Oh Snap...or Rather Snap Ouch

Today is day five of this weeks goals and I have not consumed any soda; dammit, I mean pop. But I haven't gotten very far with the kitchen. I did get a lot of healthy things to eat, although I haven't been as successful about making my lunches and taking them to work as I want to be. But I can forgive myself for that and the lapses in healthy eating I may have had because my goal this week wasn't to completely overhaul my diet and start eating clean and healthy. And the lapses are justification for it. Previously I would think in a dramatic, bawling, over the top way that I had failed and use that failure as a reason to fall back into horrible eating habits, which in part would consist of consuming the vast amount of empty calories in pop. Instead I've stepped back, assessed what I've done right, been content in comparison to what I ate last week, gave the rubber band on my wrist a snap for considering giving into the temptation of drinking pop and gone about my merry way.

So, my rubber band trick is working. I'll walk past the pop machine and if I find myself strongly desiring one, snap. On my first night back at work it was the worst. I did well with the pop machine, but on my lunch I had to fuel up my vehicle and on the way to the gas station I habitually though I should pick up some pop while I was there. It resulted in a snap of the rubber band. I've also been using it to avoid the many boxes of girl scout cookies remaining the back of the van. Every time I think about cracking open a box of those I get a snap, which has been more often than pop. Nothing against girl scout cookies, they're awesome, but when I open a box I tend to eat all of the cookies it contained. There's a minimum of 900 calories in those boxes. I need those less than I need pop.

I'm not an advocate for negative reinforcement, but I do know if it works for me I should use it. And I don't think that it's the wincing from a potential snap that keeps me from persisting in bad habits. Honestly the snap hurts less than the rubber band snagging the little arm hairs on my wrist. To me the rubber band is a reminder of what I'm doing, and I see it as often as I look at my watch (which is far more often than it should be, but that's a whole other blog).

And so I can say oh snap when I walk past the pop machine like it's an a$$hole trying to get my attention, and snap ouch when I'm tempted but know better.

Starting to Organize the Insanity

I decided it’s time to refocus this blog, it was just a clusterf*** of thoughts I was having at different times. I’ve decided (in manifesto to myself that I may or may not publish in the future) that it’s time to get my sh-stuff together. Hopefully this blog with be a reflection of that happening. We shall see…

This week have two goals, cut out soda and organize the kitchen so I can use it to make the foods that I know that I need to make in order to get myself healthy and happy again.

I need to not call it soda, I’m from the Midwest and we call it pop, so really I need to stop drinking pop this week, for many reasons. I think that the reason I drink so much in the first place is because it’s a sort of comfort food. It sort of gave me my first feelings of freedom. My parents wouldn’t let us drink a lot of pop because it was expensive and therefore only allowed it for themselves. I remember drinking a lot of tap water and not much else because I didn’t really like milk and I’m pretty sure that they didn’t have juice in the house. Maybe the powdered lemonade or dollar gallons of punch, but not much else.

So, on the occasion that my parents kept their word and gave me an allowance (I did plenty of chores, maybe not in a timely manner, but more than enough to earn the bi-weekly two dollars that I rarely received), I would often get a glass bottle of pop from the gas station along with the cheap candies that usually never cost more than a quarter (I personally love thinking about how we regularly got candy cigarettes, and how so many people these days would just abhor the idea that we loved acting like we were smoking). There’s something ingrained in my mind about the freedom of being able to afford pop on my own and how more satisfying it was to drink it because it tasted like something I had earned. Looking back on it I may have just loved the change from ice cold metallic tap water, nevertheless I think that I continue to get that feeling every time I buy a pop. Especially since I most often seem to revert back to drinking it when I’m having a stressful evening or I just happen to very freaking tired.

Every time I drink it there’s a part of me that remembers the carefree weekends my sister and I spent drinking two litters of Pepsi and eating gigantic bowls full of peanut butter M&Ms. We would stay up until three or four in the morning drawing, talking about and watching anime from the caffeine and sugar highs. I think those feelings were what allowed us to work at Wal-Mart overnights without any problems. Deep down we knew remembered those nights and it allowed us to make it through all those droll nights at Wal-Mart, stocking the same shelves over and over like hamsters on wheels, regardless of how obnoxious our latest overnight manager was and how much we knew we hated the job.

That may even be what allows me to keep my sanity working overnights without her now. Every time I open a bottle of pop something in me remembers those nights, and every super sugary sip reinforces those memories.

Well, it’s time to stop that. I think that I’m going to get a rubber band and put it on my wrist. Then every time I think about getting a pop or a ridiculously sugary food throughout my work night (or even outside of my work night) I give it a snap and start associating that with the old “sugar high” as opposed to the freedom and carefree nights of my youth.

I’m sure that there are other ways (hopefully more positive) but how am I really going to reward myself. Certainly not with any kind of food, I really need to retrain my mind not to be rewarded with food, nor do I want to use money, mostly because I won’t keep that promise. I’ll just buy junk I don’t need or put it in a jar that I will somehow fish the money out of later, regardless of how it’s sealed.

In the meantime, rubber band pain it is.

 

The second thing on my list is getting the kitchen organized. This is for two reasons, I need to know what junk I have in my kitchen and need to get rid of, and I need to get my useful gadgets down where I can use them.

Since I started working my husband has slowly taken over the kitchen, this means easy to prepare, preservative packed garbage food. I know how to make cakes and frosting from scratch, yet there are cake mixes and containers of frosting in the pantry. There are canned foods, boxed foods, and stuff I would never consider “stocking up” on because I could easily make them myself, I certainly don’t need a shortcut to make them because I typically can’t stand the taste of these shortcuts.

So, I’ll go through it and see if there’s a way that I can weed out the gross stuff that’s going to shorten our lives and continue to make us sick, and start phasing in the stuff that’s going to start getting us healthy.

Then I need to get my gadgets off of the high shelves and on the shelves that we just bought for the porch. I would rather freeze my toes off on the porch in winter than worry about breaking my neck trying to get my rice cooker from the top of the kitchen cupboards. Among those gadgets are my steamer, bread maker and slow cooker, all things that I would be more willing to use if I didn’t have to worry about putting them back after I was done.

It will be awesome to start making myself fresh baked bread again.

Is It Really Worth It

I've been driving myself a little more crazy lately wondering if how hard I work is really worth it. I'm not just patting myself on the back or boasting when I say that I work hard, because I do, and anyone I work with will say the same. The problem is that I don't get a whole lot of feedback from the people who matter regarding the work that I do. Sure my manager can thank me, but I don't hear anything from anyone higher up than her, and it wouldn't be too difficult to send me an email thanking me for my hard work. Although I did hear from my manager that the big boss is talking about giving me a chance at a job with more responsibility.

Which has me wondering if it would be worth it. I took my current promotion for two reasons, the first was that I wasn't getting paid what I was worth. It's hard to work as hard as I was and know that I wasn't getting paid anything remotely close to what I should be. To make me sound a little less arrogant would be to say that I was making the same amount of money as people who were a lot less productive than me. The other was that I knew it would be good to have supervisor experience on my resume, even if I got just six months of experience that would be far more than I previously had, and when a majority of the jobs that I had previously been interested in required at least six months of supervisor experience that told me a lot.

My husband graduates from college in May and hopefully he will find a position that pays well so I can possibly go back to a job I enjoy. As it stand all I can do is hope that all of what I'm currently dealing with is worth it, and that perhaps I'll be able to find a job that would utilize my talents without my having the fear that one day they will use the words assistant manager.

I don't think that it would be very professional to laugh hysterically at my bosses.

The Majority of Us May Be Zombies

Think about it for a minute, how often do we view news stories that are actually relevant to us. Why the hell do I know who Kim Kardashian is, or any of the Kardashians for that matter. I've never watched their show, and don't have any desire to watch it. Yet, I know who they are, I know that Kim named her latest offspring Saint, I even had a discussion with one of my co-workers about this. It could be argued that I know this because of Kanye, but I don't even listen to the radio anymore, much less his music, hell, I didn't even know who he was until his MTV/Taylor Swift stunt and the Jay Leno interview that followed.

I have no desire to vote for Donald Trump, I can't stand looking at him and hearing his voice, but I know who he is and what his latest controversial comment is. I also know that I would loathe the idea of him being president but because so many people are zombies they are going to vote for him because he's the one who is getting thrust upon us by the media.

That seems to be how we decide what we are or are not going to do these days. Whatever the media (including social media) feeds us, we decide that is what is most important in our lives. The majority of the public isn't going to look at the pros and cons of what having a man like Donald Trump is going to do to us, they just know that he isn't going to do any worse than the other people who are in office right now supposedly not getting anything done. I say supposedly because they may very well be getting a lot done, it's impossible to know because the news and social media are too busy writing stories about the Kardashians and Trump and that's what we're reading, whether we like it or not.

I wish I could say that this is my declaration to step away from Facebook and Twitter, or even away from any form of technology, but I'm just not willing to do that.

And therefore I have to admit I too am a zombie, I don't like it, and I'm not suggesting anyone go off the grid in order to avoid being a zombie, I just kind of hope that somehow being aware of it will help me delve deeper and find out information that is significant and makes me a little less than a zombie.

It Really Is About Boobs This Time

It's been a long time since I posted anything, which is mostly because I've been excruciatingly busy. I've got two jobs and have been working between 50 and 60 hours most weeks. It's tough, but it's what I've got to do right now. I'd like to think that it keeps me from going beyond the demure part of my insanity, but I may be going past that because of all the hours I work.

As for the boobs title, that's what I'm dealing with, and it seems that's all I've been posing about. Unfortunately the mammary glands seem to been the bane of my existence right now. Within the last few weeks I've had a bilateral MRI, two mammograms, an ultrasound, stereotactic (core) biopsy, and cellulitis on the side where I had my lumpectomy. It's to the point where my health care providers are encouraging mastectomy. That's not something that I want to hear at 33 (almost 34) years old. I always thought if I was going to get a boob job it wasn't going to be because they were being cut off first, but at this point that's what it may be.

There's a whole laundry list of reasons while I should and shouldn't do it, but really the reasons to get it done far outnumber the reasons not to get it done.

I have some time to think about it. Right now the cellulitis has the doctors baffled, I have to get over this problem with them before I can move on to the next.

Facing My Mortality

I've had a pretty rough year. And while there are many things that I could address, but much of it feels insignificant compared to the two brushes with my mortality.

At the end of July I found out I had breast cancer and had to go through the treatment process, while I was fortunate it was only early stages and didn't have to go through chemo it was still startling blow to my reality that at some point my body could betray me as it had already begun to do so. If I had not chosen to have the biopsy to remove the lump and just continued to get mammograms and ultrasounds every six months there is the strong possibility that it could have been a lot worse than it was.

Then there was the car accident, I was on my way to a job interview when the GPS took me down a back road on an icy day. The back wheels hit ice, I thought I'd be in a snow bank and nothing more, but I hit a driveway that sent the car rolling three times and it landed upside down. I had to roll the window up to open it and pull myself out. I walked away with cuts on my hands and body strains that have me in physical therapy.

The car was totaled, my mother-in-law saw it and couldn't believe that I had walked away from it.

It didn't help my depression at all, but it has set me forth to take care of many things that I've kind of been putting off. I took a job I didn't necessarily want to take, but it is time to get moving forward, and if I have to take a few steps back in order for that to happen so be it.

I'm fortunate to be alive and mostly healthy, it's time to live and be fully healthy.

Boobs...Sorry, I'm Just Looking for the Attention

And throwing around a word like boobs tends to do it.

When I started this blog at the beginning of the year I thought that a lot of it would be about how I changed my lifestyle, and in all honesty my life has changed, though I can't really say the lifestyle has much.

I had ideas about where I was going and what I was going to do and now I weigh more than I did and my eating habits are equally atrociousness, I don't spend as much time with my spouse and children as I wanted to and I haven't met any of the goals that I planned. And while I could blame my boobs for these problems, that's not really the case at all. More of it is what's been going on in my head than what's been going on in my body, although technically the chemical chaos in my brain could be considered what's going on in my body but I'm not going to argue the technicalities with myself.

The fact is before I started to think about getting any of that stuff done I had to deal with what I call my demure insanity, commonly known as depression. There are varied opinions of depression and how to deal with it, but I know it's a shy and quiet sort of insanity that few people other than the person dealing with it can notice or take care of, if other people could then suicide rates would be lower and we wouldn't be mourning the loss of Robin Williams.

I've struggled with depression since my teenage years, I have enough insight to know when I need help and this year I decided to take the steps to get help. I've gotten on medication and am in much needed counseling. I especially needed this after the cancer scare. This time I have every intention of getting my life in order and learning how to get myself on the path at I need to be on, a path that will not only benefit me, but the ones around me who have to suffer with demure insanity being a sickness, rather than the demure lady who throws out crazy, witty and fun quips like I want to be, and have been in the past.