But then comes this one redeeming week. So, The Bachelor, for the wise uninitiated, is this show where they take one guy and 25 women and week after week he whittles down the women from twenty five to one. Da, da, da! You can see how it is just the worst version of the Cinderella story ever. Why do I watch this crap?!

Oh yeah, this week. So, this week, he is down to four women and he gets to visit their families. I should really just watch “The Hometown visit” episodes. I guess what I like about these visits is that their families are always so important to the people. So, during the earlier shows, you see a lot of posing, a la high school, but when people go home, you can really see them being genuine and genuinely caring about their families. Also, their families usually look and act like normal people which is rare to see on TV. I just find it touching.

So, although I DON’T recommend the Bachelor. I do recommend this week’s home town date episode!! Look at the cute families! See how the one dad says that he married his best friend and that’s the best you can do. CUTE!

I want to find me my best friend. (said in a Colorada accent) Where are you best friend? I promise I won’t make you watch the Bachelor with me.

The Bachelor, episode 6. (Skip the earlier ones. They might make you hurl.)

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don’t dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be…

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

This would be a pretty quote to illustrate.

———–
“There was a lot of buzz this past week about a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Turns out fitness may trump fatness when it comes to living longer. In other words, it’s better to be fit and fat than to be at a normal weight and out of shape.

“I can’t tell you how happy this news makes someone like me. I feel like I’ve known this my whole life, but never really had the scientific proof to back it up. I’ve watched thousands of people shape up and experience medical transformations without necessarily reaching a weight most would call “slim.””
———-

Another note to any fat prejudiced people: Even if all people who have more fat on their bodies than you are comfortable with are unhealthy, that still does not give you an excuse to be rude, judgmental, or think that you are superior. You’re not!

(If you want to shift out of judgment: instead of thinking something along the lines of: “they shouldn’t be fat,” Try something along the lines of, “I prefer to be at about 15% body fat. That is my strong preference for myself. Other people can make different choices.” Check out this article by Steve Andreas for an in depth look at shaking the black hole of judgment.)

Sorry for the angry lecture, everyone else, the fact that some people think that fat prejudice is still acceptable really burns my tootsies.

Click here to check out Kathy Smith’s fitness blog.

She is pro women’s sports, pro exercising and eating healthy, pro women of all shapes and sizes, and anti-deprivation. So, I think she’s my kind of gal. I found many of her posts to be really inspiring (even though some also link to her products.)

Check out what she says about deprivation:

“I’ve noticed that most people get caught up in that vicious cycle of dieting and then blowing the diet. It usually goes like this: You’re unhappy with the way you look and feel. You seek a diet that promises instant weight loss through complete control of what, when, and how you eat. Soon you discover that you can’t stick with it, and you end up right back where you started…

“To be successful, you have to move out of a diet mentality. Most plans don’t take into account what food really means to us. They don’t consider how the flavor and color and texture and presentation of food can give us so much pleasure. They don’t consider how eating foods that you don’t like leaves you unsatisfied.

“It was a good reminder for me today that, as I support others in their efforts to lose weight, choosing foods you truly love and that also enhance your physiological well-being are the key to becoming an independent eater.”

Well said, Kathy! And a timely reminder for me as I was about to launch into diet-like behavior by eating a protein shake on a regular basis, rather than a really yummy breakfast. My diet like thoughts may help explain why I was eating cake mix out of the package with a spoon this week. (I know, pretty image.)

When I just decide to eat really delicious and mostly healthy food, I end up eating a very healthy, balanced diet. (It doesn’t necessarily make me lose weight, but I do feel and look healthier.) But if I start thinking that I need to get thinner and then focus on that goal, the fearful gorging begins.

Breathe in, deep breath. I’m letting go of needing to look a certain way. That won’t guarantee me love. People of all shapes and sizes are loved. (I’m already loved, why am I trying to get all thin to get love?) Just focus on moving my awesome body and eating very delicious, mostly healthy food. Breath out…

So, from conception he was older, but from birth I was. We were born in California and then both our families moved to Utah when we were toddlers. Our families visited each other every now and then, and I have many memories of Star Wars based play. He got all the cool toys. We even had the same baby dolls.

Adam died when we were 29. Wow. When I was planning this post in my head I was planning to say that I was over the grief of it now, which I think I mostly am, but writing that still makes me cry.

It’s funny. I didn’t remember it was his birthday until my mom mentioned it, but I did remember him last night and I think it was after midnight. I was reading about Mimi Smartypant’s mini smartypants who was playing Star Wars based play with her boy pal.

Oh, Adam. Oh Adam’s parents. I was pretty much sick with grief when he died. I did have a nice dream in the weeks after that comforted me and the last moment of it is an image I see when I think of him. Here’s how I remember it now:

I’m in a big building that looks something like a conference building. One side of the building is glass. People are walking around. It’s like a prison because we can’t get out. Someone may have announced that we can’t get out. It’s not a horrible place to be. It’s just that we have to stay there.

I’m following a man. He’s walking in front of me, somewhat purposefully. He walks along the walkway in the building by the glass wall and then suddenly, he opens a door and just walks out! I’m astonished. I can’t follow him anymore, and I’m sad he’s leaving us, but I’m glad for him that he made it outside. I watch him go, through the glass. He keeps walking, never turning back, over the broad expanse of the earth, towards the sunset.

It’s very informative and I can see many blunders in the people around me, but the authors said to focus on evaluating myself. Oh.

It turns out that I have a LOT to learn about making first impressions! After reading this book, I’m surprised that I have any friends at all! It’s really highly informative and I think it will be useful, but it’s also overwhelming.

I’m going to avoid the temptation to list everything that I could improve, that might be banal and provide more detail than you would like to hear.

Also, it might be construed as complaining. According to the book, complaining is seen as the most boring type of conversation. Complaining even provokes hostility because it involves

“the boring person’s violation of a norm that prohibits ‘the wholesale boredom of others.’”

I would tell you more about what is in the book, but as a good conversational partner, I now want to hear about YOU! YOU! fabulous YOU! I am completely interested in, and can’t wait to hear, what you have to say. (It’s true!)

Ok, your turn! What do you think about me and what I had to say?

Then I talked to my genius mom:

Me: How’d you do it?

Mom: It helps to look in the mirror at first. When I first started trying to wiggle my ears…

And then I stopped her because, although I knew she could wiggle her ears, it had never occurred to me that at one point she couldn’t wiggle her ears, had wanted to wiggle ears, had made it a goal to do so, and had practiced until she succeeded. !

Me: Wait, wait, WHY did you want to learn how to wiggle your ears?!

Mom: Hmmm… I don’t remember now… but at first I could only just barely see them moving. You know when you move your head out and back like you are an Egyptian?

Me: Yeah

Mom: Well, try and move the front of your face out front while you try and hold the back of your head in place.

Me: Wait… this feels really weird…

And then, wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles, I could squeeze my back scalp muscles together and wiggle my ears.

“Walk like an Egyptian!!”

If you ever need to giggle, try a little wiggle. We were talking on skype and I was very seriously showing her my progress, while she was wiggling her ears too, “Look, look, did you see my ear wiggle!” Then we both started laughing.

The funniest part about this, to me, is imagining my mom looking in the mirror and trying to wiggle her ears, and going about it with the hard working dedication that she applies to most everything. Ahhhh…. funny.

Update 4/15/08: It really works! After just a day of doing the scalp exercise, the horizontal lines in my forehead are significantly reduced! I got those lines young due to my face actually freezing in that expression. :) I hadn’t been able to relax my face consistently enough or do anything else to get rid of them. WOW. This is a truly amazing result, especially after just one day.

My answer begins with who you should marry:

I think it makes sense to marry someone you are crazy about, someone who lights up your life and twinkles your toes, and is a decent person who treats people kindly, who is willing to work on a relationship, and who has goals that are compatible with yours.

So, if things aren’t going well and you think maybe you want out, should you call it quits? I have three answers for you:

1. YES

I think that if people are in abusive relationships, they ought to get divorced RIGHT AWAY! Don’t try and fix it! Get thee out!  The hard part is, what is abusive? That can be a trickier to answer than you would think when you are in a relationship and much easier to see when you finally get out.

If someone hits you, sexually abuses anyone, or in any other way degrades your soul, then I would JUST LEAVE (make you sure you research how to do it safely if you are worried about the other person hurting you- make your safety your highest priority.)

2. MAYBE

I just read on the Divorce Busting site that 1/3 of the marriages ending in divorce are abusive. That means 2/3’s aren’t.
If you are not in an abusive marriage, and you never felt twinkly about the person you are with, and you don’t have kids, I just don’t know. My only advice is that you do everything you can to improve the relationship and even if you decide not to try and keep your marriage alive, at least do everything in your power to be a true friend to the person you married.

I think that if you do decide to get divorced even after you make every effort to improve your relationship, the thing that will comfort you is that you have a healthy relationship of some kind and that you treated and continue to treat the other person very well. (And who knows, you might find that you can create a very satisfying relationship with the person you are with after all.)

3.Do Your Best To Save Your Marriage

If you once felt twinkly about your partner, if the person just annoys the hell out of you, you have lost interest in them, if you feel repeatedly rejected because they have lost interest in you, if you no longer find sex satisfying or any other host of problems- but they are not abusive, and especially if you have kids,

Then I would say do EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING in your power to make it work.

I’m thinking about this right now because I stumbled across the site: Divorce Busting and while I am very, very glad that divorce exists for anyone in abusive relationships, and I HIGHLY recommend high tailing it out of there (you can be so much happier when you are with someone who treats you well, you won’t even believe it), there are many people whose families are torn asunder who probably could have mended things if they had just known how. That is really tragic.

I really wish some of my friends, and my friend’s parents had access to this information back in the day.
Especially interesting articles from the site:

1.  The Walk Away Wife Syndrome
2. Hopefully Ever After 
3. He Must Be Teething

Then I said I had to go because I had an improv class. She said, “What, you can’t even prioritize talking to me on the *phone*?” “No!” I said. Then we both said, “Bye, I love you.” Because neither of us wants to leave with bad words in case one of us dies before we talk again.

Oooh I was irritated all the way to improv class. I needn’t have worried, because it’s easy to be happy in improv and tonight was especially funny. The theme of the night was “Yes, AND…” There are all kinds of “Yes, and” games. The idea is that someone throws out an idea, and WHATEVER it is, you agree with it and add information. (It’s very much like dancing.)

Say you have a scene where you are in a bank and your partner says, “I love that ballarina outfit you’re wearing!” You don’t say, “I’m in a bank, why would I be wearing a ballerina outfit?” You say… anything that agrees with their reality. “Oh thank you! I love the tights, but do you think the tutu is too much?” Or…”Yes, darling, it’s intermission at Swan Lake and I have just enough time to cash my latest honorarium if you wouldn’t mind letting me just tip toe ahead of you in line.”

You even “yes and” offerings that you find sort of repulsive. “Didn’t you used to date George Bush?” “Yep, we went out for a couple months. We met in rehab.”

It was an especially funny night, I was glowing from the laughter, and as I was driving home my mind turned back to the argument. I imagined answering some improv friend’s questions about my fight with my mom: “Yeah, I think that if she had just said. ‘Yes! That’s a great idea! It would be so awesome to get together with all of our family! I love that idea. We could even rent a boat or something!’ Then I would have been happy. Then we could talk about ways to make it happen and find out if it might or might not work….”

“Yeah, good point, I could have yes-anded her too. ‘Yeah, you’re worried that it’s just not going to happen and you want me to be happy about whatever amount of time I do get. Yeah, I hear you, you don’t want me to be disappointed.’ True, I could have said something like that. And I often do, when I’m in a more mature mode. Plus I know I toss out what sound like wild ideas to my sometimes cautious mother and I have empathy for where she is at and her concerns for me. But, come on, I wanted one month a year, so I’d already brought my suggestion down to what I thought was crazy reasonable before I said it!”

My imaginary improv friends lost interest at this point. Rude.

Now you know how to respond to me when I tell you an outrageous idea.

Just tell me that you like my tutu and leave it at that.

It’s an interesting issue that I’ve been thinking about for a long time and I’m not sure yet if my life is matching up with my values. I’m still working it out. And like Alicia Silverstone says, it’s not all or nothing.

Here’s a list of what I think of animal rights and what I do:

Eating

I think that it is ok to eat animals and animal products, but not ok to be cruel to them. I don’t think raising or eating factory raised animals is ok.

What I do: I only buy fish or birds to eat. I try and buy “organic” “free range” birds and wild caught fish, but it’s really hard to tell how the animals were actually treated. It might be easier just to be vegetarian. I eat eggs but only “cage free” eggs. I buy eggs from birds raised on small farms when I come across them, even if they cost more.

The book In Defense of Food has reasonable and balanced guidelines for eating in a way that is healthy for us and the earth. He doesn’t advocate vegetarianism, but does advocate eating heavy on the vegis and light on the animals. This is more of an ecological way of looking at animal rights rather than caring about individual animals as much, but he is against eating factory raised animals.

Animals I wouldn’t eat even if I were starving. They are part of my tribe.

Hunting

Watching animals die at factories on Peta is like watching animals die on the discovery channel. It’s a harsh world in some ways, but should we contribute to that? With our human ingenuity we have really pushed cruelty over the top when it comes to killing other animals, simply due to efficiency. To bring our behavior more in balance with the rest of nature, I think we should at least be as ineffective as other predators and hunt for food we eat. (We, like wolves, are predators- see our forward facing eyes and motions.)

What I do: My behavior isn’t in line with this belief because I don’t hunt. I did go hunting with my dad and older brothers when I was a kid. They taught me how to shoot a gun. I loved hunting until they actually shot a deer. Then I cried and cried and cried.

Food I didn’t have to hunt for.

Clothing

I’m allergic to wool. I have very few shoes. A couple pairs are leather. I keep my shoes for so long (decades) that I don’t feel bad about that. If everyone had my shoe habits, very few cows would need to be killed for leather. So, I guess moderation is my general principle here. I’d definitely be willing to buy shoes made out of other materials too.

I think it’s alright to buy any kind of animal made products at a thrift store because buying them at a thrift store doesn’t contribute to the industry that makes those products.

Pets and feral animals

I have a friend who is a vegan AND a biologist. She thinks that feral cats should be killed because they upset the native bird population. It’s an interesting way of looking at the issue. As a biologist, she is looking at the population as a whole, but as a vegan, there must be some concern for the individual animals. (I think it can be successfully argued that you can raise and eat meat on small farms and other ways that are in balance with the environment.) Interesting.

I think it is horrifying to kill feral cats. I think a good thing to do with them is to catch them and spay or neuter them. Growing up, we adopted stray cats that wondered into our yard and spayed or neutered them. Last year my mom caught feral cats in her neighborhood in traps, got them spayed or neutered, and then released them back into her neighborhood. So, when it comes to these cats, I think of them as individuals, but when it comes to hunting, I’m ok with hunting for food because I’m thinking of the effect on the population overall and how it balances out ecologically.

I’m not saying either of these ways of thinking are better. I’m just thinking through this and noticing these interesting inconsistencies.

Feral cat in my mom’s backyard, neutered but not killed, and still on the prowl.

Animal Testing

Cosmetics: Absolutely not ok with me. I try and make sure I only buy things that haven’t been tested on animals. To survive, I can understand eating other animals, but for the sake of looking cuter?? No way.

Medical testing

This one is tricky. There is A LOT of lab work being done on animals in research centers and universities. I would never do this work. Does this make me a hypocrite for using the medicine that comes out of this work? My Granddad is on three medications for Alzheimer’s right now. I’m glad this medicine exists. It seems likely that it was tested on animals. What do you think about using this medicine?

I went to a lecture at the university I was working at. What they found out was facinating and might help humans a lot, but when I heard how they figured it out using lab animals, I wanted to cry and retch. After seeing that presentation I thought, maybe it isn’t so tricky. Maybe the sum total of what we’ve gained by dissecting creatures physically and dissecting reality into it’s component bits in our Western intellectual tradition does not equal what we would have if we lived and thought more holistically.

Granddad who I love very much who is helped by medication probably tested on other animals.

What do you think about these issues? I would love to hear from you.

Thoughts? Insights that makes any of this more clear? Any of your own inconsistencies that you notice?