Front-Matter Addendum: a colleague of mine has suggested that, however unlikely it may be, it's possible that someone who would take offense to this post would come upon it and that I could avoid an unlikely google search by omitting the actual name of the school/district in which I teach. Given that my last name is no where on this blog and run-of-the-mill google searches do not bring it up, I don't really see any reason to be additionally cautious. However, I have changed the name of the school and district to something very silly, which I think improves the piece dramatically. Please enjoy.
I just finished my 29th teaching day at my new job. Now 16% of the way through the school year (a figure that raises the simultaneous questions of "already that far in?" and "only that far in?"), I am starting to get a real read on the deal with Plumberville High. I suspect it will take me many more months to have a true understanding of the climate, culture, and actual operations from top to bottom, but at least I can say that I am no longer completely ignorant and in the dark. If this were the Allegory of the Cave, I would be like a third of the way out of the cave, at least aware that there was a world beyond it.
Plumberville High School (and, either as a cause or a result, the entire district) is obsessed with testing. Although I don't think this is a positive characterization, I doubt that even the administrators there would wholly disagree with me. PHS spends an inordinate amount of time and energy (and therefore money) on preparing students for tests. The biggest and most critical of these is the MCAS, or Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System. Although it is slated to be replaced by the hopefully-but-probably-not-that-much-better PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) test, the MCAS is still the be-all and end-all for 9th and 10th grade students at PHS. English 1 and 2 courses could easily be called MCAS Preparation 1 and 2, and that would not be entirely inaccurate. This is not to say that these classes have no value outside of the tests, or that the teachers of these classes are not doing wonderful jobs - neither of those are true - but it is apparent from a single curriculum development meeting or even a glimpse at the unit and lesson plans of these courses that the ultimate goal is for all students to score Proficient or Advanced on the MCAS.
Fortunately for those of us teaching 11th or 12th grade, this pressure is non-existent because the 10th grade MCAS test is the final one for both ELA and Math. There is, however, now an increased focus on raising student performance on the SATs, typically taken late in junior or early in senior year. Although the time and attention devoted to preparation for this test (which, by the way, was originally called the Scholastic Aptitude Test but now the letters stand for...get this...nothing) is far less than that which is devoted to the MCAS, at least in the English Department, there has still been a push from administration to get students prepared for this college entrance exam.
The problem with the angle the school is taking, which is the problem with all teach-to-the-test curricula, is that the ultimate goal is never to better students' learning, impart unto them valuable skills which they can use in a variety of career paths or educational settings, or even get them ready for college (a goal which, in itself, is fairly short-sighted and should be addressed at an appropriate scale). The goal is to raise test scores. Full stop. Period. The end. If students' learning is increased and they build skills, that's great, but those outcomes are not necessary for the school's plans to be considered successful. If students scored Super-Mega-Opposite-of-Dummy Advanced on the MCAS and all subsequent standardized tests, yet were unable to discuss a book in a thoughtful way or count correct change at a cashiering job, the teachers themselves would likely be rather concerned, but the administration at large would consider this a speed bump, not a major problem.
To be fair, I did know to some extent what I was getting into at Plumberville High. Any public school in Massachusetts with such a diverse population and an iffy academic record is going to be focused on test preparation because of a number of factors, Race to the Top/No Child Left Behind not being the least of those. I became aware of just how key MCAS was at PHS when I concluded by initial job interview with a written task. My assignment was to examine the assessment data from a theoretical class, read through and score an open response writing sample (one of the two types of writing done on the MCAS), and then design a lesson to supplement the class' learning based on what I thought they needed help with. The whole thing stunk of MCAS prep, and there was no effort on the part of the interviewer to disguise this fact. I completed the task, apparently to the satisfaction of the department head, and after another interview I was offered the position.
After I was officially hired and began attending professional development sessions, my first impressions were only confirmed, especially after I sat in a classroom for two hours after school one day and essentially observed the 9th and 10th grade teachers making lesson plans directed at improving students' performances on the open response section of the MCAS. At least, I'm pretty sure that's what was happening; it was hard to keep my attention on the conversation at hand given that it a) didn't apply to my practice and b) was yet another conversation about how better to prepare students for assessments. The broken record of "let's raise those scores!" was beginning to wear on me.
The problem - as I see it - is that Plumberville's plan is working. Their MCAS scores have gone up by huge leaps and bounds the last couple of years. The goal is being met, and even exceeded in some cases. The plan, approaching areas of the test with the greatest potential for improvement, is actually a very good method if the only thing you care about is raising test scores. It's like practicing "Smoke On The Water" over and over again on guitar...eventually you'll be really good at that song, but if someone asks you to play a whole set at a gig, you're fucked. These kids get absolutely pounded into the ground with drills for open responses, but half of them don't know what they're talking about, and I daresay that more than half of them crumble when writing outside the very prescriptive and static confines of such a writing environment.
I consider it rather unfortunate that Plumberville has been honored and awarded repeatedly over the past month for these achievements. The increase in MCAS scores is one of the primary reasons that Plumberville High went from a Level 3 school (considered low-performing but not bad enough to get taken over by the state) to a Level 1 school (highest possible rank) in the Massachusetts school accountability ranking system. The administration's collective reactions to the MCAS scores and subsequent student growth percentile (or SGP, a number that indicates individual student improvement on the MCAS in Math and ELA) was nothing short of orgasmic. The English department head came around to classes on the day the MCAS scores were officially released and joyously congratulated the students on their data. The kids had no idea what SGP was or what it meant to be a Level 1 school, but the department head was happy, so it must be good news.
The reason I consider this delight to be unfortunate is that it's only reinforcing a shitty direction of curriculum and instruction. The emphasis on open responses and test preparation did, indeed, allow PHS to achieve its goal of raising test scores, but there is no "and then..." The test scores were the end point. My response to the gleeful announcements of success is an internal So fucking what? The delight with the test scores comes from a deep, willful misunderstanding of the purpose of assessments. It's not Plumberville's fault (see these articles, many by Diane Ravitch), but they are going with a flow that is not a good flow with which to go. Public education in America is jumping off a bridge and Plumberville, heedless of its parents' warnings about peer pressure and mindless social conformity, is jumping too.
If you ask any educator about the purpose of assessments (in theory, not in practice as in the case of the MCAS), you'll probably get an answer like, "to see how we're doing, to see where we're succeeding and where we could improve, and to make our instruction better." This rationale has been so twisted and perverted by policy-makers and heads-too-busy-being-up-asses-to-be-in-classrooms top-level administrators that the spirit of education and assessment's role in education has been discarded in favor of a completely new reality: selectively-collecting data that doesn't necessarily represent good teaching or good learning, but it's data we know how to work with, and then using that data to make huge generalizations about every student, teacher, classroom, and school which then means huge decisions get made based on those generalizations. Because the data from assessments is being used to drive instruction and all decision-making from top to bottom, the raising of test scores becomes the goal rather than a measurement tool. It's like keeping your car's engine topped off with motor oil so that you don't disappoint the dipstick. The logic is completely backwards.
I can't blame Plumberville for being this way, at least not with anything more than some frustration in my heart. The fucked up assessment-is-the-goal point of view is not only common among public schools across the country, it's being actively encouraged by both state and federal programs and mandates. Instead of improving the school in order to improve the test scores, many schools (generally those with a history of low performance on standardized assessments and not a lot of money in the coffers) don't bother taking a holistic approach, instead targeting the test - what appears to be the simple solution to the proposed problem actually kind of ruins everything forever.
It is with all of these thoughts and feelings roiling around in my head that I find myself carving out a space at Plumberville High School for little ol' me. Given the rhetoric and cult-like obsession with test scores that was so aggressively transmitted in every encounter I had in my summer professional development, I worried that I had left one flawed tiny alternative program to end up in a just-as-flawed huge high school, and that I may not have chosen the best place to work. My personal education philosophy, or Every Education Grad Student's First Paper, conflicts so directly with the emphasis on assessment and top-down micromanage-y mandates regarding what is taught and how (particularly in grades 9 and 10, where the classes within each grade level are so uniform that one could almost rotate the teachers and hardly tell the difference between them), I figured I wouldn't last a year at Plumberville. Either they would find my alternative-education whole-student tests-are-just-tests-man approach to be inappropriate for the setting and would can me in June or I would become so disillusioned and my delicate sensibilities would be so offended (I do declare!) that I would leave after a year.
I have found myself thinking less and less this way in the last few weeks. I have two things to thank for this. First, my students are fucking great. I don't mean that they are all high-achievers or even universally kind-hearted and motivated beyond belief. Frankly, some of them are shitheads and some of them don't care very much and many of them are not trying as hard as they could. But that's not what I'm talking about. They are interesting. They come to class. They ask and answer questions. They smile and laugh when things are funny, get outraged when things are unfair, and feel pity for fictional characters going through a hard time. They show depth and range as human beings that I admire. Sometimes I want to beat them half to death for making bad decisions or not demonstrating the thing I taught them all week and then we have to do it over again...but if I didn't like them, I wouldn't give a shit if they made good choices or learned anything. I'm already deeply invested in their learning and success, as whole people, and I want them to do better, to shoot for their maximum potential even if they never quite reach it. It made me a little sad when they got their MCAS scores and announced with delight "I'm advanced!" and "I'm proficient!" Labeling these kids does absolutely nothing for them. It's borderline toxic, but we do it anyway. I want so badly for them to get beyond those useless labels and call themselves things like "driven" or "skilled" or "improving".
The other factor that has shifted my thinking was a brief meeting I had with my department head a couple of weeks ago. Before school began, one of our many staff meetings addressed the issue of reading aloud in classes. Apparently PHS used to do what I did at EDCO, which is to read aloud almost all of the novels together in class. Students either struggled with the reading at home or didn't bother to do it, so it was done in class.
[If you're discussing and exploring the text as you read aloud, it takes about 4 minutes to read a page of a novel written at the high school reading level (an estimate I came to confirm many times over when reading 10 pages in a 45-minute class at EDCO) - this number is less when you don't bother to discuss, explain, or question as you go, but I'm talking about maximum depth and coverage as you read. If this number is our basis for calculations, a 250-page novel would take 1000 minutes to read aloud, or 18 55-minute class periods (the length at PHS), assuming you read from bell to bell. Given that classes only meet 36 times per quarter and the general rule of thumb is one novel per quarter, that means that literally half of class time would be spent just reading the text.]
The English department head found this kind of ridiculous, which I agree with, and she decided that much more reading needed to be done at home. At the end of last school year, against the wishes of many of the teachers, she dictated the appropriate percentages of at-home reading based on course level. Honors classes would read 100% of the text at home, standard levels would read 75% at home, and the lower-level skills courses would work up from 25% to approach 75% by the end of the year. If those numbers seem fine, I guess, but totally arbitrary to you...well, you're not wrong. As soon as I was presented with the percentages, ever fiber of my being rebelled at the idea of being told exactly how many pages of a novel are permitted to be read in class. Their Eyes Were Watching God, the first novel for juniors, is 193 pages. Does that mean that 48 pages may be read in a standard class, but 49 is unacceptable? And which 48 pages are we talking about? For honors, is reading even a single page verboten?
When I (and my colleagues) raised these concerns to the department head, she acknowledged that there would, of course, always be appropriate times to read in class. The first page of a chapter, the very beginning of a novel, a pivotal scene, or anything for close reading of a small section...these are all reasonable things to read together, regardless of level. So with these figures in mind but the ever-present voice of reason urging me to make good instructional choices independent of the numbers, I forged ahead with my plans and lessons. The first time my department head came to observe, she did so while we were reading the first few pages of chapter 2, the first "real" chapter of a novel told as a frame narrative (story-within-a-story) and a crucial scene where some wacky shit happens under a pear tree. As soon as she walked in, I knew exactly what conversation we would be having later. I changed nothing about the lesson, delighted when my students put two and two together ("you mean that 'ecstatic shiver' and 'limp and languid' are sexy words?!?"), and went on with my day. My expectations were met when my department head later reminded me of the percentages we had discussed and warned me of the dangers of "getting caught up in the reading" as if this were antithetical to good instruction, like, at all.
I nodded politely and left the meeting feeling as though all of my negative assumptions and impressions were correct, and I was doomed to hate this job, get fired, or both. A short time later, the aforementioned department head sent out a survey to all the ELA teachers with general questions like "Do you have any classes or students that you're concerned about?" and "What could the department be doing to help or support you?" and so on. It was not anonymous. I figured that there was no reason to play games with my thoughts, and I answered the questions tactfully but honestly, making sure to mention in particular that I felt as though my instruction were being micromanaged with the reading percentages. Later, when my department head asked me to meet with her, we discussed the variety of topics in my replies, including this. The exchange, if you'll forgive a crude foreshortening of a paraphrase, went something like this:
Department Head: You expressed some concern about the reading percentages and everything. Well, you know, those are really just guidelines. You know best how to teach your own classes.
Me: Well, that's basically the opposite of the message we've been getting from you.
DH: Yeah, but, you know, the percentages are just to get people to move in the right direction.
Me: Yeah, except when I followed your precise instructions for acceptable exceptions to the read-less-in-class guideline, you still gave me feedback that instructed me not to read in class with them.
DH: Yes, I did. But..well...if I were worried about you, I would tell you.
Me: Um...okay.
And it was in that moment that I realized several things: first, my department head seems perpetually confused about reality, perception, perspective, and communication. So I should listen but take things with a grain of salt unless all the other teachers give me the "no, really bro" signal. Second, despite administration in general and my department head in particular appearing to have no faith in the abilities of the staff they themselves selected, apparently I am being trusted to teach, in a manner of speaking, so I should just do that, and do it well. Third, and perhaps most importantly, my job is not to please my department head. My job is to teach. Me trying to get my department head to give me good feedback is just as stupid as PHS focusing on raising test scores. You might get what you want, but you're missing the point. If I do a good job, and try really hard, and am always improving, and I can stand by my work and say, "yes, I did these kids a service and I am proud of what I've done," then my department head's opinion is secondary. If I'm proud of my work and she's not, then it's not a good place for me to work. If I'm proud of my work and she is too, then all the prescriptive bullshit doesn't matter.
It's a little ironic that the conclusion I've come to, and the perspective I have now taken, is one espoused by administration with words but subverted with actions. The headmaster, who interviewed me in the second round of the hiring process, paid a great deal of lip service to putting the kids first, building rapport with students and fostering a community of learners, so on and so forth. The test obsession is NOT doing any of those things, but I don't think he or any of the other PHS administrators truly understand this conflict or are doing anything out of malicious intent. They want the kids to do well, and they see test scores as the indicator of that, end of story. For me, test scores are a piece of a complicated puzzle, and I will celebrate my students' successes in that area as I celebrate their other small victories -- coming to school on time for the first time in several days, finishing a particularly hard assignment, grasping the elusive figurative meaning of a passage in the novel, remembering a tricky literary device and how its used, getting a job at a place they've always wanted to work, performing well in a soccer game, or whatever else is important to them.
At an all-day professional development session before the recent long weekend, the day ended with a rousing chorus of the school song (which I had never heard) and the distribution of t-shirts that read "PHS WE'RE #1". I felt the familiar doublethink conflict of simultaneously feeling inspired/energized by the proceedings and remaining cynical about the whole thing. I made the active decision to let the former feelings win. I like liking my school. I changed into my new (very large) t-shirt before I left and wore it proudly about town. It has already become my go-to bum-around-the-house shirt. I wear it with pride, but also with the knowledge that the intention behind the shirt is good, even if the rationale and execution of the ideology ("we're #1" referring to our MCAS scores and Level 1 status) is fairly shitty. It serves as both a positive symbol of my workplace and a cautionary tale about what happens when you aim for the wrong goals. Pretty important for a stupid shirt.
There are a lot of reasons that Plumberville High could be really good for me. The environment, job expectations, day-to-day tasks, and complicated inner-workings are all challenging in a way that I find productive and useful. I'm learning every day, improving my practice and honing my skills, and hopefully becoming a better teacher with each class. My vain and pompous hope is that, if I'm there long enough and I get good enough, I can be really good for Plumberville High School too. Not as a subversive secret agent who defies the administration's edicts and gives the kids the real scoop but rather as a community leader who pushes for positive change and open communication to improve every class and the working and learning environments for everyone in the building. We'll see if I survive my first year, and if PHS likes me enough to keep me. I'm still finding my place, learning the ropes as they say, so it's too early to tell. But I'm in a hopeful, positive place, mentally. It's like being adopted by a dysfunctional, fucked up family. It may be totally crazy sometimes, and there's a stranglin' or two, but at the end of the day, you're home.
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
How "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" Fucked Up My Life
Okay, that title comes off a little dramatic. It's not like it fucked up my whole life, and it's not like this is really limited to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It's just a particularly good exemplar of something that has dictated my perspective and behavior and basically every relationship and social interaction I've ever had. That still sounds pretty dramatic. Let me explain.
If it's been a while since you've seen Temple of Doom or you just blocked it out of your memory, I'll remind you. Dr. Jones, who has no time for love, gets stuck with a blonde, high-maintenance lounge singer in a tiny village in India. With the help of his diminutive Asian side-kick, Indiana Jones discovers a human-sacrificing cult underneath a huge palace, gets captured, gets brainwashed, gets unbrainwashed, and breaks up a child slavery ring before defeating the creepy cult leader and returning the aforementioned child slaves to their families in the aforementioned tiny village.
As this is an Indiana Jones movie, it is defined just as much by its female companion as by its villain. In The Temple of Doom, this companion is Willie Scott, an American singer working in a Shanghai nightclub at the beginning of the film. When Dr. Jones unwittingly drinks poison in an archaeological business deal gone wrong, he threatens Willie's life in exchange for the antidote. Chaos ensues, we learn that Willie is shallow and motivated by diamonds, and eventually Dr. Jones, Willie, and Short Round escape, only to board a plane owned by the criminal who poisoned Indiana in the first place. The three must jump out of the plane via an inflatable raft, and somehow don't die on the way down a huge mountain that terminates in the middle of nowhere in India.
The entire time, Willie is losing her shit, screaming and yelling, sassing Indiana Jones and somehow not finding Short Round endearing. She blames Indiana Jones for basically everything that's happening, and it only gets worse from there. She has to ride an elephant in the jungle, where she is accosted by her own beast of burden as well as the local fauna. At Pankot palace, she blanches and finally faints when presented with a racist-ass meal of live eels, eyeball soup, and monkey brains. Later, when Dr. Jones sexually propositions her and then goes back to his room, she reacts with frustration when he later returns and silently searches her room (for an attacker she doesn't realize he expects to find, given he was just accosted in his room). She recoils when called down into a dank hallway literally covered with various insects.
Indiana Jones has absolutely no time for Willie's bullshit. He's trying to uncover the mystery of Pankot palace, help a bunch of enslaved brainwashed children, find a magical stone, and not get crushed by some spiky ceiling shit. In fact, he barely has enough time to tell Willie he doesn't have enough time for her shit. She is constantly screaming when silence is required, causing international incidents with her vaguely racist reactions to local custom, and giving Dr. Jones the business when he's in some high-pressure situations. She is like a 110-pound rucksack that squeals every five minutes and constantly complains about being carried. She is the worst.
Yeah, except she's not. Let's take a minute to look at the facts. Indiana Jones took her hostage in the first scene of the movie and she gets caught up in all of his international archaeologist drama. She doesn't intend to fly to India, or visit Pankot palace, or save a bunch of kids or any of that. She intended to sing in a Shanghai nightclub and schmooze with rich patrons. That's it. She's not an adventurer and she doesn't want to be one. She enjoys a life of privilege and has no intention of leaving it. So when she's doused in stagnant jungle water by a baby elephant and presented with monkey brains (in the original container) and forced to climb through the most impressive insect infestation in history, she freaks out. Because that's what a normal person would do. I can't think of a single person I know who would do anything other than shout "fuck that!" and storm out when presented with "snake surprise" for dinner.
And yet, Willie is the most annoying female companion of any Indiana Jones movie by far, and there's not a single scene in the movie when she's not a humungous pain in the ass. Even though I recognize that she is reacting like most people would react (throwing more tantrums, perhaps, but those aren't ridiculous, just exaggerated), I still watch the movie and think Jesus Christ, lady, get it together. Just shut the fuuuuuuuuck uuuuuuup. And that's my problem.
You see, Willie Scott is the perfect example of how I view women in relationships. They're needy, whiny, prissy, spoiled, and incredibly high-maintenance. I assume that Willie Scott is how men view women with needs, and if I hate her guts without having to be responsible for her, I can't imagine how much a theoretical boyfriend would hate her. So, without consciously realizing it, I have spent my entire life since puberty trying not to be Willie Scott. Independent, self-reliant, tough, stoic, low-maintenance. I saw the woman in a relationship being a burden on the man, and I resolved never to be that burden. So I have always done my best to ask nothing of my partner. My needs, however objectively reasonable, were always a little too much to ask to be fulfilled. My concerns, however objectively reasonable, were always a little too overblown or dramatic to be addressed. I would actively dismiss and devalue these things because I assumed that asking absolutely anything of my partner would mean I was Willie Scott.
I'm sure you can see how this could be a problem. After all, I'm not a saint, nor am I some mythical being who has no needs or concerns. So eventually, all my once-reasonable qualms would burst forth in the midst of some minor disagreement, so that an argument about a miscommunication of social plans suddenly turns into a huge Airing of Grievances, where both parties lay out all of the now-huge problems and then there's crying and raised voices and perhaps some vulgar language. In trying not to be Willie Scott, I basically guaranteed that I would be an awful person to be in a relationship with, just in a more staccato way. 90% of the time, my needs weren't being met and I was unhappy, then 10% of the time my needs weren't being met and I was very loudly unhappy. I would become resentful because I try to be such a caregiver and nurturer in relationships, but I never seemed to date anyone who behaved the same way.
Of course, I talk about this in the past tense, but this shit is still current to this day. I swallow my concerns and my needs, avoiding bringing up anything problematic and negative, and basically hope for the best. It's still a shitty way to be, and I'm aware of that, but it's not easy to reprogram your subconscious after over a decade of pretty hardcore training. If I ever need to bring up a concern I have or something that's bothering me, I have a really strong physical reaction to that (read: I feel like puking). That's not normal. Most people aren't that afraid of talking to their significant others, at least not outside of abusive relationships.
I can't really blame all of this on The Temple of Doom. Yes, okay, I did make my dad rent it like monthly so I could watch the heart-ripping scene (I did love me some gore when I was a kid), so I've probably seen the damn thing 50 times. But there are plenty of other movies, TV shows, books, plays, and real world examples of the dangers of women having needs. Most of the shit I was exposed to as a kid featured damsels in distress, women who only cared about pleasing their men, and partially-realized female characters who existed only in connection with the butch protagonist (*cough cough* Disney *cough cough*). And it's not like that's out of fashion today, either. I mean, shit, look at Bella. An alternate reading of the Twilight series might reveal that she was a figment of Edward's imagination, because I find it hard to believe that she would even exist if he weren't there. Does she have any notable personality characteristics outside of how she feels for Edward? The Fifty Shades trilogy, originally written as Twilight fan fiction, suffers from the same awful problem, and yet is a riveting (junk food) read. Any does anyone remember Kate from Lost? She was supposed to be this strong and independent female lead, and all she did was toy with the feelings of two men, get in the way, and make pouty faces. I hated her character, just like I've always hated Willie Scott, and it's because of how much she fucked things up for other people.
And that's why it's essentially impossible for me to push for what I want and need in a relationship. A huge portion of my happiness in relationships is derived from my partner's happiness/success. I enjoy facilitating that. As a matter of fact, that's how I function with every person I know and can tolerate. I bake for my students all the time, regardless of how they're doing in class, because I like doing nice things for them. It makes me happy. Being thanked is nice, but honestly, the best part is their psyched expressions when they see me with some cumbersome-looking tupperware. It comes off as selfless and giving, and I'm not saying it's not, but really it's just me maintaining my own happiness by fostering it in other people.
The problem is that I am pretty much alone on this one. Most people don't function that way, at least not broadly and regularly. They behave in a primarily self-interested way most of the time, tending the people in their lives like a garden as needed, but not putting the needs of the garden above their own. This is how normal people operate. But I somehow got it into my skull that when others' needs compete with my own, 9 times out of 10, the right choice is to hold off on my own stuff and do what works for others. There are areas in which I have formulated reasonable standards ("No, Student, I can't sit and work through this entire review packet with you question by question during my lunch break. Because I will kill you and eat you, and then you definitely won't pass.") but even those aren't exactly inconveniencing anyone most of the time ("I'm just going to go heat this up in the microwave. I will be back in two minutes, at which time I will shove food into my gullet while working through this packet with you.").
Because really, the problem isn't that I'm always trying to do the nice thing for other people. It's that I find it so difficult to do the thing that isn't net positive. Not baking for my students isn't a big deal. Borrowing five bucks from one of them for something to eat would be awful (not to mention totally weird, with the whole teacher-student dynamic, but that's not the point). Not having the time to help Dan with his chores isn't a big deal. Asking Dan to help me with mine is unacceptable. I still hate asking for rides anywhere, and I have to do that shit all the time. It kills me to be the limiting factor when we're trying to figure out a restaurant to go to, and yet that is how it is every single time. I don't know how I am somehow able to believe that my friends and family are not a burden at all and are worth lots of effort to keep them happy, yet I'm a shithead if I have needs.
A few weeks ago, I ran a marathon. Yadda yadda, I'm great, blah blah blah. It was Mother's Day, so my mom and Dan were there with me. I sprung for the fancy hotel rooms right next to the start/finish, Dan did all the driving to/from Providence. The plan was for Dan and my mom to wake up at a reasonable time (not for my 6am start, which my mom was still up for because that's when she gets up), figure out about where I would be on the course, and come cheer me on from a location or two before meeting me at the finish line around 12:30. Yes, it takes me 6.5 hours to run a marathon, you read that right. All the more reason it was vital to have a cheering section. My running partner's family practically stalked us the entire way. Her sister ran with us for probably a fifth of the race, including the last several miles. Her little brothers were super annoying and bouncy, but ran with us at the end too. Even her bumbling father jogged along with us. I saw Dan and my mother exactly one place: the finish line. They tried to drive to a spot on the course, got stuck at some detours, didn't know the area well, so they gave up and went back to the finish line to wait for me. I was so angry. It's hard for me to even make the words to express how I felt and still feel about it. I needed them. I needed them more than I've ever needed anyone, and they. weren't. there. I could run 26.2 miles, but they couldn't ask a traffic cop how to get to a good viewing spot? My running partner's family followed us almost the entire way, but Dan got one befuddled GPS message and packed it in? Am I seriously not worth a tiniest fucking modicum of effort to support me in the toughest challenge of my adult life?
I said nothing. It was Mother's Day, so I certainly wasn't going to berate my mother, especially since she wasn't the one driving. I still haven't really expressed to her that her brief failed marriage resulted in $60,000+ in student loans that I alone have to pay off, so if I haven't let her feel that guilt, I'm certainly not going to let this incident sneak in there. But for Dan, the one who made the call to stop trying to meet me on the course, I totally could have brought it up. His actions caused me to have very strong bad feelings. But the two possibilities from me telling him that are him feeling very guilty (which I would not enjoy) or him responding defensively and turning that guilt around (which I would also not enjoy, and additionally feel angry and resentful about). So instead, I said nothing. I don't think I ever will say anything. I'm going to bear it, not exactly silently, but without trying to do anything about it. Because that's what I do.
At this point, I'm fine blaming it on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It's childish and a gross exaggeration to do so, but acknowledging it for the complex and multifaceted problem that it is would be a lot of emotional work. Instead, I'll berate myself like the mother in American Beauty, keep it together, and go bake something for my kids. Hey, they've had a tough day, right?
If it's been a while since you've seen Temple of Doom or you just blocked it out of your memory, I'll remind you. Dr. Jones, who has no time for love, gets stuck with a blonde, high-maintenance lounge singer in a tiny village in India. With the help of his diminutive Asian side-kick, Indiana Jones discovers a human-sacrificing cult underneath a huge palace, gets captured, gets brainwashed, gets unbrainwashed, and breaks up a child slavery ring before defeating the creepy cult leader and returning the aforementioned child slaves to their families in the aforementioned tiny village.
As this is an Indiana Jones movie, it is defined just as much by its female companion as by its villain. In The Temple of Doom, this companion is Willie Scott, an American singer working in a Shanghai nightclub at the beginning of the film. When Dr. Jones unwittingly drinks poison in an archaeological business deal gone wrong, he threatens Willie's life in exchange for the antidote. Chaos ensues, we learn that Willie is shallow and motivated by diamonds, and eventually Dr. Jones, Willie, and Short Round escape, only to board a plane owned by the criminal who poisoned Indiana in the first place. The three must jump out of the plane via an inflatable raft, and somehow don't die on the way down a huge mountain that terminates in the middle of nowhere in India.
The entire time, Willie is losing her shit, screaming and yelling, sassing Indiana Jones and somehow not finding Short Round endearing. She blames Indiana Jones for basically everything that's happening, and it only gets worse from there. She has to ride an elephant in the jungle, where she is accosted by her own beast of burden as well as the local fauna. At Pankot palace, she blanches and finally faints when presented with a racist-ass meal of live eels, eyeball soup, and monkey brains. Later, when Dr. Jones sexually propositions her and then goes back to his room, she reacts with frustration when he later returns and silently searches her room (for an attacker she doesn't realize he expects to find, given he was just accosted in his room). She recoils when called down into a dank hallway literally covered with various insects.
Indiana Jones has absolutely no time for Willie's bullshit. He's trying to uncover the mystery of Pankot palace, help a bunch of enslaved brainwashed children, find a magical stone, and not get crushed by some spiky ceiling shit. In fact, he barely has enough time to tell Willie he doesn't have enough time for her shit. She is constantly screaming when silence is required, causing international incidents with her vaguely racist reactions to local custom, and giving Dr. Jones the business when he's in some high-pressure situations. She is like a 110-pound rucksack that squeals every five minutes and constantly complains about being carried. She is the worst.
Yeah, except she's not. Let's take a minute to look at the facts. Indiana Jones took her hostage in the first scene of the movie and she gets caught up in all of his international archaeologist drama. She doesn't intend to fly to India, or visit Pankot palace, or save a bunch of kids or any of that. She intended to sing in a Shanghai nightclub and schmooze with rich patrons. That's it. She's not an adventurer and she doesn't want to be one. She enjoys a life of privilege and has no intention of leaving it. So when she's doused in stagnant jungle water by a baby elephant and presented with monkey brains (in the original container) and forced to climb through the most impressive insect infestation in history, she freaks out. Because that's what a normal person would do. I can't think of a single person I know who would do anything other than shout "fuck that!" and storm out when presented with "snake surprise" for dinner.
And yet, Willie is the most annoying female companion of any Indiana Jones movie by far, and there's not a single scene in the movie when she's not a humungous pain in the ass. Even though I recognize that she is reacting like most people would react (throwing more tantrums, perhaps, but those aren't ridiculous, just exaggerated), I still watch the movie and think Jesus Christ, lady, get it together. Just shut the fuuuuuuuuck uuuuuuup. And that's my problem.
You see, Willie Scott is the perfect example of how I view women in relationships. They're needy, whiny, prissy, spoiled, and incredibly high-maintenance. I assume that Willie Scott is how men view women with needs, and if I hate her guts without having to be responsible for her, I can't imagine how much a theoretical boyfriend would hate her. So, without consciously realizing it, I have spent my entire life since puberty trying not to be Willie Scott. Independent, self-reliant, tough, stoic, low-maintenance. I saw the woman in a relationship being a burden on the man, and I resolved never to be that burden. So I have always done my best to ask nothing of my partner. My needs, however objectively reasonable, were always a little too much to ask to be fulfilled. My concerns, however objectively reasonable, were always a little too overblown or dramatic to be addressed. I would actively dismiss and devalue these things because I assumed that asking absolutely anything of my partner would mean I was Willie Scott.
I'm sure you can see how this could be a problem. After all, I'm not a saint, nor am I some mythical being who has no needs or concerns. So eventually, all my once-reasonable qualms would burst forth in the midst of some minor disagreement, so that an argument about a miscommunication of social plans suddenly turns into a huge Airing of Grievances, where both parties lay out all of the now-huge problems and then there's crying and raised voices and perhaps some vulgar language. In trying not to be Willie Scott, I basically guaranteed that I would be an awful person to be in a relationship with, just in a more staccato way. 90% of the time, my needs weren't being met and I was unhappy, then 10% of the time my needs weren't being met and I was very loudly unhappy. I would become resentful because I try to be such a caregiver and nurturer in relationships, but I never seemed to date anyone who behaved the same way.
Of course, I talk about this in the past tense, but this shit is still current to this day. I swallow my concerns and my needs, avoiding bringing up anything problematic and negative, and basically hope for the best. It's still a shitty way to be, and I'm aware of that, but it's not easy to reprogram your subconscious after over a decade of pretty hardcore training. If I ever need to bring up a concern I have or something that's bothering me, I have a really strong physical reaction to that (read: I feel like puking). That's not normal. Most people aren't that afraid of talking to their significant others, at least not outside of abusive relationships.
I can't really blame all of this on The Temple of Doom. Yes, okay, I did make my dad rent it like monthly so I could watch the heart-ripping scene (I did love me some gore when I was a kid), so I've probably seen the damn thing 50 times. But there are plenty of other movies, TV shows, books, plays, and real world examples of the dangers of women having needs. Most of the shit I was exposed to as a kid featured damsels in distress, women who only cared about pleasing their men, and partially-realized female characters who existed only in connection with the butch protagonist (*cough cough* Disney *cough cough*). And it's not like that's out of fashion today, either. I mean, shit, look at Bella. An alternate reading of the Twilight series might reveal that she was a figment of Edward's imagination, because I find it hard to believe that she would even exist if he weren't there. Does she have any notable personality characteristics outside of how she feels for Edward? The Fifty Shades trilogy, originally written as Twilight fan fiction, suffers from the same awful problem, and yet is a riveting (junk food) read. Any does anyone remember Kate from Lost? She was supposed to be this strong and independent female lead, and all she did was toy with the feelings of two men, get in the way, and make pouty faces. I hated her character, just like I've always hated Willie Scott, and it's because of how much she fucked things up for other people.
And that's why it's essentially impossible for me to push for what I want and need in a relationship. A huge portion of my happiness in relationships is derived from my partner's happiness/success. I enjoy facilitating that. As a matter of fact, that's how I function with every person I know and can tolerate. I bake for my students all the time, regardless of how they're doing in class, because I like doing nice things for them. It makes me happy. Being thanked is nice, but honestly, the best part is their psyched expressions when they see me with some cumbersome-looking tupperware. It comes off as selfless and giving, and I'm not saying it's not, but really it's just me maintaining my own happiness by fostering it in other people.
The problem is that I am pretty much alone on this one. Most people don't function that way, at least not broadly and regularly. They behave in a primarily self-interested way most of the time, tending the people in their lives like a garden as needed, but not putting the needs of the garden above their own. This is how normal people operate. But I somehow got it into my skull that when others' needs compete with my own, 9 times out of 10, the right choice is to hold off on my own stuff and do what works for others. There are areas in which I have formulated reasonable standards ("No, Student, I can't sit and work through this entire review packet with you question by question during my lunch break. Because I will kill you and eat you, and then you definitely won't pass.") but even those aren't exactly inconveniencing anyone most of the time ("I'm just going to go heat this up in the microwave. I will be back in two minutes, at which time I will shove food into my gullet while working through this packet with you.").
Because really, the problem isn't that I'm always trying to do the nice thing for other people. It's that I find it so difficult to do the thing that isn't net positive. Not baking for my students isn't a big deal. Borrowing five bucks from one of them for something to eat would be awful (not to mention totally weird, with the whole teacher-student dynamic, but that's not the point). Not having the time to help Dan with his chores isn't a big deal. Asking Dan to help me with mine is unacceptable. I still hate asking for rides anywhere, and I have to do that shit all the time. It kills me to be the limiting factor when we're trying to figure out a restaurant to go to, and yet that is how it is every single time. I don't know how I am somehow able to believe that my friends and family are not a burden at all and are worth lots of effort to keep them happy, yet I'm a shithead if I have needs.
A few weeks ago, I ran a marathon. Yadda yadda, I'm great, blah blah blah. It was Mother's Day, so my mom and Dan were there with me. I sprung for the fancy hotel rooms right next to the start/finish, Dan did all the driving to/from Providence. The plan was for Dan and my mom to wake up at a reasonable time (not for my 6am start, which my mom was still up for because that's when she gets up), figure out about where I would be on the course, and come cheer me on from a location or two before meeting me at the finish line around 12:30. Yes, it takes me 6.5 hours to run a marathon, you read that right. All the more reason it was vital to have a cheering section. My running partner's family practically stalked us the entire way. Her sister ran with us for probably a fifth of the race, including the last several miles. Her little brothers were super annoying and bouncy, but ran with us at the end too. Even her bumbling father jogged along with us. I saw Dan and my mother exactly one place: the finish line. They tried to drive to a spot on the course, got stuck at some detours, didn't know the area well, so they gave up and went back to the finish line to wait for me. I was so angry. It's hard for me to even make the words to express how I felt and still feel about it. I needed them. I needed them more than I've ever needed anyone, and they. weren't. there. I could run 26.2 miles, but they couldn't ask a traffic cop how to get to a good viewing spot? My running partner's family followed us almost the entire way, but Dan got one befuddled GPS message and packed it in? Am I seriously not worth a tiniest fucking modicum of effort to support me in the toughest challenge of my adult life?
I said nothing. It was Mother's Day, so I certainly wasn't going to berate my mother, especially since she wasn't the one driving. I still haven't really expressed to her that her brief failed marriage resulted in $60,000+ in student loans that I alone have to pay off, so if I haven't let her feel that guilt, I'm certainly not going to let this incident sneak in there. But for Dan, the one who made the call to stop trying to meet me on the course, I totally could have brought it up. His actions caused me to have very strong bad feelings. But the two possibilities from me telling him that are him feeling very guilty (which I would not enjoy) or him responding defensively and turning that guilt around (which I would also not enjoy, and additionally feel angry and resentful about). So instead, I said nothing. I don't think I ever will say anything. I'm going to bear it, not exactly silently, but without trying to do anything about it. Because that's what I do.
At this point, I'm fine blaming it on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It's childish and a gross exaggeration to do so, but acknowledging it for the complex and multifaceted problem that it is would be a lot of emotional work. Instead, I'll berate myself like the mother in American Beauty, keep it together, and go bake something for my kids. Hey, they've had a tough day, right?
Monday, April 15, 2013
There is no title
I am writing this with almost no information.
It is just after 4pm on Marathon Monday, and there have been explosions reported at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Two people are confirmed dead and at least 23 are injured. No one has said for sure if it was a pair of bombs or something else. The prevailing opinion appears to be that it was an act of terrorism, but that is based on circumstantial evidence. The marathon has been cancelled, and the thousands of runners who did not finish before the explosions went off have been diverted and kept away from the Copley area.
I am feeling right now a way that I have only felt twice before in my life. The first was in August of 1999. I was 15 years old and my mother woke me up very urgently to tell me, without preamble, that my father had died. The shock immediately gave way to grief. After I got dressed, I went downstairs to the kitchen, where I cried with my mother and brother for a good long time. My boyfriend at the time, who was an unequivocal doof and an emo hipster (before we knew what those were), rode his bike all the way to my house to bring me a potted plant. It was a sweet gesture.
The only other time I had felt like this was on a day that I assume you could have guessed. The second week of school of my senior year in high school, four planes were involved in a terrorist attack in New York, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania. I have written about this before, so I will not belabor the point. I had almost no info about what had happened all day (my school's administration made the extremely distasteful call to block students from any news sources so that we could have a distraction-free school day....yeah, right). When I got home, I got all of the information and images and expert testimonies all hit me at once. I was completely stunned, I had no idea how to react. I barely remember that evening. I know I cried pretty much the whole time. I remember practically screaming into the phone to my boyfriend, something about what it must have been like for all the people in the buildings who saw the planes coming or who were in floors above where the planes struck. I bought a newspaper the next morning on the way to school because I knew it was important.
Both of those times, I felt this sense of uselessness that was infuriating. I'm not an EMT, I'm not an expert on terrorism or international relations, and in the case of my father's death, I was 15 so it's not like I was making arrangements or taking care of the practical shit that has to be dealt with. There was literally nothing I could do. I can't even donate blood because the size needle they use causes my veins to spasm and clamp shut like a kinked hose.
So here I am, home alone and watching live coverage of the bombing of the Boston Marathon, feeling this again. I live less than three miles from the finish line, but my proximity does nothing but make it scarier for me. My work is right in the heart of Kenmore Square, less than a mile from where the bombs went off. If I went down there right now to help, what would happen? I would be pushed back, told to go home, and for good reason. There's nothing I could do. But at home, where I should be, I'm just sitting here watching news coverage. I'm hungry, actually really hungry, but I'm too sick to my stomach to eat. The dogs need to be fed and walked, but I'm torn between welcoming the distraction and fearing being away from the TV for more than a moment. I don't know why it would matter that I would find out a piece of news a few minutes later than live, but for some reason, it matters to me.
Suddenly, and once again, all the bullshit of my day-to-day life seems meaningless. Today is not the day I had a nice 6-mile run on the Esplanade. It's not the day that I had my first professional driving lesson. It's not the first weekday of my school vacation. That's all voided. Today is the day that someone blew up the finish line at the Boston Marathon. That is what today will be from now on. The immediate stuff gets lost in the tragedy. What's for dinner? I don't know, someone blew up Copley. Want to watch a movie tonight? No, I can't, there was a bomb at Marathon Sports. Did you do laundry? No, they're saying the incident at the JFK Library might be related. I have no idea what to do with myself. There is nothing to do.
It's now 5:30 and more information has been released, yet it feels as though I still know nothing. I'm glad my dogs like to cuddle.
It is just after 4pm on Marathon Monday, and there have been explosions reported at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Two people are confirmed dead and at least 23 are injured. No one has said for sure if it was a pair of bombs or something else. The prevailing opinion appears to be that it was an act of terrorism, but that is based on circumstantial evidence. The marathon has been cancelled, and the thousands of runners who did not finish before the explosions went off have been diverted and kept away from the Copley area.
I am feeling right now a way that I have only felt twice before in my life. The first was in August of 1999. I was 15 years old and my mother woke me up very urgently to tell me, without preamble, that my father had died. The shock immediately gave way to grief. After I got dressed, I went downstairs to the kitchen, where I cried with my mother and brother for a good long time. My boyfriend at the time, who was an unequivocal doof and an emo hipster (before we knew what those were), rode his bike all the way to my house to bring me a potted plant. It was a sweet gesture.
The only other time I had felt like this was on a day that I assume you could have guessed. The second week of school of my senior year in high school, four planes were involved in a terrorist attack in New York, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania. I have written about this before, so I will not belabor the point. I had almost no info about what had happened all day (my school's administration made the extremely distasteful call to block students from any news sources so that we could have a distraction-free school day....yeah, right). When I got home, I got all of the information and images and expert testimonies all hit me at once. I was completely stunned, I had no idea how to react. I barely remember that evening. I know I cried pretty much the whole time. I remember practically screaming into the phone to my boyfriend, something about what it must have been like for all the people in the buildings who saw the planes coming or who were in floors above where the planes struck. I bought a newspaper the next morning on the way to school because I knew it was important.
Both of those times, I felt this sense of uselessness that was infuriating. I'm not an EMT, I'm not an expert on terrorism or international relations, and in the case of my father's death, I was 15 so it's not like I was making arrangements or taking care of the practical shit that has to be dealt with. There was literally nothing I could do. I can't even donate blood because the size needle they use causes my veins to spasm and clamp shut like a kinked hose.
So here I am, home alone and watching live coverage of the bombing of the Boston Marathon, feeling this again. I live less than three miles from the finish line, but my proximity does nothing but make it scarier for me. My work is right in the heart of Kenmore Square, less than a mile from where the bombs went off. If I went down there right now to help, what would happen? I would be pushed back, told to go home, and for good reason. There's nothing I could do. But at home, where I should be, I'm just sitting here watching news coverage. I'm hungry, actually really hungry, but I'm too sick to my stomach to eat. The dogs need to be fed and walked, but I'm torn between welcoming the distraction and fearing being away from the TV for more than a moment. I don't know why it would matter that I would find out a piece of news a few minutes later than live, but for some reason, it matters to me.
Suddenly, and once again, all the bullshit of my day-to-day life seems meaningless. Today is not the day I had a nice 6-mile run on the Esplanade. It's not the day that I had my first professional driving lesson. It's not the first weekday of my school vacation. That's all voided. Today is the day that someone blew up the finish line at the Boston Marathon. That is what today will be from now on. The immediate stuff gets lost in the tragedy. What's for dinner? I don't know, someone blew up Copley. Want to watch a movie tonight? No, I can't, there was a bomb at Marathon Sports. Did you do laundry? No, they're saying the incident at the JFK Library might be related. I have no idea what to do with myself. There is nothing to do.
It's now 5:30 and more information has been released, yet it feels as though I still know nothing. I'm glad my dogs like to cuddle.
Monday, March 18, 2013
Diary of a Fat Girl - Episode 25: The Hardest Mile
Today, I ran in the New Bedford Half Marathon. I ran 14 miles last weekend, so I knew I could do the distance, but this was my first "real" race longer than a 10k. For no good reason, I was all antsy-in-the-pantsy before the race and felt an awkward combination of nervous, excited, and really just wanting to spend a day on the couch. Given the pace I've been running the last couple of months, I was hoping to finish in about 3 hours, but honestly I just wanted to survive long enough to say I completed the race and post annoyingly on Facebook about it (you're welcome).
Knowing that I am roughly as slow as molasses, I knew that I would be way back in the pack and probably running pretty much alone after the 10-minute-milers took off. I've only ever been a slow runner, at least as long as I've been any kind of runner at all, so I have come to terms with the fact that my recent accomplishment of running a mile in under 11 minutes, for example, is only impressive in a subjective way. I did not anticipate that my slowness would pose a morale problem for me, race or no race.
And then today happened. I was maintaining a pace of about 13 minutes. I was happy about how the race was going and feeling relatively good. At each mile, there was a large sign and a timer clock, which I found very helpful. As I crested a slight hill and approached the five mile mark just over an hour into the race, a red pick-up truck passed me and pulled over next to the mile sign and timer. The driver broke down the timer and tripod, chucked them in the back of the truck, and drove away. I didn't even get a chance to see the official time before he did it. As far as I knew, he was going to go along the course and break down all of the timer clocks before I got there, and it was only mile 5 of 13.
Usually in a long race, the last couple of miles are where runners make it or break it. For a half marathon, miles 11-12 are crucial. But for me, for this race, mile 5 was the greatest challenge I have experienced as a runner. When I saw that guy breaking down the timer and packing up like the race was already over, I became so disheartened. I was furious at the guy for fucking with my mojo, and the wind that had previously been in my sails was instead trying to prevent my forward motion. (There was, in fact, a strong headwind for a lot of the race, to be fair.) There was a substantial crowd along the route right at the mile 5 point, but many of them had been out there for almost an hour and their interest was clearly waning, which was understandable considering that large packs of runners had been replaced by individuals or small groups many feet apart.
As I chugged along the route past the place where the timer used to be, I looked to the spectators to bring me back up. I listened to the words of support from the crowd, unmistakably tinged with sympathy and pity. The more patronizing (yet obviously genuine) things I heard, the more I felt like Li'l Brudder, a one-legged dog that can "make it on [his] own" and is "such a trooper". I didn't want or need their pity. I might be slow, but I was not in danger of not finishing, if I may be permitted a double negative. In my head, I kicked myself for looking to others for motivation when I knew that only a week earlier, I had done 14 miles with no crowd, no music, no mile markers, and no promise of a big official finish line at the end. The only thing I had waiting for me at the end of that run had been a mile-and-a-half walk home. I didn't get bummed out by anything because I hadn't been counting on anything other than myself.
This would have made for a great pep talk from me to me if I had been thinking this way after mile 5, but basically I just slogged through until I realized the rest of the timers were still up (if sometimes strangely inaccurate) and that the crowd was a bonus, not something I really needed. By mile 7, when the course followed the coast of New Bedford for about four miles, I was back to neutral and actually enjoying the smell of the ocean (and the long-awaited existence of port-a-potties). When I reached mile 11 and a slow caravan of police cars alerted me and the nearby runners that the course was opening back up to traffic, I was better able to handle the natural consequence of being a slowpoke. I was much more prepared for this reality given my anticipated pace, and shortly after the cars starting coming, Dan met me and ran/walked along with me for about half a mile; he could not have been more welcome. He snuck away to cut over to the finish line, and with half a mile left, I turned up the Led Zeppelin and went for it.
I finished in 2:51:50, more than eight minutes faster than I had dared to hope earlier that morning. According to the race results, only 52 people out of more than 3100 finished slower than I did, but I don't really care. The Dreamfar lady who speed-walks was only 14 minutes slower than me, or about a minute slower in overall pace. I don't really care about that either.
There's something that happens when you don't give up. It's often subtle, masked by self-deprecating humor, sarcasm, exhaustion, knee pain, and whatever else you can throw at it, but there is a satisfaction that comes with doing something when it would have been easier not to. There's a lesson I've been teaching myself (and learning from the other Dreamfar people) with these runs. Stopping when you want to stop gives you immediate satisfaction. It lasts a few minutes, maybe a few hours, and is later replaced with a dull sort of blah borne from not doing what you said you would do. But not stopping, refusing to give up, is much harder. It doesn't feel good right away. But it does feel good later, and you can go back to that feeling over and over again whenever you need it. Remember when I felt shitty and didn't really want to keep running, but then I did? That was great. Remember when I pushed through and just decided that I wasn't tired? Bitchin'. I think most people realize this from an objective standpoint, but it's a whole other animal to make it into a course of action and, eventually, a habit.
I have a quote hanging up in my classroom that is intended to motivate students to come to school when they really don't feel like it. My students often have in common a set of traits that have made school problematic and will only get worse as they enter post-secondary education and/or the workforce. This quote is trying to communicate the importance of perseverance, and now I'm thinking I also hung it up for my own benefit. The quote is from Muhammad Ali: "I hated every minute of training, but I said, 'Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.'"
Man, fuck that guy in the red truck. He sucks and I'm great. So there.
Knowing that I am roughly as slow as molasses, I knew that I would be way back in the pack and probably running pretty much alone after the 10-minute-milers took off. I've only ever been a slow runner, at least as long as I've been any kind of runner at all, so I have come to terms with the fact that my recent accomplishment of running a mile in under 11 minutes, for example, is only impressive in a subjective way. I did not anticipate that my slowness would pose a morale problem for me, race or no race.
And then today happened. I was maintaining a pace of about 13 minutes. I was happy about how the race was going and feeling relatively good. At each mile, there was a large sign and a timer clock, which I found very helpful. As I crested a slight hill and approached the five mile mark just over an hour into the race, a red pick-up truck passed me and pulled over next to the mile sign and timer. The driver broke down the timer and tripod, chucked them in the back of the truck, and drove away. I didn't even get a chance to see the official time before he did it. As far as I knew, he was going to go along the course and break down all of the timer clocks before I got there, and it was only mile 5 of 13.
Usually in a long race, the last couple of miles are where runners make it or break it. For a half marathon, miles 11-12 are crucial. But for me, for this race, mile 5 was the greatest challenge I have experienced as a runner. When I saw that guy breaking down the timer and packing up like the race was already over, I became so disheartened. I was furious at the guy for fucking with my mojo, and the wind that had previously been in my sails was instead trying to prevent my forward motion. (There was, in fact, a strong headwind for a lot of the race, to be fair.) There was a substantial crowd along the route right at the mile 5 point, but many of them had been out there for almost an hour and their interest was clearly waning, which was understandable considering that large packs of runners had been replaced by individuals or small groups many feet apart.
As I chugged along the route past the place where the timer used to be, I looked to the spectators to bring me back up. I listened to the words of support from the crowd, unmistakably tinged with sympathy and pity. The more patronizing (yet obviously genuine) things I heard, the more I felt like Li'l Brudder, a one-legged dog that can "make it on [his] own" and is "such a trooper". I didn't want or need their pity. I might be slow, but I was not in danger of not finishing, if I may be permitted a double negative. In my head, I kicked myself for looking to others for motivation when I knew that only a week earlier, I had done 14 miles with no crowd, no music, no mile markers, and no promise of a big official finish line at the end. The only thing I had waiting for me at the end of that run had been a mile-and-a-half walk home. I didn't get bummed out by anything because I hadn't been counting on anything other than myself.
This would have made for a great pep talk from me to me if I had been thinking this way after mile 5, but basically I just slogged through until I realized the rest of the timers were still up (if sometimes strangely inaccurate) and that the crowd was a bonus, not something I really needed. By mile 7, when the course followed the coast of New Bedford for about four miles, I was back to neutral and actually enjoying the smell of the ocean (and the long-awaited existence of port-a-potties). When I reached mile 11 and a slow caravan of police cars alerted me and the nearby runners that the course was opening back up to traffic, I was better able to handle the natural consequence of being a slowpoke. I was much more prepared for this reality given my anticipated pace, and shortly after the cars starting coming, Dan met me and ran/walked along with me for about half a mile; he could not have been more welcome. He snuck away to cut over to the finish line, and with half a mile left, I turned up the Led Zeppelin and went for it.
I finished in 2:51:50, more than eight minutes faster than I had dared to hope earlier that morning. According to the race results, only 52 people out of more than 3100 finished slower than I did, but I don't really care. The Dreamfar lady who speed-walks was only 14 minutes slower than me, or about a minute slower in overall pace. I don't really care about that either.
There's something that happens when you don't give up. It's often subtle, masked by self-deprecating humor, sarcasm, exhaustion, knee pain, and whatever else you can throw at it, but there is a satisfaction that comes with doing something when it would have been easier not to. There's a lesson I've been teaching myself (and learning from the other Dreamfar people) with these runs. Stopping when you want to stop gives you immediate satisfaction. It lasts a few minutes, maybe a few hours, and is later replaced with a dull sort of blah borne from not doing what you said you would do. But not stopping, refusing to give up, is much harder. It doesn't feel good right away. But it does feel good later, and you can go back to that feeling over and over again whenever you need it. Remember when I felt shitty and didn't really want to keep running, but then I did? That was great. Remember when I pushed through and just decided that I wasn't tired? Bitchin'. I think most people realize this from an objective standpoint, but it's a whole other animal to make it into a course of action and, eventually, a habit.
I have a quote hanging up in my classroom that is intended to motivate students to come to school when they really don't feel like it. My students often have in common a set of traits that have made school problematic and will only get worse as they enter post-secondary education and/or the workforce. This quote is trying to communicate the importance of perseverance, and now I'm thinking I also hung it up for my own benefit. The quote is from Muhammad Ali: "I hated every minute of training, but I said, 'Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.'"
Man, fuck that guy in the red truck. He sucks and I'm great. So there.
Friday, February 22, 2013
Diary of a Fat Girl - Episode 24: Losing 60 Pounds by Being Imperfect
Hi, my name is Amber, and I am a douchebag elitist.
That's a harder admission for me to make than labeling myself a fat girl, as I did in the very first post of this blog series back in July of 2011. It's easy for me to be unhappy about my weight - or at least it was when I actually felt that way - but it's harder for me to be unhappy about being great. And by great I mean snotty. It's easy to conflate those two things if you're self-applying labels. I don't know what makes a person turn into an elitist, but I know for me it happened really early. When we finally got internet service at my house when I was in high school (suddenly this sounds like a very old-person sort of thing to say), I spent a lot of time arguing on the internet and trying to be right about absolutely everything. Which, for a 16-year-old, just isn't going to happen. But I felt smarter than everyone around me and I thought that that justified whatever level of snobbery my giant head could support.
As I rapidly approach 30 years of age, my elitism is continually getting tempered by the real world. It's like a rough stone pelted by lots of debris - eventually that stone will smooth out because of those impacts. So, although it's not saying much, I can at least aver that I am not as bad as I used to be. I still wrestle with the tendency, though, to be right about everything. It's a high standard to set for one's self, being right all the time. I'm sure that there are some people who combine egotism and elitism in such a way that it requires no self-reflection, but for me, I have to set the example of what I preach in whatever realm we happen to be dealing with. Hypocrisy infuriates me, so I at least try to avoid being a hypocrite.
When I started my actually-successful fitness and fat loss trek (as opposed to all the failures of the past), I was relatively ignorant, as n00bs tend to be. I had some first-hand experience with exercise and nutrition, but my science was weak, as was my practice. By the time I learned enough to know what I was doing, it became clear that I still hardly knew anything. I knew, however, that if I was going to make this work, we were talking about a complete lifestyle change. Which is super fucking scary.
The exercise component was actually the easy part for me. I enjoy exercise, which I know isn't true of a majority of people, but as many can tell you, all the exercise in the world isn't going to undo the damage of a preposterous diet. You can't outrun chicken fingers and french fries, at least not for long. There are lots of asterisks and subtleties to this principle, but the rule of thumb is that you have to expend more calories than you take in if you're trying to lose weight. If you're eating around maintenance (that is, equal amounts in and out, so maintaining weight) then you could theoretically just add some exercise to your day and slowly lose weight. But for most of us at the time when we decide to get our shit together, we're either gaining weight or maintaining a ridiculously unhealthy weight, so a walk around the block isn't going to do the job.
Knowing that I would have to alter my eating habits drastically gave me a lot of anxiety. You see, I'm a picky eater. I've talked about it here before, so I won't get into the whole rigamarole, but basically I don't eat a variety of foods, I don't try new foods, and I hate flavor. At least unfamiliar flavor, which is almost everything. I like my food boring, straightforward, predictable, and thoroughly play-tested. If I started eliminating entire foods from my diet, I would run into serious problems. But with such frequent players as french fries, Doritos, soda, and chocolate, well...how the fuck was that going to work?
I decided that I would simply follow the math of (calories out) - (calories in) = >0. I switched from full calorie soda to a variety of acceptable diet sodas (currently Pepsi Next is well-stocked in my house), but other than that, I just worried about the math. If I could "afford" to eat junk food, then fine. If I couldn't, then I didn't. My portions were measured and consistently small. A food scale became absolutely essential to making this work. Some days I went over my calories. More than some, really. But instead of thinking of every day as a final test of my will, I thought of every day as a practice run. If I noticed that I was emotionally eating, or eating past satiety, or eating because of a social situation, I made a mental note of it and used that information to improve my habits. I didn't go on guilt trips over eating a cookie or having an extra meatball with dinner. I used my dropping weight to motivate myself to keep going, and used the stalls/plateaus either as pieces of data to improve my routines or simply just ignored them.
In this manner, I have lost 60 pounds. I'm basically at maintenance weight, although I'm intending to lose another 5-10 pounds over the course of my marathon training (my bodyfat % is still higher than I'd like, so that's really where I'm focusing right now - the weight is really a non-issue at this point, which is nice to say). It has been hard work. I spend a lot of time and energy giving a shit. It's really, really easy to be fat. Not emotionally, of course, but with the day to day stuff? Yeah, that's pretty fucking simple. Eat, sit, sleep, repeat. Now, I wear a FitBit to track my steps and activity throughout the day, weigh and measure all my food, log everything I eat and drink on MyFitnessPal, use GymPact to make sure I'm exercising enough times during the week, and log all of my exercise on Fitocracy. It is a lot of work, and I'm sure it looks obsessive to someone who couldn't imagine themselves doing all of that stuff, but it's what has worked for me.
So when I read posts on Fitocracy or hear trainers talk about the importance of "eating clean" or choosing "whole foods" or sticking to "paleo" or whatever else their thing is, I get really worried about the n00bs. If I had truly believed that I wouldn't find success if I kept eating processed foods, I might never have tried. How many people get turned off by "experts" who espouse certain methodologies or strategies without acknowledging the myriad ways in which one can become healthier? I remember how badly I wanted to know, to understand the right way of doing things so that I could be efficient and correct and perfect.
It is a huge relief to be imperfect. Knowing that I am choosing a path that is not some objective ideal but is rather what I need, it makes everything so much better. It's still hard for me to interact with others on this issue because I sometimes interpret advice that contradicts my methods to be a personal indictment, but I know that it's not. I know that advice about food is probably falling on deaf ears with me because, frankly, I'm not going to eat a pomegranate. It's not going to happen. But if that pomegranate helps someone else, well then, godspeed.
There's this concept called "risk management" that I think applies to fitness. In risk management, you identify the courses of action available to you, look at the possible outcomes from all of those actions, and then determine what the risks and benefits are for each. For a simple example: if I cut my finger, I have two basic options, to use a bandage or not. If I use a bandage, I minimize the bleeding and minimize the risk of infection, but I also risk that ouchy feeling of taking the bandage off later. If I don't use a bandage, I'll get blood everywhere and I might also get an infection, but I won't have to take a bandage off. In my assessment, I determine that the better course of action is to use a bandage, and that the ouchy feeling later is an acceptable risk.
With fitness, risk management comes in to play all the time, or at least it should. People often get overwhelmed with all of the new studies that come out revealing that basically everything is bad for you. Eggs are bad, butter is bad, red meat is bad, caffeine is bad, and good lord is diet soda the fucking devil. It'll give your cancer cancer. If you eliminated every food from your diet that has ever been shown to have negative effects in humans, you'd fucking starve. That's not to say the studies are bullshit or that you shouldn't listen to research on harmful foods. If Splenda gives you stomach cramps, stop using Splenda, dick.
But if we're being realistic, you can't create a nutrition plan based on only eating and drinking things universally considered to be healthy, because that plan doesn't exist. If you're trying to gain muscle so you're taking in extra protein, there's some problem to identify with every possible fucking protein source. Eggs raise your cholesterol, beef lowers your lifespan, milk...god, don't even get me started on milk. To hear the milk-is-for-babies people talk is like nails on a chalkboard. Milk is delicious, bitches! Anyway, I digress. Food science is not black and white, and neither should be anyone's thinking on their own nutrition and fitness. So often, I've seen people foster this mindset of "well, if I can't get to the gym three times a week, I might as well not go at all." It's such disordered thinking, but I understand where it's coming from. There are plenty of things in this world that only count if you do them all the way. Just watch an episode of Pawn Stars where someone tries to unload a half-finished car refurb that cost waaaaay more than they're ever going to recoup. It's not hard to see how the all-or-nothing mindset finds its way into fitness and nutrition when, really, it has no place there.
This is why I try to keep my thoughts to myself when I feel myself getting critical of someone else's nutrition or fitness plan. My internal mantra has become, "If they're not going to hurt themselves and it might work, just let it happen." I know full well that I have no business being elitist about this stuff because, by all accounts, I'm doing it wrong. I had chicken fingers and french fries four days in a row this week. In a row. That's crazy even for me. But I also know that it's vacation, that my calorie counts are solid, and that I'm hungrier than usual because I'm running more and more every week. Without any context (or maybe even with some context), someone looking at my food log might be horrified and assume I'm going to put all my weight back on in no time. But I know better, and I don't need anyone else to agree with my shit.
So if you're reading this and you're trying to conform to some article or study or person's plan for the absolutely correct and perfect strategies for nutrition and fitness that, like, are the only way to do this stuff, take a moment and think about whether or not that plan, whole hog, is right for you. If you skip the gym because you don't feel like doing what's on the docket for that day, maybe it's time to revisit the docket, you know? Allow yourself to be a little inefficient and a little weird (a lot weird) and a little wrong. Trying to be perfect means that you will fail every single day forever. Try to be imperfect, a controlled demolition, and you'll succeed a helluva lot more.
That's a harder admission for me to make than labeling myself a fat girl, as I did in the very first post of this blog series back in July of 2011. It's easy for me to be unhappy about my weight - or at least it was when I actually felt that way - but it's harder for me to be unhappy about being great. And by great I mean snotty. It's easy to conflate those two things if you're self-applying labels. I don't know what makes a person turn into an elitist, but I know for me it happened really early. When we finally got internet service at my house when I was in high school (suddenly this sounds like a very old-person sort of thing to say), I spent a lot of time arguing on the internet and trying to be right about absolutely everything. Which, for a 16-year-old, just isn't going to happen. But I felt smarter than everyone around me and I thought that that justified whatever level of snobbery my giant head could support.
As I rapidly approach 30 years of age, my elitism is continually getting tempered by the real world. It's like a rough stone pelted by lots of debris - eventually that stone will smooth out because of those impacts. So, although it's not saying much, I can at least aver that I am not as bad as I used to be. I still wrestle with the tendency, though, to be right about everything. It's a high standard to set for one's self, being right all the time. I'm sure that there are some people who combine egotism and elitism in such a way that it requires no self-reflection, but for me, I have to set the example of what I preach in whatever realm we happen to be dealing with. Hypocrisy infuriates me, so I at least try to avoid being a hypocrite.
When I started my actually-successful fitness and fat loss trek (as opposed to all the failures of the past), I was relatively ignorant, as n00bs tend to be. I had some first-hand experience with exercise and nutrition, but my science was weak, as was my practice. By the time I learned enough to know what I was doing, it became clear that I still hardly knew anything. I knew, however, that if I was going to make this work, we were talking about a complete lifestyle change. Which is super fucking scary.
The exercise component was actually the easy part for me. I enjoy exercise, which I know isn't true of a majority of people, but as many can tell you, all the exercise in the world isn't going to undo the damage of a preposterous diet. You can't outrun chicken fingers and french fries, at least not for long. There are lots of asterisks and subtleties to this principle, but the rule of thumb is that you have to expend more calories than you take in if you're trying to lose weight. If you're eating around maintenance (that is, equal amounts in and out, so maintaining weight) then you could theoretically just add some exercise to your day and slowly lose weight. But for most of us at the time when we decide to get our shit together, we're either gaining weight or maintaining a ridiculously unhealthy weight, so a walk around the block isn't going to do the job.
Knowing that I would have to alter my eating habits drastically gave me a lot of anxiety. You see, I'm a picky eater. I've talked about it here before, so I won't get into the whole rigamarole, but basically I don't eat a variety of foods, I don't try new foods, and I hate flavor. At least unfamiliar flavor, which is almost everything. I like my food boring, straightforward, predictable, and thoroughly play-tested. If I started eliminating entire foods from my diet, I would run into serious problems. But with such frequent players as french fries, Doritos, soda, and chocolate, well...how the fuck was that going to work?
I decided that I would simply follow the math of (calories out) - (calories in) = >0. I switched from full calorie soda to a variety of acceptable diet sodas (currently Pepsi Next is well-stocked in my house), but other than that, I just worried about the math. If I could "afford" to eat junk food, then fine. If I couldn't, then I didn't. My portions were measured and consistently small. A food scale became absolutely essential to making this work. Some days I went over my calories. More than some, really. But instead of thinking of every day as a final test of my will, I thought of every day as a practice run. If I noticed that I was emotionally eating, or eating past satiety, or eating because of a social situation, I made a mental note of it and used that information to improve my habits. I didn't go on guilt trips over eating a cookie or having an extra meatball with dinner. I used my dropping weight to motivate myself to keep going, and used the stalls/plateaus either as pieces of data to improve my routines or simply just ignored them.
In this manner, I have lost 60 pounds. I'm basically at maintenance weight, although I'm intending to lose another 5-10 pounds over the course of my marathon training (my bodyfat % is still higher than I'd like, so that's really where I'm focusing right now - the weight is really a non-issue at this point, which is nice to say). It has been hard work. I spend a lot of time and energy giving a shit. It's really, really easy to be fat. Not emotionally, of course, but with the day to day stuff? Yeah, that's pretty fucking simple. Eat, sit, sleep, repeat. Now, I wear a FitBit to track my steps and activity throughout the day, weigh and measure all my food, log everything I eat and drink on MyFitnessPal, use GymPact to make sure I'm exercising enough times during the week, and log all of my exercise on Fitocracy. It is a lot of work, and I'm sure it looks obsessive to someone who couldn't imagine themselves doing all of that stuff, but it's what has worked for me.
So when I read posts on Fitocracy or hear trainers talk about the importance of "eating clean" or choosing "whole foods" or sticking to "paleo" or whatever else their thing is, I get really worried about the n00bs. If I had truly believed that I wouldn't find success if I kept eating processed foods, I might never have tried. How many people get turned off by "experts" who espouse certain methodologies or strategies without acknowledging the myriad ways in which one can become healthier? I remember how badly I wanted to know, to understand the right way of doing things so that I could be efficient and correct and perfect.
It is a huge relief to be imperfect. Knowing that I am choosing a path that is not some objective ideal but is rather what I need, it makes everything so much better. It's still hard for me to interact with others on this issue because I sometimes interpret advice that contradicts my methods to be a personal indictment, but I know that it's not. I know that advice about food is probably falling on deaf ears with me because, frankly, I'm not going to eat a pomegranate. It's not going to happen. But if that pomegranate helps someone else, well then, godspeed.
There's this concept called "risk management" that I think applies to fitness. In risk management, you identify the courses of action available to you, look at the possible outcomes from all of those actions, and then determine what the risks and benefits are for each. For a simple example: if I cut my finger, I have two basic options, to use a bandage or not. If I use a bandage, I minimize the bleeding and minimize the risk of infection, but I also risk that ouchy feeling of taking the bandage off later. If I don't use a bandage, I'll get blood everywhere and I might also get an infection, but I won't have to take a bandage off. In my assessment, I determine that the better course of action is to use a bandage, and that the ouchy feeling later is an acceptable risk.
With fitness, risk management comes in to play all the time, or at least it should. People often get overwhelmed with all of the new studies that come out revealing that basically everything is bad for you. Eggs are bad, butter is bad, red meat is bad, caffeine is bad, and good lord is diet soda the fucking devil. It'll give your cancer cancer. If you eliminated every food from your diet that has ever been shown to have negative effects in humans, you'd fucking starve. That's not to say the studies are bullshit or that you shouldn't listen to research on harmful foods. If Splenda gives you stomach cramps, stop using Splenda, dick.
But if we're being realistic, you can't create a nutrition plan based on only eating and drinking things universally considered to be healthy, because that plan doesn't exist. If you're trying to gain muscle so you're taking in extra protein, there's some problem to identify with every possible fucking protein source. Eggs raise your cholesterol, beef lowers your lifespan, milk...god, don't even get me started on milk. To hear the milk-is-for-babies people talk is like nails on a chalkboard. Milk is delicious, bitches! Anyway, I digress. Food science is not black and white, and neither should be anyone's thinking on their own nutrition and fitness. So often, I've seen people foster this mindset of "well, if I can't get to the gym three times a week, I might as well not go at all." It's such disordered thinking, but I understand where it's coming from. There are plenty of things in this world that only count if you do them all the way. Just watch an episode of Pawn Stars where someone tries to unload a half-finished car refurb that cost waaaaay more than they're ever going to recoup. It's not hard to see how the all-or-nothing mindset finds its way into fitness and nutrition when, really, it has no place there.
This is why I try to keep my thoughts to myself when I feel myself getting critical of someone else's nutrition or fitness plan. My internal mantra has become, "If they're not going to hurt themselves and it might work, just let it happen." I know full well that I have no business being elitist about this stuff because, by all accounts, I'm doing it wrong. I had chicken fingers and french fries four days in a row this week. In a row. That's crazy even for me. But I also know that it's vacation, that my calorie counts are solid, and that I'm hungrier than usual because I'm running more and more every week. Without any context (or maybe even with some context), someone looking at my food log might be horrified and assume I'm going to put all my weight back on in no time. But I know better, and I don't need anyone else to agree with my shit.
So if you're reading this and you're trying to conform to some article or study or person's plan for the absolutely correct and perfect strategies for nutrition and fitness that, like, are the only way to do this stuff, take a moment and think about whether or not that plan, whole hog, is right for you. If you skip the gym because you don't feel like doing what's on the docket for that day, maybe it's time to revisit the docket, you know? Allow yourself to be a little inefficient and a little weird (a lot weird) and a little wrong. Trying to be perfect means that you will fail every single day forever. Try to be imperfect, a controlled demolition, and you'll succeed a helluva lot more.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Diary of a Fat Girl - Episode 23: Trying to Enjoy Being Foolish
At the beginning of the school year, I tried to start a fitness club at my school. We don't really have extracurricular activities because, frankly, ain't nobody got time for that. The students who end up in my program are trying to spend as little time in school as possible, so staying late to hang out isn't usually on the agenda. But when I shopped the idea around, many students expressed an interest. I wasn't sure exactly what the club would look like - considering we don't have a gym, an open field, or funds for equipment (or a place to put that equipment), we'd have to connect with a local business or just make do with what we had. When one of the counselors at the school heard what I was trying to do, he told me about this program called Dreamfar High School Marathon.
Dreamfar trains high school students to run a marathon. That might sound crazy to you because it kind of is. But the idea is that, by challenging students to push themselves and do something that less than 1% of people will ever do, Dreamfar teaches kids much more about themselves than most of their other high school experiences. Teachers at each participating school volunteer to lead their teams and conduct the practice runs after school, and community members volunteer as mentors to run with students during the whole-team long runs on Saturdays. I started with 4 runners and a lot of maybes. By the end of first quarter, I had no runners left. I didn't realize it at the time, but that was pretty much my last chance to back out. I could have quit and no one would have blamed me for it - after all, my students up and quit on me, so it made sense that I would stop.
But I didn't even consider that. I was training to run a marathon. Just because my kids quit didn't mean that my training was less valuable. So I stayed on as a mentor and just switched roles. I do my practice runs by myself on week days after work and join the team on Saturdays. This weekend, I'm going to run 11 miles. As is the case with the last three Saturday runs, this will again be the longest distance I've ever run. Seven was fine. Eight was lovely. Nine hurt like hell. Nine was the first run I've done with Dreamfar that made me reconsider my participation in the program. And not really reconsider, as if I was ready to stop training. But for the first time, I recognized the reality that I was not bound to this program for any reason. The only thing keeping me there was my own desire to push myself and be a part of something beyond just me. No students would be abandoned if I left - there is no person for whom I am the only connection they have to Dreamfar.
The couple of practice runs I did the week following the 9-miler weren't great either. I did them, and they were fine, but I didn't get that surge of satisfaction afterward that I usually feel when I complete a run. I felt tired during the run, battled a voice in the back of my head telling me that I could do a partial run because hey-man-you-did-nine-miles-so-it's-cool, and felt like I was fighting a losing battle. I thought to myself, Self, you never really intended to run a marathon anyway. That's for crazy people. You even said, when you first started running, that you didn't plan to get into real distance running. So why are you bothering? I went into this past Sunday's 10k race feeling pretty meh about running.
And then I beat my best pace and finished 15 minutes faster than I had planned. A time of 1:15 for a 10k might not be great for a runner runner, but for me, it's amazing. My fastest 5k time is 39 minutes, so even if I didn't have to slow down to double my distance, I still was 3 minutes faster than I would have been at that pace. AND that 5k time was running outright, whereas this 10k (as all other Dreamfar runs) was an interval run with 3 minutes of running and 1 minute of walking. It was a challenging run, but I kept a surprisingly consistent pace the entire time, enjoyed myself, and only cared a little that it was something like 15º with a brutal wind chill.
That 10k helped me recapture something I had started to lose. I don't know if it's motivation or perseverance or just enjoyment of the activity. But I reconnected with it then, and I felt it again yesterday as I plugged through another 3.5 miles on the treadmill (sidenote: I usually use my gym's window-facing treadmills if I run inside, but when those were all taken, Law & Order: SVU made a very compelling case for the TV-facing machines). Hopefully, as I take advantage of the unseasonably warm weather this afternoon, I'll feel it again as I cruise down the Esplanade trying not to get mugged.
I genuinely don't know how the 11-mile run this Saturday is going to go. If I split the difference between my standard slow pace and my most recent 10k pace, it'll take me 2.5 hours. That's a long time to pound the pavement. If I push myself too hard, run through "bad" pain, or get sloppy, I could be looking at serious injury, either acute or chronic. Besides possibly killing my hopes of finishing the marathon in May, an injury could seriously derail my entire fitness routine and make my life miserable. I'm doing this for my benefit, not as punishment, so I need to make sure that I'm pulling away from this experience with a net gain. Last week, I wasn't feeling it. I was putting more into the runs than I was getting out. That feels different this week, and I hope it stays that way.
For now, I'm trying to enjoy being foolish. It's foolish to just fall into a marathon training program. It's foolish to keep doing it even when your students quit. It's foolish to try to do this while planning a wedding. But I'd rather be a fool than a quitter.
Dreamfar trains high school students to run a marathon. That might sound crazy to you because it kind of is. But the idea is that, by challenging students to push themselves and do something that less than 1% of people will ever do, Dreamfar teaches kids much more about themselves than most of their other high school experiences. Teachers at each participating school volunteer to lead their teams and conduct the practice runs after school, and community members volunteer as mentors to run with students during the whole-team long runs on Saturdays. I started with 4 runners and a lot of maybes. By the end of first quarter, I had no runners left. I didn't realize it at the time, but that was pretty much my last chance to back out. I could have quit and no one would have blamed me for it - after all, my students up and quit on me, so it made sense that I would stop.
But I didn't even consider that. I was training to run a marathon. Just because my kids quit didn't mean that my training was less valuable. So I stayed on as a mentor and just switched roles. I do my practice runs by myself on week days after work and join the team on Saturdays. This weekend, I'm going to run 11 miles. As is the case with the last three Saturday runs, this will again be the longest distance I've ever run. Seven was fine. Eight was lovely. Nine hurt like hell. Nine was the first run I've done with Dreamfar that made me reconsider my participation in the program. And not really reconsider, as if I was ready to stop training. But for the first time, I recognized the reality that I was not bound to this program for any reason. The only thing keeping me there was my own desire to push myself and be a part of something beyond just me. No students would be abandoned if I left - there is no person for whom I am the only connection they have to Dreamfar.
The couple of practice runs I did the week following the 9-miler weren't great either. I did them, and they were fine, but I didn't get that surge of satisfaction afterward that I usually feel when I complete a run. I felt tired during the run, battled a voice in the back of my head telling me that I could do a partial run because hey-man-you-did-nine-miles-so-it's-cool, and felt like I was fighting a losing battle. I thought to myself, Self, you never really intended to run a marathon anyway. That's for crazy people. You even said, when you first started running, that you didn't plan to get into real distance running. So why are you bothering? I went into this past Sunday's 10k race feeling pretty meh about running.
That 10k helped me recapture something I had started to lose. I don't know if it's motivation or perseverance or just enjoyment of the activity. But I reconnected with it then, and I felt it again yesterday as I plugged through another 3.5 miles on the treadmill (sidenote: I usually use my gym's window-facing treadmills if I run inside, but when those were all taken, Law & Order: SVU made a very compelling case for the TV-facing machines). Hopefully, as I take advantage of the unseasonably warm weather this afternoon, I'll feel it again as I cruise down the Esplanade trying not to get mugged.
I genuinely don't know how the 11-mile run this Saturday is going to go. If I split the difference between my standard slow pace and my most recent 10k pace, it'll take me 2.5 hours. That's a long time to pound the pavement. If I push myself too hard, run through "bad" pain, or get sloppy, I could be looking at serious injury, either acute or chronic. Besides possibly killing my hopes of finishing the marathon in May, an injury could seriously derail my entire fitness routine and make my life miserable. I'm doing this for my benefit, not as punishment, so I need to make sure that I'm pulling away from this experience with a net gain. Last week, I wasn't feeling it. I was putting more into the runs than I was getting out. That feels different this week, and I hope it stays that way.
For now, I'm trying to enjoy being foolish. It's foolish to just fall into a marathon training program. It's foolish to keep doing it even when your students quit. It's foolish to try to do this while planning a wedding. But I'd rather be a fool than a quitter.
Tuesday, January 01, 2013
Diary of a Fat Girl - Episode 22: Before I'm 30 (Not Very Scary Edition)
This past Saturday, I turned 29 years old. It was a rather anticlimactic birthday, no party or anything like that, just a dinner with Dan and our friend Brian. With a birthday so close to Christmas, it's usually not a big to-do and often gets lost in all the celebrations and travel that go on at the end of the year, so it takes me a while to realize that I'm a new number. I liked 28; it was a good year for me. I got engaged right at the start, lost a bunch of weight, got a lot stronger, earned my master's degree, and did some pretty fun stuff. But I also have a lot of goals and things about my life I'd like to revise. I've never been particularly afraid of turning 30, but I'm willing to use the "things to do before I'm 30" thing as motivation if it gets me going.
1. Be better about maintaining friendships - there's nothing like a 3-person birthday dinner (self and live-in fiance included) to make you realize that your social situation is kind of shitty. I've always been a hermit, preferring to keep to myself and stay home if it's up to me. When I have a free evening (or even a free Saturday) ahead of me, I don't think, "well, I'd better see what my friends are up to and make some plans to fill that time!" Instead, I think "thank god, a nice obligation-free period of time in which I can either be solitary or just watch TV with Dan." I know that seems unhealthy to some people, but those people don't know what an introvert is. Hanging out with people can be pretty exhausting for me, even though I do genuinely enjoy it, so I don't often seek out social interaction. The volume of interaction that occurs without me trying to do anything extra is just fine, so I let people come to me, rather than going to others. The problem is, when it comes time to count your friends, introverts may not find those numbers to be satisfactory. Although I don't know that it's within my power (or even preferable) to change my fundamental nature, but I can make a more concerted effort to maintain my existing friendships. Even if it's just sending a few e-mails every week or keeping up text messages, it's better than nothing.
2. Run a marathon - I've been training for the 2013 Providence Cox Marathon for a couple of months now, and it's starting to get serious. I recently ran 7 miles, the longest distance for me so far, and it's only going to get harder. To date, I've never run a distance so arduous that I've had to stop. It's kind of scary to know that, at some point, I'm going to reach a limit. Hopefully it won't be anything drastic or injury-inducing, considering I'm following a conservative training plan that gradually adds distance week by week, but I know that at some point, my body is not going to be able to do what I'm asking it to do. I hit limits all the time in my weight lifting, but that's kind of the point. Try to move something too heavy, back it off a little bit, then keep training until you can lift that heavy weight. With running, it's not quite the same. You don't try to run 20 miles, fail, and then notch it back to 18. That's not really how it works. Here's hoping that May 12th is a positive experience, chafing and busted knees notwithstanding.
3. Get married - Well, unless something really fucked up happens, this is going to occur whether I do a "good job" or not. But there's a lot of planning to do, and both Dan and I have been kind of lazy about it. We need to pick a JP, DJ, staffing company to serve food, alcohol provider, hotel for a block of rooms, and a bunch of other stuff. I'm buying a dress in February, but that's pretty much the only thing I've planned. The wedding is going to be pretty laid-back, but I need to be less laid-back about getting it sorted out.
4. Seriously examine employment opportunities - I love my job passionately, and I'm deeply invested in alternative education in Boston. That being said, there are two big reasons for me to start looking at other jobs. First, I'm very underpaid. With my degree and years of experience, I should be making something like $15,000 more than what I'm getting. It's not that my school doesn't value my services, but rather that they're broke as fuck and can't afford to pay a salary equivalent to Boston Public Schools' teacher salary. So the money thing is a big deal, especially if Dan and I plan to have kids and buy a bigger house at some point in the not-too-distant future. A second issue, and one that is harder to pinpoint, is the shift in my school's focus with regard to its population. Currently we serve "at-risk youth" from BPS, usually kids who have dropped out or maybe had a kid and they need a school where they can get back on track and graduate. Our students usually have a lot of complication in their home lives, and we have a counselor on staff during the school day to help kids refocus on school and process their issues enough to get back to work. But pressure from BPS and community organizations is shifting us to serve more of a SPED population, which is not something we're currently designed or staffed for. We don't have aides or paraprofessionals, and none of us are trained to teach special education students. I've never been particularly interested in working with that population, so it makes sense for me to start looking elsewhere before my school wastes its money trying to train me to teach a population I don't really intend to teach. Unfortunately, English teachers are a dime a dozen, and ironically, it's a lot easier to get hired if you're SPED certified. Sigh.
5. Complete a Run Ruckus with aplomb - I'm doing the 4-mile Run Ruckus in mid-June 2013. It's a month after the marathon and a month before the wedding, which I hope is enough time on either end. I know it will take a few weeks to recover fully from the marathon, but the Ruckus is certainly a very different sort of physical stress, so I'm hoping that I won't still be a worn-out wreck from the marathon, assuming, of course, I get to the marathon without injury and finish without dying. Two pretty big assumptions. The Run Ruckus will be a big opportunity for me to claim some of the glory I had hoped to achieve during May's Run For Your Lives zombie 5k. As wonderful as it was to finish the 5k and to feel the accomplishment of doing something I had trained for (for, like, 6 months), the race was not the experience I had been hoping for - it was short on obstacles and long on trekking through really deep mud. Fewer than 20% of the finishers had any flags remaining by the end (and were therefore "alive"), which meant that there was NO chance of me surviving, which was kind of a bummer. The theoretically dangerous parts were really simple and brief, and the theoretically less dangerous parts were actually super scary because it turns out that traipsing through muddy, hilly woods isn't super safe. Because we did a later race time, the obstacles were generally busted and the ones at the end had lines, which was a big let-down. Nothing like freezing your ass off and waiting 100 yards from the finish line for an hour to really get your adrenaline up, eh? The Run Ruckus seems to be a much more obstacle-centric affair, and will hopefully be less goopy. It's New England, so who knows, but fingers crossed. I picked a much earlier heat time after the 3pm massacre at RFYL. In preparation for the Ruckus, I'll be working on agility, interval training, grip strength, and lots of upper body work. It would be nice to be able to do a chin-up.
6. Push myself to keep learning - Whether it's keeping up with/relearning some of my Spanish, finally getting behind the wheel of a car (the most terrifying thing on the entire planet, as far as I'm concerned), or getting versed enough in one or more sciences to get certified to teach them, I need to keep learning. I've been done with grad school for a year and it's time to spend some of my free evenings putting things into my brain instead of allowing images to gently caress my occipital lobe. I also need to be more aggressive about reading. I have a backlog of, no exaggeration, 75 or 100 books, fiction and non-fiction, just waiting to be read. Stuttering my way through them on the subway to/from work is all well and fine, but a book every 2-3 weeks isn't cutting it. Some of the most profound experiences I've had in the last year have been through reading non-fiction, so I need to make that a larger priority for me. My goal is to read 50 books this year, of any genre and length. I'd also like to keep track of what I've read and what my thoughts are as I finish them. This would mean less time spent surfing the couch with Dan (unless he wants to read instead of watch TV - ha!), but I think it would be good for me.
If being 29 is even close to as great as being 28 was, I've got quite a year ahead of me. This last year wasn't entirely without its challenges, but my personal growth was pretty badass, and it's amazing how great the average day feels when grad school is over. I intend to ride this post-grad-school wave for a lonnnnnng time. Here's hoping for a fun, better-all-the-time sort of year. Happy New Year, people.
1. Be better about maintaining friendships - there's nothing like a 3-person birthday dinner (self and live-in fiance included) to make you realize that your social situation is kind of shitty. I've always been a hermit, preferring to keep to myself and stay home if it's up to me. When I have a free evening (or even a free Saturday) ahead of me, I don't think, "well, I'd better see what my friends are up to and make some plans to fill that time!" Instead, I think "thank god, a nice obligation-free period of time in which I can either be solitary or just watch TV with Dan." I know that seems unhealthy to some people, but those people don't know what an introvert is. Hanging out with people can be pretty exhausting for me, even though I do genuinely enjoy it, so I don't often seek out social interaction. The volume of interaction that occurs without me trying to do anything extra is just fine, so I let people come to me, rather than going to others. The problem is, when it comes time to count your friends, introverts may not find those numbers to be satisfactory. Although I don't know that it's within my power (or even preferable) to change my fundamental nature, but I can make a more concerted effort to maintain my existing friendships. Even if it's just sending a few e-mails every week or keeping up text messages, it's better than nothing.
2. Run a marathon - I've been training for the 2013 Providence Cox Marathon for a couple of months now, and it's starting to get serious. I recently ran 7 miles, the longest distance for me so far, and it's only going to get harder. To date, I've never run a distance so arduous that I've had to stop. It's kind of scary to know that, at some point, I'm going to reach a limit. Hopefully it won't be anything drastic or injury-inducing, considering I'm following a conservative training plan that gradually adds distance week by week, but I know that at some point, my body is not going to be able to do what I'm asking it to do. I hit limits all the time in my weight lifting, but that's kind of the point. Try to move something too heavy, back it off a little bit, then keep training until you can lift that heavy weight. With running, it's not quite the same. You don't try to run 20 miles, fail, and then notch it back to 18. That's not really how it works. Here's hoping that May 12th is a positive experience, chafing and busted knees notwithstanding.
3. Get married - Well, unless something really fucked up happens, this is going to occur whether I do a "good job" or not. But there's a lot of planning to do, and both Dan and I have been kind of lazy about it. We need to pick a JP, DJ, staffing company to serve food, alcohol provider, hotel for a block of rooms, and a bunch of other stuff. I'm buying a dress in February, but that's pretty much the only thing I've planned. The wedding is going to be pretty laid-back, but I need to be less laid-back about getting it sorted out.
4. Seriously examine employment opportunities - I love my job passionately, and I'm deeply invested in alternative education in Boston. That being said, there are two big reasons for me to start looking at other jobs. First, I'm very underpaid. With my degree and years of experience, I should be making something like $15,000 more than what I'm getting. It's not that my school doesn't value my services, but rather that they're broke as fuck and can't afford to pay a salary equivalent to Boston Public Schools' teacher salary. So the money thing is a big deal, especially if Dan and I plan to have kids and buy a bigger house at some point in the not-too-distant future. A second issue, and one that is harder to pinpoint, is the shift in my school's focus with regard to its population. Currently we serve "at-risk youth" from BPS, usually kids who have dropped out or maybe had a kid and they need a school where they can get back on track and graduate. Our students usually have a lot of complication in their home lives, and we have a counselor on staff during the school day to help kids refocus on school and process their issues enough to get back to work. But pressure from BPS and community organizations is shifting us to serve more of a SPED population, which is not something we're currently designed or staffed for. We don't have aides or paraprofessionals, and none of us are trained to teach special education students. I've never been particularly interested in working with that population, so it makes sense for me to start looking elsewhere before my school wastes its money trying to train me to teach a population I don't really intend to teach. Unfortunately, English teachers are a dime a dozen, and ironically, it's a lot easier to get hired if you're SPED certified. Sigh.
5. Complete a Run Ruckus with aplomb - I'm doing the 4-mile Run Ruckus in mid-June 2013. It's a month after the marathon and a month before the wedding, which I hope is enough time on either end. I know it will take a few weeks to recover fully from the marathon, but the Ruckus is certainly a very different sort of physical stress, so I'm hoping that I won't still be a worn-out wreck from the marathon, assuming, of course, I get to the marathon without injury and finish without dying. Two pretty big assumptions. The Run Ruckus will be a big opportunity for me to claim some of the glory I had hoped to achieve during May's Run For Your Lives zombie 5k. As wonderful as it was to finish the 5k and to feel the accomplishment of doing something I had trained for (for, like, 6 months), the race was not the experience I had been hoping for - it was short on obstacles and long on trekking through really deep mud. Fewer than 20% of the finishers had any flags remaining by the end (and were therefore "alive"), which meant that there was NO chance of me surviving, which was kind of a bummer. The theoretically dangerous parts were really simple and brief, and the theoretically less dangerous parts were actually super scary because it turns out that traipsing through muddy, hilly woods isn't super safe. Because we did a later race time, the obstacles were generally busted and the ones at the end had lines, which was a big let-down. Nothing like freezing your ass off and waiting 100 yards from the finish line for an hour to really get your adrenaline up, eh? The Run Ruckus seems to be a much more obstacle-centric affair, and will hopefully be less goopy. It's New England, so who knows, but fingers crossed. I picked a much earlier heat time after the 3pm massacre at RFYL. In preparation for the Ruckus, I'll be working on agility, interval training, grip strength, and lots of upper body work. It would be nice to be able to do a chin-up.
6. Push myself to keep learning - Whether it's keeping up with/relearning some of my Spanish, finally getting behind the wheel of a car (the most terrifying thing on the entire planet, as far as I'm concerned), or getting versed enough in one or more sciences to get certified to teach them, I need to keep learning. I've been done with grad school for a year and it's time to spend some of my free evenings putting things into my brain instead of allowing images to gently caress my occipital lobe. I also need to be more aggressive about reading. I have a backlog of, no exaggeration, 75 or 100 books, fiction and non-fiction, just waiting to be read. Stuttering my way through them on the subway to/from work is all well and fine, but a book every 2-3 weeks isn't cutting it. Some of the most profound experiences I've had in the last year have been through reading non-fiction, so I need to make that a larger priority for me. My goal is to read 50 books this year, of any genre and length. I'd also like to keep track of what I've read and what my thoughts are as I finish them. This would mean less time spent surfing the couch with Dan (unless he wants to read instead of watch TV - ha!), but I think it would be good for me.
If being 29 is even close to as great as being 28 was, I've got quite a year ahead of me. This last year wasn't entirely without its challenges, but my personal growth was pretty badass, and it's amazing how great the average day feels when grad school is over. I intend to ride this post-grad-school wave for a lonnnnnng time. Here's hoping for a fun, better-all-the-time sort of year. Happy New Year, people.
Friday, December 28, 2012
The One Where Amber Talks (almost coherently) About Religion
With the Christmas season recently completed, God and Jesus and those fellas have been on some people's minds an awful lot lately. When word spread of the massacre in Newtown, many people turned to religion for comfort and to ask how something like that could happen. Prayers were said and vigils were held.
Then something else happened. Some of the people who turned to God for comfort then shifted their gaze. In sadness and anger, they wielded religion as a weapon. "If God were more present in our schools," they said, "things like this wouldn't happen." Shaking their heads, they mused, "this is what happens when you turn your back on God."
I got really, really angry when I read things like that. I am still angry thinking about it. I'm still not sure if I am truly able to put words to my feelings, but I'm going to try.
Passing judgment on others is not okay. Wrapped up in the sentiments I summarized above is the assumption that those who are not Christian must therefore be morally void or bad people. Is that really what these people believe? That there are those who are saved, the good people, and then those who are not, the bad people? I'm not a Biblical scholar nor am I a Christian, so I'll abstain from quoting religious texts with which I'm not really familiar, but my understanding has always been that Christianity is a religion of charity, love, and forgiveness. Maybe that's not so?
My other primary problem with the sentiments about God in schools is that, well, they're wrong. Factually. God wouldn't prevent people from shooting each other any more than he has prevented priests from molesting kids. A glib point, yes, but it holds water. Being Christian doesn't remove the existence of free will. People will do what they want to do, and while the pressures of religious doctrine might encourage certain behaviors, it's not a mathematical certainty. Think about the people who bomb abortion clinics - they actually believe they are doing God's will by murdering people. They don't see any problem with killing people to prevent the killing of (tiny) people...who, in fact, are also killed in the prevention killings. But those crazies are not the ones (as far as I know) who have been proclaiming with sorrow that God could have saved the children of Newtown. It's the normal people who aren't crazy. They really, truly believe that a Bible in every classroom and a prayer at the start of each day would somehow prevent things like this. I can't imagine a sadder, more confused line of logic.
Recently, a crazy person shot a bunch of firefighters in NYC. Are we really going to blame the godlessness of firehouses, now? Or perhaps we're going to accuse the neighborhood in which the man lived of not being holy enough? When we start blaming the victims or the community rather than the perpetrator, we absolve him of any wrongdoing. It is the same line of logic that argues a woman's skimpy outfit invited sexual assault. Even in less-charged circumstances, the same logic follows. If you hadn't left your purse open, your phone wouldn't have been stolen. If you had gotten that fancy security system, your break-in would have stopped at the front door. If you hadn't been walking in that bad neighborhood, you wouldn't have been mugged.
We've probably all thought those things. I am constantly reminding my students to keep their phones and bags on them and not to leave things on a table if they're leaving the room. It's sad, particularly because I teach in a tiny school where we call each other by first name and at least attempt to have a respectful, safe environment, but it's the reality. And yet, there is an important distinction that needs to be made here. If a student's phone is stolen after they left it on the table, it's not that student's fault. They might have been able to prevent the theft, yes, but it is the fault of the thief. Period.
If we blame the student, we remove personal responsibility from the thief, as if it is in the student's power to keep the phone safe but not in the thief's power to not steal a phone. Maybe this sort of victim-blaming mentality is a mechanism we use to make ourselves feel safer. If it's the victim's fault when something happens to them, then it was within the victim's power to prevent it. If it's in the victim's power to prevent bad things, then it's within my power to prevent bad things from happening to me. Hence, I am safe.
Is this really how we want our elementary school students to think? If they had just prayed harder, maybe a random person wouldn't have shot their friends, their teachers? If the teachers had just broken the law and forced religious teachings into the classroom, then the shooter would have skipped that room? If we blame the school for not being holy enough, we are automatically blaming the individuals within that school.
Think about who that really means. Teachers who lied to the shooter to protect their students only to be shot themselves. Staff who shielded students with their own bodies and were killed. The acts of courage and love performed that day should be beyond reproach. If I can break my own rule and quote some scripture: "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends." (John 15:13) If a teacher performs an act of the greatest possible love, doesn't that mean that God is already in our schools? Doesn't that mean that He is already within those who love and care for others, those who would protect innocent children without hesitation?
I worry that the self-satisfied superiority expressed by those who blame secular education for the shooting means that those people do not see any other problems that need to be addressed. If the issue is the lack of God in schools, then there is no need to examine our gun laws, or the lack of availability of mental health services in this country, or the way news organizations celebritize mass shooters. That mindset makes me sad, and a little scared. There have been plenty of all-Christian-all-the-time communities throughout history, and none of those (as far as I know) were without problems. Putting a cross on every door and the Commandments in every main office of every school isn't the solution. But maybe if we all took some of that scripture, the bits about love and forgiveness and charity, and actually did what it said, we'd be in much better shape.
"If anyone says, 'I love God,' and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother." (John 4:20-21)
Then something else happened. Some of the people who turned to God for comfort then shifted their gaze. In sadness and anger, they wielded religion as a weapon. "If God were more present in our schools," they said, "things like this wouldn't happen." Shaking their heads, they mused, "this is what happens when you turn your back on God."
I got really, really angry when I read things like that. I am still angry thinking about it. I'm still not sure if I am truly able to put words to my feelings, but I'm going to try.
Passing judgment on others is not okay. Wrapped up in the sentiments I summarized above is the assumption that those who are not Christian must therefore be morally void or bad people. Is that really what these people believe? That there are those who are saved, the good people, and then those who are not, the bad people? I'm not a Biblical scholar nor am I a Christian, so I'll abstain from quoting religious texts with which I'm not really familiar, but my understanding has always been that Christianity is a religion of charity, love, and forgiveness. Maybe that's not so?
My other primary problem with the sentiments about God in schools is that, well, they're wrong. Factually. God wouldn't prevent people from shooting each other any more than he has prevented priests from molesting kids. A glib point, yes, but it holds water. Being Christian doesn't remove the existence of free will. People will do what they want to do, and while the pressures of religious doctrine might encourage certain behaviors, it's not a mathematical certainty. Think about the people who bomb abortion clinics - they actually believe they are doing God's will by murdering people. They don't see any problem with killing people to prevent the killing of (tiny) people...who, in fact, are also killed in the prevention killings. But those crazies are not the ones (as far as I know) who have been proclaiming with sorrow that God could have saved the children of Newtown. It's the normal people who aren't crazy. They really, truly believe that a Bible in every classroom and a prayer at the start of each day would somehow prevent things like this. I can't imagine a sadder, more confused line of logic.
Recently, a crazy person shot a bunch of firefighters in NYC. Are we really going to blame the godlessness of firehouses, now? Or perhaps we're going to accuse the neighborhood in which the man lived of not being holy enough? When we start blaming the victims or the community rather than the perpetrator, we absolve him of any wrongdoing. It is the same line of logic that argues a woman's skimpy outfit invited sexual assault. Even in less-charged circumstances, the same logic follows. If you hadn't left your purse open, your phone wouldn't have been stolen. If you had gotten that fancy security system, your break-in would have stopped at the front door. If you hadn't been walking in that bad neighborhood, you wouldn't have been mugged.
We've probably all thought those things. I am constantly reminding my students to keep their phones and bags on them and not to leave things on a table if they're leaving the room. It's sad, particularly because I teach in a tiny school where we call each other by first name and at least attempt to have a respectful, safe environment, but it's the reality. And yet, there is an important distinction that needs to be made here. If a student's phone is stolen after they left it on the table, it's not that student's fault. They might have been able to prevent the theft, yes, but it is the fault of the thief. Period.
If we blame the student, we remove personal responsibility from the thief, as if it is in the student's power to keep the phone safe but not in the thief's power to not steal a phone. Maybe this sort of victim-blaming mentality is a mechanism we use to make ourselves feel safer. If it's the victim's fault when something happens to them, then it was within the victim's power to prevent it. If it's in the victim's power to prevent bad things, then it's within my power to prevent bad things from happening to me. Hence, I am safe.
Is this really how we want our elementary school students to think? If they had just prayed harder, maybe a random person wouldn't have shot their friends, their teachers? If the teachers had just broken the law and forced religious teachings into the classroom, then the shooter would have skipped that room? If we blame the school for not being holy enough, we are automatically blaming the individuals within that school.
Think about who that really means. Teachers who lied to the shooter to protect their students only to be shot themselves. Staff who shielded students with their own bodies and were killed. The acts of courage and love performed that day should be beyond reproach. If I can break my own rule and quote some scripture: "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends." (John 15:13) If a teacher performs an act of the greatest possible love, doesn't that mean that God is already in our schools? Doesn't that mean that He is already within those who love and care for others, those who would protect innocent children without hesitation?
I worry that the self-satisfied superiority expressed by those who blame secular education for the shooting means that those people do not see any other problems that need to be addressed. If the issue is the lack of God in schools, then there is no need to examine our gun laws, or the lack of availability of mental health services in this country, or the way news organizations celebritize mass shooters. That mindset makes me sad, and a little scared. There have been plenty of all-Christian-all-the-time communities throughout history, and none of those (as far as I know) were without problems. Putting a cross on every door and the Commandments in every main office of every school isn't the solution. But maybe if we all took some of that scripture, the bits about love and forgiveness and charity, and actually did what it said, we'd be in much better shape.
"If anyone says, 'I love God,' and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother." (John 4:20-21)
Monday, December 24, 2012
A Brief Commentary on the Concept of the "Friendzone"
[Spoiler alert: This post is more aggressively offensive than usual.]
I've spent the last few minutes reading the tumblr Nice Guys of OkCupid, which is amazing. The joke is essentially the same from post to post, but it's a funny one, and one I think needs to be made. The short version, for you non-click-through people, is that men on this particular dating website complain about how women don't want to date them because they're "too nice" but then post other things on the same website that reveal how awful they are as people. I'm sure plenty of people have plenty say about this, but before I get caught up in Christmas Eve gift anticipation and sugar overdoses, I'll post my 2¢ here. Sidenote, I'm pretty impressed with myself that I remembered the number pad alt code for the cent sign.
The problem with identifying as a nice guy: Here's the thing, fellas. YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE NICE. That is a basic human quality. It doesn't mean you have to be perfect, but rather that your intentions should be mostly good instead of mostly bad. You're allowed to make mistakes, to have flaws, but you should be a good person. Being nice is not something you get a fucking cookie for. It is a requirement for continued social interaction with anyone else who is also nice. Which, I'd like to think, covers most people. The guys who you claim are all assholes who get the girls? They're probably mostly nice, too. The problem is that they either made mistakes, or there was a fundamental disconnect in their relationships that caused one or both parties to be hurt. Sure, some of them are serial cheaters or just horrible people, but if you genuinely think that those qualities are what draw women to those men, you are crazypants. And yes, there are some qualities that sometimes get bundled with dickish behavior - for example, being forward, taking risks, that sort of thing - but if you are psychotic enough to think that most or even some women are actively attracted to men that exist solely to cause them pain, just do us all a favor and kill yourself.
And that whole nice thing that you're so goddamned proud of? That entitles you to nothing. You do not earn an Old Fashioned by pulling out a chair or holding a door. You don't get blowies just for paying attention to a girl's story for 10 solid minutes. And you sure as SHIT don't get laid because you bought dinner. Women are not automatically prostitutes, whether the currency is dollar bills or steak tips. If you assume that you are owed any sort of affection or sexual favors because you did something nice, then you don't understand what "nice" means. Seriously. Like, not at all. If you identify as a "nice guy" but you also get upset when a girl doesn't put out after you bought her dinner, you are retarded.
The reality of your situation: You probably are nice. I mean, I don't necessarily know that for sure, but if I'm assuming that most people are nice, there's a statistically significant chance that you are, in fact, nice. But, if you're nice, why aren't you dating whatever the 2012 equivalent of Carmen Electra is? Dan says I mean Kate Upton. So yeah, why aren't you dating Kate Upton? Well, a lot of fucking reasons that have very little to do with your fundamental niceness. Here are some possibilities:
But seriously fellas, turn your gaze inward. I'm not saying you need to be self-loathing or what have you, but rather that you should understand a simple concept: the common denominator in all of your failures with women is YOU. It's not that all women are the same. You are the same with all these women. I don't know exactly what your goddamned problem is, but rest assured that it is YOUR problem. If you're so angry about all these girls you love dating assholes over and over, never realizing that a great guy is right in front of them...well what does it then say about you that you keep pursuing these unavailable/uninterested women over and over again? Who are YOU ignoring, discarding, disregarding, or rejecting? What women would love the chance to dote on you if only you would ever take your head out of your ass and look at them? Well, maybe none. I don't really know. But seriously, stop playing the victim. It's depressing, unattractive, and ultimately sets you up to have an oppositional relationship with all women. Not exactly great for your romantic future. If you see women as obstacles to be overcome or territory to be taken, why don't you do us all a favor and wear a t-shirt that says "I have the mentality of a rapist" and save us all the trouble of identifying you at a party.
Ugh. Go fuck yourselves, you whiny pricks. Merry Christmas.
I've spent the last few minutes reading the tumblr Nice Guys of OkCupid, which is amazing. The joke is essentially the same from post to post, but it's a funny one, and one I think needs to be made. The short version, for you non-click-through people, is that men on this particular dating website complain about how women don't want to date them because they're "too nice" but then post other things on the same website that reveal how awful they are as people. I'm sure plenty of people have plenty say about this, but before I get caught up in Christmas Eve gift anticipation and sugar overdoses, I'll post my 2¢ here. Sidenote, I'm pretty impressed with myself that I remembered the number pad alt code for the cent sign.
The problem with identifying as a nice guy: Here's the thing, fellas. YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE NICE. That is a basic human quality. It doesn't mean you have to be perfect, but rather that your intentions should be mostly good instead of mostly bad. You're allowed to make mistakes, to have flaws, but you should be a good person. Being nice is not something you get a fucking cookie for. It is a requirement for continued social interaction with anyone else who is also nice. Which, I'd like to think, covers most people. The guys who you claim are all assholes who get the girls? They're probably mostly nice, too. The problem is that they either made mistakes, or there was a fundamental disconnect in their relationships that caused one or both parties to be hurt. Sure, some of them are serial cheaters or just horrible people, but if you genuinely think that those qualities are what draw women to those men, you are crazypants. And yes, there are some qualities that sometimes get bundled with dickish behavior - for example, being forward, taking risks, that sort of thing - but if you are psychotic enough to think that most or even some women are actively attracted to men that exist solely to cause them pain, just do us all a favor and kill yourself.
And that whole nice thing that you're so goddamned proud of? That entitles you to nothing. You do not earn an Old Fashioned by pulling out a chair or holding a door. You don't get blowies just for paying attention to a girl's story for 10 solid minutes. And you sure as SHIT don't get laid because you bought dinner. Women are not automatically prostitutes, whether the currency is dollar bills or steak tips. If you assume that you are owed any sort of affection or sexual favors because you did something nice, then you don't understand what "nice" means. Seriously. Like, not at all. If you identify as a "nice guy" but you also get upset when a girl doesn't put out after you bought her dinner, you are retarded.
The reality of your situation: You probably are nice. I mean, I don't necessarily know that for sure, but if I'm assuming that most people are nice, there's a statistically significant chance that you are, in fact, nice. But, if you're nice, why aren't you dating whatever the 2012 equivalent of Carmen Electra is? Dan says I mean Kate Upton. So yeah, why aren't you dating Kate Upton? Well, a lot of fucking reasons that have very little to do with your fundamental niceness. Here are some possibilities:
- You are unattractive. This could be a busted face, a terrible body, awful hair, or just something gross about you. Again, I don't know you. It might be fixable, it might not.
- You are depressing as FUCK. People who mope around all day are not fun to be around. Who wants to date somebody like that?
- You whine like a little bitch. (See previous point.)
- You have no idea how to interact with people, especially women to whom you are attracted.
- You keep aiming too high. Realistically assess the women you're pursuing. Are you even close to their level? Never go more than 2 above your own rating. Realistically I'm a 5, maybe a 6 provided I'm wearing a push-up bra. I'm not out there chasing 9s and then getting pissy when they choose to date other 9s.
- Your priorities make no sense and you take good things for granted. If a girl puts you in the "friendzone", either value her friendship for what it is and move on or tell her to go fuck herself. If you wait around for her to realize why you're awesome, you're not listening, dumbass. SHE SAID NO. If you're not willing to listen to her extremely clear fucking signals that you're so mad about, what makes you think you'd be a suitable boyfriend? (Also, this.)
- You are not as nice as you think you are. Again, this is fodder for the Nice Guys of OkCupid tumblr, so I don't need to go there.
But seriously fellas, turn your gaze inward. I'm not saying you need to be self-loathing or what have you, but rather that you should understand a simple concept: the common denominator in all of your failures with women is YOU. It's not that all women are the same. You are the same with all these women. I don't know exactly what your goddamned problem is, but rest assured that it is YOUR problem. If you're so angry about all these girls you love dating assholes over and over, never realizing that a great guy is right in front of them...well what does it then say about you that you keep pursuing these unavailable/uninterested women over and over again? Who are YOU ignoring, discarding, disregarding, or rejecting? What women would love the chance to dote on you if only you would ever take your head out of your ass and look at them? Well, maybe none. I don't really know. But seriously, stop playing the victim. It's depressing, unattractive, and ultimately sets you up to have an oppositional relationship with all women. Not exactly great for your romantic future. If you see women as obstacles to be overcome or territory to be taken, why don't you do us all a favor and wear a t-shirt that says "I have the mentality of a rapist" and save us all the trouble of identifying you at a party.
Ugh. Go fuck yourselves, you whiny pricks. Merry Christmas.
Tuesday, December 04, 2012
Diary of a Fat Girl - Episode 21: Yikes
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| Summer 2011 |
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| Graduation Up-All-Night 2002 |
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| Move-Out Day 2003 |
My freshman year of college proved somewhat counter to the general expectation. By the end of the year, I ended up losing probably 10 pounds, though I can't remember how much I weighed at any given point during that time. I hated most of the food served in the dining halls and had yet to discover the glory of the student union food court and the fried bonanza known as "Late Night" that began after dinner service ended. My roommate (pictured) and I even occasionally woke up early to haul our asses all the way across campus to exercise at the tiny gym. Granted, we didn't know any better and just spent a half hour recumbent cycling before walking home, but it was better than the zero exercising we did most of the time. Freshman year ended up being the last time I saw a weight in the almost-healthy range for a while.
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| End of the School Year 2004 |
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| Iftar (Dinner during Ramadan) 2005 |
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| Summer Job Faux Prom 2006 |
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| Brother's Wedding 2007 |
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| Wedding of Aforementioned Roommate 2008 |
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| Alzheimer's Walk 2009 |
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| Halloween 2010 |
That gets us back to the summer of 2011 and my ecstatic fucking ice cream face. I had taught for five years, finished the coursework for a masters degree, bought a goddamned condo (well, jointly), and formed a stable and healthy relationship with a guy who liked to play video games as much as I like to watch (currently he's embarrassing his AI opponents in Saints Row: The Third). Basically, I had all my shit sorted out, my stress post-grad-school was dropping like a stone, and I became acutely aware of how fucking miserable my weight and my body were making me. I felt awkward and lumbering, weak, swollen...I wouldn't even fully realize how yucky I felt until the weight started coming off.
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| Post-Zombie 5k May 2012 |
I began to see my relationship with food and my body as primarily psychological in nature rather than physical/practical. I still eat shitty food pretty regularly. Sometimes I go over my calories for the day. But I have been losing weight for 18 months and I'm not looking back. I do my best not to let the stalls and plateaus affect me, because I know that maintenance, at least for me, is its own kind of progress, and that I am doing good work. Perfection is not the goal; improvement is.
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| July 2012 |
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| August 2012 |
But I think it's good to be scared. It keeps me focused and accountable. Having positive things to head toward is wonderful, and that's the stuff that keeps me motivated day in and day out. But having negative things to run away from has its own benefits. If I'm not driven to go for a run because of the wonderful way I'll feel afterward, maybe I'll get my ass out on the road because if I don't, I'll blow up like a puffer fish and have to go buy all my own clothing back from the Good Will down the street. It might be an exaggeration, but if I'm not scared, it means I'm complacent, or worse - indifferent. I won't let that happen. I look and feel too awesome to let it get like that.
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| November 2012 |
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