Question:

Would a diet almost entirely made up of cereal ultimately result in weight loss?

Mean or Worth It?

Mean: deciding that the heavy walker who makes your cubicle shake every time she walks by should be named "Horse Walker"


Worth It: Hearing your co-worker giggling over the sounds of your own snickering each time she walks by and knowing that galloping horses are running through her head too

Why?

Why is it so gosh darn difficult to look awake on Friday mornings.

I'm awake. I know that I am. I have a clear memory of painfully ripping myself out from between the sheets this morning.

I love...

Sandwiches

So You Think You Can Dance...dance...dance...dance!

I have a small (read: giant and possibly unhealthy) love of the show So You Think You Can Dance. Aside from a prolonged love affair with the Real World(s): Boston, London and Miami and Flava of Love, I don't watch reality TV. Actually, since I don't and haven't had cable for about two years, I don't watch TV at all except for what I can get Wes to DVR and watch with me at his house. But I looooove So You Think You Can Dance and I got to watch last week and this weeks episodes last night. I have some comments:



#1. If I looked like any of the competitors, specifically Melissa: -->
I would never ever wear clothes. I would just be nakie all of the time.


#2. Person I think I would be most likely to be star struck by: Ellen Degeneres. She's funny. She's irreverent. She dances every day on her talk show. Somehow, dancing every day on her talk parlayed into her being a guest judge on So You Think You Can Dance. Brilliant!

#3. Sometimes, it reminds me why I do what I do.

#4. I love music but I suck at finding it on my own. SYTYCD has given me more new songs for my running playlists than is probably normal. Ruby Blue, She Wants Revenge, Pitbull...even songs I didn't like the first time I heard them on the radio, I love them when I see what was choreographed to them. And then I love them forever.

#5. Unitards have joined skinny super low rise pants, banana hammocks and fanny packs in my almost-always-a-poor-wardrobe-decision category. If you look good in a unitard, you will look way better in pretty much anything else.

Clean Sheets

One of my favorite authors, Frank McCourt passed away this past weekend. Frank McCourt’s memoirs Angela's Ashes, 'Tis and Teacher Man reminded me that small things, like clean sheets, are something to be grateful for.

I often find myself irritated with people reminding me to be grateful for what I have been given in life mostly because said reminders often exclude the things that I have earned. I have no difficulty recognizing and embracing that the warmth, comfort and love that I was born into is something to be grateful for. I do have difficulty when people expect me to apologize for it.

Frank McCourt reminded everyone who read his books of the small things we take for granted and the even smaller things that we bemoan as unfair or awful. It’s all about the small things. Like freshly laundered sheets and a soft bed. Thank you. :)

Sotomayor and Benjamin

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Epic Doodle

Ava or Rebecca? Or...schizo?

What if you actually GOT amnesia? I know that amnesia doesn’t exactly work the way it seems to on House but wouldn’t it be kind cool if it did? If you didn’t know who or what you were, where would you start?

I’m going to go ahead and skip straight over the whole the essential elimination of all good relationships and happy memories, the emotional trauma and potentially stunting aspect of it because…well, that’s just not fun to think or write about. And really, if I could or wanted to accurately imagine and record that, I’d be writing a novel. No novel. Blog.

Skipping over all that then we get to the fun part: the do-over. If you don’t remember anything then you are in fact, as an adult, not the sum of your experiences because you effectively don’t have any. Does that mean that you get to choose yourself? I suppose this could boil down to a nature vs. nurture debate. For example: my vehement dislike of horror movies, nature or nurture? Would Slate-Wiped-Clean Anna like horror movies? Or would she simply suffer though I Am Legend because she doesn’t know that perseverance and ‘happy’ endings won’t make her feel better? And the debate rages on…. So not only would you get to rediscover sushi, trampolines, the ocean and vanilla lattes, but you also find yourself free from assumptions about yourself that formed way too early to have a basis in truth. Assumptions like, “I’m not athletic.” Or “I’m the smart one.” Or “I’m the quiet one.” Assumptions that really only hold us back, because nobody is the athletic one, or the smart one or the quiet one all the time. So, if I didn’t know that I’m uncoordinated or un-athletic, maybe I’d not only be brave enough to try but also confident enough to succeed. If I didn’t know that some people just don’t listen to me when I speak, maybe I would speak in a way that would make them want to listen. But if everyone around me still knew these things about me, would that alone have the power to shape me back into the same person?

The ultimate solution to all these maybes though is to discard what we know about ourselves without risking traumatic brain injury. It is so tempting to define ourselves with what we have been and what we have done. Maybe we just need to remember that we don’t really know much about ourselves because there’s so much that we haven’t done yet.

Homework: define yourself by the things that you will do rather than the things that you have done.

Insult to Injury

One of the most ridiculous things about working in the health care industry with absolutely no health care training is the development of acute onset hypochondria. I (and my other non-nurse researchers) are constantly finding new and exciting things to fear / be grateful I have not yet (and will hopefully never) experienced. C. Diff, PICA, necrotizing fasciitis, prolapsed orifices and all heme malignancies top my list of health complications that I pray to be spared each and every time I pray. When I worked in sleep research, I learned that there have been incidences in which progressively worsening insomnia resulted in the complete inability to sleep, which within weeks can result in death. This was also shown on House - it was very dramatic. Needless to say I have pondered over this extensively when I find myself awake during the wee hours.

So lately, while not dying though possibly a little punchy from lack of sleep, I've been back on the insomnia train. This is much like Mary Murphy's Hot Tamale Train, with just a little less enthusiasm and not so much grace or coordination. Also, where as people are dying to get ON the hot tamale train, I'm begging to get off the insomnia train. On second thought, it's nothing like the hot tamale train.

While parts of my day are spent in a soporific haze, this may be balanced out by the expanse of time free time formerly dedicated to sleep. This morning, up and at 'em around 5 am and rather than lay in bed and curse whatever damage is keeping me from oh so amazing sleep, I decided to get up and be productive. I got up, did some laundry, made my bed and headed out to the gym to take a run. While it would have been lovely to run outside, it was still dark and still July in Florida, which means hot, humid and a titch smelly in the mornings. So I go the gym, get my music rockin and CNN on silent and I get to runnin.' And this is when it happens. The woman next to me on the treadmill crop dusted the gym. I was gassed out of my run by the massive (or series of massive) toot(s.) One word: wrong.

Now this is just insult to injury. I'm 25 years old, I'm awake before 6 am, I'm NOT hungover and being heart healthy by getting in some cardio before going to work where I will do my part in curing cancer. Do I really deserve this?!? I keep running. I don't say anything because I have to assume that this assault is not malicious in nature. The implications of premeditation and the effects that it would have on my confidence in human kind are far to profound and expansive for me to consider at this point. But I'm still running, and because I'm still running, I'm still breathing. Hard. There's no avoiding it, but do I breathe through my mouth or my nose! (We've discussed this dilemma before in regards to elevators (What's it like to always have your feet firmly planted on the ground.)

Overall - just a poor way to start the day.

SoMuchToSay ponders: Nature or Nurture?

So…I’m generally not a fan of nurture vs. nature debates, much like questioning whether the chicken or the egg came first, I find it pointless. Never the less, I’m going to have to raise one: is the mysteriously advance ability and aptitude of boys/men/males to find some of the most obscure and random pornography on the internet a result of nature or nurture?

As a freshman in college, I lived on a coed dorm floor and the skills that guys had in locating porn on the intranet was astounding. I’m not talking about your basic run of the mill site that can be located by Googling your favorite smutty word and clicking around until you give your computer a virus (better the computer than yourself.) I’m talking about disturbing (and at times bizarrely intriguing) websites with web addresses don’t even closely resemble anything I would recognize as a web address. This is the point in my internet education where I learned that www. isn’t necessarily a requisite prefix for a series of letters and numbers that direct your browser to a site. I’m reasonably computer savvy, but I would never have thought that “ dbrl;g;fjdaskl;dddbewdod.weohne///asdklafj;” would possibly lead you to a website with nothing but videos of donkey shows.

So…do they teach this to boys in middle school? Possibly while the girls are stuck doing step aerobics in gym class while the boys ostensibly “wrestle,” or while we’re in home economics and the boys are theoretically in “shop.” This was originally my thought, thus making this propensity towards finding obscure internet porn a nurtured skill. Until it was pointed out to me that when I was in middle school the internet was just becoming a big thing – something that only the rich people had. Even if you were rich enough to have AOL, it was all dial up which mean that if you were surfing for nakie pics you’d have to wait 20 minutes for it to come up, thus highly increasing the chances that your mom would walk in on you. Probably a decent deterrent I’m thinking. So…clearly this wasn’t taught to my generation in middle school, it’s as skill that they picked up later…say…naturally?

One might argue that males “naturally” have a greater predisposition to seeking out porn because they are “naturally” more visually stimulated and hormonally charged. Thus they “naturally” develop these preternatural internet skimming abilities. I don’t know about this one though. I have some pretty sketchy female friends that put most of the guys I know to shame in regards to wretched language, perversion and kink. Wouldn’t one think that these chicas would have the same location skills as guys? Yet they don’t.

I just don’t get it. Is it nature or nurture?