5 x 1 mile
Mood:  happy
Topic: Marathon
I got up early this morning and managed to get my workout in before the sun was too high in the sky. Today was a simple 5 times 1 mile workout, and it was fun. I did the first mile following a 1 min. walk, 1 min. run sequence. Mile two was run two minutes, walk one; mile three was run three minutes, walk one; mile four was run four minutes, walk one; and I ran mile five without a walk break. With each minute of running that I added, I took between 30 and 45 seconds off my mile time, which doesn't seem like very much. Turns out I ran mile three at about the same pace I ran mile five, so it obviously pays to take walk breaks. Today's optimal ratio was running four minutes and walking one.

Unfortunately, my time for mile four was still well over 14 minutes per mile, so it looks like I have to get used to the idea that I may need to be bussed over the bridge at mile 20 in the marathon. There is still some time that I think I can shave over the next ten weeks, but it's going to take discipline. Next weekend I increase the mileage to 23. I'm hoping to do 23 in the time it took me to do 20 two weeks ago.

Despite the humidity that was already present at 6:00 a.m., I really enjoyed the workout. I think making a game of it with each mile being a different ratio made it more fun. Mentally, it was easier to run five miles that way than it would have been if I'd just set out to run five miles. And I had no asthma attack, so I'm considering using this same build-up strategy in the actual marathon, peaking at run 4, walk 1 and holding that pattern for as long as I can. (I'm going to experiment with run 5, walk 1 and run 6, walk 1 this week to see if they improve my time enough to warrant using either of those ratios.) I'll try that next weekend and see how well I hold up.

And in other news, I think I have to somehow find the reserves to hold myself to a better eating plan. After two weeks of feeling fairly strong, confident, and optimistic (what Hans has labeled a manic phase), I crashed on Friday night and the slump lasted through most of Saturday. It started with me feeling what I refer to as "free floating guilt" which is just a nagging feeling that I've done something wrong, but I'm not sure what it is. This usually happens if I've had too much caffeine to drink. I've given up drinking caffeine, with the occasional exception of a single 20 oz. bottle, because I've tested this theory enough that I've finally convinced myself of its truth. However, on Thursday and Friday I binged on chocolate covered donuts and then was surprised to find myself responding to the caffeine from the chocolate when I got home Friday night. I'm going to talk to my new therapist about hypnosis, and then either try to schedule a few sessions with her or with the therapist in Carrboro that I met at the Book Festival back in May. Either that or look into a Greensboro meeting of OA, but if I can avoid that, I want to.

Today has been better. I think the run was a great way to start off the day. Then Hans and I went to see The 40-Year-Old Virgin this afternoon, which was a lot of fun, and a good way to relax. I'm a little nervous about my therapy session tomorrow morning because I have less of an idea what to expect, but I'm looking forward to this week. Sudie and I have been getting a ton of work done, and I've got some good momentum with the marathon training, and I'm hoping that this week will just build on all of that.

I Take That Back
Now there's an ad for a "natural" lithium product posted, so I have to take back what I said about there being no drug offerings....

Targeted Ads on This Blog
Mood:  mischievious
There aren't enough emoticons available to me! Where's "amused" or "thoughtful" or "serene"?

When I checked the ads that run atop my blog the other day, there was a nice mix of heart rate monitors and virtual coaching and running sites listed. Today, however, I notice that there is a straight across the board listing of mental health support sites! Thankfully, no direct advertisements from drug companies, but the ads clearly let you know you've crossed into crazy person territory!

Yes, where is that "amused" emoticon?

Savannah Blue's Activity Book is here!
Mood:  celebratory
Topic: Books
We received 4,000 copies of Savannah Blue's Activity Book from the printer on Wednesday. They look fabulous! We sold our first copy, without trying, that very day!

This is the first book project Sudie and I have completed together, and it is very exciting. My first assignment when I started working for Sudie was to find a bilingual editor, and then a translator. That involved a very steep learning curve, since I don't read, write, or speak Spanish, as did trying to figure out how to communicate regularly and inexpensively with an editor who lives and works in the Southern Hemisphere! Oh, and, of course, we can't forget having to untangle all of the details of the ISBN number--apparently, the U.S. has decided to join the rest of the world in using a 13-digit ISBN by 2007, which is a change from the 10-digit we currently use. This sounds fairly straightforward, except that no one in the industry really knows the transition is happening or how to deal with it. (Except maybe Bowker and us, finally.)

I spent most of yesterday creating a map that covers Sudie's whole kitchen table outlining our domestic and international marketing plan, so she could see all the pieces. She asked me when it would all be accomplished! She should know as well as I do that, as long as you have product, marketing is never finished. This is especially true when she wakes up at 3:00 a.m. and starts scribbling notes about needing to break into foreign markets that I find on my desk when I get in in the morning. Right now I'm working with our graphic design geniuses on a new ad campaign, and with our web designer to get an announcement up on Sudie's website. I'll post a link to the new book as soon as it's in place!

Back on the Couch
Mood:  lyrical
Topic: Daily Eruptions
I had my first session with my new therapist this afternoon. It was interesting. I didn't cry. I always cry. Whenever I'm in a safe space and doing real work, I cry. So maybe I wasn't doing real work yet, or maybe it wasn't safe space yet. Or, maybe, I'm really in a better place than I have been before and things aren't as desperate as they seemed eleven days ago.

She's not convinced I'm bipolar, which is good, because I'm not convinced either. The funny thing is she suggested that the things I do that look like manic episodes may be obsessive compulsive disorder instead! Hans hasn't heard that one yet, but he's going to die laughing. I am the farthest thing from OCD and he is the OCD King. His roommates in college used to move things around the room and have friends over to time how long it took him to put everything back the way it belonged, all while he was talking to them and completely unaware of what he was doing. The all-or-nothing part of OCD sort of makes sense to me, but there is not an environmental component for me at all. I think because I went in with lists of issues categorized by whether they were a long-term or critical concern, potential action steps, goals for the next 12 months, and questions I would like her to help me explore I looked more OCD than I really am. What she hasn't seen yet is that my brain and my environment are both slightly controlled chaos and if I don't write things down, nothing makes sense.

It was an interesting shift in perspective, however, and she said some things that made sense.

As I left I remembered why I can only take so much therapy before I have to leave. It tries to reduce so much to brain chemistry, and squeezes out personality and choice. My choice to ride a bike from Seattle to Washington D.C. could be seen as either a manic episode or a fit of OCD. How romantic!

Tactical Error
Mood:  happy
Topic: Marathon
I let myself sleep too late this morning before getting out to do my ten mile workout. I don't sleep well on the night before the long runs, probably worrying about not hearing the alarm or not getting up. And even though the alarm was set for, and went off at, 5:00 a.m., I didn't get up until 7:00. With dressing, pills, inhalers, breakfast, walking Kaija and feeding her, I wasn't out the door until 8:00 and by then it was humid, the sun was out full blast, and it was already too late. The heat index was 93 degrees.

I walked the first half mile to warm up, then started my watch. I managed the first mile in 13.5 minutes, which made me very happy because I was shooting for 14, by running four minutes and walking one. Unfortunately, I couldn't sustain this, or couldn't bring myself to work that hard. I eventually settled down into a run one minute, walk one minute rhythm which was manageable for the first two hours. After that, somewhere in mile 8, I decided it was too hot and I allowed myself to walk the last two miles completely. It's days like this when a coach would be good. A coach would have urged me to keep running and would also have been there if I got into trouble. I'm probably too easy on myself and would have achieved more mental benefit, and physical maybe too, if I'd forced myself to keep up the running.

By the time I'd finished 10.5 miles, though, I was every bit as wasted as I'd felt last week after twenty. I drank both water and Gatorade twice as fast this week as last, couldn't bring myself to actually eat anything once I'd started, and began getting chills after only three miles. I shivered throughout the workout, but I continued to sweat, so I decided that was probably okay.

I'm running out of time, and there is a real possibility that I will need to be bussed over the bridge for being slow and may be the last person to cross the finish line. These thoughts went through my head while I was out there today and they definitely weren't helpful. I tried to counter them each time they came up by reminding myself that I will finish--I always finish, workouts and races--and that as long as I'm still training and as long as I get to the starting line, I've already accomplished something. This for me is about the process and not the outcome, and I'm still in the process, so all's well. I even managed to smile a few times today and I am walking better after this week's workout than I did last week, so maybe I'll have the energy to get some work done around the house.

War of the Worlds--Warning: Sappy
Mood:  happy
Topic: Daily Eruptions
I've been having a really lovely extended conversation with Tad. We actually talked on Monday, and we've been emailing ever since. And Tad's emails are unlike anyone else's! Just like his conversation, they include references to Rilke and Jesus and Krishna and Buddha and Jonathan Livingston Seagull. In other words, they're intimidating! But they are also inspiring and reassuring and full of love. I never quite feel like I'm giving back to him the kind of wisdom he's sharing with me, so all I can assume is that he gets something out of knowing that I, too, am a seeker and that we're artists and on similar paths, even if his path includes more formal spiritual study and mine includes more psychotherapy.

The Class of 1985 had its twenty year reunion last weekend, and that's been freaking me out a little bit. My twenty year will be happening next summer and on the yardstick by which I judged success in high school, I'm not sure I even register! I've had a series of amazing adventures and learned a lot of things I wanted to learn and some things I didn't even know I needed to learn and I've always been able to surround myself with great people and I take risks regularly and I'm really pretty cool (in a quirky, weird, yeah, I'm-still-a-geek-but-not-making-any-money-off-of-it kind of way). But those are not the kinds of things you can easily put on a business card--although I did try when I was living in Seattle.... So there has been a renewed push by me to make my life look like I wanted it to look, or still want it to look, depending on where I am on any given day. The push to lose weight, figure out my marriage and either make it the partnership of my dreams or learn to be thirty-something and on my own again, to be a writer who writes and is published and paid, to start my own business, to find some way to make a recognizable, valuable, and substantial Contribution (yes, capital C, Contribution). And I know that much of this is ego driven and comes from a need to please my parents and other adults who encouraged me when I was growing up. And much of it comes from insecurity--I need to be able to hold these things out in front of me to justify my existence, to feel worthy, to feel "successful." And, because these things are worldly things, maybe they aren't as important as spiritual things.

Tad, I think, has been trying to help me realize--forever--that my spiritual growth is more important than my material worth. He wants me to find my true work and engage in it because it is what I love and what I'm here to do. I want this, too, of course, but a lot of times I feel paralyzed. I think I know what the true work is, but fear overpowers the love I feel for it. The material, ego driven comparisons I make between myself and others make me doubt my ability, the truth of my work, its value, my value. And so I do little and accomplish less and expend an enormous amount of energy denying who I really am, really trying to hide myself, trying to convince myself and everyone else that I'm unworthy.

But at the same time there is a part of me that's clinging to the truth and hoping desperately that someone will see me for who I am--luckily, there are a small group of people around me who do see me--and feeling hurt that I can't believe in myself and convince others to do the same.

So I have a foot in the material world and a foot in the spiritual world, and I can't quite make up my mind which it's going to be. (The really scary thing is that I may never make up my mind and never make any progress in either world!) What I'm really hoping to accomplish as a result of this current bout of depression and therapy is self-confidence. I know I'm capable of it. There have been times in my life when I oozed it. But then it's like I misplace it, like I do so many things, and I can't find it again. Or maybe I know where it is but I'm afraid to go claim it as mine. So I want to go claim myself again, get comfortable in my own skin again, stop making and believing in comparisons. I just want to go do the work because it's what I love and why I'm here. This is possible. I've lived there for brief periods in the past. I just have to learn to make living there a habit and let myself fall so in love with my life that I won't lose it again.

Revisions
Mood:  sad
Topic: Daily Eruptions
Okay, so I revised my statement about not cooking for Hans. If he will keep the necessary ingredients on hand, then I will continue to cook and bake for him. I don't think it's my job, though, to go to three stores--or more!--looking for the exact right ingredients, when he goes to those places throughout the month and can just be sure everything is stocked. I got online today and found the Spectrum Organic site and the shortening product is made from a single ingredient that Hans can eat, so we either need to order it online and have it Express Shipped (in the summer months, express shipping is required) or find a retailer who carries it. They have a second product, refined Coconut Oil that can also be used as a butter substitute. But after 11 years of being the one who has to find and adapt every recipe for every recognizable dish Hans eats, and when the list of things I have to avoid using grows every year, I'm really burned out. It would be different if Hans were a child with severe allergies and had to rely on me to do all of this for him. But Hans is old enough and capable of doing these things for himself--it's just such a gigantic hassle he has given up on baking and relies on me to do it for him. His idea of cooking is to open a can of tuna or sardines (with 3 ingredients or less and absolutely without broth), a can of black beans (again, 3 ingredients or less), and pour them over a bowl of crushed up tortilla chips (3 ingredients or less, no spices, no partially hydrogenated, etc.). So, Hans's end of the deal is that he no longer gets to walk into the kitchen, find me cooking or baking something for myself, and guilt me by saying, "I wish I had brownies/chili/fill in the blank," in his sad sack voice to make me feel bad for not taking three times longer to cook from scratch something that he could also eat.

Total Waste of Time
Mood:  don't ask
Topic: Daily Eruptions
Well, I spent an hour and a half driving out of my way and shopping for the ingredients for lemon squares, which, by the way, I made as recently as Hans's birthday without complaint. Kroger didn't carry guar gum, only xanthan gum which Hans is somehow allergic to, so I decided to skip that ingredient and see how the crust held. Then, they didn't carry the Spectrum margarine I've used for Hans for the last five years, but they did carry Willow Run Soybean Oil margarine. I have used this for Hans in the past, and it is made with partially hydrogenated oil--which I know Hans avoids but has nothing Hans is allergic to. The only other non-dairy margarine alternative was a completely hydrogenated product, which would have been great, except it has mono- and di-glycerides which Hans also has reason to believe he is allergic to. So I opted for the partially hydrogenated Willow Run and had made the crust when Hans walked in the door, opened the trash to see the soybean oil margarine wrapper, and refused to eat the lemon squares. He dragged out his list of forbidden ingredients, which at this point is three columns wide and three pages long, and showed me the word "hydrogenated." He insisted it had something to do with fermentation. A quick check of the dictionary and a call to Chad squashed that theory, and the best we can come up with now--aside from the heart disease issue which is not one of Hans's issues--is that it may cause inflammation and should be avoided by asthmatics--I am the asthmatic, not Hans. Still, Hans refused to eat it. So, a total wasted effort that caused an argument. I vowed, as I have before, that I will never cook for him again because if he doesn't refuse to eat it, then he comes back three days after he's eaten it interrogating me on what could have been in it that is making him sick. I hate saying I won't cook for him, because there have been times in the past--before the list exploded to include everything related to gluten when I went on a gluten-free diet in 2002--when I have spent hours laboring over something special, a birthday cake or peach pie, and it has meant a lot to him. Saying I won't cook for him feels like I'm denying him love, but I can't take the stress of it anymore. So maybe at least this means I won't be calling any of my friends at 10:00 at night complaining that Hans is insisting I stay up to make him a batch of chili (while he goes to bed) because he has nothing to eat for lunches for the week and he doesn't have time to cook for himself.

I really was trying to do a good, loving thing. Really.

Intimacy
Mood:  lucky
Topic: Daily Eruptions
I am so lucky that Tad is still my friend after all these years. We hadn't talked since my birthday in February, but after several months of phone tag, he called me Monday night. He said I hadn't sounded at all happy in my last several phone messages and he had to call to make sure his friend wasn't going crazy, and if I were, to make sure that it was at least just the usual flavor of crazy. We were able to talk for several hours. He told me about recent difficulties he had with one of his women friends that sounded an awful lot like other difficulties he's had with other young women. It seems Tad is capable of forming intensely intimate bonds with women, but unfortunately, it sounds as though the intensity eventually sucks all the air out of the relationship. I, on the other hand, am suffering from the exact opposite: intense neglect.

I asked Tad what reasons he had for telling me on my wedding day, "You chose well." He told me (all good reasons), and as he did, I remembered that he had told me before. He also listened, without laughing, to a dream I had had that morning about a former boyfriend. He was able to explain to me why that former relationship was the way it was, which helped me understand why I keep going back to it in my head, and why it's also not a useful model of a long-term relationship. There's a good chance he's explained this to me before, too, and I promise not to forget this time! I blame my memory problems on a highly developed corpus collosum--because I'm always zipping back and forth between the two hemispheres of my brain, I never know where I was when I learned something and so can never find the pathway back to it. You'd think, though, with major emotional insights like these that I'd be able to find a way to hold onto them. And just because Tad remembers EVERYTHING doesn't mean that I get to abuse him by making him repeatedly remind me of what has happened in my life and why this or that event is significant!

One of the reasons Tad thought Hans was a good match for me was because he wrote such amazing wedding vows (and cried while he read them), and, very obviously made me very happy in so doing. (I reminded Tad of the Billy Joel & Christy Brinkley situation: Christy acknowledged that Billy was a musical genius but said she needed more than one song a year to tell her how he felt about her.) So I went looking for the paper copies of the vows we each wrote and unfortunately they weren't where I thought in the Guest Book with all the wedding cards I saved. Which means they're with the wedding planning notebook I kept, and I don't know where exactly that is among all the moving boxes right now. (And I can't watch it on video because the VCR isn't hooked up to the t.v. yet.) I will keep trying to find them, though, because I'm considering asking Hans to write new vows with me now as part of our counseling work (provided we actually make it long enough to start counseling--last night he suggested that due to the crazy hours of his new job he may not be able to join me in sessions until December, and not October as we're currently planning). I read some articles online last night about the "maintenance" phase of marriage - the phase that follows wooing and the honeymoon, the phase you stay in until one of you dies or leaves. I have some strong objections to some of the articles' assumptions, and I'm at least glad that beginning next week I'll have someone to talk to about things like this.

In the meantime, I've decided that it might help me feel loving emotions if I engage in loving actions, so I'm driving to Kroger in Durham--the closest one to the new house--tonight after work to buy rice flour, tapioca flour, and guar gum to make Hans a double batch of gluten-free lemon squares. He really is having a tough time with the new call center, and it would make him very happy to come home to find his favorite dessert waiting. Wish me luck that Kroger has all the ingredients I need!