Day 326: Screw You, I am too Nice!

For all my bitchiness, I consider myself to be quite a kind person. I hold doors for people, let cars in, volunteer, donate to charity, help old ladies in the grocery and even smile at babies. I realize that not everyone has seen my best side, shout of apology out to Jane from Target and pretty much everyone who encountered me from the ages of 19-32, but it is there. I may not smile at everyone I meet or tell people to have a “blessed day,” but I believe true kindness can be measured in actions. Unfortunately, the same is not true for everyone and it shows.

How difficult is it for a person to give a wave of thanks after I’ve let their car in in traffic? I’ve done all the hard work, I’m doing them the damn favor, all I want is a nod, smile, or wave of acknowledgment. Or what about when I hold the door open and people just walk through like I’m the doorman? For that matter, even if it is my job, they should still say thank you. People are rude little bastards and it’s annoying. I get all this grief for being a bitch and yet I’m the one stopping to help some poor woman carrying her baby in a stroller down the subway stairs, while I am in heels and businessmen in flat shoes and likely more muscle mass are rushing by.

There is a part of me that misses the hat tipping and manners ever-present in old black and white films, but I also understand the overall implications of such a world. If we were all nice all the time, then I wouldn’t get to tell a cabby who almost runs me over to go “blank” himself. Bad moods would be unforgivable and no one would ever have a case of the Mondays. We’d be nice all the time, but that shit is just exhausting. I’m a realist, I know that’s not what I want, but I think there is a happy medium.

For instance, I would never suggest you actually aim for the hole in the toilet seat when you are drunkenly hovering above it, but maybe you could take a moment to wipe up your own damn urine from the seat. I’m sure many people who go into a stall with a urine-misted commode simply hover, add their own lady sprinkles and walk away. Not me. No, I actually wipe up the other person’s mess and also clean up my own before furiously scrubbing my hands. Why do I do this? Well, part is embarrassment. I certainly do not want the next person entering to think I did all that and the other is genuine concern for whatever poor girl has to clean those restrooms. I don’t even like cleaning my own bath at home, can you imagine if your job were to clean other people’s messes all day? So yes, I‘ll wipe up your spray, but I don’t like it and I shouldn’t have to.

Maybe people would prefer if I took some of the energy I use towards passing out change to every vagrant I come across or picking up other people’s paper towels they just couldn’t seem to get in the trash can and use it for more smiles and “blessed” days, but that’s not going to happen. We are all both bitchy and kind in our own ways. I just happen to believe that my kindness makes a bigger impact than your fake smile. If you don’t like it, bite me.

Day 325: What is This Strange Emotion? Could I be Happy?

Few things get me as excited as the NFL. Tonight, for the first time, the NFL draft happened in prime time and I watched every minute of it. Football always perks me up, but it’s more than that, I think I am finally becoming happier – at least temporarily. I feel really positive and motivated about my life these days and I’m not afraid to admit, I’m a little out of my territory.

There are so many great things happening in my life. It’s spring, I am making significant and positive changes to my diet and exercise routines, grad school looks like a sure thing, the marriage thing is flourishing, and today I had the first hint of the football season to come. Life is good and I feel good. For most people, this would not be out of the ordinary, but for a woman who prefers moodiness to cheer and cynicism to optimism this is a brand new world.

Still, it’s not all easy streets. There is some fear happening here too. The danger of being too positive is that you have a longer way to fall when it all starts to go wrong. I’m not kidding myself, this newfound happy-happy bullshit will not last, it’s just not me. At some point my rainbow and unicorn magic-filled mental state will start to recede and the reality will set in that life is hard and sometimes it sucks ass. Letting myself enjoy this happy period is tricky for me. I hate disappointment and frequently plan for the worst case, but never the best-case, just so I will not be caught off guard.

At the same time, I am enjoying this newfound inner joy and plan to make the most of it. For some people the cheer comes naturally, for others they must work at it constantly, and for me, I pretty much say screw it and deal with the moods as they come. Life is unexpected and there exists both joy and disappointment around every corner. I fully embrace all the twists and turns and I guess I’m never going to be someone who wants to live in a silver-lined bubble. I like the blues and the mean reds as much as the euphoria of good times. It’s those hard-luck cases in movies and real life that I’ve always been drawn to. The Willie Nelson’s and Holly Golightly’s of the world are unpredictable and live fully, and yes they suffer, but they have a quality that makes me want to sip scotch alone at a dimly lit jazz club and I really like that. For now, I will try to embrace this new optimism, but I can tell you right now that pretty soon I’m going to miss my single malt.

Day 324: Juggling Was Never My Thing

I had a random guy at a bar last year tell me that he could tell I was old because of my hands. I’m not sure if he just wanted to ruin my night or perhaps thought it was some way to strike up a conversation, but either way it did not go over well – for me or for him. I realize that to a certain extent we all judge and are judged by appearances, which is why I spend so much time slathering on lotion and skin care products. I even worry about the aging effects the sun and free radicals can have on my hair, but that night I realized that no matter what you do, you’re always going to let something slide.

Everything in life is like this, in my opinion. You work a job, do the laundry, clean the house, take care of yourself, pay the bills and then realize you forgot to get an oil change for the last nine months and now your engine is locked up. I think we all need an admin to help us track the daily activities in our life as well as the special events. How can any one person keep up with life and friends and family?

This is one of the reasons I’ve always been somewhat selfish with my time. I hate to plan things in advance because who knows what mood I’m going to be in when the day rolls around and I’m not into tons of friends because they all require effort. It’s probably no secret why kids were never a priority, but I do feel like I can be a caring friend, wife and family member just maybe more one on one. There is only so much time and effort I’m willing to devote to anything in life, the rest I reserve for myself. Sometimes that means I don’t wash my hair, my nails look like crap, and my hands make me look twenty years older. Other times, it means I stay in more than I’d like because I hate to make plans and by the time I roll around to wanting to go out everyone else is busy.

I’ve never been the popular girl with loads of social engagements and it’s not because I don’t want them, I just don’t know how to balance my love of alone time with the rest of the world. I am trying to get better about this and make a real effort with those people and things in my life that are important. I sometimes think maybe I have too much downtime and that keeps me from planning and organizing. That may not make much sense, but for all those friends and family that I know who juggle demanding jobs, multiple children, hobbies and social engagements I’m sure you get it. Those people are organized and they somehow fit more in their day than I do in a week. I may never get the hands of my youth back, but maybe I can find the drive to get a full life back.

Day 323: Maybe We're Better Off With What We Don't Remember

There are so many examples out there of people who are smarter, stronger, thinner, taller, prettier, wealthier, happier, and any other superlative you can think of. It is so easy to get down on ourselves after looking at everyone we perceive to be better, that sometimes it feels like the only way to build ourselves up is by knocking someone else down. To be truly confident and happy as a person, however, I know there are no shortcuts. The path to inner happiness is to find that self-esteem within myself and not in other people. I was reminded of this today when emailing with an old school chum who I remember having a really tough time of it, but here’s the thing, he doesn’t. He has blocked out much of those years.

I’m as guilty, if not more so, of using sarcasm to poke fun at people from time to time. In my defense, I will say that rarely have I ever done so in a mean-spirited fashion. I have been the persecuted. We were poor and I wore hand-me-downs most of my childhood and adolescence. I didn’t drink or smoke and I wasn’t excited about parties with alcohol-laced kool-aid bought by the dropout who was still trying to relive his glory days by providing booze for high schoolers. Kids were cruel and I definitely got my share of it. So what’s my excuse now?

I am a grown woman and yet many of the issues I have are leftover from those days of feeling inadequate. Can we ever truly embrace ourselves without forgetting a little of what we didn’t like? The mean kids in fourth grade that picked on us or the prom date that never materialized haunt us long into adulthood – unless we learn to bury it. For me, it’s always been a crutch. I am an insecure woman in many ways, but for a long time I blamed all the hardships and unfairness of youth for my lasting issues.

But the truth is, I got over most of that shit long ago, these days I’m just looking to everyone else’s flaws to highlight my successes. I don’t have to get fit as long as others are less healthy than me, etc. It’s an ugly way to live and I’m hoping that as I struggle to improve my physical appearance and health, that my emotional health will improve as well. I actually am happy for others when they get a promotion or take a great vacation. I want to let all those parents know that I am proud of them for raising four kids or dealing with a spouse’s illness. We all have hardships and I am continually in awe of the grace with which people handle them. It is that ability to dig down deep and find a way to make a life for ourselves that determine our true self-worth. So what if we have to forget a little to get over it, what counts is how we turn out and not all memories are keepers anyway.

Day 322: Skinny Fat or Healthy Chubby, Avoiding Them is Hard Work

My personal journey with this blog has taken me through a lot of emotional territory. I’ve also documented the physical, the frivolous and one too many stories about my husband that got me into hot water. My current focus in life is on my body and my health. As you know, blog readers, wherever my mind goes, my keyboard follows. So here I am, almost six weeks into a vegan lifestyle, perched on the brink of starting a crazy 60 day intense fitness program, exhausted from the application process for grad school and now I’m doing a cleanse.

A cleanse is a great thing in theory. Our bodies suffer through all the damage we inflict on a daily basis. The sugar, salt, chemicals, fat, and animal byproducts all test the efficacy of our internal organs. A cleanse is intended to do just what it says, cleanse the body and blood of toxins to bring us back to an optimum level of internal healthy balance. Sounds good right? Well, the bad part is that most cleanses require a fast. It makes sense, in order to clean the body of toxins and food and digestive tract blocking goop one needs to cut all those things out from the diet.

I am doing the Master Cleanse to help me flush out all the bad stuff and that means a delicious liquid diet consisting of homemade organic lemonade with cayenne pepper and maple syrup mixed in. That and water is pretty much the sum total of consumption for TEN FREAKIN’ DAYS!!! I have done this cleanse before, but by day six I give it up because I get headaches around day three. My focus in the past was usually to lose weight, but this time it’s different. Of course I want to drop a few pounds, show me a woman who doesn’t, but for me this is an important step toward future good health.

I don’t want to be “skinny fat,” nor do I want to be healthy, but not fit. True health and fitness is a joint project and while I have been eating healthier than ever these last five weeks, I’ve also gained weight due to a lack of activity. So I have pledged to myself to do whatever it takes to change my life, get healthy, get happy and be the best me I can be. The cleanse is exhausting. Because I’m only consuming about 600 calories a day, I’m tired, a lot. I am also cold and cannot stop peeing. That might be more than you needed, but it is me after all. There is a certain amount of detoxing that naturally happens when you suddenly become a vegan and I’m hoping that this cleanse will finally purge all the bad stuff and put me on the path to a healthy weight, clear skin and the will to exercise regularly.

Right now, it’s pretty much just making me wish it were over and a little cranky. My will is strong and after discovering that I am indeed capable of sticking to a radical life change such as veganism, I’m also confident that I can finish this cleanse (or at least six days of it) and start that crazy new workout regime I have planned. I am an all or nothing girl that is so often why I fail. I throw myself whole-heartedly into something, but when perfection proves unattainable, I lose my will. This is different. The only person I can disappoint on this journey is myself. There are days when I think I’ll have a Diet Coke. It sounds so good and my body still craves it, besides, no one will have to know. That’s when it hits me, this isn’t about other people’s perceptions of me or my health. The only person benefitting from my success is me and the same is true of my failures. I want to be healthy and fit and while yes, the journey is a pain in the ass and dining in restaurants can be trying, I am finally becoming the woman I always knew I could be. I just hope my outward appearance catches up fast, because, my flabby thighs need a little encouragement.

Day 321: Sometimes the Bad is the Good

When I think over my life, what I find most amusing are the things I miss. There are the obvious of course, my Mother, family gatherings when I was a child, eating whatever I want without gaining a pound, but I’m talking about the more frivolous. I found myself in New York City and it is the place I feel most at home in the world. It’s true it can be a hard place to live, but there is joy and comfort in the most unexpected of places. Most often, I find that I miss the oddities and eccentricities that once seemed so foreign and now feel like home.

Today there was an article in the Times about the looming threat of a doorman strike in the city. To most of us, that probably sounds fairly benign and I suppose in some ways it is, but it’s also a potential disaster for anyone that lives in a doorman building. They don’t just hold the doors open. They accept deliveries, run the elevators, admit guests, remove trash, operate freight elevators and storage areas, provide security and help load and unload your parcels. Doormen in the city are essential and if they walk, a part of the city stops.

A few years back, when I still lived in New York, we experienced an MTA strike. All the trains and busses were shut down, prevented from moving along with substitute operators by union laws. Jeff was in Afghanistan that winter and it pretty much sucked, except that the strike did something that made me fall in love with my city again, it gave me a community. Taxis began operating with a four passenger rule, meaning they would stop to pick up up to four separate riders, charging a flat fee for each. It was a hell of a lot easier to get a cab that week. Everyone worked together to make it palatable and as we rode together, complete strangers squished three across in the backseat, we were kind. The unspoken rule became that whoever was running late got dropped off first and we worked together in a way people who lived outside of the city would not understand.

I miss that people talking to themselves did not faze me, that street performers were routine, that every walk down the city streets was a fashion show of every kind. 9/11, the blackout, the transit strike, trash mountains on the street, 95 degree subway cars, bad attitudes, exploding manhole covers, cranes that fall off skyscrapers and kill passers by, and now possibly a doorman strike. New York City is a place of great tragedy and incredible surprises and I love and miss every single one of them. We lived in a doorman building; it was fantastic. Still, if the strike had happened then, we would have trudged forward, residents taking turns acting as doormen, chipping in to accept one another’s packages, possibly even talking to one another.

I miss what some people might consider the downsides to life in the city. To me, every day there was a gift and a possible surprise. For a girl who hates surprises, it’s the least likely conclusion and the one I cannot escape. I miss the noise, the crazy, the danger, the rats, the roaches, the trash, the subways, the heat, the cold, and that incredible energy that makes a concrete jungle come to life. I never thought the potential for a doorman strike would make me long for the city, but I wish I were there, because I miss all the bad that came with the tremendous good New York gave to me.