The Weigh We Were

Proven Weight Loss Supplements

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 09:45:05 -0500

Proven weight loss supplements include some meal replacement bars and shakes, as well as fiber and green tea extract. Find out what weight loss experts have to say about diet supplements.

Hot Diggity Dog!

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 03:22:00 -0500

Arkansas beat Texas last night! WOOT! Texas an Arkansas are huge rivals. This was a awesome game. GO HOGS!

Last night was a short 4 mile run. I went with the running group last night. It was chilly, but I managed to tough it out. I am glad I did.
I haven't decided if I am running tonight or not. I may take a DOR or I may go. I will make that decision tonight. If I go, we are doing 5 miles and I may join the running group again. It does make the runs go by faster.

My food is still going great. I am also getting in my water. Things couldn't be any better when it comes to exercise and food this week. ROCK ON!
I love New Years....I just hope I can keep this momentum going.

Off to make some hot tea!

CNN: Obama talked with Sanjay Gupta for Surgeon General role

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 02:48:35 -0500

Ooof:

The Obama transition team approached Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, about becoming U.S. surgeon general, according to sources inside the transition and at CNN.

Via the LA Times through the Chicago Tribune:

More recently, Gupta -- the son of immigrants from India and Pakistan -- launched a nationwide campaign on CNN titled "Fit Nation" to highlight the dangers of obesity in children.

"We are told that the pitch to him has been that healthcare reform will be a top priority," [CNN's John] King said, "that wellness, fitness, obesity, the issues he has focused on often here at CNN, will be a top priority.

This seems like a really, really bad choice.

Wednesday - Whooaa already (Tuesday WI)

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:36:00 -0500

I love how fast the work week goes, but I'm not thrilled with how time in general seems to be whisked away before I've had a chance to make something of it - does that make sense? Ugh.

Well, weigh-in was last night, and I lost a measley (sp?) .3.

Week in review: Tuesday night, pizza. Wed was w/in points as was Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Sunday I had a fast food burger and baked potato and I made a stress-batch of Chex Mix. Monday was good as was Tuesday. So, what went wrong?

Well, I did get TOM ("Aunt Flo") which explaines the 5 lb gain two weeks before - holidays and PMS=ick! I also started exercising again which I know can make a difference. I drank a lot of diet soda as well=sodium. So, frankly, I need to keep doing what I'm doing with a major increase in water and don't eat fast food this week. I should see a loss next week - well, a better loss.

Hugh seems to be feeling better. He says his ear still hurts, but I'm holding out for it to subside. If not, I'll take him in on Saturday.

Gotta go. Need to walk walk walk this a.m.

Make it a great day.

The Best Workout Ever

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:29:48 -0500

Question. Should you or should you not work out when you are pissed off?? I usually allow my tempers too cool off after a while. But today was different, I won’t explain, but it was different. My first thought was do your 30-40 minutes of cardio and pump some weights and call it a day. And [...]

The Best Workout Ever

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:29:48 -0500

5 Reasons You Should Add Stairway to your iPod

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:08:15 -0500

"Somtimes words have two meanings"

The Not-Rape Epidemic

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:18:00 -0500

Pushing me up hard against the wall of the freight elevator, he leaned into me, his breath warm on my neck. Heat pulsed through me as I felt his hand move up my thigh under my skirt. "Um, I don't think..." I started to say but he covered my mouth with his hand. So far this almost reads like a trashy romance novel, doesn't it? And I will admit I was initially attracted to N. He, a 25-year-old rakishly handsome college student and I, a 15-year-old nerdy high schooler, worked together at a the University catering company where I got my first real job. For some reason, he immediately became attached to me. He took me under his wing and showed me the ropes, telling me how to get the cooks to make a special order that wasn't on the menu or which of our many bosses I should ask first when I needed time off or how to make the house-special drink (never mind that high-schoolers should not be mixing drinks). And then one night he stopped the elevator. It was an ancient contraption known for its persnicketiness, horror movie wrought iron doors and pervasive smell of rotting food, a legend in its own right. But tonight it would be burned into my memory for an entirely different reason.

Sliding me down onto the dirty metal floor until the raised chevrons cut into my back, he slipped his hand inside my shirt, undoing a few buttons for good measure. It was then he said it: "I could rape you right now and there isn't a thing you could do about it."

The fifteen-year-old I wish I was looked him square in the eye, and snarled "Like hell you will." And then pushed him into the racks of glassware stacked four deep behind him.

The fifteen-year-old I was simply went mute with the horror of it as all the color drained from my face.

There was a tense moment where we stared at each other in the near darkness. At last I nodded my understanding and he took his hand off my throat. And then, strangest of all, he picked me up, cradling me like a baby in his arms, and said, "But I won't. And I never will. Do you trust me?" Not knowing what else to do, I nodded again. He cried into my hair for an eternity and at last set me down. That was the first time I was Not Raped.

When I told my friend later on her first response was, "Wow, you're really lucky nothing worse happened." Which has been pretty much been the reaction of every girl that I have told about that night - not that there were many. I did feel lucky. And also terror stricken. But was it right to be upset about something that only could have happened but didn't? All the people around me said no and so I tried to count my blessings and not think about it anymore.

True to his word, N never did rape me. It seemed to be enough for him that he knew that I knew that he could. In fact, N became fiercely protective of me, slamming his hand down on the table, rattling glasses and telling a customer who left me a lewd note instead of a tip that I "was not that kind of girl" before threatening to follow him to his car and slam his head in the door. I worked with N for another year before, predictably, he ran afoul of the law, getting arrested for the statutory rape of another girl we worked with. When the police pulled me out of class to question me about him, all I could do was wonder what the other girl had said in the elevator and how I had stumbled upon the right answer. I was lucky.

The second time I was Not Raped was, as I have alluded to before, in a self-defense class in college. The man was the teacher's assistant. As Sensei Don can attest, I am not a natural when it comes to martial arts. I'm all about the flight, not so much with the fight. Maybe that's why I'm such a fast runner. At any rate, the TA could see I was really struggling in class despite trying very hard. He asked me to stay after class one evening to go over the lesson. Wary, I asked if anyone else would be around. He said our teacher would be in his office in the next room. I stayed, the memory of the elevator enough to keep me awake some nights.

For the first half hour, we practiced and practiced. The same drills over and over again. And then he suggested we try some attacks, meaning he would attack and I would defend. It got heated pretty quickly and his attacks came fast and hard. Finally there came a move I had not the skills to counter and I found myself flat on my back with the wind knocked out of me and the TA on top of me, his sweat running down the insides of arms and dripping on my shoulders. And then in a move I never saw coming, he pulled a gun out of his bag that was lying on the floor near my head. He pointed it at me, right between my eyes. "What do you do now?"

I didn't know. We hadn't been taught what to do when a gun is aimed at your head. I didn't even know if it was a real gun or if it was loaded, although it looked real enough to me. I started to cry. Later a friend would ask me how big the hole in the barrel was and what color it was and if I could see burn marks on the nose but none of that registered at the time. All I knew was the old elevator fear pulsing through me. "Please don't do this to me," I whispered. "It's too much."

And then he said it. "I could do anything to you right now and you can't stop me." He forced my legs apart for emphasis. "What do you do?"

I swallowed my bile and said, "The teacher is in the next room."

He smiled for the first time, "No he's not. I lied to you." I looked at the doorway to the office. It was dark underneath. Placing the gun on the floor, he ran his hand across my stomach where my shirt had come up, pausing on the button of my jeans. "You just failed." Then he got up and that was it. I went home to my roommates who were all appropriately stricken on my behalf. "You're so lucky he let you go!" they gasped. But it was what my roommate's boyfriend said that has stayed with me, "Whatever, it wouldn't have been rape. You're so stupid. Obviously it wasn't a real gun, they don't let people just carry those. Besides, if he reached to pick up a gun
then that meant he had to take a hand off of you. Why didn't you punch him or something?"

I don't know why I didn't. I didn't return to class that next week, or ever. Nor did I reply when the TA e-mailed me to ask me out.
The Not Rape Epidemic
Does two incidents from the history of a hysterical teenaged girl make for an epidemic? To be honest, while those incident were frightening at the time, I had chalked them up to bad choices on my part + a bad situation + sketchy men = nothing good can happen. And then I read this. Latoya Peterson, who blogs at Racialicious, detailed a similar experience that happened to her as a young girl. Except she gave it a name. Not Rape. And she told her girlfriends' stories. And her commenters told even more stories. And then Jezebel picked it up and added their own take, ending with one of their contributors, TatianaTheAnonymousModel, sharing her own chilling story. And each story, despite being written by seasoned bloggers used to sharing their most personal feelings, was raw - still imbued with a lingering sense of terror.

It made me realize for the first time that I'm allowed, both now and when it happened, to be afraid of Not Rape. It made me realize that this has happened to lots of women and girls. You all know that I have written extensively about the more traumatic and life-altering sexual assault by my ex-boyfriend. I am grateful for all of the support I have recieved and your patience in letting me work it all out. And yet it feels good to throw open the windows on Not Rape because not only (I assume) is it more prevalent than rape or sexual assault but because we are often told that it's not worth feeling bad over. That we're just lucky.

I do feel a little bit guilty writing about this knowing that the crimes against women world-wide are often much more horrendous than what I've just described. And yet I have to ask - have any of you been Not Raped? Your answers are important to me because the question that has long haunted me when I have bothered to remember these incidents is "What is it about me that made them do this to me?" But if it has happened to others, as I'm discovering all these years later, then perhaps it never was about me. My other question - and perhaps the men here can help answer it (if they're still reading - sorry, fellows) - did those two men know what they were doing? Was the TA genuinely trying to help me and I just took it wrong? Was the waiter's point really to teach me to trust him? Help me to understand. I hate feeling 15 again.

Note: This post is not intended to say that Not Rape is a male trait in general or that I hate men. I love men and have been priveleged to know many good, kind, beautiful examples of the gender. However, they don't give me nightmares so they get written about less.

Please do not put you name or url in the body of your comments

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:13:08 -0500

Oh. My. God.

Please do not put your name or URL in the body of your comments.

I did not make this policy clear until a week ago. Those of you who did this before then, I forgive. You did not know any better.

I recently put this policy in bold in the comment disclaimer at the bottom of every page, right below the "Submit" button. Yet, people still left their names and URLs in the body of comments. I privately emailed them and asked them to stop doing this. They apologized and I forgave them.

Tonight, I added another disclaimer, right about the body section of the comment, just in case people didn't scroll down all the way to see the other disclaimer. And yet again, someone just left their name in the body of the comment.

So now, I am writing this post, and I am asking you, for the love of all that is holy or unholy in this universe, DO NOT PUT YOUR NAME OR URL IN THE BODY OF YOUR COMMENTS. There are fields for that data. Putting them in the body is redundant. It pisses me off. It makes me want to murder you and everyone you have ever loved, including that boy you kissed in elementary school.

And I know, as I write this, that many of you will be mumbling to yourselves, "Wow, PastaQueen has finally lost her shit, hasn't she?" Yes, yes I have. If you haven't been able to read between the lines of this blog, my life has been a miserable ball of crap recently. I am hanging on by a thread. And when you blatantly disregard a reasonable request that I have made easy for you to read, I am about THIS close to finally snapping and running through the streets in my pajamas screaming.

So, please do not be the person who finally pushes my schoolbus over the edge of a cliff. Leave that to the unfortunate asshole who cuts me off in traffic tomorrow. And before anyone asks, yes, I am seeking professional help and yes, I am on medication. I am doing my best to get by right now, but you are NOT helping me when you sign your name and URL in the comments. I know this is a stupid, stupid, stupid thing to angry over and the rage it has induced in me is a sign of my own current mental instability, but please, PLEASE, PLEASE, do NOT sign your name or URL in the comments. And please, do not even sign your name or URL in the comments on this entry as a joke. I bill ban you and that will be it.

Thank you and good night. I will tell my psychologist you say hello.

Copyright Jennette Fulda. Read more at PastaQueen

Old dog, new tricks

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:20:54 -0500

I’m in training at work this week, learning to use a new computer system that is supposedly bigger!better!more efficient! The upside to this training is that I’ve discovered I’m still pretty darn smart and capable of catching on to things pretty quickly. When you leave school, you don’t think you’ll miss sitting down and learning [...]