of the Black Party. Ten years later, Jeff and I are celebrating our anniversary by going home to upstate for the weekend to enjoy some relaxing time with one another and then take a cruise down south in April when I’m finished with class this term.
Neither of us is big on the mushy romance of it all and that’s just fine because we’ve always shared that kind of played-down sentimentality. Still, ten-years is ten-years and quite a milestone from where we both started out and for someone like me who gets bored and ready to move on to the next better thing after the initial fun wears off, it is quite something. That means Jeff has been the next better thing all along and I’m thinking I’ve been pretty good for him, too. So, happy anniversary to us for ten really good, really hard, really significant years together.
It's gratifying to know that other people can relate to my perpetual New Years resolution of being better. I've never been one to lead in saying or doing things and in fact, the hallmark failing of my Myers-Briggs personality type, if you go for that sorta thing, is a constant fear of failure and trying to convince oneself that what one says and does is actually correct. That is, without question, me. I spend great quantities of time and effort to try to be right and spend even more time and effort trying to convince myself I am while all the while holding firm to the idea that I could very well be wrong. I am nothing short of a perfect Gemini. But then again, what is 'right'. Right? I'm nothing if not always uncomfortable, at least a little, in most of my day. More so at work, but even when I'm home, even when I'm home alone, I question everything I do from a stand point of it being right for me. And this all ties back into being better.
My goal then is to be better and feel right about it which, depending on whose definition of 'right' we're considering, could be perplexing, contradictory, unachievable, or wrong, all together. Is right for me being selfish? As a care-giving, avoider, non-confrontational personality type, the whole idea of putting myself and my needs first seems selfish and childish however that lack of boundary is more often then not, troublesome and a dead-end avenue to anxiety, stress, and a whole lotta tsoris. So I try to be better about it and keep it on a short leash. As I grow older and wearier of the Whole Thing in general, this seems to become easier. Am I on a path to curmudgeondom? Maybe, who knows? I recognize I need to have more humor and laughter in my life and approach things from a humorous point of view; that in laughing the troubles of the day away, one does tend to live longer, happier, and have more people who like to be around them and that seems like an admirable goal for myself, just in general.
So being better is tough and after reading back through my blog entries for last year which is really the only record of the past year I have, sadly, I didn't find much. Of course it may just be the small ways in which I was better didn't make for good blog fodder but even so, it would have been nice to have alluded to it somehow, somewhere. I can't even cull up a "best of..." list of books, movies, music, or events and that sort of puts me off a bit too. So I'm now coming from a place of being better in small ways and thinking that recognizing my betters on a day to day basis might be good for the soul. Also, to make them a bit more bloggable which entails using exciting adjectives, embellishment, and exaggerations where necessary. Is it right? Who knows? Haven't I been making a case for how pathologically indecisive I am? Hello?
My question then for today is: was I better than the day before and if so, how? At first I would say no; there was nothing in my day that I would say made me better. Work has crazy voodoo shit going on and I'm finding my increased responsibility quite taxing and stressful (thus I'm up with insomnia at 3am writing about it). I hardly ever feel better about having to call someone out or redirect their behavior for the betterment of the job however that is part of the work and in doing it I'm fulfilling the role assigned. But as a person who, as I've said, hates confrontation most of all, it's just never a situation I come away from feeling better about. Except that my E. Roosevelt motto, "You must do the thing you think you can not do" has been fulfilled. I took the risk, gagged the hand-ringing Mealy Mouth, and charged forth. I'm can't sleep because of it, but I did it, none the less. But as I thought over my day, with all the minutes spread out for intimate review, I realized that as Jeff and I were sitting on the couch this evening, just passing the time together, I got up to get something and just wanted to kiss him and so I did. Just a few nice, good kisses and that was it. And that made me feel that I was being better by embracing the moment and feeling and just doing something about it instead of wishing I had. It's just a tiny, tiny fraction of my whole day but in that one thing, I wasbetter, and I think more then anything, that counts a whole lot and is what my idea of being better is all about. Of course I could go on to say how I wasn't in the mood but let Jeff ravage me anyway with dirty monkey love when we went to bed and that would be me being MUCH better (for both us, admittedly), but I'm going to focus on the Hallmark-nature of the stolen kisses and leave the wholesome image of that as I finish this ramble.
So the question posed then for anyone and everyone, where you better today, in some small way? Think about it.
