Eat, I must.

Between sessions of launching myself off diving boards and logging miles on the pavement this fall I slogged my way dutifully through my first formal nutrition class. A prerequisite for nursing (and pretty much any health field) I was introduced to the finer points of medical nutrition therapy and met again the USDA recommendations for a healthy diet. It's not the first time I've heard this information, anyone who's been through health class in public school has been subjected to the rigors of what to eat, how much to eat, and what to do if you eat to much.

But for some time now I've been struggling with the big agency of what really constitutes a healthy diet. America is notorious for being a "melting pot" society, an overly used descriptive phrase if there ever was one yet one that still accurately describes our situation. However our blessing of diversity and government mandated policies regarding our food has manifested itself in a food culture that has basically become a display of the magic of product processing.

Biologically humans are driven to two ends: reproduction and eating. It's wired into our evolutionary centers to feed ourselves and pass on our genes and we honor millions of years of fine tuning every time we sit down to a meal or smile at a pretty partner. But while we've placed extreme care in selecting the right mate it seems like for many of us choosing what we consume has taken a back seat. How could we have let eating become a chore instead of the life-sustaining activity that it really is.

There is a tangible feeling to consuming simple foods. Clean water, fresh baked bread smeared with plain butter, crisp fruits, vegetables roasted within an inch of their lives, and meat coaxed into flavor spectrum with just herbs. It's a beautiful thing and there are few activities more pleasurable than enjoying good food.

But it's rare that we really take the time to appreciate the foods we have. In a system designed for mass production and additives I'm forging, and foraging, a path to good tastes and simplicity. I love eating and food way to much to listen to government recommendations any longer and subject myself to "diets".

So I challenge myself to eating for life again. Not eating for a diet, not eating for a vision or a cause. I'm sick of hearing about how I should go organic to avoid pesticides or save the planet. I don't want to be a foodie or a chef. I just want to eat and nourish and enjoy what I'm putting into my body. To tap into that deep seated part of myself that is connected to the act of feeding for life. It's going to be a fun trip.

So thanks for the memories USDA recommendations, but I think I'll figure this one out on my own.

Brow Crinkling

It seems like every day there is something that I discover that just confuses the hell out of me. I don't know if it's because I'm more aware now of variety after spending two years in isolation, or if it's really because there is some crazy stuff out there. Really, I have no idea. But here's a short list of things that cause my brows to come together in a look of confusion. Real "crinklers" as I like to call them.

1. Coke Zero
What's the difference between Diet Coke and Coke Zero? Maybe I've just completely missed the boat on this one, but it seems like it's the same product under two different names. Both offer a zero calorie version of delicious addictive Coke, so what could be the underlying difference? At first I thought it might be the taste. But after trying both (yes, I did a taste test) I found they were pretty similar to the point of not having any real difference. They both had an after-taste, they both were bubbly, they both were brown. Meh, at the end of the day I'm not really impressed by Coke Zero.

2. Shake and Pour Pancake Batter
Have we really gotten this lazy? Seriously? I have a hard time reconciling this one in my head let alone bringing myself to actually try it. Part of the fun of pancakes is the chemistry like trial and error of making the batter in a big bowl. Is it too thin? Too thick?? You'll never know if you're just shaking it in a jug! But I guess props to the company for bringing back the jug. Many foods are better from jugs. Just not pancakes.

3. Vampires
I go away for five minutes and pop culture goes insane for vampires. Every where you look there's some kind of new show or movie or book or teen hyped sensation over blood suckers. Oh, and that one Tyra show where she had "real" vampires on. (Pretty much the only channel I got clear reception on the island showed the Tyra Banks show. Stop Judging.) She had this one guy who slept in a coffin and this other girl who said that because she stayed up all night and slept all day then she was a vampire. I knew guys in school who had that sleep schedule. And they weren't vampires. Just engineers. Seriously, this whole entertainment theme needs to stop.

4. Lady Gaga
This seems pretty self explanatory.

5. Vanilla Oreos
This just goes against nature. Oreos by definition are chocolate, and on the rare occasion that I actually eat an Oreo I want one that is going to bring all the nostalgia and delicious-ness that only a chocolate double-stuff can bring. If I'm going to eat it, I'm going to do it right. None of this vanilla junk. Bring on the chocolate!!!

Been down that road before. Seriously.

I've written about running before on this blog and I'm sure that some of my other posts were much more poetic than this one is going to be. Those that came before were probably written from the pleasant perspective of just having run a race or dreaming of the time when I could fly down a road feeling totally comfortable and making it look easy. I have come to find out that running is not easy for me.

Sometime in the middle of last summer I decided in my head that I would run a half-marathon sometime in the next year. This was coming at a point when I was barely making it three miles down the road. How I expected myself to pull off thirteen miles was beyond my comprehension, but somewhere in my head some part of my brain decided it was doable. This was the same part of my brain that says that springboard diving was a good idea. Yeah, it's gotten me into trouble before.

This year I decided to make good on my promise to myself and set my sights on running that half this fall. That was back in early June and I decided on the Wine Country Half-Marathon happening October 11th in Healdsburg. At the time, October seemed like an eternity away. I counted the weeks, planned out my schedule, and decided that I really was going to commit.

And so far I've done pretty good. I'm keeping to the plan, maintaining solid runs and squeezing more miles out of my body than I had previously thought possible. I've abandoned the idea of finishing with a time goal. I simply want to finish. I want to finish so bad that it's consuming me. I realized a few days ago that I am roughly six weeks from tee-off (so to speak) and I am partly excited but mostly scared out of my mind.

I know I'm preparing for it, but the distance so beyond me right now. Trying to do this on my own without any running partners is a challenge. I have to rely solely on my own determination to keep pushing when I want to quit. Tim said to me one morning as I was heading out the door that my mind will give out long before my body will. It's no surprise that I repeat that to myself when I'm feeling the mental pain and pushing myself.

I'll be happy when this is over. I can feel my body changing but I am still a little haunted by the person who's never done something like this before. I still feel like I'm biting off more than I can chew, that I really am destined to be the fat kid in the corner who gets picked last in gym and gets pounded with the dodgeballs anyways.

I don't know what lies beyond the half, but I'm willing to find out. I guess that's what keeps me going.

The funny thing about stereotypes is that they're built on some truth.

I know I shouldn't be doing this, but right now I am feeling an incredible wave of regret. This past spring I was rejected from every graduate program I applied to, even though I worked really hard to make myself an attractive candidate. At the time I wasn't devastated by the news, but for some reason it's stinging now more than I thought it would.

I applied in science writing programs, one of them at UC Santa Cruz. Every year UCSC publishes the works of their grads, and for the most part they're all very good. Actually, they're all very good. The only fault I can find with them is in the inclusion of short biographies of the student writers at the bottom of their stories. If I ever want to feel inadequate as either a scientist or as a writer all I need to do is to read these bios.

I read one tonight for a guy who is a dead-ringer for Jason Schwartzman, and whose ego is unrivaled. He declared that it was Nobel laureate who told him he should be a writer, egging him on in a passion he'd carried since childhood. As if the endorsement of a Nobel winner makes him a certifiable genius, he at least assumes it gives him the liberty to take head shots wearing corduroy jackets and collared shirts, tilting his head as if to say, "Yeah, I'm smarter than you."

I hate this guy. I feel it deep down in a place I don't even like to think about and it really doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel good when I'm struggling to find work and trying to go to school while trying to make new friends and get back into life. I hate this guy for his pretentious picture and his ability to succeed where I so blatantly failed.

Maybe that's what's pissing me off the most about it.

If I were meant to fly, I'd have wings

First off, I am not your textbook definition of an athlete. If you really held me down and threatened it out of me I'd call myself a runner more than anything else, but really my gait probably more resembles an awkward shuffle than anything else. But it does the trick. Growing up I wasn't particularly physically inclined, I played my fair share of softball and managed a good time out of that, but once I got to high school I was entrenched in band and was more apt to spend my time studying or playing music than anything else.

The last few years I've been flirting with sports participation, explaining my most recent devotion to running from point A to point B, but in the last few weeks I've stepped it up in ways I never thought I would. This term at school I decided, mostly on a whim than anything else, to take a springboard diving class. I have no idea what possessed me to do this. I am not fond of heights, let alone jumping off them. When I told a friend of mine what I was going to be doing they said, "You know pirates used to make people walk the plank as punishment," I guess he meant the diving board was my personal form of the plank.

And it was with that in mind that I found myself on Monday standing with my back to the pool on the end of the board and the diving coach literally 6 inches from my body. He wanted me to do something completely against my self-protective nature. He was telling me to reach up over my head, look at my hands, and reach back towards the pool. The theory was that by doing so I would execute a passable back-dive, something I'd never done before. To say that I was terrified was an understatement. If I had been wearing pants I'm sure I would have peed them. Being as it was it was rather anti-climatic to pee your bathing suit I settled on some shaking breaths instead.

He counted to three and when I starting tilting a little bit he sped his voice up and started saying, "gogogogogogo". I wanted to punch him, and I'm sure I could have if it wouldn't have ended up with me being dropped into the pool anyways. Sure enough upon leaving the board I suddenly saw the water coming up at me. Rapidly at me. I had barely enough time to think, "Shi-" before breaking the surface, my eyes completely open.

Flashing back to my favorite movie as a kid where the heroine went blind because she dove into a pool of water with her eyes open I surfaced and gasped for air while making sure my eyesight was still intact. I could see the coach laughing from the board, the other students on the deck trembling a little in fear but smiling at my success at not killing myself. My eyes and brain stung from the sudden onslaught of chlorine, but all in all I was intact.

Maybe the constantly facing my fears part of class will cause me some personal growth or something along those lines, but for now I'm just hoping I can avoid shaking pool water out of the back of my skull after back-dives. Then we'll consider it a win.

change...can ya spare it?

I don't know how many times I've changed this blog, the layouts, the pictures, the tone, the themes. Bah. It's getting old. I even remember those days when I thought I had important things to say. Now I just realize that whatever I say is important pretty much only to me and at the end of the day that's an okay thing. There's a certain arrogance about blogging, about putting your thoughts out into the world. Or as much of the world as the two people who have ever read this are a part of. But goodness knows I love those two people...

Tears

Today was definitely a tears day. I ran a 5k this morning and it was hard. Hotter than I'm used I had a hard time through the entire thing. I've got a long way to go before October. I'm figuring to run the Kenwood footrace on the 4th of July, I haven't decided on the distance though. It depends on how I'm feeling and the training I've been able to get in.

I'm hoping this month to get back into the swing of training. I'm also figuring maybe I should stop paying attention to what's going on with my watch. I get really stressed about the running a race that i forget that I really have fun when I'm out there on my own. So I have to get back to that mindset.

it's come time

I am leaving the island in a few weeks to start a new chapter. I'm moving to Northern California and it's going to be so good. I'm in the process of finding a place, a job, and a car. I'll be moving by the end of the month.