Breszny time!

Pisces Horoscope for week of August 14, 2008

Pisces (February 19-March 20)
Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the UK, chose an unlikely context to propose marriage to his future wife: She was kneeling in front of the toilet wielding a scrub brush. I expect a comparable event in your near future, Pisces: An appealing invitation or big opening will come your way while you're in a humble position. The only advice I have is to put down your scrub brush before responding.
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Oh, Tony Blair, you oddly appealing little screwball, you.
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No guitar lesson last night - my instructor's on vacation. Heard on the news this morning that sunset tonight is at 8:04 p.m. Some part of me fears that last week may very well have been my last evening of walking to guitar lessons for a while. Guitar is going pretty well, I think. In the next six months or so, as I approach two years of lessons, it will be time to reconsider how much I've gotten out of lessons and how much I want to continue to get. Right now, mainly when I pick up the guitar, it's to practice. One of the reasons I wanted lessons was to have a regimented practice routine, for someone out there to have specific expectations of me, because I work better to that motivation than to "perhaps I will noodle around on the guitar this evening." (I also work well to the motivation of "I am paying for lessons, I'd better bloody well practice!") I do not regret the lessons at all, I have loved learning to play the guitar. In a recent lesson, and this happens more and more frequently, we have theory discussions. At the heart of this lies the question, "Do you want to be a musician, or do you want to be a guitar player?" (My teacher has said that, so it's not just me making up that distinction, just for the record.) Music is a lifelong journey, and I feel like I'm just starting out, and I got started so late! But lessons will only take me so far. As long as I am sitting down to play what I'm told to play, I'm not going to do a lot of exploring what else I can do.

As an example, I just took about four days off from practicing. The night before my wisdom teeth extraction, last Thursday, I went out to a movie and so didn't practice. Nor did I on Friday or Saturday as I lay about, stoned and recuperating. On Sunday, I totally could have, but I skipped it anyway (hey, I thought, I don't have lesson on Tuesday so what's the rush?). So on Monday I sat down to play for the first time in a while. And I felt really comfortable with what I was doing, like I'm starting to lose the fear that the daily regimented practices are some kind of magic talisman that are enabling me to be able to play the guitar. I got my mind around some stuff in a new piece that I'd been kind of blocked on. And for a while, just a while, I...well, I noodled around. I put sounds together to see what was cool. I played just to play.

My basic theory is that I'd like to keep the lessons going for a while longer, but probably a year from now? If I am so fortunate as to still be in a place to be able to support this little habit, I might want to take a serious look at stopping after three years of lessons. I don't know if I will ultimately become a musician or not; lessons have gotten me well down the road toward "guitar player," and eventually I'm going to have to cut out lessons and just continue to explore the instrument on my own. Then, I will also note, I can stop having those nerve-wracking recitals every six months.

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Despite having some new projects at work, this morning is strangely calm. So I will now go off on yet another tangent! My friends list has been populated with fitness posts lately, people sharing how awesome they feel and what their latest accomplishments are, and I thought, "I should do that too!"

My routine has become habit, something I seriously miss when I do not do it. (Like over the weekend, post-teeth-extraction!) MWF is cardio, on the elliptical, for gradually-increasing levels of difficulty. The time can't really increase much unless I get up earlier, unfortunately - I'm averaging about 40 minutes a day. But I'll deal with that when I get to the point where more time seems the only way to challenge myself or keep my fitness at a level I'm comfortable with. TuThSa, I do the little "weight circuit" in our fitness room, which I think is a pretty nice little set of machines. Doing the whole thing takes about 45 minutes, more if I dawdle (which I tend to do on Saturdays, because hey, no rush!).

I can honestly say I'm in the best shape of my life; not hard, since before I was never really in any kind of "shape" at all. I'm not going to list my numbers here, because I really try not to focus on them. (My brother's mother-in-law once asked me what my goal was, and I said, "Well, to be healthy!" and she clarified, "What size do you ultimately want to wear?" As if women's dress sizes had any logic or meaning to them whatsoever. But I digress.) That said, though, I will note that I recently purchased a bathroom scale (which lives in my foyer...what? I'm good at digressing!), because I was curious, and because I no longer fear and detest what it tells me.

In simple truth, though, I didn't fear and detest the actual numbers. They become pretty meaningless after a while. What I feared and detested was what those numbers might or might not be doing to me. In my mind I always thought of myself as a fairly healthy person. In 2000, I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, but once medication brought that under control it was fairly easy to get back into the mindset of "yes, I'm fairly healthy!" I have been blessed with parents, doctors, and a peer group that have been generally understanding and accepting (not like some of the horror stories I'm coming across in the book club book, which - while I'm not done yet - I can earnestly and enthusiastically recommend) throughout my life and my weight fluctuations. Then, almost exactly a year ago, I was diagnosed with Type II diabetes. Suddenly, that whole "I'm a fairly healthy person" thing was starting to really fall apart. Diabetes was tough because honestly? I didn't feel bad. Even at my heaviest, on a daily basis, I felt mostly okay.

Now, looking back, I suppose it's because I was never a very physically active person, and so I didn't have much to compare it to. It's true that I was not in pain daily, that I did not suffer from the backaches that so often occur for top-heavy women, that I had never suffered a truly serious illness in my life (up until the U.C.). But I was never very comfortable in my own body. "I," I would think to myself, "have a life of the mind!" And I do. I have. I always did. I'd think back to my childhood and how often I would sit inside with a book, or engage in imaginative play, or write stories. Memory is selective, though - I wasn't a couch-potato kid. I played soccer. I loved games like tag and capture-the-flag. Importantly, physical activity was just a part of my life when I was young in a way that disappeared after college. I didn't walk anywhere anymore. I didn't climb stairs. I didn't really do anything physical at all. And I'd lost touch with how great it feels to rely on your body to do things you want it to do, to just have no trepidation about physical exertion at all.

I had to change my diet, with the diabetes. Of course. I'd managed to convince myself I ate fairly well too, but I really didn't. It was obvious stuff: an entire box of macaroni is not dinner. No, not even if you cut hotdogs up into it. I'd been exercising fairly regularly for a few years, even belonged to Curves for a while, but once I started eating a more balanced diet, and being more aware of the choices I was making when I fed stuff to myself, the exercise really took off. It became easier to do. My joints were less burdened. My heart was stronger. Physical activity was nothing to be shy of anymore, and it was great.

It is great. It's great every single freaking day. I'm only sorry it took not one but two diagnoses to wake me up to potential in myself I'd been ignoring for a long time. The other week I got the latest newsletter from Adventures in Good Company, and I read about their Kilimanjaro expedition. And I thought, "I could do that. In a few years, if I trained, but I totally could." Never in my life would I have even allowed myself those thoughts before, and that's what fitness has done for me more than anything: lifted barriers I didn't even know I'd closed myself behind.

Oh, and now that I've lost nearly 100 pounds in the past 8 years, and feel all great and everything? Yes, I'm still just over the edge into the "obese" category on the BMI chart. Screw you, BMI chart.

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It looks like I may well be going to the Crystal Palace USA game tonight, though I will be attending with a pack of Harrisburg supporters, so I hope not to have things chucked at my head. If anyone's interested, let me know!