I spuddle.

I’m a bit rusty.   That’s the creaking.   Get it?    OH, SO FUNNY.   Except not.   AM OUT OF PRACTICE.

The thing with blogging is that it’s like exercising and if you don’t do it every day, it starts to seem impossible and HAS actually been impossible in the last week or two because of Christmas (which makes EVERYTHING impossible) and sick kids, really dramatically sick, complete with high fevers and disturbing hallucinations.  (“Who is that girl, Mummy?”  ”What girl, sweetie?”   “The one who is standing behind you.”   IN HER ROOM.   IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT.    WITH NO ONE AROUND.) (Is possible that house is haunted and actually this is not the first time I’ve thought so, but that’s another post that I may never get around to writing.)

Speaking of exercise (were we?), I have started exercising again. I had literally not exercised in 2009 AT ALL, period.    I was waiting for MRI results to say what exactly was wrong with my back and under a doctor’s advice, was laying off exercise until diagnosis so as not to aggravate a possible disc.   But then!  I had the MRI and it said that lo, I have a disc, and I asked my doctor what sort of exercise I could do and he shrugged and said, “Oh, I wouldn’t aggravate that disc.”  Which is not advice so much as it’s a generic, answerless response containing no information.   My doctor treats me for all things by hovering in the doorway of the examining room while I sit on a chair ten feet away.    He is constantly looking back over his shoulder as though someone is about to come up and tap him and demand he perform something urgent STAT, such as an emergency tracheotomy using only a Bic pen on someone who is suffocating in the lobby.   As a result, I never really know anything about whatever I think I’m asking him about.    So without any medical advice whatsoever, I’ve started going down to my stinky weird basement every day for half an hour and rowing 5k or doing a couple of miles of stairs (my rowing machine is set to kms and my stairmaster is set to miles and I have no idea what the conversion is, so there you go) and shouting at the children to not pull each other up and down the Total Gym on the slidey thing because they ARE going to get hurt, yes I mean it, yes you will, I TOLD YOU SO.    Then I stop exercising when they start climbing up my legs like tribbles or some other alien type creature that climbs on you while you are trying to row without rupturing your damaged, herniated disc.

Does this make me a better person?   I have no idea.

On that same subject, except not really the same at all, I got pulled into a debate on these here internetz in the last few days about fatness and thinness and the relative fault of people who are fat and thin and who should/could exercise every day and why and how when fat people say that thin people are lucky it either is or isn’t anything to do with luck.   It got me thinking about a whole bunch of things, mostly about judgement and about how harshly we judge each other and ourselves about our bodies and how we can somehow take someone else’s body and make it about ourselves.   I’m pretty sure this is basically a girl-thing, I don’t think most men run around with a list as long as we do of what makes us/others OK (exercise! diet! ability to fit into jeans from highschool!) and what makes us/others failures (fat!).   I actually don’t think that fat is a failure or that fat people need to start starving themselves and exercising every morning at 5:00 am.   Unless they want to.   I think people are fat for a lot of complicated reasons to do with health, and yes, luck, and mental health, and circumstance and on and on.   Besides, I don’t recommend the starving part.    Ever.   Maybe they don’t want to exercise at 5:00 am.   Maybe they like themselves just the way they are.    Maybe they do exercise but it isn’t instantly visible to an outsider.    Maybe — just maybe — it’s none of anyone’s business but their own.    It struck me, in this debate, that a lot of the thin women who were commenting and saying that yes, yes, those fat girls needed to stop making excuses and start exercising, damn it, a LOT of these women in their paragraphs of response mentioned how they themselves had eating disorders, they were recovered/recovering anorexics/bulimics/exercise bulimics/etc., and it made me think, is that really “better” or is it just a different kind of eating disorder?   Because so many of us, whether we are fat or thin or fat-thin or fit-fat or whatever, have eating disorders of one type or another.   We eat too much or not enough, or we exercise too much at the expense of some other part of our life, or not enough at the expense of something else.    We are motivated sometimes (mostly, I’d wager) by fear, fear of getting fat or being perceived as unfit or being regarded negatively.   Fear of judgement.   Sometimes we’re motivated for the “right reasons” and sometimes we aren’t, either way, it isn’t obvious from the outside.   Ever.    What looks like health can become scarily consuming, you don’t know what dark forces are driving other people’s actions.   It’s hard to be a woman, is what I’m saying.  It’s hard to find balance and I think most of us have a hard time with it, I know once I start exercising I start feeling anxious as hell if I miss a day, and somewhere, underneath all the good parts about improved health and whatnot, there is a dark part which is the tiny seed of obsession that grows if I let it and turns the whole “healthy” thing into something that takes over and becomes everything.     I don’t know what my point is, which is why I’m posting this here instead of on the other thread, because it doesn’t have a pithy point or clever conclusion, I guess it’s just that I think that fundamentally something that looks “healthy” on the outside, may be completely messed up on the inside and something that looks “unhealthy” on the outside, may actually be just right.

So ANYWAY it seems like if I take this precious half hour and exercise, the half hour I might have spent blogging vanishes, so I have to choose between being flabby or being verbose, which is a hard choice except it’s not right now because I’m so exhausted all the time that I need to exercise just to give me a small bit of extra energy which I need because man oh man, I am spread THIN and that is nothing to do with my weight, which is low right now due to anxiety and exhaustion and hopefully not the fault of the LUMPS and whatever is causing them.

I’m without a babysitter right now for a variety of reasons and without a babysitter, I am stalled completely on the books I am meant to be writing, need to be writing, am under contract to be writing, want so badly to be writing.     So if I don’t open my computer, I’m not reminded that I’m meant to be writing and it’s overall easier to go to the basement and row while watching romantic comedies on the old TV/VCR and contemplate whether or not I’m having a heart attack actually for real or if it just feels like I am.    I am SUCH a hypochondriac these days, triggered by the LUMPS (still awaiting more testing, FYI) of course but spiralling into everything else, like right at this moment I have a weird cold feeling travelling down the big fat vein on the side of my neck which I secretly (or not secretly at all) wonder if is a clot bound for my heart and my INSTANT DEATH.   Then all that time spent exercising in 2009 (at least 8 hours!) will have been a waste.

ANXIETY.   Oh, screw you, Anxiety.   I’m not up for you.

In other unrelated news, I got the JCrew pink coat for Christmas and I love it so much, I can hardly stand myself.  (You can’t have one, unless you already do, because it is sold out.)   I would be wearing it right now, with my pyjamas, if it wouldn’t be a weird thing to do.   I also bought — with my Christmas money — this Roots bag (in black).  It is neither of the ones I posted, but one that’s sort of a cross between them both.   It is bigger than I thought it would be but I like all its pockety goodness.    I am always losing things in my large purses.   Also, it smells good.    Very very good.    If you like the smell of leather.   If you don’t like the smell of leather, then I cannot advise you any further.

More unrelated things:

I was putting The Bun to bed the other night and he likes to say things that are very profound right at bedtime, mostly centered on how sad he will be when I die.   He’s done this since he could talk, I don’t know why or where it came from, but the conversation usually is about how his heart will break into a million seventeen eighty pieces when I die and then it will dry up and he will die, too.   But a few nights ago, he took a different approach.   I think he’s decided that Heaven is actually like a big UFO, sucking people up into its belly.   Am not even really sure where he got his Heaven imagery from as Heaven isn’t something we really ever discuss, except for when Clayton’s good friends, the Jehovah Witnesses, interrupt our Saturday with their annoying magazines.   But anyway, there it was, his idea that hey, if there is no Heaven, then no one dies, right?   So he said, “I hate Heaven.   Let’s take it down.”   I don’t know why that’s funny to me, but it is.   Am thinking of getting him his own Twitter stream.   THAT’S GOOD STUFF, PEOPLE.

The Bachelor starts this week, I think, but am too lazy to check.   Yes, I will be blogging this season.    Yes, I will keep you in the loop.   What I’ve heard so far?    Jake freaks out!  Is it a breakdown?   Will there be DRAMATIC SOBBING?   And someone runs of with a member of the crew!  Who is it?  WHO?   Oh, sweet rumors planted by the network to make us watch what is likely to be the Dullest Season Ever!    I can’t wait.    Can you?

I HATE HEAVEN.   LET’S TAKE IT DOWN.

So good.  Maybe if I get The Bun his own Twitter stream he could get a book deal like that Shit My Dad Says guy.    A really good book deal.   I mean, who wouldn’t buy THAT?

Filed under: Me, Myself and I, The Bachelor