I’m Not Comfortable With This Cereal…

There’s a sense of glamor associated with how bright and shiny you can make yourself. Teeth, hair, skin, doesn’t matter, it just needs to reflect as much light as is physically possible.

And you can have it all these days, straight out of a tube.

I think a friend’s blog post nudged my brain further in this direction, but it realy was weeks ago when I started thinking more about what I put in my body.

The scene, Aldi. The chore (and yes, it is a chore that I hate), grocery shopping. Just was gonna pick up a few things. Eggs, half-and-half, almond milk, some cereal, some Aldi-brand Fiber One type bars. I also grabbed some kefir. At the time, my grandfather was in the hospital with a mass in his colon (that turned out to be much more extensive, of course.) It was by the grace of God, I really think, that I had the random thought that most of what I had in my hands was processed. Unwhole. I stopped and peered at the labels on the bars and the cereal.

And said to my fiance, quite promptly, “This is way too processed.” I put the grainy stuff back and grabbed a bunch of fruit from the produce section.

What was I about to put in my body?

And what goes on it, every day, for that matter?

I think if I’d stuck with chemistry as my major in college, I wouldn’t be able to say “I don’t recognize anything on this label.” But I didn’t, and I don’t recognize a whole lot of the stuff in processed food, in my makeup, in lotion and soap and shampoo and everything that can be and is absorbed into my skin.

It weirds me out a lot that I have to use Vaseline to take my mascara off. I mean yes, oil does desolve oil, but after having a tube of waterproof that washed off with soap, standing there with tight skin around my freshly washed, still mascara coated eyelashes was a little jarring.

I found out the hard way that Aldi cream, formulated for slightly older skin, breaks my twentysomething face out. I don’t know what’s in that either, so to avoid stripping my face of sebum in the morning, after I have been in the bed and not gotten dirty at all, I just use witch hazel. Works for me.

So after reading lots of thought-provoking and informative articles about the possibly (and probably) harmful ingredients (what even is “fragrance”?) in mainstream, drugstore cosmetics and body care, I’m totally feeling like homemade might be the thing to ease into.

This blog here has some really cool recipes and advices, all of which I’m itching to try. I’ll probably use them. If it can save me money and help me avoid prologed exposure to grocery shopping (one of my least favorite things to do, still serious) I’m in.

A few motivators do play into this. First, I like makeup. Sephora’s main draw for me is the sheer amount of color inside, and I’m a sucker for neat packaging. (I think book people just are in general.) But I’d like to make my own and maybe reach a point where I don’t need it so much, and I can only reach that point by eating healthy food and putting skin-friendly things on my face. A lot of stuff isn’t skin friendly, it turns out.

Second, I’ve bumped up my running to 5 days a week instead of three. I’m faster, I have more stamina, and I just plain like it) but why should I sabotage all that work (almost to the end of C25K!) by putting gross things in and on my body on a daily basis? I’ve been mostly going without wheat for a while now (though I still have a little) and trying to eat meats, veggies, and fruits. Not really a diet, but I feel better.

Third, I want to have a healthy house and healthy babies.

Fourth, again, I cannot stand grocery shopping. It’s boring, and tedious, and there are a lot of things I’d rather do in my spare time instead, like read or write or make things or play Super Mario Galaxy or walk Pippa.

Fifth, money. I don’t have a ton of it to start with, and an awful lot of my little bit goes to school loans every month. If I can make our food items do double duty as cleaner, makeup, lotion, deodorant, toothpaste, and laundry detergent, I’m there.

So there. I’m going to gradually wean myself off the synthetic stuff (like I’ve been trying to do with food) and see where that takes me.

I think this is going to be quite fun.

Oysters on Boxing Day

On December 26, every year for as long as I can remember, it’s been a tradition for me, my parents, and my brother to have breakfast at my grandparents’ house in Virginia. It’s the whole works, of course. Eggs, bacon, sausage, my Gramma’s biscuits with grape jelly, orange juice, coffee, and and a big plate of fried oysters that my PaPa would get and cook for us. They’re good with ketchup and I have chewed them carefully since I was a kid, on the off chance that there might be a pearl inside.

This year, I don’t know.

Last week, my PaPa passed away.

Gramma and PaPa came for a short visit, for a wedding, actually. Three days later, he went to the emergency room because he was losing a lot of fluid. Even that afternoon, he was smiling, even though he was in more pain than I knew then. By the next Monday, words like “palliative care” and “hospice” became a reality as a PET scan revealed the real horror of the situation, how far disease had really spread.  

This year, September 11 didn’t have me posting pictures of my country’s flag on Facebook. My fellow Americans will have to forgive me, because that day, I didn’t care all that much.

Instead, I stood in the local hospital, holding one of PaPa’s hands as he crossed a bridge that we couldn’t follow him over.

And after. After I kissed my PaPa one last time, after I moved out of the room to let his sisters see him, watched the men in suits appear and wait politely down the hall with a red gurney, and after we walked down to a teeny waiting area so they could begin the final journey…it was a little easier to feel calm. Not coldly logical, but knowing that he’s not hurting anymore. That he’s with my uncle now. That one day, death will die.

Nothing I could do but get my purse, go home, figure out lunch, eat. Go running while my fiance went to class that night. Holding down the fort while my parents went up to Virginia the next morning to make the arrangements. Cleaning the yard and the house on Friday. And finally, Saturday.

It was easy enough to rush into the house to dress, scarf down a quick lunch, and hurry to get to the funeral home.

Life after the service ended up being harder, at least for me.

PaPa was everywhere. Not so much in pictures, but in the things he left. On Wednesday, his watch and glasses, his shirts I’d washed. Pants hanging up on the bathroom door. On Saturday, a pair of shoes down in the basement, a coffee mug. A truck and two cars.

Just there. Like he’d stepped out for a minute. Like Gramma should have been saying “Pop went up to the store for some chicken. He’ll be right back.”

Gramma is living with us now. She’s gone back to their house for a couple days to go through stuff, to pack it up. They were married for 66 years. PaPa was 18, she was 17. I think she assumed she might be able to go back there for good, but her words to my mom last night were “I gotta get out of this place.”

I knew she’d live with us if anything ever happened to PaPa, but it turns out even a reasonable idea that you can accept in the daylight hours, when everyone is healthy…even that can be abstract until you’re faced with it.

The hardest part is not hearing PaPa reply “I love you too, honey” in his rumbly voice with that southern Virginia accent. The hardest part is my mind screaming at me throughout the day that Gramma is here and PaPa can’t be and won’t be ever again. The hardest part is the horror of absense.

I don’t know what Christmas will be this year. Sad, for sure. A little emptier.

I don’t want to say anything trite here about pressing on, and being strong. I wouldn’t say anything like that to someone else. Part of my world is gone for a while.

Just a while.

It Appears I Did Some Actual Damage This Time

I watched the end of Who Framed Roger Rabbit last night, and it was still as terrifying as when I was two.

Most of the reason that the end of that movie scared me was that the main bad guy got squished by a steam roller and came back to life in the most frightening way possible. My fiance agreed that he was indeed nightmare fuel, and I told him the story of going to Disney World when I was three and going to a live stage show themed after the movie. There was a figure of the villain on the wall, and I watched it the whole time, so scared that it was going to come alive. Obviously it didn’t.

But my imagination does like to run away with me, and this hasn’t gotten any better as I’ve reached adulthood. For an app like Zombies, Run!, imagination is key to really getting immersed in the story. My mission last night was “A Voice in the Dark” (squee) and I decided to change up my route to go along with the spirit of the plot.

I swear I wasn’t gonna actually run on any non-paved ground, or keep going. I was going to turn around before I reached the really busy road that runs in front of my neighborhood. But once I saw the stretch of grass and dirt and roots and the farmland, and knowing that there was a wide expanse of grass and other ground that would allow me to keep a safe distance from the road and still run, I took off down that way and even ran a good bit.

Right at the start, I directly caught a dip in the ground and rolled my right ankle.

And despite the rather obvious pull and stiffness on the outside of my right leg, kept going.

So right now, I’m dealing with this nice little burn in that muscle (and some soreness if I flex, plus a nice sudden cramp last night) and the ankle joint hurts a little.

But if it’s swollen at all, it’s only a little bit, and I can put weight on it and walk normally. I have no idea what I did. I actually did do something, and it hurt then and hurts a little now, and I know a little better than to “push through the pain” when it’s something other than muscle soreness.

But I finished, and pushed on through to doing five actual kilometers in 42ish minutes. Yes, that’s slow, and bear in mind that I was walking at certain points. Still, I’m happy, if sore.

I seriously cannot get enough of this running thing.

The Zombies Live In My Shoe and Bite Me Daily

I feel like it’s been a pretty long time since I last posted anything. That said, I’ve been working pretty hard, both at my book and pounding the pavement. I’ve sucked my fiance into C25K, and we will be starting week six probably tomorrow. It’s been a weird week.

Because I have stumbled into that awesome combination of being both broke and in need of new shoes, my heels look terrible. I was going to post pictures of them, but I ended up grossing myself out. Here is a picture of Pippa instead. Isn’t she sweet?

“I’m the baddest little chick in the neighborhood,” she says.

Anyway, part of the blame must be shared with my progress on C25K and the very very awesome app that I have been supplementing my regular program with: Zombies, Run!

Ladies and gentlemen, I am hooked. I’m not going to review the app; it’s been out for a year and all of the internet has beaten me to that. I like this app a lot, and it has made me add two workouts to each week. I am rationing because I paid for this app. It’s like a book, plus great music, and some actual funny stuff. I am genuinely glad I bought this game, and I love feeling so epic at the parts of the game where it detects zombies and you have to run. Tuesdays and Thursdays have become that much more awesome for me.

I still partially blame it for my ugly feet, but good-naturedly. And gratefully.

Watching shows like The Biggest Loser isn’t that inspiring for me. I don’t ever really follow a whole season. It’s great that those people all get healthy, even though once the weeks are up, they won’t have resources like six hours of working out every day available to them, and will probably gain back if they’re not super careful.

Shows like that and others similar are a little terrifying. The winner might get to show off his or her figure on the cover of a magazine, but for every after, there’s a before.

Any time I see a story where someone is sedentary and never goes to the gym and only cooks or eats junk food, it’s scary to me because it’s really really easy to get into those habits. To gain forty or fifty or a hundred pounds, just like that. Because you got “busy.”

It terrifies me because I’m human, and it can happen to anyone. People who are so large and so sedentary that they can’t walk ten feet without getting out of breath, so they just use the scooters at Walmart to get around. I’m not talking about people who have actual health problems, but rather those who prefer not moving and eating horrible things and torturing their bodies because they won’t walk the ten feet. I’m 100% sure not every large person I see using a scooter is like that, but I know I’ve heard that at least once. Spoken by a person on one of those shows.

I’m scared of becoming someone like that. Of being an otherwise young mom who doesn’t just have baby weight, but lots of non-baby weight, and who passes bad habits onto their children, who only know to eat the awful and have high cholesterol in the fifth grade.

My feet aren’t going to be pretty. They might hurt some. I know they’ve bled, and I know that’s not good either. But I’d rather have ugly, bleeding feet than weigh 400 pounds, have pretty feet, and say about being active, well, exercise is just not for me. It scares me because I know how easy it is to just let your body go.

Blood, sweat, and zombies. Bring it all on, because this is totally for me.