165.2#

After a crazy year of ups and downs with my health, I weighed in today at 165.2#. This means I have officially gained 10# since my gallbladder surgery in September and am 7# away from where I started two years ago.

Instead of choosing frustration, I'm choosing action. It isn't just because my wife and I are going on a cruise in January, it isn't because I want to look better in jeans... I want to FEEL better. I know that my food choices and lack of activity can be most linked to laziness and comfort. I need to get off my ass, use the gym membership we're paying for, eat food that actually nourishes me instead of making me feel sluggish and make positive changes FOR ME.

I feel like I have a good shot at it this time.

Even though I have changed into pajamas, my clothes still smell like bonfire. It's imbued into my hair, my skin, my fingernails... and, although I could shower again, I like it that way.

Tonight might very well be the last birthday bonfire I have with my grandparents.

We've been doing them as long as I can remember, since I was a child. I grew up around that bonfire, went from eating hot dogs to veggie dogs and back again (and since back to veggie dogs!). I matured, came out of the closet, got married, got divorced, had a kid... and every year I knew I could go back to that place and have one thing in my life be stable.

It's difficult to admit that my grandparents are getting older because it's even harder to admit that I am. When my grandmother said that this may be the last bonfire because it's too difficult for them to set up and haul around everything needed to prepare ahead of time, it made me sick to my stomach. I understand and respect it... they have earned it... but it still makes me sad.

Writer's block.

It's been awhile. Too long, in fact. I can't even remember the last time I sat down to write and flex my muscles. 

This makes it hard to pick the habit back up. I've started a few entries only to immediately erase them. My mind doesn't seem to be working with the written word as easily as it used to. 

Obviously, I'm devastated. Logically I understand that writing is a muscle, that it can atrophy without use. But to sit down in front of the computer and have it be so completely blank, that flashing cursor laughing in my face, is difficult to say the least. 

It's not that I don't have much to say; it's just that I can't seem to find a way to say it.

Today, I started back on a journey towards health. Over the course of wedding planning and honeymooning, I gained back a substantial portion of what I had lost the year before. I'm now sitting uncomfortably back at 165#, which sets my body dysmorphic disorder on a sharp, downward spiral. I am convinced that my backside is 20 feet wide, that my jiggling arms could create a tsunami... all completely unrealistic things that my brain convinces me are encyclopedic truth.

I set all that aside today and I ran. I didn't run fast, I didn't run far, but I ran. It felt great. I was hot and sweaty, but I was doing something positive for my body for the first time in a long time. I know it's a process, but it's a process that I am fully ready for.

The one thing I have a hard time with is justifying my desire to lose weight with my feminism. It's difficult to really suss out my reasons... am I brainwashed by society to think that I'm not attractive or worth anything if I don't fit into a certain size jeans? Is it really about wanting to be happier for myself? Although I can say that I would feel better having lost 20#, I know from experience that I wasn't very happy even when I weighed 107# in high school (with an eating disorder).

I've always been happy to be a mold breaker and I would have hoped that getting older and gaining maturity would have help continue that pattern into my 30s. I've found that now I just get stuck in different molds - career, job, credit score...

But, for now, I'm going to throw myself into running. I'm going to focus on doing what I can to make myself feel better for me.

This kid...

I very strongly believe that raising a child is a perfect mix of nature versus nurture. You decide what is important for you and attempt to instill those values into your child while, at the same time, understanding that your child may also choose to value other things as he or she gets older.

Although, years ago, my child responded to a question about what I've taught her over the years by saying that she knows to be "responsible with [her] money and [her] vagina," I've always known at some point she was going to go her own way. I've been prepared to have a cheerleader, a Republican... anything that is polar opposite of who I have grown to be over the years.

What I ended up with, at least so far, has been a miniature version of myself. Case in point, we rearranged her room this evening and she quickly put up her two Girls Rock! posters and a Crimethinc poster above her desk. I couldn't be more proud. Of all the things I want to instill in her, a strong sense of self and belief that being a female ISN'T a weakness are some of the most important.

She's going to need all the help she can get in this world, unfortunately. I want her to go out there and grab the world by its neck and not be afraid to tell people (not ask!) what she wants.

I'm pretty sure she's getting there. :)

Remember when you were a kid and your parents/grandparents told you to put on clean underwear before leaving the house in case you got into a terrible accident?

In today's day and age, the equivalent is what is left behind on social media.

While reading an article about the twelve-year-olds in Wisconsin that are accused of luring a "friend" into the woods in order to prove that Slenderman (an online social media folklore creation) exists, I stumbled upon an article that goes in depth into the parents' Instagram accounts.

Apparently the fact that the father likes "death metal" and the mother had a fascination with skulls makes them culpable for their daughter's decision. This disturbs me, to say the least. As a parent with crows, skulls and pin-up girls around the house, I find home decor and photo sharing choices very rarely inform any parenting decisions I make.

Are we at a place where, through mostly our own actions, literally every choice we made is documented on social media and capable of creating judgment? Are we able to step back enough to live the lives we had 10+ years ago, before Facebook and Myspace and Instagram took over? Do these online lives really decide who we are as people? As parents? Can it make us murderers?

Maleficient (spoilers so, like, don't read if you haven't seen it yet - duh!)

A few years ago, I saw a documentary at the Normal Theater called Miss Representation. As I sat there, next to my then ten-year-old daughter, it occurred to me just how under and poorly represented women really are in the media. Women are pitted against each other, made unnecessarily into sexual objects, dumbed down and made minor characters mainly serving as love interests. There are few movies with a strong female lead that doesn't have giant breasts (I'm looking at you, Lara Croft) or just unnecessarily made weak by lusting after a man.

Going into it, I was nervous that this was going to be another love story gone wrong. Girl meets boy, boy breaks girl's heart, girl turns evil... you've seen it a million times, chewed up and spit out into the same tired configurations.

Man was I wrong.

I absolutely loved this movie and the newer trend of bucking the old stereotypical love stories with female leads. Although some parts of the movie were uncomfortable to me (did anyone else see the wing dismemberment as a pseudo date rape situation? It legitimately made me nauseated.), I loved that this movie focused on who Maleficient was (and who she thought she was) and her relationship with herself. Bad things happened, she followed the "human" path of wanting revenge and learned that it doesn't fix things, opened herself to alternative forms of love (besides the cliched romantic variety).

This movie, written by a woman, is an amazingly strong retelling of a fairy tale that we thought we knew with HUGE feminist undertones. We need more movies like this for our girls. You don't need to wait for your true love, you can have bad things happen to you and come back stronger and, ultimately, YOU are in charge of your own destiny.

We should all be so lucky to have a little Maleficient in us.

Rainbows for the first.

It was especially poignant to see a rainbow today, the day marriage equality became state-wide law in Illinois. If I were religious, I might see this as a sign that maybe God  doesn't care as much about gays getting married as some of the more bigoted Illinoisans would have us believe.

I feel very grateful to live in a time and place that affords us these basic rights. We're not so far removed from the Stonewall Riots for me to understand just how lucky this makes me. Having marched on Springfield, having listened to lawmakers tell their personal stories, having my child not be as afraid to "come out" as the child of two moms... we have so many daily victories that we often take for granted.

Today also marks 12 days until I marry the love of my life. Dresses have been purchased (two in my case!), plans have been made... all we're doing now is waiting to celebrate with our friends and announce our love in public. I'm ready to make this thing legal (if you like it then you gotta put a ring on it, amiright?). Last night, We were sitting at a movie in the Normal Theater and the manager asked the crowd how many people were married. 75% of the crowd raised their hands and I just sat there, smiling to myself, knowing both how exciting it will be to raise my hand and how still slightly subversive that simple act is.

What it really comes down to, for me, is basic liberty. I pay taxes, I go to work, I make dinners and pack lunches... all I ask for in return is the right to sign a piece of paper, put a ring on her finger and go on doing what were were doing before. I'm still completely flabbergasted and confused how that effects anyone else's lives except mine, my daughter's and my soon to be wife's. If someone could sit down and explain that to me without a Bible verse, I would be hugely grateful.

But today, I celebrate with my LGBTQIA brothers and sister. We won this one and I'll be ready to fight again alongside you for the next one too.

Spring awakening.

This winter has stretched out absurdly long. I'm beginning to feel the ice and snow settle and crystallize in my veins, turning me into an ice creature that longs for warmer days. I worry that, once those days come, it'll take my soul some time longer to thaw. I long for spring, the scent of warm rain, the green around me on the hiking trail. I need to get outside, to find myself lost and able to really contemplate life.

For all of the discussion of the "free man," we, as a whole, are chained beasts. We fool ourselves with this vision of freedom while we slave away, content to live our lives for the few minutes of the day when we truly feel free. What do we do with this freedom? We watch TV, subjecting ourselves to corporate interference that makes us feel "less" - less attractive, less intelligent, less worthy. We zone out, tune out, drop out of the moment. We aren't truly present in our lives, no matter how fast we run out of work.

Our lives are routine, a hamster on the spinning wheel. Eat, work, sleep, repeat. Connections are becoming fewer and more far between, mainly due to technology becoming our mode of communication. When you talk to someone via text message, can you see their face? Can you watch their eyes when they say something? Do they mean what they say or are they being untruthful? We become solitary creatures, no matter how many people we surround ourselves with. 

It worries me that I find myself with a harder shell, an awkward exterior unable to push through the initial discomfort and eye contact to make a deeper connection with people. I've set aside so many of my friends for the comfort of solitude, the ease of not having to make the right joke at the right time or feel like I'm being judged even when I'm not. I've settled uncomfortably into being a hibernating homebody but, with spring so close yet so far away, I feel the thaw begin. I only hope that I come out the same as I went in.