Productive day

I'm not known for my ability to focus and get things done. Today was really not that different, but I had so many projects that were this close close to being done and so I went for it. I completed a grant proposal, an article review, a letter of recommendation and an abstract for a conference next year. To put this into perspective, I was almost done with all of these projects, but that's always been the problem. I'm almost done with a ton of stuff and then I never finish. Today, I FINISHED. That may not sound like a lot, but it's been a persistent struggle for me, and completing all those tasks felt wonderful.

The plan for tomorrow is to read an entire dissertation. I don't know if I can do it, but I'm going to give it all I have. How awesome will it be if I can have two days in a row of productivity? As strange (and awful) as that sounds, it would be a huge accomplishment for me. I'm looking forward to the challenge!

Weepy movies

I cried at the end of Terminator 2. Truly. Watching the Terminator voluntarily go into the vat of whatever melted him was really sad. This point highlights that I will probably cry in just about every movie I've ever watched. I cry at the end of romantic comedies, dramas, comic book movies; you name it, I'll cry.

One of the bad crying jags occurred after watching Love Actually which really isn't a sad movie at all, but I cried and cried because of that cute dude who loved Keira Knightly, but she married that other guy. And Emma Thompson's character was so sad, too. Of course, everyone couldn't have a happy ending, but that dude really tore me up. There was just something about him resigning himself to life without her and moving on that touched a chord with me. I wondered if he ever found someone.

I saw the movie with a friend and cried the whole way home. She brought me into my duplex, which I shared with a roommate (Luis), apologized to Luis and bolted. He, of course, couldn't understand how I could go to the movies to see a romantic comedy and come back bawling. We sat on my double papazan while I explained (through sobs) what I thought was so sad. Being incoherent didn't help me clear up the mystery for Luis, but he was a good sport. I ended up falling asleep with my head in his lap, worn out by my tears. He kept patting my head for what must have been about 45 minutes while I slept. When I woke up, I felt really bad that he sat there and patted my head for 45 minutes, but I was glad to know that even if I didn't have a boyfriend, my friends were well and truly awesome.

Tonight I watched The Secret Life of Bees and bawled and bawled when May killed herself. Having gone through a mildish case of depression for about 6 or so months, I was struck by the idea of being so weighed down by sadness, that suicide was a more palatable option. I've never contemplated suicide, and I don't intend to start now, but as I watched the movie, I was struck by her sadness, and it started the waterworks. It reminded me that whatever is going on in my life, whether it's my dad's declining health, my professional stumbles, or personal loneliness, I do not carry the weight of the world on my shoulders, and therefore, I have the strength to get through the problem. So, while I was concerned about whether or not I would hyperventilate, I am not concerned about my adaptive abilities and my capacity to deal with life's sadness and worries. It may difficult to deal, but it won't be impossible.

Exhausted

Lack of motivation is going to be a recurring theme of this blog, and it's really frustrating to me. In all kinds of ways, I want to accomplish a lot, both professionally and athletically, yet for some reason, I am my own worst enemy. I get started really well, and then I fall off the wagon. Exercise-wise, last week was phenomenal. I ran 5 days and did p90x 4 days...and lost 4 pounds. This week, I ran ONCE, did p90x ONCE and I can see the weight piling back on. Additionally, I'm exhausted. Granted, last night I only got about 5 hours sleep, but then I took a 5 hour nap this afternoon. Crazy. And, as soon as I finish this post, I'll go back to bed and likely sleep a solid 7 hours.

I do have one bright spot to report: I finished a stitch project yesterday. It's a small project for a friend, but it only took me a couple of weeks, which is a record for me. Working on it every day was a key to finishing. Now, I need to apply that consistency to other areas of my life.

I know I've made a lot of progress on many of my issues, especially in the last six months or so, but consistency and motivation are the big ones that really inhibit my success in so many areas. It's times like this when I really ache for a partner who can encourage me and push me. If I can't have a partner, a 'kindred spirit' would be so helpful as well; one who actually lived in the same town as me. I feel so isolated and my reaction is to sit on my couch and watch tv, eat mostly bad food and feel sorry for myself. And all the volunteering in the world won't make that better, it seems. I need companionship, and I fear that loneliness is my lot. And that's exhausting.

Glee addiction

Quick post: I came home relatively early to practice my cello (which I did), but instead of going to bed afterward, I sat down and watched tonight's Glee. I can't seem to stay away. And next week is Neil Patrick Harris! :swoon: Except for a stupid episode here and there (and the first part of the season was better than the current part, Madonna excepted), it's an awesome show! Will probably spend tomorrow night watching the part of this season that I stupidly erased from my DVR.

Better results

Mondays are weigh-in days, and I'm much happier with today's result than last week. I got all five of my runs in this week, and I completed 4 p90x routines. Additionally, I tried to limit bad food (though I did slip several times during the week). The result: a 4 pound weight loss. That makes me happy. It's nice to see the scale moving in that direction for a change.

It's really funny that it took me 2 years to lose 20 pounds, but I gained that same amount back in 4 months. Boo! Still, hopefully I can keep my motivation going and make quicker work of those pesky pounds. Certainly, I can't rest on my laurels, and I need to keep working hard, but it's nice to get positive reinforcement with what I'm doing. This coming weekend, it's going to be nearly impossible to get my workouts in because I'm volunteering at the Big 12 track championships, but I'll be running around, so hopefully I will be burning some calories.

Hard work, good eating and exercise...I guess it's a simple enough plan for better results.

Accepting compliments

As we were waiting for the softball game to start tonight, the captain of my team and I were talking about the fact that I've had the same glove since I was 9 or 10 and I should probably get a new one since there was no padding left in mine. He suggested that I get a first baseman's glove since that's my position. I've been playing first base pretty much since I started with this team two summers ago, largely because I fell down my basement stairs during the second week of the season and wrenched my right shoulder as I grabbed the railing to keep from falling the whole way down. Due to the wrenching, I couldn't really throw the ball from the outfield and they put me on first so I could do something productive. Turns out, I'm pretty good.

Anyhow, the captain suggested I get a first basemen's glove and I suggested that I might not always play first base. His response: You're so good, there's no way we're moving you. Now, this is a beer league softball team made up of mostly nonathletic academics, so "good" has a pretty loose definition, but it was a nice thing to say. He went on to say that I was the reason there was a co-ed team from our department. This seemed really crazy, so I pressed him about what he meant. He said that it was rare to find a female player who was really good at first base, and having such a player was critical because it allowed us to play a guy on third base. Blah, blah, blah, accusations of sexism, blah, blah, blah, and the end result was that if our team didn't have a good female first basemen, it would have been hard to recruit enough guys to play.

Now, to me this is crazy generally, but it's even crazier because all I do is catch the ball. Seriously, I barely field and just catch the ball with my foot on the bag. It's true that the left side of our infield can get a little wild and I have had some spectacular catches, but the idea that the team would be impossible to field without me on first is just a crazy thing...and a very flattering compliment. Which, of course, I had real difficulty accepting.

I'm not sure why I don't believe people when they say nice things to me, but I don't. I try to argue with them and convince they why I'm not as good/worthy/whatever as they seem to think. I'm trying to learn to say "thank you" and leave it at that, but it's hard. Funnily, even if I do manage not to argue with the person, in my head, I still say what I would have said to the person aloud.

Apparently, I'm indispensable to my beer league softball team. Thank you.

Pain in the @ss

Wow, am I sore.

I did two workouts on Tuesday and Thursday and my glutes are rebelling. So, I allowed myself to be a bit of a slacker today and took the day off. I intend to go back to two workouts tomorrow, but today, I just needed to let my body rest.

My schedule is helping me get things done, and I'm proud of that, but there's more work to do. I really need to be working on my diet. It's seems like I can't have two things working at the same time. If my fitness is in hand, my diet goes to crap, and if I ever get my eating to a good place, I tend not to be exercising (but usually both are in bad shape). I don't know why this is, but I need to address it. My running would be so much better if I could shed all this unwanted weight. And I'd love to shed it sooner rather than later. Eating french fries, potato chips and pop is not going to make that happen.

One step at a time...if my glutes cooperate.

Finishing

I am not a closer. I have a horrible tendency to start things, get them about half done and then stop and move onto another project. I've even starting doing this with books, and I never want to return to the books later because I can't remember what happened. I went through my magazines a couple of weeks ago, and I found that I had started reading about a third of them but never finished.

Two glaring examples of this lack of finishing are really starting to bother me. Recreationally, I have four cross-stitch projects in various stages of completion. The oldest was started in November 2007, another was started probably in the summer of 2008, the third began in March 2010 and the final piece was started last Tuesday (April 27, 2010).

More seriously, I have four journal-length manuscripts in various stages of readiness that I haven't sent out. Two were previously submitted journals and rejected, and I just haven't made the time to fix them up and send them out again. My career depends on me getting these and other articles published, yet they languish on my desk for months and months.

Why don't I finish what I start? This is actually a difficult question to answer. I think I get bored of my stitching projects, or I don't work on them very often so I don't feel as if I'll ever finish them. I have hope about new projects so I take them up enthusiastically and believe that I'll fly right through them. Then, I get bored with them and want to move on. I've already promised to start a new project for a friend, but he is wisely not giving me the pattern for the project since I have so many others to finish. Thus, I can't move off my current project (two of my current projects are for others) and onto the bright, shiny new one.

Why don't I finish my manuscripts? Part of the problem is that I know they'll be rejected (rejection is the modal category) so I'm discouraged before I start. Part of me worries that my writing is terrible or my ideas are uninteresting and I don't want that confirmed by my field. Part of me (a mostly secret part) is not even sure I want to stay at a research university. If I don't publish, I will be fired, but if I'm fired, I can pursue a job at a college/university with less of an emphasis on research, and maybe I'll be happier. Here's the problem, though: especially at this time of year, I hate my students and I wish I didn't have to deal with them. If I moved to a teaching institution, that's all I'd do. And I'm not actually that bad at research. I especially love collaboration. So, the trick is to remind myself that I need to at least give this life the old college try and have the option of staying or going.

So, I'm trying to pursue a new strategy that schedules time to write during the day and push some manuscripts out the door, and schedule some time in the evening to work on my various projects. If I can write two hours a day and stitch one hour a day, I can get a lot accomplished in both realms in a relatively short period of time. This still leaves plenty of time to exercise (2 hours/day), sleep (7-8 hours), and deal with all the other responsibilities of life and work. Some days I'll write more than scheduled, and some days I'll stitch more, but I'm going to try very hard not to do less. I'd like to start the stitching part of the plan this Thursday and the writing plan next Monday (I have a lot of grading this week). I bought a planner, and I'm penciling in the time when I'll focus on these things. I feel capable and motivated to do this. I really, really hope I can make it last.

Weigh-in Day

Bleh! Today is weigh-in day.

My best friend, Susan, and I are trying to motivate each other to lose weight and so we've engaged in many a challenge to see who can post the best weight loss numbers. We post our weight every Monday, and because we're both uber-competitive, we want to beat each other so badly that we stick to our health and fitness plans. Until the boy-induced depression/sadness crap. I've gained about 20 pounds since this time last year, and today I topped the scale at 211.5 pounds. That's humiliating, but it's got to stop.

I was in IL with some amazing runner chicks this weekend, and they LOOKED like runner chicks. I, on the other hand, not only looked bad but felt bad too. I will never have a runner's physique, even if I lost 60, 70, or 80 pounds. I'm just not built that way. Still, I wanted to feel more confident when I was with them, and I didn't. And when I uploaded the pictures off my camera today, I felt even worse. I have bad posture which didn't help the cause, but I was embarrassed by how bad I looked. People who love me don't care how I look, but it's hard for me to love myself when I treat my body so badly.

I recently got into Glee and tonight I watched the last episode, "Home". One of the story lines was about Mercedes having to lose 10 pounds to stay on the Cheerios squad and how bad she felt about herself because she was struggling to lose the weight. She sang Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful" and it really touched a chord in me. I want to be able to sing that song and mean it.

I am beautiful, no matter what they say

Words can't bring me down.

I am beautiful in every single way.

Yes, words can bring me down,

So don't you bring me down today.

I need desperately to stop being the person saying the hurtful words to myself. So, today, despite the crappy weigh-in, I went to the grocery store and stocked up on fruits and vegetables and yummy, healthy snacks. I will go running tomorrow and I will do a p90x video. I can do this, and I'll see myself as beautiful, both inside and out.

It's a Start

So, in July 2009, I fell in love.

Doesn't sound too momentous, but this is actually the first time I'm admitting it. I fell in love. Hard. I met him online and we clicked immediately. Always had stuff to talk about. Crazy physical attraction. I was sure he was the one. I don't have a lot of relationship experience, so I didn't notice the warning signs until it was too late. I mean, when you make a habit of crushing on unavailable (usually married) men, the signs are always that it's not going to work. Dating a straight single guy? The signs are all different. At any rate, I missed them, and six weeks after I fell head-over-heels, it was all over but the crying.

Maybe if there was more crying, it would have been easier to deal with. I cried a lot while things were falling apart, and I cried a lot in my therapist's office, but I had to go to work, teach, interact with people, and while everyone knew I was sad, I didn't really talk too much about what I was going through. As a result, I went into a state of mourning. Mourning for the relationship that seemed to have so much promise. Mourning for my 34 years of loneliness. Mourning for the fact that I'm in a town I don't like, in a job I'm not sure I can keep, with friends who aren't "kindred spirits" or if they are have too much of their own lives to deal with to be the type of "bosom friend" I need in my life. (Don't hate on the Anne of Green Gables references.) I went into mourning. Which is a nice way of saying that I was depressed for a good 4 months. I lost interest in the people and things that used to keep the loneliness at bay. I sat on my couch and watched tv and kept the outside world away. Sure, I hung out with people; I went to work. But I didn't engage with anyone or anything.

I started pulling out of malaise in February, but I realized that I had dug myself into a hole. I had largely stopped running, my go-to self-help for the previous two years. I tried to start running again, but it was painful and I didn't enjoy it. So, I signed up for a marathon. I have until October 3 to get myself into fighting form. March was a pretty good month, but I allowed myself to find excuses, and I stopped running again in April. So here it is, May 2, and I am determined to be ready in 5 months and a day come Hell or high water.

To start, I ran 3 miles this evening. It's a start. I also plan to do p90x. I'm going to buy a planner tomorrow and keep track of my daily running, fitness and research goals (because my professional life is going to crumble on me soon if I don't get my carcass in gear). I'm going to track my progress and hopefully, I'll be motivated to keep moving forward.

Still, it's almost 11 pm and I have a ton of reading to do for tomorrow, a lecture to finish, a study guide to prepare, a final exam to write, 6 sets of reviews to grade and more reading for Wednesday. Will I be able to cobble everything together? Yes. Will it be fantastic? No. Will it be good enough? I hope so. Can I get better? I have to.

Where will I find my motivation? It's trite to say that I will find it within myself. But it's also true.

Day 1 (May 2): 3 miles

It's a start.