Living Small

Distraction

The other night, David and I went with some friends to see Archbishop Desmond Tutu give the UM's annual Raoul Wallenberg lecture.  We got to Hill Auditorium more than an hour before it was supposed to start, and there was already a line around the block.  Fortunately, though, one of our friends is temporarily in a wheelchair, so all five of us were able to enter through the wheelchair entrance well before anyone else was let into the building.  We staked out our seats in the wheelchair section, and then watched everyone else file in.  The place quickly filled up, and overflow was sent to another building.  The talk was quite good, though some parts of it seemed more canned than candid.  It was also quite a bit funnier than I expected.  The university seemed to have done a lot to accommodate various types of disability in the audience.  Not only were those with mobility problems let in early, but there was a sign-language translator and closed-captioning for the speech.  Normally, I find closed-captioning rather helpful, especially when the speaker has an accent.  In this case, though, it seemed that just about every other word was misspelled or misinterpreted, and I think the audience spent as much time laughing at the closed-captioning as at the speaker's jokes!  It was quite distracting, so, in order to take my mind off it, I focused on the woman knitting in the row in front of me.  This also turned out to be quite a distraction, however, because I noticed that she was knitting wrong!  Rather, I should say that she was purling wrong, bringing the yarn around the needle clockwise instead of counter-clockwise.  Then she finished the row, turned, and started knitting into the back loop instead of the front loop.  Being a bit of a perfectionist (to put it mildly), I was nearly going out of my mind between the typos onscreen and the travesty of knitting in front of me!  I think Tutu's speech may have had something to do with tolerance, but I fear the message was lost on me :)

Still Here -- Or, Rather, Back

I apologize to those who were worried by my last post.  I'll be brief about it and just say that I'm coming to terms with the fact that I need to gain weight and am trying to enjoy the process as much as I can.  I'm still injured and not running, so that helps, and I'm also remembering how much I loved sweets before deciding they were evil.  For now I'm just going with my gut and hoping that I'll find balance eventually.

So, where have I been for the last week or so?  Miami!  That's right, I've finally gone and presented the research I have been working on for the past year.  I flew down last Tuesday, had a meeting on Wednesday (where I found out I was the official minute-taker only AFTER the meeting had already started), went to round tables and paper sessions on Thursday, presented my paper on Friday, had another meeting on Saturday, more paper sessions on Sunday, and then flew home Sunday night. 

But there was also time for fun!  Highlights included:

• Nearly getting trampled at an Obama rally
• My own personal walking tour of Little Havanna (complete with a Cuban sandwich at a lunch counter where nobody spoke English)
• Two brief trips to South Beach
• Stairclimbing at the MetroMover station to the amusement of the locals
• Cake every day
• Meeting and drinking with social scientists from all over the world

Nonetheless, I'm glad to be home, though not glad to have arrived at work less than 12 hours after my plane landed!

Not Fair

For the last three years, I have eaten what anyone would view as a perfect diet.  Including three daily servings of dairy.  Yesterday, I found out that I have osteoporosis, which just seems so unfair.  Aren't people who eat well (and I ate PERFECTLY, not just well) supposed to avoid degenerative diseases?  Especially when we are only 29?  It turns out that there was just one thing missing from my perfect diet -- enough calories to sustain normal hormone levels and protect my bones.  Oops.  Somehow, even though I was following a meal plan given to me by a DOCTOR and a NUTRITIONIST, I was physiologically starving.  The problem, I realize now, is that I was letting my head control my eating rather than my stomach. 

At this point, the best thing I can do for my bones (besides maybe taking a calcium supplement, though I technically am getting plenty of it from food) is to gain weight, so I'm giving it my full effort.  I have scrapped every piece of nutritional wisdom I have ever heard and am now letting myself eat everything that has been off limits since about 2004.  Sugar.  Fat.  Refined grains.  So far, this has mainly meant brownie sundaes and tons of granola (my favorite faux-health food), but I look forward to trying many more things.  It's a bit scary, but I'm trying to just trust my gut here.  I may have to change the title of this blog to "Living Large."  I'll probably be buying some new clothes soon.  The thing that worries me, though, is that I always look about ten pounds heavier than I am.  At my current weight (about 2-3 lb heavier than in the photo), nobody has ever told me that I look underweight.  When I weighed 100 lb and wore a size 0, somebody actually said to me, "you don't LOOK like a size 0."  In fact, people have been saying recently how good I look, which is scary.  If I look good when I'm physiologically starving, that means that when I actually get to a healthy weight (another 5-10 lb), I'm going to look OVERweight.  So if you know me in real life, do me a favor and don't tell me I look good until you start to think I'm getting a bit pudgy!

The Awkward Years

Somehow David and I started talking about the movie Heathers the other day and realized that, although we had both seen it, we had never seen it together, and so we rented it last night.  Even though the movie came out in 1988, it was the iconic film of my adolescence.  I think I was eleven the first time I saw it (1990), and at some point later it was on television and I taped it and watched it over and over.  For years.  It's certainly a good movie, but I'm not sure why I liked it so well when I was in middle school and couldn't even understand much of what was going on (particularly the sexual content).  I may have liked it because parts of it were filmed at my actual middle school, or it may just have been because I also wanted to kill most of the people I went to school with.  

I know that is a strong thing to say, but before you go worrying about my mental health, just think about it.  Did you like middle school?  It is probably the worst and most awkward time for most kids and I would venture to say that anyone who really enjoyed middle school either was home schooled or was the one who victimized all the other kids.  By eighth grade I had pretty much found my niche and a really nice group of friends, but there was still drama.  I'll never forget being slapped across the face by my so-called "best friend," though I can't for the life of me remember why she did it.

A few years ago, I had a dream that it was my first day of middle school all over again, yet even though I was only eleven years old, I knew everything then that I know now.  I so wish I could go back and tell my eleven-year-old self that everything would be okay.  To tell her that, yes, her teachers were all idiots, but that she would survive nonetheless and that three years isn't a life sentence.  And to tell her that she didn't have to have perfect grades all the time.  Though if I hadn't had perfect grades, I might not have gotten into Pomona, and then who knows where I would be now...

Switching Teams

I feel quite sheepish for posting about this event more than a week after it actually happened, but it is definitely worth posting about, so let's all just pretend I got this up a week ago!  So not last weekend but the weekend before, the University of Michigan played football against the University of Illinois.  I realize that was rather awkward phrasing, but for my non-football-fan readers, that was the clearest way to state it.  David and I have some good friends who went to University of Illinois, but now live in Ann Arbor and have become Michigan fans.  Every time the two teams play each other (this only happens every few years), they organize a giant "bipartisan tailgate" where they get their Illinois friends together with their Michigan friends to celebrate the game together (regardless of who wins).  The last bipartisan tailgate occurred in Illinois, and they rented a giant RV to bring their Michigan friends down for the game.  David went but I didn't because I was in grad school then and didn't know how to have fun :)

This year, the party was here in Ann Arbor.  David and I went to the party, though David refused to go to the game, since he has renounced Michigan football (a very long story, perhaps for another post).  I went to the game with the wife of the host couple, and David stayed home with the husband (who had recently had foot surgery and was confined to the couch with elevated leg).  There were probably about thirty of us altogether, two-thirds Illinois fans and one-third Michigan fans.  And I was both.  Or rather, I was each at different times.  Since I just happen to have an Illinois t-shirt, I wore that as my base layer, with a Michigan sweatshirt over it.  As we were getting ready to move from the party to the game, the weather turned cold, and I borrowed an orange fleece to wear over my sweatshirt, so I was, once again, sporting the Illinois colors.  By the time we got to the game, however, the sun had come out, and I stripped down to my Illinois t-shirt, which I wore through the first half of the game.  I received a bit of heckling on the way in -- a Michigan fan started yelling the Illinois cheer at me (I-L-L), so I yelled back the rest of it (I-N-I) -- but there were other Illinois fans near where we were sitting, so I didn't get much flack after that.  Even though I was wearing the Illinois t-shirt and cheering for Illinois, though, I couldn't help singing along when the Michigan band played Hail to the Victors.  I was, however, a fairweather fan, so when it began to get a bit chilly after the first half, I put my Michigan sweatshirt on.  By the end of the third quarter, it had gotten even colder and it was clear that Illinois was wiping the floor with Michigan, so I donned the orange fleece, and was on the winning team when the game ended!  School spirit is great, but at the end of the day, what really matters is staying warm :)

The Difference Between Runners and Bikers

When I was first learning how to ride my bike, I spent quite a bit of time on the internet, looking for cycling sites that might offer tips on technique.  What I found, however, is that all bikers (or do they prefer to be called cyclists?) talk about is their equipment.  There is, of course, good reason for this -- the type of bike you ride can significantly affect your speed.  Nonetheless, I grew frustrated with the emphasis on equipment, and was relieved to be able to get back to running (after my July injury -- I'm still sidelined with my September injuries) and reading Runner's World with its emphasis on technique.

But runners have their own obsessions.  One is their stomachs, or perhaps more accurately, their digestion.  We talk and read endlessly about our different fueling options, and experiment with scientific precision to figure out what we can and can't digest before, during, and after a run.  I went through three kinds of energy (read: sugar) gels to find one that didn't give me stomach cramps, and on the morning of my long runs (once I got up to about 14 miles) I would wake up at 4am to eat a bowl of oatmeal and give it a chance to clear my stomach before the run.

Another obsession is shoes.  This is somewhat different from cyclists' obsession with their bikes because I don't think anyone believes that the perfect pair of shoes will make them a faster runner.  Instead, we are looking for shoes that will make us injury-proof.  We try to navigate between neutral, stability, and motion-control models to find the one that will make us pronate perfectly and thus prevent a whole range of problems from plantar fasciitis all the way up to ITBS (not to mention blisters).  Last night, our local running store was hosting a special fitting event put on by Mizuno, offering a complete technical analysis to find the perfect fit.  David and I arrived around 6pm and were told that the wait would be at least an hour.  Neither of us were interested in waiting, and I already wear Mizunos, so it is highly unlikely that they would have told me I was in the wrong shoe, so we took off.  Nonetheless, every time I feel a twinge in my knee or hip or achilles tendon, I can't help wondering if maybe I need a different shoe.  After all, a shoe is much easier to change than my pelvic structure, which has turned out to be the real source of my woes.