An Exercise in Sublimation

I went to Target just now to buy a yoga mat. It was on sale for $12. Somehow, I managed to spend over $200. I was feeling reckless and impulsive. When I get like this, it manifests in either of the following two ways: A) Eating too much of something that's bad for me; or B) Spending way too much on stuff I don't really need and can't really afford. Check and check. Not to generalize for over half the world's population, but I think these are pretty typical female coping mechanisms. These past few months at work have been inconceivably stressful (I know, what else is knew, but for reals, it was bad), and there's some stuff in my personal life that's just a tad effed up as well.

Strange, my yoga mat didn't come with a pretty flcwer...

FALSE ADVERTISING!!!

This was a recipe for disaster that almost cost me all the amazing progress I have been making with my healthy lifestyle changes. I gained back six of the seventy-six pounds I had lost, on top of reverting to some of my old compulsive over-eating habits. There's nothing worse than feeling out of control. Especially when you can undo six weeks of hard work and weight loss with three days of poor decisions. I let myself wallow in misery for a whole weekend. Sometimes you just have to. But then last Monday, I got over it. I did laundry, scrubbed my whole apartment (including the shower which I confess had not been cleaned in... let's just say a while), and paid bills. There's something to be said for a cathartic cleaning and organizing purge to reset yourself and gain new perspective.

I'm the life of the self-pity party!

Monday was also the first day I started going to the Burbank Athletic Center. They had a free three-day trial, so I figured I should check out the mythical place known as the "Gym." I'd never really gone to a regular gym before. I was always in sports as a kid, then I went to Curves a few years in high school (apparently they donate to some uber-conservative causes, so boycott them if you can). In college, there was a free state-of-the-art gym that supposedly Kobe Bryant used to work out at, but it was too far to walk to and I didn't have a car. After college, I was too poor to afford a real gym, so I would just go running around the 'hood. But you couldn't do that after dark at the risk of being murder-raped. Then I created this workout, but it wasn't terribly effective. I've been running here in NoHo since about September, but the repetitive motion and hard impact from the concrete really messed with my hip. It was terrifying to me to think that I might not be able to exercise for physical, not psychological reasons for the first time. But perhaps working out on commercial quality machines would fix my joint problems.

Fuck this dude. He makes me vomit.

I wouldn't want to work out at his gym anyway.

It turns out, I frickin' LOVE the gym!!! I can't believe I didn't discover this earlier! Think of how much weight and weight-related aggravation it would have saved if I'd have known that endorphins aren't just a conspiracy designed to get us off our sizable butts in pursuit of naturally occurring uppers. They really do rock, who knew? I always thought gyms were expensive, at least $40-50 bucks a month, but the BAC is actually super cheap at around $10. Even my broke-ass can afford that. I've gone every day for the past week and I look forward to it every time. If you know me at all, you know how crazy that is. They have pretty cheap yoga classes too, which I impulsively signed up for just now to try it. I'm going at 9am tomorrow, so we'll see if I'm just as jazzed on yoga as I am about cardio and strength-training. (I'm assuming Wii Yoga really isn't the same.)

Clearly I can't be trusted with a credit card when I'm emotional.

This initial impulse-buy led to the afore-mentioned yoga mat purchase. Which was accompanied by yoga pants, yoga capris, new sports bras, brightly-colored sweat towels, multi-vitamins, and a bunch of other stuff to get me excited about this new phase in my life. I think this is behavior I learned from my mother. If you're going to make a big change, it helps to buy new stuff to get you mentally prepared. Even though I probably could have made due with the million sports bras and workout clothes I already have, I needed to do this. I will probably regret it when I get my Target card bill, but for now, I'm just stoked to see what all the fuss is about. And it feels good to finally have some control again. Well, I'm still eating too many things I shouldn't, but at least I'm overcompensating for my short-comings with excessive exercising. And it's a lot healthier to take out all my rage and frustrations on the Stairmaster than getting drunk or high or eating a whole tub of cookie dough.

Allow me to rant a bit...

Today has just sucked (other than spending the first part of it with my wonderful Mama Hutch and fellow gang members). I feel like whining because I should be ironing my new suit and I think I'll avoid that by throwing a colossal hissy fit. A hissy fit, in list format.

1. My throat feels like "death shat on me." (Thanks to my friend Kirsten for that little nugget.)

2. I'm still achey and weak from this dragged-out cold, but I don't have insurance so I'm hoping it's not something more serious than laryngitis.

3. I have no voice because I used what was left of it debating with my dad last night about heteronormative gender roles and feminism. It was already going, and now it's gone. And I have to go to work tomorrow and spend a large portion of the day rasping into the phone.

4. My plane was late, and check-in/security took way longer than usual.

5. Confession: the seat belts on airplanes just barely fit me. I am that reviled, disgusting creature who is so large, she will soon probably be asked to purchase an additional seat which I so can't afford. It's humiliating fighting with the seat buckle, just barely getting it to close and then have it snap open again. When I switched to the seat next to me, it closed just fine. So it wasn't me! But in the meantime, this was mortifying. It's like the time I couldn't get the seatbelt on a roller coaster to close and they had to stop the whole ride to help me. My face was bright red and sweating from the effort. Kevin Smith, I feel your pain. Pray you never have this problem and stick with your new year's resolutions.

6. Because I still am harboring this cold like a fugitive, my ears still refuse to pop, giving me a massive headache and echoing in my ears.

7. Baggage claim took forever. Taxi line took forever. It's 39 degrees in Burbank, not exactly the kind of weather you want to stand out in a thin, joke of a pea coat.

8. When I arrived at work to pick up my car, they told me they almost towed it. Wonderful, thanks for the heart attack, security.

9. Thankfully Stan started (which he doesn't like to do after several days of being neglected), but then when I got out of the front gate, this ditzy soccer mom in an SUV backed into my bumper, literally all up in Stan's grill. I honked at her, but she claimed she couldn't see me. Well you can't see something if you're not looking, honey. Luckily this was like 1 mile an hour and neither us, nor our vehicles were harmed. There will probably be an incident report tomorrow morning waiting for me since it took place on company property, but we didn't want to deal with the hassle.

10. I was so shaken from the accident that I almost rammed into someone else when turning onto the street. And I never am that careless. I hate being honked at. I take it way too personally.

11. So I get home and it's 54 degrees in my apartment and my heater is barely good for raising the temp 3 or 4 notches. Ffffff-reezing!

12. My friend is coming to stay with me for a couple of days until she finds an apartment. I'm happy to have her, but I fear that I will just be a big, old, frozen solid block of crankypants who can't talk and can't listen because her ears have still not popped. Not to mention, I'll be working like crazy to prove that I'm not a slacker at my new job. And there are dishes in the sink and trash piling up and I really don't have the energy to deal with them right now.

13. Oh, I'm still depressed about my grandfather's funeral during which Papa Hutch gave a heart-wrenching eulogy that haunts me to this day.

14. OH and Mama Hutch and I went suit shopping on New Year's Eve, which was miserable because I'm two different sizes and completely out of proportion in many areas. Shopping for something specific as a plus-sized woman at her holiday heaviest is not fun, let me tell you. You'd think every store would carry a plain black suit in every single size, but nope. No they don't. And even with extensive tailoring, the ones I ended up with are both snug and pouchy.

15. One final thing: I'm exhausted because I kept having to wake up to go pee in the middle of the night because I was good and drank buckets of water to get over this black death. Whoever said "Drink plenty of fluids" clearly had an iron bladder the size of the hoover dam.

Ok, I think that's everything that's irritating me. Other than fighting the scam website which totally screwed me out of 200 bucks and AT&T for charging me a massive late fee when they never sent me a bill in the first place. Bollocks bollocks bollocks. 2011 was supposed to be different, Universe. You better get'cho shit together. On the plus side, I did spot a little kid wearing a tin foil hat at the airport, presumably so aliens couldn't read his mind. My team.

Hopefully I'll be in a much better mood for my next post, but in the meantime, Happy Friggin' New Year.

I am not now, nor have I ever been a drug addict

Though it's a little soon to crow, I think I should announce that I HAVE A JOB!!! Which is awesome for several reasons: 1) Duh, 2) Unemployment sucks, 3) Being poor sucks, 4) It's a really good job even if it's not in film, 5) I'm over-explaining this. Yay me! So that was fast. I didn't even have time to enjoy my unemployment checks that were three times what I got last year when I was unemployed for eight months instead of one. Oh the irony. But all of this job-having could come to a screeching halt if for some reason I fail the stringent criminal background check or 90 day hair follicle drug test (which I just took this morning. Goodbye huge clump of hair, though I'm glad they didn't rip you out of my head and merely snipped.)

Some things they might find in my criminal background:

1. A fix-it ticket for a busted headlight on my car. It wasn't supposed to go on my permanent record and at the time I didn't even know the headlight was busted. But you never know how thorough their detectives might be.

2. A possibly thrown-out parking ticket for when I was towed most unfairly on a day they randomly decided to pave a small section of street without informing its residents. The jury's still out on whether that's going to happen, because you best believe I fought that mothereffer.

3. I stole a Milky Way candy bar on my last day at Blockbuster. It's sort of an unofficial tradition that I probably shouldn't share with outsiders, but still. When you consider how much they jack up their prices on candy and how much of my paycheck they got back for said candy, I earned that Milky Way. Call it a perk, if you will.

As for drugs they might find in my hair, I was a little bit more paranoid:

1. Birth control pill. You never know what that might show up as in the test. Mistakes happen all the time. Just consider the misunderstood poppy seed muffin.

2. I had a cold recently, so Nyquil, Dayquil (generic, but still), Airborne (again generic).

3. Evidence of what one might consider an "excess" of merlot about once a month for the past three months. Definitely not an abusive user, but you never know what they're judging you on. When I asked my friends if this might be an issue, they replied that if they never hired someone who had an occasional drink, no one would ever be hired. Except for Mormons maybe (one of the unexpected downsides of leaving the church perhaps.)

I'm hoping that that's all that could be construed as less than upstanding citizenship behavior. Unless they find out about my lost year in Bangkok...

I may or may not have been a drug smuggling mime

after my passport and wallet were stolen on a journey to find myself.

To celebrate having a job, I went to the Crenshaw (South Central) mall. Not exactly Rodeo Dr., but still an outlet to spend my not-yet-hard-earned money. I am not a shoppaholic by any means. I never get the urge to shoe shop and I would much rather watch a movie and eat chocolate to console myself than indulge in 'retail therapy.' And spending money is usually like pulling teeth. But today was fun. I bought a fabulous new pair of shoes (both fun and practical), some random stuff at Wal-Mart, and finally invested in nice, grown-up unmentionables. The Hanes six-packs from Target I usually purchase get the job done, but make you feel as feminine as a one-eyed tree-stump.

I googled 'poor kid playing basketball'

and this cake came up. I want it.

On a completely unrelated note, I also bought a basketball. Why? Well it was my Toy for Tots, a requirement for attending Ellen's Christmas giveaway show next Tuesday. I figure a basketball gets kids to exercise, and can be used for singular or group recreation allowing my unknown poor protege to make friends and stay fit. Plus, it's unisex. I played basketball as a kid and now some unfortunate child can get the same joy out of it that I did. And if that kid happens to grow up to be the next Kobe Bryant (only not an asshole), then I will feel directly responsible for donating his/her first basketball. And if they happen to seek me out and reward me financially for inspiring their dreams, then so be it. Now I'm feeling rather pleased with myself that I spent 8 bucks on the poor and cough cough bucks on fancy underoos. I also contributed greatly to the economy of this relatively impoverished area, so kudos for me as well!