4LetterWord: are you eating enough?

I know some of you are bored to death by this so I'm telling you up front:  this will be more about Fitocracy, losing weight, and getting back into shape (if you're new, the 4 letter word is 'diet,' because I hate to diet).  Feel free to skip it.  Or skim.  Or write me an angry e-mail.  That would be new.  In all the time I've had this blog, I've never received an angry e-mail. 

I was probably a little harsh with that post about Fitocracy the other day.  For the most part, people are welcoming, kind, and encouraging.  It has been really good for me to hang out with people who are such good athletes.  And it has been a revelation to me-- a complete and utter astonishment-- to discover how much I can do if I push myself.  And to discover that even when I push myself very hard, I'm not doing very much compared to many other people, even people as ancient as I am.

It shouldn't surprise me that I can do this.  I come from an athletic family.  My dad was a semi-pro fast-pitch softball pitcher for years.  My mom was a tennis player, and my older sister went through college on a tennis scholarship and coached tennis for a year at a university.  My uncle and aunt taught college-level physical education for decades (my aunt still does).  We are all avid sports spectators, of almost any sport.  I am genetically capable of this-- and I'm lucky that way, I know many are not.

But it was part of my rebellion as a kid to be completely and unapologetically unathletic.  I was the middle of three sisters, and you know how that goes.  The middle child of three same-sex siblings gets lost.  It's not uncommon, and it wasn't remarkably bad-- my parents were proud of my achievements, even if they didn't enjoy band and orchestra concerts nearly as much as they did tennis tournaments.  This is not a story of abuse and neglect.  But still, I had the distinct feeling that if I did the same things as my older sister, I would disappear.  Irrational, I know, but what kid is rational? 

So a large part of my battle to get into shape is mental.  It's a huge turnaround in the way I think about myself to acknowledge that I can do this stuff.  If I keep working my muscles, they get stronger.  If I walk regularly, I can go farther and do more difficult walks.

There was a part of me that had all these weird negative-magical-thinking ideas about what was supposed to happen if I exercised.  For one thing, it wasn't supposed to be hard.  If it got too hard, there must be something wrong with me or with what I was doing.  If I got hot and sweaty, I didn't want to do it.  If it made my muscles ache the next day, it was too hard.  It's been a huge change to learn to push through that.  If I work hard, I get results.  Not always as fast as I would like, but they happen.  I don't disappear, and I like the changes that are happening.

This is so not where I was going when I sat down to type.

So, anyway.  My ongoing love-hate relationship with Fitocracy.  It took me awhile to figure this out, but there's a reason why the Fitocracy point system is so skewed against cardio (cardio = exercise that works the cardiovascular system, like running, walking, cycling, aerobics, etc.)  Weight lifters are trying to build muscle mass.  Cardio burns calories.  They don't want to burn off calories, they want to turn calories into muscle.  So, plain and simple, the purists don't value cardio.

This should be the place where I give you examples of points for different activities, but I doubt you'd be interested.  You can earn lots of points for running or cycling if you go a very long ways or for a very long time-- three hours of cycling will earn you plenty of points.  But generally speaking, on Fitocracy you would earn two (or more) times as many points weightlifting as you would in the same amount of time doing cardio.

And once you understand their reasoning, it makes sense.  For them.  But if you get hooked on the site, and you're not interested in building muscle mass (and I'm not, I just want to be strong enough to do the things I want to do), you just have to put up with the fact that Fitocracy is first and foremost a weightlifting site.  As someone said succinctly in the comments to one of my friend's workouts the other day, "Fito is a lifter's site.  Deal with it." 

Now we're finally getting to where I was going when I sat down to type.  ha.  They also have an entirely different attitude towards diet, which has fascinated me.  If you're lifting hundreds of pounds many times in a workout, you need fuel for your body.  If you're going to build muscle mass, you need fuel, and lots of it.  You need to eat.  In the forums, a common bit of advice you hear to newcomers is "are you eating enough? are you getting enough sleep?"

It is, again, a big difference in how they think about food compared to how I think about food as someone who wants to lose weight.  I think in terms of calorie restriction:  how can I eat the fewest possible number of calories today without making myself miserable?  What can I cut out of my diet so that my body will shed pounds?  They think in terms of what their bodies need:  what kind of food and how much of it do I need to eat to fuel my body's activities? 

I love this.  It's a much better way to think about food.  What does my body need?  Sure, I still need to think about avoiding sugar and empty calories, but if I think about it in terms of what my body needs instead of as a restriction, it is so much more .... better.   It's just better, a better way for me to think about food.  Since I need to lose some weight in order to be healthy, what my body needs includes weight-loss.  But it's not the only thing my body needs.  I also need healthy food to fuel my activities.

Which is why I love Fitocracy, in spite of all the reasons it drives me nuts.  I love when people challenge me to think differently. 

DYEL?

Well, first things first.  We have eggs.  The neighbor kid who was watching the chickens while we were at the lake last weekend found the first one (wouldn't you know it).  But then for the past three days, there have been two eggs a day.  Isn't that amazing?  Do we not have the most brilliant chickens ever?  (don't answer that.  I know that eggs are the logical outcome of having chickens.  I guess I just didn't really believe it would ever happen.)  We're not sure exactly which ones are laying the eggs, but that's OK.  There are eggs.  I am happy.

So maybe you noticed that I haven't posted in awhile.  I just haven't felt like I have anything to say.  And I still don't.  But I thought maybe if I just plunged back in, something would show up.  So here's what I've been up to.

First of all, exercising.  I've been exercising a lot.  The best thing (for me) about being on Fitocracy is the extra motivation.  There are the points, of course, and the little shout-out you get when you level up.  And then there are the people who are older than me, or far more out of shape than I am, who are working far harder than I am, or managing to exercise with a far busier schedule than I have.  And then there's the exposure to all different kinds of ideas of what to do to be active.  As I've told you before, the majority of Fitocrats are weight lifters, but there are plenty of other things going on.  There's the normal stuff like running and cycling, of course, but there are also people who are dancing and ice skating and swimming, or doing Zumba or martial arts or climbing stairs on their lunch hour.  It's amazing.  and inspiring.

I've finally even broken down and started lifting handweights.  In spite of my griping about the weight-lifting snobs, it's not the first time I've ever done it.  Several years ago, when I first started working on getting into shape, I couldn't hold downward dog in my yoga class because I just didn't have the upper body strength.  So I decided to try and build up my arms and shoulders by working with 5-lb handweights.  (In some corners of Fitocracy, anything under 20 lbs is laughable.  If you are lifting 250 lbs, or 350 lbs, or more, you are allowed to disdain "barbie weights." But I have to start somewhere, right?)

But even at that small weight, about two weeks into it, I started waking up with numbness in my hands (not carpal tunnel, remember that whole mess? something different).  So I backed off and eventually gave up on it.  Then four or five months ago when I first started trying to hold a plank (which is holding yourself up off the floor on your forearms and toes), again my upper body strength was the limiting factor, far more than my core strength.  So I started lifting my itty bitty weights again, and had the same results again-- numbness in my hands, with the added problem of exacerbating the tennis elbow I developed (without ever playing tennis) at some point in the past year. So I stopped again.

But here is something I've learned from hanging out with the amazing people on Fitocracy.  You don't give up.  You adjust, you try lighter weights (yup, there are weights even more pathetic than 5 lbs) or fewer reps, you check around for different moves, you ice down when you're done, but you don't quit.  So I'm in the midst of trying that now.  I've been doing weights again for about three weeks now, and I'm waking up with numb hands again and my non-tennis-related tennis elbow is a bit worse and my shoulder muscles are sometimes so sore that it worries me, but I'm not quitting this time.  Or at least, not until I've pushed through it for awhile to see whether or not this is a solvable problem.

But here is the funny thing.  You remember my gripes about the point system on Fitocracy?  How a lifter can get more points just for being in the same room with the weights than I can get for 45 minutes of brisk walking?  Yeah, that gripe.  Well, suddenly I am on the receiving end of it.  Not kidding.  Yesterday I did about 20 minutes of lifting my little weights, plus a few lunges and squats, and it was over a thousand points. (My usual workouts average between 150 and 200 points.) I just about fell out of my chair when I saw the point total.  My arms were a bit shaky, and I did break a sweat, but I didn't get nearly as tired or sweaty or winded as I get in a 45-minute walk.

So the purist part of me feels a bit guilty that I'm getting all these points that feel EASY CHEESY compared to what I was doing before, especially since I griped so much about how skewed the point system is. But mostly I'm OK with it.  ha.  I've leveled up twice in two weeks since I figured this out-- previously it was taking me about a month per level.  But what I really like is being stronger.  I carried stuff up and down the stairs at the lake last week that I wouldn't have been able to manage by myself before this.

So I think this was going somewhere, but I can't remember what the point was.  Maybe I'll try again tomorrow.  The post title--DYEL? -- is a lifter's phrase, one that appears (apparently) on T-shirts at gyms.  It stands for Do You Even Lift?  and I think the answer is NO if you're lifting the rubberized little weights I use. :-) And also, for the record, not all the weightlifters are snobs.  Some of them are so kind and encouraging.  But some of them are not.

p.s.  They must agree with me.  I did a similar workout today and they had scaled back the points considerably-- the weight lifting part of it was only about 650 points, even though I did almost exactly the same routine.  It completely makes sense to me that they did that, but I have admit to being a teensy bit disappointed. :-P

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well, I really was going to write something before we went out to the lake for a few days, but I ran out of time.  And we will be well out of cell and internet range till the middle of next week.  Hope everyone is enjoying their summer and I will be back soon.

the promised photos

Nell's graduation, with fancy arrow showing her approximate location.

 

(I hope you are impressed with that arrow. It took me about 15 minutes to figure out how to do that.)

In NC, MadMax and his cousin B doing epic battle with....

...an enormous ray (thanks to Uncle J for handling it safely!)

Sun and Waves at the beach

Taking my sister and family up to see some snow

What happens when you fall asleep without knowing where your camera is

Tour Guide Julie at the gorgeous Eugene library

I'm the one in the purple shorts.  lol that cracks me up just typing it.

new additions to my usual walking route-- these guys just appeared on Monday

Walked in a new area today and there were a couple dozen of these guys running around-- can you see them?  they're prairie dogs.  They're hard to photograph with a phone because they're so quick.

Riffday: what I did in June

June was insane.  Lots of fun, but exhausting.  Most of last week I spent trying to recoup.  Now it's time to get back to work-- I'm going back to my thesis on Monday.  But the month off was good-- I'm not dreading it anymore.

So what happened in June?  Well, for starters, Nell graduated, which made us practically burst with pride and also was a lot of fun.  How often are you in a stadium with about 20,000 people, all of whom are happy?  Great atmosphere.  I thought it was going to be supremely boring to sit through a three-hour graduation ceremony, but there was so much going on that really it wasn't bad.  Dean's dad flew out to celebrate with us, which was only appropriate since he had helped fund Nell's college adventures.

Then the next morning, we flew straight from Seattle to the intercoastal waterway in North Carolina, where we spend a week every summer with Dean's family.  The fun continued.  It was a bit rainier than usual, but otherwise wonderful.  There was a brief, heartfelt family memorial service for Dean's sweet mom, who passed away in January.  She was a dream mother-in-law, always kind, thoughtful, and welcoming.  I met her when I was 21; about the same age Nell is now.  She is missed.

Then we flew back to Seattle, moved Nell out of her apartment, and drove home, just in time to get the house ready for a visit from my younger sister and her family.  More fun ensued, including hikes, trips to various lakes, and many loud games of Speed Uno.  I don't usually play because I'm a bit slow, but they even talked me into a hand or two.  They're very patient.

Then (this keeps going on), the day they flew home, I got in the car with MadMax and one of his buddies and we drove to Oregon where we got to go to one day of the Olympic Track and Field trials, and meet Julie.  The whole trip was great except for the seedy hotel where we had to stay since--not knowing we were going-- I waited until way too late to make our reservations.  I knew we would love the trials, since both MadMax and his friend are track and field athletes and I love sporting events, but it was even more fun than I thought it would be-- there were several exciting finishes, and although the weather wasn't perfect, we didn't get drenched.  It was just a bit drizzly.  And I got to meet Julie and her husband Dan, and Max, the star of the daily dog photos on her blog (who is much smaller in person than he appears in the photos).  Also became horribly jealous of the Eugene library.  Hmmm.  I'm remembering that I took pictures, but I'm not sure what happened to them.  Maybe tomorrow I will post pictures.

And then, when we got home, the painters and the roofers showed up on the same day, so we spent all last week being painted and roofed.  They're not done yet-- the roofers are only about half done, and the painters are coming back on Monday to stain the deck, but already the house looks so much better. This was part of the original plan when we bought the house, but we had to wait for the weather to get nice enough for painting and roofing. 

The chickens are fine, a bit bigger, but still not laying eggs.  We had to fence off our strawberry patch once they discovered it because turns out chickens love strawberries.  MadMax is turning 15 next week, which means I turn 51 two weeks after that.  Time just keeps flying by. 

And there.  now I'm caught up and maybe I will have something more interesting to say in a few days.

What I read on vacation, part 2: Lois McMaster Bujold

I spent many of my formative years reading sci-fi and fantasy, but for some reason I stopped somewhere around the time my kids were born, and lost touch with the good stuff.  So I first heard of Lois McMaster Bujold just a few years ago, although she's quite prolific and has at least two dozen books in print.  Someone recommended starting with Warrior's Apprentice, which I read and enjoyed.  But for some reason it didn't inspire me to read any of her other books.

Fast forward to last year.  As you know, I do much driving--sometimes well over 500 miles a week.  So I listen to a lot of audiobooks.  While searching for a good one last fall, I ran across a bunch of five-star reviews for The Curse of Chalion.  I didn't recognize Bujold's name until later.  Curse is the intricate story of Cazaril, a military man who ended up serving for nineteen months on a slave galley after someone "accidentally" left his name off a list of soldiers to be ransomed.  The novel opens as Cazaril returns to his homeland, his body broken and scarred.  He wants to find a quiet place in his old home town to live in peace.  He is hired to be the tutor of the young royess (princess) and her lady-in-waiting.  When the royess is called to the capitol city to learn court life, they are plunged into a complex warren of political, religious, and personal intrigue.  Cazaril eventually hazards his life to rid the royal family of Chalion of a curse that has followed it for generations.

It's a brilliantly multi-layered story, but the thing that makes it so fascinating--all the detailed intrigues-- is also its major downfall.  There are several times where I just wanted to find out what happened, without needing to know all the details of history, theology, and politics.  But without all those details, the story would be far less rich.  So if you are an impatient reader, this is not the book for you.  But if you love complex world-building, Curse of Chalion is a dream.  I found myself marveling time and again, How did Bujold think of all this stuff?  It's fascinating. 

But then again, sometimes I am one of those impatient readers.  So I have somewhat mixed feelings about it. Definitely worth reading--great book.  But be prepared to be patient--especially at the beginning. It gets off to a slow start. (The audiobook is great, if you're interested in audiobooks-- good narrator who does a great job with all the voices-- sometimes it's hard to believe it's just one guy.) 

There was one other thing that bugged me. Cazaril, who is 35, ends up with a young, vivacious 19-year-old at the end.  It just didn't feel right to me.  After all of his travels and experiences, it just didn't seem right that he would fall for a teenager who (at the beginning of the book) has never left the town of her youth. It's a relatively small part of the story--this isn't a romance novel--so it certainly doesn't ruin the book, it just didn't feel right to me for his character.  Especially because there is another character named Ista who seemed at times to be a better fit for him.

Fortunately, Ista gets her own entire novel in the sequel, Paladin of Souls, which I read on the plane on the way back from this most recent trip.  I loved this book.  Ista has been through hell and back (as was revealed in Curse of Chalion).  The actions of Cazaril in the previous book have done much to give her a new start on life, but she is stuck in her hometown with nothing to do and nowhere to go.  A chance meeting with a group of pilgrims gives her an idea, so she sets out with a small retinue on a pilgrimage of her own. Many adventures ensue. Although it shares the occasional slowness of pace that Curse of Chalion had, I thought this was a better book than Curse. 

Ista has been touched by the gods of Chalion in her past, with disastrous results.  So when it begins to become clear that they have a new role for her to play, she is dead set against it.  She wants nothing to do with the gods and their vagaries.  But gradually it becomes clear that she cannot refuse to intervene in the lives of the people around her without hurting people she cares a great deal about, so finally she plunges back in to activity.  By the end of the book, she is one tough cookie, capable of taking on ancient, multi-layered demons and kicking their asses back to the world from which they came.  It's frustrating to read her reluctance at the beginning, but it makes sense given her past. Highly recommended.  Memorable characters, memorable problems.  I've been thinking about it ever since I finished it.

There's a third book in the series, but since apparently it doesn't have any overlapping characters with the first two, I will probably wait awhile to read it.  Since some of you are already Bujold fans, tell me your favorites!  I'm happy to have a new author.

What I read on vacation, part 1

What did I read on vacation?  a stack of genre fiction, that's what.  Some I liked better than others, but not a clinker in the bunch.  yay.

The Thin Woman by Dorothy Cannell.  I enjoyed the first third of this mystery novel as much as anything I've read in the past couple of years.  It's a terrific setup.  Ellie, a snarky, overweight woman, hires Bentley, a writer of smutty mystery novels who supports himself by working for an escort service, to accompany her to a dismal family reunion.  Part of what I enjoyed about it is the surprises--I had no idea what was coming. So that's all I'm going to tell you, except there's a death, a huge creepy castle, and a treasure hunt.  It starts to drag a little in the middle-- much telling and very little showing, to use the writer's workshop catch-phrase.  But still, highly recommended.  If you can, keep yourself from reading plot summaries ahead of time.  Cannell writes great dialogue and her characters are memorable and sharply drawn.  The ending doesn't quite live up to the promise of the beginning, but it's still well worth reading.  And although I did guess parts of the ending, she also surprised me with some of it.  I love it when an author can legitimately surprise me.

Watermelon by Marian Keyes.  I'd never even heard of Marian Keyes until about a month ago when someone mentioned her in their blog (Judy?), and then half a dozen people chimed in in the comments.  Watermelon is her first book, and I enjoyed it.  Claire's adored husband leaves her on the day their first child is born.  Heartbroken, Claire heads home to Dublin for her maternity leave, moving back in with her ditzy family.  Since I've never written a novel at all, I'm very forgiving of first novels.  It astonishes me that anyone can write a novel.  I loved parts of this one.  Claire is a terrific narrator, and she is often snarky and laugh-out-loud funny.  But she also needed a better editor.  There were many places where her snark would go on and on and I would start to skim.  Also, while she is in the midst of being heartbroken, her memories of her ex-husband paint a picture that is completely unrecognizable when he finally shows up in Dublin.  Which is wrong?  her memories, or the present?  Keyes never really fully addresses this.  But this is another one I enjoyed.  Great vacation read.  I will look forward to reading more by this author.

The Toll-Gate by Georgette Heyer.  You all know I love me some Georgette Heyer.  This one is middle of the pack for me.  It's very similar to, but not nearly as good as, The Unknown Ajax, which is probably in my top three Heyer novels.  In both novels, a young man who has recently left the military is thrust into the midst of a family in need of help.  In The Unknown Ajax, Hugo must figure out what is going on with the mysterious actions of the younger brother of the house, ultimately resulting in one of the more clever denouements I've read (it is also one of my all-time favorite audiobooks-- great narrator).  In the Toll-Gate, John Staple gets involved in the life of a community after getting lost in a storm and spending the night in a deserted toll-gate.  It's a good story, and an enjoyable read, but the ending isn't nearly as satisfying as Ajax.  In fact, it's difficult to believe that John will be able to settle down and be happy.  Both books are more about the situation than the romance, although there is a romance in each.

Boy Meets Girl by Meg Cabot- a fun, quick read that worked just fine for a day of airplanes, but wasn't nearly as good as the previous one, The Boy Next Door.  Kate is a human resources representative who must fire Ida, a favorite lunchroom employee, after Ida runs afoul of the boss everyone hates.  There are immediate sparks with the lawyer hired to represent Ida, although there are an appropriate number of hurdles they must surmount before the happily-ever-after.  It was fun, but Kate is just a little too good to be true--the naive, small-town girl schtick doesn't work as well here as it did in the previous book.  Most of the story is told in e-mails, which works really well as long as you remember to check who is the writer and recipient of each e-mail. What doesn't work so well are the numerous journal entries written by Kate, which tended to be long and boring.  And when she writes journal entries on menus in restaurants while she's waiting for people to arrive, it stretches the bounds of believability past the breaking point.  But it's still fun.  Not a bad read.

Then there was the best one, by Lois McMaster Bujold, but it's getting its own post because this is too long already.

just us and them chickens, part 2

freedom! she let us out!

one of the Buff Orpingtons, Lord Orpington's wastrel sons

My camp chair, with umbrella, since it was raining/drizzling the whole time I was out there

MadMax shivering in the garden.  This one is so you can see what a miserable day it was here.

just us and them chickens

We're about to take off for Nell's graduation and then a week of vacation, and then we will have out-of-town company, and then the trip to Oregon.  So I probably won't post again for quite awhile.  So here is a chicken movie in the meantime.  It's only about 25 seconds long, but it took forever to upload.  I'm not sure what that means for you watching it.  If you have the patience for it, try it and let me know.

 We've been letting them out for awhile every day, but there are so many predators around (foxes, hawks, owls, even the odd bald eagle) that I don't feel comfortable with it unless one of us is out there.  So there I was, wrapped up and sitting in a camp chair with my book, freezing.  Today it is about 45, breezy, and drizzling.  Ah, spring in Montana.  I'm getting pretty fond of our little brood, but they still are not fond of me.  It's easy to herd them, because they're so terrified of me that all I have to do is walk up behind them and off they go.

I'll put a couple of still shots in a separate post in case this takes so long to load that it's not worth it.

Green Acres is the Place to Be

This morning at 7:30 a.m. I was driving into town in Dean's truck thinking, nothing says class like driving a 12-year-old pickup with a crate of chickens in the back. Pullets, I mean. Pullets are chickens that are out of the chick stage but less than a year old. Did you know that when you get pullets in the mail, the post office calls you at 7:15 a.m. to tell you to come get them?

So after I dropped MadMax off at school, I was headed to the post office to pick up the newest residents at our place, three Rhode Island Reds and three Buff Orpingtons.

It turns out that pullets are actually shipped in small-ish boxes-- two per box, and the three boxes were taped together-- so I could pick up the whole thing with little problem. It fit in the back of Dean's pickup with room to spare to put the lid down, so I didn't look any tackier than I usually do when driving the truck. 

And we now have six beautiful pullets.  They are surprisingly healthy looking, since they just spent two days in a box. 

So here they are, upon arrival:

They were thirsty! (sorry I didn't manage to get all six of them in one shot, but they're active little things.)  We'll see how it goes.  Wish us luck, and advice WELCOME.  We are complete neophytes.

riffday: get crazy with the cheese whiz

The title is apropos of nothing, it's just a line from my favorite Beck song.  I promise I have not been eating cheese whiz, in spite of my rant in the previous post about how over-hyped some food fads are.  Which I posted just because I was insanely grumpy. I have absolutely no scientific evidence to back it up.  Except that I went the first 45 years of my life without eating anything organic, and I seem to be just fine.

Anyway.  let's not get started down that road again.

I'm supposed to be working on my thesis right now.  There are no hard and fast deadlines until next fall, but I told my professor I'd have a first draft to him by the end of next week.  Yeah.  Like that's going to happen.  Actually, it still might, but I'm going to have to put the proverbial pedal to the metal to make it happen because I just could not get myself to concentrate that first week after classes were over, and this past week wasn't much better.  I'm going to give it my best shot, anyway.

So let's see what else has been going on around here....

Nell is graduating in a couple of weeks, have I mentioned that?  We just dropped her off about six months ago, I'm sure of it.  We are so impossibly proud of her.  She majored in international public health, did an honors thesis, spent a year rowing crew, spent a quarter in Prague, spent as many hours volunteering this year as she did studying, made a gazillion friends after heading off to the big city without knowing a soul, and generally kicked college's ass.  If you know what I mean.  She's studying for the MCATs right now and will have her med school applications finished in a few weeks, then she just has to wait to see if she gets in.  I don't see how they could turn her down.

So next year she will be back here while she waits to find out what happens with med school.  You note how as soon as we downsized she decided to come back home?  yuppers.  It will be close quarters, but I bet it will be fun, too.  MadMax is actually looking forward to it.  He thinks we are way too boring.

And speaking of MadMax, a couple of weeks ago he broke the middle school record for discus throw by 15 feet.  Which I think is more than just breaking it, that is smashing it.  His winning throw was 126' and change.  I'm taking him to the U.S. Olympic Track and Field trials at the end of June, and it just so happens that those trials are held in EUGENE, OR.  Which means I get to meet frequent commenter Julie for the first time ever.  Can't wait!  There will be pictures!

Last weekend Dean and I went to a Marriage Enrichment conference.  It was good.  I was a bit worried going in, because y'all know I am a private person, and I was worried that there would be forced sharing.  But there wasn't.  There was only one time, the very first night, that everyone had to say something, and after that, it was all optional.  We learned many new skills, but more than anything, it forced us to sit and talk to each other, probably for about 3 hours total spread over the weekend.  Lots of important things were said.  We've been having nightly check-ins since we got back, just as a way of making sure that we really talk to each other at least once a day.  So far so good.

the 4-Letter Word update:  in my weigh-in yesterday, I had lost another pound.  Which is a little surprising because although I've been exercising faithfully every day, I've been a bit lax about calorie restriction.  I haven't gone over by a huge amount, but I've only had 2-3 days out of the last two weeks where I wasn't in the red on MyFitnessPal at the end of the day.  So that brings my total loss since January up to 9.5 pounds.  It seems like I should feel more of a difference with practically ten pounds gone, but really I feel pretty much the same as I did then. 

The best book I've read on parenting teenagers had a bit in it about how important it is to keep hanging in there with curfew.  If you set a midnight curfew and your teenager keeps coming in at 12:30 or 1:00, do what you need to do in terms of consequences, but don't give up.  It's better than having them come in at 2 a.m. or 4 a.m., which is what may happen if you dump the curfew altogether.

That's how I feel about MyFitnessPal right now (you were wondering how that was relevant, weren't you?).  I haven't been under my calorie count very often the last couple of weeks, but I haven't gone way over, either.  Without that mental limit, I think I would still be constantly over-eating.  And I lost a pound.  Oh, my lord, what if this works and a year from now I'm actually at my goal (which is another 17 pounds away)(Hmmm.  Maybe two years!)  We'll see.  I didn't exercise today for the first time in over a month.  I just needed a break.  Back to it tomorrow.

And that's everything I can think of.  I've done some minor re-arranging here, mostly stuff I don't think you'll even notice.  One thing I did was add a "back2school" label, since people keep ending up here after googling "back to school."  If that's why you're here, try the posts with the back2school label.  If you want them chronologically, unfortunately you have to scroll down to the bottom and read "up."  The other thing I did was add a "subscribe by e-mail" box at the top of the right sidebar.  I haven't tried it myself, but if you type your address in there, presumably you'll get an e-mail every time I post something new. 

Riffday: the online version

I love xkcd.  He is often brilliant.  But that has to be his most brilliant one ever.  I've been on the internet a long time.  I was using e-mail and listservs and bulletin boards back in the mid-80s.  I've been in an online moms group off and on since 1997.  I've had a blog since October of 2003.  I've been around for the demise of several online communities, including one implosion that happened just a few months ago.

So I thought I was over this need to state my opinion, to charge in with flags waving and anger blaring, to point out to people that they are Wrong.  I've been through my "save the world through the Internet" phase and come out the other side.  It doesn't change the world.  The online world is so vast now (that's what has changed in the world), that people just go find their little splinter group that believes the same thing, and does anybody's opinion ever really change?  The splinter groups get more extreme, and (I hope) the rest of us figure out that the Internet works best as a way to stay in touch (with people we already knew) or get in touch (with kindred spirits)(which possibly equals our own splinter group).  The only way my own opinions have changed in the last 30 years is to realize that they are really, truly just that. Opinions. 

So it has come as a great surprise to me that not one, not two, but three times in the last month or so I've opened my virtual mouth and stuck in my virtual foot, with hobnail Doc Martens on.  What the hell am I doing?  On one major occasion, it was about something that I don't even really care about.  I was reacting more to the attitude than to the actual issue.  It was a dumbass move.  I regretted it ten minutes after I hit submit.  That's one of the reasons I've stepped away from my keyboard.  If I can't keep myself from being an idiot, what the hell am I doing online?  and why should you read about it? *sigh*

New topic.  Every morning I drop MadMax off at school around 7:30.  As I've said ad nauseum, I am not a morning person.  Often I've been up until 12:30 or 1 a.m. the night before, and when my alarm goes off at 6:50, I feel like something the cat drug in.  But by the time I've made his lunch and driven to the middle school and back, I'm awake and there's no way I'm going back to sleep. 

This morning it occurred to me that I could go the grocery store on my way home.  (Well, it's not exactly on my way home, but close enough).  Grocery stores are open 24 hours, right?  I've never bothered with the early morning version of that, but you know, it was a great idea.  I got my grocery shopping done and was home before I was even fully awake.  There were more people there than I was expecting, but it wasn't nearly as crowded as it will be by this afternoon, which is when I usually go.

But it occurred to me as I was standing in front of the eggs and the organic, free-range, antibiotic-free ones were FOUR DOLLARS AND THIRTY-NINE CENTS that we have reached the  point of absurdity.  One of my big gripes with processed food is that the major corporations who distribute most of our food care more about profit than they do about our health.  But let's be serious here.  It's not like the organic folks don't care about making money.  It's not like the health-food guru who sells books, workbooks, DVDs, tote bags, water bottles, and bumper stickers is only in it out of the goodness of their heart.  

I'm tired of all the fussiness.  Ten years ago the holy grail was just making home-cooked meals every night.  Entire cookbooks full of recipes using convenience foods were published so that we could get dinner on the table.  Then it had to be from scratch.  Then it had to be organic and from scratch.  Now it has to be gluten-free, organic, and from scratch.  Not to mention free-range, GMO-free, hormone-free, and antibiotic-free.  And local.  God forbid you should buy something that was grown on the other side of the country.  And if you're not doing all those things, there are people who are willing to write long opinionated blog posts* stating that your children will grow up with some horrible problem or complication or allergy, or dammit, they might not be perfect.

I'm ranting.  Gah.  And wasn't I the one who was just complaining about all the opinions on the internet?  I'm on board with the effort to minimize the amount of processed foods that we eat, and to minimize shipping and packaging by buying locally.  I really am.  But I'm not going to extremes.  We're pretty dang healthy.  We get the occasional cold, I have occasional migraines.  I'm willing to try various different things to see if they make a difference in how we feel.  But I'm not going to double our grocery bill and quadruple (or more) the amount of time I put into grocery shopping and food preparation for a 5% increase in healthiness.  I'm just not.

OK.  Rant over.  Move along.  Nothing to see here.

*like this one.

Vegan dipping sauce for artichokes

I luuurrve artichokes.  This was so good I had to share.

1 box silken tofu
1 T olive oil
1 T dijon mustard
juice of 1/2 lemon or lime
2 shakes sriracha (more to taste)
1 heaping t umeboshi plum paste*
(* probably could leave out if you can't find it, they have it at our local health food store)

Dump in food processor and process till smooth. Add more lime juice and/or dijon to taste. Also add salt as needed (if you didn't add the umeboshi plum paste--which is very salty-- you will probably need at least 1/2 teaspoon salt). Yum.  Loosely based on a recipe from Passionate Vegetarian.

business as usual

You know how at the end of every semester I write a post about how panicked I am and I'm never going to get my paper written and it's the worst paper that has ever been in the history of the world?  yeah, that post.  Insert it here.  If you pray, or do white light or vibes or fgbvs or whatever, send some my way because this is a mess.  And it's due in about 36 hours.

4Letter Word: It's May! It's May!

(the four-letter word is "diet" because I hate to diet.)

So when last I checked in about this, I was doing MFP (MyFitnessPal) for calorie tracking, Fitocracy for exercise tracking, and reading Judith Beck's book. But I was about to dump Fitocracy due to the prevalence of fitness snobs, who have little to no respect for any kind of exercise except lifting heavy weights.  So here's the update.

Fitocracy:  I know I said I was going to quit, but I didn't.  I'm hooked on it.  Even though my workouts are pathetic compared to what most people do, I really like it now.  The lifters earn a thousand points (or far more) with every single workout.  Me, I'm happy when I get over 200.   But my OCD self likes the tracking system, putting in my exercise routine every day and getting a little pat on the back by seeing my numbers steadily increase, even if it is much more slowly than most people.  And then every 2-3 weeks I level up!  woot!  I'm level 12 now!

Also, and I can't say this strongly enough-- the other "Fitocrats" are so encouraging and supportive.  Well, not all of them, obviously, some of them practically sneer.  But many of them are.  I have about a dozen people that are consistently supportive, and plenty more that pop in from time to time.  On Fitocracy, you "give props" for people's workouts, sort of like "liking" something on Facebook.  Yesterday, five minutes after I posted my 204 point workout, six people had already given me props.  It's nice.  And the other good thing-- I get good ideas for better workouts.  I've learned about some great new (to me) exercises that have made a big difference in how my body feels.  so yay for that.

MFP:  I really like this site.  On Fitocracy, I'm Granny Clampett; on MFP, I am a fitness goddess.  I exercise almost every day, and although I don't do anything spectacular, it's usually enough to add 200-300 calories to my calorie count for the day.  That looks really good on MFP.  There are many people there with far more serious weight challenges than mine, especially in the over 50 age range.

But I haven't really been dieting lately.  You can hardly call it dieting to eat 1900-ish calories a day.  I haven't been feeling very motivated to cut calories, and I think part of me (the wordless one, remember her?) needs to know that this is do-able.  I'm not going to have to starve myself or deprive myself horribly to become more healthy.  So my goal recently with MFP has been just to do it, do the calorie logging, every day.  Other than the week we were on Spring Break, I've logged in every day, even the days I've gone way over on the calorie count.  A couple of years ago, I would have drowned myself in guilt for going over, felt really bad about it, and quit MFP because I was too embarrassed.

But not anymore.  If I decide to go over on any given day, I'm owning it.  And it is a decision, even though sometimes it's not an entirely conscious one.  I don't have the patience on those days to figure out every little calorie, so I'll just stick in an extra 500 or 800 or even 1000 "quick-add calories" so that I'm being honest.  And I keep going.  So if I've had a bad day and let myself have a treat, or if we went out to dinner and I decided to splurge, I'm not embarrassed about that.  It's part of the new plan (which is evolving).

The good news is: that approach means that I'm much more aware of my food choices.  So most days, I stick to the 1900 calories.  So even though you could never call what I've been eating for the past month a diet, I've lost about a pound.  A pound in a month is practically laughable, I know, but it's a gold mine for me because it means that I can manage my food choices.  I'm starting to feel confident about this.  (YAY!)  Last fall I felt really out of control of my eating.  Not so much now.  I can screw up and get back to it, or let myself eat normally for a few days and still be OK.  It's taking away a lot of the guilt and shame that I used to load up on myself because I felt helpless to change anything.

So I guess I'm going to continue using both Fitocracy and MFP.  For the moment, they are both providing something important for me.  Once I'm done with this semester, I have a link to a new health and fitness site that I'm going to try, maybe it will fulfill both functions and I'll only have to do one.

damn this is getting long.  sorry.

The Beck book.  This was going to be the longest part of the post, but I'm getting bored of typing and I need to get back to my paper.  Yesterday was my last day of classes, so I felt OK about taking the time to post, but I have a ton to do by next Wednesday.  So I will just comment quickly on two points that I made in the last post about Beck.

First of all, letting myself get hungry.  She is a big proponent of letting yourself be hungry--it's not going to hurt you, the feeling comes and goes.  Get a drink of water and ignore it.  But I am hypoglocemic, and my experience has been that if I let myself get hungry, I get a headache.  But I said in the last post that I would play around with this a little, just try it and see what happened.  So here is the report:  I don't always get a headache.  Good to know.  It's about 50/50.  Sometimes she's right, if I just live with it, it goes away, or at least backs off to the point where it's not that noticeable.  Sometimes, I end up with a headache.  But only once did I end up with a true migraine.  So, I'm still playing with this.  It's not as much of a one-to-one correspondence as I expected.

Secondly-- she said something about how people who have trouble losing weight "like the feeling of being full," and I didn't think that applied to me.  But you know, it does.  So I'm working on changing this.  I'm working on being satisfied with being about 80% full, because that is plenty of food for human survival.  And also because if I keep eating until I'm 100% full, I often go over the line and end up being stuffed, which is a feeling I don't like.

Geeze.  Sorry this went on and on.  If you're intrigued by the idea of Fitocracy, I think you have to have an invite, and I'm pretty sure I can give you one.  Let me know and I will figure it out.

under the heading "too much time in the car"

My paper on Moby Dick is about one of the minor characters, a vaguely middle-eastern man named Fedallah. He's so rarely a part of the action that he is almost a place holder, but he plays an important role. As is common in nineteenth century lit, his stereotyped eastern-ness (dark, passionate, mysterious) is used as a foil for the Westerners' rational forthrightness. And since he is aligned with Ahab, he serves to reinforce the sense that Ahab is insane.

This way of using an imaginary, made-up version of Middle Eastern people to emphasize (by contrast) the desirable characteristics of the West is called Orientalism.  It's based on the idea of psychological 'othering.'   You take the characteristics you don't want to acknowledge in yourself and project them onto someone who is 'other' and then you don't have to see those traits in yourself.  So slave owners projected onto their slaves that they were bestial, with uncontrollable sexual urges and limited intelligence.  Or colonizers would see indigenous peoples as barbaric, uncivilized, and in need of help.  And it isn't necessarily negative-- men saw women as sweet, nurturing, domestic creatures who were too weak and irrational to function in the business world.  This provides two advantages to the person who is doing the 'othering':  you can ignore those traits in yourself (because you aren't one of them, and they are the ones with those traits), and you can rationalize treating them like crap because they deserve it.

There is lots more you could say about this, and books have been written about it.  Lots of them.  Shelves of them.  And I've only read a few dozen pages about it, so I'm hardly an expert, and why am I telling you this?  Only because I was thinking about it in the car yesterday.

anyway.  The funny thing about 'othering' is that you tend to cling doggedly to these 'othering' beliefs even when your experience tells you otherwise.  Even when a nineteenth century man had experienced in the schoolroom that his sister was smarter than he was, he would still assume that she was in a completely different category than any man, and was incapable of understanding politics, philosophy, or finance.  Even when a white slave owner was regularly having sex with several different slave women, he would still assume that he was not as bestial as the slaves, because he is a white man and white men are in a different category than slaves, who have uncontrollable urges.

When you're outside the system, it's infuriating, because it's so obviously not true.  But when you're in the system, it's just the way things are.  And of course we still do this today.  You can identify some of them (conservatives assuming that liberals have no morals, ignoring some pretty dang scandalous actions of their own; liberals assuming that conservatives are cold, calculating, and profit-driven, but see numerous liberals who have made extremely lucrative, profitable careers out of feeding that belief; romance novels that depict gypsy/Native American/Italian heroes as being hyper-sexualized; someone who is homophobic being utterly certain that a gay teacher will try to convert their children, etc), but for the most part, we're probably unaware of the ways we do this.  We can't see it, because we're inside the system, and it just seems like The Way It Is.

But what I was thinking about yesterday is the way we do this on a personal level.  The way I do this on a personal level.  I can't exercise because I'm not "athletic," you have to be An Athlete to be athletic.  Athleticism belongs to a group of people of which I am not a member.  Ignoring the fact that at several different times in my life, I've done athletic things and enjoyed them.  Or:  I can't be expected to give a talk in front of a group because I'm not a public speaker.  I get nervous and sweaty and my mind goes blank and I have nothing to say.  All of which is true.  And yet I remembered the other day that I once got up in front of my entire 100+ member high school band and gave a devotional before we went on a trip, and hardly felt nervous at all.  (doesn't that just say how old I am?  back in the days when you still did things like that at a public school in the Bible belt.)

So part of this is just about the ways we limit ourselves by coming to some conclusion based on one set of experiences and ignoring others.  I'll never be athletic the way some of my friends are or the way Dean is, but I'm more capable of it than I give myself credit for.  I'll never be a public speaker, and I don't want to be, but I can do it.

C U L8R

a favorite author recently wrote a blog post about blogs.  She speculated on the reasons why people blog, but since she's an author, her view was slanted toward marketing, name recognition, and fan interaction.  She neglected to mention "compulsion to publicly post your thoughts," which seems to be my reason.  But for some reason that compulsion has disappeared, for several weeks now.  That last post is only there because I made myself write it.  And since the end of the semester craziness is fast approaching, I'm just popping in to say what you could probably already tell-- I'm not going to be posting much for a bit.  In the past, as soon as I've said something like that, I've come up with something to say the next day, so that may happen.  You never know. 

Happy Spring!  It's gorgeous here today, the grass is even turning green!

Lent: Maundy Thursday

The church I grew up in didn't observe the church calendar (Advent, Lent, Holy Week, etc).  The closest thing we had was the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering wreath, which was an enormous wreath with four white C7 Christmas lights attached to it.  As the amount received for the Christmas Offering reached another thousand dollars (or whatever that year's increment was), another light would be turned on.  It wasn't until years later that I attended a church that used a similar wreath to celebrate the four weeks of Advent and I realized where they'd come up with the idea.   

So you can imagine my confusion when my middle school friends started talking about giving something up for lint.  My mom was a third (fourth?) generation Dallasite, and my Dad immediately adopted Texas as his home state once he got there, but I was born and lived the first seven years of my life while they were in exile from the promised land-- i.e., above the Mason-Dixon line. (you can tell a Southerner because they know what the Mason Dixon line is, and consider it a reasonable topic for dinnertime conversation).  Don't worry, because they moved back South as soon as my dad could get a job there. The lingering effect of those first seven years is that I said "pehn" for "pen," the subject of endless amusement to my friends, who all said in correct southern-speak, "pin."  Can I borrow a pin?  Mine's out of ink. 

So my parents had to explain to me that giving something up for lint didn't have anything to do with laundry fuzz, it was Lent, the forty days before Easter, when people give something up in order to prepare for the celebration of Easter, as a way of identifying with Christ's suffering.  My friends would give up sugar or soft drinks or watching TV.

I'm a sucker for symbolism and ritual, so I was enchanted by the idea, but it was Not The Thing in our church.  We just went to church on Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night, all year round.  There was no differentiation of different seasons or holidays (except for Easter, but that mainly meant that we got a new dress with matching shoes).  We sang Christmas carols at Christmas, and "Up from the Grave He Arose" at Easter, but other than that, it was just the same damn thing every week.

No, of course I'm not resentful, why do you ask?

So I never heard of Maundy Thursday until I was in college and started attending a lovely Episcopal church.  Maundy Thursday is part of Holy Week, which is kicked off with Palm Sunday (which commemorates Jesus's entry into Jerusalem), followed by Maundy Thursday on.... wait for it.... Thursday, then Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter is on Sunday.  I'm being silly here because I had a moving experience at our church's Maundy Thursday service last night, and I'm (apparently) still too cynical to play it straight.

So.  Maundy Thursday is the church service that celebrates the Last Supper.  In Episcopal churches I've attended, there is a three-hour service on Good Friday that goes through the sequence of events of Jesus's trial, torture, and crucifixion, so Maundy Thursday is only about the Last Supper.  There is often a foot-washing ritual, as Jesus washed his disciples' feet at the Last Supper.  But our current church doesn't have a Good Friday service, so our Maundy Thursday service telescopes the entire sequence events of the last few days of Jesus's life into one service.

It was beautifully done last night.  The sanctuary progressively darkened as readers read the story, until at the end, three people carried out the cross, wrapped in black.  It was very  moving.  But the story is awful.  The last hours of Jesus's life were appalling--betrayed by one of his own, deserted by the others, whipped, beaten, tortured, and then crucified.

When I was five or six, a helpful Sunday School teacher painted the picture in even more graphic detail than what is in the Bible story.  Did you know that the whips that were used on him were probably cat-o-nine-tails, commonly used by Roman soldiers in whippings, which were a group of leather thongs wrapped together at one end, with glass shards embedded in the other end?  The forty lashes Jesus probably received had been enough to kill people on other occasions.  And then the Crown of Thorns pressed onto his brow.  And the nails into his feet and hands.  And then once he was up on the cross, he would have had to push down on the nails in his feet to lift himself up so he could breathe.  And then the sword piercing his side.

It was horrible.  Here we were, this semi-circle of little five and six year olds, listening to her tell the story in twenty minutes of vivid detail.  And of course, she ended with: Jesus wouldn't have had to do all this if it weren't for YOU.  Jesus died on the cross of his own free will because of your sinfulness, so that you could go to heaven when you die.  If you don't accept Jesus as your personal savior, he went through all that for NOTHING.  I was completely and utterly sick that Jesus went through all that for me.  I couldn't line up fast enough when she did her little invitation at the end, asking did anyone want to accept Jesus as their Personal Savior?

Until last night, I'd never quite recovered from this.  In the past, when I thought of Easter, it wasn't about the renewal and rebirth of the resurrection, it was about the sick ball of guilt and shame in my gut because Jesus was tortured and killed and it was all my fault.  That's why I never went to see the movie The Passion.  Just the thought of it made me sick to my stomach.  But last night for some reason at the end of the service, I was finally able to get some adult perspective on that childhood guilt, that childish belief that everything is your fault, and let it go.  phew.  Like a great whoosh of tension and shame leaving my body.  I don't know how else to describe it.  Renewal of the best kind.  And hey, I only had to be 50 to figure it out.  Some of us are just slow.

Happy Easter.  However you celebrate this weekend, as the return of Spring, the Passover, or the resurrection of Jesus, or just a chance to get great candy at half price, I hope you have a great day.

p.s.  this is the post that I've been putting off writing since I started this series of posts, but it ended up being much different than I thought because of last night.  It wasn't so bad after all. :-)

spring blahs

We're off on vacation tomorrow.  We're headed to Southern California with another family.  Originally we were going to do some of the SoCal tourist-y things, but everyone's so wiped out that we may not do anything but sit on the beach.  I'll let you know how it goes.
I've had a rough week.  I've talked to several other people who have had similar weeks.  Maybe it really was the solar flares, or maybe we're all just damn tired of cold, wet, gray, miserable weather.  It's almost time for my annual post about how it's not winter that I hate around here, it's spring.  Winter is as it's supposed to be, but spring is just another three months of winter.  We won't even get green grass for another five or six weeks.

So have a great week and I will post pics when I return.  There, now that I've promised that, I'll have to find something to take a picture of. :-)

Lent: rebel without a cause

So you might have noticed that I have a problem with authority.  It's one of the main reasons I can't diet-- just go ahead and try to tell me what to eat.  You're not the boss of me.  *sigh*  I have this damn rebellious streak and it's a mile wide and it is the biggest pain in the ass.  For example, it severely limits the number of jobs I can have, because I simply cannot work for someone I don't respect.  At my last job (where I worked for a wonderful woman who was not a problem), the employees were still talking about the previous boss, who was a problem.  The stories were awful.  I asked one of them one day, so why did you stay?  And she shrugged and said, "I figured I'd outlast her."  And she did.  But I wouldn't have made it six weeks working for that woman.  I would have given up a great job with great benefits because I could not take orders from someone I didn't think deserved to be able to give them.

A couple of weeks ago I told you I decided it was time to start re-thinking Christianity again. [note from AB: the first draft of this post was written over a month ago.] I hate these posts because I worry that they make me sound like some kind of religious fanatic, and I guess I am in some ways, but just not in the way you'd think.  But like I said, it won't go away.

So of course I immediately started looking around for a book to read, because when I need to think about something, that's what I do.  I read.  We were in the middle of packing up the house, and Dean would have just gone ahead and pulled out all my fingernails if I bought any new books.  I lost count of how many boxes of books we packed.  So I started poking around in the books I already had and found one that someone gave me several years ago, Flesh and Blood Jesus:  Learning to Be Fully Human From the Son of Man.  It's by a guy that I heard speak a number of times when I was in college, and I liked him very much.  It was a place to start.

The first couple of chapters were pretty standard stuff.  There were a few new insights mixed in with some fairly run-of-the-mill interpretations.  But then I got to chapter 4, which was on Jesus' attitude toward authority.  And the author had some interesting things to say.  He pointed out that Jesus didn't always react to authority in the way that you'd expect.  And he didn't always react the same way.  He had a variety of options.  I do, too.  (*light bulb*)

1.  Jesus and his mom at the wedding in Cana (John 2.1-11).  The hosts are running out of wine.  Jesus' mom pulls him aside and tells him to take care of the problem.  Remember, we're doing the "Bible as Literature" thing here and interpreting the story within its own confines; we're not questioning whether or not it is factual or "true."  (I have no idea whether or not it's true.)  In the story, Mary knows that Jesus can do something about the problem.  (How does she know? has he been practicing his miracles around the house?)  Jesus doesn't want to.  This is early in his career, and he's not ready for people to know that he can do party tricks.  But she confidently tells the servants to do whatever Jesus tells them to do.  And he does.  He turns water into wine, and it's good wine, and the party is saved.  The entire story is less than 300 words, but there are a number of telling little details.  Her confidence that he can fix the problem; his willingness to do what she asks in spite of his initial reluctance-- I read it as amused respect and trust between the two of them.  They know each other.  There is no power struggle going on here.  I want you to do this.  But I don't want to.  Yeah, but I really want you to do this.  Okay, then, I'll do it.

2.  Render unto Caesar.  The Jews were expecting a political Messiah.  They were an oppressed people; their country had been taken over by the Romans.  They are looking for a Messiah who will deliver them from political oppression.  But Jesus' agenda never included politics.  He didn't lead rebellions; he didn't plan midnight raids on the barracks. When the local Jewish leaders ask him if they should pay taxes to the Romans, it is a loaded question.  If he says yes, his fellow Jews will be disappointed; if he says no, then they can turn him over to the Roman authorities for inciting insurrection. Jesus does neither.  He asks for a coin, and holding it out, shows them Caesar's profile on the coin.  Give Caesar the things that are Caesar's.  Give God the things that are God's.  He didn't get his back up, he didn't unthinkingly rebel against authority.  He used his brain and came up with a different way to respond.

3.  Jesus in the temple.  There was an entire superstructure in place at the Jerusalem temple that revolved around selling animals for sacrifice to people who were visiting the temple.  It must have been quite profitable for those doing the selling.  But it angered Jesus.  He responded swiftly and violently; he wades in and overturns tables, throws money boxes, sets the animals free.  Interesting that he doesn't rebel against the government, but he reacts violently against religious hypocrisy, yes?  Let the political leaders do their thing.  Vote your conscience, say your piece, but political power is not important in the long view of things. But mess with my temple, and your ass is grass.

See what I mean?  My version of rebellion is knee-jerk.  Some diet guru tries to tell me what I can eat?  I DON'T THINK SO.  Some flunky higher up the corporate ladder wants me to spend two days wasting time on corporate bureaucracy?  HOW ARE YOU GOING TO MAKE ME?  Anybody tries to tell me what to do, I get pissed.

But Jesus was thoughtful.  He had more than one option, and he chose his response based on the situation. I'm working on it.