Diet Coke

Oh sweet nectar of the Gods! After creeping up several pounds in the past month due to stress eating, I decided to go back to trying to lose weight. I went back to a company that I last saw back in 2007. I was 20lbs heavier then and looking to lose weight (shocking, I know).

On the plus side, the habits that I picked up over the past two years are no longer an issue. Any weight I lose now is lost naturally. Woo! Go me!

On the down side, the company wants me to give up any soda that's not diet, clear, and caffeine-free. That sounds a lot like water to me. If I actually drank the recommended amount of water for this program - 80 oz a day - I wouldn't have much bladder space left for anything else.

I closely monitor the amount of Diet Coke I drink. I have to. If I didn't I'd be consuming a 12-pack a day and wondering why my stomach hurt all the time. So far, I consistently drink two cans of Diet Coke a day, unless I'm in a restaurant and just go crazy. I'm considering giving up my second can of soda and drinking flavored water at lunch time (yes, I'm still planning on drinking one soda in the morning instead of coffee. I know some people think it's gross. Just pretend you didn't read my confession if you are one of those people).

I just really, really want another soda right now. This sucks.

Perspective

"What are you to Mama? Her baby

What are you to Nana? A big boy!

What are you to Papa? A buddy"

- My Dad and Zac

Calling him my baby started one night after the bath. I would wrap him up in a towel and carry him like a baby. He loved it. I told him that he would always be my baby, no matter how big he got. He smiled and giggled.

He's growing so fast now a days. With every yogurt that he drinks and canned hot dog that he eats, it almost like I can see him growing vertically. His toddler belly is getting smaller and he's outgrown almost all of the 3T clothing. He just started being able to sound out words and identify letters, which makes driving in the car with him so much more interesting. "Mama!" he shout into my right ear, "That sign says 'One Way'. Are you going the right way?" "Mmm hmmm" I would mumble while negotiating traffic. "Are you going the right way?" If I don't answer him immediately he suddenly turns into a three foot tall drill Sargent. "Can you say yes please? I want you to say yes!" "Yes, Zac. We are going the right way. I promise." "Oh, ok, good".

On Wednesday at school he helped a friend in his class who was trying to spell the word 'pig'. As his teacher recounts the story: "Zac just told her flat out, 'P-I-S doesn't spell pig. It spells Pissssss,' I had to tell him that P-I-S did indeed spell piss, but that we shouldn't use the word very often. He helped his friend find the 'g' that she needed."

I love how blunt he is. I have no idea, of course, where he gets that from. Now if I can just assure myself that I'm not forever ruining his concept of himself in relation to women, I'd be great. I don't really want him to grow up and be a big baby, you know? For now, though, I'm content for him to be my baby.

Foggy

I didn't exactly land on my feet with the last GMAT exam. It was more like landing on my side, with my shoulder hitting the mat right before my head bounces off. It's the kind of landing that doesn't cause any injuries, but it stuns you to see the world shift out of focus for a moment.

I scored exactly the same as I had 5 weeks ago. The only difference is that this time I got a 20 someodd percent on quantative and an 89 on verbal. On paper, I know look like I should be an English teacher or wait, a Grants Manager. It was disappointing to say the least.

There have been a lot of tears this week, just trying to figure out what I'm going to do. For a while I wasn't even sure if I should continue my applications for school or just ignore them. Fortunately, it's a very small application fee to my top choice school and my secondary choice for schools just waived their application fee until July 1st.

I have an interview with the second school on Monday. I finally figured out how why the online application wasn't working for me (dual accounts with my name on my side, website upgrades and down software applications on their side).

So cross your fingers please. I am hoping for the best.

Just Me

"At least I am able in all of my travels to make these memories quit,

but tonight I clearly recall, every little bit..."

I'm filled with self-doubt tonight. All I hear are the voices of others telling me I will ultimately fail, even if I have small successes along the way. I'm taking the GMAT tomorrow for the second time and I'm struggling to believe that anything will be different than it was before.

Trusting myself seems to be one of the hardest things for me. It's always so easy to remember the times when I wasn't able to see something through to the end. I wonder when I'll be able to forgive myself for not finishing Peace Corps and for not being as strong as I'd like to be. When am I going to be happy with the person that I see in the mirror? Even if I do 9 things right, I obsesses about the one that I did wrong.

What's so interesting about this all is that it appears to be adult-onset of self depreciation and doubt. I skipped over my teenage years of self-loathing and we straight into my early twenties.

Growing up as a competitive gymnast, I very rarely attempted any move before figuring out
how I could land it well, with "well" being a subjective word meaning different things at different times. At the beginning of the learning process, a safe landing meant that even if I didn't land in the place I wanted to (like on top of the balance beam) I could land safely on the ground, usually curled into the fetal position. That kind of confidence is almost unshakable. That kind says, "I'm going to take my body and contort it into about five different hexagonal shapes and know that even if my feet don't hit the ground first, that I have enough spatial awareness to make sure that I don't break an appendage doing this."

When I was little I saw some of the worst kind of accidents a gymnast could sustain. I saw a girl, no more than 8 or 9 years-old put both of her hands behind her to stop her fall. Her arms hit the mat first and absorbed the entire weight of her impact. She broke both arms in half. Her arm bones ruptured her skin at a 45 degree angle through each elbow. I'll never forget the sight of her small, white bone surrounded by all of her blood. I can still hear her screams as the picked her up with her arms hanging limply to the side.

Practice continued on normally once the paramedics left. It was either confidence or ignorance to believe that it wouldn't happen to any of us.

Metaphorically, that's the place that I would like my life to return to. I'd like to have the confidence to step to the end of a balance beam and know that I'm going to dismount off and land safely, even if I may not know how I'm going to accomplish what I set out to do. At the very least, I now that eventually by body will make contact again with Earth. Sometimes that has to be enough.

Bringing those memories to the forefront of my mind has a soothing effect on me. I know that I didn't turn into a coward that day in UlaanBaatar, when I was told that I was going back to the U.S. for therapy. I didn't turn into a sniveling piece of nothingness when I left Peace Corps three weeks later, without saying goodbye to the volunteers and friends in Mongolia.

I'm still here, though. Whatever obstacle I try to overcome, I at least have the faith that I'll land safely. If I fall, I'll grimace for not being able to complete it, but then smile when I realize that the experience didn't transform me into someone else; I'm still me. As me, I'm lucky enough that I don't have a a scoreboard tally of success to failure hanging over my head for everyone to see.

If I did though, I wonder how that scoreboard will look tomorrow, around 3pm when I finish the damn test.

Indigo Hues

"What makes me think I can start clean-slated?

The hardest to learn was the least complicated"

I've relearned in the past month some of the basic tenets of relationships: be good to others; cruelty will always be returned to you, usually more powerfully than you delivered it to someone else; cherish your family; remember to smile. I've been so far from perfect that I wouldn't even suggest that I was in the realm of even being good. I'm trying, though. Every day I wake up and I'm trying. If I didn't believe that I would be happier and healthier than I was, it would be almost impossible for me to get out of bed in the morning. I'm seeing a new therapist that wants to see me once a week. I have no idea how I'm going to work that into my schedule since I'm in a negative with sick and vacation hours at work, but I'm purposefully putting my hands and my ears and singing, "la la la" whenever I start to think of the finer logistical points of getting to therapy before 6pm every week.

Zac has been struggling a bit. Now that we are back in our apartment he frequently asks if he can sleep next to me, only to wake up in the morning and ask to go into his own room. That makes me wonder if it's possible that I'm snoring louder than he is or if we've reversed the ninja kicking. Maybe he feels the most confident between 5 and 7am. I don't know. He also wants to hold my hand as much as possible. If I'm walking in front of him, trying to get out to the car as fast as possible before work, he calls out: "Wait Mama! I want to hold your hand!!" I stop, wait for his little legs to catch up, and then we go out to the car together. Man, he's a cute kid.

When Zac and I picked my sister and brother-in-law up from the airport, we met up with them at the baggage claim. I left Zac with my sister, rather quickly. He was acting all shy and I knew that negotiation with him would fail, so I just told him that I would be right back and dropped his hand. My sister asked him what was wrong and he told her, "I'm nervous," which for some reason impresses the hell out of me. As MNS said, kids are great because they will actually tell you what they are feeling, rather than adults who will do almost anything to hide how they really feel.

I'm a little more cautious this time around about blogging about how I really feel. All of my blog posts are saved and unpublished. There was just too much unhappiness in one place for me to feel good about them even if I know that I am more than a composite sketch of words. For now, I'm happy leaving those words to rest a minute. I need a clean slate.

I Don't Want Anymore

Although I'm not dating right now, I've been online dating for three years. Occasionally I feel like I should get some kind of award for that. Something along the lines of, "Most Pathetic Individual" award because, really, who dates online for that long? Shouldn't I have met someone at the grocery store or in a coffee shop by now? I'm not new to the area. I have a couple of friends here, even if friends that I make here usually move away from the Houston area. That really shouldn't be allowed, at least not in my book.


One of the most annoying things about meeting people online is tendency of people (because I've heard that women do this as well), to send gratuitous nudity shots to strangers. Here's a newsflash, I'm not going to think you are sexy if you show me a picture of your rippled abs. I'll think, "Jeez, he probably works out a lot more than I do." God help me, if you show me a picture of your genitals, I'll think, "God God Almighty! Why? WHYYYYYYY do you think that I need to see this????"


It's like a male peacock strutting his feathers around the female peacocks. Does he really think that the female peacocks will form opinions about him based on the color and size of his feathers? Does his showy display make him a better peacock or father to the bebe peacocks?

Please, please for the love of all that is holy, don't send me any pictures of your body. I really don't want anymore. I'm still scarred from looking at the pictures the last guy thought were appropriate to send me. Honestly, I'm good. Thanks. No more.