bitter orange

So, contrary to popular opinion, losing weight and skinny pants are apparently not correlated in my life.
I stepped on the scale yesterday to discover that I had gained about 4 pounds. This is depressing because I wanted to lose about 10 before this incident, so now I want to lose about 15. Man. Isn't that just always the way?
I haven't been doing a whole lot of running lately, in the winter its always a little harder to talk myself into getting out and doing it--it becomes more of a "get it over with" kind of thing, rather than a "yeah! lets do this!" kind of thing, and I am just not dedicated enough to "get it over with" more than once or twice a week I guess.
Well, unless you bring weight into it. Stepping on the scale and seeing the numbers go up rather than down is always something that will make me rethink my commitment level (which obviously isn't all that high). So I know I need to do more.
Weird thing is:
This morning I was pretty much totally out of pants. I haven't done laundry in over a week, so I've managed to make most all of them slightly too grimy for work. I pull out the dreaded skinny pants--which usually fit if I'm running 15+ miles a week or so (my hips shrink, I swear) and give them a look, knowing that the scale has said they shouldn't fit right now. But I try them on anyway, because I'm desperate for pants. And they do fit. Weird. I mean, I did have to do a little shimmy to get them over my hips to begin with, but they button fine and are not saran-wrap tight or anything. its very strange.
Whats bad is what this particular information could do to that revised commitment level. Yeah. I'll try not to let the pants go to my head, but its going to be hard. I mean, they're the skinny pants!
I am so going running this afternoon. I so am.

The Shallow Cup

Sorry for being so lame about this thing lately.
Haven't really been very good at motivating myself lately. I need to find a way around that, but so far its a lot easier to just wallow in it. I kind of wish I was a fatalist lately. That I could just sort of give it up and wait for something to happen to me. But I've never been much for that. Fatalism is for floaters. I don't want to float, I want to swim run bike whatever the terrain requires. I'm leaving under my own power.
Its just one of those things. I'm a girl, and I'm small and I have a total lack of upper-body strength and I haven't ever wanted to give in just because of any of that. I am going to do it on my own, even if I can't actually do it at all. I've never been good at asking for help (with pretty much anything: heavy objects, a total lack of paycheck, whatever, I am much better at giving help than receiving it. I'm always too ashamed--I feel like its cheating, and like other people probably need that help more anyway).
But yeah, so I'm in sort of a funk. The kind of funk where I don't really feel much like doing much of anything at all. Writing included. But I am trying to move past that by just ignoring the whiny pansy-ass part of my mind that is crying "Noooooooo!" every time I get out of bed and just going on with things as though it weren't there at all.
This morning I pretended that my cat needed me to get out of bed, that she was my sidekick in a wacky comedy series and she was sick (cough, cough) and I had to go to work to get her medicine and so I had to get up otherwise the tv audience watching at home would know that I was a lazy sack and stop tuning in every week for our outrageous adventures, and then we would have to get real jobs again and poor sick sidekick kitten would never be able to hold down a real job so we might end up out on the street. She totally played along by getting up even more slowly than I did (loaf--kitty) and then getting all mouthy and following me into the bathroom to perch on the sink and serenade (berate) me while I showered.
I know its rather more involved than it ought to be probably, but providing a zany and improbable backstory to my morning makes it at least slightly better.
I was going to go running yesterday but I couldn't hack it and now the temperature has dropped and its about 10 degrees out and man am I going to feel lame if I can't talk myself into a mid-afternoon run. Perhaps it is some sort of challenge? Maybe I need to rescue a group of retired clowns who are on a hijacked school bus headed toward the ocean. ..yeah, I don't know about that one either.

walk around walk around

So. Yeah.
Had kind of a busy day yesterday, and obviously didn't get as much accomplished as I wanted to (for instance: no writing). But it was a pretty good day, all told: I managed to get up early (!! shock of shocks!!) for the first time in a couple of weeks and feel fairly motivated in the morning. I had a big presentation deal at work which went sort of haywire at t minus 2 hrs to lift off and caused a lot of running around and panicking, leaving me with massive amounts of adrenaline that stopped me from eating anything yesterday afternoon even though there was lunch at the presentation and my actual active piece of it only lasted through the first ten minutes. So that meant I went to the gym when I got home from work (after going to the city library to pick up shameful genre fiction that I will read in the seclusion of my quiet bedroom and nowhere else) and talked my gym buddy into trying this with me, which I am very excited about (I went the whole deal: I weighed, measured and photographed my "before" self in preparation for the slick new me. Friend thinks I am hilarious and ridiculous, and so far I can't say she is wrong, but I want to gauge and mark and track my progress. Here's hoping for progress!!)
Can you ever tell who you are going to end up friends with, or keeping in touch with? I never can. I think it is very possible that I just do not interact well or keep in touch well or something like that, and so possibly I am the only person who looks back at the last five or ten years and goes "my god: where did my peeps go? And who the hell are you?" I mean, there are people that I have kept in touch with and kept up with who are wonderful and fine and great and then there are people that I've had halfhearted online relationships with who, when we get together it bounces back into fullness and the friendship is totally alive and wonderful and you promise yourself no more dry spells but it never quiet works out. Then there are the folks that once upon a time you were inseparable for months or years at a time and now you just wonder "what happened?"
I bring this up in part because gym buddy is someone I knew in high school. She was Ms. Valedictorian, Ms. I-am-morally-and-intellectually-superior, and occasionally Ms. stick-so-far-up-my-ass-its-in my-brain-stem, back then. So I can't say I considered us close friends--we were both in the accelerated classes together, did the occasional project together, for a little while drama geek-ettes together, but not exactly confidants or pals or anything. But we kept in touch. Through her Ivy league education and my parallel state school stint. My graduate degree and the disintegration of my college romance , her quick marriage and drawn out divorce in (of all places) West Virginia. And now we're living in the same area code again, and we've started going to the gym.
Really, she asked if she might use me for my gym membership: she doesn't want to fork over the cash for one of her own, and one of the perks of my job is access to the gym for free--and I am allowed guests, which I had mentioned to her at some point.
But in a larger way, too, it is odd that of the people I knew in high school somehow I have hung on to gym buddy. I have a roommate right now whom I also went to high school with--but that makes more sense, because we also went to elementary school together, and played soccer together even before that. I have known that girl forever, and she is one of the ones that even though we might go a year or more without speaking, when we do talk it all comes back: the shared past, the quirk factories that are our brains, the camaraderie. I'm really glad that things sort of fell together the way that they did (it started out with a blind "hey does anyone know of a decent apartment for the summer...looking to sublet" that she sent to probably three dozen people and I just happened to be going out of town for a month, so she sublet from me and then one of my roommates moved home and she took his room and has been around ever since. fortuitous). I'm lucky to have both of them around (separately however--they do not and have not ever gotten along, which I remember well from high school) its just such an interesting thing, the way the universe works out sometimes.