Mandajuice

Going back to Cali*

Right around the day I filed my tax return, I got an e-mail invitation to a family reunion on Easter Sunday in California. My Aunt didn't have my e-mail address and went out of her way to make sure someone would forward it to me. When my cousin, Amber, e-mailed it to me I was honored. There's been a lot of water under that bridge and I've been worried that I'd actually burnt it down forever.

Apparently not.

For the first time in a long time, I had the money to Say Yes. So I did! I'm taking the whole clan to California for Spring break from March 30 through April 9th. Actually, only the kids and I will be gone that long. Joel starts a new job on Monday so he only gets to take a week off. Liza will be with us for about five days.

For me it will be ten days in the state formerly known as home.

I'm going to need an extra pair of running shoes and a hip flask if I'm going to survive, but my grandmother is turning 90. NINETY! So I can't miss it. Which makes it that much easier to get over myself and Joel will be right there next to me. 

So I'm good.

Actually, I'm stoked. I can't wait to run the squishy rubber track at Los Gatos High and show Joel the house I grew up in and the beach where I gave my first blow job. Both of my brothers are down to host and I can't wait to see them. I wonder if I'll cry when I see my nephews like I did the last time I was in San Francisco. They seem to grow so fast when I'm not around.

My only promise is to take a lot of pictures and see my therapist the moment I get back.

*... I don't think so.

Comme ci comme ça

Things have been good around these parts lately. I haven't heard back about grad school yet, but my tax return came in and I was not only able to pay back some debts and catch up on my bills, but buy fun things like car insurance! and running shoes! and a phone that actually turns off! My iphone 3 (not 3GS, just 3...) had been on its last legs for nearly a year, so I bought a new one, switched to Verizon and added myself to Joel's family plan, which saves me so much money every month that the phone basically paid for itself.

Which only makes the Siri-related tomfoolery that much more fun! I'm glad the poor gal doesn't have much of a long-term memory.

Lest you worry, I had already bought another kindle weeks ago, but that didn't stop the children from starting a cage match over who got my old phone to use as an ipod. I think Genoa may have won. Mostly because she wanted me to set up her e-mail account and Alex was too busy playing Minecrack.

Baby's first e-mail?

To Joel: "You smell like dirty socks and armpits!"I beg to differ with her, obviously. Oh! That reminds me; did I mention Joel and I are officially back together? Because that happened. It's not without complications, no doubt, but dude, you guys, we're like magnets, yada yada yada, nothing worth doing is easy. And no, we're not moving in together again.

We sealed the deal with Valentine's day tattoos.

He got his Alfred Hitchcock Geek logo on his arm and I had him write, "Be who you are." over my heart. Not sure I'm exactly sure who I WANT to be yet, but I seem to end up being me in spite of myself.

Since it was my BFF, Terry's, birthday, I also did the tattoo thing with her. Because she's the most generous person I know, I had her write "Share" on my shoulder. She's also a chemistry teacher, so not only is mine written in mathematical symbols, but the tattoo she promised her students was this rad atom:

It was fun to spread the badassery around my little family circle. Speaking of challenging badassedness, my boy is doing well. He might have a hard time paying attention in school, but at least he found a new reason to love going to church every Sunday.

What else?

Work has been delightfully busy, I've been running five miles at a go, I signed up for my first race, and this week Joel and I are making a last-ditch effort to see all nine Best Film Oscar nominees before heading to our friend Rachel's house on Sunday for a formal-wear pizza party in front of a live television.

Never a dull moment!

Even better? My next post will be about how I'm booking a trip to California so all five of us can attend a family reunion on Easter Sunday.

Hold me.

mandajuice shared an Instagram photo with you

(I was hoping I could post directly from Instragram to my blog, but alas, I haven't figured it out yet...)

Thin Privilege

The running continues to delight, amaze and frustrate me. I feel SO GOOD after I'm done with a run, but man, the progress is painfully slow. Today I ran laps around the city water supply up at Mt. Tabor, which sounds dull, but honestly, this is Portland:

I'm having a hard time getting my speed up when I run outside and it's starting to piss me off. On the treadmill, I'm doing 9 or 10-minutes miles, but outside, it's 11 minutes or more. I really want that fucking tattoo! And yet the 8-minute mile goal seems just as far away as ever. Sometimes I wish I had a coach barking at me to go faster, but the truth is I have never been in better shape than I am right now. I have never run more than one mile without wanting to die. Today I ran over four miles straight, stopping only for a fraction of a second to adjust my sock so I wouldn't get a(nother) blister. I couldn't even do that as a teenager.

Which reminds me how I need to write about the box of old photos and journals my sister gave me. The photos were somewhat life-changing and I plan to dedicate a whole post to how they made me feel, but inside the box I also found the original cheer leading uniform my mother made for me when I was TWELVE.

It fits.

Which is insane. Especially since this body still feels so foreign to me. It's stronger. It goes faster. It's bendy! It has better orgasms and wears smaller clothes. But I still have no idea how much space it takes up. I just feel like ME. Not that I haven't been thinking about body size lately, especially since my little sister and I broke up over my inability to fully embrace the Fat Acceptance Movement. I LOVE the idea of body acceptance at any size and I'm proud of her for the way she has learned to love her body, but you'd be hard-pressed to convince me I was even remotely healthy at 310 pounds. I was out of control. I played video games all day and ate fast food all night. Even walking was painful. I was miserable, but not because of how I looked. It was always about how I FELT and how being obese limited my ability to do normal things. Like conceive children. Or wipe my ass in a public restroom.

Now that I'm at the opposite end of the spectrum, it still isn't about how I look. I would have been perfectly happy to be a size 14 for the rest of my life and I never would have known the difference. But now I apparently have something called "thin privilege," which I agree, I do. It kind of annoys me, to be honest. Sure my inner fat girl loves being accepted as "normal," but my inner feminist wants to punch a bitch every time she (or he) tells me I look skinny.

The more I think about it, though, the more I think the real me, the one who is neither feminist nor fat girl, woke up this morning, put her running shoes on and KICKED SOME ASS. When I got home, I ate fresh berries with greek yogurt and a spoonful of crunchy organic peanut butter. My "diet" is the opposite of restrictive; in fact, it has never been more colorful. Running does this amazing thing where I can eat pretty much anything I want and still maintain my weight (food insurance, as my friend Donna puts it), but it turns out I only WANT to eat foods that make me feel good.

I no longer receive any kind of emotional gratification from food.

I eat because I need to. I only think about food while I'm eating it (or shopping/meal planning/cooking for other people). Food is fuel - delicious, delicious fuel - and it's my body that tells me when I need it, not my brain.

I'm not gonna lie - it's pretty rad. I never knew my body could feel like this and I never want to go back to the days of thinking about food 24-7. I'm not all the way there yet (caffeine and booze much?), but I feel like I'm really learning to take care of my body and in return, my body is taking care of me and my crazy, crazy brain.

This obviously hasn't been the path of least resistance. It took, and continues to take, some difficult decisions. So, much to the Fat Activism Movement's dismay, I feel strongly that if being this size affords me any privilege, it has only been earned through sweat and tears (and lots and lots of therapy). I should not have to apologize for it. Big or small, no one should have to apologize for their size.

I work best at the last minute. Not that I've ever tested that hypothesis or anything.

So I got my application submitted mere hours before the PSU deadline. All of my transcripts and references went through. Woot! Now I get to sit back and wait to see if they call me for an interview. Apparently only 400 people applied for the 60 spots, so it's not like I have any competition or anything. I clearly have nothing to be nervous about. Especially not this paragraph from my admissions essay where I talk about how my clients trust me:

This trust means there is approximately a six-minute delay between the initial handshake and the moment I’m inspecting naked genitalia under a magnifying lamp. The result of this just-add-water intimacy is that my clients (both men and women of all shapes, colors, ages and sizes) not only drop their pants for me, but their shields. They tell me everything. I hear about their broken marriages, their narcissistic mothers, their anxieties and self-doubt, their low self-esteem, their body issues, their sexual abuse, and, on a good day, their triumphs.  And while I constantly strive to be a good listener, I wish I had better answers, or, at the very least, better questions.

I'm in like Flynn, right?

The thing is, I could've written a very academic essay about my accomplishments and why I want to be a counselor, but I figured I'd just be me and write it like a blog post. I hope it works because the more I think about it, the more excited I am about going back to school. Even if it's not this year, it is a life goal I intend to pursue.

And for the record, I'm not doing it for the money. Did we not discuss this yet? I would like to live above the poverty line and some day help other poor, single mothers do the same. That's about it, though. I want to become a therapist because I think it's what I'm supposed to do. Something about me (my openness? my fearlessness? my utter disdain for judging anyone whose shoes aren’t on my side of the closet?) makes complete strangers comfortable telling me their secrets. They've done it my whole life. So pursuing this path just feels like I'm finally listening to what the universe is trying to tell me. 

So cross your fingers for me, will ya?

Moon

Thanks to Joel, I have a new favoritest poem ever. I read it for the first time in public and cried both like and for the "sleeping infant of myself."

Moon
by Billy Collins

The moon is full tonight
an illustration for sheet music,
an image in Matthew Arnold
glimmering on the English Channel,
or a ghost over a smoldering battlefield
in one of the history plays.

It's as full as it was
in that poem by Coleridge
where he carries his year-old son
into the orchard behind the cottage
and turns the baby's face to the sky
to see for the first time
the earth's bright companion,
something amazing to make his crying seem small.

And if you wanted to follow this example,
tonight would be the night
to carry some tiny creature outside
and introduce him to the moon.

And if your house has no child,
you can always gather into your arms
the sleeping infant of yourself,
as I have done tonight,
and carry him outdoors,
all limp in his tattered blanket,
making sure to steady his lolling head
with the palm of your hand.

And while the wind ruffles the pear trees
in the corner of the orchard
and dark roses wave against a stone wall,
you can turn him on your shoulder
and walk in circles on the lawn
drunk with the light.
You can lift him up into the sky,
your eyes nearly as wide as his,
as the moon climbs high into the night.

Aaaaaaaah, FREE COUCH!

(AKA Le Freak, C'est Chic!)

The good news is that I've been taking decently good care of myself lately. I haven't had a cigarette in weeks. I'm eating again. I've been really good at setting boundaries with family and respecting the needs and boundaries of those I love. I've even been practicing extravagant benevolence! Or at the very least, acceptance. I've been making sure my kids stay active and forcing myself to run every chance I get. Even if I only have ten minutes, I'll put on my shoes and hit the road. I figure a mile is a mile. It's my way of putting my own oxygen mask on first. If I don't take care of myself, how the fuck can I take care of anyone else?

The bad news is how often it turns out I need that oxygen mask. Things have been STRESSFUL. In every imaginable way. I've got money stress, family stress, work stress, love stress, kid stress, and now, because I'm apparently a glutton for punishment, I've decided to add even more to that list by applying for graduate school.

Little Mommy pretty much HATES me right now.

Sweet Jesus, I haven't talked about Little Mommy yet, have I? If not it's only because the whole concept is very personal, even for me. But let's just say that from a very young age, I took care of the people around me. To excess. More than any child really should have. I changed diapers and fixed bottles at 3AM and made sure we didn't miss our planes. I was capital "R" Responsible from my very first memory.

Little Mommy is the source of my panic attacks. Every time she rears her ugly little I CAN HANDLE THIS head, suddenly REAL Mommy can't breathe. It's super fun!

So when I decided a week ago that I was fucking sick of being poor and that I needed to finally mow myself down a future and go back to school, Little Mommy wasn't so happy about it. I researched and researched and found out that the only place I can get my Master's in Marriage and Family Counseling within driving distance is at Portland State.

So NATURALLY their application deadline is February First. You know, one WHOLE week away.

GOOD TIMES!

As a way of coping with this Magic! New! Stress! on Friday I went for the most magnificent run I've had yet - along the Vancouver Waterfront.

It was frigid and sunny and after about a mile, I got a terrible stitch in my side (which is when I stopped to take this picture), but I walked it off and kept on going. I felt like a champ when I got to my car an hour later, but as soon as I started driving home, Little Mommy took over and decided my to do list was waaaaaay to long for her little 8-year old brain to handle. Not even runner's high could shut her up.

Eventually I texted said list to Joel in the hope that just getting it off my chest would help me breathe:

Go to Costco for Rx
Finish blog post
Email Val
Email Chris
Order rush transcripts from:
    UC Davis
    San Jose State
    De Anza
    USF
Finish PSU application online (both)
Finish FAFSA
Clean the kitchen
Take down the Christmas tree
Put away the rest of the Christmas crap
Mop the dog piss so my house doesn't smell like ass

(All this during a weekend with the kids!)

Telling Joel helped. It always does. But when he decided to stop what he was doing, drive to my house with Liza and clean my kitchen for me while I was at work? Well, duh! Even Little Mommy cried. Who wouldn't? Especially since he'd already bought me a book of Billy Collins poetry that day. (My favorite poet.) And that same night when we all met at the roller rink in Gresham, he bought me a plastic rose and had the DJ call my name to come get it, love note and all. (Winning much, Mr. Gunz?) (It's no wonder I've lost interest in all the other boys.)

On Tuesday my therapist told me she was proud of my recent progress, which meant a lot to me given I want to be her when I grow up. (I've been seeing her through the same Counselor Education Program at PSU to which I'm currently applying.) She told me a great story about the first time she took her own kid to therapy. When the counselor asked what she wanted for him, she said, like ALL parents do, "I just want him to be happy."

The therapist's reply will stick with both of us forever: "You have no control over your children's happiness. All you can do is teach them to cope."

Little Mommy is 36, but I'm beginning to think she might be learning to cope.

So Very Hard To Go*

Yesterday I woke up exhausted. Joel and I had stayed up way too late together and then after he zonked out, I got up and proceeded to write really awful poetry until 3AM. Which obviously made no sense given that I had to be at work by 10:00, but I recently lost a poem because I didn't get out of bed and write it down and I'm still pissed off about it. That one was actually good, too. The ones I wrote Wednesday night were shit. Anyway, I  felt sorry for my first few clients the next day because I wasn't my usual chipper self. I mean, I still gave good wax, but it was less poetic than usual. Certainly less energetic.

Somehow I made it through the morning on two feet and then ended up having a long break in the middle of my afternoon schedule. So I finally forced myself into some spandex and hit the road. I hadn't gone for a run in nearly a week and I was starting to feel really bad about it. Especially since I'd run out of my happy meds for two days and was only just starting to feel them kick back in. But I really DIDN'T WANNA GO. I wanted a fucking NAP is what I wanted, but I went for a run anyway.

OUTSIDE.

IN THE SUNSHINE.

And it was magic! Who knew? I'd been bummed that my running enthusiasm seemed to be waning so quickly, but it turns out I just really hate running on a treadmill. Sure, it's great for checking speed and distance (and avoiding sleet), but it's an otherwise mind-numbing torture device. But running outside? Even when the voice in my Hello Kitty earphones told me to COOL DOWN, I kept running. Then I kept running more. Now that I think about it, I ran my first 5k in over two years.

When I got back to work afterwards, I was a completely different woman. Obnoxiously chipper. Happy. Easy-going. Really able to connect well with my clients. Sweaty. I even had a better night with the kids than I was expecting. We went swimming. We ate fast food (for the first time in MONTHS). They read out loud to me from my bed while I finally put away all my laundry. I had more patience than I usually do.

Runner's high, biatches! I finally get it.

 

*Tower of Power was the first song on my play list. Perfection.

Grace vs. Heart Thrash

As much as I'd like to finish the Year of Sundays project, that would mean I couldn't go to the to The Bridge every Sunday, which is where I've been for the past few months as part of my DO ALL THE THINGS mental health regime. Last Sunday, wild horses couldn't have kept me from being there (and not just for the free bread). Angie and Todd were on music duty again and they were so wonderfully loud, it somehow managed to fill in all my hollowest crannies. Which is some pretty fucking loud music. I loved it almost as much as I loved the sermon, in which Geoff did his best to explain grace, a concept a godless wonder like myself can only maybe sometimes BEGIN to grok on a good day. But one of my New Year's Resolutions is to LET IT GO and I can't stop thinking about how that might be the same thing as grace.

God-talk aside, I agreed with a lot of what Geoff had to say about how there's a difference between being a LOVING person and being a GRACEFUL person. I think it's possible to have love without grace. Love is something we need so much of that most of us are designed to give and get it pretty easily. It's impossible not to love our parents, our children, our partners, our friends. But most of the time that love has strings attached. Like, don't be an asshole. Don't hurt me. Love me back the way I need you to. Be there for me.

Grace, on the other hand, has no expectations. For Christians I think it's probably the idea of God having your back all the time so even if you fall, he always catches you. He fills in the gaps that you can't fill yourself. But since I don't believe in God, grace is pretty fucking terrifying for me. The way I see it, grace has no me. It's loving ANYWAY. It's practicing what Geoff calls, "extravagant benevolence," which is a beautiful way to describe a terrifying way of living.

After the sermon Joel described it as that moment Wiley Coyote runs off the cliff and realizes there's no ground under him anymore, which sums it up pretty damn well.

I'd like to think I've got the balls (or stupidity) to keep running off of cliffs. I want to be the girl who can catch herself when gravity sets in or at the very least, grab a branch to soften the fall. But here's a big shocker: it's not something I know how to do yet. I can love big and hard, but I also give my love about as gracefully as a linebacker. I'm not sure where I'm going with this or how it's all connected, but suffice it to say that I owe Joel so much grace that I'm overdrawn. I should be paying him interest.

But on the other hand when I think about how grace actually FEELS, I'm not sure I can do it. At least once a day I think, "but what if I'm wrong?" and my heart explodes in my gut so fast and so hard and so loud that the sound of my own blood thrashing toward my extremities makes my ears ring. My therapist asked what I call that feeling and I'm pretty sure it's heartbreak, but I don't know. Whatever I call it, I'm not sure I like it when my heart feels like a tsunami drowning me from the inside.

Is that the risk I take in pursuing grace without believing in God?

Whenever I think about that hovering moment of gravitational doom, I can almost hear that heart thrash murmuring from under my skin. I'm supposed to listen to my body, right? I just wish I knew what it was trying to say. Is it a warning? Some kind of emotional prescience? An omen? Or is it more like running - no pain, no gain. Maybe I'm just stretching my heart muscle in a way that's exquisitely painful because I've never used it before.

Gimme a hundred more miles or so and I'll see if I can figure it out.

Hurray for the Riff Raff

 

On Thursday night a friend of Joel's invited us out to go see a band play for free at one of the McMenamin's hotels downtown. I was in a pretty piss poor mood (emphasis on the poor). It's been a rough month and sadly, I know it hasn't just been that way for me. So instead of jumping at the opportunity, I doddled cleaning up after work trying not to think about how it was my mother's birthday and how I hadn't called her, but that it wasn't because I forgot to.

Eventually Joel texted me to shake a leg and get my ass down there because it was a band I couldn't miss. He had described them as alternative country from New Orleans, which didn't really appeal much to me, but I went anyway because that's what I do. I'm glad I didn't miss it because Hurray for the Riff Raff is my new favorite band. They made me cry at least three times.

This was probably one of the first songs that did it because, honestly, who CAN get enough?

Enough...

The next day I had to take drastic measures to keep my utilities on. The only thing I bought my kids for Christmas this year was a Kindle Fire. It was my compromise on the "WE BOTH WANT IPADS" thing. A compromise that was working really well - not only did they have to share it, but they had to READ in order to get to play games on it. Huge win.

Obviously a huge mistake, too, because I had to take it back to keep the water from getting shut off. I thought December was a real bad, terrible, awful month, but apparently I just hadn't met January yet.

Since my heart was already broken and the concert was free, we went back for more Riff Raff on Saturday night and brought Sage and Tim (my roommates) with us. It was so packed we all sat on the floor and during intermission I begged the band to play my favorite song from Thursday.

Which they ever so graciously did:

My recording is crap, but here are the lyrics. If you know me at all (and how Joel always did my dishes when we lived together), you'll see how this gets me every time I hear it.

WRONG TIME TO BE RIGHT
I woke up this morning
No coffee warming
Oh, it feels just like my head
Is gonna roll

The telephone was ringing
Some fool was screaming
About a man who had a purple dream

Lot a funny people in my house
Well oh my aching head
Who's that sleeping in my bed?
Wondering if my baby's coming home

Dirty dishes in the sink
Ain't no money in the bank
Sure picked the wrong time to be right
Sure picked the wrong time to be right

Everyone just says that love is
Only some passing thing
But I cry all night long
and it ain't no crazy dream

Ever since my baby's gone
My blues went out of sight
Sure picked the wrong time to be right
Sure picked the wrong time to be right

Lot a funny people in my house
Well oh my aching head
Who's that sleeping in my bed
Wondering if my baby's coming home

Dirty dishes in the sink
Ain't no money in the bank
Well I sure picked the wrong time to be right
Sure picked the wrong time to be right

Here's a better version of Sam Doores playing the song with his band, The Tumbleweeds. Who knew I could love country so much?

I was too broke to be able to buy any of their albums, (if only I hadn't picked the wrong time to be right!), but I hope you can. They have a decent amount of stuff on Pandora and iTunes. Some day we're gonna look back and go, "Remember when we saw them at Al's Den!?"

They made an otherwise shitty week pretty spectacular.