Just Say No and GROW UP!

I came home from school feeling like my own personal hero. Why? Had I gotten through to a child? Did I save one of my students from certain danger? None of the above. The reason I came home practically fist pumping was because I just said "no."

You see, I have a terrible addiction that causes me to tremble and shake and weaken and rationalize and throw away periods of time that I have gone without. This addiction is to baked goods. Today, there were pretty mini cupcakes in the office. These were the types of cupcakes I would have normally gobbled up without thinking twice about it. Each one was perfectly topped with sugary, buttery white and pink frosting for Valentine's Day. I stood there looking at these cupcakes and thought to myself, "if not now, then when?" Every day, I cave in, eat whatever the hell I want, then suffer the wrath of the inevitable sugar crash. And then the beating up of myself begins. Today, I proved to myself that I have the power to just say no to baked goods. But this actually isn't the point of my post today. Let us segue into the real topic.

I was thinking about writing about how proud I was of myself and about my addiction to sweets and beauty and beast that is a simple sugary cupcake. And then I got to thinking about how often I think about, ponder, plan for, indulge, focus on, and finally write about food. I decided to look at my little heart diary with the lock for proof that other things had to happen in my life. This is
what I found:



How simple! How sweet! I had a day in the spring of 1987 where nothing went wrong and had to write about it.

Here's one where something terrible happened:



My day was ruined because my little brother scribbled all over my Betty Boop shirt. That would still piss me off today, no doubt. You better believe that if someone scribbled all over one of my favorite shirts now, I would be writing up a furious storm about it.
*sidenote- they were playing Betty Boop shorts at the movie theater before a movie I went to see a few weeks ago and that was one fucked up show. In this episode, she was breathing in laughing gas and tripping her face off with a clown... a clown!!! So weird and creepy... and wonderful!

Now let's look at a journal entry from February 2010, while I was in Barcelona:




I was in Barcelona on a trip I was so excited about and I was writing about candy and snacks at a place called Lady Jasmine's. I could have written about the people I saw, the language, the streets, the culture, the smells. Nah. I'm going to focus on the wide abundance of gummy and marshmallowey candy at my fingertips. In my defense, those are my favorite types of candy.

My fear here is that maybe I haven't changed that much. Then again, when you really think about it, maybe my life is just so wonderful that I get to write about candy as an adult... I could think of it as a luxury rather than a detriment.

Who knows? But it does illustrate that, as an adult, sweets have taken quite a large role in my life and today, I showed the ultimate restraint. I just said NO! And it wasn't no to a crumby chips ahoy or an oreo... it was a solid NO on three seperate occasions to beautiful pastel cupcakes. I did that. Now I am going to have to do it for the next few weeks unil Hellentine's Day is over...

You're on my Good List

When I was in the twelfth grade and my early years of college, I used to hang out with a girl named Karen. We still talk today. We used to drive around in her blue subaru or my tiny blue corolla hatchback with the one functioning door and listen to Tribe and Ani DiFranco and Phish. We would wax poetic about the world over cigarettes and cups of coffee with chocolate cream from 7 eleven and eventually make our way back to her incredibly comfy home where her mom always had a full stock of peanut m&m's and a cabinet full of the best cereals ever. But one of my fondest memories lie in our blank notebooks.

I was always a diary-keeper. When I was eight, I had a little white one with pink hearts on it. In it was information mostly about meals I'd had and how my brother beat me at board games and one day I wished that I could beat him. About a year later, I traded that one in for a better model, literally, another diary with pink hearts but this one had a lock! I was nine. I don't think I had anything juicy that I needed to keep private but it felt so delicious to hear that click of the lock after I'd finished writing half a page about snack or whatever I thought was super important when I was a geeky nine-year-old. In middle school, I stole my mom's mead notebooks, tore out her stuff (I knew she didn't need it anymore) and fill it with things like drawings of boys I liked and lists of names that I liked. Names like Hillary and Geneva and Azalea graced those pages in the early 90s! I wrote things like Mario Loves Laura 4-EVA! I really did write that, I really did like a guy named Mario in 9th grade. I had some periods of time that was journal-less. In the eleventh grade, I was in my first ever serious relationship and for some reason, didn't feel the need to document any of that. Not Junior Prom, not the sweetheart ring he gave me, not all the time I spent at his house learning what love was, not any of it. It's a bit odd.

Karen and I met in 1994. We were Seniors at the same time but in different schools. Karen was an avid writer and reminded me of all those books I'd filled and abandoned over the years. One of the things we liked to do together from time to time was make lists. We would just write one thing after another of things that we loved or liked or simply appreciated. It's a good list. And it can be as deep or as simple as I want it to be. And it changes all the time as I change and grow and come into contact with new things and new people. So, the list of things I love on January 14, 2012 is about to unfold:

long hair
short hair
watches
bad TV
spandex
warm hiking boots
movie theaters
hot cocoa
popcorn
a good work out
FINN
fam
friends
coconut french toast
cheese
being in on a freezing cold day
car rides
the fact that I still hang out with some people from my 1998 study abroad experience
ocean breezes
landing in a brand new place after being on an airplane for a while
beginning a movie I've been waiting to see
writing my blog
watching people draw
seeing a friend that I really missed
just finishing cleaning
autumn
singing
geysers
hotsprings
thunderstorms
chubby hubby ice cream
tomatoes
bread soup at Loki in Reykjavik
thickly sliced dark rye bread with butter and cheese
men with smoldering eyes
perezhamilton.com
the discovery of something great that consumes you for a bit
putting on a new piece of clothing and having it look great

I guess I will end it here; I could surely keep going but there's a movie on that I want to watch on this cozy Saturday evening.

I think everyone should make these lists every once in a while. One thing I recently started to do was to force myself to find that thing; that one good thing in any situation because there always is one. Well, not always, of course, there are those situations that are just terrible and it would be shitty of you to say anything close to "look at the bright side" but in most situations, it's there for the taking. I like my lists.