Marina is just that – it’s an open marina that you row in a counter-clockwise loop, and depending on your course it can be about 6000m, not counting inlets. You’re out there with everyone else – rowers from other boathouses, recreational motorboats, sailboats, a couple of commercial tourist fishing expedition boats, and the occasional Catalina-bound ferry. As you might guess, sometimes that makes for an adventure wrapped in chaos punctuated by many an utterance of “What the fuck?”

Creek is different. It’s an outlet of the LA river which has about 2400m of protected water between two bridges that’s two, maybe three boat lanes wide. Thanks to our location, Bear!Boathouse has a dock that lowers down directly to the water. Everyone else has to actually row out of the marina, go out around the breakwater & surf about five or six hundred meters of ocean waves to get access. As such, the course doesn’t get much play beyond some of the local Masters who know how to manage that sort of hazard and college crews who have a coach launch as safety escort.

I like rowing in the creek. Not just because the water is flat – after six years in our marina, shit water is just part of the game. No, I like creek because it helps me let go.

Truth told, I really needed that this week.

Laziest. 2k. Ever.

I did a 2k piece last weekend. I went to SD & did their Indoor Classic, and while everybody else in my heat was busting their ass racing, I just went ahead and… did a piece.

One of the Juniors described it later as “the most casual 2k ever”, and it’s true – I pretty much did the anti-2k.

I sat down, I did a nice steady state piece. I adjusted the volume on my ipod twice, I deliberately didn’t go faster than the girl who was winning the lightweight division (open & open ltwt went together) & and I really only put pressure on for the last 400m when I looked the screen & saw that Hoff (who came in 2nd in the lightweight division) was +10m up on me, which the junior rowers described as, “it literally looked like you said, ‘ehhh, screw it, I’m gonna go ahead & beat Hoff‘.”
That was actually a very accurate assessment, except that longtime readers will not be surprised to know that in my mental version of that statement, I dropped the f-bomb.

After I was done, I put my handle in place, reached back for my phone, took a picture of my screen, then cheered on the girl next to me for her last 500m & waited for everyone else to finish.

Rowers reading this story are either laughing or horrified right now. Or, as JRo said to me at work on Tuesday when she heard, “Wow. You seriously did that & still won your race? You’re kind of an asshole.”

Salter:	hahaha…what a good example you lead for the high school kids
Claris:	what? i cheered the girl next to me on – that’s totally sportsmanship!

Why did I do a piece instead of a race?

Because the problem isn’t my body, it’s my head.

For me, last weekend wasn’t about winning or busting my shit out, it was about composure. It was about rowing a piece without freaking out. Last Saturday, I pulled a 1.53.7 average split – pretty much the same time I pulled last year. The difference is that this year, it wasn’t a fight. I wasn’t hyperventilating. There were no panic attacks. Honestly, if I was anything last week, I would describe that piece as oddly detached.

I wasn’t rowing for time. I was rowing for flow.

One of the things that I’ve come to realize over the last few months is how much I’ve lost my flow.

High School Locker People: where you the shover or the shovee?

On the water, athletically, I love rowing.

Off the water… well let’s be honest, folks – the rowing community has a lot of crap.

Rowing is a small group of people to begin with, and each individual boathouse is a bit isolated from others, so oftentimes you end up in what I can only describe as high school, only nobody is ever forced to graduate, so they just sit at that maturity level. Forever.

The result? You see a lot of dumbass crap.

For people like me, who didn’t participate in high school when I was in high school, being different can make you a target. Add in that I’ve never been one to duck a punch, and you learn real fast what it means to stand alone.

But having to deal with that sort of thing, to keep taking care of yourself over & over… after a time, expending that energy takes its toll. And in the course of that, I’d lost much of what made me love my sport.

So I retreated. I purposely backed away from people & just concentrated on the rowing. Z changed the metrics of my training plan so that I couldn’t measure things the way I usually would. And while the detailed entirety of the tale will no doubt be a different blog entry at another time, for the last four months, I have simply dialed things back & worked the problem.

All of which is why, last weekend, I rowed a piece for flow. I rowed it like I was in the creek.

While the water conditions are mostly flat, unless you have very specific conditions, the split you pull in the creek isn’t really an indicator of your actual speed – since we tend to row early in the morning & later in the evening, the tide is almost always either coming in or out, so one direction your split will be really great, and the other… not so much.

If I really wanted to, I could I find those perfect conditions – as Z loves happily pulled out his phone on Sunday to demonstrate, there’s totally an app for that.

Do I bother? Nah.

Right now I just need to row to row. After Saturday’s 2k, I came home, went to sleep, headed over to Bear!Boathouse on Sunday and hit the creek for a 4×20′ under 155 HR where I literally spent and hour & twenty minutes just playing around with the technicality of my stroke.

The truth is that right now, I am a selfish rower.

Christmas Day, I rowed a 2x with Stesha Carle.
@Steeesh & I had known each other for a bit, but really only started talking over the last year or so, & have never actually rowed together, so when there was nobody around & neither of us had a training plan for Christmas, we decided to meander out & see what there is to see.

…and I was reminded that damn. I row selfish.

Overall, it was decent for never having rowed together. Balance was good, & as someone who normally rows a single, I was perfectly happy to let the little control freak bow so I didn’t have to steer.

There was some slight mismatch – due to yoga having allowed me to develop the ability to scrunch my body into as tiny a ball as one could be when 5’10″, I have a fair compression at the catch so my front angle is deeper, but Stesha comes off the footplates & turns around into the drive much quicker & harder than I do — which is probably why she’s got the silver medal for team USA from this year’s Worlds in Bled and I’m just mucking about in a creek on my own.

…but the thing that struck me the most about that row was the difference in how we balance.

As we would go up the slide, I could feel Stesha behind me – there were wiggles and twitches and movement from her calves and toes as she counterbalanced me.

For me, balance comes from relaxing – I tend to deliberately loosen my upper body as I go up the slide, push my shoulders away from my ears, finesse the oar handles, and allow the boat to roll around me.

Now, to be clear, neither approach is wrong. It just illustrated to me a difference in mindset.

Competitively, Stesha rows a quad, so she’s used to counterbalancing and working with other people in the boat. As much as she concentrates on her own performance, there’s always a part of her brain that also constantly adjusts what she’s doing to better mesh with her teammates.

For the most part, I row a single – because I don’t have to worry about what anyone else might do to offset my motion, my instinct is to just keep my body in line, allow the shell to go where it’s gotta go, & re-engage as I approach the front in order to allow for as little disturbance as possible.

While neither of us knew it at the time, looking back, I know now that really needed that row. For me, that row, and the lesson that I learned from it – athletically, it was a kind of blessing.

When you learn to row, you’re taught to row with others – the most common boat is the 8+. You work as a team, you compete against others for your seat. So much of what & how you do things involves other people.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I love an 8+. Rowing-wise, I was born & raised to be an engine room, and after the practice row for last year’s Crew Classic, I was the one going, “Sweeeeeeep – wait, why are we stopping? Let’s go again!”

But, much like the fact that my parents raised me in a Catholic Republican environment only to have their daughter send them a copy of Farenheit 9/11 right before the 2004 presidential election, how I was raised is not who I turned out to be.

What that row with Stesha taught me is that right now, I’m a single rower. And there’s nothing wrong with that other than that I hadn’t accepted that because what I row has changed, how I approach how I row has to change. I have to be selfish. More importantly, I have to be okay with being selfish, and doing what I need to do for me, no matter how that stacks up to what other people think or expect.

I’m just now getting to the point where I can start to put my head back in the game. Last weekend was the first time in three years where I rowed 2000 meters on something other than the paddle and didn’t feel like my heart was going to explode from neurosis.

Was I at full pressure? Hell no.
Athletically can I do better than that? Yah, I totally can.

But mentally, that was the best 2k I’ve rowed in four years.
There was no psychologically abusive coach telling me I’m not “a real athlete” because I hadn’t hit a certain split, no lung-stealing panic, no feeling that the walls were gonna close in on me. I stopped thinking about anything other than what I needed to do for me, & I did a piece. I did okay. I didn’t freak out. I was okay.
I am okay.

This weekend? Round 2.

There’s another erg sprint at Beach!Boathouse, so I’m going to build on what I did last Saturday & try it again. Based on the heat sheets, I know there’s at least one other girl who’ll probably beat me in the event, and honestly… I don’t care. All I want to do this week is to be able to go a little faster than last week & still have the same composure. To push out of my comfort zone a bit more & still be okay.

This isn’t my endgame. This is a step. This is part of my process. To get to there, I have to get through here. So if I lose on Saturday, that’s fine. Right now, I’m finding my flow.

I’m not racing to win. I’m not there yet. Today, I’m just rowing for me.

Music: Falling – Staind (Chapter V)

previous adventures

• letting go & learning to breathe.
• Just like freakin’ Ghandi.
• rowing & puppies – because really, what else is there?

ShareThis

Expectation:
For the record, I had plans for these last two weeks of the year. Seriously. I was going to go through, finish cleaning out my apartment, organize my electronic files, finish up some lingering projects… you know, all those things that allow one to feel like they’re starting the new year in some semblance of control over their life.

Reality:
…did I mention that I’m moving on Saturday?

But we are! The week before Christmas, Sachiel & I took the Friday beforehand to go look at a couple of possible apartments… and came away completely disheartened. Personally my favorite was the guy that was willing to rent to us and then when he found out I had two dogs, told me the rent had just increased $100/mo. Seriously, dude? I mean, I’ll pay a full deposit or a pet fee, that’s fair, but you want me to pay you $1200 more a year for the entire time I rent from you?

Yeah… we decided to pass.

source

Episode II: The Search Continues

Christmas Eve, we had one place to look at before Sachiel went to visit with Polgara’s cats for two weeks & I migrated with the puppies to the Long Beach Menagerie for a week. When we’d looked at the ad earlier in the week, I’d said to Sachiel, “I vote we just show up at the open house with the dogs and let them charm the landlord the way they do everyone else in the entire world.”

Sachiel was in agreement with this, so when we walked in & the property manager appeared to be a fairly normal, non-shifty lady who responded to my question about two dogs with, “Oh, I have a 13 year old Doberman, that’s fine” — I’m not gonna lie, I could have hugged her. However, this is California, and thanks to the celebrities we have laws about touching & keeping a legal safe distance from strangers, so I held back.

Instead, I offered to bring in the miscreants so Property!Manager could meet them.

On the way in, I looked at my errant canine children & said, “Okay, before we go in, both of you need to pee now or forever hold your peace. Go on, go potty.”

Ernie, always happy to show off that he’s a little boy, obligingly lifted leg & emptied the tank.

Zoey on the other hand, looked at me & was all, “I’m good dude. Totally good. Let’s do this.” Since Ernie is normally my troublemaker, I let it pass & we went in to the potential new apartment.

…where, after prancing about & initiating Property!Manager into their fan club, Zoey promptly trotted over to the smaller bedroom & hunkered down to pee on the carpet.

OMG NOOOOOOOO!!

source

Luckily after a decade of hanging out with Zoey, I know the signs & was able to rush over, pick up her troublesome ass & scoot her out the door with Sachiel before she did any major damage.

After apologizing profusely to my prospective landlord, I went outside to get napkins from my car to sponge things up. Sachiel, who’d been outside with my urinary miscreant, took the napkins inside, and I stood there with Zoey.

“Well go on then,” I told her, “you might as well pee the rest of it out & finish what you started.”

At which point she laid down on the grass as if to say, “Nah, I’m good. I just wanted to do it there.”

:sigh: Little bitch.

Thankfully, Property!Manager wasn’t offended, and let us know there’d been another dog in the apartment with the last tenant, so Zoey was probably marking territory & they’d been planning to shampoo the carpets before the new tenant moved in anyway.

She was also really nice about the fact that, in the hubub, we’d totally just left Ernie with her in the apartment off his leash.

I don’t know if the two dogs had decided to declare Opposites Day just to screw with the humans or what, but while Zoey was expressing herself, Ernie was, according to Property!Manager, “Such a good little boy — so cute and well-behaved!”

:pause:

source

Okay… okay sure. Why yes, yes, he is like that all the time, it’s great. Awesome. Totally. Right.

Luckily, Virginia, there is a New Apartment Santa Claus.

Needlees to say, we applied for the apartment then & there, and got a call the next day saying that yes, we’d been cleared & it was ours for the taking.

:fist of triumph!:

source

oh, but don’t worry – the universe continued to screw with me. because it’s fun.

For oh yea, there is joy in the land, my beloved miscreant readers – Sachiel & I went forth & offered up two cashiers’ checks to the Gods of Security Deposit & First Month’s Rent, and I left my 30 day notice letter at 1049. We got keys to the new abode, and Property!Manager promised to email us the lease because her printer had run out of ink that morning.

All was well.

Then, as we were at 1049 (where my printer lives) and I was reading the lease, I saw this:

No it is too long, let me sum up: The lease says that if the landlord gets through the condo zoning process & decides to start selling the units off as condos, they can kick us out at any time with 30 days’ notice.

…and I was like, “WHOA. What?”

source

Because no. No way. No way was I going to move into a place, thinking I’d be there for at least a year, & then get told that I’d have to move out & have only 30 days notice to find a place that would take two dogs. No.

I mean, seriously, I was trying to be like, an adult & be calm & reasonable about the whole thing, because hello we’d already put down the deposits & sh*t, so we kinda had to sign the lease & move — but that wasn’t mentioned in our tour or anything, so while I could plan contingency and all, the five year old in my brain was totally not dealing well.

source

However, Anya talked me off the ledge and I emailed Property!Manager & managed to very calmly & casually be all, “Hey – what up with that?”

…and a few hours later, I got a response from Property!Manager that no no, this was just something they have for all their properties, the owners have held the property for nine years & had no intention of selling. It seems the properties had actually been zoned for condos about five years ago, and she kept telling the owners they needed to change the language in the contracts because it keeps causing this question from new renters, etc. ::insert further annoyance with employer here::

Short version: we’re good to go.

source

You know what the hardest part of moving is? The part where you move.

…which is where we are now. Sachiel & I had two options: we could shift things over a bit at a time over the course of the month… or we could just freakin’ do it & try to get everything in by this weekend so it would all just be over.

Of course we chose the crackhead option.

Which meant we spent our New Year’s cleaning the new apartment, and in my case, packing up the old one. and yesterday, doing online traffic school, but we’ll talk about that later.

On Saturday, Math & DJT are going to come help us move the larger furniture-type things (big couch, oversized armchair, bookcase, desk & a trunk) and various other shiznit, after which Sachiel & I will no doubt have to fall over & sleep for a while.

source

Hopefully by Monday the only thing left to do will be for me to go back & clean the old place, hand over the keys, and glare ominously at Old!Landlord to remind him that he should get my deposit (and the 10 years’ interest that West Hollywood renters’ law entitles me to collect) to me quickly because let’s be honest – should the occasion require, sometimes… I’m kind of a bitch.

source

And after all that’s done, I just have to circle back to where we started: Expectation.

because all of those things that I was going to do over Christmas break before I knew I was moving?

Yeah. they still need to get done. But at least now that I’ve moved significantly west towards where The Things That Make Up My Life reside, I’ll have an extra hour & a half of time not spent in traffic each day to work on actually accomplishing them.

Which means I’ll probably only have 45 minutes of free productivity time because really, who are we kidding — I’m totally going to sneak in some sleep.

source

Tru fax?

Honestly, my real fear is now that we have an apartment with a garage to work in, I may come home from work one day & find that Sachiel has decided to give Ernie a makeover.

source

source

Good luck, little dude. Just remember – Mommy loves you.

Music: Jason Mraz – Sleeping to Dream – Live from Montalvo (Selections for Friends)

previous adventures

• Zombie Abandonment Poll: A holiday activity
• passing the wil wheaton test & puppies building forts
• Thinking in colors, dating like an Austen novel, & how to booby-trap a brand identity.

ShareThis

After my mixed bag exercise at Head of the American, last week was my week off.

Why did I take a week off?

originally asked by Sachiel.
In most training plans, athletes are encouraged to take at least one week a year off. For a lot of rowers, this often happens in August/September — it’s a natural break between sprint season ending & fall head racing beginning.

In my case, it happened in July — I wasn’t going to Canadian Henley, so after tearing down the course at Mercer like a bull in a china shop, I’d had a break and started training for the fall in August.

With my right arm injured & the decision not to row NARF, I took the week after Head of the American off — not only in the hopes of allowing my elbow/forearm to heal up, but also so that I could do a second step test to be compared to the one from earlier this fall. I’ll most likely do lactate testing with the kids at Beach!Boathouse in December, but since my first step test was done right after I’d been Sick Because of the Wheat, we did another to see if there was any difference or I just… suck.
(no, I don’t know the answer to that one yet, The Man Doing the Math had two high school regattas to run that Saturday & Sunday – we squinched it in last Friday due to timing of training schedule, so we both knew he’d get back to me with actual results when he gets a chance to breathe.)

For the record, a week off doesn’t mean I sat around on a couch watching TV & eating bon-bons. Instead of doing say, seven workouts in five days, I only did 3, and I was indeed completely off the water for… actually come to think of it I still haven’t been back on the water – my first days back that the boathouse have been erg workouts. #sad

so this is what other people do…

It’s an odd thing, a week off. The only comparison I can make is that it’s like when you work a 9-to-5 job and then there’s that one day when, for one reason or another, you’re not at your job and are instead out & about in the world. You drive around, go to the grocery store, Do Things Out in the World, and think, “So this is what happens in the rest of the world when I’m avoiding meetings and playing WordsWithFriends compiling code? Huh.”

I remember talking to one of the junior alums Alle when she came home for Christmas her freshman year. After four years rowing in high school, she got to uni in NY and decided that college rowing was not for her.

“It’s kinda weird at first, isn’t it?” I’d asked her.
“Oh my god,” she’d exclaimed, “I got like, twenty hours a week of my life back. I didn’t know what to do with myself!”

…and in a way, it’s like that. You look at your schedule & decide it’s going to be an All the Things! week. You’re going to Clean All the Things! and Make All the Food! and Catch Up on All the Client Work!

…and that totally, totally, completely doesn’t happen.

You think you know … but you have no idea.

What actually happens is that you get home from the regatta, and after having driven 12-14 hours in three days, drop all your crap in the middle of the living room, consider a shower, decide that you’ll just sit on your couch for a moment first, and then wake up on your couch the next morning.

Awesome start to what should have been The Week of Efficiency.

The next morning, when you were going to pack your boat on the car then row Z‘s Filippi before driving to Beach!Boathouse to drop off said boat & then pick up the Canine Brigade from their stint as part of Doggie Devo, you discover that it is not only pitch dark, but the coast has also been enveloped in a fog wall roughly the consistency of pea soup.

Good times driving the 45 minutes south on the 405 with that one, especially since my roll of twine disappeared & I couldn’t tie down the ends:

by the time I got to Beach!Boathouse and stopped after the speed bump to take this picture through my windshield, the fog had thankfully gotten a bit better than when I’d left LA. and yes, it was only my second time driving with $5k of hardware on the roof, so these conditions aren’t nerve-wracking at all.

…and the whole week just kinda goes from there. I got some things done, but not nearly as much as I really should have, or honestly, needed to.

The Week of Efficiency turned out to be The Week of Sludgery. Every time I’d be home to do something, I’d end up putting it off. Or sleeping. Or getting distracted by the dogs because I’m home for once & I should spend time with them. Or…something.

But most of all, last week reminded me of just how much the structure of having an athletic schedule helps to stave off depression.

silver lining: modern creatives have learned to abstain from ear amputation. (mostly)

Here’s the thing about creatives – we’re all a little crazy in our own way. That’s what makes us able to see things differently enough to comment on it in some form which gets your attention. If our brains worked like “normal” people, you’d only get “normal” stuff, and then we’d all just be really friggin’ bored at the office.

and in case anyone’s wondering, I actually did buy my parents AAA for Christmas last year.

And for the public at large, this great — these are the kind of minds that think up how to win a debate with your husband over whether to buy new towels by putting a 4 foot high metal chicken on the front stoop, or Seven Games You Can Play With a Brick.

But it also gets you into places where you freak out because all you can think is that you have no idea what the f*ck you’re doing and you have to be honest with people that the reason you haven’t been writing is that you’ve been trying to figure out why you don’t want to get out of bed.

I think part of it is that it’s just that time of year. Here in SoCal, summer ran out on us faster than a whore the morning after payday, leaving behind cold winds and a fog worthy of a Brontë novel, and everyone’s just like, “ugh… great.”

But across the board, I have several highly creative, incredibly smart friends who are having Life!Crisis!Moments! Whether it’s from a book deadline, job uncertainty, or in one case dog training, there’s a high occurrence of us each talking one another off the ledge as of late, and it just keeps reminding me to thank $deity for the internet. Years ago, we’d have each just been the town weirdo, isolated & told by others that there’s something wrong with us, but thanks to the power of the interwebs, town freaks across the world can connect & discover that it’s not that you’re the only person having these issues, it’s simply that geography separated us from meeting face-to-face, so let’s just go ahead & create our own electronic-based support group.

In terms of helping to create an emotionally stable place for creatives to innovate the ideas in their head, the internet just might be the best thing to ever happen for that weird kid who sat in the back of class in high school.

why? because our fellow crazies help us feel better.

Here’s the thing — just like the brains of creative people have the ability to bring about really great things, it also works in the way of being able to see life in creatively bad ways, the thinking about which can cause one to go completely over the edge — not necessarily into Hacking Apart My Neighbors Mode, but more into a despondent sort of Why the F*ck Am I Even Bothering Mode, where you’re so apathetic that not even the possibility of unicorn bacon could make things better.

In Despondent Mode (as I shall refer to things in a rare attempt at brevity), you just don’t care. Things are never going to work out right anyway, they never have, why bother doing anything? It’s way easier to catch up on Hulu, or take a nap, or walk to Target & get food you shouldn’t be eating even though there’s food that’s good for you which could easily be made in the fridge because things will never change and one day everyone’s going to figure out that I’ve actually been desperately hoping no one will notice that underneath everything I’m just a huge failure so why bother trying in the first place when the inevitable is inevitable — after all, that’s why we call it inevitable because in this case I know that that word means what I think it means, goddammit.

It’s especially hard when you’re alone. When you’re out in the world, at work, or amongst other people, you can take your mind off it and focus on other things, and probably get things done. I am ridiculously productive when I’m at Museum!Co – the thought of going in on a day when I’m not getting paid to be there so I can work on other clients has seriously crossed my mind, I sh*t y’all not.

Because as much as you can email, and call, and connect with the Internet Friends Who Are Your Kind of Crazy, there’s a limit to how much that can help. So if you’re someone that’s single and lives alone, there’s no one to talk you off the ledge in real life, because oh holy jesus you don’t want to talk to someone you see every day about it, because then they’ll look at you and what if they always wonder if you’re about to go crazy, and then they’ll try to be like, sensitive & sh*t & be all, “You know, if you ever need to talk, it’s okay” which is well-intended but just comes off really… patronizing. A relationship? Forget it. Who would want to deal with that? Normal people aren’t like this, after all, and people want to be around people who are normal.

…and that’s the kind of thinking & reasoning that starts things off. The problem is that when you’re by yourself, with only your brain, that’s when things can go… a little off the rails.

it’s called a downward spiral for a reason.

When you’re already tired & you get home to the apartment that for the love of god you’re trying to leave but finding somewhere that doesn’t mind that you have two dogs is such a bitch in LA, and there’s work to be done and food that needs to be made because hey – turns out your body doesn’t like wheat so the majority of any food in packaging has become off-limits, and there’s laundry and it’s just you to do everything, because there is no one else there.
You’re on your own, the same way you’ve always been and sometimes can’t help but think you just might always be if for no other reason than that your brain doesn’t work like other girls which is why guys always ask the tiny cute girl who doesn’t have these problems and knows how to play whatever game it is that I’m supposed to understand but don’t because clearly I missed that day in junior high when everybody else got to go over the rules which is why I always do the wrong thing, and even if I did know what I’m supposed to be doing, it doesn’t really matter because guys in California are only interested in Tiny Cute Girls which my double-digit jeans size ass will never be, ’cause while being able to balance 3/4 slide at a standstill with oars up in a single looks great on the water, turns out that’s not exactly something guys consider a siren song of date-ability, and maybe my mother was right that no man is going to want a girl with a smart mouth like mine so couldn’t I at least try to lose a little weight because you’d probably look just lovely if you lost a few pounds but if you can’t manage that you’d best go make yourself useful & work.
Because work is all I’m really good at, or I would be if I would just finally get everything done and live up to all of my supposed potential that everyone is always telling me I have, except I’m tired and I don’t want to have to do everything myself but there’s no one else and I need to just figure everything out and get everything done and do it on my own because I can’t depend on anyone else to actually do anything, I can’t even trust the woman that’s been walking my dogs because when I came home at 7pm on Wednesday she was only just taking them out for their second walk and when I went to give her the check for the month she reeked of pot and I’m so glad I was able to tell her no es más after November 20 because holy shit you’re old enough to be my mom and I already grew up with Drunk Mommy I don’t need Pothead Dogwalker plus now I’m wondering how many times you’ve come into my house and taken my dogs out onto the street when you’ve been high as a fuckin’ kite and am I the only one in this apartment building that’s not a pot smoker this is why I keep trying to leave, for fuck’s sake I just want an apartment that I like in a neighborhood that doesn’t suck in my price range where they don’t mind that I have two dogs and that one of them is over 40 pounds I hate to break it to ya but both of my dogs will cause far less damage than a cat — have you ever been in an apartment where the cat refuses to use the litter box? Do you know how noxious the smell of fermented cat pee in the walls and carpet is and you’re worried about my dogs? Christ on a crutch I hate this place and I don’t want to do a damn scrap of client work even though that money would make it easier to move because I’m just so tired and I really want a nap because I don’t want to deal with any of this and fuck my potential and accomplishment and all the shit I’m supposedly capable of, I am tired and alone and why does it seems like everyone else knows what they’re doing when I feel so lost and it would be so much easier just to go to sleep.

… because in your head, things sound like that, and you just want to sit down and cry.

A bunch.

…and then when you wake up the next morning, all that stuff from the night before is still there needing to be done, and you have to deal with it.

All. Over. Again.

slicing life into more manageable pieces.   like cake.
mmm… cake.

So how, you might ask, does one get through moments like that and not end up in a padded cell wearing a jacket that hasn’t been fashionable since the completely unexpected Spanish Inquisition?

Everybody’s got their own way – some people have a shrink, some people cry, some people yell at other people on the internet, and I’ve got two friends in San Francisco who became roommates & declared themselves The House that Biochemistry Built.
Warning: While there is very little chance of involuntary anal leakage, morbid humor has been found to be a common side effect of any therapeutic technique.

For me, it’s structure.

Other than my time at Museum!Co, I technically do not have an actual accountability to be anywhere or see anyone at any point in time. I am a freelancer, I make my own schedule – theoretically, I can work from wherever I want whenever I want. While that sounds really great, the whole working-in-your-pajamas concept, it’s actually incredibly hard. Most of the time, for me to get any significant work done, I have to literally physically leave my apartment. The CBTL on Melrose? For some reason, that spot is just incredibly productive for me. I can get more done in one 8 or 12 hour stretch where I’ve glued my arse to the chair in the table by the door than I would in three days spent trying to work in my apartment.

But it’s also about not working 12 hours at a stretch, and giving myself a break.

As one guy I know said, “your brain just never stops working, does it?”
To which I unthinkingly replied, “I was left to my own a lot as a child, and according to my brother’s military recruiter I have a high aptitude for creative problem-solving.”
–> for the record, ^that response tends to be a conversation-stopper. just a tip.

I’ve learned that it’s important for me to create times when I can put all of the things in my head aside and just do without thinking, which for me is often achieved by working out.

Some people work out because they’re angry. rowing has a lot of this one.
Some people work out because of their body issues, some people use it to work off stress.

I work out so that my brain is too tired to work itself into Slightly Crazed Despondent Mode.

After growing up & being told that I was chubby & not an athlete, rah rah one of the last kids running around the track on Presidential Fitness Testing Day & all that, I walked into a gym at the age of 18 and discovered something:

High amounts of cardio makes my world better.

The Riddikulus Voice doesn’t think four chess moves ahead because I simply don’t have the mental energy to hear it – truth is, I’m actually kind of okay with the fact that I have a tendency to forget day-to-day operational details — trust me when I say that in my case, better to be absent-minded than overly-minded.

In terms of the largest yield of Fatigue Acquisition in the shortest amount of time, rowing’s hard to beat. Competitive rowers are, well, we’re kinda not right in the head, and most other athletes will openly acknowledge that. I was walking across the pitch at the San Diego Highland Games a few years ago when a very friendly, completely fit Irish guy made a beeline over & tried to recruit me for the San Diego Rugby league. (Like I said, I ain’t a tiny girl.)

I laughed & said, “”First off, I’m from LA, so I’m geographically useless to you, but also the UK already got me in another sport.”
“Oh really,” my would-be recruiter asked, “what’s that?”
“Rowing.”
“Never mind,” his delightful Irish accent informed me as he took a step or two back with his hands in the air. “I used to go running with the rowers at university. You fuckers are crazy.”

That’s right, people. Irish rugby players think the rowers are crazy.

In terms of comparative scale, that’s what one could call “an indicator”.
And every rower that just read that story just had a moment of pride in our sport. #trufax

Exercise also gives me a schedule. I have to get up in the mornings because rowing isn’t something you can do at any ol’ time of day. Or at least, not if you want anything to go well. While Beach!Boathouse is open to members 24/7, it’s a minimum 45 minute drive away.
Thus I have to go to Bear!Boathouse, whose morning hours are from 6am-9am, so if I’m going to go, I’ve got to get up. I try to set up my double days for when I’m not working onsite not only because of scheduling flexibility, but also because then I can’t tell myself I’ll just work later — I have to do it between this time & this time because I’ve already got something to do later.

This way, I don’t have to do everything all at once or feel pressured to Accomplish All the Things in one huge swath — I’ve got a slice of Work Cake built into my schedule, and I’ll do as much as I can in that slice of Work Cake before I go to my next slice of Exercise Cake.
mmm… cake.

except now I have a day without Exercise Cake. omg, no cake!

While it’s admittedly not perfect, this system is sort of what I’ve sussed out for myself, and it wasn’t until this last week when half of my structure was gone that I realized just how much I depend on it to make my world function. Not having that time set aside and not having planned anything to fill that gap in my schedule was just a new kind of horrible, and it really wasn’t until towards the end of the week when I realized that I was running out of time to do all the things that I was supposed to have gotten done over the last week that I actually got my procrastinate-ey depressed arse in gear & was Productive Due to Panic.

I’m not gonna lie — when I put together what we’d discussed for the next stage of my training & sent it to Z for proofing & revisions, I was honestly looking forward to being told, “Yes, go with that”, and being able to have my structure again.

I did not expect the response I got.
“I think everything looks good except that you don’t have a day off. You need one. A complete day off.”

well… crap.

Seriously, this caused me to have a moment.
Like, an actual serious pause where I laid in bed at 4:30am* and had to think about how to do approach this beyond my knee-jerk response to him of, “You & your allowance for HUMANITY.”
*4:30am: Zoey woke me up because she had to pee & I was checking my email on my phone before I let her in & we both raced back under the covers.

learning how to build structure with different materials. I’ve gone from recipe to civil engineering experiment.

The truth is, as scary as the idea might be after the last week, a day off is a good thing. Right now I’m living the present workout/work setup with a specific goal in mind, but I won’t always be able to keep up this pace, either physically or schedule-wise. And Z knows me enough to know that I will just mindlessly work myself into Fail Mode, denying that I need a rest all the way until I hit a wall.

Example: I just got the intro email confirming my membership to CrossFit & they mentioned that on Sundays they have open gym to make up workouts, do extra, or work on certain skills, & my brain went, “I could totally go do that after my 15k steady state… Wait — no, no I’m not supposed to do that anymore. Bad Claris!“

So I’ve got this – the one day free. Baby steps to figure out what it is that everyone else is doing while I’ve been burning off my neurosis. That way, when the time does come for me to step away from things, I don’t have a repeat of last week.

For now, however, it’s time for me to go do an Intro O-lifting class so that I don’t accidentally break myself this Friday when I join up with the regular CrossFit classes. There’s still plenty of time between now & endgame, so I still need to do the work in between.

… which is probably for the best, because I really can’t eat wheat & after writing this, I completely & totally want some freakin’ cake.

Music: Shake it off – Florence + The Machine (Ceremonials)

previous adventures

• parking cars, building walls, and creating structure: oh yeah, I’m livin’ the dream.
• pooh bear tech support, babies of various species, & power tool acquisition

ShareThis

Looking back, I suspect he gave it to me so that I left him alone before he threw it at my head — just because I insisted I could feel that the oars weren’t set evenly & it turns out they were off by .3 does not mean I’m crazy. It means I’m precise, so there’s no reason to ask if I’m the Princess & the Pea like it might be a bad thing, it means that I now know how to change out handles & set even lengths on oars, and I think that’s a good thing.

…right? Right. Totally!

Note: For the record, I gave Z his book back, because I’d gone to Amazon & ordered my own in case I wanted to be able to take notes.

The point being that rigging a boat & doing wiring — normally these things & I are, if not Great Friends, then at the very least, Fairly Amicable Acquaintances.

Sadly for me, the following story is not normal.

Saturday. The day I thought I had it figured out.

So for those of you that actually read my blog entries that have #rowing in the header:
first off – thanks for putting up with me
second, you probably know that with my new boat, there’s been a slight… struggle with setting up my wiring.
(“struggle” : trans. MTV called from the 90’s, they’d like to know if I would participate in Claris vs Boat wiring as a Celebrity Death Match.)

Thus far this process has involved discovering that my wiring set didn’t have a magnet on the seat (my fault for not checking & assuming it’d be there), switching out the original wiring that came with the boat for a new set, trying three different magnets before I found one strong enough (really NK? What’s up with a weak magnet in my NEW wiring set? A couple of rowers at Beach!boathouse say they had that problem too, you might wanna check your supplier.)

The point being, two wiring sets & three seat magnets later, I finally had a rate.

Unfortunately, it appeared to be the horribly wrong rate, unless I’ve suddenly developed the heretofore unknown to me superpower of thinking I was paddling and in fact rowing a 46. (for non-rowers, you paddle at like, a 16. Slight difference, that.) G-mo borrowed my 1x for his heat at SW Regionals* & it told him he raced his 1k at a 108 stroke rating, a skill of which we were all appropriately in awe.
*because of my vertical proportions, I discovered my best hardware fit was a mens’ F-15 with a 165 weight cap. As such, my boat is the envy of every lightweight male on our team.

Since everything appeared to be installed correctly, we declared that I’d gotten a crap wiring set, & I ordered another from NK. Got it, put it in… same. damn. problem. Stroke rate: approx a bajillion.

Em. of. effffffff.

Attempt at Silver Lining:
Well, I have been working on improving my ability to hold a higher rate.

At this point, I gave up, admitted that I’d hit the edge of my troubleshooting capability, & asked DaddyMcG to take a look. So after team practice on Sat morning, we took my boat down, & by the time I’d gotten my speedcoach & came back, he said, “I can see the problem right here.”

The magnet was too far back.

JTG, whom I’d bought the boat from, already had wiring in there, so when I put the new sets in, I used his old spots thinking, “Okay, he’s already proven this is the right place. As they say in Beauty & the Beast, if it’s ain’t Baroque, don’t fix it.”
@Steeesh: B&B reference is totally your fault. I’ve had that song in my head on & off ever since you said “Hey gurl!”

Realize you’ve put the seat on backwards.

Sit 100m away from the dock & go, “Son of a b*tch!”

Paddle back to the dock. Get out of boat. Pull oars in. Take seat off tracks.
Turn seat around.
Put seat back on tracks.
Grumble.
Run oars out. Get back in boat. Push off dock.

Five strokes… no stroke rate again.

I just… I don’t, I can’t… it’s not fair.

Okay. Stop. Breathe. Engage yoga breath. Apply brain. You had a stroke rate last time, then you put the seat on correctly.

…if the magnet was at the front when the seat was on backwards, putting the seat on properly moved it to the back again.

When I stopped to talk to the other rower & explain that I didn’t come back in because Something Dire Had Occurred, I must’ve not been paying attention & put the magnet right back where I’d just taken it off from.

Go. Team. Me.

Paddle-back-to-the- dock. Get-out-of-boat. Pull-oars-in. Take-seat-off-tracks.
Put the damn magnet in the right damn spot.
Make sure seat is facing right freakin’ way.
Put seat back on tracks.
Grumble.
Run-oars-out. Get-back-in-boat. Push-off-dock.

Obligatory five strokes.
Achieve stroke rate.
:fist of triumph!:

Start to paddle away… realize that there’s a click & slight bump when approaching the catch.

What. What now? What the freakin’ bloody hell now???

With the added weight of… well let’s just be honest – my ass, the seat now bends in just enough that the two magnets don’t pass by one another, they hit each other.

Really? Really? It’s not enough that I’m having this morning of mornings, but now you gotta make a sister feel fat, too?

WHY DOES THE UNIVERSE LIKE TO TORTURE ME?

Seriously, people – I’d put up with a lot from the Cosmic Muffin that day, but the fat joke — oh, that put me right over the edge. I just started mumbling stuff like, “You wanna go, b*tch? Really? You wanna go? Fine. Effin’ bring it, and we will em’ effin’ go. And you will lose, because right now I’m in the mood. I am from New York. My mom works at Wal-Mart. My parents live in a trailer. I was the first to get a freakin’ degree. You know what that means? Underneath all this nice, civilized, well-spoken, meditation-practicing, educated-up guise, I am a Long Island girl with a bad temper whose parents are technically trailer trash and if need requires, do not doubt for a moment that b*tch, I will cut you. ”

Backtodock. Outofboat. Pulloarsin. Seatofftracks.

Let’s look at what we’ve got here.

Okay. Seat – magnet cannot get any higher, it’s on the frame for the seat wheels. No give there.
Boat. We’ve got the deck, the tracks, the porthole cover.

Dude, wtf, I lost ten pounds & shifted BMI this summer because I’m freakin’ allergic to mother-lovin’ wheat. What is wrong with the world when I have to give up bread and my own damn boat is still telling me my ass is too big? Why you gotta be like that, Baby? Didn’t I get you new wiring? I’m gonna order the new shoes soon! Momma loves to row you, why you gotta be so mean?

Okay. No. Stop that. Focus, brain. Focus. Let go of the leftover childhood insecurity borne of being taught an unrealistic body image and focus on the now.

Porthole cover. That’s inset, so it’s lower than the deck. Unless I flip the boat :pause to knock on internet wood: I’ll pretty much never take that cover off, so it really won’t move.
I can try putting the magnet on that, and it should be low enough so that the magnets will clear each other under the apparent weight of my ginormous ass.

Hey hey! Focus, remember? Focus. Before we descended into allowing Bridget Jones’ neurosis to control thought process, there was an actual good applicable solution there. Let’s focus on that.

As you might guess by… most of the entries in this blog, my life often falls into the category of… special, and as such I’ve learned to contingency plan, which is why, when I’d first come down to the dock, I’d brought a roll of electrical tape & a small pair of scissors which I keep in my toolbag just in case.

This, it turned out, was just such a case.

I gently pried the hull-magnet (attached by double-sided tape) off the deck, scooted enough slack in the wiring to stretch to the porthole over, and pressed the hull magnet onto the cover, using my handy-dandy electrical tape to tack things down for testing purposes.

Run the oars out. deep calming breath.
Get back in boat. it’s gonna work. it’s totally, totally all going to work.
Push off dock. Things will be fiiiiiine…

Obligatory five strokes.
Achieve stroke rate. yay!
Five more strokes, listening carefully….
No clicking noise.

No way.

I’m almost afraid to say this, but I think it works.

YES!
It’s possible I almost started to do a victory dance before I remembered I was in a slightly tippy conveyance out in the middle of a body of water and thus needed to hold on to the oars in order to stay upright.

Finally.

I paddled out clear of the dock & the stadium which was no longer open to rowers & thus meant I couldn’t calibrate that morning, & started up the channel towards the yacht club. Held water, took a minute to check things before I started my workout an hour & fifteen minutes after I first put my boat in the water (Not that I’m bitter. Not at all.) Looked up as I was putting my sunglasses on, & saw…

… the rest of my team rowing by from the bridge to the dock as they finished their practice.

Hey guys… :sad little wave:

At that point, it was about 8:30am, the sun was up & in the sky at full shiny brightness, the rest of my team was headed home, & I’d accomplished jack-all for a workout that morning.

There was really only one thing to do.

…and so, 3×30 minutes of steady state later, I was done.

What? Of course I did the workout after all that — even my boat is saying my ass needs to train!

Music: Henry Nearly Killed Me [It’s a Shame] – Ray LaMontagne

ShareThis

And in adjusting to all that, sleep has at times been a little elusive, not to mention just the brainpower of getting the semantics of everything figured out so I can go seamlessly from one thing to another & not have to actually think about details while doing so.

…which is part of why I’d like to stop & apologize to you, the ragged band of miscreants who occasionally peruse my bandwidth for (questionable) guidance & entertainment (which tends to endanger what little self-esteem I have left).

Because the last time I was here, I asked you to do me a favor & help out by hitting up the facebook like, Google plus, twitter RTs & tumbler re-blogs through the site directly instead of through my personal facebook page, as some of you are wont to do.

You know what I forgot to do before I said that?

I forgot to put up the f’ing SMS buttons which would allow you to comply with my request.

:takes a bow:

In my defense, at least I realized this all on my own, so no one here got the joy of the neener-moment.

As a bonus (because I’m a giver that way) not only did I recognize the issue on my own, I also fixed it, so if we could all be so kind as to sally forth & pretend this little operational hiccup never happened, that’d be great.

Example the first:
So it’s Saturday morning, and I’m driving down to Beach!Boathouse for practice. As most weekends this summer, France is in the car with me. I was a coach when France was in high school, & when we first started carpooling, I warned him, “Just so you know I’m probably going to treat you like my little brother. Especially since you’ve got the same name.” (Which on the morning when France & my biological younger brother FlyBoy were in the same car, was admittedly a little confusing. Not gonna lie.) France accepted that fairly well and we fell into the pseudo-sibling way of interacting to the point where Pomatto once asked if we were related. *snerk*

Anyway, so there we are cruising down towards Beach!Boathouse. Now, the road goes stoplight, stoplight, stoplight, stoplight, then stop sign, stop sign before the turn.

Well France is kind of laconic by nature, and I was thinking about how to set up the work I had to get done after practice, and I realized… we’ve been sitting at the stop sign for a good minute, minute & a half as the half-paying-attention part of my brain that’s driving waited for the non-existent stop light to turn green.

“Oh my god,” I said as I pulled away, “I was totally waiting for the light. Why didn’t you say something? You just sat there & let me!”

France shrugged. “Hey, you’re driving. I figured I’d give you another few seconds.”

Little fracker…

In my defense, the next day another rower admitted that she’d done this as well. Seems it’s a common mistake for sleep-starved athletes in the area.

Example the second:
so there I am, on my way out of work at Museum!Co one day. Headphones for my ipod in, I meander my way over to the platform for the tram, doing what all of the employees to – go to the tape railing at the edge of the track, disconnect the “barricade”, walk in, then reconnect it.

The platform was empty, but eh, I figured I’d just missed the last tram. There were a bunch of people walking down the hill, which was odd, but after a while when you work at a place that attracts a lot of tourists, you just shrug off odd behavior & think, “psh. tourists.”

So there I am, leaning against a pillar, spacing out, checking facebook, looking at my email, Pandora going in my ears, and somehow in my peripheral vision I see movement.

Looking up, I see k-walla waving madly at me. She starts miming an odd message, and my first thought was, “Dude, you suck at charades.”

Then I realized she was basically saying, “Choo-choo no go.”

In other words, the tram I’d been waiting for? Never gonna show up, and it would seem she’d been standing there for about oh, five minutes or so – jumping up & down, calling my name, waving her arms… whatever to try & get my attention whilst I blissfully hung out as lines of tourists passed me by to begin their walk down the hill to ground level.

Way to go me.

Example the third:
Our network was being slow on Wed, so my playlist on spotify kept freezing up. Tired of that, I moved my headphones to my iPhone & turned on my Pandora app.

Five minutes in, I was flipping through screens on my computer, & got all annoyed at my Spotify interface because I’d set it up to play King, the new release from O.A.R., but I kept hearing Trouble by Ray LaMontagne. I literally kept hitting “Play” pause “Play” pause and going, “Dude, wtf, why aren’t you playing the right song?” for about three minutes before the song in my ears changed & I realized that I was trying to alter my Pandora playlist using Spotify.

So basically right now if we were going to tweet my life, it would look like this:

#GoTeamMe #firstWorldProblems #UserFail

The solution?

Clearly, I need a keeper. Or at the very least, a boyfriend who doesn’t mind that he’ll occasionally have to stop, take me by the shoulders, turn me in the proper direction & say, “Walk in that direction, honey.” Also he’ll have to be okay with the fact that this is something which will occur when I am completely and totally stone-cold sober.

…and yet I remain single. How on earth that is, I do not know.

:looks at the sky:

Hey, Universe, can we possibly work on that? Even just a little?

:silence:

:crickets chirp:

:more silence:

…as always thank you for your excellent guidance. I’ll let you get back to Reginald’s quivering member.

Music: Twin Peaks – Surfer Blood

previous adventures

• Computer tips, geek workouts, & how CPR illustrated that I really am losing my mind
• Scribbling signs of life, 10 min at a time
• An idle mind, bosses that rock, and the VS Angles…

ShareThis

Let me be clear: I don’t hate my clients. I’ve actually weeded those clients out, the ones that make me want to tear my hair out & scream. The non-Museum!Co clients I have at the moment are either people I actually know, & one that was referred over to me by a friend. And the work that presently needs to be done isn’t even all that hard, just things that need to be plodded through to get to the next stage of the project, and making myself do that is creating the same reaction as trying to get a vegetable-averse toddler to eat his brussel sprouts.
I have the clearest memory of being a kid on Long Island & my mom telling me I wasn’t leaving the table until I had eaten all of my brussel sprouts. It just happened to be the night of the neighborhood fire drill, & luckily for me the neighborhood alarm went off, so we all had to leave the house & go stand in the street, rah rah. Well on the way out I grabbed my brussel sprouts and ditched them in the hedge as I went by. Some might call that trickery, but due the biodegradable properties of brussel sprouts, I prefer to think of it as composting at an early age.

I’m just having this horrible apathy towards work of any kind at the moment – not a good thing for any self-employed freelancer. That’s not to say I don’t have ideas and ambitions, just that I’m a bit burnt out on actually doing things about them, so I’m stuck in this same cycle of
panic -> work furiously -> finish -> fall over -> avoid because I’m burnt out again -> panic
… rinse & repeat as needed.

It just seems like there’s so much work, & so much that needs to be done, & while things are so much better than they were this time last year, I can’t help but wonder when I’ll get to the point where I can just… leave everything behind for a little while. Even this weekend, where I’m down in Long Beach house sitting at the Menagerie, I was doing practice at Beach!Boathouse & going grocery shopping for myself, & all I could think was, “I should be working. There’s stuff that’s overdue, I need to work on that.”

I feel like my time management sucks, & that while I know what I should be doing, actually making myself get it done is an entirely different matter. And I just have to power through & get it done, & I’ll have my time back, but here I am, waiting for the neighborhood fire alarm so I can ditch my brussel sprouts.

I dunno. I know that my life isn’t a horrid pit of despair. I recognize that. And while I still maintain that a lot of garbage has been cleared out over the last year, I suppose it’s like being at the point of moving where you’ve thrown out as much as you can, have packed up a bunch of boxes, and all you can do it look around & see how much is left to do, & the thought of having to do it all alone just makes you want to sit down & cry.

I think more than anything lately, it’s the “alone” part of that which makes me tired the most. Because when I make plans, I do so with the given that I’ll be doing everything myself & I have to accomplish it all alone, and that takes… well it requires a lot of energy, which I don’t always have.

I have… well thanks to my family I have huge trust issues, and I tend to be solitary to begin with, something that’s only become more compounded over the last few years. I wonder sometimes if the fact that I don’t have any real roots or connections to anything is what makes people think it’s all right to try to roll me or make me a target when they need a scapegoat. If they think they can treat me as their disposable punching bag because I appear to be on my own and thus vulnerable. Because that seems to happen quite often, and then everyone acts surprised to find out that alone I might be, but available to be taken advantage of I most certainly am not.

The problem being that after everything is said & done, I may be able to maintain my position, and I can pay my bills, and while in every secular sense, I come out okay, but when it’s all over, everybody else has each other & their lives, & their friends. Meanwhile, I’m the one that ends up alone, and the only guy that wants to spend time with me is a 19-lb puggle who, while indeed ridiculously cute, is not exactly what I’m looking for in terms of a fulfilling relationship.

But you tell yourself to buck up. You talk to like-minded friends & remind yourselves that life is not about having a boyfriend, that you’re a liberated modern woman, and that we need to let go of the idea of happily every after, because as I once put it, “We’ve all been sold on the fucking lie.” But everyone around you seems to have a new boyfriend, or getting married, or having babies, and while you have a perfectly good career & life and you can do & know many, many awesome things, the world just occasionally appears to be populated by a swath of seemingly blissful couples wandering around having lovely weekends while you sit in a Starbucks on a Sunday reading about tunnel car washes so that you can write copy & integrate a new section into a client’s site.

On an intellectual level, I know it’s silly. The pragmatic portion of my brain that’s been functioning to ensure self-preservation since approximately age 4 when my sister called in a fake fire & blamed it on me knows that it’s not true, that everyone else is not full of delight & bliss about their lives, and that having a significant other doesn’t guarantee happiness, if for no other reason than it would seem that science has actually proven that even when you’re in a relationship, romantic comedies are still ruining your life, so maybe we should all just blame Katherine Heigl for our crappy existences and move on.

But the emotional part of me… I dunno. I think it’s harder in summer when everyone is going on vacations, & enjoying themselves, and I get to… stay here. And work. Because that’s what I do. And I don’t want to deal with anything right now, but I know I need to. And I’m just kind of having a moment. Because while life is a constant series of change, but you just can’t help but wonder if this aspect of your existence will always be the same.

However, none of this really changes the original issue at hand here – me procrastinating from doing work, and I’d best get on that, because based on the text messages, Loki is rather chuffed that I took advantage of the Menagerie’s Roku box to start to watch Parks & Recreation, so I need to finish things up so we can talk about the adorkability of Amy Poehler, and honestly? I’m kind of curious to see who’s going to be next to fall into that damn pit.

Shelter – Ray LaMontagne

previous adventures

• romantic geekery
• Hoff’s maximum speed, code vs life, & my continued employment – aka, ALL HAIL THE POWER OF THE LIST!
• pooh bear tech support, babies of various species, & power tool acquisition

ShareThis

Dude. I love bread. In fact, let’s stop, because I don’t think I said that right.

I LOVE bread.

As I’ve said in the past, bread is my bad boyfriend, and I have many a Walk of Shame away from many a scale to back that up. Bread is warm, & crusty. It’s comfort food, it makes you feel better. Pizza really is just one of my favorite things in the world, possibly second only to really good lasagna.

For the most part, I don’t drink alcohol. I don’t do drugs. I don’t drink soda, I don’t crave cheesecake or mass amounts of ice cream, or really keep any junk food in my house. But I do love bread, in its many, many forms.

So as you might guess, giving up bread has been a little rough, and it really has taught me that carbs honestly are addictive. I would have days when I would literally just crave bread. It’s been a lovely little physiological battle — headaches as my body would have DTs wanting the chemical carbs, and then if I gave in & got the cookie or had the cornmeal/flour crust pizza for dinner*, eye aches and instant weight bloat as the rest of my body got mad at me for having had The Deadly Substance.
*This has been the only pizza I could have & not get as sick.

One of the things that I’ve been doing is keeping a food diary – just for me, just so I could get an idea of what I’m eating, what I’m doing, & seeing how it affects my weight, how I’m working out, etc.

From that, I’ve been noticing that when I eat wheat/gluten products, I literally have like, a wheat hangover. The thing is, I didn’t know this was happening until it stopped happening. Following the days when I managed to stay away from bread completely, I’m finding that my weight goes down, I have an easier time getting up in the mornings, and even my mood is better & brighter.

As time has gone by, I’m finding that my body is reacting this way not just to bread, but also to white rice, and, much to my dismay last Friday afternoon… mashed potatoes.
(I was so happy the day I realized that hey! I can eat potatoes! They have no gluten! But no no, my body proceeded to tell me in its own very special way for four hours afterwards… no, no that’s off the menu too. dammit!)

At first, I thought it was just me – as we go through life, you can develop allergies as well as create immunities, & this is simply the way that my body is reacting to things as my diet has naturally changed over the years simply by being in California.

Then this morning, I read this:
Are Carbs more Addictive than Cocaine?
(hat-tip to Jess & Jam for the link.)

Full disclosure, one of my favorite things in the world is the Broccoli Cheese Soup in a bread bowl at Panera. I was totally that person the article talks about.

Now, I’m not saying I’m 100% “Tru Fax, yo!” standing behind this article, but after the last three months or so, I will agree with the theory they present – that processed carbs are addictive & pretty much unnecessary for most diets. I think at this point I’m more sensitive than most people, less extreme in my body’ reaction than some others, but yes, I would have to say that the majority of the excess weight still on my body is from years of having been fed carbs & probably has been on my body since childhood.
We were raised on bagels & hot dogs & noodles & other staples of, well, let’s be honest – poor people food. Every so often when my mom was having a mood, we’d get elbow macaroni that’d been tossed in a pan with butter & breadcrumbs & that’d be dinner.

Looking back & knowing what I’ve learned since moving to Cali, I’m more than moderately horrified at the nutritional standards presented in our house when I was a kid.

At this point, I’d say that I’m about 90, 95% off of gluten/wheat/processed carbs & sugar. Every so often I’ll cave & grab a spinach-feta wrap & birthday cake donut for breakfast from Starbucks, add on a cookie from the Museum!Co cafe, or get the small pizza from Whole Foods when I get out of my evening workout & am RAVENOUS, & I’ll tell myself, “Oh, it’ll be fine, just this once.”

…and yeah, that doesn’t work.

A bit back, I wrote a piece on food addiction & trying to break the psychological habits of comfort food.
In it, I talked about how you have those moments when you sit in the grocery store & literally have a mental debate with youself as OldChildhoodYou tries to persuade Now!You that no, no, it’s all right, you can buy that, it’ll be fiiiine.

I thought of that this morning when I sat in my car in the Starbucks parking lot for ten minutes having the mental debate of my inner 5-yr old wanting a breakfast with bread, & the logical part of me talking myself through the fact that I had a perfectly good breakfast of chopped fruit, granola & yogurt sitting on the seat next to me to be eaten when I got into Museum!Co.
Thankfully, Logic!Me won, & I pulled onto the highway, still breadless.

For me, the hardest part is the prep work – not the cooking, I actually have discovered I rather like that. Rather, finding the time & energy to get it done, because it has to be done. Take a look around at the world — if you want just protein & veggies that haven’t been kind of violently cooked into submission, you really do have to bring your own. There’s very little that you can just pop in & pick up for dinner at a regular grocery store in that category which doesn’t consist of plain 75% iceberg lettuce*.
(*I’m not counting the Whole Foods salad bar in this – blessed, blessed, bastion of things I can eat on the nights I’m willing to pay the higher price to avoid having to cook.)

Today, I had breakfast & a cut up oranges for a snack already prepped, but since I woke up late this morning, no lunch made. Usually for me this means that I’ll go to the Museum!Co cafe & get a container of tuna salad & a chocolate chip cookie. Today, I walked away with two little containers of tuna salad & no cookie instead, telling myself that the double shot of protein was better than the bread for getting through cycle tonight. As silly as this might sound, for me that was friggin’ huge progress.

The thing that you don’t think about until you’re in it is how filling bread is. Because yes, bread is totally filling, so when you switch to primarily veggies & lean protein, which your body can process faster, you find yourself hungry a lot more often. And not like, a little hungry – like, hard-core Jurassic Park velociraptor, ravenous-style hungry.

I’m not gonna lie, I pretty much inhaled that first container of tuna salad & made myself put the second aside for about five minutes so my stomach had a chance to digest & I could eat the second with some semblance of dignity.

Sounds crazy, right? Stupid little moments like that sound totally insane, and you think that oh holy mother, there’s something like, mentally wrong with me… until you find out it’s not just you.

As of late, I keep seeing people talking about the process.

Not the shiny, you’ll-be-a-bajillion-pounds-skinnier, the-world-will-shine-in-a-rosy-hue, life-would-be-perfect & why-can’t-you-be-just-like-me infomercial-style results. That’s not the part being highlighted.

No, these are the crappy days – the realization that you have to change everything you’ve ever thought about how you eat, say goodbye to certain foods that have been a comfort when people weren’t, and change an entire aspect of your life. This is about coming clean to the fact that even though mentally you know the consequences would suck, there really are moments when your inner id would cheerfully club a baby seal for a Pepperoni Pizza Lean Pocket.

Over at Gluten-Free Girl & the Chef, Shauna is doing a series on what this transition entails and what she’s learned since she began the process, never thinking that six years later she’d have a husband, a child, and a career educating people about the problem that she didn’t know she had which almost killed her.

On a less structured level, I’ve been reading The Adventures of Jess & Jam, who are going full up paleo diet for a month, & running into a lot of the same issues I’ve had – withdrawls, energy bursts, simple operational issues in terms of how & when to eat & stick with what they’re supposed to be doing. If nothing else, watching Jess come off of coffee cold turkey has been kind of amusing.

I wish that there was some shiny, happy-go-lucky way to wrap this piece. A joke to make everything tied up in a pretty bow so that I wouldn’t want bread, or turned out to have been wheat-sensitive, or still have seven pounds to go before I’m back down to my pre-injury weight and another 13 pounds after that. I wish I could say that I don’t have the temptation to chuck it all, skip spinning, get a meat lasagna from Trader Joe’s & spend tonight watching episodes of Castle while snuggled on my couch with the puppies & taking comfort from meat, cheese, & pasta.

Instead, I’m going to wait another hour, then have my snack of sliced up oranges because when I was in San Diego last weekend I went to the Farmer’s market & bought a bag of blood oranges to mix in there for something different. After I get out of work, I’ll hop on the 405 S & head down to Venice & spend time with Gina as she runs our asses into the ground on bikes & then attempts to stretch us into calm in yoga. After I’ve changed out of my sopping wet sweaty clothes I’ll have a gluten-free protein bar & some oj on the drive home, which will include stopping at Target to get puppy food in a trip that will not involve the purchase of pizza for dinner. Instead I’ll have the chicken breast that’s defrosting for dinner tonight and set up my food for tomorrow, and head to bed, one more day without bread down, & a life lived better than that which came before to go.

’cause right now, that’s all I got, peoples. That’s the best I can offer.

Today’s sing along song?
Some pre-psychotic breakdown Britney. Both as a nod to my bad boyfriend, & also a motivator, because seriously? Giving up bread just might be worth the fuss if it means eventually I might have her abs.

Can’t stop the dream, people. Can’t stop the dream.

Music: Slave for you – Britney Spears

ShareThis

Conversations with teenagers, part bajillion. Topic: boys.
I didn’t really… do being a teenager. I got my first job when I was 12, & it’s been 30-40+ hrs/ week of work for almost 20 years now, so when you get down to it I suppose I’m finally reaching the chronological age that I’ve been functioning at for the last 2 decades. On a bright note, hey – I finally caught up to me! Yay me!

As a consequence of this, I tend to talk to teenagers like adults, because when I was their age, I was already an adult, so I treat to them the way I wanted to be spoken to back then — namely, that they have a brain & are not just hyperactive balls of hormones.

In my experience, this actually works fairly well in terms of maintaining order, especially with teenage boys. At one point when I was coaching, I put it to the guys thusly: “Look, you’re teenagers, and you’re going to do stupid sh*t. Let’s not pretend it won’t happen, it’s just the way things are. I just ask that you don’t do stupid sh*t when I’m in charge of you, because then I have to do the paperwork to explain what happened, and I hate paperwork, so if I have to do paperwork, I’ll make you pay for it in physical pain. Instead, let’s make a deal that if you guys can act in such a way that I am not forced to be An Authority Figure, we should all get along just fine.”
And the cadre of teenage boys kinda laughed, nodded, and I never had a major discipline issue with them, which worked out well for everyone.

One of the odd side effects of this being that because I am no longer officially a coach for any one team, or technically have any actual title in the rowing community, yet I’m still around as Nebulous Older Than Us Person Who is Sometimes in the Locker Room When Other Adults are Not Around*, I occasionally find myself in… interesting conversations.
*for the record, that title only applies to the girls – I am never in the boys’ locker room. Just want to throw that statement down for clarity.

This past Sunday, I ended up having one such conversation with one of my favorite flyweights, whom I shall call… Flyweight. (I know right? Totally creative nomenclature.)

Flyweight had just broken up with her boyfriend, another kid that I know — they’re both good kids, she just had the realization that they were better friends than boyfriend/girlfriend, which I think actually shows some good judgment on her part.

We were talking about that, & the fact that it was an amicable breakup, & in the course of the conversation, Flyweight & I got into the fact that she just gets annoyed at the guys she hangs out with as friends when she watches their relationships.

Flyweight is… different. She’s young, but she’s already very driven, very focused, completely knows her path & what she wants & what it takes to get there — both athletically & academically. Little fracker’s going to graduate high school next year & already have enough credits for her AA, which totally makes me jealous ’cause I’d have loved to do my undergrad in her projected two years instead of my three.

So we’re talking about this over the process of showering & doing what girls do in the locker room, & I finally said to her, “Look, here’s the deal – you’re different. You know this. And not in a bad way, just in a different way. You have different priorities than the kids around you, and I don’t mean that in a better-than-them way, just in the way where what you want is different, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But because of this, it’s going to be harder for you to date, and you will probably have fewer boyfriends than other girls you know simply because that’s not where your ambitions lie.”

Flyweight: “Well yeah – I’m going to do grad school and get my PhD, & then I want to work on as much research as I can while I’m still in training. And I don’t get why guys don’t get that.”

Claris: “Because that’s not what they’re used to in girls. They’re used to… you know… that girl. The tiny perfect-looking girl who will show up for whatever the guys wants, & do whatever he wants, & is just… That Girl. You know that girl, right?”

Flyweight: “Oh my god yes, she hangs out at our table & I can’t believe the guys fall for her crap, because it’s totally obvious that she’s -”

Claris: :hand up: “Yes, yes. We can stop there. But yes. That Girl. Because they’re athletes, Rower Guys tend to be pretty, and because of that, you’re going to see a lot of That Girls around, and a lot of guys are going to choose her because it seems easier.
However, I can tell you right now that I know a lot of guys who chose TinyCutePerfectGirl, and ya know what? After a while, they realize that what looked good at first & was the easy option at the time… now that the initial stuff has passed, they don’t actually like her as a person. Some of them will get out, some won’t – either way, that’s a lesson that they have to learn for themselves, and you have to be okay with walking away when this happens, because you have to take care of you.”

Flyweight: “But they’re being stupid!”

Claris: “Yes. This will happen a lot. There’s nothing you can do about that, so there’s no use getting upset over it.”

As she opened her mouth to try to argue the point, I interrupted her & said, “Look, you will most likely end up with one of two guys:

1. the one that’s never even bothered to look at TinyPerfectShinyGirl because he figured out right off the bat that’s not what he wants.

2. the guy that’s already had that relationship, realized that ‘oh holy jesus I don’t want that!’, learned his lesson & is willing to man up & make the effort of treating you honorably by asking you out instead of just saying yes to the next TinyPerfectShinyGirl who runs up & offers her services of :Insert Girlfriend Figurine into Appropriate Spot in Facebook Pictures Here:.

“The point is, either of these options may take a while to appear, so in the meantime, you will most likely not have as many boyfriends or date as much as other girls, and that’s totally okay. Also, if guy #2 does learn his lesson & figures out that he needs to approach you properly, it’s all right to give him a second chance to see if he can get it right, because to do that will take a good amount of courage on his part, and at some point, you’ll probably make a mistake or two of your own as well.”

Flyweight: “But how long does it take?”

Claris: “Oh, as long as it takes. I’m 31, & I’m still working on it.”

Flyweight: “But I wanted to already be married by the time I’m 30! That’s so long awa — wait, you’re over 30? I totally thought you were like, 26 or 27!”

Claris: “No honey, I am indeed, old & decrepit. Really, when you think about things, it’s a miracle that I can actually manage to get my creaking bones into a boat all on my own, but I somehow I do find a way to manage. And just a tip – HelloKittyRowerFriend is two years older than me.”

Flyweight: “No way! Dude. Okay, so wait – you’ve walked away from a guy like that?”

Claris: “Yes. More than one, actually.”

Flyweight: “Recently?”

Claris: “Just last week.”

Flyweight: “Can I know his name?”

Claris: “Absolutely not.”

“duuuuuude…”
“No.”
“But – ”
“No.”
“I’m gonna find out!”
“No, trust me, you really, really aren’t.”
“But – ”
“No.”

…and we kind of descended into frivolity from there, I’m not gonna lie. While my life’s functionality has caught up with my chronological age, sometimes the behavioral maturity occasionally gets stuck a bit behind. I’d like to say I’m working on that, but… yeah. It is what it is.
For the record, she never did find out his name.

But hey, just to bring it all full circle, let’s use Ingrid for today’s Sing-a-long Song:

Music: Ingrid Michaelson – Everybody (Bonus Track Version)

ShareThis

Thank you, that would totally be my reaction

Breakup sex with my bad culinary boyfriend.
So as of late, I’d taken to referring to bread as my bad boyfriend — I know it’s not my friend, & I should just leave it be, but when it’s there it just feels so good, even though I know I’ll feel guilty afterwards… oh good bread, you’ve caused me many a gastrointestinal walk of shame, you tempting, tasty satisfying bastard, you.

However, in the last month, I managed to give up bread & wheat for two whole weeks so that we could test a theory regarding wheat that’s been circulating for a while — namely that I may be allergic to it. Or at the very least, sensitive enough to have a reaction.

The easiest way to test this is to give it up for a while, then have some and see what happens. When Damian first suggested this to me, I was like, “Well, how will I know if I’m having a reaction?” He laughed & said, “Oh, don’t worry — you’ll know.”

Because the thing is, if all you have is a sensitivity, then you’re not like say, someone with celiac — the reaction won’t be horribly severe, because your body can work around it once there’s a tolerance, it just has to work harder, and that can be expressed by retaining extra weight, having a skin reaction, etc. Just enough to be annoying, but nothing so big to warrant medical attention. So one way to test this is to give it up for a while, let everything flush out of your system & basically allow your body’s tolerance for it to wane, & then re-introduce it and… see what happens.

So for two weeks, I went off wheat. which, really… sucked. But it can be done.

Then, I had a spinach & cheese frozen pizza from CPK. In terms of junk food, that one is pretty low on the totem pole, but still – crust=bread.

Holy crap migraine.

Within an hour, my stomach hated me, & my head was all, “What did you do to us? :insert obscene gesture here:”

…which I’m guessing is what Damian meant when he told me I’d know. Awesome.

So at Crew Classic this past weekend, I did what any girl does with a boy who’s got the hurts so bad, but feels so good vibe — one last round of culinary breakup sex before I left. I had hamburgers with the bun on, I had real pizza from a pizza place, (which I just can’t even remember the last time I did that)… and the Sunday morning, I had my favorite breakfast in the world, a bagel with cream cheese.
Technically, my favorite breakfast in the world is a kosher salt bagel toasted with actual sliced lox & cream cheese, but San Diego is sadly not New York, so I had to work with the resources I had at the time.

On the way home, I even stopped & got McDonald’s, complete with strawberry shake… which is when I learned that I’ve totally lost my taste for McDonald’s because I couldn’t even eat the fries. Sad.

Before I drove down, I took all my baking supplies of white flour & white sugar, packed them up, & left them with the kids at the House of Wind & Sea where I was staying — barring special request, it’ll be a while before I start baking again, & when I do it’s going to involve copious consulation with Shauna’s site since she’s already done all the experimentation work, so there was really no reason to have the six pounds of flour, four pounds of white sugar, two pounds of brown sugar, three bags of chocolate chips, box of baking chocolate & that last batch of brownies that I left in their fridge.

I mean, let’s be honest – I know how to do this. I’m an adult, & an athlete, & I’ve been in & around people who are far more serious about their nutrition & training than I am for almost six years now, so just by sheer osmosis I’ve got a good amount of knowledge as to how this works. It’s just a matter of actually… doing it, and doing so for longer than, say… three days. I just need to actually set up my life to bring food with me most of the time, & make the proper decisions when out in the world…

…and not think about the fact that it’s only been a day & a half, it’s 12:39 in the afternoon & I really totally want a cookie.

:sigh:

Today’s sing-a-long song
… is for @samhlee, who needed a musical pick-me-up.

You Got Me – Tristan Prettyman

Music: All I Want is you – Tristan Prettyman Live Session (iTunes Exclusive)

ShareThis

The truth is that after the last few years… I’m not exactly the best judge of anything on that front right now. Lil’ nervous, doncha know. In fact, just the other day I talking this newborn colt, and he was all, “Okay, seriously girl, I’m not trying to be harsh here, but you’re like, way skittish. I’m just sayin’.”

So ya know… life, man. Just… freakin’ life. :shrug:

Okay, seriously, Google? Now we scare me.
Title of the email I just now got? Relationships Can Give You a Complex. I sh*t you not.

in case my mouth wasn’t loud enough, now you’ll also be able to see me coming from a mile away
Last week, one of the jnr coxswains at Beach!Boathouse was wearing the yellow one of these. (It looks better on those of us who actually have boobs.) Correctly surmising that such a color would be fantastic for bowing or rowing a single, I asked her where she got them, and upon seeing the price of a mere $5.80 each, decided to get all of the colors — even the pink, which is a huge growth experience for me.

Oh god, I can’t even look at that. Effin’ ay, man, that’s so totally my Kryptonite.
Dao Jones sent me a link for a little guy that’s on the Urgent Rescue LA facebook group and oh god – this is why I don’t look at those sites… because I’m such a freakin’ sucker. Adults are (for the most part) fully sentient beings, I don’t have a lot of pity for their mistakes, but animals & kids are defenseless, man – you try to hurt them & I will (and have) take people out for that sh*t. After all, that’s how I ended up with the Weimermonster, and ten years later, we’ve almost got each other trained.

That said, if Dao can work things out, Zoey may have a foster sibling for a little while. Damn you, Dao! :shaky fist:

Flashback much?
Pandora.com just flipped from Oasis to Richard Marx. I know, right? I know.

Note to self: Do Laundry. Restructure Life. Learn to use plurals when there’s more than one note.
Two weeks ago, I brought the kitchen under control. Last week it was the bathroom (and the dog via bath before cleaning the bathroom) This week’s project will undoubtedly be A Lot of Laundry and The Organizing of the Taxes. The laundry because I’m out and sadly forgot to pack a bra today, which is just never comfortable when you’re someone who gets cold easily, and the organzing because it’s a month into the new year, & I haven’t even set up this year’s invoicing folders yet, which should give you an idea of how my filing system went as I started working at Museum!Co last fall. Oh, this is going to be ugly, people. So very, very very so.

Music: Falling for you – Jem (Finally Woken)

ShareThis