But Call Me Betsy

I like a routine at the gym, and I like limitations on time. I go between three or four times a week and do either 40 or 45 minute of cardio and sometimes a few sit ups and weights. But most of the time that I'm there, I'm dying for it to be over and having the same thoughts. It's not like other solitary activities--like if I'm walking or in the shower, my brain works on solving problems or maybe I think about a story or a to-do list. At the gym, maybe because my body is fully occupied, my brain can't organize itself around a set of coherent or useful thoughts. Here's basically what circulates through my brain: 1. Don't look at how much time is left. Don't look at how much time is left. Keep going, don't worry how much time is left. Oh, god, that's all I've done so far? 2. Who the hell keeps dropping the weights? He should be banned from the gym. I am going to go over there after I get off this machine and tell that guy that he's l...

Stealing Sugar seems like it should be a title for a young adult novel about a girl and her quarter horse.  But what I'm talking about is this part of me who still remembers being poor in Chicago--not poor like impoverished or needing food stamps, but poor like having five dollars in my checking account and a week left until pay day, living off of a waitress' salary and tips and somehow managing to pay rent and never really having any savings to speak of except for the annual $20 my grandma used to send me for my birthday. And honestly, until Obama was elected and offered that tax break to buy a new house and I got $8,000 back, I never had more than $1,000 in savings. Getting that lump sum all at once somehow made it easier to squirrel the money and spend a part of it on house renovations. But why then, when I'm nearly out of Sweet and Low for my morning cup of coffee, does my mind first go to the arduous task of stealing packets from the coffee shop? Not like a lo...

Do you recognize the post title? Yes, that's right. It's from The World According to Garp. I haven't read it in a while but I think it's what the little boy thought everyone was saying when they really meant, Beware the undertow. Mishearing them, he had visions of this giant toad sitting at the bottom of the sea, looking up for little boy legs to gobble down. Dreamed last night that I was rooming with four undergraduate girls who were super young and cute and partying and I came home to find that they drank all of my Kahlua and filled it back up with water. They wanted to go out again and I said I would go with them, but I wasn't dressed appropriately--wore my raggedy looking sneakers next to their cute yellow and orange delicately strapped sandals. A guy friend of mine who was going with me had an embarrassingly large spaghetti sauce stain on the front of his white pleated shirt (the shirt was just as attention getting as the stain). Then later, I was trying...

While lying with my feet higher than my head, biting down on a huge wedge of plastic, with my mouth held open by tools (this is not the beginning of a S&M post, I promise), I decided that the best way to survive the root canal would be to try to disassociate and think about what I hated most so I could write it here later. First, I should mention that I had trouble falling asleep last night because I couldn't remember the name of this guy I dated (the term "dated"is used very, very loosely) when I worked at Northwestern University Dental School (the program is now defunct). His first name was Armen . He was also Armenian, but we never referred to him as Armen the Armenian. He and I had this off again, on again relationship, mostly off because he was deep, deep into the first year of dental school which basically is the same year that med students take. He's the one who showed me my first dead body, because one of the times we hung out after work, he offered to ta...

Shawn (who insists that if I had gotten to mentioning him in the last post about music, would've written that Neil Diamond's "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" reminds me of him. I guess this is true, but it wouldn't have been my first choice) sent me a link to a blog of a woman who has been fighting breast cancer--who went into remission and got married and bought a house and who now is having a recurrence of the cancer. It sort of puts into perspective the dumb shit that I obsess over every day--my appearance, my writing, my lack of savings--and makes me realize that I could be grappling with much, much more. And maybe will some day, but not today. She's doing all of this positive stuff like visualization and meditation and reading and holistic medicine and unholistic medicine--everything she can attempt to fight back. Don't you wonder how you would do in a similar situation? My fear is that I would give up immediately and become a morphine addict right ...