Backsliding

So the minute I wrote the word "backsliding," I thought two things:

1)

2) Mmm, sliders. I don't know what it is about those little guys! My introduction to the concept wasn't the best--one of the VPs at the captioning firm where I worked would buy a sack of White Castle for our potlucks, and by the time we got to them, they were reaching the unpleasant side of cool (not to mention being White Castle)--but I am obsessed with finding them on the menu of various area gastropub-type places.

How apropos that my second thought was a paragraph about sliders when I'm going to talk about my recent dabbling in backsliding on calorie counting. Or at least it felt that way. It was really only one incident--a delicious salty-sweet Chicago Mix of an incident--but combined with the fact that I then didn't do any kind of exercise for two days, I felt completely and utterly disconnected from my well-established way of doing things to get healthier.

I bought the Chicago Mix--for those of you neophytes who have not experienced the glories of Chicago Mix, it is half cheddar popcorn, half caramel popcorn--with the intention of eating one serving. But it had been quite a day Monday, largely due to work stressors and sort-of-half-ignored-Mother's-Day-makes-me-sad stressors and taking-Trumper-to-the-vet-which-wasn't-his-regular-vet-and-having-his-bladder-stabbed-with-a-needle stressors. And the latter two stressors sort of fold in on one another, because Mom was always so good and thoughtful with our various pets, and I am not very good or thoughtful if Trumper is having pee hose problems, and I wish she were here to talk to when the cats get sick, what am I going to do, Plum is 12 now, and I've never had to be in charge when a pet is heading off to the otherworld...

So you see from all that run-on sentence bologna that my solution of eating the entire bag of Chicago Mix, all 900+ calories of it, was the next logical step.

Duse and I have talked about our mutual shared fear that once you do something "bad," you can't come back. Like when you allow a vampire to bite you, and it takes your soul, only instead of a vampire, you're letting a Hardees sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit bite you. Twice. Maybe with some hash browns.

And clearly that's crazy defeatist logic. In my case--can't speak for Duse--I've always been a natural-born quitter. If something exceeds my God-given talents or capactiy, I like to quit, thoroughly and completely. When I was bumped from 1st chair clarinet to VERY LAST CHAIR when I moved from middle school to high school (because I didn't want to march in the GD marching band, which was sacred and holy at RFHS), rather than apply myself and work hard, I quit. Then I sold my clarinet to pay for an AOL bill. Ask Kate sometime about how often I said, "I'm moving back home" during our first two years in Chicago. And I was a mostly grown-ass adult at that point.

But I've tried to get better since then, accept that I will not be the best at some things (when I was getting all wound up about the 5K, Kate said, very deadpan, "You're not going to win, okay?" Which was both such a relief and SO INFURIATING to hear) but that it doesn't mean I shouldn't try them or keep working at them.

I've done pretty well on this whole lifestyle-change, lose-weight-thing overall, but sometimes the most important thing for me isn't to go to the gym or yoga or count my calories. Sometimes the most important thing is to remember the 3+ years of counseling I had after Mom committed suicide. To remember that the things I can control mostly relate to me and working to make me better, whether it's finding a new job or a volunteer opportunity or whatever else, is way more rewarding and far less frustrating than trying to change the past. And sometimes the things I can change about me don't necessarily pan out, but not panning out isn't failure, even if it really, really, really feels and smells like failure, and the only solution to failure is to quit trying and also to eat a bag of Chicago Mix.

And then something about the journey that's super profound goes here. I don't know. Kristen said something to me about the changes that happened after leaving Girl Scouts. Ask her for more details. (WINKIE.)

So I ate that Chicago Mix and didn't go to the gym. Two days later, I ran 3+ miles. My body still remembered how. And more importantly, me and my big juicy brain remembered how.

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I haven't had very good pictures of my outfits lately, but I'm awfully proud of this one, where my goal to kinda sorta dress like Joan from Mad Men came together:

Next stop: red hair dye