Assumptions Make a You-Know-What out of You-Know-Who

"THAT'S why women need to have their own income, a job, and their own security." 

A puzzled look creased my brow. I narrowed my eyes at the woman across the table from me.  She jerked her chin, directing my attention to the table to my right.  

I turned to see a trim, well dressed man eating a chicken wrap.  The woman across the table from him wore a soft cast propping up her swollen hand.  Her eye was purple and green and was swollen down onto her cheek.  She was using her good hand to fork the big salad in front of her.   They spoke animatedly. They even laughed a little at some unheard joke between them. 

It appeared to me that she had been in a car accident but my lunch mate's implication was clear: the well groomed chicken wrap eater had done that to her.  

...Shame on him for being so mean. 

...Even more Shame on her for staying with him.  

The assumption that this relationship was wrecked instead of their Camry digs at me.  I've been down the abused path before (emotional, never physical).  I spent the next 10 years unfairly projecting a parallel.  I assumed that the public/private dynamics of my relationship must be the same in other relationships, too.  I made numerous accusations to that point that only cast my victim experience in sharp relief.  It did nothing to address the faults I projected onto others' relationship dynamics.  

I think it is natural to judge others for not being like you.  It is natural to judge others though the lens you judge yourself.  I always look at other women to see how I stack up --but I never look at the things I like about myself.  I look at the things I hate.  

We are conditioned to think in certain ways by many different things.  We notice things that stand out to us.  We notice things that we don't like about ourselves.  In the process, our individuality and others' individuality are left by the wayside like so much road kill.  

It is true that all people need their own sense of security. and Shame on abusers.  It is also true that we need to take a breath, recognize our own lens, and collect more information before we mentally accuse strangers of abhorrent actions. 

The Gospels urge us not to judge.  "Judge not lest ye be judged." from my experience, this might be in the wrong order.  Before my abuser, I didn't even see abuse.  How could I have judged it?  After that experience, it was all I could see for a time.  It was all I wanted to see for a time.  I'm relieved that this burden did not blind me today.

I've listened to many a sermon on premature and uninformed judgment.  Maybe I need just one more.  Maybe we all do. 

Beef - It's What's Making Me Sick

Beef - It's What's for Dinner.  This is a familiar ad I grew up with - this triggers all kinds of happy memories from grilling out to the theme song from Rogers and Hammerstein's Rodeo.  I was raised on the gold standard of beef - grass fed.  Twice a year, my Dad would scope out a prime specimen among the hundreds of unknowing bovine candidates in our pastures to become our dinner for the next six months.  He'd carefully select the best one out there, load it up in the trailer and roll off to the butcher 80 miles away.  A few days later, we'd pack empty coolers in the back of the Suburban and bring Bessie back to the deep freeze as steaks, roasts, ribs and ground beef.  

Because I was raised on such lusciously wonderful beef, I haven't been particularly impressed by the grocery store's efforts at what they call beef.  This has apparently been a lucky stroke for me.  Several years ago, I had a student who was diagnosed with a beef sensitivity, along with sensitivity to tons of other crazy things like olives.  She was a high achieving student, but reached new heights after she quit eating beef.  A couple of years later, my Mom's skin rash that had been diagnosed as Lupus and subsequently as a Latex/Lanolin allergy was so bad she changed doctors.  She was diagnosed with all kinds of crazy food allergies, including beef, watermelon and Brazil nuts.  She never eats Brazil nuts, so cutting those out was obviously not a problem - the other two were.  But after she quit eating foods she was sensitive to, her skin rash totally disappeared after plaguing her for constantly for more than 10 years. It was when my sister-in-law was diagnosed with similar crazy allergies, including a sensitivity to grapes, that I started to pay attention to my own reactions to foods I eat.  

My culprits:  almonds, soy, fruit whose juice is red, melon/squash, and...you probably saw this coming...beef. I went to the hippie grocery store last weekend (as opposed to the regular folks grocery store with lower prices and *gasp* corn fed beef) specifically to buy the good stuff.  I made this super-licious spaghetti with meat sauce to store away for lunch this week.  I've been eating it like gangbusters because of just how yummy it is.  I've been increasingly indescribably uncomfortable, and I've lost sleep because I've had acid in my mouth all night.  Then last night, I had a pretty wonderful grass-fed burger at a party along with several tums.  I think it was about halfway through the fireworks that a light bulb came on over my head that the Beef was making me sick.  I hadn't eaten any of those other foods in weeks because I'm very careful about not eating them.  It had to be the beef.  

So - this discovery doesn't really help me today.  In a few minutes, I'm off to get antacids to get me through until the Prilosec kicks in.  I've already had as much allergy medicine as I can have and stay awake for work today.  So, goodbye grass fed drips of grease down my happy hamburger eating chin, goodbye chunk of savory Sunday pot roast, goodbye to the sizzle of Ruth's Chris steakhouse, and goodbye spaghetti with super-licious meat sauce - we had a good run.  Now to find an allergist to get official confirmation of my own crazy food allergies. And more Tums.

Q-Tips: Enemy of Warrior 3

Yoga went much better today than normal.  In the past six months that I’ve been going to the Chiropractor regularly, I’ve recognized that I have one side of my spine and body that is much more flexible and strong than the other side.  That’s mainly because I have a tiny tad of scoliosis just above my sacrum.  I never guessed that clumsily leaping off a high jump mat and cracking my tailbone in the 5^th grade would echo into my 30’s. A valiant attempt to impress those 8th grade boys had become a miserable preadolescent fail.  

My main Yoga problem, however, is not my unbalanced strength and flexibility – it’s balance.  Warrior 3 is a joke for me – you want me to stand on how many feet?  Not all of them?  I’m quite sure that my instructor can feel my incredulous eyes boring a hole in the back of her head.  This whole issue, or so I thought, caused my right side balance to be much more stable than my left side balance on most days.  That is, until today. 

The past few weeks, I’ve been feeling sore in my left ear.  Saturday morning after my run, it started to get worse.  Monday I was fevered and the pain was beginning to diminish my appetite.  I noticed I could not walk a straight line down the hall.  Yesterday, I admitted to myself that I was fully into the 3^rd day of an ear splitting headache and was going downhill fast.  I left work early to go to the clinic.  After washing my ear, which felt like they were shooting a stream of water up into my eyeball with a stun gun, they made me lay on my side while they pulled out a piece of earwax larger than what should logically fit inside my tiny ear canal.  It was big.  And unnaturally gross.  It was a color that things that come out of your head should never be.  It was like a train wreck – I was utterly repulsed but I could not look away.  The culprit?  Q-tips.  The Dr. said that using Q-tips is like loading a musket with a tamping rod – it just shoves whatever is in the ear canal up against the ear drum.  Since I am a fan of really clean ears, it made sense, but I’m going to have to rethink my affection for the little white cotton covered tamping rods if this is the ultimate and super nasty conclusion of all things Q-tip.

 

After she removed the giantific ball of wax, I felt nauseous and the nurse had to hold me up because the room started spinning.  I recovered quickly, spent more than enough at the pharmacy for meds and went to bed early. This morning, after a massive dose of pain medication and my first round of eardrops since I was a baby, my Yoga practice was unfettered by any concern about my balance.  In fact, I’m wondering why I hadn’t decided to blame my ear wax for a less than stellar practice up to this point.  Warrior 3 was a one-footed miracle today – one that I don’t want Q-tips to ever steal from me again!

Kick Something's Butt Every Day

Today was a bit of a workplace nightmare.  Your boss being on vacation only guarantees that a week of workplace bliss will be followed by several days of workplace chaos.  This was Day 1.  After a morning of nothing to do (remember this is only my 3rd Monday of a highly technical job for which I am still training), the afternoon hit.  I had told a colleague that I was afraid I would soon have more than enough to handle on my to-do list.  


Just after lunch, a flurry of email snowed me under for the rest of the afternoon - it will spill over into tomorrow.  I have a stack of papers to process through waiting for my prompt 8 a.m. arrival.  One of those emails led me like Alice through Wonderland, digging through stacks and stacks of forms, tracing through data files and subfolders I didn't organize (IF I had organized them, I would have gone right to what I needed).  


I started feeling overwhelmed, and by 4:30, I was almost in tears because of my lack of success.  I decided that I needed to kick something's butt today and finish the report.  After visiting my very well rested and happy looking boss, I systematically replicated his procedures, and on the third time running the data,  things came out just fine.  


After all, kicking something's butt must be on everyone's to-do list every day.  I wonder what it will be tomorrow...

5 and 5

Wow – Starting a new week of workouts at 5 a.m. AND starting a new job (my first 8-5 job ever and my first full time job in two years) is a killer.  I’ve been making it ok until 5 p.m. every day, even spreading out my water and calorie intake enough that I don’t feel crazy hungry when I get home.  When my alarm buzzed at me at 5 a.m. this morning, the devil on my left shoulder and the angel on my right shoulder had a long conversation, and I turned over to my left for another hour and a half of sweet rest which was punctuated with my typical alarm-free alarm clocks on the highwires outside my window – the choir of mockingbirds and mourning doves that are there every day.

The first sleep-in usually portends a longer stopping period for my workouts – like several weeks of sleeping that extra hour and a half.  When I was teaching, this used to happen during the end of April or beginning of May when I was tired and ready for the school year to be over, and I would not pick back up until I got ready for the next school year to begin. Honestly, it was always kind of nice to look at myself in the mirror during June and July and gradually see the need for a daily work out slowly become evident again – if you know what I mean.

I think that to be the person I want to be I need to be working out on a regular basis, and if that means I stay with it year-round because I have a different kind of job now, then that’s what it means.  But at the same time, I just don’t have the stamina yet to wake up every day at 5 and also work from 8 to 5.  Maybe four days a week is ok this week – maybe the third and fourth days will be my great acts of faith for this week.  I know that I have a go-to-the-gym workout with a friend tomorrow before the crack of dawn so that’s insurance.  I also have this weekend off from working out, so that’s a longer period of rest that is upcoming.  I guess Rome wasn’t built in a day – and work/work out stamina isn’t built that way either.

In the spirit of keeping my bigger goals and reasons for working out in mind:

1.       I want to lose about 15 pounds

a.       So that I feel comfortable in the clothes that I currently own

b.      So that I feel confident about any swimsuit opportunity/invitation

c.       So that I can maintain my ideal about my belly not sticking out past my boobs

d.      So I am lower on health-risk indicators (although I’m beginning to think that BMI is a crock of crap from the 1950’s – I’m in the level marked “obese” even when I’m at my fittest)

2.       I want to be a disciplined and focused person

a.       So that I can achieve the things I want to achieve

b.      So that I can feel successful at work

c.       So that I can have time and money to play

3.       I don’t want to be perceived as lazy, sad and fat because although I have my moments, they are not who I am most of the time. 

4.       I want to develop a consistent workout attitude now so that when I am older, I don’t lose function because I don’t work out

a.       I want to keep my muscles and mind sharp

b.      I want to be living independently and healthily for as long as possible

c.       I want to experience what life has to offer at many ages in the future even though I have not fully done that at past ages

With those things said, I feel a little more motivated again - too bad I need to leave for work in 30 minutes and can’t hit the weights right now!

Such a Great Cloud of Witnesses…

In the Bible in the book of Hebrews, the writer lists all of these great people from the Old Testament, describing how they were full of faith.  That writer remembers the folks who were renowned for great things – Moses for bringing the Israelites out of Egypt, for example.  When I think of great folks from the Old Testament, I think of David.  What’s the first thing I think of with him?  The Bathsheba incident in which he slept with her and killed her husband – drama ensued. 

During my workout this morning, the instructor urged us to find someone in the class whose energy was inspiring and we should match the energy of that person.  That often works for me until I start thinking about the emerging blister on my big toe, how much my heel hurts or how loud I’m being and the lady downstairs is still in bed.  I do have my favorite people that I watch, especially since most of my workouts are videos.  I’ve been doing the BeachBody thing long enough that I know exactly the one in the video who will screw up at exactly what point.  It kinda makes me feel better when I either screw up myself or when I hit the choreography when they miss it. 

So, why do I remember the screwups and not the ones who did it right all the time?  I do think it makes me feel better when I see someone who is not perfect.  But that does in some small way give me “permission” not to be perfect.  In one way, both fitness and faith seem more attainable because of those who are not perfect, but at the same time, if the writer of Hebrews is putting up examples of folks whose faith was enough – shouldn’t we be looking at them as examples of how to really “arrive”? 

It seems like all of the people listed in Hebrews did great acts of faith.  What about their day to day lives – surely they screwed up and went through phases where they felt the blah’s about all things faith.  Surely those great acts were both preceded and followed by times when they didn’t measure up to the perfect faith standard they are known for because of their one great act. 

Both fitness and faith are more than just one great act – they are the input and outcome of consistent choices.  They are the input and outcome of choosing to get back on track after the screw up.  I want to be the kind of person whose screwups and great acts are both remembered.  I don’t think you can have one without the other.