New Year’s Resolutions

I guess it is that time again. A new year. A new you.  Or at least some attempt to renew, regenerate, start over, make it better this time around.

It’s hard to come up with only a few New Year’s resolutions because I want to drastically change my life.  I’m not talking about cleaning out the sock drawer or losing 10 pounds.  I want 2008 to be the year when I explore my life and improve myself in the most fundamental ways.

All of the baby steps that I have been taking over the past few months will increase in intensity. I want to continue on the spiritual journey through books and journal writing like I have been doing but I’d also like to add an element of community. I’m ready to get out in the world and learn from others. So I am going to look for a church (or five) to attend regularly. I still don’t feel comfortable with religion but I hope that being around people who do believe in something and take time out of their lives to reflect on those things might be inspirational. I also would like to have opportunities to do community service through a church group.

I am also interested in taking meditation, yoga, and pilates classes.

And, of course, I will be embarking on the Macrobiotic Lifestyle.

So those are my three spiritual aims.

In terms of relationships, I am maintaining my No Date 2008 plan. In terms of friendships, I would like to deepen my friendships and take more time for one on one, deep conversation. In terms of my family, my mom and I have decided to write letters (like oldfashioned penpal type thing) to each other as a way of deepening our connection beyond the small talk of phone conversations. I would also like to start calling my Nan more often just to have those small talk phone conversations.

As far as schoolwork goes, I am going to finish my masters this spring, present at conferences, and spend more time thinking about what I actually want to do with these degrees. I have to admit that I don’t have a very purposeful, long term objective with this grad school thing. Being a professor seems like it would be satisfying but I haven’t thought it through in terms of what type of school I would like to teach at. I guess part of me is waiting to see how much I like teaching next year, so 2008 will likely help to determine some of my career objectives as well.

Above all, this will be the year that I finally become emancipated from the past. It is time to reflect and feel, then accept and forgive. I want to become a balanced and gentle person who is compassionate and centered. There is no need for the fuss anymore. I want a simple life. In fact, my new motto may come from a country song that I heard on the radio last week: “ Complications may arise, but I live a simple life.”

Pre-Macro Feasting

What is the opposite of a macrobiotic diet? Maybe something like a microlethal diet?

Like New Year’s dieters everywhere, I have taken my impending lifestyle change as a license to eat all of the foods that I will be deprived of in two days.

And eat them I have. All of the terrible foods that are sludging me up and bringing me down, all of the favorites of my childhood, all of the sugar and dairy and white flour that my taste buds desire. Lasagna. Bacon. Applebee’s Oriental chicken roll up. A Boston Creme donut. Blueberry bagels with about 2o tablespoons of cream cheese. My favorite Amish treat: the whoopee pie. And let’s keep in mind that all of this has been consumed AFTER the holiday festivities where I consumed so many country homestyle treats (baked corn, green bean casserole, sweet potatos, mashed potatos, rolls, turkey, ham) and even more sweets (cheesecake, christmas cookies, pies, peanut butter meltaways).

I have fattened myself up like a cow going to slaughter. I refuse to weigh myself but judging my bloated stomach that looks like I am about 12 weeks pregnant, I would say that I have gained a solid 8 pounds.  In my stomach.

But that is 2007 weight. 2007 binging. The physical manifestation of 2007 crap.

2008, on the other hand, will be clean. Wholesome. Pure. Healthy and peaceful- inside and out.

On January 2, 2008, I will return to Bloomington and turn over the proverbial new leaf – or seaweed, as the case may be.

I have been researching the macrobiotic lifestyle for the past 6 weeks or so. I bought a book, found some websites, and have taken notes. I have shopped at 2 grocery stores in order to purchase things that I have never eaten before in my life and can’t pronounce. Lots of seaweed and rice derivatives. Barley malt and rice vinegar. Sea salt and miso. Shoyu, mirin, soba noodles, oats, kombu, tempeh, and daikon. It’s actually really exciting to try to find these mysterious new foods that will now constitute my food intake.

The last few days have been a goodbye to the old ways. The lasagne and cookies tasted good, but I feel gross:  heavy and dumpy. In 2008, I get rid of the junk. Starting with my kitchen cupboard and then systematically going through every drawer of my inner psyche. In terms of food and self, I will ask: What is pleasurable? What is a crutch? What is healthy behavior? What seems good on the surface but really makes you sick? What parts of my life are thoughtless habit and what would change if I challenged and changed these aspects? Is happiness the simple and wholeness of food and life? Is misery in the extremes? What does it mean to sit through the pain of craving instead of self medicating and distraction? Where do love and discipline, forgiveness and accountability meet?

I am hoping the answers lie in a grain of rice.

5 Day Threshold

Five days.

That is how long I can be home before I start getting annoyed with the incessant TV blaring, the door slamming as people go in and out of the house, the yelling across multiple rooms to convey a simple message and the shrill freak outs of adolescent siblings.

Seven days.

That is how long I can be home before I start feeling like my 14 year old self. Somehow, my desire to attain what is, to the outside world, objective measures of success, such as vast amounts of education, culturedness, and upward mobility, makes me the black sheep of the family. I could have stayed in Cental PA and done NOTHING with my life and it would be all the same to them. In fact, they’d probably like me MORE. I know it sounds like I am balking at unconditional love, but it is not that at all. I just want them to understand and appreciate what I am doing with my life.

Ten days.

This is how long it takes for me to feel completely inadequate and miserable in every possible way and in the exact way that only holidays can. I wonder if there really are families out there who feel a swell of joy as they celebrate the holiday season. If, in some families, togetherness and solidarity increase instead of tension and buried resentment. I would like to find those Folgers commercial families and join them just for only one day.  December 25.

Instead, I get to grit my teeth and smile pleasantly as I encounter countless unenlightened conversational gems.

 So, you know those people who don’t believe in global warming? I met some at a Christmas Eve’s Eve get together. They said that IF it is happening, there is no way it could be caused by humans. And they said “global warming” in the same tone that one would use when talking about UFOs.

It gets better:  then they started talking about how Amish people treat the White people. I finally had to speak up and say, “Um, the Amish ARE white.”

My life is like one of those dark humor independent films like “Little Miss Sunshine.” Like, oh say, last week, when I was in a snow covered graveyard trying to find (and dig out) my long-dead grandfather’s grave (in high heels) with an ice scraper so that my now-dying grandmother could put a (fake plastic) Christmas wreath on it. Then our car got stuck on the icy path, precariously near a ledge, and I had to walk the whole way through the cemetary to someone’s house to ask for help.

So, basically, yes, basically, I am saying:  I hope you have a Merry Christmas, whether it is as quirky as mine or not.

My So-Called Life

In the past week, I have doing a lot of reading, some academic and some for pleasure. I am debating about whether I should try to do the entire Harry Potter series or not. I have not read a single book nor have I really had a desire to, but I feel like I am missing a crucial element of pop culture so I may as well.

One pop culture classic that I have no ambivalence about is the DVD set of the one and only season of My So-Called Life. I am so addicted! I remember that I really liked it when it originally aired way back in 1994-95. I was in 5th grade and loved Angela Chase. Ok, who am I kidding? I loved Jordan Catalano. Like most girls on the cusp of adolescence, I could not wait to be a teenager. And they all seemed so badass.

Now 13 years later, I have a completely different perspective on the show. It is knock your socks off realistic. Not in a gritty way, but in a sort of soft truth. Watching the show now completely transports me back to the misery of angst and self-consciousness that I experienced during early high school. But now, I see that the show is just as much about the parents and their relationship and I think that the show does an even better job of portraying marriage. From my position now – safely out of adolescence but not yet married- I feel empathetic and reminiscent of the adolescent struggle and increasingly intrigued and fascinated by the marriage/parenting aspect.

Bottom line: One of the best shows ever to be on television. And despite the flannel overload and grunge music references, timeless.

Running in a Winter Wonderland

I just got back from one of those “wow, it feels good to be alive” experiences.

After a full day of shopping yesterday, I was pretty exhausted today and tried to put off running for as long as possible. Even though I was excited to break in my new (and much needed!) pair of Mizuno running shoes (such a fancy runner these days), I waited until dark to go to the track.

I’m so glad I did! The moon was nearly full, all of the Christmas lights were on, and the snow on the ground was glittering. I barely ran one lap when I suddenly saw four beautiful white tailed deer within 15 feet of me. I kept moving and was able to get even closer before they got spooked. It was so amazing to be running with only the glow of the moon, Christmas lights and snow lighting up the path. I could see my breath and shadow and every few laps or so I would see the deer. I felt like I was living out what it would be like if Walt Disney made a Nike commercial.

I’m not sure if it was the atmosphere or because my legs were so frozen that I couldn’t feel anything anymore, but I ran about 6 miles.  A new distance record for me!

Xmas Shopping

Further proof that most of the world has not taken the GRE:

Today I went Christmas shopping with my mom and found a cute pair of shoes at a department store. We went to check out and the employee at the cash register said that we had to pay for the shoes at the shoe department because they work on commission.

I said, “Oh, in that case, don’t worry about it. I don’t want them. I’ve been waffling this whole time anyway.”

The employee looked perplexed, looked at the shoes, and muttered, “waffles?”

My mom then interjected, “Yes, she has been going back and forth about them.”

Good thing my mom is there to help me keep it real. The funny thing about having an expansive vocabulary is that sometimes it gets in the way of communicating.

I can change, I can change, I can change

So, wow, life is really changing for me these days.

It feels like the tectonic plates of my life have dramatically shifted. It definitely hasn’t been a sudden change. The massive plates of habit and and self  have been inching apart for a few months and now I have all of this new space in my mind to think clearly. Some of the plates have been growing apart which has made me less tense and emotional and mean. And some of the plates have been colliding and creating new landmasses of growth.

I am still not sure exactly where I want to go with all of this, in the sense that I do not have an ultimate conception of who I want to be or what I want my life to be like. And this is probably for the best.

Even though I cannot foresee the destination, I do know how I am going to get there. And for the first time since adolescence, I do not feel rushed or pressured to get there quickly and flawlessly. I have plenty of time. Right now, I am estimating that it will take until my 25th birthday. A year and a half seems like a luxurious amount of time to get to that nebulous place of where I want to be for this stage of my life. To be clear, I do not think that by age 25, I will have it all together. I merely think that by then I will have filled in the gaping holes and reached a more neutral state of being.

For the next year and a half, I am going to focus on my spiritual growth. I just finished reading a book on macrobiotics and I believe that I have found my “religion.” I have never been so convinced about anything like this before. It makes sense to me on an intellectual level which then allows me to open myself up spiritually. Plus, the macro lifestyle is completely suited for the changes that I want to make in myself. I am ready. I am excited. I know that this is right for me.

I can’t wait to get started on January 2!

Home again.

I have returned to the motherland. 

I have really been looking forward to getting back to Pennsylvania and spending time with my family again.  As the stress and papers piled up over the past few weeks, I was thinking that it would be a welcome respite from the craziness of the semester. I hoped that I could create a three week vacuum of relaxation and get some peace of mind away from Bloomington.

Unfortunately, it appears that this visit may be more of a reality check than a vacation. Since I have gone to grad school, I only visit home 2-3 times a year. This creates a situation where I am disconnected to the daily happenings and big struggles of my family and instead live an insulated life of telephonic cheerful recaps, small talk updates, and, in my mind, an idyllic representation of a small town life in which my family lives happily and uneventfully.

With my family mentally tucked away in a state of pleasant dullness, I have focused virtually all of my energy on my life, my education, my woes, my fun, and my self-growth. I have completely filled up my own life with myself.  

So now I am really sad to find out that life has not been so easy and happy for my family due to untimely deaths and illness. Real problems. Not angsty, self absorbed Laura problems, but matters of life and death. I feel bad for complaining so much about 2007 now because a lot of the things that were bad about it were not very important in the grand scheme of things. This past year was difficult because it was the first time that I really had to face myself and make mistakes that really came back to hurt me. But, in getting so wrapped up in the bruised ego and broken heart, I definitely let myself get disconnected from what was going on in the background of my life.

It’s just hard. It’s hard to be away. It’s hard to grow up and start building a life on your own. It’s hard to keep the relationship depth when there is distance and more immediate concerns. In some cases, my family and I were mutually working to shield me from these things. How could I ask about things when I wasn’t informed or when I was told about them, the gravity was downplayed? But maybe if I had made more of an effort to be involved, even at a distance, it all would have been revealed. Or maybe, since this has all been happening in the past 6 weeks, we all sort of thought that I could deal with it when I got here.

Regardless, I am here now. I am fully present and concerned and engaged. I will do everything I can to be a good listener and support person and to find out everything I can in order to remain plugged in when I return to Bloomington.

And I am going to be really conscious of appreciating this Christmas because it will likely be the last one when we will all be able to celebrate together in the way that we always have. It is bittersweet to know that, but it is better to know than not know, and it is better to be sad than stupid.

Appalling.

Yahoo News has been running some pretty terrible stories tonight.

I admit that I am fascinated by death. It is a natural human curiosity. And sometimes, we need to use humor to cope with it.

But it is entirely possible to go too far. And sometimes it just isn’t funny. It’s appalling.

The first story comes out of Penn State where two students dressed up as Virginia Tech shooting victims for Halloween. I just don’t see anything remotely funny about this. And if it was for the shock value, I would have to say that the only thing shocking about it is how repugnant it is.

But wait, it gets worse. The California Highway patrol sent out crime scene photos of 18 year old Nikki Catsouras who was decapitated after a high speed car crash last Halloween. The photos have spread all of the internet and people have taunted her family with them. Some of the comments online say that she deserved it for being a spoiled, rich girl and others defend the release of the photos as a warning to other young people who speed. She seems to have incited jealousy for being rich, young and beautiful, and yes, perhaps she could serve as a symbolic warning but people should remember that she was also someone’s daughter and sister. She was a person who deserves respect and privacy in death. How would you feel if there were pictures all over the internet of someone you love with their head torn off their body?

In both of these cases, people have invoked the First Amendment as reason for not being able to take any disciplinary action. While I wholeheartedly support the freedom of speech, I do feel like there should be some moral bounds to it. I just wish that there was someway to enforce a bottom line of moral decency. If we shall not yell fire in a crowded theater, then shall we also not reenact and circulate images of the gruesome deaths of young people?

I mean, really, have some respect.

1 day, 1 down, 1 to go

Well, for those keeping track, I am very close to being done with this cursed semester. I handed in the social psych paper this afternoon. I still don’t have any sense of its quality, but I will say it is one of the densest and longest pieces of social science that I have ever written. I actually went over the page allotment that I had set my sights on which I think is a good sign because for quite awhile, I was struggling to get past 9 pages.

It is unreal that I have been in school for 18 years, 6 of them at the collegiate level and I still have not learned the lesson of starting papers early and getting things mostly done by Thanksgiving or Spring break. Never again will I put things off so close to the deadlines. I’m getting too old for this type of procrastination and the resultant late nights and long hours when I am most depleted. Ah, well. Could I really expect anything more from the horrid year that was 2007?

On the bright side, I have finally gotten over my fear of going out in public in sweatpants. In high school, girls would sometimes wear pajama bottoms to school. I found this distasteful. In college, girls wore their Juicy track suits to class. I found this to be merely a more expensive show of bad taste. Is it really so hard to throw on a pair of jeans? But in grad school, I have found myself easing my anti-sloppiness stance and today, I actually went to Starbucks in sweatpants. I am both proud and not proud of this. In a way, I am loosening up. Maybe it sends out a vibe of “I’m so cool and chill in my casual athletic wear. I don’t care about my appearance.” Or maybe it sends the message, “I’m such a diligent student and concerned with schoolwork that I cannot be bothered to use a hairbrush.” But neither of those options – Sporty Spice or Sloppy Intellectual- are appealing to me. I will give myself a pass for this week because what is done is done and I can blame it on the freak accident that has been 2007.

But next semester, I am pulling it together. We all have boundaries that should be respected. Mine involve sweatpants. Sweatpants are for the privacy of my own home, and that is just the way I feel about it. Perhaps I will make 2008 be the year of heels and pearls. I will be the anti-slop. Class it up. I like it.

But for now, I will just sit here in my sweatpants, and finish editing Paper #2 that is due tomorrow and count down to the minutes until Wednesday when I will dance off the semester’s stress!