Roti and The End of Overeating

Here's a fresh roti (with chickpeas and roasted sweet potato)...

...and here's what happens to a roti when you take it out of the freezer and put it in the toaster. (The toaster worked so well for the plain and aloo parathas, but turned the roti into a cracker. I wonder if that has something to do with the roti's "no oil" content.)


This is a better picture of tonight's dinner, although it's harder to see the detail on the food. Of course, when your yogurt is bleeding into both the chickpeas and the steamed spinach, maybe it's better to avoid too much detail.

So today I read the latest crazy hit book, David Kessler's The End of Overeating. The title is a bit misleading; the book should be called something like Chain Restaurant Food Is Full Of Fat And Sugar and Chemicals and They Mix It Up In A Lab and an Underpaid Line Chef Defrosts It For You. That's essentially what the book is about, and for what it's worth, it's interesting--though it's nothing that anyone who has read Fast Food Nation or seen Super Size Me hasn't heard before. Kessler's particular take is that we overeat because the food itself is addictive, which again is not a new idea, but he peppers his book with delicious anecdotes like "the chicken in Chili's Southwestern Eggrolls is ground into a smooth puree so you don't have to chew it, which Chili's food scientists did deliberately because they knew that the faster you ate, the more you would eat."

Kessler's solution to overeating, which he claims is inevitable given the state of American food (high-fat, high-sugar which melts on the tongue and creates an instant craving for more), is nothing more than sheer willpower. He says you have to tell yourself every day, at every moment, that you choose not to eat the HFCS muffins at the office meeting or the 1,000 calorie burger at the fast food joint or the Cinnabon being pumped through the air vents at the mall. And eventually, he says, you'll stop wanting to.

It's a bit of a dismal idea but I understand where he's coming from. The more I step away from packaged food and the dreaded HFCS the more I understand how eating it changes my brain. After every dinner, for example, I eat one square of an 85% cocoa Lindt chocolate bar. (Sadly, the chocolate never makes it into any of my photographs.) Last night, my sister brought over some Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. She took two and gave me two and put the rest of the bag on the sofa; the minute I had the first one in my mouth I was already thinking about how excited I was to eat the second one, and then the entire time we were watching The Golden Girls ('cause of Bea Arthur, natch) I was sitting there thinking "there are more peanut butter cups on the sofa..."

But before I sound too "my diet is more FTW than yours," here's the kicker. You all have seen what I eat. I have Kashi and homemade yogurt for breakfast, dal or soup and homemade bread for lunch, and a sensible dinner followed by a square of chocolate. I take apples for my morning and afternoon snacks. Maybe twice a week I have a cookie at work (because there are always cookies and I can't always resist them). And on the weekend I go to Tryst and have a chai or cappuccino with two inches of steamed milk on top.

On top of that I'm active; I walk four miles a day and I practice Ashtanga six days a week.

And I've put on ten pounds in the past ten months.

*sigh*

Explain that, Dr. Kessler.

Burgers and Ballerinas

One of the things I didn't really think about when I started to post my cooking projects onto my blog was the way it might open up criticism about my eating habits.

I mean, when I look at the above picture, instead of thinking "she should have run those sweet potato fries under the broiler for a few minutes to make the tops all crispy and bubbly," I think "wow, that doesn't look like enough food; does she have an eating disorder???"

Of course, what the picture doesn't tell was that I had taken the laptop out for a spin earlier that evening and had played internets while eating a cup of all-natural frozen yogurt. So I didn't need a lot of dinner.

But yes, dinner last night was a black bean burger without bread (I hadn't yet baked a new loaf), sweet potato fries, and turmeric pickle in lieu of ketchup.

I saw the movie Ballerina last week, in a theater full of "former dancers" (aka women who had taken ballet lessons as children), and was struck by how ridiculously, unhealthily thin these women looked. Shot after shot of concave stomachs with nary an abdominal to be seen.

Meanwhile, underneath my clothes I have abs of all kinds, and underneath my sleeves I've got my own set of secret biceps (if Michelle Obama's are called Thunder and Lightning, I nominate that mine be named Action Item and Open Loop), and all that does for me is make me look... well, not fat, but definitely not skinny.

So about once a month, usually during the same week (the unfortunate one when both weight and the desire for cookies are at their peak), I think to myself "do I need to exercise more? do I need to eat less?" And then I think "no, you've been underweight before"--my first month in India, or the semester in grad school when I could only afford rice and yogurt--"and it wasn't any fun."

Which it isn't. Being too skinny hurts. The only fun thing about it is that fake sense of superiority one gets when one's jeans are falling off.

But at the same time--it's frustrating for me, in a very stupid and shallow way, to accept that even though I walk four miles every day and do Ashtanga and eat healthy meals, those ballerinas in the movie are going to be the ones considered "ideal" and I have to go to the store and buy the "curvy fit" pants.

Anyway. Off to peruse cookbooks for tonight's dinner! I bought some Jerusalem artichokes and I am dying to learn how to use them...

The Pee Post

So there was this article on Jezebel about Susie Orbach, who wrote Fat is a Feminist Issue and just published a new book titled Bodies which is about (obvs) loving our bodies. Orbach is all about telling women to stop having these weird relationships with food/hunger/overeating/dieting, and to prove the point Jezebel links to an Orbach quote:

It’s very hard—when you have a population that is disturbed by eating—to know how to eat the right amount of food without going nuts.

The only way out of that is knowing what hunger is and what satisfaction is the same way we know what peeing is. That could be the only guide.

At first glance that quote seems to hold up. But when I thought about it I realized that I, like many people, have a bit of a complicated relationship with peeing too. Complicated in the same way that my relationship with eating is. Consider this:

1. The first thing I do in the morning is pee, even if I don't have to.
2. The last thing I do before bed is pee, even if I don't have to.
3. Sometimes I pee just because friends are peeing.
4. Sometimes I want to pee just because someone else mentioned pee.
5. Sometimes even thinking about pee makes me want to pee.
   
6. Sometimes I pee just because I know I won't be able to pee again for a while.
7. Sometimes I pee just because I want to see what the inside of a bathroom is like.
8. Sometimes I pee because I need to get away from my desk for a moment.
9. Sometimes I pee just because I'm in the bathroom (doing something unrelated like brushing my teeth) and the toilet is, like, right there.
   
10. I always have to pee extra when I'm nervous, stressed, or tired.
    

Substitute "eat" for "pee" (and "refrigerator" for "toilet" in number 9) and it's the same thing. Sure, we all know when we really have to pee (and when we're really hungry), but many of us pee for unrelated, emotional/social/habitual reasons. Just like we eat.

Or am I the only one who does this? ^__^

(Thought I'd throw that one out there to the blogosphere for your amusement. )

Sleeping In

If you're of a certain generation (mine), you probably remember waking up at some ridiculous hour of the morning without even an alarm clock to remind you so you could race to the tv, turn it on, and start watching Saturday Morning Cartoons.

For me, if I remember correctly, Marsupilami started at 6:30 a.m., followed by that show where the kid gets sucked into his Nintendo and has to fight Mother Brain with the help of Kid Icarus and a sentient Game Boy, then Camp Candy (the idea of basing a children's cartoon on "what would happen if John Candy ran a summer camp" creeps me out a bit, in retrospect), then Garfield and Friends (THE BEST ONE -- and it ran for an HOUR), then Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

It seems quaint, now, to think of a world where cartoons were only shown for three hours, one day a week.

At any rate, blah blah blah and I grew up and my circadian rhythms changed and I found it impossible to wake up before 10 a.m. on weekends (and sometimes slept until noon).

Now they've flipped back. Like, overnight.

Part of it, I think, is yoga's fault: if my usual wakeup time is between 5:30 and 6:00 a.m., then of course my body thinks that sleeping until 7:30 is "sleeping in."

But even on these weekend days when I don't get to bed until midnight, when I would think that my body would want to keep me asleep for a little longer, it pops me right up at 7:30 exactly and says "let's go let's go let's go! time to do yogas and write and eat kashi!"

Bizarre.

I'd say it was a function of turning almost-thirty, but I've talked to other people in my peer group and they still have no problem sleeping until noon.

I suppose the next step is turning seventy and finding myself compelled to eat dinner at 4 p.m. and go to bed at 9. ^__^

Yoga Rest Day

At the beginning of my Ashtanga practice, whenever Saturday rolled around I was all "dang, it's yoga rest day! but I want to do my yogas!"

Now I'm all "BRING IT."

I guess I've reached another stage in my Ashtanga practice: the stage where I should probably start going to class 3x per week instead of 2. I'm getting into more difficult postures now, the ones where I have to be "placed into" the posture by my yoga teacher because I'm not yet flexible enough to find the posture on my own. I've been working on Marichyasana D for three weeks and haven't been given another posture (the posture I referred to on my Twitter yesterday was a closing posture), which is completely fine, because I am having enough work getting myself in and out of Marichyasana D and still haven't found a way to unlock it.

I'm also a bit perturbed because after a lot of work I was able to do successful jump throughs (not jump backs -- still haven't figured out how to get my knees pulled in enough for those), and then after a few days of being able to do jump throughs I suddenly couldn't any more, no matter how tightly I tried to tuck my legs in.

So I need to start going to class more, and I probably need to start getting up a little earlier to do so (gaah! 5:30 a.m.!). But I wouldn't do it if I didn't find Ashtanga completely intriguing, and if I wasn't enjoying myself. (I still think that Ashtanga uses the parts of my brain that used to get excited about playing video games: the parts that are all "ooh, how do I defeat this monster, maybe if I try this way or that way, ooh, now I did it! and I get to move on to the next level, which is 95% exactly like the previous level except for this one harder thing...")

Sometimes I look at the other students in Mysore class and think "wow, if I keep this up someday I will be doing what they're doing -- and that looks really hard!" Sometimes I think "why aren't my hamstrings as flexible as everyone else's? darn my short-legged genetics!" And sometimes I think "I wonder if I'll still be doing Ashtanga in ten years? I wonder if I'll still be doing it when I'm 80 years old? I wonder if it fights osteoporosis?"

But mostly I think "I need to come to Mysore more often."

Which means 5:30 a.m.

These days I (and my muscles) really appreciate yoga rest days. ^__^

Obama's Shoes

I love my MBTs. Love-love-love them. I'd like to buy the world a pair.

When I first wrote about my MBTs, I posed a question: what kind of athletic shoes does Barack Obama wear?

Well, now we have an infamous picture to give us a clue:


Ladies and gentlemen, the President-Elect of the United States of America wears Asics.

Should I change brands?

MBT FTW

So... my feet.

I like to think that I walk a marathon every week, which, considering that I log at least 17.5 miles just walking back and forth to work, seems plausible. I probably don't hit the full 26 miles every week, but I come close.

On August 5, I bought a pair of Champion brand "maryjane sneakers" from Payless for $12.

Sometime in mid-September, the velcro holding down the straps came loose, so I sewed it back on.

And about two weeks ago, I started having foot pain.

I think it actually started a bit earlier than that, but I didn't understand what it was; it was taking longer than the usual 1/2 hour for me to walk to work, and my legs were feeling heavier. (This I chalked up to a side effect of what I was reading on the scale.)

Then I started having heel pain in my left foot. Then in both feet. I decided it was time for a new pair of shoes.

First I went to Ecco, mostly because I knew that the Googlers wear Eccos, and Google is pretty much the smartest game going right now. (I wonder what shoes Barack Obama wears?)

I went over my lunch break, which was in retrospect a mistake. I also got a salesguy, who, when I asked if he had any Kriyas in stock, had no idea. "What's a Kriya?" he asked. Then he tried to sell me a pair of Ecco-brand high heels.

I ended up snagging a pair of Ecco Jumps. Not as sexy as the Kriya, but the salesguy couldn't find any. (Note to shoestores: I hate it when you hide your shoes in the back and make us ask for them. I also hate it when your salespeople put the shoes on me. I can do it myself, and better, and six times as fast.)

The first day, the Jumps felt fine. Then the next day I woke up and my feet were in can-barely-walk pain. I limped around for the next three days, trying to break the Jumps in, and only got more and more miserable.

So I went to the other shoe store on my block, a Comfort One outlet. There I got my feet "professionally" analyzed by a fancy machine that told me that my weekly marathon in the Payless Champions had caused problems in both my gait and my heels. (I got to see my feet on a giant screen with the heels lit up in red, and the salesguy asked me "are you having some pain there?")

Long story short, I spent almost two hours at Comfort One talking to the staff (who seem to know more about shoes and feet than Mr. "What's a Kriya?"), and tried on many different pairs of shoes and orthodic insoles in the name of relieving my heel pain, fixing my gait, and avoiding screwing up my "I had foot surgery in January" right big toe. (Boy-oh-boy, spending all that time in those Payless shoes is sounding stupider by the moment.)

And then I tried on the MBTs. I've actually blogged about these shoes before, without realizing it. To quote myself:

[I] wandered into stores and looked at these weird shoes that have soles like rocking-chair balances and claim to add "+9 Resistance To Your Abs, Thighs, And Butt!" (I wanted to take out my pen and add "And Ogres!" to the sign... but resisted. +9 resisted.)

Well, now I am wearing a brand-new pair of MBTs and I too have +9 resistance against thighs, butts, and ogres.

Seriously, team: putting these shoes on was like stepping into a little piece of awesome. All my foot pain instantly disappeared. My posture re-aligned. I can once again clear 2 miles in under 1/2 hour. And every step is... well, the shoes are supposed to simulate walking barefoot on sand, and it's been a long time since I've done that, but it feels right.

The best part, of course, was that I managed to get my pair for half price (current retail price is $260). What I did: I didn't buy any shoes after my two-hour stint in the Comfort One store. First I had to make sure I could return the Eccos, and secondly I had to do some research to make sure the MBTs weren't the foot equivalent of the Master Cleanse. Upon doing my research, I found out something very interesting: this year's MBTs were $260, but last year's models, if they could be found, generally retailed around $120.

So the next day I walked back into that Comfort One and said "I want a pair of MBT Boost Blues in a 38. Do you have that in the back?"

This time, the salesguy knew exactly what I was talking about.

And I am the happiest little walker on the planet.

Blue Lifehacks Her Diet

I'm not going to do this every day because that would be obsessive. (But doing it every-so-often is more of a lifehacking kind of thing.)

Today I tweeted everything I ate, which comes out as follows:

Small bento with Kashi, plain yogurt, and raisins (approx. 320 calories)
1 cup coffee with turbinado sugar (20 calories)
1 cup dark chocolate cocoa (which is a pinch of pure dark chocolate mixed with water -- unbelievably, according to the box, only 5 calories and much, much better than Swiss Miss)
1 Luna bar (180 calories)
1 banana (80 calories)
1 peanut-butter-and-prunes sandwich (believe me, after eating that, one isn't hungry for a while... also about 500 calories)
1 apple (60 calories)
5 white-chocolate mini-Reeses (200 calories)
1 apple-and-cheddar-cheese sandwich (360 calories)
1 orange (60 calories)
1 Luna bar (180 calories)

Total: 1965 calories.

Even if my estimates are a little off it's still nowhere near overeating. It's also not junk food, although arguably I could have skipped the candy.

I'll keep compiling data just long enough to pick up the trend (because calorie-counting is obnoxious, in the long run) and to see if there are nifty little ways to "lifehack" it.

Edit: Add before-bed "stomach is growling" pbj and three prunes. New calorie total 2365. Perhaps therein lies the problem.

Critical Mass

Part One

I've reached a sort of "point of no return" stage in my Ashtanga practice (probably the first of many). My teacher has given me enough positions that my practice now takes close to an hour to complete, and the time commitment is only going to increase as I get further into the training.

In other words, I'm at the point (again, probably the first of many) where I have to decide whether I can work out my life to fit the requirements of my practice or whether Ashtanga "isn't for me."

Luckily, the choice is easy: I can absolutely re-arrange my schedule to sleep earlier and get up earlier so I can have enough time to practice before work, either on my own or at Mysore class. But it's interesting because this is about the same time limit I found myself butting up against when practicing the piano: once I hit the hour mark, I would get up from the piano and leave. My teacher in college always tried to sell me on the virtue of practicing three hours per day, and I never exactly took that advice.

So, fine. I'll get up a bit earlier and spend an hour on Ashtanga. No big deal.

I wonder what will happen at the 90-minute mark.

Part Two

From teh internets, on how yoga practice affects weight:

If you are not overweight, your weight will remain about the same. If you are underweight, you will gain weight. The weight you gain will be healthy firm muscle tissue, not fat. That is, yoga will tend to produce the ideal body structure for you. This is due to yoga's effect of fixing glandular activity.

Now, I have no idea whether or not these particular internets are reliable. (Glandular activity what now?) But the idea of yoga producing the "ideal body structure" for me is intriguing.

Unfortunately, the body structure it seems to be producing is one dress size bigger than the body structure I used to have.

I've been studying Ashtanga now for three months. I've also been walking 3.4 miles five days a week, to and from the office. I've toned up a bit. To put it in plain English, my stomach is firm and my underarms do not wiggle!

But I've also gotten... larger. And this is distressing me to the point where I am spending far too much energy perservating over it.

Before everyone gets all "dude, muscle weighs more than fat, so of course the scale should be going up," let me re-emphasize that I am increasing in mass as well as in weight. When I finally bought the ATL dress that I had followed from the front display to the discount rack, I found out that an ATL size 2 no longer fit and I was (gasp!) a size 4.

What to do?

I started out by doing what any self-respecting young woman would do in this situation: I instantly put myself on a diet. Starting October 1, I told anyone who cared to know that I was on "The Last Days of George W. Bush Detox Diet," which meant that I wasn't going to be ridiculous and restrict actual food, but I was going to swear off the stream of free cookies, donuts, etc. that continually poured into our office, just to see if that was causing the problem.

So between October 1 and October 15 nary a cookie, cake, muffin, or Hershey's Kiss crossed my lips. (That's part of the reason my Obama-Biden Pie was made out of fruit and yogurt.)

Between October 1 and October 15, two things happened:

1. I got extremely constipated

and

2. I put on three pounds.

On October 15 I canceled the "diet" and celebrated by enjoying an organic pumpkin cupcake at Hello Cupcake.

Between October 15 and today I enjoyed several more cupcakes, because they were just that good.

Currently am no longer constipated and remain the exact same weight I was on 10/15.

So. What to do? Y'all have seen my eating habits and my exercise habits, and for all intents and purposes I seem to be living a healthy lifestyle. Is this a metabolism thing? Does it have something to do with the fact that I turn 27 on election day?

Or is the yoga website right and this is in fact "the ideal weight" for me? ^__^

"Honey, Now You Have A Style!"

I haven't cut my hair in three years.

This is not exactly true. I trimmed it, twice, using hair scissors I bought at Walgreens; but I haven't been in any kind of hair salon since I started graduate school.

By the end of three years my hair was really long.

Sure, it was pretty, but it had started to become a hassle. It was impossible to dry, so I felt like I was spending half of every day going around with wet hair in a messy bun. When it was out of the bun, it kept catching on things, like the back of the office-supply chair I sit in while I temp.

Since I'm going in for a job interview on Monday, I thought it was about time to get a few inches chopped off.

Before I went, I did my research -- and there was plenty of information to be found. In the end, though, for every "I went to XYZ Salon and got the best haircut ever," there was one that read "Well, I went to XYZ Salon and asked for a Posh Bob and got a Katie Holmes Bob instead, and went home and cried."

In the end I wasn't able to make any kind of real comparisons between potential salon quality, and so ended up choosing my first-haircut-in-three-years salon based on how far I would have to walk to get there.

VSL Hair Design.

The next step was finding "the picture," since the salon reviews left the uncomfortable impression that unless you bring along a picture of your desired haircut, you're liable to end up with a Nicole Richie Bob, which is even worse than a Katie Holmes one.

Okay, fine. A picture of a woman with fine, straight hair, medium length, something that would look good on a square face... got it.

(The funny thing is that Cameron is, like, one of my least favorite characters on House. But Jennifer Morrison has baby-fine, super-straight hair. So there you go.)

The VSL experience was pretty awesome. Even though it's a "value" chain (okay, that was the other reason I picked it), it was a far step beyond the MasterCuts and SuperCuts I used to frequent. I got a consultation, during which my stylist took one look at my picture ("House is such a great show!") and then began to explain the components of the haircut and ask me if I was okay with all of them. He was appreciative that I had done my homework and not picked a style that wouldn't work with my hair, and told me the look was totally achievable.

When he started cutting, I mentioned that he was giving me my first haircut in three years. My stylist looked appalled. He spent a moment carefully studying my hair, and then said "Well, it's incredible that it isn't damaged, but it looks like it's in really good shape."

(I didn't respond to this, but I'm curious: wouldn't messing around with hair cause more damage than leaving it alone? I never flatironed or curled my hair, or razored it or anything like that. I just washed, brushed, and braided. So... um... yeah, it isn't damaged.)

In the end it's a little shorter than Dr. Cameron's, and my cowlick prevented the bangs from falling against my forehead like the picture. But... it still looks fantastic.

Or, as my stylist said,

"Honey, now you have a style!"

Nasal Spray Is Evil

I've had a stuffy nose for the past week or so.

When I stopped off to visit a friend on the tail end of the Nashville trip, she gave me some decongestants -- Benadryl, and something else in the morning when I didn't need to be drowsy.

They both worked okay, but not great. I was still sniffling and still generally uncomfortable.

So that evening I went to the grocery store to grab some NyQuil, because I knew that would at least knock me out well enough to sleep.

That's when I saw the nasal spray. It was the right price ($1.59) and it had the advantage of containing neither sleep aids nor caffeine. The NyQuil/DayQuil combo pack, by comparison, was almost eight dollars. So... I chose the nasal spray.

I had never used nasal spray before, and I had no idea what to expect. I did notice that the bottle gave a very clear warning not to use the product for more than three days. But what if your cold lasts for more than three days? I thought. Most colds last almost a week!

Well, I shot the stuff up my nose and was rewarded with instantly clear sinuses. Brilliant. This stuff worked better than salsa and hot soup combined. No drips, no stuffiness, no nothing.

The next day it wore off, so I sprayed again... and etc. etc. until there I was at the end of the third day, nose stuffed so hard I could only breathe through my mouth, staring at the warning label on the bottle.

Do not use for more than three days.

Well. I googled "nasal spray dangers" and found out that, as I had suspected, the nasal spray itself doesn't cure you. It just... stops the snot for a little while. All the snot that wasn't dripping from my nose for the past three days is still there, ready and impacted and trying to find a way out.

Using the nasal spray for more than three days won't necessarily harm you, but it's not the smartest thing to put into your body. Mine contains oxymetazoline hydrochloride, which... well, Wikipedia says it sympathomimetically causes a decrease in interstitial fluid accumulation (via alpha-2 adrenergic receptors), which essentially means... okay, I don't know exactly what it means, but there are plenty of warnings about how a person shouldn't sympathomimetically aggravate their alpha-2 adrenergic receptors too often, or the nose lining will get irritated and start to break down. Not to mention all of that impacted snot still sitting around, dreaming of Kleenex Heaven.

Unfortunately, because of its effectiveness, nasal spray is also incredibly addictive, as I found out at about 1:30 a.m. when I squirted the stuff into my nose just so I could sleep, rationalizing it with "well, the internet says it won't kill me... I can go off the spray in the morning."

Now I'm sitting here, nose-constipated and miserable. I wonder if stuffing a raisin up there would help.

Size 4 Is Not Fat... Yet

Let's get the nitty-gritty stuff on the table right away.

I stand 5'2" and three-quarters inches.

I weigh anywhere between 114 and 118 lbs, depending on what day of the month it is.

I am, very clearly, not fat.

Still, I'm not exactly skinny. There is stuff covering my bones. Some of it is muscle, and some of it is squishy. All of it contributes to my having enough curves to not be able to fit into a standard pair of pants. (Then again, does anyone fit into a standard pair of pants?)

And yesterday a friend told me that this next year would be the one that determined whether I would become a fat person or a thin person... for the rest of my life.

To wit: I'm on the other side of 25 and my metabolism's slowing down. I'll be starting an office job which will probably involve more sitting. I may get caught in the trap of eating lunches and dinners out. The odds are stacked so that I might put on a little weight.

"But if you let yourself start to gain weight," my friend said, "it'll never go away, and it'll never stop."

How to prevent creeping obesity? Apparently, with a triathlon of intercultural effort: a little Ashtanga from the Indians (Maya, the video you sent rocks); Hello Kitty-shaped portion control from the Japanese; and from the Americans, ritual-obsessive gym attendance.

Hmmm. The first two sound entirely doable. (And I would totally be the cube chick with the kyaraben.)

But gym? Every day? For the rest of my life???? Even with the thought of plugging into a video iPod and mastering stairs to the soothing blue eyes and tortured voice of Mr. Laurie, gym just sounds miserable.

On the other hand, I've heard they've improved gym since I went to high school, and I might be able to buy some cute workout clothes.

And I suppose if this is "the year," I might as well get to it.

So... woo-hoo! (Right?)

Cast Party For Life

The play opened last night without a hitch, as they say, and the audience loved it. It was the first comedy in a semester, after a series of all-too-serious plays about abortion, corrupt governments, etc. etc. etc.

All the other plays this semester ended with a death; ours ended with a wedding. We also took every cheap gag we could find, so characters were continually getting hit by doors or tripping over things or taking... um... "the nut shot". We managed to do it all by maintaining the period style of "presenting," e.g. standing and walking around like this:


... and the incongruity of physicality and action prompted some delightful responses from the audience.

Afterwards, we got our official ACTF adjudication. (First of all, I have to mention that one of our cast members asked the adjudicator, very politely, if he thought the toned-down seduction scene was "period," or if we had gone too far -- to which he responded "Too far???? You didn't go far enough!")

The adjudicator prefaced his remarks by saying "I'm going to keep this short, because I know you all want to go out and drink and party."

Our cast looked appalled. Then again, they had all changed from their costumes into matching Relay for Life t-shirts, with one member proudly displaying the slogan "You can survive cancer. I'm living proof."

"Excuse me," one of them said. "We're not going to drink tonight. We're going to cure cancer."

So after our opening night performance, the entire ensemble went to Relay for Life, and it was probably the coolest cast party idea ever. Instead of getting drunk and congratulating one another all night, we rocked the quad and luminarias.

And now... am very sore. But well worth it.

Food Stamps

At the beginning of the year, I applied for food stamps.

I was somewhat late to the process; when I enrolled in graduate school, I asked if there were any additional scholarship or fellowship competitions to which I might apply myself in order to increase my meager stipend. The departmental secretary said "no, but we do encourage our graduates to get food stamps."

So I applied, back when I started the grad program, and was told that I had too much money (over $2,000 in assets) to receive any benefits.

I applied again this year, as my assets are now closer to... negative four thousand.

The application process itself took over a month to complete; then, after learning that I had qualified for benefits, I sat and waited for another four-odd weeks. (Truth be told, the real reason it took me four weeks to take any action on this was because I was overwhelmed with work and forgot I was supposed to be receiving food stamp money. I could have solved the problem right away, but... so it goes.)

When I finally made the call, I was told that in order to collect my food stamp card (it's all on a "debit-style" card now), I needed to come into the office between 1:00 and 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, in order to go through Food Stamp Training.

I suppose I'm lucky in that I didn't have, say, a full-time job with mandatory hours. I re-arranged a meeting and made it into the food stamp office right before the 4:30 deadline.

I checked in at the reception desk and was told to wait until my name was called.

There was no one else in the room, but I waited.

Five minutes later, the receptionist called my name.

Then I took the "food stamp training," which consisted of my proving that I could, in fact, swipe a card through a register, and a quick lecture on how food stamps could only be used towards "things that are humanly edible," which does not include cat food, laundry detergent, or booze. (I would argue that two of those three are humanly edible, but that's another essay entirely.)

I got my card. And later that evening, I got my groceries.

They include:

Milk
Eggs
Swiss cheese
Fruit-flavored yogurts
Kashi GoLean! Flax Crunch
Brussels sprouts
Broccoli
Spinach
Tomatoes
Bananas
Pie crusts (for quiche)
Veggie burgers
Lettuce
Salad dressing
Mustard

I am so excited about eating a bowl of Kashi w/banana tomorrow morning. I am also thrilled about eating something besides "mixed vegetables" and "mashed peanuts and jelled strawberries between bread."

Woo-hoo!