Here's my confession for the day: I kind of hate healthy people.
It's not that I have anything against them as people. I'm sure they're all very nice. I can admit that a lot of it is jealousy. Them with their stupid gym bags and their 5 a.m. yoga classes and their healthy snacks in their desks in case they have a "craving". Jerks.
If I haven't made it clear over the past couple of years in this blog, I'm not exactly an example of good health. If there's food to be had, make mine "comfort". If there's alcohol to be had, make mine wheat-y and calorie-filled. If there's salad, make mine caesar, and could you add some extra cheese to it? You see, I come from a family of barbecuers who might as well be carnivores. Our staple vegetable is a casserole with rice and cheese and butter... and broccoli. (Also: spinach dip.)
But lately, I have been moaning a lot about the fact that I am unhealthy. I work in a seven story building, where I am on the fourth floor, my boss is on the fifth, and the place I take my timesheets is on the third. Print timesheet, run upstairs, get timesheet approved, run back downstairs, print submitted timesheet, run upstairs, get boss to sign timesheet, run down two flights of stairs, drop timesheet off, run back upstairs. This little routine ends with me at my desk, where I sit next to healthy people, and I try to not seem like I am so out of breath I'd like to borrow some of theirs.
So, I sucked it up. Started eating less, joined a gym, became friends with an elliptical trainer, started drinking 8+ glasses of water every day. Over the course of three weeks, I lost 7.5 pounds.
The thing is, I'm still sort of doing what I want to do. I'm still going to the bar, I'm still eating the occasional greasy snack. But people, I am not kidding you with this - yesterday at the diner in our neighborhood, I saw the girl across from me get cheese fries, and they DID NOT LOOK APPETIZING. Does this mean I'm becoming one of you people? I woke up at 10 to go to the gym before my husband woke up, and then agreed to help a friend move out of her second and third story apartment without a second thought. I went to the gym four days in a row and then felt guilty when I had class the next day and couldn't make it. Are we KIDDING?!
While 7.5 pounds is not a ton for a person my size, the way I feel is a little ridiculous. I'm making healthy choices because they're actually the ones that appeal to me rather than feeling like they're what I "should" do. I'm motivated not by the number I see on the scale, but by the fact that I don't get winded halfway through my little timesheet dance. (Though I'm not going to lie, the number on the scale helps.) Yesterday helping Amy move, I didn't think about how I was out of breath, but instead focused on breathing the right way. Today, my legs hurt "the right way" - my thighs are sore, but my knees are perfect.
So, what's up, health world? I'm interested in making your acquaintance. And maybe for you, I'll even try to order light beer next time.
Also, I know I talk about work sometimes, but never show anything I do. The reasons for that are pretty simple. I work on 3D visualizations for stores that won't be built for probably another year. The designs are not only unfinished for the most part, but they're strictly confidential.
First of all, I would like to thank those of you who have responded to my internet-wide call to give me your thoughts on "women and numbers". Your responses meant a lot to me and every single one was presented to my professor, who was impressed with the number of responses I received and the amount of thought that clearly went into them. Since some of you have asked, here's a little more information about my project. I'm in the process of putting my presentation together to give to my classmates tomorrow, and a refined version will be given to all my professors next Friday, so this seems like the perfect time to ramble out some thoughts about it. How it started Last quarter at my job, I was working on a store targeted mostly at young teenagers - think "Limited Too" generation. (I can't say much about it, because it's still very confidential information and this is the internet. Professionalism and whatnot.) I work in 3D animation, as some of you know, and I was seeking pictures of merchandise to use as reference images. I ended up at Limited Too's website, looking through their clothes, and realized that these clothes were definitely not the clothes of my youth - they were things my mother would have grounded me for. Padded push-up bras. "I left my brain in my locker" t-shirts. Low rise jeans. None of this is to say that I'm some sort of prude, or that I don't remember what it was like to be that age. Of course I do. But somehow it just got to me. I'm an adult woman, or close to it. The reason we wear padded push-up bras and low rise jeans is to make those parts of our body look more attractive, and whether we're doing it to feel good about ourselves or so that other people will notice it, these are not things that ten-year-olds need to be doing. If I had a daughter, I wouldn't keep her locked up in the closet until she was 18, but I would try to give her the sort of environment that allowed her to explore who she was as a person without feeling like she had to be pressured to be sexy before she was out of double digits. And she sure as hell wouldn't be wearing a t-shirt that said she left her brain in her locker. I started wondering where all of this comes from. I can remember a friend of mine in middle school who was the first one of us to buy anything at a junior's store instead of a kid's store. She had this little jumper that was from 5-7-9, and it was a size 5. For whatever reason, she thought that was important - it was a size 5 - and I still remember it over ten years later. I remember it because it might have been the first time I thought size was really important. When shopping for outfits to wear to an eighth grade dance, I remember my friend Claire not being able to find anything that would fit her because it was all too small. Me, I was trying on medium and large shirts. I wasn't a big girl when I was 13, but I wasn't tiny either. All of a sudden I was ashamed of my size, and it didn't have anything to do with Claire. She helped me look for shirts and cute things to wear and I don't remember her ever passing judgment on me for one second, but I was so unhappy to be looking at a totally different rack of clothes than she was. And to be honest, she was a tiny, tiny girl. She had a sort of metabolism that I will never see in my adult life that was totally natural for her. We were different body types - but I didn't really understand that at the time. I read heartbreaking stories that day at work. The killer was a teenage girl who said she wouldn't ever wear a size 6, because boys wouldn't like her anymore. A woman who bought a dress she hated just because she was so happy to fit into a size 2. These are not numbers that anyone sees. They. Do not. Matter. I got to thinking about one of my biggest pet peeves: beautiful, healthy girls that stuff themselves into pants two sizes too small because they're convinced they have to be that size, and therefore make themselves look much, much worse. But it's not entirely their fault - they really believe that a 10 is not pretty but a 6 is, and they're clinging to the days when they were a 6, and hey, they can fit into it, so what does it matter? The more I read, the more people I talked to, I began to realize that this isn't just about a dress size. It's about numbers. It's about people feeling "old" on their birthday as if a whole year just passed, as if they were more than a day younger yesterday. It's about tying your health to a number on a scale instead of how good you feel or what a doctor tells you. It's about uploading your picture to a website and basing your self-worth off of how people on the internet "rate" you. Where I am now Through a ridiculous amount of revising one or two sentences, I decided to focus on "women and numbers". I'm fascinated by the way women define themselves by numbers. I "am" a size 12, rather than "this dress is a size 12". We take on these numbers as a characteristic of ourselves. That's why it's so hard to let it go when we try on the 12 and all of a sudden it doesn't fit. We panic at the BMV and lie about our weight as if anyone other than bartenders (and perhaps the occasional police officer) will ever take one look at the license. We can tell dirty jokes at bars and tell embarrassing stories about ourselves, but people aren't allowed to ask how much money we make or how old we are. We're jealous of people who can fit into a size 2, even if we're a perfectly healthy, fit size 10. There are a couple things I want to make sure of in my approach. Number one, I want to make people laugh. Because honestly, the more I think about my own capstone topic, the more ridiculous I think it is. A woman actually spending money on a dress she hates just because the label says it's a size smaller than she's been able to wear in years? It's laughable! Who does that? People do it. She left the store that day feeling like a million bucks, like she finally did something right. She got to define herself as a size 2 that day, but nothing had changed since she woke up that morning. I want to make people laugh, and I want to make people feel comfortable. I don't mind talking about this, but I know a lot of people do. I'm creating a motion piece that will be somewhere between 3-5 minutes long. If there's a group of people sitting in a room, and they're all different sizes, ages, etc., I don't want someone to see it and think "I wonder what so-and-so is thinking?" just because they're bigger. I don't want that bigger person to think "Oh my god, I wonder if everyone is looking at me?" Priority number two is all about being comfortable with who you are and doing things for the right reasons. That's the whole point. I think we've lost focus of what's really important. I'm all for being healthy - I've been to the gym four days in a row this week, I drink my 8+ glasses of water every day. But I'm not going to the gym to fit into a different size dress. I couldn't care less what it says. I'm going because my knees hurt, because I hate being out of breath after three flights of stairs, because I know I'm unhealthy and I'm sick of having no energy. There is no fantasy in my mind that I'll ever be a size 2, because I just don't have the body type for it. But I can be healthy. I can be pretty, and confident, and I can feel good about myself. My job is a lot of fun and I'm proud of how I do it, no matter how much money I make. I can talk about all this for hours, of course, but I'm starting to lose focus here. Once again, thanks to everyone who gave me such great information. If you want more information, stay tuned here, or you can check me out for periodic updates on twitter. (You'll also have to sift through a lot of babble about my job, the gym, and food.)
Five weeks are gone out of my ten week quarter. DAAP doesn't really have "mid-terms", per se. We do, but they happen around the eighth week of the ten week quarter. No, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me either.
Through much deliberation and mental anguish, as well as being an annoyance to everyone around me, I have a capstone topic. I'll be creating a motion piece based on the idea of women and numbers. Vague? Oh, maybe. It makes a little bit of sense in my head, and I have three more weeks to work it out before I get thrown under the bus in front of a panel of professors. I'm not terribly worried. Just a little worried.
It's my experience, in my clearly so-many-years-as-an-adult life, that women tend to define themselves by numbers. Even smart, successful, amazing women have that occasional voice in the back of their head reminding them how old they are, how much they weigh, what size that skirt was that they couldn't fit into yesterday, how many calories were wasted on lunch, how long they'll have to spend on the elliptical to overcompensate. We create websites based on giving a woman a numerical rating, as if someone can be defined by one picture of themselves uploaded to the internet. Sure, some people think it's all in good fun, and I won't pretend I haven't looked through them with friends and had a good laugh or two, but what does that honestly do to our view of ourselves and one another?
If anything comes to mind for you when "women and numbers" is mentioned, feel free to drop me a line. Comments here will be seen by everyone, of course, but you can feel free to email me at rizzo.jen @ gmail.com if you'd like to share your thoughts with just me. I'm compiling information from everyone who's willing to give it to me. Your thoughts will contribute to the final project, but your identity won't be used in any way.
Other than that project, nothing terribly notable has been going on. Work has been a little slow, teaching has been great as always, and I'm working on a diabolical plan to book three vacations in the near future. (Kansas City in April, Sarasota in June, Kansas City again at the very end of June for the graduation party spectacular.) It has left me complaining to anyone who will listen about the price of gas, hotels, airline tickets and renting a car when you're under the age of 25.
I'm also cooking up a plan for dinner on Valentine's Day. (Pun entirely intended.) We're a little strapped for cash thanks to one of us finishing up our education and dropping to less-than-part-time hours, so rather than going out for a pricey meal, we've decided to do a nice, quiet evening at home. I have no idea what I'm going to come up with, but I wouldn't be surprised if some sort of seafood was involved.
