Greetings! Time for another weekly update. Unfortunately, it's not quite as upbeat as last week's, as I have finished off what started out as an excellent week with a cold. A rather nasty cold that my family was generous enough to share with me. Thanks, family.
Um, let's see...last week I did a kickboxing workout with the yummy Guillermo Gomez, 2 treadmill workouts, a Walk Away the Pounds workout, and a Gaiam Walking DVD, which was actually a really good workout. Lots of lower body strength exercises, and I was feeling it the next day. Drank my water, got my sleep, but the eating, once again, was not awesome as I had a serious craving for chocolate and ice cream. I've been good about staving off the ice cream the past few months. This is a major issue for me, as ice cream is one of those "trigger" foods, I guess. If I buy preportioned - like bars or individual treats, fine, but a half gallon is gone in two days. So I don't buy it...until last week. And, yup, it was gone in two days. I did not buy more.
Let's talk books now. We haven't talked books lately, and I have been craving a good book discussion. You would think I would get enough with two book clubs, but no way. I've read some good ones lately. My friend K recommended The Fault In Our Stars, which was excellent, very emotional and beautiful, but here's a question. I was a relatively smart teenager. My son is a very smart teenager, who hangs out with smart teenagers. None of these smart teenagers talk like the supposed intelligent, well-read, unusual teenagers in any of these modern young adult novels. “That's why I like you. Do you realize how rare it is to come across a hot girl who creates a adjectival version of the word pedophile? You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.” This is said by Augustus, the brilliant male protagonist who breaks my heart. Maybe the unlikely dialogue is due to the fact that the characters have all faced, or are facing, serious disease, and so they've had to deal with their own mortality, something with which most teens are completely unfamiliar. More likely, however, it is dialogue an adult author thinks a brilliant teenager would say. And maybe that's why young adult lit is so popular with adults - because we would like to think that is the way we would talk if we were smarter versions of ourselves?
That went on longer than I planned.
Another interesting book I've read lately - Gretchen Rubin's Happier at Home. I was going to start this sentence by apologizing for this, because I know many of my friends find Rubin to be a little saccharin sweet and maybe a bit self-centered. Which makes me giggle a bit. It's a memoir. Isn't a memoir supposed to be self-centered? It's a book written by a person, about that person's experiences. Also, she is very careful to begin her book by saying she is not a mental health specialist, and she does not have clinical depression. I do have clinical depression. I wasn't expecting this book to cure my depression. She is writing about discovering the things that truly make her happy. And making a specific plan to explore these happy-making activities and include more of them. I enjoy her explorations and plans.
You know, one of my resolutions this year (unwritten; it's kind of evolved over the past few weeks) is to stop apologizing for the things I enjoy. A few weeks ago, a friend of mine posted one of those pieces from...somewhere or other...10 Songs We're all Sick of Hearing, or some such something. And people are either announcing, loud and proud (on Facebook, you know what I mean), "I've never even heard of number 3", or 6, or whatever. Or other people are saying, "don't punch me, but I really kind of like #2." And, while I hadn't heard of one or two of them, and I hated a few, I really enjoy some of them. I listen to them on purpose. And I'm a grown-up, and I'm kind of tired of feeling like, as a woman with any intelligence, I shouldn't enjoy working out to anything by Britney Spears. Or that I should be sick of hearing Daft Punk's "Get Lucky" (no, I'm not sick of it, I have no idea how arrogant the band is, and I really don't care. I like the song.) Or that I should not be dancing to Blurred Lines. It makes me want to dance. And I never listen to lyrics, anyway. I'm not apologizing anymore! And neither should you. If you enjoy listening to West Side Story over and over again, so that your best friend wants to throw herself bodily from the car, you do it. And laugh as she then sings "When you're a Jet, you're a Jet..." for the rest of the day. Oh wait! You already do that, don't you?!
Wow. That was a bit of a rant. Completely unprovoked, which makes me laugh a bit. And now I have to go upstairs and spend some time with my daughter, who is appalled and the mass amount of crap I am spewing. That is not what she said. But she was shocked. I actually had something I wanted to chat about, re: Happier At Home; that will have to be my next post. Sleep prettily, friends.
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