Harry Potter and the Uterine Urgency Graph

I recently read an article on Slate.com about how parents talk about parenting. It struck a chord with me throughout, but this quote in particular practically had me jumping up and down: "If becoming a parent 'changes everything,' as everyone says, then what is its promise to those of us who are already happy?"

I like my life. Currently, not hypothetically. All I keep reading are these satirical or tongue-in-cheek or painfully earnest blogs and articles about sniffing butts to check for poop and never sleeping again and having no life/friends/hobbies/time/sanity..."but it's so wonderful, I wouldn't trade it for anything" yadda yadda. My friends on social networks post these articles alongside winky faces and LOLs and 48 tagged friends who “will totally get this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” As a 31-year-old woman, I see these things every single goddamned day. “I haven’t eaten a meal with two available hands since 2013, but life is great!”

You're not selling me. I like sleep. I like free time. I like the fact that I am beholden to only myself and some dogs. I can stay late at school as needed, sleep in on weekends and school vacations, take a dump in peace, imbibe infinite quantities of caffeine, put caustic chemicals in unlocked cabinets, go to the grocery store with an exhaustive list and leisurely stroll the aisles reading labels and comparing products without regard to naptimes or boredom levels or a little one's propensity for removing all bottom-shelf merchandise. Away from work, I don't have to watch my language or think about what behavior I'm modeling all the time. I can play video games for 14 hours. I can watch TV shows with violence, language, and sexual situations no matter what time of day it is or who is in the room. I can say things like "snack" and "cookie" and "ice cream" and "park" and "nap" without having to spell them. (Our dogs are very stupid.) I don't have to choose between making just enough money to cover the daycare that I need because I’m working or bringing in no income but not needing daycare. I can spend a great deal of time and energy and money taking care of my wonderful and pathetic students who always need EVERYTHING and who aren't going to get it from most of their other teachers (or families, for that matter). Dan can take trips to Vegas with friends or go to Orlando for work and be gone for four days and my response is "okay, have fun!"

Everyone I know who has kids speaks very fondly of their lives as parents. Then again, I don't know anyone who would be like "you know, if I had to do it all over again, I might have just gotten a vasectomy/tubal ligation and gotten on with my life." Some people probably THINK that, but it seems there's some sort of contract you sign in the Labor and Delivery ward that prevents you from ever saying it, except through Post Secret. Even parents who were not trying to have kids speak lovingly of their lives as parents.

Which is fine. But all I keep hearing about are all of the objectively terrible things that happen when A Wild Offspring appears, and isn't it so humorous and vexing to have everything you once loved ripped from your life in a procedure not unlike antebellum battlefield amputation. And I completely understand the need to commiserate and reflect and find humor in parenthood, which seems to be most accurately characterized as "a mixed bag."

In fact, I do the same thing with teaching - I frequently share both positive and negative things about my job, with most of my commentary being far from the "I want to save all the children" mantra that we carry with us to various schools of education and our first teaching jobs. The difference is that I don't try to sell other people on becoming teachers. I love it. I think that if you believe you'd love it too, you probably would. But it's hard as hell, and it's NOT for everyone. Not by a long shot. Teaching in America, specifically, has a lot of systemic problems right now that make the job worse than it should be. So if someone said, "hey, should I go into teaching?" I would give them a lengthy answer, the gist of which would be "maybe. If you want to."

But from parents, all I hear is "god, this kid is driving me crazy and I haven't washed my hair in four days. BUT YOU SHOULD TOTALLY HAVE KIDS THOUGH." Which seriously besmirches their credibility, as far as I'm concerned. It's like when you find something gross-smelling and your response to your friend is "EW! Hey, smell this." No, bro, I don't need to smell it. Your reaction was very clear. I trust you.

I was told my biological clock would be ticking...?

This is part of why it’s so infuriating to have people telling me, directly and with no uncertainty, that I should have kids right now. Although the most vocal individuals are my female elder relatives, this refrain comes from a wide variety of sources, same-age peers included. They cancel plans over and over again because of the kids, but then lobby for you to join the Procreation Army, the cult-like shadowy organization that shall not rest until all child-bearing age humans are among its ranks. Sure, the conversation always starts as a question – “Are you guys thinking about having kids?” But when my answer isn’t either “yes, we’re fornicating regularly solely for this reason, thank you for inquiring about my uterus” or “NEVER!” then they turn on the hard sell. “Well, there’s no good time to have children,” they say. Yes, that’s true, I think, but also NOT a good reason to have a kid. Something being accurate does not automatically make it convincing. 

We live in a condo that doesn’t even have enough room for my possessions, and THOSE can be shoved into a closet. There is literally no room for a baby. The baby would sleep on the couch. Or we’d watch TV from the crib. Either way, we don’t have room. Are we planning to move? Yes, probably in the next 6 months to a year. Do we feel the need to get pregnant as a precursor to that move? No. To this line of reasoning, they reply, “You know, it’s hard, but you find a way to make it work.” This is how I would describe an adequate response to an emergency.

Parenting should not be an emergency. Yet that is probably the closest word to what parents on these blogs and websites consider parenting to be. Your kid is always about to die, about to kill the dog, about to be killed by the dog, about to burn the house down, about to die in the aforementioned house fire, or, perhaps most insidiously, slowly killing you through a calculated program of sleep deprivation and starvation. Basic hygiene and self-care go out the window, social engagements get missed so often that the opportunities stop presenting themselves, husbands and wives find all sorts of things to argue about, and

For all my talk of 14-hour video game marathons and leisurely strolls through the grocery store, I do actually find myself quite busy most of the time. I always have papers and things to grade, I struggle to find time to make it to the gym, and chores get pushed back for days or weeks at a time. Could I power through all of those things on a regular basis and leave myself almost no free time in the process? Yes. If I once trained for a marathon while simultaneously job-hunting and planning a wedding (and honeymoon), then yes, almost anything is possible. But adding a kid to the mix? A kid who lives with you, like, all the time? And relies on you for every single one of its needs? That sort of commitment is beyond what I’m willing to make right now, whether or not I would technically be able to handle it.

I think one of the things that makes me so resentful about other people pressuring me to have kids (immediately!) is that they don’t seem to have a lot of respect for or trust in my own personal decisions. Either my preference to wait comes from a place of gross ignorance or my thoughts are simply irrelevant. “I would love to see what kind of mom you’d be! I think you’d be great!” Thanks for the vote of confidence, but I’m not going to procreate so you can settle a bet. “Once you have a kid, you’ll understand.” Yes, I’m sure that’s true. But given my talents for rational thought and extreme empathy, I bet I have a pretty good handle on most of it. I’m not saying I have experience and knowledge equivalent to parents, but rather that I have a pretty solid imagination. I can imagine that being in a concentration camp was bad. I can imagine that being a gazillionaire with a large staff to care for my mansion would be pretty sweet. I can imagine that splitting my pants in the middle of the street would be embarrassing. I don’t need to have these experiences myself to wrap my head around them, and I don’t need to have a kid to wrap my head around the general experience of parenting. If anything, I’m over-informed. Maybe if I didn’t know about episiotomies and liquid infant poops and terrible twos and the stage when your kid wants to examine and discuss and utilize his/her genitals all the time, I wouldn’t be so hesitant to embark on the journey that everyone has decided is next for me.

To be honest, though, there are a million reasons I’m not ready. Sometimes when I get frustrated with the dogs on a walk, I pull their leashes harder than I have to. Certainly not hard enough to hurt them (or, it would seem, inconvenience them), but I don’t like that I have that reaction. I worry that I would be that way with a kid.

When my life gets busy or difficult outside of work, I tend to be less creative and productive at work. I get behind on grading and I don’t put a ton of effort into innovating and making cool lessons. When I broke my foot last fall, the combination of my mobility problems and my dark-as-midnight depression meant that I was almost no better than a substitute teacher would have been. I worry that I would have to choose between phoning it in as a teacher and phoning it in as a mom (and I would choose the former, obviously).

After losing more than 60 pounds and getting down to a size 6 or so (from a size 16), I have struggled to keep the weight off since I started teaching at my current job in September 2013. The added workload of a public school job (as opposed to the alternative school, where the children did almost no work and therefore required very little grading, comparatively) meant that my gym routine suffered dramatically – I went months at a time between gym visits and even runs around my own neighborhood. Earlier that year I had been running 6 miles a day 3 times a week with a longer run every Saturday. I ran almost 100 miles over the course of April 2013. In October 2013, I ran 1.7 miles. Total.

Not pictured: Chicken Fingers Consumed Per Month

I did a little better over last summer, doing at least a couple of runs per month, but I never got back into the habit fully, and then the combination of the school year starting back up and a lovely foot fracture this past October was the death knell for my exercise life. With almost no time and/or ability to exercise, I found it hard to keep up my food habits as well, and my motivation was inconsistent at best. Since the summer of 2013, I’ve put about 20 pounds back on (roughly one pound per month), not nearly the full amount I lost, but enough to make a significant portion of my clothes no longer wearable. And that’s just because I went from one teaching job to another. I worry – not unreasonably – that I would not be able to maintain healthy food and exercise habits with a kid. I know that many people do, but I don’t know that I would. The endless posts about not being able to lose baby weight and having one's own body betray one in unimaginable ways are not helping.

So although I enjoy my life, it's certainly not perfect. I struggle to find a balance between all of the areas that I wish to give my attention. My greatest complaint about my life right now is that I don't have enough time for all the things I want to do. If that's my main problem, why would I add a kid to that? That seems like the exact opposite of a good idea.

Of course, I also worry that I am going to wait too long, that my eggs will be made of silly string and that horrible chocolate with air pumped into it for some reason. I worry that if and when we eventually try to have kids, we will find out that we can't. Or we'll have a bunch of miscarriages, or kids with disabilities because my eggs are all jacked up. Or we'll spend $25,000 on fertility treatments and IVF only to have it fail again and again. Or that if we can't have biological children then we'll happily adopt, only to have to fight to urge to murder everyone who asks us if we have any "real" children. Or parenthood will be amazing and we'll regret having waited so long because we'll be "old parents". Or we will realize we want to have like a bajillion babies but we won't be able to because we waited too long. But I don't share these concerns with the Procreation Army because they don't need my help fighting their side of the battle. They have already perfected the significant glances that accompany the whispered dire warning of "just don't wait too long."

For all my dismissive talk of the practical and horrible sides of parenting, I am absolutely positive that, in addition to the fecal and various other nightmares, it is actually as wonderful and mind-blowing as they say. I can imagine the Grinch-heart-expanding feeling when your small child accosts you with affection with their newly-discovered gross motor control. I can imagine the pride and satisfaction and bittersweet joy of first words or first steps. I can imagine the secret, foolish-feeling tears shed in the car after dropping your kid off for the first day of school. I can imagine the gut-wrenching conversations with your spouse about what your child is or is not ready for, and how much trust to place in someone who, just a few years ago, ate a button battery and made you go to the emergency room for four hours (only to be told by the doctor that everything was fine but you'd have to go through the stool later...and you did. You went through poop just to be safe.) I can imagine the frustration and heartache and confusion the first time your kid, no longer little, talks back to you with genuine, fully-realized anger.

I have absolutely no doubt that these experiences are part of a realm that is difficult to fathom before you have kids. But I also don't think I'm ready for them, financially or emotionally or in any other realm, and I'm not suffering from their absence the way I was always told I would. The dogs woke me up this morning, a Sunday, with horrible whining at 6:30am. The only reason it didn't ruin my day was that I knew I could take a nap later, or just go to bed extra early tonight. If it were a kid waking me up, rather than the dogs? To paraphrase a Seinfeld legend, no sleep for you.

For all of the anticipated joys and delights that come with parenthood, the blogs and articles that populate the web reveal to me what I've always suspected - a lot of a parent's life is just abject misery. It's misery that's worth it of course, misery that you would absolutely suffer again and again for the protection or happiness of your child, but misery nonetheless. Parenthood eats your money, your free time, your sanity, your willpower, your friendships, and sometimes your marriage. These hyper-honest Mommy Blogs make no pretense about that.

I share my concerns, openly and without guile, but the Procreation Army is still not satisfied. “Yes,” they admit, face full of concern and understanding, “it’s true that a lot of stuff changes when you have a kid. Some things will always be different. But it’s amazing, you’ll see.” As with the smelly item proffered for communal suffering, I put my hand up and say, “No, bro, I’m all set. Your reaction was very clear. I trust you.”

Why I'm not doing the Ice Bucket Challenge (and it's not because I think ALS is peachy keen)

It's possible that you don't know what the Ice Bucket Challenge is. If so, I'm a little jealous of you. The idea is that a person is challenged to participate in the challenge, and must either dump a bucket of ice water on their own head or skip the ice water but donate $100. The cause to which you are supposed to donate is the ALS Association. Although there is some question as to the original mind behind the challenge, one of the earliest people to post about it is Pete Frates, a former BC basketball player who has ALS. Considering that there is already a Frates-inspired charity event every December, the Plunge 4 Pete, where people collect donations then jump into the freezing ocean at Good Harbor Beach, I suspect that Frates was the inspiration for or driving force behind the Ice Bucket Challenge.

The dual goals of the Ice Bucket Challenge are to raise awareness and garner donations to the ALS Association in the US (there are comparable organizations in some other countries with participants, like the MND in Great Britain). Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease, is a neurodegenerative disease with multiple causes, including hereditary predisposition and a history of head trauma. Its primary symptoms are muscle spasms and muscle weakness that progresses over time and can interfere with speaking, swallowing, and breathing. Most people with ALS die from respiratory failure within 3-5 years of the onset of symptoms. Stephen Hawking has lived with ALS for over 50 years, an unusually long time. My husband's uncle had a more typical progression of ALS, and passed away earlier this year.

In mid-July, videos starting popping up on social media, especially Facebook, of people participating in the Ice Bucket Challenge. The typical format is that they would name who nominated them, dump the water on themselves (usually to comical effect replete with schadenfreude for us), then nominate up to 3 people in the challenge. The people who were nominated but did not want to do the ice water dump were then expected to donated $100 to the ALS Association.

Here are the reasons that this thing is driving me nuts and I can't talk about it with people:

1. Peer pressure is infuriating. I don't know if it's a holdover from my teenage years or what, but when someone says, "C'mon, DO IT" then I don't want to be around that person. Maybe it's because I don't smoke, don't partake in drugs, and rarely drink, so people interact with me in this mode more often than I'd like. Maybe it's because that kind of pressure speaks to a fundamental lack of respect for my choices. If I say no to something, either drop it or have a conversation with me about it, don't just try to exert your will more forcefully in the hopes that my desire to conform and please you is greater than my desire to fulfill my own wishes (it's not).

2. AND donate, not OR donate. There are a couple of variations of the challenge floating around, and as with any game of Telephone, sometimes the message gets lost. In MANY of the videos I've seen (and explanations on the news I've heard), the two choices are to dump water on your head OR donate $100. Even in the best versions, the post-water-dump donation is still much smaller than $100, usually $10. But here's my question - why is the preferred result the one that ends up with less money going towards a good cause? I mean, I can understand a certain logic there, that the making of a video has the potential to garner more money like some weird goody-two-shoes pyramid scheme, but it's still kind of fucked up, isn't it? "Do this useless gesture or else you have to do something nice, god forbid."

3. "Hey everyone, come see how good I look!" This is probably the thing that irks me the most with the least logical reasoning behind it, and also the thing that is likeliest to offend people I know. Now, I don't know if the blame for this can be placed solely at the feet of the originators of the Ice Bucket Challenge, if it should be spread equally among all participants, or if the truth is somewhere in between...but the goal of the challenge seems to me NOT to be raising money. It's to get people to see how awesome you are while raising money (and from my previous point, raising LESS money). "Look at me! I'm doing something selfless, which is only happening so that I can get attention! I don't really understand what selfless means! LOL" In the age of Facebook and Twitter, when self-importance, self-promotion, and catering to the id are the hallmarks of social interaction, we feel most comfortable doing something for a cause when the context is everyone knowing we're doing it. It's even better if it comes packaged in self-effacing fun-poking, like how funny it is that you swore really loud when you had ice water dumped on your head. I can imagine the shouts now: "That's not me! I just wanted to do something nice, and if it's funny and cute, then all the better! I'm not doing it for the attention; it's for a good cause."

That may be entirely true, but just imagine this. Think of the warm, fuzzy feelings you get when you think about completing the Ice Bucket Challenge and posting the video online with a challenge to your friends. Now think about just donating $10 and never telling a soul. Doesn't give you the same warm fuzzies, does it? Not even close. We are driven by wanting to get credit for the good that we do. We want to be published. We want the "likes" or the retweets. We also are pretty partial to the tiny power trip of nominating 3 friends and making sure they look like assholes if they don't get a bucket going ASAP.

Now, it's easy for me to feel superior here. I regularly donate too much money to various causes, often without posting about it or trying to do additional fundraising - unless it's the Alzheimer's Walk, the time of year where I annoy people for money in a very direct, non-ice-water way. My real issue with the Ice Bucket Challenge here is more of a pet peeve I have about the psychology behind it. It's not that self-importance and fundraising are necessarily mutually exclusive - in fact, they often pair just fine, in ways ranging from subtle (charity walks) to aggressive (ice buckets). This is just a thing that bothers me, probably because it's tied to ignorance. I'm not annoyed that people are motivated by self-promotion when they do this challenge, it's that they don't know that they are. If people posted Ice Bucket Challenges with captions like "The only thing I love more than posting videos of myself is doing so while hopefully raising some money for a good cause" then I'd have no complaints. I know that I get a big ol' charity boner every time I give money, so I don't act like I'm doing anyone a favor if I give a few bucks. If it didn't feel good to give, I probably wouldn't do it, so there's nothing saintly about it. Ditto for the Ice Bucket Challenge.

4. Before celebrities and professional sports teams got involved, the donations were not that impressive considering the social media sensation. In the first few weeks of the challenge being truly viral, by which I mean that the news had heard of it, donations to the ALS Association went up ten-fold. That's awesome, right?!? Yes, it's awesome. However, ten-fold meant that they went from $20,000 (the average this time of year) to $200,000. Given that there are 152 million active Facebook users in the US and Canada, if even 1% of those people had given half of the expected minimum donation of $10, it would have been $7.6 million. If 1% is really the right number (I'm not saying it is) and $20,000 of that number would have been donated anyway, the real donation would be just under 12¢. If all the participants really did give the $10 donation that was suggested, then only 18,000 people participated. Do you really think 18,000 people doing something is enough to make it on the news? According to this article, 6 million people had "joined the conversation" (posting, liking, commenting) about the Ice Bucket Challenge on Facebook by early August, the same time that the $200,000 figure was being thrown around as evidence of the challenge's success. If 6 million people raised $180,000, that means they each contributed 3¢. This means that my 1% estimate was too kind.

So no matter how you slice the numbers, the amount of fuss over the Ice Bucket Challenge did NOT match the donations that came in. All these articles and blurbs kept coming up, oh look how well it's working, what an incredible movement. But the numbers, at least when it was just regular Joe Schmo, were underwhelming to say the least. You can say you're raising awareness all you want, but if you're not also raising money, there's only so much usefulness you can claim. Awareness doesn't fund the labs working on drug trials; money does.

Now, the "not enough money" complaint is becoming irrelevant because, frankly, celebrities and sports teams have made this challenge worth the trouble. $7.6 million has been raised in the first two weeks of August (hilariously enough, the exact number I calculated if 1% of active Facebook users donated $5 each). Some of these donations are undoubtedly celebrities and organizations giving far more than the requisite $10, but many of them are just from people who only give a shit now that Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates and the New England Patriots are dumping cold water on themselves. As soon as famous people started doing it, then it became worth doing. That's a really depressing commentary on our society, but at least it means that this thing is finally raising enough money to be worth it. (For a final down note, though, the same article that said 6 million people had "joined the conversation" about the Ice Bucket Challenge by early August also says that the number was closer to 15 million by mid-August. So if all of those people are potential contributors, they all gave about 50¢. Way better than all previous calculations, but still, imagine if they all just gave $1. Or $5. Or $10.)

5. Dystopian America is coming to pass but we're too busy looking at how cute Chris Pratt is when he is cold. Don't get me wrong - he is. Chris Pratt, as I'm sure you're aware, is cute when he does everything. He was cute when he was average pudgy Andy Dwyer, and he's cute as kinda jacked Star Lord. I enjoyed watching him get water dumped on him. That video would be funny without the context of the challenge, as would many of the celebrity videos.

Oh, hey - have you heard about what's happening in Ferguson, MO? It's probably the most important issue today regarding civil rights, abuse of power/force, and the role of police in American society. Before this, I might have argued that the Supreme Court's endless war on women was the most important rights-related issue in the US today. But something so crazy and outlandish, so over-the-top cartoonishly evil is happening in Missouri that it has superseded many of the other pressing issues of the day. For your enjoyment, here are some graphs on Google search term popularity:

This graph compares the search terms ferguson, mike brown, ALS, and ice bucket challenge. The average mentions over the past 7 days are about equal between the two related pairs. However, you might notice a problematic trend: the ferguson and mike brown search terms are sharply declining in popularity, while the ALS and ice bucket challenge search terms are steadily going up. Granted, this data only goes through Saturday, August 16th and new violence has erupted in Ferguson as of Sunday, August 17th, so these figures are slightly outdated, but it's something to think about.

This graph tracks the search terms ferguson, mike brown, and robin williams. Unfortunately, the Google Trends site won't allow date-to-date search parameters so I had to choose between the past 7 days and the past 30, so this isn't a perfect graph. But still, look at how unbelievably distant the peaks of the search terms are. On this graph, the robin williams search term peaked at 100 on the index, while ferguson peaked at 8. I was very sad to hear of Robin Williams' suicide.  I was not, however, 12.5x as upset about Robin Williams as I am about Ferguson, and I hope most people aren't either, if they even know about Ferguson.

This is not to say that ALS is unimportant. Or that when one problem rears its ugly head, we have to drop the other problems. Or that Americans are only capable of keeping one issue in their heads at a time. Or that social issues are more important than medical ones. However, I do worry that we're focusing on ALS because the way we're doing it right now is fun. You can't dump ice water on your head and save a black dude from getting shot by the police. There aren't a lot of fun ways to stand up against what's going on in Ferguson. ALS is an easy enemy. Nobody is on the disease's side. We can all agree that it's terrible. The issue is as uncomplicated as it gets. Not so with Ferguson. There are sides to choose, and lots of grey areas. There are things that many people, including me, think are absolutely fundamentally wrong while many others don't take that view. There isn't an easy solution where you click "Donate" and you've done your part. People's reluctance to get involved in the complicated and upsetting news out of Ferguson, MO means that it's not making the social impact it could if it had the full force of the like/click/share/comment machine that the Ice Bucket Challenge has. Thankfully, Twitter is blowing up about Ferguson (finally) so hopefully that will mean something soon.

6. The whole thing smacks of upper-middle class privilege and I can't explain why that bothers me. I remember the reaction I had when I first heard about the "or donate $100" consequence for not doing the Ice Bucket Challenge. "Who the FUCK has $100?" I might be paraphrasing, but it was something like that. Now, after I settled my monocle back over my eye and picked up the diamonds I had sent scattering with my shock, I began to think.

Seriously, though, who the fuck has $100? It really made me wonder about the challenge. Are we, as a society, really doing so well that we each have $100 to donate to disease research? Or has ALS become such a common disease that it behooves us as a country to come together to eradicate it once and for all? Or maybe, just maybe, is this challenge not for most people?

A quick check of personal finances in the US reveals the following:

• The average disposable income (money after taxes) is $37,492 for an individual.
• According to the spending percentages here, the money spent on housing (incl. utilities), transportation, food, insurance, medical bills, entertainment, education, and miscellaneous expenses is $33,555.
• That leaves the average American with $3,937 for the year, or $328 a month.
• This remaining money must cover expenses related to clothing, credit card bills, loan payments including student loans, and any contributions to a savings account.

For personal reference, I have $590 in student loan payments due every month, and when my payments shift again soon, that number will top $600. Despite this being in the most dire financial position in my calendar year (the weeks before school begins and paychecks kick back in), I am still okay. Mostly because I have a husband who makes more money than me and doesn't become unemployed for 2 months of every year. But still, I'm fine. I pay my bills on time, I don't have to check my bank account balance when I go out to dinner, and if a sudden expense were to pop up, I would have resources, like the aforementioned husband or necessary evil of credit cards, to help me out. Someday I might even have a robust enough savings account not to need those resources.

If I looked at the $100 donation amount and balked, what about people who make less money than I do? What about people with more expenses than me? What about all of the millions of people at or below the average income? The guilt-trip peer-pressure format of the Ice Bucket Challenge comes packaged in privilege. The people who nominate others with the caveat "but you must donate $100 if you don't do it" don't worry about making their friends feel ashamed of not being able to donate, because of course they can afford it. "It's for a good cause," they say, as if feeding yourself or making rent aren't good causes too.

This is not to say that people with average or lower incomes can't donate money. They do - all the time. This recent video puts forth the argument that sometimes those with the least are the most giving, and I've seen this happen many times in many contexts. But the $100 "penalty" for non-compliance and the guilt format of the challenge suggest that the Ice Bucket Challenge itself is simply not meant for an audience of lower income individuals. More than 60% the Americans surveyed in 2010 were below the income figures I discussed above, and even someone at those numbers would struggle to afford a $100 donation. I don't have a problem with financially-comfortable people telling other financially-comfortable people they should donate money, but the way this does it just strikes me as tone deaf and ignorant.

WITH ALL OF THAT BEING SAID, really what I'm doing is criticizing a social movement that is doing good. Even if the motivations of some people are suspect or the challenge itself is annoying for those of us who take issue with how it's being done or everything from the phrasing of the challenge to the psychology behind it is problematic, it's still raising money to fight a disease that is a shithead, if diseases can be shitheads (they can). I would rather grumble about annoying viral charity trends than not notice when no one is doing anything good about anything. Of all the possible things in this world, it's hardly the worst. If Uncle Paul were still here, he'd probably find it silly and amusing, and thank everyone for doing it, because he wasn't a negative asshole like some of us. But if you nominate me for the challenge (and you have), please consider this post my extraordinarily lengthy "no, thanks."

Diary of a Fat Girl - Episode 26: I Bought the Wrong Donuts

It's been well over a year since I've written an entry in this series, and probably 11 months since I was in peak physical condition. After the marathon and the wedding, I got out of a lot of good habits and replaced them with things like "working more" and "bringing home work" and "maybe going to bed". Depending on the day, I might describe my current health/wellness/fitness situation in one of any number of ways, ranging from "on the up and up" and "clawing desperately at the cliff-face as I topple off the mountain of awesome down into the valley of expanding flesh".

Last Friday, I bought the wrong donuts. It was National Donut Day, which apparently is a thing, but instead of going to a Dunkin Donuts for a freebie, I snagged a box of Entermann's at the grocery store whilst shopping for other, more standard fare. I've never been obsessed with donuts or anything. More than once, I've gotten an emergency chocolate stick (nee cruller) from the kiosk in Government Center, when that T station actually existed, and powdered donuts are one of my convenience store weaknesses, but if you asked me to name my favorite foods, donuts wouldn't even be in the top 25. Nevertheless, I was hungry (never a good condition for grocery shopping) and the donuts looked good. I considered my options with great care, greater than was truly necessary.

In the end, I decided on the tried and true staple: yellow cake with chocolate exterior. I like to dip them in milk piece by piece and devour them soggy and cold. It had been months or possibly years since I had eaten them. I was more than a little eager to get to work on them, perhaps the next morning to kick the weekend off right.

It wasn't until I got home that I realized I had purchased chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. They're delicious, of course, but NOT what I wanted. When I realized my error, I became viscerally upset. Mad at myself, mad at the injustices of the world, mad at the death of the golden-donut-eating dream I had indulged in all the way home from the store. Part of me wanted to hit up the local CVS to get the right ones, but even the fattiest fat kid could feel shame at such a thing. I didn't need 12 donuts before, and I definitely didn't need 24 now. I mourned the fantasy I had created, and I mourned it hard.

I didn't bother eating any of them until Sunday morning, when I ate 3 of them, or 150% of my standard complement. I gorged myself on the wrong donuts. I don't know why. Maybe I was trying to get rid of them faster, whether to erase my mistake or to bring about the appropriate correct-donut-buying time. Maybe I felt the need to punish myself for buying the wrong ones, so I ate an amount that I knew wasn't healthy and would probably make me sick. I haven't had any since.

It's now Wednesday night. I'm still unhappy about the wrong donuts. I know why. In the weeks and months before now, I have been slowly realizing and reconfirming how much my emotions are tied to my relationship with food. I don't know if there's really a term that covers everything, but we'll just say I got me some disordered eating. You name an emotion and I'll tell you why it justifies the most horrific eating you can imagine. I couldn't get closer to eating my feelings if I decorated a cake with emojis.

This is why, despite several weeks of a revamped effort to run and weightlift multiple times a week, I haven't lost a single pound. Exercise has always been the easy part for me. I enjoy it, genuinely. Yes, I'm often too lazy to initiate it, and if I give myself the option to go home instead of to the gym, home usually wins. But I actually like working out, both for the experience and the results.

The real hard work for me is mental and emotional. It's getting into good habits of mind, not body. I remember this lesson from the first time I learned it, a few years ago when I was pushing 200 pounds and decided that I needed to change some shit. Frankly, the closer I treat my relationship to food to the way an addict views his/her drug of choice, the more successful I am. It's not that certain foods are the enemy - behaviors and decisions are. Giving in to impulses to overeat. Making poor choices when out in the world. Deciding not to care about calories and long-term results. Those are my real addictions.

I remember, years and years ago, I thought that I'd rather be happy and fat than miserable and skinny. But that was a false dichotomy. I have been miserable and fat, and I have been happy and skinny. The happiest I've ever been in my own skin was when I worked on my own health for hours every week, put on a loose-fitting pair of size 6 shorts, and strutted around like I was hot shit (I was).

Now, I'm still down over 40 pounds, but up about 20 from my lowest weight. I don't really care about the number, but I do care about fitting into clothes and feeling good. I have a LOT of summer clothes that fit be beautifully last year but are now sitting in a storage bin because there's no point in taking them out right now. Before marathon training took up the vast majority of my time and energy, I was very close to being able to do a full push-up and a full chin-up. I was excited about the possibilities of what my body could do. Now I'm halfway back to the start, doing 45º incline push-ups and 60lb lat pulldowns. My longest run in the last 10 months is under 5 miles. I don't know whether I feel motivated or discouraged. Maybe both, which is why I can't seem to shit or get off the pot.

I don't particularly enjoy the mental work associated with successful weight loss. I have trained my body to feel happy when I engage in unhealthy eating habits, ergo making smart choices feels like a bummer. "Yeah, I guess I really should just eat a chicken breast for dinner and call it a day. Sigh." "Dessert? I don't have the calories for that." "One cup of milk will have to do because I can't swing one and a half." Calorie counting and portion control sound all well and fine now, but that's because my belly's full. It feels a lot different when I'm hungry and starting at a wall of food.

Even so, I have a Muhammad Ali quote hanging in my classroom: "I hated every minute of training, but I said, 'Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.'" The hardest part of this is getting into the good habits. Maintaining them is not nearly as difficult. If I really want what I say I want -- a healthy body capable of feats of strength, the ability to push myself physically and mentally to new heights, a bitchin' silhouette -- then I really need to do the work. I already overcame the fear and uncertainty when I lost 65 pounds over the last couple of years. This is well-worn ground, or at least not entirely uncharted territory. I did so much hard work on so many fronts to get to this point, and it would be a disservice to myself to fall apart now.

So when I buy the wrong donuts and find myself asking, "Why me, God? Why??" what I really should be asking is, "Bitch, whatchoo need 12 donuts for anyway? You got 11 friends coming over tonight?"

Genuine Advice for Buying a Car from a Dealership

Yesterday, I bought a car.  I don't have it in my possession yet because the DMV has not yet become an instantaneous service (ha!) so I won't actually be driving around for a couple of days.  That being said, the hard part is over.  I had to learn a LOT about negotiating, car dealerships, the make and model of car I wanted, and sales in order to make the process happen in a way I was comfortable with.  The entire thing, from first contact with a dealership to signing a sale agreement, took just under a week, and that could have been substantially shorter if Christmas hadn't fallen in the middle of the week.  In the blurbs below, I hope to impart to you the essential nuggets of wisdom I learned in my research, in the hopes that you will have a good car buying experience next time you're in the market.  For curious parties, here is a lengthy article that I found illuminating.

1. Do your research online ahead of time.  Look at what cars have what features, and figure out what's important to you.  Do you want excellent fuel economy?  Top safety rankings?  Something that looks bad-ass?  Find one or more cars that look like they would meet your needs.  If you have access to a Consumer Reports account, that site has valuable information comparing cars within a size class, which I found very useful (read: the most useful thing in selecting a car by a mile).  It can also tell you how the reliability and safety of a car has performed from year to year, which can be particularly helpful in selecting used cars.  Speaking of selecting cars...

2. Select an appropriate price range of vehicles before you go to a dealership. Know exactly what you can afford (consider total price and monthly payments, assuming you are financing), and look only for cars within that range.  If you can't afford a BMW, then let it go, my friend.  Don't test drive something you shouldn't buy.  Cars are expensive to buy, expensive to maintain, and they are a terrible investment, so now is not the time to get vain and fancy.  That being said, it's also usually not wise to buy a $1500 used car if you can comfortably afford something much better; you'll end up throwing $3000 into it in repairs and then getting rid of it in two years, so it's not actually saving you any money.

3. Be aware of your sales person and his/her techniques.  Okay, I'm just going to talk about this person as if he is a male because there's a 99% chance you'll talk to a salesman rather than a saleslady.  Basically, your salesman has two entire personae.  The one you'll see is friendly, attentive, helpful, respectful, a little corny with the jokes, interested in your questions, and always always always looking out for your best interests.  The one behind the scenes might still be a nice guy, but he is 100% ulterior motive.  First off, this guy wants your money.  The more the better.  Never forget that his job is not to save you money or get you a good deal.  His job is to maximize profit because his paycheck is based on commission.  This puts you at direct odds with the salesman, assuming you want to save money (and I'm guessing you do).  The guy will act like he's on your side (which is why all offers and financial decisions have to come from someone else, be it his manager or some other department) but he isn't.  Now, to be fair, both of you want you to walk out of the dealership having purchased a car, but that's about where the common ground ends.  Some common tricks and why they do that:

• Making you wait endlessly.  This occurs mainly before and during price negotiations.  The idea is that you'll get impatient and agree more readily to unfavorable terms as long as you can get the hell out of there.  You can proactively avoid this if, when your sales guy says he'll be right back, you tell him exactly how long he has before you walk out (and you really have to be willing to leave).  You can also do what Dan and I did, and after a long interval, just start standing up and stretching, then looking like you're ready to put coats on.  Amazing how quickly people will get it together when you send the "I'm leaving" signal.
• Using bad penmanship and nonsense scribbles to confuse you.  Watch any car salesman discuss prices and options with a customer, then watch what happens when he gets a blank piece of paper and a pen.  It's kind of amazing to see, provided you have no stake in the agreement.  He will write down every number he says, sometimes more than once, along with terminology and notes that go with these numbers.  They will be arranged on the page in a way that makes no sense after the fact, and will often be so hard to read that you have no idea what's going on.  The idea is for him to sound like an expert and for you to get flummoxed.  People don't want to inconvenience others and they don't want to sound stupid, so instead of asking for clarification, they say "oh, sure, that all seems fine."  While this conversation isn't binding, these terms will end up in a contract that is.
• When financing is involved, focusing on the monthly payment rather than total price.  Car dealerships make good money off of car loans, which is why there are always cash-back offers and other incentives when you finance with them.  The longer the term of the loan (how long you have in order to pay it back), the more money they make.  If the salesman says he can get you a $22,000 car for only $200/month, there's something fishy there.  Look at the loan term, the interest rate, and the down payment before you sign anything.  When negotiating, get the total purchase price to a number you're comfortable with, THEN talk about loan terms.  If you want to skip financing with the dealership, you can get pre-approved for an amount at your local bank, and then the financing terms are not a part of the car negotiation.
• Manipulating your emotions.  Depending on the stage of the negotiation, the salesman will want you to feel different things.  When I took the Fit for a test drive, the salesman asked me what I liked about the car.  The trick is that, by having me say all the good things about it rather than him saying it, I got myself excited about the car without feeling like I was being sold to.  Salesmen will keep pictures of their families on their desks for background guilt trips when you're really pounding them on the price.  I also had several dealerships not-so-subtly accuse each other of unnamed trickery when I would say "well these guys are offering me this price, so can you beat that?"  Rather than saying, "nope, can't go that low" they would say, "I don't know what they're doing over there are Dealership A, but that price is a lot lower than we're able to do, no matter how we crunch the numbers."  The idea is that, knowing that you're basically already a lost sale because they can't hit that number, they hope to plant the seed of doubt in your head about the other dealership, possibly contributing to the deal falling through.

4. Watch a lot of Pawn Stars (or similar shows).  I wish I were kidding, but this was one of the most important factors for me.  I watched a lot of negotiations and learned, by example, what good and bad deals looked like.  Never take the first offer.  There is always room for negotiation.  Know ahead of time what number(s) you find acceptable.  Know what other people are paying for the same thing.  Keep your guard up until the deal is final.  Be aware of how you are being manipulated.  Walk away if anything is dishonest or suspect, or if you smell bullshit in any way.  Being willing to walk away is one of the most important aspects of any negotiation.  If you're not willing to sink a deal when it no longer meets your needs, you are giving up a great deal of leverage.  Remember that you're the one with the money, which puts you in a position of power.  You've got the upper hand, so don't give it up.  If you're buying a new car or a widely available used car (or if you're not married to a particular car), you don't need any specific dealership nearly as much as they need you.  A salesman will act like he's doing you a huge favor by entertaining your request for a car, but the real arrangement is that you're doing him a favor by allowing him to offer you a car.

5. Read every line of every piece of paper.  Ask a question about literally everything.  Bring someone with you for support and a second pair of eyes.  Don't let a salesman rush you through anything, encourage you to sign something without reading it, or tell you what something "basically" says.  You're not signing what they're saying out loud, you're signing a piece of paper, so be aware of what you're agreeing to.  Dan and I considered tanking the entire sale when a question we asked got two opposing answers from two different people at the dealership.  It ended up being a difference of about $40, but if we hadn't gotten clarification on it, we could have ended up owing an extra $500 simply because the first guy answered our question incorrectly, either because of a language problem or old fashioned dishonesty.  Ask questions, be clear with your terms, and make sure the sales people are clear with theirs.

6. Contact multiple dealerships in whatever way you're most comfortable.  I had two distinct rounds of car pricing.  The first time, I called half a dozen dealerships in the area, told them I was looking for a quote, received their initial offer, told them I wanted a price more like x, waited for them to call me back, and kept going like that.  By the time I realized that the first offer I had gotten was the best, the dealership, like the bag of dicks they were, pulled it off the table and said that they didn't have the flex cash (bullshit sales incentive) to offer it at that price anymore.  Suddenly I was back to square one and it was Christmas.  For the next two days, I sent online inquiries to many of the same dealerships, plus a few others I hadn't contacted before, and started negotiating over e-mail.  This system was much easier for me for a number of reasons (not the least of which was having everything in writing already, plus the fact that I can't hear for shit over the phone).  I ended up making a great deal over e-mail, then just finalizing things in person at the dealership.  Using e-mail allowed me to be more thoughtful in my responses, wait for other offers if I wanted, ask questions as they arose, and forward quotes from one dealership to another.  Because I had already gone for a test drive and I knew a rough range of prices that I could expect, there were absolutely no drawbacks to doing negotiations over e-mail.  So whatever way you want to negotiate, go for it.

7. When you're finally ready to visit a dealership, be prepared for a lengthy stay.  Both times I went to a dealership, it took about an hour longer than I thought was necessary.  I test drove a Fit and got a quote from a place down the street, and was there for well over an hour, nearly two.  I was starving.  I was grumpy.  I wanted to leave.  When Dan and I went to make my actual purchase at another dealership, I came better prepared.  I ate shortly before we went, brought snacks, and mentally readied myself for a long, boring visit.  We were there for exactly two hours, and about an hour of that was wait time between various things.  Waiting for the online guy to come over and "say hi" to pass off the sale to the in-person guy.  Waiting for the car to be ready for a test drive that we didn't need to take because we had already done that.  Waiting for things to get photocopied.  Waiting for the finance guy to be ready (this was the wait where we got ready to leave and then were served more or less promptly thereafter).  Basically, if you are going to a dealership for any reason, bring something with 3G service and probably a snack.

8. Don't worry about the stuff they seem to focus on in movies from the 80s.  A firm handshake and eye contact might help you in the business world, but ultimately your negotiating tactics and your emphasis on price will be the largest factor.  You don't have to dress fancy (your credit score speaks volumes more than your shoes), you don't need to have good posture, and you don't need to call everyone "Old Sport" like Gatsby does.  If you remember what I said in #4 about you being the one with the power, then obviously there's no need for you to put on a show for them.  They are the ones putting on a show for you, so let them run around like maniacs while you sit comfortably in your jeans and sneakers.

9. Know what you're getting for the money.  You don't need a warranty beyond the one that comes with the car, but if it makes you happy, then okay.  The finance guy at the dealership wanted to sell me a paint sealant and a fabric coating and an anti-theft system (the car already has one, but this one would be, like, totally awesome) and a seven year service warranty and and and...the bottom line is, if you add up the amount that the warranty costs you and then add up how much you can expect to pay out of pocket without the warranty, the numbers almost always work out in favor of skipping the warranty.  If it makes you feel better to have the warranty, especially if you don't have AAA or anything like that, then go for it.  But just be aware of what you're getting and for how much money.  Know what the warranty does and does not cover.  In addition to that, understand all of the elements of the purchase price and get this number up front ("What is the number I would have to write on a check to drive the car off the lot?").  For example, in addition to the cost of the car itself, I paid for the taxes (6.25% in MA), the registration/RMV fees, and documentation fees, which all together were nearly an additional $1,500.  This process was pretty straightforward because, whether it's just Honda or how many dealerships operate these days, there was no attempt to slip in unmentioned costs in the sale right before I signed anything.  Sure, they wanted to sell me warranties, but there was no high-pressure push to switch to buying the more expensive Sport model or adding options or the dreaded "undercoating".  Granted, you should still keep an eye on every item on the bill, but I did not find this part to be as full of bickering and itemizing as I dreaded.

10. Be aware of timing.  Dealerships have sales quotas for each month, quarter, and year.  I chose to buy a car at the end of the year not just so it could be a birthday present from me to me, but also because I knew dealerships would be particularly desperate to make sales.  With new 2014s coming in (although, surprisingly, Honda isn't putting out a 2014 Fit), sales numbers getting wrapped up for the month/quarter/year, and the low volume they do over the holiday season, I knew I would be more likely to make a good deal now than any other time of year.  It also helped that I was becoming increasingly desperate to shorten my commute from ~90 minutes round trip to more like 45 minutes - but don't tell Honda that!  Basically, if you can wait for the right time to buy a new car, try to hit them when new model years are coming out, when quarters or years are wrapping up, or any time sales are slow.  Also, dealerships are much busier on weekends, so go on a weekday if you can.

This won't help much if you're doing something drastically different from what I did, which was buying a new car with no trade-in.  When you get the trade-in involved, negotiations become complicated (one article I read suggested breaking this up into two steps and doing the trade-in in a private sale).  For used cars, you run into problems of people buying the car you wanted before you make a deal, having trouble comparison shopping because there are rarely identical used cars, and spending a lot more time inspecting individual vehicles and doing test drives.  Hopefully, however, my advice on research and negotiation will help regardless of the sales situation in which you find yourself.

If you're interested in the numbers involved in my purchase, I'm happy to share the information upon request. Once I actually have my car in my possession, I will also happily tell you whether or not you should go to the dealership I went to, but the Yelp review will have to wait!  Fingers crossed for a timely RMV process (har har!).