Adjusted Reality

***whiny brat post ahead – you may finish the post with the desire to smack me over the head***

Some days, you get smacked in the face with the “woe is me, wahhhh” bat.  Yesterday was one of those days.  Today isn’t looking better.  I whined a lot on twitter and I whined a lot to Zliten over IM and I whined a lot to myself.  Because my life is so terrible and horrible and everything is wrong and poor me *laughs*.  Let me elaborate below.

First of all, I’m trying to figure out what to do for my birthday coming up.  For some reason, it is a BIG DEAL this year to me.  I don’t want to just throw a party and have people come over.  I don’t want to just go out to a bar and get drunk.  I want to do something ridiculously cool.  I want to be that kind of person that pops off to another country for their birthday.  Or at least somewhere out of town.  At the very least, something cool and unique.

The everlovin’ problem is – money.  Whoever said that money is the root of all evil is a damn dirty liar – it’s definitely the LACK of money.  Zliten is (smartly) insisting that we save some and do some house renovations this year.  But I mean, seriously?  Who needs new countertops and windows and working central heat?  I’m only half kidding – a life without vacations to look forward to for me is seriously NOT happy.  I’m willing to work hard, but I also need to play hard.

I’ve already made sacrifices.  The honeymoon is moving from 2010 to 2011 due to work schedules.  I actually decided I was going to be very frugal about clothes shopping in 2010, since I’m not losing weight, to save money.  I *need* very few things.  I need to get back to my budgeting spreadsheets to get a handle on how all the funds come and go.  Instead of running the Long Beach Marathon in October and taking a happy fun vacation then, I’m running the San Antonio one in November.

My big bad mood issue is – I’m fully realizing that I’ve lost both aspects of importance about my job.  Back in San Diego, we were broke as shit but I was enveloped in this awesomely rewarding job experience and I didn’t mind.  The things that were important to me were my Zliten and my job, and that’s pretty much it.  Now, I have a little less passion about my job (which is, honestly, a good thing for my sanity).  I’m just a good employee wanting to make a good product.  I work my hours, do my job, and go home and don’t obsess over it.  I’m also the managerial ying to my previously creative yang.  So I no longer get that whole “I made this and it’s awesome” fulfillment.  It’s ok – it had to end eventually.  But I picked this end for the money.

Now, the money just isn’t adding up.  I no longer am able to say, “well, I like my job, but I’m not in love with it, but HEY, it affords me a comfortable life.”  When you take away my vacations and make me monitor the amount of THRIFT shopping I’m doing, I no longer feel as if I should suffer doing something I don’t completely love.  I might as well figure out what that is and go nuts and be COMPLETELY poor and at least have that creative fulfillment again.

This does not bode well for a mortgage payment that keeps getting higher (my neighborhood is like the ONE place in the world where property values continue to rise which means more taxes! wheee!!!!) and the 10k left on my car installment loan.  So here I sit, feeling trapped, pissed off, and grumpy.   I always mocked people like me-now.  I’d never  be them.  I’d rather have happiness than money.  If I was unhappy where I was I would leave and figure it out.  It’s just not that simple.  I used to be a shining star, now I’m just a burnt out and jaded middle manager.  I might as well be in a Dilbert cartoon.

The other problem?  I have no carrot, just sticks right now.   You know what I mean?  Maybe it’s a bad analogy, but… sticks being things I want that are a lot of work, carrots being things just to look forward to?  2004-2006 there was a lot of work “carrot” promising if I worked just a little harder and did just a little more of a job I would have practically done for free anyway, I might get the money/support/fame/fancy cars/bling bling.  2007 held the excitement of starting a weight loss endeavor, moving states, and buying a house. 2008 continued the scale going down down down, and I started running and it was novel and exciting and then I shipped a game and then we went on a cruise.  Hard year, filled with carrots and sticks, but very rewarding.  2009 was the year of GETTING MARRIED and RUNNING RACES.  Both sticks, but balanced with THREE out of town trips.

This year, it all just feels like STICK right now.  Two races, which are awesome but also WORK.  I might get a promotion next January, but it’s gonna be a hell of a year to get there.  I would love to have something written by the end of the year, and I’d really like to pursue actually possibly someday getting paid for writing, but again, it sounds like so much WORK.  Everything that used to sound exciting sounds like so much EFFORT.  Putting money into the house sounds horrible to my inner baby brat right now because it’s a) taking money away from fun and it’s b) effort and messy and more fucking WORK.

The running does help though.  I rocked my sprints HARD last night even though I went into the gym pissed and sad and feeling glum and slightly nauseous from the cake I self-medicated myself with earlier (bleh – note to self – NEVER eat a full piece of cake again, half is enough – gave me a headache).  I reminded myself that running was something that was fully under my control, and the sprint workout that was supposed to be my killer actually came pretty easy.

Also helping,  the impending beautiful weather and longer days.   Bike rides and long walks and hiking is pretty much free, and I’m looking forward to taking FULL advantage of these next few beautiful months before it gets too hot.

I’m just trying to figure out some compromise with myself.  Sure, I might not be quite as far along here at 30 as I wished I’d be – but I’m not doing so badly.  Sure, I might not be able to hit Costa Rica for my birthday, or even get out of town, but I’m not going to sit at home and eat ramen and drink Natty Ice and cry.  Sure, we might not have made progress on renovating our house and increasing the value, but we have a house.  We’re not in foreclosure. We’ve made money on it in the 2.5 years we’ve owned it.  I may not have my dream job and might feel like a fucking glorified secretary sometimes, but I make *decent* money and have *some* clout around here.

But since I’m a brat this week, none of this is cheering me up.  People are homeless and Haiti is in ruins and most of the world is wondering where their next meal will come from and I am bitching about vacations.  And I wish that made me have some happy fuzzy realization, or think altruisticly, or made me feel better.  I have whiny baby syndrome BAD and I know I’m being ridiculous.  But, as it happens every once in a while, I fall into one of these little foxholes and it takes me a few days to crawl out.  I want it all, I want it all, I want it all, and I want it now.  And it’s just not fair that I can’t have it.  Perhaps the lottery ticket Zliten bought tonight will solve everything, cross your fingers for me.

So, what is your biggest wahhhh-mbulence type gripe lately?  Something that’s cheesing you off, and you know is ridiculous, but is still getting your goat anyway?  Spill it in the comments and it will make you feel at least 58% better, I swear!

Usually, fitsugar.com is a bit “Fitness Mag” for me, so I don’t really pay much attention, but this article caught my eye for some reason.

Mariska Hargitay is not someone I’ve heard of before, but for those of you unhip as I am, she is an actress.  She looks fabulous.  She does not look like the token big girl in a sea of skinny women, she fits right in (you know what I mean, right?  Like the cheerleading captain in High School Musical who is obviously not FAT, but looks a little out of place?).   She does not look waifish, but she looks slim, sexy, confident, powerful, and strong.  This woman does not need to lose any weight.  This woman looks like she belongs in the business.

She is a size 8.  I am a size 8.   I think she’s a little hippier where I’m a little heavier on top – she’s a pear to my inverted triangle.  And I’m jealous to hell of her jaw definition, but I think I beat her in the sexy legs contests.

Like, she is really and truly my size.  I flit between a 6 in some brands to a 10 in others.  My go to size is 8 for jeans.  My go to size for shirts is medium (which is generally – 6/8).  And this hot looking t.v. star does the same thing.  Well, all things considered she probably doesn’t shop in thrift stores but it’s the size that matters here.  Oddly enough the lack of ability to walk into a super upscale store and shop matters way less to me as I get older.  Priorities, I guess.

Sadly, this is huge to me – the size thing.  I have a minor in theatre.  I might have majored in it, but I didn’t figure it would be terribly good at making me any money (not like my psych degree did any good, but I was young and naive).  I always dreamed of running off to LA after college and making a go of trying to get into acting.

But I never got the leads in college.  Those always went to the skinny girls.  I was convinced that to succeed in theatre, I needed to lose weight.  Not develop my acting, not get better at auditioning, not expose myself to more plays – but lose weight.  I believed that was the only thing standing between me and success.  I’d typically audition fairly mundanely, get a bit part, and directors found that I was actually pretty talented (sorta), I’d get picked for the featured bit parts.  My shining moment was being able to do 6 bit parts for a weird adaptation of A Clockwork Orange where I got to sing on stage as well as eat a pot pie (not at the same time, that would have been TRULY a feat).  I also had some really cool main parts, but they were for class performances where they HAD to cast me as SOMETHING.  One of these parts included my one and only stage kiss, which is WAY less hot then it sounds.

Although I had fun with my short lived college theatre career, I always felt like I had to be something that felt unattainable to succeed.  I mean, as a full time student with a part time job also doing theatre rehearsals, it didn’t leave much time to eat healthy and exercise.  I kept active by running around campus and taking some aerobics/dance classes for credit, and occasionally making it to the fitness center, but I ate ABHORRENTLY.  Either way too much of the wrong things (a denny’s club sandwich with french fries and ranch was a lite dinner, which NOW I know is about 1200 calories), or way too little of the wrong things (hello, living for a week on 3 boxes of crackers, coffee, and dayquil).

Now, I’m about 20-50 lbs lighter than I was back then, have tackled a lot of inadequacy issues, and feel a lot more comfortable getting up in front of people and saying and doing shit.  But I still have those few requirements in my head about when I am DONE losing weight.  One of them is to feel adequate in any situation that’s reasonable.  At my current weight, I did not feel as if I was there – partly because I didn’t feel like leading lady material.  Silly, I know, because I’m not doing theatre, but I HAVE thought about getting back to it.  I don’t think I’m going to be gracing the Paris runways with my 5’5″ and muscular build anytime soon – but it’s not outside the realm of possibility that I might want to take up acting again.  And I don’t want to ONLY get cast as the comic relief or the fat friend.  Maybe I’m there, it’s just hard for me to see it.

I’ve been toying with trying to see myself as other people do.  People call me little.  I don’t feel little.  I sure don’t see myself as a 265 lb person anymore, but I don’t feel little.  Small.  Someone that can be thrown over a shoulder.  Someone that looks like one who participates in athletic endeavors.  It’s tricky after so many years, but I’m working on it.  And finding out I wear the same size as a pretty hawt looking actress is a big help.

Such a little thing, a number.  But I gotta say, Mariska Hargitay, I didn’t know who you were before, but you certainly changed my perspective today.  Maybe I should give your TV show a try?

..so I’m going to re-run an old post.  Originally from March 2009, titled “On Perfection”.  Look for happy fun italicised text explaining WTF I’m talking about in some places.  Have a lovely weekend!

Once again, Charlotte makes me think.  This post didn’t quite go where I thought it was going to – but I’ll try to tie it in a little at the end.

I am a recovering perfectionist.  I still fantasize occasionally what my life would have been like if I had shunned everything and decided to really try for elite gymnastics.  I wonder if I would have given it another 6 months of 100 hour weeks at my last job, if I could have finally turned it around and got the support and recognition we needed and deserved.  I wonder what fitnessy pursuits I could have undertaken in my 20s if I wouldn’t have been so anti-athletics and gained a billion lbs.  I wonder what life would have been like if I really dedicated myself to pursuing the acting bug that really caught me in college instead of being scared of being another diet-pill-addicted waitress in LA looking for her big break for the rest of my life.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my life.  Really.  Sure, I could pick out 10 or 20 little things I’d like to change, but mostly it’s the lazy stuff like more money, less stress from stupid shit at work that could be avoided by communication, a maid, a butler, a helicopter, etc.  I love that I have a stable job in an industry I love and I get to do amazing things like audition, cast, and then direct professional actors.  I love the wonderful Zliten I ended up with and nothing in the world could make me happier.  I am proud of taking this big lumpy lump of clay that was my body 2 years ago and molding it into a pretty darn nice sculpture (if I may say so myself), and it can do things like run races and lift heavy things and dance for 3 hours and keep up with anyone doing just about anything.  I have a group of great friends who are a hell of a lot of fun.  I have a house which I am still seeming to be able to pay mortgage, so that’ a bonus.

But, truth is, I am not a beautiful and unique snowflake.  I guess I’m lucky enough to have a variety of hits on my name that are actually me.  I’ve enjoyed some mild internet fame as Sapphyra the drunken barbarian being interviewed on gaming websites and participating in podcasts.  The pinnacle of my fame was a for real magazine distributed nationwide in the millions interviewed me and did a 2 page spread on my 3 year old game – which is actually a miracle.  However, I really had (have) this big huge desire to be famous in some way.  I want to leave my mark on humanity, and I want people to know my name as being truly excellent at…something.  This drive is what causes me to really dig into something I love and want to be good at, and can make me crazy because I WANT TO BE THE BEST AT IT.

Instead, I am not the best at anything.  I never got past level 8 in gymnastics.  I never even got to state in diving (argh, by one place, both years!) and didn’t get an athletic scholarship for college.  I had mostly bit parts in college theatre and sometimes didn’t even get cast.  I’m middle management instead of overlord of my own project.  I don’t have the fanciest car, best decorated house, and I can’t make it to all the cool parties I see and want to attend because I really enjoy my sleep in my old age.

After many years in life of wishing I could be really, really good at something and berating myself if I couldn’t, I came to a realization.  I found that to be the best in the world at one thing (or even attempt it), you have to also give up being even moderately good at mostly everything else.  Elite gymnasts have no lives outside the gym.  People who live and breathe their jobs usually end up burnt, unhealthy, and sometimes alone.  If you want to be good at something, you have to work for it.  Extraordinary results require extraordinary effort (or something like that), and effort = time.  Time is something we have a finite amount of, even if we are, in fact, perfect.

In the wisdom the comes with old age (yes, I’m going to milk this until it gets old…like me…zing! note: this was just after my 30th birthday, tee hee), it is apparent that I can only control what I do with the 24 hours I get every day, and just about nothing else.  If I want to become a better runner, guess what I need to spend some of those hours doing?  If I want to sell jewelry on Etsy, guess what I need to spend my time doing?  It’s certainly not zoning out to TV and laying on the couch for hours…

I’ve already realized that if I am NOT something, there’s no use dwelling on it.  Instead of saying that I’m a horrible person because I forgot to get my doctor visit in before 30 and I’m lazy and stupid and I’m now probably going to die because they didn’t catch a rare disease with no symptoms early enough (ok, now I AM starting to freak myself out so I should stop that…tee hee), it’s first on my list of things to do and I’ll get to it when I can (note: took me until November…).  Same with running a 10k (note: took me until April – see where my priorities are?).  Same with finishing 10 jewelery items and selling it on Etsy (note: never did this – maybe someday).  I’d say same with getting myself some new clothes/workout clothes, but I really don’t seem to have ANY problems with that.

If more people could treat themselves like their friends treat them (or like they SHOULD treat you if you have crappy friends), then we’d all be much better off.  Next time you start having perfectionist thoughts berating yourself for not being something you think you should be, start coming up with a plan to become it.  You can’t change the past, so it’s useless to lament over things that are there and will never be again.  Chances are, it will either seem silly once you start scheming about how to become an elite gymnast at the age of 30, or it will lead somewhere you never thought you could go.  I’m still working on it, but I’m not perfect.  And that’s becoming more and more ok with me.

So it was another loooooong day at work, then a 6 mile tempo at the gym (which I ROCKED even though I REALLY DID NOT WANT thank you Felice, THIS post was amazing), I’m beat.  Physically and mentally.  And I have that same deep-y thought post staring at me and I’m just staring back at it blinking with an empty brain.  Oh well, perhaps tomorrow.  I am going to be a cheater cheater bo beater (see, brains-no-worky) and make this a conversation and not me and my soapbox.  So, the dear happy lot of you, these are some things that I wonder about you.  Please feel free to comment answering any, all, or none of them.  I’m pulling this from my brain, so get ready for a technicolor ride.  Or something.

1.  Tell me one time that you were truly and completely happy.  I don’t just mean content, but full of joy.  Almost enraptured.  Like your heart was going to burst if you felt anything else.

2.  If you could eat one type of food for the rest of your life, what would it be?  For example, I might say “sandwiches”.

3.  How did your significant other propose?  If you’re not married/engaged/etc, what is your dream proposal?

4.  I see you at a bar, and I say next round’s on me, and the bartender has every beverage in the world.  What do you order?

5.  What is the sneakiest thing you’ve ever gotten away with (that you’ll admit to publicly)?

6.  Tell me about the most intense, ballsy, crazy, fear-conquering, superhuman, proud-moment thing you’ve ever done in your life.

7.  If you could erase ONE thing from your history, and make like it never happened, what would it be?

8.  Hey, hot stuff.  What are you wearing?  Like right now.  No cheating.

9.  Lady Gaga, awesome or overrated?

10.  If you could time travel back 10 years, and leave yourself a very short and cryptic note so as not to screw up the time space continuum, what would you say?

And that my friends, is a DIY post if I ever saw one.  But it only works if you comment!  I’ll add mine tomorrow in between the crazy.  But here’s the catch – I’ll answer ONLY the ones that someone else answered first.  So if you have a burning desire to know my opinion of Lady Gaga, you have to offer up yours first.  I dunno – sounded like a fun, fluffy post, so let’s see if this is a fun game or it sucks balls.  However, for now, I’m taking my tired legs to bed.  Deep thought tomorrow?  Looking unlikely.  But we can always hope.