Recent dreams

I have a new recurring dream -- that I'm hanging out at an art fair. It's a pretty enjoyable dream. I'm having fun and looking at art and talking to people and enjoying the outdoors. But my favorite on-line dream dictionary does not have an "art fair" entry, and related entried are kind of annoying. They don't respect how much I like art, and how it makes me feel smart and joyful at the same time.

Quotes are from dreammoods.com
"Art Gallery
To dream that you are in an art gallery, signifies disappointing reunions. You struggle to put forth a happy appearance, but in the inside, you yearn to be somewhere else."

This is kind of how I feel about my job lately. The election season is leaving me in a daydream wherein I quit my job and get a low paying but meaningful job helping people get health insurance.

"Joy
To dream that you are joyful, denotes harmony amongst friends and loved ones. "

My first paragraph above made me think to look up this word. This makes a lot of sense. I recently dumped my very last shitty friend, and now all my friends are wonderful and fun and get along with each other.

The entry for artists only talks about if you are the artist, and in this dream I'm the consumer of art, not the creator. Of course, from an economic standpoint, by buying art, I am assisting in its creation. This summer I went to the big art fair in Minneapolis, and I bought a real piece of art, and it felt like one of the most important things I'd done with $100 in a really, really long time. I purchased a piece of pure beauty for my own enjoyment, and put some money in the pocket of a very talented potter.

From "artist", "The picture that you are painting in your dream may symbolize the way that you are visualizing your current situation in your waking life. "

Fun, beauty, all five senses... surrounded by people whose motivations I relate to? Yes, that is how I visualize my personal life lately.

"Fair
To dream that you are at the fair, suggests that you may be regressing into your childhood where times were simpler."

This bugs me because it sounds bad, but since I actually spent my childhood being overly responsible, maybe a little regression is a good thing.

"Music
To hear harmonious and soothing music in your dream, is a good omen of prosperity, pleasure and the expression of your emotions in a positive way. Music serves to heal the soul. "

In the art fair dream I had last night, I was listening to my ipod.

This art fair dream is extra nice because for more than 10 years, at least 3 times a week I dream I'm living in a big house full of furniture and rooms and people of all varieties, and they last for hours. The relationships with the people always feel longstanding but not particularly close. The rooms and furniture are often very detailed and memorable. Sometimes the houses repeat. Sometimes the rooms repeat. I never go outside or look out a window or really do anything. They're not unpleasant, it just felt like I must be stuck in a rut to be having such similar dreams all the time. The art fair dreams are more varied. Last night ipods were being sold with the art. Last week, the fair was actually in an artists colony in a postapocalypse type setting, and I spent hours wandering towards the art fair, and then hours wandering back home. Yeah for my subconscious.

This week I've also dreamt a few times that I was on a date with an African-American man, and he finally tells me that he plans to vote for John McCain, and I feel this deep sorrowful sadness for the world and our common future. Each time he is a different type of guy, too -- young, old, educated, not educated. The irony of Obama not being guaranteed to win black voters, plus my stomach wrenching anxiety over the thought of being taxed on my health benefits... are the inspirations for this dream. Everybody has the right to vote for whomever they wish.

Addiction Miracles

My mom has encouraged me not to get hooked on coffee. My mom has never mocked me harder for anything than not owning a coffee pot. She used to actually say it was bad manners and it made her feel completely ill at ease to spend any time at my house. This regrettable conversation occurred many years ago, before it became socially acceptable to rely on coffee shops for your coffee. Nowadays when coffee-loving people are on their way to my house I just stop somewhere and get the little cardboard cup holder with all their favorite drinks in it, and everybody is grateful I didn't try to make it myself. And over the years my mom has just developed the habit of a. not coming to my house before noon, and b. using a visit to my house as an opportunity to prove she can go a few hours without coffee.

I am a coffee drinker in that I LOVE good coffee and I'm quite snobbish when it comes to what coffee I will actually drink. But I've never been able to tolerate it on a regular basis. The caffeine fries my nerves and I turn into a hyperventilating vomiting mess. But lately...

Lately I can drink decaf TWICE a week -- whoo hoo! AND tea in between. I am trying to not get hooked on caffeine. I'm like still trying to sleep instead, and just use caffeine when the sleep just didn't happen. But you know, I LOVE coffee so there is a bit of a conflict of interest.

So me and my mom were eating pancakes and I whined that I wanted coffee and I thought to myself it's been a long time since we argued about coffee, and now that we're 30 and 50 instead of 20 and 40, I thought it was a good time to ask... "so should I just let myself get hooked, or should I try to avoid that? what do you really think?" And she spoke, in a dead serious way, which she rarely does, "no, don't get hooked. you know I drink it even when it's not good. I like the way it tastes, but I keep drinking it even when I'm sick from already having drank too much."

My own mother advising against coffee makes it seem like anything is possible.

Toast

All I can think about is toast. My eating has been very bad lately. Very emotional. I am of the school that if you want it you should eat it. But eating and eating and eating is not the intended outcome of this school of thought, and that is where my lovely eating compulsion has taken me as of late.

As a note to my future self, whom I'm sure will get out of this funk:

The quinoa-pumpkin muffins I made a few weeks ago were awesome. Pumpkin was a great way to revive the quinoa muffin. I sweetened the batter with pureed apricots (pureed with the water so as not to break the blender). Next time I plan to halve the amount of apricot, and instead add cinnamon and nutmeg and clove and walnuts, to make it more like pumpkin bread. I'm dying to put raisins and shredded carrot in too, but neither of these ingredients is on quinoa day. I might try a dried fruit other than apricots. I'll have to see what is available at the co-op. Figs or dates maybe? Just NOT prunes. Previous attempts to use prunes in my baking were completely gross.

Toast. (Homer-inspired-drooling)

La-la land

I used to be really worried and stressed all the time about everything. It was bad for me, but it really made time management natural and easy. The last couple of years, I've been learning to relax. This was a very healthy move, but I haven't yet learned how to manage time while relaxed. I'm late everywhere, I pay bills late, I'm always rushing to get my food prepared, I don't have time to read or exercise.

I've always had a childish dislike of activities being timed. Like tests especially, I figure if I know it, I know it, and it doesn't really matter how long it takes to pull it out of my brain. And it's always really bugged me on Project Runway how little time they get to plan their design and pick out fabric. I've always thought that things would turn out better if they had more time.

The challenge on the episode last night was to design an outfit for a recent college graduate. Each designer had a young woman and her mother as the "clients." They had 30 minutes to pick out fabric and it suddenly clicked that things are timed because in grown-up land, you can't afford to spend three hours picking out fabric. Your client is paying you to get the job done, and you have lots of other jobs to get done, and there are only so many hours in a day.

So I'm having a new appreciation of the ability to do something quickly and efficiently. It's finally just hit home that time is limited and working efficiently could go a long way to making life more enjoyable. I love watching my hands make rice (one activity I do efficiently.) It goes so smoothly. There are no mistakes or re-do's. It's smooth, thought out and practiced. Compare that to grocery shopping. I spend a lot of time daydreaming about this or that dish, or maybe someday being able to eat such and such food. Or making the smallest decisions like what kind of peanut butter to buy. Thinking over my routine tasks, I think many of them could be made more efficient, and more enjoyable in the process.

Yes, sometimes it's nice to just go off into la-la land and really take a lot of time on something. I just don't need to do that all the time. It makes it hard to have time to do the things I want to do. And actually makes me worry sometimes that it's an escape for me, a way to avoid life's problems.

I fully believe in having unstructured time in which to let my brain ferment and relax and daydream. But I think I can improve my life by being purposeful with this unstructured time. Do it while relaxing near a window. Or doing something creative that I enjoy. At the very least, NOT in the peanut butter aisle.

Things I like

I like it when my sister gives me stuff that used to be hers that she doesn't want anymore. Everytime I use it I get a warm fuzzy. It has my sister in its history, and when she was done with it, she thought of me and thought I would like it. On a even more practical note, the item has been test driven which means I end up using it a lot. Nothing pokey or itchy in the clothes she gives me.

I like vinegre as a cleaning product. Vinegre is single handedly making me the type of person that cleans everything. Which is very good for my environmental allergies. And my very real belief in feng shui. A clean house is obviously good, but vinegre goes above and beyond clean on the feng shui front. It's simple, inexpensive, multi-use and safe for the environment and my person. I can store it anywhere. I like it. As a belonging, it has a big fat gold star.

I like yoga. I am stuck indoors right now due to my allergies. The weather is beautiful and it's that kind of summer that makes all the winter cold okay. But I've had a sore throat from the pollen that hurts so bad I can't sleep at night. I had this problem last summer too. It was stupid to not start getting allergy shots right away. I didn't start until 3 weeks ago. But anyways, I'm stuck inside and I'm really grateful to know more than enough yoga to stay in shape and not go crazy.

Bell Peppers II

The peppers were local, but not organic.

I care more about local than organic. Maybe this makes me a bad environmentalist. An organic vegetable from California sits in a truck for 2-3 days being driven to my grocery store. A local vegetable gets sprayed with pesticide and fungicide, and grows in soil enriched with chemical fertilizers. But then it takes a 2-3 hour drive to my grocery store. Now that I see it in black & white, it seems like the problems with each are of equivalent weight, both for my own health and the environment's health. So I care more about local than organic, but just by a little bit. What tips it towards local is how much better the food tastes. And those extra three days I can leave it in the fridge before it wilts. And supporting the farmer who is trying to help the environment by selling to a local grocery store.

I get in a zone at the grocery store. If it is plump and fresh looking, I buy it. I spent 20 seconds staring at the bucket full of peppers wondering why nobody was buying them. And then bought 8 of them. And feeling weirdly guilty ever since. Or maybe not guilty, but defensive. Or annoyed. Or confused. Ok, I think I'm back to not caring now. Whew.

It's not really a soapbox I want to stand on. I'm definitely okay with giving my customer testimonial, for local, organic, and local-AND-organic. But I will emphasize flavor and convenience right along with health and the environment.

Bell Peppers I

I bought bell peppers at the co-op that are just mind boggling. The brightest and deepest colors I've ever seen in a pepper, and heavy for their weight. That means instead of a thin layer of pepper holding in a lot of air, you have lots and lots of sweet crispy pepper flesh and just enough space on the inside for the seeds.

The Joy of Cooking tells you to buy squash that are heavy for their weight. I tried it and was completely sold. The thicker layer of squash on the inside means you can scoop out big spoons of squash and then scrape the skin, whereas when you buy a squash that is light for its weight, it's all scraping. More work, less squash.

And for these peppers, there is also more pepper for the same amount of slicing. But there is also the novelty and intense pleasure of biting into such an enormously thick slice of pepper.

And it isn't just thick - it's fresh. Because it's local. I'm totally hooked on local. My super simple food preparation methods, necessitated by my food issues, are not a hindrance to me when cooking with very fresh food. It seasons itself. And when I do season it, I need just a pinch.

Red bell peppers taste like strawberries when they're really fresh. Well, they taste like strawberries would taste if the world ended, a time capsule was found, and a Strawberry Shortcake doll was used to re-create the flavor of a strawberry. None of the yucky tartness of a real strawberry.

Although, my bitterness that real strawberries do not taste like a Strawberry Shortcake doll smells, was recently reduced considerably. I got my hands on local strawberries. At first I was kind of pissed off because they were too tart for human consumption. But then I remembered the sugar bowl -- people who didn't grow up with my calorie-phobic parents do this funky thing where they dip fruit in sugar before they eat it. So I got my zylitol and started dunking. Homer-Simpson-inspired-drooling. Much, much more similar to the doll than ordinary strawberries. Though a fresh red bell pepper is still a closer match.

The Uber Fit

We need new words to describe fitness. The more I read about fitness, the more I know. Or rather, there is a lot of ignorance to be had, and after much reading, it is shocking to find out exactly how much ignorance I had. Shocking because my parents exercised with us when we were all little. On their own they ran and walked and did light weight training. With us they walked, biked, skated, swam, and played badminton, softball, ping pong and occasionally tennis. So I should be on the more knowledgeable side. There shouldn't be much of anything that shocking.

The shocking part has been to learn exactly how much work goes into looking like you're fit. Or rather, to look like the people described as fit on TV and in magazines. The conclusion I've drawn is that is 110% ridiculously horrifically ludicrous to describe those people as fit. Fit as an adjective should be attainable by everyone. Kind of like the words alive and breathing. If you're alive and breathing you can be fit. If your main focus in life is getting into the top 5% of human fitness, alwaysX10 focusing on what affect your training is having on your appearance? There should be a different name for their results. I should get to call my results fit. I can walk 5 miles and pick things up off the floor without any fear at all of hurting my back. I can dance for an hour and climb two flights of stairs and carry my own groceries. But I feel entirely prohibited from doing so. People like me are supposed to call ourselves “relatively in shape” and I just think it's bullshit.

Super fit. Uber fit. Obsessed. Compulsive. Really really fit. Really really really dedicated. Professionally fit (they can and invariably do make money off of it.) Professionally in shape. Having the appearance of a fitness model or a personal trainer or an action move actor. Shockingly fit.

Or even “fit in appearance.” Which would leave me and myself with “functionally fit.” Because a lot of the uber fit have pretty major injuries they have suffered, are suffering, or are perpetually recovering from. Not all, but a lot. They are certainly also functionally fit, but in the bigger picture, I should "fit" and they should get "uber fit."

Maybe now my heart will be free

I am still fine tuning what I want to write about here. But I think I'm finally back to my original idea, which was to share my daily crazy thoughts and experiences. The pressure to have a blog that is all on one topic is strong -- never overt, invisible really, but strong.

So here is the one thing today that made me laugh so suddenly I inhaled my own spit. In my gmail account which advertises to me based on words and phrased it finds it my e-mails, was this ad:

He Lying To You? - TakeBackYourHeart.com - Learn "Secret Reason" Why You're Attracted To Jerks & Players

Snort.

New round

I am starting over on my food allergy diet. I am sick of all the dishes I've been cooking - I need new dishes. Some of the food in my freezer is way too old, so every meal is a process of tasting first, and then deciding whether or not it's edible (yuck). Plus I've been eating out regularly for a whole month, which means it's hard to get back to strict, especially given the two previous sentences.

For this round of strictness, I plan to focus on eating less meat. I can't have dairy, and I'm sick of nuts that aren't peanuts, and I can only have beans every other day. So there is no way to have a daily routine, which I usually find comforting and easy to follow. So on bean days about twice a week I plan to make a bean-containing-salad in the evening for dinner, and eat the leftovers for lunch the next day. For the other bean days I will make bean soup with or without small amounts of meat, and well seasoned ground meat patties I lovingly refer to "sausage." For non-bean days I will make pureed soups consisting of fish, and veggies and fresh herbs from the farmers market, and more "sausage." It gets a little weird, given I have to rotate my herbs and spices, but I have a "sausage" recipe for every day in the rotation. It's the only way to prepare meat right now that doesn't turn my stomach.

Being strict also requires a hefty supply of pancakes and muffins.

I have some ideas for entirely new things to eat. (The paragraph above, while newish, is all stuff I've done variations of before.) This summer I plan to seek out new green leafy vegetables I especially want to try escarole after having it braised in Las Vegas. I am also planning to take toasted nori sheets I bought at the co-op and try making sushi-inspired rolls with grains and fresh veggies. It won't taste like sushi. I will be satisfied with edible.

Also, I have decided this blog should be more casual. I am not enjoying the complete thought and sentence process I have been trying to sustain in previous entries.

Big Light on "Beauty"

What makes people so obsessed with being beautiful on the outside? Why does it equate to being un-lovable? The more I get past my own obsession with it, and the feelings of insecurity that go along with it, the less logical and more compulsive it seems. It's illogical because most people aren't that attractive, and most people have people that love them. It's compulsive in the way that a compulsion makes you focus on one thing and exlude other things. I compulsively focused on my outer appearance and over-looked my positive inner qualities, in addition to all the obvious life success of people that aren't that attractive. It is also compulsive in the way that a compulsion makes you focus on one thing as the solution to all problems, which makes it easier and easier to avoid dealing with problems at all. I focused on my outer appearance in order to avoid looking at the unattractiveness of my insides. And I was convinved that the inside didn't matter, that only my outer appearance needed to be good. For me the extraordinary power of wanting to avoid my insides is what made being beautiful seem all important.

I'm speaking in the past tense to highlight my progress in this area, but I still do often fall into the trap of obsessing about my outer appearance.

Our culture is currently not very supportive of working on the insides. It's almost like working on your inner beauty means you're ugly and you've given up trying to be less ugly. What a horrible message to send! There is this imagined ultimate-validation that comes with being ultra beautiful. It doesn't exist. The ultra beautiful are just as insecure about their appearance as the rest of us. I think we should be trying to bring about an age where good hygiene and a modicum of attention to one's health are all that is needed to be beautiful, and people spend their energy becoming loving, tolerant, generous, patient, and kind. Think about how much more beauty would exist in the world if that happened? Where people like themselves because they're likeable, and their beauty shines out of them like a big light.

Home-Made Reality

A woman alone in her kitchen cooking for no one except herself. This is not what people think about when they think about cooking. The celebrated ideal is cooking fabulous food and inviting over all your friends to enjoy the food together. How many times have I felt horrible about not being able to please other people with my recipes? 100? 1000? In my own world, where it's just me and my body and my kitchen, it has been a monumental accomplishment to learn to cook for myself. Monumental, glacial migrating, intergalactic, stupendous, epic, life altering achievement.

A lot of factors have contributed to my not cooking for other people. 1. Most people, even if they prefer healthy or home-made food to processed or uber-seasoned, still want a certain level of sophistication or complexity in a dish prepared by someone else. 2. I'm not a genius at cooking. 3. My super sensitive body has never tolerated soy sauce, wine, cheese, MSG, teriyaki, horseradish, sugar, or dried fruit, and at various periods I have also had to forgo tomatoes, potatoes, dried herbs, garlic of any kind, fruit, vinegre, yeast, and salt.

I have struggled in my life to find and honor my own voice, and keep it from getting drowned out by other peoples' voices and the voice of the world. In my kitchen, the sky is blue, and I value simplicity, freshness, and abstaining from anything and everything necessary to heal my body. I don't need to be the girl that throws dinner parties, and I don't need to be the girl whose nail soup makes people swoon, and my boyfriend doesn't need a mom-girlfriend, he needs a healthy happy partner.

My voice in the kitchen has been feeding my body and my soul for quite awhile now. I would like to thank myself for all the hard work and improvement in cooking. I choose to no longer be swayed by whatever weirdness other people have with food. I know what works for me and I know how to please myself. I'm not alone. I have centuries of other cooks behind me, and it's my own decision to count myself among them, and not excluded just because my voice is different.

Home-made fish sticks are what turned this tide. Last night I bit into a bite size piece of tilapia battered with a mixture of ground pine nuts, arrowroot starch, flax meal, and dry mustard powder, and fried in walnut oil. I didn't even mean to make a fish stick, it was an accident. I didn't even know I missed fish sticks. But a fish stick is what is was, and it was way better than the ones from the box. I whine sometimes about not getting to eat processed food, complex, and uber-seasoned food, but slowly and surely I really am learning to prefer better food.

I am my own chef

This morning for breakfast I crushed 7-8 brazil nuts and 2 walnuts together and stirred in stevia, cinnamon and flax oil. Then I cut up a banana and threw it in. It was super yummy. It was all the warm fuzzy of banana nut bread.

The salads I've been making with savoy cabbage give me a similar warm fuzzy about a salad my mom used to make. My mom's salad was savoy cabbage thinly sliced with cubed chicken, crushed ramen noodles, roasted slivered almonds, and a sweet but tangy dressing whose contents I don't remember. My salad is just savoy cabbage, roasted slivered almonds, oil & vinegre. I was very happy the first time I thought to add the almonds. I've missed that salad a lot.

And this is a weird example, but I also have a recipe to replace stuffed peppers. I never ate them as a kid, but I was missing the smell (and the flavor I thus imagined) of them cooking in my parents' house. I cooked wild rice and let it cool, and then mixed it into ground turkey. Then I made meatballs and put them in a stock pot with oil and cubed green pepper. I cooked it on medium until the meatballs were browned, and then simmered for another 15 minutes. The flavors all cooked together it and it smelled right and tasted even better.

These recipes don't make me sick, and they scratch the itch to eat those foods.

For the first year I was on the rotation diet, I didn't eat flour of any kind. There were so many other things to worry about, I didn't try to bake anything. I was reacting to corn and potatoes, and sweet potatoes were not on sunflower seed day, so I didn't have any chips to eat either. When I first got down the recipe book to try buckwheat pancakes, I felt pretty pessimistic. The ingredients are buckwheat flour, oil, water, and salt & vitamin c crystals for leavening. But I made them and sat down to eat one. It felt so luxurious spreading the tablespoon of walnut oil over the pancake. The emotion of it hit me when it touched my lips, before I even tasted it, and when I tasted it... I cried. It was so smooth and delicate and sweet and the stress of all the deprivation in the prior 12 months and the strange austerity of the whole project, feeling like a monk living alone in the woods. The pleasure of it was just so intense and the sudden full knowledge of exactly what I had been going without.

Healthy Food

I've been wanting to start writing here again but the little voices of self doubt have been standing on a tall stool lately.

Healthy food. I'm on a long road to making it a familiar, comfortable part of my health. A long, long road. I am a very, very emotional eater. Pizza, mac n cheese, and canned soup were like my best friends. I had a very limited taste range that I liked and was/am very attached to -- salty, sweet, savory, and the texture was basically "processed" -- mooshy, flaky, smooth, consistent. In itself such a narrow range is not healthy. A variety of foods is healthy and the foods with the most vitamins rarely fall in that particular range.

Lately my strategy for healing my food sensitivities and preventing future ones is to eat the widest variety of foods possible. I am eating things that taste weird to me even after a whole decade of avoiding MSG, and a whole two years of eating okra and buffalo and quinoa on a regular basis. I grew my own brocili sprouts - they tasted fresh, which I do really like, but they were also bitter, and had some other flavor I couldn't identify. I've been making salads with Savoy cabbage. Normally this is fine - I splurge and use a little vinegar to make it taste like salad, but every once in a while I taste the cabbage-y of it, and it kind of turns my stomach a little. And last night I made a salad out of soy beans, water chestnuts, carrots, fresh ginger, oil & lime juice. Last night it all went down fine and I was happy with myself. But I ate the leftovers for lunch today and my brain and stomach are talking to each other about how gross soybeans are. The rest of the ingredients covered up the flavor of the soybeans so I could totally enjoy the freakishly yummy texture, but still... it will take some getting used to.

Last weekend I also finally tried dinosaur kale. The stem goes all the way down the very narrow leaves, which meant a lot of cutting up. (The stems on regular kale are dis-gus-ting, so I made the leap and assumed the same with the dinosaur.) I simmered cubed lamb roast for 2 hours, then added cubed sweet potatoes (the real sweet potato, light brown outside, and very pale orange interior) and the sliced up dinosaur kale, and simmered for another 1.5 hours. It was super yummy. No complaints about this healthy soup at all. I love kale, I just kind of loathe cutting out stems.

Sweet, Boggling

The Boyfriend asked me to tell him what I plan to do tonight, once I've decided. I usually tell him, but he has never asked me to before. It's like one of those accidental things you do while visiting a remote island -- we drank from the same golden coconut on the night of the full moon. Does this mean we're married now?

Today I am boggled by the difficulty I have with doing something everyday. I want to write in my journal everyday because I feel sooooo much less anxious than usual when I do. And I'm thinking about all the times I wanted to do simple things like stretch my hamstrings everyday, but could never remember, or was too lazy. It's very weird to me.

Of the dumb articles CNN has been posting lately, today I read the dumbest one yet. It encourages you to get a job in the hospitality industry. Four of the ten jobs they mention make $21,000 or less per year. Forward this article to all your enemies now! It also mentions several hospitality jobs that earn good money, but they all require skills that are marketable in many industries. Summary: This is not news.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/worklife/01/23/hospitality.jobs/index.html

The dumbest CNN article ever was a list of skin products for men, and the details of how those products prevent skin cancer. Cute, fine, whatever, but the article also included the brands and prices of the skin products to use. In the movies it's called product placement. What's it called when it's in the news?

Growed Up

I'm thinking about all the time I spent when I was a teenager worrying about how I look. Because now that I'm a grown up, it's really amazing how un-important it is to occasionally show up at work looking exhausted or having a bad hair day.

Whenever I complained when I was a kid my parents would tell me that it would be much worse when I was an adult. I didn't believe them, and now that I'm grown up, I disagree with them. I see their point. There are certainly things about it that are way more complicated than anything I dealt with as a kid. They just didn't know me very well. They didn't know how much I value my independence, or how I thrive in an environment where no one is yelling. Or how much pain my obsession with my appearance was causing me.

The voluntary simplicity movement has made a big impact on me enjoying adulthood. My participation is pretty minimal but just knowing that I have the option to participate more gives all my hard work a terrific sense of being optional. I don't feel stuck. When work is stressful, I don't think, "I wish I didn't have to work." Instead I think, "This sucks but it pays for the lifestyle that I enjoy soooooo much."

Ever Available

Perfectionism is an ever available excuse for failure.

May imperfection be my new love.

I came to revel in imperfection one day. I was so tired of beating up on myself before I'd even begun. It was one of those desperate moves, but once I'd leapt, the new ground felt like rolling around naked in a pile of money, dirty, pleasurable, taboo.

A new crazy

Orthorexia is being obsessed with healthy eating to an unhealthy degree. Persons suffering from this obsession can get so obsessed they become malnourished. It starts out innocently, eating healthier, but instead of being satisfied with a reasonable degree of healthfulness, they keep striving for healthier and healthier, more and more pure or whatever, until it's all they think about.

For over a year I didn't have anything even vaguely junky to eat that I wasn't allergic to. I was so happy when I finally got a junk food back, potato chips. It was definitely a fork in the road. I considered the possibility that it would be healthier to never eat junk food again. But I felt so deprived all the time. I decided it was saner to eat the chips.

I believe strongly that there is such a thing as healthy enough.

I got a few sour faces in my direction while jubiliantly chattering on about potato chips. Like a, "but potato chips aren't healthy" face. It felt like they were disappointed that I was failing to be "perfect" in my pursuit of health.

Then, I got more junk food back (avocado, more fruit, coffee, more nuts, bacon). Then I did some emotional eating related to other health problems. And I gained two dress sizes, going from a size 6 to a size 10. And several of the people I mentioned it to were shocked that I didn't intend to diet it off. I had stopped the emotional eating. In my mind the problem was solved already. Why would I diet back down to size 6? It seems kind of crazy to think like that.

So here is my new theory, and it's based on this experience plus hundreds of other experiences I had on my journey to healthy-enough.

It is an unrealistic goal is to make massive diametrical changes to myself. But if I dislike myself so much that only a diametrical change would make me like myself, then smaller, realistic goals are not worth the effort. But unrealistic (unattainable) goals, don't motivate me to change, so I was stuck.

Where does this idea come from that health and fitness must be perfect? I believe it is because self worth has become bound with health and fitness. The binding to self worth arose from the idea that a woman is only worthwhile if she's attractive, and then with the last 30 years of model culture, a woman is only attractive if she's perfect.