Trying to get out of this funk I’ve been in for the past 2 1/2 weeks. This is the longest one since 3-11. They usually last less than a week. The other day, I started feeling short of breath when all I was doing was standing there. I am wondering if this is part of (peri-) menopause, or if I am under too much stress and need a career change, or if I was just hypoglycemic or something. I’m in my mid-40s, the workload certainly was crazy that day, and it was around 1 pm and I hadn’t had lunch yet, so it could have been any of the three.

I’m trying to be responsible for my health, but the world is not cooperating. It’s been too cold and windy to run, so I’ve been making do with doing Jillian Michaels’s 30 Day Shred. Some exercise isalways better than no exercise. This past Friday, I tried to book a mammogram and they said they were full until the end of the month. Unfortunately, the end of the month is when my Pumpkin City-issued mammogram coupons expire, so I’ll have to wait for the next set of coupons to arrive (sometime in April). I’m trying to look on the bright side. So many women are getting mammograms and finding breast cancers that would have otherwise grown fat and content and spread all over the place! This is a good thing.

The other thing that’s potentially lengthening my misery is not sewing. I haven’t done anything since the New Year Holiday. I want to shorten the sleeves on a new Uniqlo blouse I got last fall, but after a washing, the sleeves are a little tighter than I like, so I’m wondering if it’ll be worth the effort. I have a blazer with sleeves that could use shortening, but it fits so nicely around the shoulders that I’m not sure I want to mess with them. The contrasting lining is really cute so it looks nice with the sleeves rolled up, so I want to keep the cuffs loose. My white jeans need replacing (the narrowed seams are starting to fray) so maybe that will be my next purchase/ alteration. Or, it might be my summer shirts.

I found a new fashion blogger that I liked (I need new fashion blogs to follow because my favorite bloggers have outlived their useful lives and become commercials for the companies that pay them to wear their clothes and carry their bags and fly on their airlines.) She dresses almost entirely in Uniqlo. Note I said “liked.” I liked her until I realized she was 10 cm taller than me but wears jeans three sizes smaller. This makes 1) me jealous of how slender she is 2) her blog becomes irrelevant to me because even if I can afford the clothes she blogs, they will never look the way they do on her on me.

So, here's to hoping next week will be better than the past two.

Willpower

Ishi no chikara

(Pictured: What we try to will ourselves away from, with inconsistent degrees of success. And by inconsistent, I mean negligible.)

The past week, I’ve kept a journal (o.k., more like a checklist) of what I did (or didn’t do) that day. I found that when I do everything like I’m supposed to (like exercise AND work like the Energizer Bunny all day AND stay away from social media until I’ve done everything AND not drink or eat chips before bed), I will get “good behavior fatigue” and have about two rebound days short on exercise and big on emotional eating and going down the internet rabbit hole. And while I am ready to forgive myself for one rebound day, I will beat myself up over having two in a row, then I will get moody and snap at innocent strangers (well, the guy wasn’t completely innocent, he was being righteous and obnoxious, but being those things isn’t a crime and he shouldn’t have had some middle-aged woman he didn’t know yell at him because of it).

So what is the solution here? Set lower expectations for myself? Try harder not to have two rebound days? Forgive myself when I do? Or maybe all of the above?

Time flies like an arrow

Kouin ya no gotoshi (this one is kind of like a proverb so it's in classical Japanese)

Three weeks into the New Year. Wow, that’s fast! I think it gets faster every year, as we age. (Theory of relativity in ageing: a person’s concept of time is determined by the relationship between a given time frame and how long the person has lived. One year to a seven-year-old is 1/7^th of his life, whereas one year to a 45-year-old is 1/45^th of his.)

Addendum to New Year’s Goals: 

1)    I’m still working on the online course. I’m up to Unit 4 (of 8). It’s difficult, which is why I didn’t absorb and retain it as an undergrad.

2)    The Pumpkin Princess sewed her drawstring bag all by herself. I let her make mistakes, pointed them out before they became impossible to fix, and let her do all the ripping out and re-stitching by herself. She now proudly carries her PE uniform in it every week.

3)    The decluttering has spread to the pantry. Spices expired pre-2011? WTF??

4)    I should hire a gardener.

5)    Only four cubes left. I definitely should have made a bigger batch.

6)    I ran 6k on the second weekday after the holiday, and I think that should count as a holiday run, so  that I can say I accomplished my goal of doing 3 runs over the holidays. Since then, I’ve done Jillian Michaels’s 30 Day-Shred Level 1 when it looked like consecutive days of bad weather would give me more than a whole week without exercise.

7)    Ended up with leftovers that stayed in the fridge longer than several days, and had to chuck them. I’ll have to revise my New Year’s Cooking for the next New Year’s Holiday, since the next one looks just as short as this one.

Trying to stay focused and do my part in the machine of quasi-academia and society, but also trying to be realistic about what I can and cannot do, and what is best for me and my family. 

Aren't we all?