Addicted to [at the moment] exercise

My colleague, J, says that I always have to have something to worry about. He’s right. He says that when I don’t have anything to worry about, I’ll make sure I find something to worry about. Again, he’s right. That’s how I roll (man), and I’m not going to change. At the moment, I don’t have a great deal on my mind (apart from the usual insurmountable issues of money, career, state of the world, etc.) so I’ve made something up. And that something is exercise.

Now, I’m 5’4″ in height (or 1.62ms), 118lbs in weight (or 8 1/2 st, 53KGs), and 8 to 10 in UK dress size so I really don’t need to lose weight (well, I have a little bit of a belly but, to be honest, I sort of like it) but I’m still gonna. I’m obsessed with my weight now, you see. My weight can fluctuate, certainly, and I had too much weight on, say, this time two years ago but it never gets particularly excessive and it’s never a threat to my overall health. I eat very healthily (because that’s another obsession), I know the approximate calorie and fat count of most foods, and I seldom drink, so I don’t need to worry so much in that respect either. But I’m still gonna.

Some things happened a year or so ago that gave me a touch of body dysmorphic disorder.¹ Since then, I’ve been very conscious of how I look and how others perceive me. I really don’t like it, and I hate how I spend too much time thinking about that and not enough time thinking about what I should be thinking about, but I can’t turn it off. I use a site called myfitnesspal.com to keep track of my food and exercise per day and if it tells me that I’m saving any fewer than 400 calories a day, I’m not happy with myself. Sometimes it tells me that I’m not eating enough calories a day to maintain a healthy diet, and I sort of like that. I probably spend more time on that site than I do on any other right now. I walk a lot and very quickly. This is all embedded, of course, in a patriarchal culture that is cruelly prescriptive about how women should look (and, importantly, not look) and I get very angry at myself for subscribing to, and ultimately perpetuating, those norms. But I still do it.

Um.

What has long been a source of frustration to me is that I can’t run. I could cycle or walk from here to Ireland, but I can’t run. I don’t know what it is, but I just don’t have the lung capacity for it at all and I don’t quite know why (as I said, I walk a lot and I do so very quickly). As such, I today started the Couch to 5K running regime and completed my first 20 minutes (well, 18) this morning. It was hard in places, but I did it anyway. (The major problem I have is finding places to run – Yorkshire is very hilly!) Apparently it doesn’t take long to build up capacity and to start running for longer. I hope so. I half-heartedly tried to do something like this before but I’m determined this time. (Any tips would, of course, be most welcome.)

I want to get to a place where I’m completely happy with my weight and I just need to stop all of this before I don’t have a stitch of clothing to fit me any longer. I’m not sure which will happen first.

——
¹ And that’s as personal as I’m ever going to get on this blog.

Me and [lapsed] Catholicism (pt1)

Today’s as good a day as any to start writing about why you’re no longer Catholic, right? I think so. “Good Friday” was the day that Jesus died for our¹ sins, apparently. He rose again three days later (even though the resurrection is celebrated just two days after the crucifixion) but I can’t quite recall why that happened.²

But this is about why I lapsed from Catholicism. Context: I was raised Catholic in Ireland, and attended Catholic school for the 14 years of my life I was at school before I went to university. My family wasn’t particularly devout, and has always had a good sense of proportion and cynicism about religion, but Catholicism was always part of my home life. Going to mass on Sundays and Holy Days (e.g., Good Friday) was obligatory, and attending confession was  strongly and heavily encouraged, particularly when I was younger. Growing up Catholic in Ireland has a whole other meaning because of the Troubles, but that’s a story for another day. I started to move away from Catholicism when I was about 15 or 16, lapsed unofficially (i.e., stopped attending but didn’t tell my family) when I was about 18, and lapsed officially when I was  22 or so.

It all began when I was about 13 or 14. I embarked on a period of extreme religiosity when I actually thought for a while that I might like to become a nun. (I know!) During this time, I had started, you see, to have Impure Thoughts and I couldn’t figure out from whence they came or what I was supposed to do with them. I was tormented because, not only had I been told 1000 times (at Catholic school and at mass) that such thoughts were the devil’s own creation, I’d been led to believe that girls were especially not supposed to have them. Boys were allowed, sort of, because they probably couldn’t help themsleves and it was different for them anyway. I was never actually told what “different” meant.

But I’d similarly been led to believe that, in order to do God’s “great work of procreating”, one would have to to engage in the very act I was being told not to think about. It was all so contradictory and confusing and difficult, and, for a year or so, I invested a lot of energy in trying not to think about any of it at all. I was convinced, you see, that if I continued along the wayward path that I was clearly setting for myself, I would end up in the burning fires of hell before long. That’s what happened to girls like me. (At this point, I hadn’t so much as held hands with a boy, never mind anything else.) I prayed and I prayed and I prayed that such thoughts would go away and leave me alone but it didn’t work; they were as prevalent and disturbing as ever. It was then that I decided that I should become a nun as soon as possible. Nuns don’t ever think about those sorts of things, right? I would be saved!

Christ! (Pun intended.)

Quite organically, I reached the end of that phase, and I got very angry indeed. I really had driven myself demented trying to be A Good Girl when all along, I quickly realised, I had been doing nothing wrong. If there is a God, I concluded, why had he allowed me to put myself through such torture? I had been, very frequently, in despair during that time (and I’d been horribly unhappy) and he had allowed me to put myself there. The nasty bastard, I said to myself. Besides, I quite liked the Impure Thoughts I was having; they were fun, they were interesting, they involved boys I knew, and I flipping well wanted to have them. So I decided that if “God” didn’t like them, he could feck away off for I was going to have them anyway. And he clearly didn’t care that much about me if he allowed me to hurt myself so badly. So I carried on having them (and I haven’t stopped since).

That drew a welcome line under that time in my life. It wasn’t too long after that when everything else fell into place. More tomorrow.

——
¹ I say “our” but for whom Jesus actually died is anyone’s guess. I conjecture that it doesn’t apply to the  Jews, for example, and probably not the Buddhists, and certainly not the Muslims. It’s never sat quite comfortably with me that either he or we get to pick and choose who that might be.
² All of the above is based on the assumption that you believe that someone Very Special Indeed called “Jesus” existed, did all of these things that are still talked about 2,000 years later, and matters one way or the other. I do not.

My carbon footprint and a gawdawful confession

(Imma starting my prompt-posting right now, so I am!)

Would you ever calculate your carbon footprint? (Prompt from Plinky.)

Yes. And then no.

I would like to but I don’t know how. I know I could learn but considering the most travel I do is to Asda in the car (forgetting for a moment a longhaul flight at the weekend), I dare say I’m not doing the most damage. But it would be interesting to know…

Actually, this leads me to a confession. I have recently become involved in a petition/ social justice site whereon I sign numerous petitions every day. They are invariably excellent causes and mirror my own concerns with women’s rights, human rights, animal rights, human trafficking etc. I also sign petitions about the environment and sustainable food, though I don’t always understand The Science.

Anyway, I was sceptical at first and but I signed as many petitions as I thought were worthwhile and waited to see what happened. As it turns out, a lot happens. Advertisers change their campaigns, senators change their votes, the wrong imprisoned are freed, politicians are made accountable, schools change their polices, and, in often very small ways, the world becomes a better place.

But I must confess: I will not sign a petition if the grammar used within is incorrect. I just can’t. If you don’t have your commas in the right place, if you abuse semi-colons, if I spot one too many errant apostrophes, if you don’t know the difference between title and sentence case, I am not signing you. I don’t care if your petition is to save the whole damned world, you will not have my X on the end of you.

I am surely a terrible person. That there just undoes all the good I do otherwise, I’m sure of it…

Post more often

I very much want to post more often and perhaps this – want to blog more often – is the way to do it. And it may even prompt more, non-prescribed posting.

I’m following the steps:

Signing up is simple – do the following:

1. Post on your blog, right now, that you’re participating
2. (You can grab a sample post from dailypost.wordpress.com)
3. Use the tag postaday2011 or postaweek2011 in your posts (tips on tagging here)
4. Go to dailypost.wordpress.com
5. Subscribe to dailypost.wordpress.com- you’ll get reminders and inspirations every day to help you bring your full potential to your WordPress blog!

So:

1. I am announcing that I am participating, starting as of this moment.
2. I’m hoping this post will do.
3. I’m going for the postaweek option; postaday would drive be up and down the walls.
4. Done.
5. Done.

Protected: My 2010 (email moreapologies gmail for password if you’ve forgotten it)

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In brief: posting by email

I wonder if that will actually make me post more? (I have been saying, after all, that I think that WP could really, really, really use a post-by-email feature.) We’ll see.

Life continues to be very busy, dear reader(s). Let’s call this a holding post, innit.