goblinbox

In which I need to whine and complain. (Don’t read this drivel. Seriously. Go read something else. I am such a baby.)

The boys over at Cocky & Rude nagged me into joining their diet competition back in July, and even though I haven’t really been dieting, I have been weighing myself every Wednesday and from that I have some fucked up observations to share.

For the first four weeks, my weight didn’t change (other than a slight and temporary bump during The Curse™, which is normal). On week 5, I gained a pound (for The Curse™, natch); but on week 6, I gained another pound.

Then on week 7, I gained SIX POUNDS. And week 8 I gained another 3 pounds, for a grand total of eleven pounds in four weeks.

I quit smoking during week 6 and ate whatever the hell I wanted in any amount I liked for about ten days, but then I went back to eating the way I normally eat, which pretty much keeps me at the same weight under normal circumstances.

I don’t think I’ve gained much fat because I am retaining so much water that my inner ankles are smooth; there’s no bone protruding where you’d expect to see an ankle bone.

This extreme water retention thing happened to me once before about three years ago and it lasted a cycle or two, if I recall correctly… I wasn’t weighing regularly so I don’t know exactly when it ended, but I remember being ankleless and reading up on edema and water retention. Home care is exercise, less sodium, and, counterintuitively, drinking more water.

Anyway, since this has happened before it’s probably not related to quitting smoking, and I have hope that next cycle I’ll drop all this hideous water OH GOD OH GOD PLEASE.

I’m noticing some other oddities too, in terms of moodiness and fatigue, that could be related to quitting – such symptoms are listed in all the smoking cessation articles – but feel more hormonal to me.

So: is this some kind of event I’m getting to enjoy merely because I’m a girl and This Sort Of Shit Just Happens Occasionally, or is it related to quitting smoking?

EITHER WAY, IT SUCKS! I’m fat and mopey and I have no ankles! Shut up looking at me!

In which I describe the awesome side-effects of suddenly halting one’s intake of various toxins.

I smoked my last cigarette in the parking lot of a condo in Joseph, OR on August 14th.

I had been heading toward that moment for months, really, and I was ready for it. I didn’t even want that final cigarette because it was the middle of the night after a gig, I was tired, and I’d been more or less chain smoking for the entire week.

I was acutely aware of how glamorous it is to be addicted: everyone else was inside, chatting, eating, getting ready for bed, and there I was, standing in a ditch, sucking on a cigarette like a total loser. Oh, yes, I planned my quit well. I’ll never forget that last smoke.

For the next seven days I gave myself permission to eat anything and everything I wanted to. I threw out any pretense about portion control or intelligent food choices or calories. I ate Mexican food, I ate entire bags of cheesy poofs, I ate chocolate truffles. I ate brie, I ate huge salads, I ate dill pickle sunflower seeds. I cleaned my plate every single time I had a meal. And on the eighth day, I stopped and went back to my normal, non-dieting-but-still-fairly-conscious eating ways.

Today is my eleventh day of non-smoking. I’ve had many, many non-smoking milestones that I’m really proud of, but this post isn’t about that. It’s about what’s happening to my body:

I’m exhausted. It’s all I can do to keep my eyes open. I went down for a brief nap yesterday evening – I was planning to do some late night QA testing – and slept, without moving, for ten and a half hours.

I’m fat. I’ve gained eight pounds in less than two weeks, but I can’t figure out how a little extra caloric indulgence turned into this. I think I’m retaining water in new and strange ways, because The Curse™ ended yesterday and the fifth day of my cycle is usually my skinniest day of the whole month.

I can now go hours without craving anything, but the rest of the time I have a vague, itchy, cellular drive to… something. Nothing in particular, just something.

I’ve finally figured out how to use the nicotine lozenges to their best effect, but I only manage to get six or eight miligrams of nicotine into my body each day. (I’m supposed to have eighteen per day for a month.) My quit plan has me using these things through November, and I intend to do that, but I might just forget to use them before that.

They’re great for emergency craving management, such as when I find myself in a room full of smokers, or I get into a vehicle I used to smoke in, or I’m on break in between sets at a gig, etc. but I have a hard time remembering to use them when I’m engaged in something that doesn’t remind me of smoking.

I haven’t begun any lung cleansing yet. I was expecting a lot of coughing and throat-clearing and sinus-draining, but I’ve experienced almost none of that. When I inhale, it’s free and clear and there’s no gurgling or anything. My lungs sound and feel like I just took a decongestant.

I’m hyper emotional today. I’ve misted up about five times about nothing. Again, I’m not in the emotional part of my cycle, so I’m attributing this experience to quitting as well.

Something clicked in my psyche somewhere; I no longer want to smoke. I mean, I have cravings, but I’ve figured out that there’s no such thing as “just a drag” or “just one cigarette;” I spent far too long making too many neuroreceptors for that to be possible. I either smoke, or I don’t. And I don’t want to suffer the long-term effects of smoking, so I can’t smoke.

The last time I quit, my voice responded with great suppleness within days. This time, I was expecting another rapid recovery but I’m not getting it. I don’t understand that, either.

So I’m fat, moody, unsatisfied, AND my voice sounds just like it did before I quit. In conclusion, quitting smoking appears to be just like PMS.

Only me, my babies. Only me.

In which I heartily approve.

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Yes.

If you’re not familiar with the details of the good doctor’s story, Dr. Wakefield is the guy who published the shoddy research that led thousands of people to believe that there was a link between certain vaccinations and autism. I say ‘shoddy’ because The Lancet retracted the paper soon after it was published (the research was bad and no one could replicate the results) but people continued to believe the results anyway. Long story short, the kicker is this: Dr. Wakefield’s research was paid by lawyers for parents seeking to sue vaccine makers for damages. The anti-vaccines guy? Was one of them. A guy who didn’t mind doing unnecessary tests on children to get a big paycheck. A big pharma asshole with low morals and a lust for money.

Actually, go read this comic. It’s informative. It’s awesomesauce. It’s just plain easier. I’ll wait here.

Okay, are you back now? Great. Allow me to go off for a minute: I’m totally and completely pro-vaccination, even though I know that once in very, very great while there’s some kind of complication. Why accept the risk? Because vaccination WORKS. If you don’t believe me, go look it up. Look at juvenile death rates by disease for the past century, correct for nutrition and education, and then tell me that you really don’t think vaccinations work.

And if you can’t read, go ask someone over eighty: they’ll tell you right to your face that kids “just don’t die as much as they used to.” (G’ma told me that when she was a kid, “everybody knew someone who had lost a child to illness.” I personally know no one who has lost a child to measles, TB, smallpox, mumps, rubella, or polio.)

And it’s not because those germs just went away on their own, people. More kids survive childhood because of the use of vaccinations. Period. This is not a belief, it’s a fact. If you think vaccines cause [insert latest paranoid scare], go find the research to back up your assertion before you let your offspring become a disease vector in the middle of the culture I live in, thank you very much, because many of my own vaccinations are really quite old and I deserve to live somewhere with herd immunity.

In the autumn of 2008, some areas of the U.S. had school populations in which 10% or more of the children were un- or under-vaccinated. “We’ve already dropped below the level of vaccine coverage where herd immunity exists for some diseases,” said Dr. Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases and head of the vaccine institute at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia. “At some point, we’re going to be forced to decide whether it is an inalienable right to catch and transmit potentially fatal infections.”

Kids are now suffering from outbreaks of things like measles and – get this – whooping cough because their parents have skipped their vaccinations. The world is small. People bring germs back from overseas all the time. How bereft would you be, seriously, if your child got sick and died from a disease like that? A disease that was, in the not-too-distant past, virtually wiped out? A disease that is preventable?

Remember, before the vaccine was introduced in 1963, measles used to kill on average of 400 kids each and every year. Measles! I’ve never even seen a case of measles. (And, after googling the disease and catching some images, I’m glad.)

If you surf the anti-vaccine web sites, you’ll notice that most of the cited research isn’t linked. The claims that unvaccinated children are “healthier” are unsubstantiated because there’s no such condition. (As far as the medical sciences are concerned, either you’re healthy, i.e. free of disease, or you’re sick. Of course there are gradations – the kid whose mom feeds him a balanced diet and who runs around outside is going to be less likely to have behavioral and emotional problems than the kid who lives on junk food and never leaves his computer – but even if it seems counter-intuitive, there’s no proof that one is more likely to survive a deadly infectious disease than the other. And a slightly better first-world diet is not going to produce an immune system incapable of catching a deadly infectious childhood disease.)

Such sources are rife with emotionally-phrased speculation about how the medical and pharma establishments just want to make money off of selling vaccinations, as if the act of making money immediately means that there’s no reason for vaccinations in the first place. I’m not even going to bother to point out how utterly irrational that kind of argument is, because it’s so irrational it can get your kids dead.

And for what? Are you really going to feel good about sticking it to the man as you bury your kid?

I mean, think about it. Vaccines work. There is no evidence that any kind of vaccine is linked to autism or any other condition. The people we think of as “them” have children too, and they get their babies poked with needles full of the same stuff: it’s in NO ONE’S interest to continue producing and selling any vaccine that harms or kills, not even for money.

Vaccination works. If you don’t believe me, look it up.

In which even 10-day breaks don’t seem to lower the efficacy of these nifty little free programs.

Okay, so I told you I’m doing these online exercise thingies, right? Where you do, like, an “exhaustion test” (that’s some kind of sporty-person lingo, apparently) and compare your results with this little table which tells you how many reps to perform per set, and after not very long you can suddenly do, like, a surprising number of reps of these exercisey things?

You’re supposed to do the program three times a week, but in looking at my logs it appears that I skipped an entire week once. Which totally sounds like me.

And yet!, today I did 132 squats, 202 crunches, and 50 (modified, girl-style) push-ups!

Did you hear what I just said? Fifty fucking PUSH-UPS, people! You know how many reps I could do when I started? Six. Six push-ups. So we’re dealing here with demonstrable improvement in body strength.

Plus I did over two hundred sit-ups today! Soon I’ll be able to do them consecutively. How cool will that be?

Since there’s a chin-up bar all handy in the basement, I’ll probably be doing the Twenty-five Pullups program when it launches. The last time I checked, I was able to do a total of ZERO CONSECUTIVE PULL-UPS, because girls and the upper body strength? Not so much. We’ll see if that’s changed after the other stuff.

Here are the links again, if you want to check them out:

Two Hundred Squats
Two Hundred Situps
One Hundred Pushups

(There are matching iPhone apps, but they cost a couple bucks each.)

Anyway.

In other news, here’s a link to The Hacker’s Diet, because it’s both geeky and tota11y full of teh win.

Let it be known that I’m so non-sporty I don’t even have a blog category for exercise.

In which I talk about stuff that was never before interesting to me: exercising, dieting, and not smoking.

I haven’t smoked since March 29th – twelve days ago, now. I can breathe, my tongue isn’t covered with slime when I wake up in the morning, I don’t clear my throat elevendy-hundred times a day, and I’ve saved at least $50.

I now go most of the day without even thinking about smoking. I can hang out in a bar and not have a nic fit for significant stretches of time. (Last time I went to the Peony I thought about smoking thrice, and only distantly: upon entry and exit past the ashtray by the door, and when the guy sitting next to me go up to go out to smoke.) I can drive without having huge nic fits, and I don’t ache for a smoke after meals. I even managed to go to a gas station and air up a bike tire without wanting to go inside and pick up a pack of smokes!

Blah blah blah, you get it: I’m quit. I doubt I’ll ever smoke again. I’ve gotten through the sucky part of quitting, I’m already reaping the health benefits of being a non-smoker, and I think I have my mind in the right place because I honestly don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. I don’t even want to smoke. Sure, I dug it while it lasted (ALL TWENTY-FIVE FUCKING YEARS WORTH OF IT), but it’s just not the fun awesome sexxxay thing it used to be. I’m over it.

I stood outside with the smokers between sets last weekend and wasn’t even miserable. I did have a couple of nic fits, but they were nothing a little 2mg Nicorette couldn’t handle. (Okay, that’s not true. I totally had a wicked mood swing and snapped at someone, but it passed and I DIDN’T SMOKE.)

In other news, my little strength-training program – crunches, squats, and pushups – is having interesting effects. I still don’t LIKE exercise, not really, but it doesn’t suck as much as it always has for the whole rest of my life. I attribute the change to being free for the first time ever of carbon monoxide poisoning. I always felt weak and icky and pissed off after exercise before, and thought all those annoying sporty people were fucking lying about their post-exercise clarity and peacefulness; now, while I’m not yet ready to say “I feel good” after a work out, at least I no longer actively feel bad.

Apparently I build muscle really fast, too. My new-found muscle tone just makes me hyper-aware of the uncomfortable and unnecessary amount of fat I have layered on top of it. I’ve decided I want to drop 20 pounds by the end of June. Since I’m freshly conversant with the whole suckage of self-denial, I went straight from quitting smoking into dieting. Instead of jonesing for smokes, I’ve switched to jonesing for food. Fucking YAY!

Plentiful, ubiquitous, high-fat, high-calorie, First World freakin’ food. It’s just so easy to get.

I’ll tell you what: quitting hard drugs is much easier than dieting, because hard drugs aren’t available EVERY SINGLE FUCKING PLACE YOU GO. It takes a strong will just to run a simple errand when you’re dieting because there’s a fast food joint every twenty feet. You can buy 1,350 kcals in a drive-thru for three bucks in four minutes! It’s insane!

Belonging to a rich culture in a rich era is a bitch, am I right? I’m not spending resources trying to obtain things… I’m spending resources trying to avoid them. It’s weird. I have to decide to make things harder; I can drive everywhere and buy cheap, high-fat, high-calorie food when I get there. Trying to walk places and eat well is like swimming against the current.

It’ll be interesting to see what sort of adaptations come out of this richness and sedentary-ness. Will we evolve digestive tracts that ignore most of the nutrients thrown into them? Will they shorten, so the food’s not in there as long?

Just a thought.

In which I’m obsessed with age-appropriate things: food, weight, and exercise. Gawd.

I rewarded myself for a week of smoke-free living by buying some groovy skins from DecalGirl. I found a 30% off code so I got three: one for my netbook, one for my cell phone, and a new one for the Kindle. I cannot wait for them to arrive! Squee!

Yes. I just said squee about expensive, fairly useless pieces of sticky vinyl. Cut the irony with a knife!

After seeing a picture of myself on Facebook from last Saturday’s gig (I had three chins), I decided it would be appropriate to add dieting to my health and exercise thing. My goal is to shed around twenty pounds by the end of June. I figure I can do two pounds a week; we’ll see if that’s true. I’m using the distressingly upbeat, cute, and cheerful SparkPeople web site to track all my weight loss deets.

Today’s breakfast (egg and cheese on toast with tea) was 391 calories. Lunch was avocado maki with miso and came in at around 400 calories. Check out the cuteness:

No, the image is not reversed. I’m left-handed, so my utensils always point off to the left like that.

This leaves me with five or six hundred calories left for dinner (which is still TBD because I haven’t gone shopping yet). I’ll probably eat refried beans and cheese or something similarly protein-y and fiber-y.

I did 109 squats today, 137 crunches, and 25 push-ups. I still don’t enjoy exercise for its own sake; this is entirely a results-focused endeavor. Bah.

My God, this is a boring entry! I’m sorry. (Keef told me to write a post about social networking. Maybe I’ll do just that, to see if my mind still works.)

There’s a new Monday Morning Mix here.

In other news, an edited-for-print version of this post will be in the local paper tomorrow.

Um, yeah.

Anyway.

In which I’m being very good and deserve lots of presents.

I haven’t had a cigarette in five days.

When I go out at night and everyone steps outside to smoke, I have a 4mg nicotine lozenge. Most of the rest of the time, I just ride it out.

The NRT literature suggests that I ingest a steady-but-decreasing amount of nicotine, but my intake has always been uneven and I don’t want to take all that nicotine when I normally wouldn’t be taking it in the first place. So this approach, this crisis-management approach, it’s working for me. Quitting is far more about the head space than about the nicotine, anyway.

Today I did 121 sit-ups and 18 push-ups. Shortly I’ll be doing 110 squats. (My ass is totally gonna hurt.)

This evening I’m going to see a lecture on Zen Buddhism at Whitman college with my friend Lannie. After that I’ll probably go see Feedback play at Barnaby’s and get my dance on.

Tomorrow night I’ll be joining Coyote Kings at Ice Harbor Brewing in the Tri-cities for the UnTapped Blues Festival launch party. Yay!

I don’t have a job, but I don’t really care about that beyond desiring more income to spend on plane tickets. I don’t really have a life plan, but I do have friends, clear lungs, a roof over my head, and a gig tomorrow night!

In which there’s a barely organized ramble to get you up to date.

Health

I relaunched “Operation: Quit Smoking” on the 25th. It sucks and I hate it.

All I want to do is eat and sleep and never go anywhere or do anything that reminds me of smoking, because nic fits suck, but of course that’s unreasonable. I was miserable between sets at Saturday’s gig because every cell in my body wanted to go outside and smoke, and no the nicotine gum didn’t help AT ALL.

Seriously, though, in spite of my words my attitude is pretty good… I just want to complain because quitting is hard. Here are my notes on the process. There’s a link to my daily diary if you’re interested in that level of detail.

Did I mention that it SUCKS? Good. Because I hate it! Rar!

Help

My band has entered into a contest to play at the Crossroads blues festival in Chicago this September. It’s all very exciting.

If you could, please click here, register for an account, and vote for us. Every day, if you can. I totally want to go play blues in Chicago for my birthday!

Other

I’ve seen the Wolf a few times since we broke up, and he’s been totally cool about it. I’m both grateful and relieved.

Want to add some music to your library? Apropos of nothing, I posted a lovely mix here this morning. Have at it!

The Curse^™ has arrived.

I still don’t have a job.

It’s totally spring here.

In which there are germs.

I have a rotten chest cold. It sucks. I don’t like it.

I’m also pretty sure that nearly everyone is way cooler than me because goblinbox.com is gonna be nine in two weeks and I still don’t have a book deal.

That is all.

In which it was too much to hope I could go two entire winters without catching something.

When my alarm went off at nine this morning, I didn’t notice that I felt bad or anything, but I did pass right the fuck back out until 11:30. Hard. Like, lights-out.

I got up and had breakfast and packed my lunch. And then it started: the dry cough, the achiness, the itchy lungs. By noon, I was huddled under two blankets and dreading the heat loss of getting dressed.

Now I’m at work and I’m cold and my chest hurts and I want to go to sleep. I think I’m running a low fever. I’m so sleepy.

I have about an hour to decide if I’m going to stay and finish my shift or not; after that I’d have a hard time getting anyone to cover me.

This cloud’s silver lining may be called Relaunch Operation: Quit Smoking Already You Silly Bimbo, though, so that’s good.

Update: I’m going home until six.

In which I share a little something I’ve been thinking about.

I try to shield myself from too much media (because American media is, as you know, ON FUCKING CRACK) but one can’t be alive and totally ignorant of the issues. One does, after all, read the New York Times and listen to NPR on occasion.

In spite of myself, I’ve come to note that the nation’s health care discussion contains all these frightened, angry, negative words and phrases: Death panels. Loss of life. Quality of life. Spending. Cost. Rationing.

The dialog contains nearly circular discussion: “What if I or my loved one needs care but is denied?” followed by “Well we can’t spend infinite amounts of money on everybody, especially when quality of life is taken into consideration!” followed by “WHO EXACTLY IS QUALIFIED TO DETERMINE QUALITY OF LIFE?!”

Everyone seems to have missed the underlying issue here. There is no infinite amount of spending to protect against. The unspoken assumption is that all people, especially those who can’t pay for health care out of their own pockets, will inevitably choose in every circumstance to spend every penny they can.

That’s just not true.

There was a caller on Talk of the Nation this morning (“It’s Not Whether We Ration Health Care, But How”) who said that his elderly father declined a valve replacement surgery because it would probably only extend his life a year and would require six months to recover from. We’ve all heard stories of people halting or declining treatment for themselves or their family members because they knew that heroic measures wouldn’t provide a desirable outcome. It happens all the time.

Expensive, heroic surgeries and treatment modalities tend to be painful, debilitating, and require long recovery times. I submit that most people aren’t gluttons for pain and trauma, and that most of our national dialog on health care is riddled with insurance horror stories about individuals who were denied life-saving treatment they actually needed. The story of the health care end-user who just spends millions just for fun is, I submit, wholly imaginary.

Therefore, if we adjust our thinking away from this imaginary spender, we have less to protect from and therefore less to legislate about. Let’s let people decide what they need, and make sure they get it. Let’s not make them accept things they don’t want to accept.

Problem solved.

Anyway.

In which I bitch about my current work schedule, but find some stuff to be excited about.

I had yesterday off, which made it my Saturday. I have today off too, which means it’s my Sunday even though it’s your hump day.

I hate my new work schedule, I really do. Let’s look at the monstrosity again, shall we?

Thursday 1:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Friday 1:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Saturday 11:00 am – 8:00 pm
Sunday 8:00 am – 5:00 pm
Monday 1:00 pm – 10:00 pm

It’s a horrifying mix of days, nights, and weekends. Last week I worked a respectable Monday-through-Friday daytime gig; now my schedule looks like I’m nineteen and working at a 7-Eleven in Compton.

Luckily I’m scheduled to meet with my boss tomorrow about adjusting it. Since the NOC¹ is open 6am-10pm on weekdays and 8am-8pm on weekends and there are only six bodies to cover all those hours, it’s hard for anyone to get a decent schedule (but especially if you’re me and have mad experience but no seniority).

I told them at my interview that I love working swing shift but need weekends off to be a rockstar, and they said they understood. I agreed to work the Awful Schedule for a few weeks as needed, but basically no one else wants to work weekends or nights so someone has to get stuck with a shit schedule.

I’m going to make an adult compromise and ask for the weekday swing shift (1pm to 10pm, Monday through Friday). If they agree it will mean I can never gig on a Friday again, which SUCKS ASS, but at least I’d be at work at the same time every day and not have to do this sucky nights-to-days translation every single fucking week.

Seriously. Let’s transpose the Awful Schedule to daytime hours and see just how fucked up it really is:

Thursday 1:00 pm – 10:00 pm 9:00 am – 6:00 pm
Friday 1:00 pm – 10:00 pm 9:00 am – 6:00 pm
Saturday 11:00 am – 8:00 pm 7:00 am – 5:00 pm
Sunday 8:00 am – 5:00 pm 4:00 am – 1:00 pm
Monday 1:00 pm – 10:00 pm 9:00 am – 6:00 pm

Four in the morning?! I can’t figure out how the poor guy who was working it did it for as long as he did. If I have to do this for more than a month I’ll explode. Or go postal. Or simply pull a no-call-no-show because I’m ASLEEP.

. .. … ……….. .. ……… . … .. .
There’s good news, though. Deep thought revealed that my schedule change might enable me to find a yoga class!

The last time I looked into yoga classes, I couldn’t go to any of them because I was always at work when they were offered; now that I work swing I have my mornings free. I dug around online and found two yoga classes on Friday mornings and emailed the studios to see if I can join. One’s actually a Hatha yoga class that starts tomorrow!

Beings are numberless, I vow to free them.
Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them.
Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them.
The Buddha way is unsurpassable, I vow to embody it.

-Four Great Bodhisattva Vows [pdf]

I also found a Buddhist meditation day retreat (with an enticing “focus on gratitude” theme) that I’d very much like to go to, on November 21st. Of course I’m currently scheduled to work that Saturday, but a girl can hope.

I could really use a meditation retreat right about now, so I’m hoping they’ll let me attend even if I haven’t been to any of their group meditations or classes. It’ not like I haven’t been meditating for twenty years, even if in a different tradition.

I’d find a retreat closer to my own discipline if there was one. A quick google shows there was an ISKCON in Walla Walla once, but as it’s no longer listed on the main site I guess it’s closed. No other hits. Buddhist meditation will have to do… and if I get to go I’m sure it’ll do just fine.

—
¹ Network Operations Center.

Update 11/12: Good news! My new schedule is equitable and starts next week: I work 1pm-10pm M-Th, have Friday and Saturday off, and work Sunday from 11am-8pm. Sundays after gigs will suck, but that’s what coffee’s for, yeah?