Nutcase 101

Did you know that you can bruise your kidney? Yes, you can. And you don’t have to be in a car accident or major incident to do it.

You might have heard that I went to a little yarn thing in Atlanta a couple of weeks ago. Where I might or might not have spent way too much money on fiber. (I’m an addict. I admit it.) But all of this happened on the way to yarn heaven. Okay, really, it was to my friend’s apartment.

I landed in Atlanta around 9 pm and had to catch the train (MARTA) to get to my friend’s apartment. Thankfully, the train stops at the airport so that part was pretty easy to navigate and get a seat to myself. But when I had to switch trains, the car had gotten full with people that had been watching the Braves wear really tight britches throwing around balls. Hey, I know what I appreciate about baseball, the uniforms.

Getting on the second train was NOT fun. All the people pushed, shoved and didn’t care about letting me on to the train – heck, I almost didn’t get on it. And then when I did, there was no where to sit so I stood in the aisle with my rolling bag, shoulder bag and hand bag. I tried to get situated before the train started moving but I was not successful, as the train jerked into motion I slammed the left side of my back into a hard plastic seat.

Thankfully, a gentleman saw my distress and kindly offered his seat. Which was great because I was ready to bite someone’s head off – I was tired, having been up and gone to work, then traveling and finally getting on two trains. And I didn’t mention that on the first one that I got stuck behind a group of former sorority sisters that only knew how to describe every other statement with “Oh, I SOOOO know what you mean.” “OMG!” And “LIKE WHAT?!”

Finally, I got to my friend and got to lay down. But I had no clue what I had done to my back until a few days later when bruises started to appear on my spine and there was sharp flank pain. And by a week later after a slew of symptoms and a battery of tests (including a CAT scan where I got to be radio active for a few minutes), it was determined that when I hit my back into the train seat that I had caused some wonderful kidney stones to play ping pong in the kidney bruising the inside while the chair did damage to the outside. Good times, good times.

Skirt.

Really? I find the perfect, I MEAN PERFECT, A-Line skirt for my pear shape body on-line. (I’m not going to say where because I don’t want to give these people anything – and I’m lazy – probably why I can’t fit into their skirts.) I see it on a normal woman on a popular blog and I click the link. This leads to a PLETHORA of skirts and I’m giddy because this place has A-line skirts that hit right below the knee…it’s skirt heaven. The proportions look right and the materials have a great drape that are can transition from business to a casual Saturday afternoon.

Then I click to see what sizes these perfect skirts come in – Small through X-large. More giddiness abounds. Because right now, I’m extra large. There just happens to be more of me to love, thank you very much. But, I’ve accepted me as of right and I’m working on making me more compact to love but until then I’m going to dress for the right now.

Since it’s a new shopping site, I click on the sizing chart because I can tend to teeter into a large when some places use vanity sizing. No, this place uses the “bitch-slap-back-into-reality-of-how-fat-you-are-and-give-people-serious-eating-problem” sizing. Extra large for this dress maker is a 10-12. Yes, that’s right, a size 10 to 12. If you’re the average American woman and sporting the curves of a size 14, so sorry, they don’t want your business. That means I’m definitely out of the running because my size 16 (14 on a good day) ass is WAY too big and my wallet is not good enough for them to cut their clothes for anyone with waist bigger than 33″.

Yup, this company is telling over half of American women, “You’re too fat to wear our clothes”. Now, if this was a business that was housed out of a foreign country where most of their women are compact and petite, I’d be understanding. But, nope, this is a good ol’ USA company. And, yes, I do know that it’s the company’s prerogative to make clothes up to a certain size but to call a size 12 woman an extra large, that’s just insulting.

BAH! BAH ON YOU STUPID PERFECT SKIRT COMPANY!

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll see that I post a lot about yarn. And a lot of people don’t believe that yarn work is the coolest hobby in the world or don’t understand why I could get so excited by a hank of fiber.

This weekend I got to go to Stitches South, where my yarn dreams came true. There were a lot of little mom & pop yarn shops where they make one batch of a yarn in a specific colorway and that’s it. I’m now the proud owner of a lot of different sock yarns that will knit up into some wonderful gifts for people.

Of course, when I got home, I had to get approval of my purchases.

And, the ‘Reeling Machine’ is a yarn swift, a nice little tool that helps a hank of yarn convert into a nice yarn cake when used with a ball winder.

(PS. If anyone is looking for a wooden tabletop swift – non-umbrella type – mine is up for sale, email me for the price.)

Dear Me at Twenty-three,

I’m sorry. You worked really hard to get the weight off of this body and the me from twenty-seven to thirty-one hasn’t been keeping up our end of the bargain. We’ve allowed greasy fast food, cakes with decadent amounts of icing and laziness to take precedence over keeping the fat off that you worked so hard to remove. You would spend an hour or two every day (even on weekends!) at the gym, focusing on cardio and the weight machines. You wouldn’t leave the elliptical machine until you had hit five miles. Now, I get winded after walking one mile.

Thankfully, I didn’t let all eighty pounds come back, just the same thirty pounds that we’ve been fighting with since I got out of grad school. We did manage to get it off for almost nine months in 2007 but then decided a sedentary lifestyle was much more conducive to doing nothing.

And the food issue, we know how wonderful fresh vegetables from the farmer markets taste – the glory of produce that was picked the day before being consumed in it’s natural state, as God intended. But now we don’t allow that type of food in the house, the Oreos needed their place of honor on the counter.

And the soda. It’s a bad addiction that’s going to be hard to break. I realized this morning that I drink almost a two liter of diet soda a day. I can only imagine what I’ve been doing to the body you had dedicated to drinking 100 ounces of water, every day, for two years straight.

But today, I would’ve made you proud. Today, I realized the harm I was doing to my body by trying to hide the food I eat from myself. My distorted thought pattern was that if I hid the food from B, I was hiding it from my body as well. Those calories weren’t going to count because I devoured it in secret where no one could witness my downfall. Also, I stopped the soda, put it down and picked up the water glass instead.

Our next step, on this side of thirty-one, I’m going to cut out sugars. Only natural sugars will prevail on a daily basis with something ‘bad’ on occasion and in moderation.

I know that these promises have been made many times to our self but today feels different. Today, I realized what you did and accomplished – how hard it was to work for that goal and I appreciate what you did, reminds me that it is possible to go back to that body. I know it’s going to be harder because we’re no longer in our early-twenties but it’s not insurmountable.

Thank you for being there twenty-three. Now, it’s time to embrace thirty-one.

Love,

Jen

Honestly, I’m in a state of emotional fucked uppedness. I’m sure that’s a psychiatric term in some shrink book somewhere. If it’s not, it should be.

Why am I in this emotional state of fucked uppedness?

Because I’m on a bloody roller coaster where I’m happy one day and damn right miserable the next. And poor B, he’s been strapped in against his will in the seat next to me.

And if I could pull the emergency brake or cut the straps so I could get out, I totally would. I just forgot my MacGyver kit when I got on.

The worse part, someone I who I knew in Grad school passed away. He and I had a few classes together, though he was in undergrad. He and I never had any ground breaking, emotional wrenching conversations but he was adored by his classmates. When he entered the room, he had the biggest grin on his face and it infected those around him. Danny was one of those guys that made the world a better place just knowing that he was on it.

He was only 27. And dammit, there are a lot of people that didn’t get to meet him. Thankfully, there was a significant number that did.

And I don’t want to post this because I feel like a whiny bitch (another scientific term). If you need me, I’ll be on the roller coaster that doesn’t stop.

Today, I got to say good-bye to Das Frankenboot!

After four weeks of wearing this five pound contraption on my left foot (and let me tell you, the calf muscles on my left leg are GREAT!), it’s finally gone. And honestly, I’d do a happy dance if I could.

But today I had more x-rays before I got my pardon and I had the forethought to capture my bones for your viewing pleasure. Also, I have a weird fascination with x-rays.

This x-ray shows you my fracture on the day of the ‘incident’ as it’s currently being called. If you look above the mouse pointer, you’ll see the small crack in the fourth metatarsal. If only my grandmother, a former nurse, could see how I correctly used my limited knowledge of the skeletal system.

And today’s x-ray! It looks 10 times worse than the previous because the crack looks wider and it appears that I did more damage to myself since the original ‘incident’. But that’s the wrong line of thought. Because I don’t have the real x-ray image (these were captured with my iPhone), you’d see that there is new bone in the crevice. Also, I’m standing in the second x-ray because I can actually put weight on my foot again – that first x-ray, I was in a small amount of pain. There was no standing.

So, now you’ve had a bit of anatomy fun with Nutcase, I won’t scare you with the ugly (but comfortable) footwear that I’ll be wearing for the next six weeks.

Every day is a countdown until Das Frankenboot is not a mandatory accessory. Right now I’m at 6 days until I go to the doctor and I get to have the freedom of wearing shoes.

One takes shoes for granted until you lug around a five pound boot that doesn’t fit comfortably for the foot it supposed to help heal and squeezes my leg constantly. Even when I get permission to wear shoes, they aren’t the cute sandals that my tootsies long for – oh no.

Sandals (and the pedicures that go along with) that’s not until May, eight weeks after the event because I have to wear supportive foot gear. And supportive sandals are NOT pretty.

Another look back, this story takes place in 2004. Enjoy.

It was 11:30 pm on a Saturday night. People around me were drinking, playing beer pong, making out in the corner or challenging each other to see who could do the longest keg stand. At the ripe old age of 24 and eleven months, I was too old for these sophomorish shenanigans.

The party was at someone’s rented house that I kind of knew through a friend that was in a class with a boy that was cute by my friend’s standards. Said friend wanted to an excuse to check out her classmate with full on beer goggles with the hope that he’d have his beer goggles on as well. Then who knew what would happen to them. (I think she had their wedding planned before we had entered said party door.)

I’d ended up at the party to make sure that my friend didn’t do anything stupid and because I needed to get out of the lab/library/apartment. Me, I was incredibly happy with my laptop or a book. They didn’t spill libations on me or try to pet my hair or (and honestly this happened and there are witnesses) lift me off of the dance floor in a He-Man-esque type move.

And this night wasn’t much different. There was one gentleman that had started drinking early in the evening and anyone with a pair of breasts was his target. Thankfully, I was able to tell him that the cute guy sitting on the couch was my boyfriend and that I was off the market. I scooted my way to the couch, sat down and started talking to the light-brown haired guy with a huge smile, like I had been looking for him everywhere. Thankfully, this tactic worked because my liquor lothario was on his way to his next target and I started up a really great conversation.

I had no clue who I was chatting with but we started talking, trying to figure out how we’d been conned into going to this gathering. We found out that we had a lot in common and decided that the couch was probably the safest place to stay while our ‘friends’ were off getting their party on. We chatted for two and a half hours until my friend came out of the back of the house crying because in true party fashion, her crush had a girlfriend but didn’t disclose this information until after my friend and he decided to see how much they could recall from Anatomy 101.

That meant I would be making a quick exit, needing to console my friend and said good-bye to cute guy on the couch.

My friend left whining about how glad she’d never marry her crush and I left with the contact information for my future husband.

I don’t know if I’ve honestly shared where the term “Nutcase 101″ came from with you, my lovely readers. My bio use to state a blurb about “after twenty-six years, many degrees and hundreds of hours of classes” but there was an actual moment where I felt like I couldn’t handle my scholastic career, I felt like I was going batshit crazy. This is that story and the inspiration for Nutcase 101.

The time on my bedside clocked glowed 4:30 and no light filtered in the window, there was no moon that night.

This was a common practice for me to be wide awake when most of the world was slumbering because I was in the second year of my double masters program and twenty-four hours a day was no where near the amount of time that I needed to get all of my work done. Since the start of August, I had been tasked with going to class, studying, go to work, running a project team of undergrads, organize and implement a recruitment campaign for my program, try to find a job and sleep (plus all of the other things that we have do to stay alive and maintain some sort of acceptable hygiene).

Sleep was the luxury that I gave up first.

There was too much to get done and I had to make sure everything was a success because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t get the grades and if I didn’t get the grades I wouldn’t get the job and if I didn’t get the job, then twenty-six years of hard work would be for nothing.

That is the thought that would run through my head every moment that I wasn’t concentrating at the task at hand. So, anytime I tried to lay down I was thinking of the what had to be completed and that I just completed or that if I dared to play hokey, that I would be so far behind my whole life would come tumbling down.

Any slumber I did get was fretful and full of images of falling in endless pits. Being awake was so much better because I thought I had some sort of control.

But on this particular morning, the synapses in my brain were firing rapidly reminding me of a giant list of tasks and deadlines that needed to be completed and met. And that’s when I started crying and I couldn’t stop. I tried studying. Sobbing. Watching TV. Sobbing. I couldn’t call anyone to share my mental state because it was so early. My mind might have been broken but my manners were still in tact. The nausea started, my chest tightened, shaking from head-to-toe, dizzy spells and a number of other symptoms of being in a state of panic.

Then I got the brilliant idea that I needed to get to campus and camp out in front of my adviser’s office door, so that when he arrived at work at 7 am he could deal with a woman in full blown mental break-down and panic attack before his first cup of coffee. I wanted to quit everything – school, life because I couldn’t handle the responsibility.

I don’t remember the drive to the campus but I do remember entering the business school building (24 hour access) and feeling a sense of relief of being on campus. But that did not last long as the panic became a hundred times worse as I realized that by leaving the graduate program that I would be letting everyone down, that my parents would be ashamed and I was going to be labeled a quitter and a failure.

And honestly, after that point, I don’t remember the thoughts that went through my head or what I did until 7 am when my professor walked around the corner and saw me there. I just know that my professor found me outside of his office curled up in a ball and he patiently spoke to me for several hours until my panic attack was over. He let me babble incoherently and took the time to listen to my fears. All of them.

He assured me of my abilities, confirmed that I was overworked and that I would be fine. That life would be okay.

And he was right.

I woke up in the room my mother grew up in, under a quilt made by grandmother’s hands to the smell of breakfast cooking. It was a month after college graduation and it was my first vacation since I was 18, having worked full time while I attending FSU full time.

The only place I wanted to go on my first adult adventure was a location that was very familiar but foreign to me. I had been to my grandmother’s small, early 1900 house many times as a child but it was never with the intent to get to know where I came from and who my grandmother really was. I wanted to know the woman that raised my mother. The woman who got her nursing license in her forties to support her family of six children because my grandfather left for greener pastures. The woman who was only four foot ten on good days but a giant in my eyes.

I spent a week listening to her stories and to her snore in front of the TV. She drove me around to meet relatives that I had only heard of in memories that my mother shared, seeing my great Uncle’s dairy farm, running in pastures that my mother called her playground as a child. Grandma told me about the way my mom shouldered the responsibilities of cooking while grandma was at work. That my mom would bribe her brothers into the cleaning by letting them lick the bowls of whatever dessert she had prepared. I learned about my great-grandparents, that I have strong Canadian roots and that I didn’t inherit the Mohawk genes that allow a lot of my kin to tan over night.

Grandma gave me a real treasure the summer of 2002 by sharing herself with me. She never knew that I went up to visit so I could selfishly keep her to myself for a few days. And now that she’s gone, the seven days in the house that my great-grandfather built is a life time of memories that I’ll share with my children one day.

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A note on the previous post, that event occurred five years ago but due to modern technology people have tried to come back in my life.