New Year's Resolutions: Update!

I have been doing yoga every day since I made my New Year's Resolutions. I've actually been doing about 45 minutes per day, instead of my minimum of 15, but I still do 15-minute sessions when I'm not feeling up to a big yoga commitment

One thing I've noticed is that lots of people who do yoga focus excessively on mastering new poses, and trying so hard to look experienced and talented at yoga. I feel like this is the opposite of what yoga is supposed to be.

New Year's Resolutions!

I generally do not make new year's resolutions because I am both lazy and wholly unenchanted by the idea of the new year, in general. But, this year I am making one. Making a list of new year's resolutions is sort of a resolution in itself, because making personal care goals for myself is something that I normally shirk in favor of homework, cleaning, and unnecessarily fermenting my mind in anxious thought. But I want to take care of myself, because I probably deserve it (okay so I'm not entirely convinced), even though my anxiety and depression tell me that I don't, and that there are more pressing matters to worry about than feeling happiness, or comfort. These goals are small because my aims are meant to be gradual. I, like lots of other people, fall off the self-care wagon ten times more quickly if I make my goals too lofty.

Here goes.

1. At least fifteen minutes of yoga every day (more, if able/desired)

2. Two full Nalgenes of water every day (64 ounces)

3. Do one thing to combat anxiety every day (yoga, therapy?, meditation, workbooks)

4. Eat more fruits and vegetables

5. Pack a lunch every day (cause otherwise I day-starve, then night-binge)

The last three aren't 100% self-care related, but here they are:

6. Be a better partner, every day in every way

7. Get a 4.0 for my last semester of university

8. Find a job for post-graduation, any job, that makes enough money to support myself

So those are my eight new year's resolutions. Some are big, some are small, but I can't help but think about what an act of self-care it is to even bother making such goals. Happy 2012, everyone!

First Snow!

Rainy Saturdays

Charlie Brown Christmas tree.

 My favorite snack and my favorite flowers.

I made some peanut butter chocolate chip cookies today.

The note reads:

For: Superman

Love: Lois Lane

hodge-podge

Today on the hill I climb to get to my Friday morning class, there was a small group of people with a microphone, standing and reading the names of all of the service people who have died in our most recent war(s). Everyone walking up and down the hill was on their cellphone, wearing headphones, or zoning out.

One of the largest bus-stop areas in the square is in front of a fancy restaurant and many high-rise banks. The contrast between the warm, smiling white people inside the incredibly clean glass windows, lounging and eating $9 salads, and the freezing cold, bundled-up, multi-racial, worn-down looking group of public transit users, waiting for a bus to wherever we're going. The difference between the faces is plain to see, as if there are some people who walk around everyday with overgrown elephants on their shoulders, and others who don't have to.

Three small children with braided hair and white-out nail polish, sitting on each other's laps on ugly blue bus seats, laughing and pointing at a squat wiener dog being taken for a walk.

The feeling of waiting to find out what my last semester of college will look and feel like, of waiting to sign up for the last classes I'll take as an undergraduate. Incomplete completion!

On sunflowers.

Sometimes you come home to a big beautiful bunch of sunflowers on your kitchen table. Sometimes they're in the same purple vase that the first bouquet was in, over a year ago. And sometimes, you find someone who thinks about brightening your day as much as you think about brightening theirs. And it is good.

On nonsense.

I wish I could write a graphic novel, something poignant and funny and dark like Lynda Barry or Alison Bechdel or Mariko & Jillian Tamaki. I like writing and reading and art, and I want to participate and make things, but I never know how. I feel like there's a perfect medium out there that just keeps eluding me and when I find it I will be home. Can you get to the point where you've read so many books that they start spilling out of you in original novels? Maybe I just haven't read enough books. Natalie Goldberg says that there is no more perfect time to write than right now this very second, and that writing is a discipline. I agree, but I am very undisciplined. I am also reading about how to like myself more, and how to think less about how I wish I were something else. I read self-help books a lot -- with Buddhist flavorings! -- and cry on the bus sometimes. It's embarrassing, like everything in life.

All I know is that I want to get away from having to see the angry and disappoitned masses every day, to walk on unforgiving concrete and the grimy artifice that comes with living in a city. I want to live in an old farmhouse, with a big wooden desk of my own, full of pens and colored pencils and watercolors, and notebooks of all shapes and sizes and textures. And I will sit in the liltingly beautiful hours of the early morning and write nonsense, and draw nonsense, and out of it will come a small worthwhile thing that will make the passing day worth finishing. Or out of it will come nothing, and I will try again the next day. And it will be my desk, and it won't be covered in clothes and homework like my current desk is now, because our apartment is too small for me to really work at my desk. And I will have chickens and vegetables, and no neighbors, a few cats and my loving partner, hodgepodge family/friend dinners, and lots of dirt but no smog. And I will feel truly alone-without-lonely for the first time and I will feel safe and full and free to do what I need to do for growth. But all these things require money and how do you find time to work for adequate amounts of money when you have to keep your soul alive, too?

I need to find a way to check out of the rat race, or I will be trampled. The pulpy remnants of violently squeezed childhood joy and wonder are something that I have to spend the rest of my life protecting inside myself. I've gotta get out of all this, for the sake of my soul, and fully inhabit my body as a world apart from this ugly dog fight of grades, the greed, minimum wage, competitive resume-writing, applications, interviews, proving yourself, proving yourself, proving yourself...I feel like a cat that has been dropped into the ocean: confused, miserable, slowly drowning, but desperately aware that there is a better place, one of comfort and acceptance and clinging to the hope that someday that place will be accessible and that place will be home.

 

 

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

A Ghost Story!

We got a cat! Her name is Ghost, and she is estimated to be around two years old, but she's only 6 pounds and tiny as a kitten, so I'm not convinced. She was found as a stray living on a golf course, but now she lives with us. She loves chin scratches, being held like a baby, and hiding under the sofa. 

She loves helping me make tuna sandwiches for my lunch box. She loves helping so much, she even eats some of it. 

On Eating and Being.

It seems really pretentious and self-centered to write about why I started this blog ("let me blog about why, me, I started this me I me me I me blog..."), but I'm doing it anyway (being afraid to do things because they are too "___," but doing them anyway, is a new theme in my life). My decision to start a food blog was not pre-meditated in any way. It was a whim. I never thought I'd be comfortable enough to write about food, and it's still really hard for me. I don't know exactly why I started it, but blogging has cracked the little nut that is my heart in ways I didn't anticipate.

Writing a food blog feels like it would be the least challenging of blog options. We all eat, we all cook in some capacity (microwaving leftover pizza is a form of cooking, if you keep an open mind), so writing on and taking pictures of food seems really simple. I've always wanted a blog, so of course I decided early on that I could never have a food blog, because it'd be a cop-out, and because I have always had -- and probably always will have -- serious issues with food, weight, and body image. So, instead, I just didn't write at all. This was a poor decision. Read Natalie Goldberg's work to find out why.

Surprisingly, the double-whammy of having "food issues" and being all defeatist about a food blog not being "challenging enough" was what lead me here. I've come to learn that I am not very smart about taking care of myself; I tend to do what I feel I am supposed to do, not what I really want to do. I have even less perspective on what truly makes me happy. In short, creating this blog was a small fuck-you to myself: to constantly telling myself that what I want to do is not what I'm supposed to do, to thinking that I have any idea of what will make me happy or unhappy, to being constrained by what arbitrary limits and restrictions I put on, well, everything.

I'm not trying to make this blog sound huge and important, because it isn't. It's really quite plain, and forgettable, and nothing compared to the plethora of elegantly designed and cohesively themed food blogs dotting the rest of this internet landscape. The fact that it is so unimpressive and small is revolutionary on a personal level, though, because usually if projects don't fit up to my asinine standards of what is relevant and worthy of my time and effort (honestly, nothing makes the cut, so I live quite an anxiety-ridden life of semi-productivity), I drop them, or never begin them at all.

But, a little happy voice in my head (it really is alone up there, amidst all the nasty, viciously hurtful ones) told me to just make the boring, worthless food blog despite its blandness, its poor design, its lack of focus. Just do it, because I can, and because I want to a little bit, and because maybe (god forbid) it will bring to my life some arrhythmic drips of joy. That really is enough of a reason, I now know.

This blog also exists as a form of rebellion from my body hate and food issues. I can write about food, and eat the food I write about, and not feel guilty about enjoying both! Okay, still working on that, but I love writing, and I'm allowing myself to use that love to write about something that brings me great pleasure and even greater pain. I'm not using this blog to work through my hang-ups, but the simple act of deciding that what I eat isn't embarrassing or shameful -- that the fact that I eat at all isn't embarrassing or shameful -- has been revolutionary to me on a personal level. To be a woman who eats and enjoys it seems to be a shameful thing in society, unless you are extremely thin and can brag about your god-like metabolism. To not be this sort of thin, god-like woman and to be writing about food makes me feel brave.

I think that everyone should do whatever it takes to make themselves feel a little more powerful, less oppressed, more positive, and less downtrodden, even if what they choose to do is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things (their personal lives, their families, their country, the world, etc...), and even if what they do has no "ultimate goal." It makes me feel brave to write this tiny blog that no one reads. Sometimes, it even makes me cry a little.

Contributing to your own well-being is like plugging in a small, but fiery, space-heater of hope that thaws your icy, cynical body more and more every time a contribution is made. I have no hopes of fame or improvement or self-actualization. I just want to feel happier and braver. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. Who knows anything about being happy, really?

Forest of Beech Trees by Gustav Klimt, 1903

Fall is finally here. Yesterday, it was in the high 70's (boo!) but for the rest of the week, it's going to be in the high 50's/low 60's (yay!). To me, this means cooking more comfort food because my semester is filled to the brim with stressful responsibilities. It means less fresh fruit and vegetables, and more canned ones, which is depressing, but it also means more melty casserole type things and pumpkin and cinnamon and warm beverages!

I'm keeping this post short because I have a big post coming (more cooking adventures: pizza and tacos -- with lots of delicious secret ingredients that I will reveal upon posting), and because I have homework to do.

Today, I recommend taking time to read and drink some hot tea, or hot chocolate. It will do your soul some good, especially if you're a student of any kind dealing with the torrential downpouring of new stress that comes with starting a new semester! I recently finished "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" by Harriet A. Jacobs for my Black Women's Autobiography class, and I highly recommend it. It's not a light or fun read, but it's an important one: can you remember ever reading a slave narrative written about a woman, much less by the woman herself? Probably not, because this is one of the only ones. It was published in 1861, by the way, and initially under a pseudonym, because Harriet didn't want those who helped her escape to get in trouble upon its publication. What a woman! If you're looking for something light, steer clear, but I truly believe that the most rewarding part of being a reader is the discomfort one feels when having to grapple with a challenging text full of difficult ideas and thought-provoking insights. Make yourself uncomfortable, and feel your brain grow.

Also, feel your stomach grow as we transition into fall, the season of comfort food! Next post soon!