Details.

This evening I got home, put my wine bottle in the freezer (it was a Big Joe wine glass kind of night), lit candles, put on the most soothing music on my iPod, turned off the lights, got in the shower, and just stood there.

I just finished week 8 of the spring semester. And I'm tired. Bone deep tired. Tired on every level. And it's not just the level of work or stress or fear of failing, because I've been there before (although never quite on this level of intensity and time commitment). It's not just the physicality of my days at the hospital or the anxiety that comes from trying to manage writing and school at the same time (not to mention being a real person too, if possible in rare moments).

My heart is tired.

I think anyone who goes through nursing school experiences all of these wild emotional ups and downs as we try to acclimate to and normalize things that are in no way normal. But I've realized something about myself specifically-the qualities that make me a writer, the ability to notice tiny little details, to pick up on people's emotions and unspoken feelings, to sense way more than I often want to sense about a person, those qualities are going to help make me a good nurse. They're also going to consistently wreck me.

Everyone notices details. But writers obsess about them. They clog in our brains and replay in intense color and vibrance. And the details you encounter as a nursing student, in a hospital with people who are sick and/or dying, the details I've noticed the last few weeks, are just hard.

These are the things I keep going back to: a mother's notebook, full of all the details of her son's long sickness, medication names and printed out journal articles; the way a sister quietly and softly rubbed her unconscious sibling's arm, just wiling him to know she was there; pictures of grandchildren at dance recitals; shoes brought from home; wives who can in detail list their husbands medical history in exact, almost scientific detail; the nervous chatter of a woman about to receive her first chemotherapy treatment, this armor of sarcasm and nonchalance that broke apart every few minutes when she asked things like when she would start to lose her hair.

And this is nothing. No one has died on me. I've never seen a sick child. I haven't even begun to get to the hard stuff.

It's hard for everyone. I'm going to make it even harder on myself, because I can't just look at a person from a distance. I see these people I interact with in every tiny detail, in every story told, in the TV judge shows they watch, in the way they take their coffee, "with creamer and two of the blue packs."

I believe it's going to make me a better nurse, because I will look at the whole person, which is the fundamental core of what nursing is as a profession. I also believe it will, consistently, break my heart. It will consistently create moments like this evening, when I started to tear up during an episode of Parenthood (as I do every time I watch that darn, wonderful show) and end up shaking with sobs on my couch-all of those details lodged firmly in my throat, refusing to let go. The challenge is finding a way to live with it without becoming hard, without losing those details and turning my patients into diagnoses instead of human beings.

And until then there's always wine.

That damn scale.

 So this blog was originally intended to showcase my latest (and Kath Eats Real Food blog-inspired, I ain't no culinary plagiarist!) healthy meals. I put together a yogurt lunch  that included fat free Fage Greek Yogurt, all natural blackberry jam (at only 10 calories a tbsp!), a chopped up banana, unsweetened coconut flakes, and organic EnviroKidz cocoa brown rice puff cereal (they look just like Cocoa Crispies and they taste like them too! which takes me back to my Thailand days when Cocoa Crispies were one of two American cereals sold in my town-the other was Corn Flakes, and I ate both of these cereals at least twice, usually four times, a day). I think there may have also been some buckwheat groats (or something like that, I got them from the self serve bins at Ellwood Thompson to make my granola balls-tehe-and I don't remember exactly what they were-they taste like cardboard but add a nice crunch!)

It was delicious and super filling.

My other healthy creation was oatmeal topped with canned pumpkin (not sweetened), a hefty spoon full of ground flax (looks like saw dust but is pretty much flavorless-but it does pack a wallop of healthy goodness), more shredded coconut, and banana all mashed up. Again, delicious and very filling.

So that was what this blog was supposed to be about, my latest healthy eats after a week of healthy eats. I posted before how I felt unhealthy and had slipped a little bit, and how I really wanted to kick start healthier eating. I've done that, been very careful about what I've eaten and about calories. And over the last week I've increased my work outs. I still work out five times a week but now at a minimum of fifty minutes (either a 5 mile run or fifty minutes on a machine at the gym).

I have busted my butt, and I felt great. I felt healthy and strong. And then after a 55 min, sweat drenched elliptical work out at Gold's Gym today I went to the locker room to grab my stuff and saw it, that devious, malicious, malevolent machine.

The scale. I understand why gyms have scales. But I both hate and crave its presence. Sometimes I can go in and out of that locker room and pretend it doesn't exist. I don't even look at it. But other times I can't help myself. I jump on. And for the last year I've been pretty darn happy with the number. Since the beginning of 2010, I've lost between 10-15 pounds (I don't know exactly because I didn't know what my exact starting weight was). It didn't happen with a diet or with a crazy resolution. It happened because I was unemployed and depressed and so I started to run to feel better. And then I ran more. And without going carb less, I began to lose weight.

The more I ran, the more weight I lost. And it all came easily then. I started to make better choices about food to reflect how much better I felt about my body. Weight came off. I got compliments (which I always deflected, all "me? no!", but secretly craved like an addict craves their next high). I went down in clothes sizes. It wasn't a dramatic weight loss, but for the first time since I was 11 probably, it allowed me this rare and beautiful thing-a healthy relationship with my body.

I've never had an eating disorder. Let me make that clear. But I also would not say that my relationship with my body has been healthy. Let's just call it dysfunctional. It fluctuated. When I tried on a size of jeans and it was too small or I was around really skinny people, it fluctuated to a decidedly unhealthy relationship. I fixated on food and weight and I went carb free and fat free and every kind of free there was. I never really changed my life. I just tried quick fixes and desperately hoped they would magically work and turn me into a size 2. 

Of course I understand the irony that when I finally did lose weight, it was because I was doing something that was not at all intentionally a weight loss program. Running was for my sanity. It was for those sweet, sweet endorphins. Because I was unemployed and just back from the incredible, beautiful thing that was Thailand and I needed something, anything to lift me out of my own black mood. 

I'm ashamed to admit how good it felt to lose that weight. How indecently excited I was every time I saw that scale number go down. I finally made it to that size 2 (and in certain stores 0! thank you Ann Taylor Loft). And I finally felt at peace with my body. I didn't think about food so much. That's the best gift that weight loss gave me, more than the number on the scale or the dress size; it was the freedom to not obsess, so darn much, about weight, to not unfavorably compare myself to every person I saw, all the time. Of course there were moments when these things surfaced, because I understand that this dysfunctional relationship between me and my body is forever. I'm never going to have one of those infuriatingly healthy and normal approaches to food and weight that some people have.

And so end of story right? Happily ever after? Well I thought so. Until a few weeks ago I saw that number creep up ever so slightly (and I mean slightly, 2 pounds, which for some people, not a big deal, but for others, and I suspect many, many, far too many women, is a huge deal), I felt the stirrings of this cold, clammy fear.

So I re-committed myself to healthy eating, to more exercise, nothing dramatic, just that little tip I thought I needed to get that number to go back down. And then today after my workout,  when that evil scale cast its spell on me and dragged me towards it, after this week of change and five mile runs and hour long workouts at the gym, the number hadn't gone down.

It had gone up. Still only very slightly, a pound and a half. But it had gone up.

I am deeply ashamed to admit how upset this made me. I admit it here, because 1) writing always helps me process and 2) I know that there are so many women out there who understand exactly that feeling.

It sucks right? It's this tiny bit of data, a three digit number, meaningless in any other connotation, but put it on a scale and it can dominate our lives. We are smart and intelligent and strong, and we can be brought to our knees by a digital read out. We can feel the same, wear the same size clothing, eat well and work out, and then one number can hit us like a wrecking ball, destructive and chaotic.

I walked out of the gym, sat in my car, and burst into tears. And I understand how ludicrous that is, trust me. I've worked so hard and eat right and work out, and by society's standards (non-Hollywood), I'm thin (and trust me, it was a huge deal the first time I could even think that word in relation to myself, because it's something I didn't think about myself, or even close to it, for a decade of my life). This shouldn't upset me. Fluid fluctuations could be the culprit. My family history of under-active metabolisms and thyroids could be to blame (oh how relieved I would be if this were my issue, I even made an appointment to get my thyroid checked, which is necessary because all of my female, immediate family members have under-active thyroids, but still, I know this is a little desperate and reaching).

There are so many explanations, so many rational ways of looking at that number. But that's the thing about scales-they make us irrational. They chain us (or a lot of us) to their results with iron clad fear. I realized something today. It reminded me of a saying I've heard athletes say. Winning is great. But for an athlete, the motivation to win is never as strong as the motivation not to lose. Because losing hurts more than winning feels good.

And that's true for weight loss too. And our bodies in general. We our capable of self esteem, of feeling good about ourselves, of fitting into that pair of pants and doing a little happy dance. And it feels great. But ultimately, it has nowhere near the power of the opposite reaction-of how we feel on the other side of the spectrum. Women lose weight because they want to feel good, yes. But I think the stronger motivation is because we don't want to feel bad, to feel fat or less-than.

And that's just so wrong. The opposite of how it should be. I understand nutrition so much better now after being in nursing school. I am so in awe of the human body, of how brilliant and beautiful and brave it is, every second of our lives. 

But all of that can go out the window because of a little number. One little number can turn so much fury and shame toward that same beautiful, brave body.

I'm working on it. I will be working on it my whole life. I am blessed that there is a limit to how dysfunctional my relationship with body is. It has never been dysfunctional enough to drive me to stop eating or to get rid of whatever I did eat. And I am so thankful for that, because I can't imagine how deeply those people hurt.

But it's not perfect. I think, for today's purposes, the moral to the story is this:

Unless you are in the category of people who have a frolicking through meadows relationship with your body and weight, then AVOID that scale.

Scales are just machines, but we silly humans turn them into weapons of unimaginable cruelty, weapons that we direct squarely at ourselves. The best solution is to give them a wide berth and keep on walking. 

My day.

Holy crap y'all. My day today was so productive it blows all other days out of the water. It could take all the other days in a week and bench press them. And then eat them. On a sandwich.

It started at 7:30am (which for me is EARLY on a Sunday). It included the following:

-Wrote, filed, and invoiced two Richmond.com articles

-Sent a ton of emails for the April issue of Belle off through the interweb

-Watched an hour documentary off the Cherokee Uniforms website then wrote an essay about said documentary to apply for a nursing scholarship due March 1 (I've kind of procrastinated this one)

-Ate an awesome lunch of oatmeal made on the stove (with a banana whipped in while cooking), topped with a spoon-full of peanut butter and two dark chocolate chips which melted perfectly in the hot oatmeal. Sounds decadent but this actually came in under 350 calories (as you can see it's really not a giant portion). But it kept me full and happy until dinner at 7.

-Went to Kroger, CVS, and Ellwood Thompson (I have to make two trips because Ellwood Thompson is way too pricey for all my shopping and they don't carry my beloved English muffins)

-Cleaned out my refrigerator, sopped up the massive leak under my sink (which I now know happens every time I turn on the garbage disposal)

-Dusted, vacuumed and swiffered my apartment until it was spotless

-Did yoga for the first time in ages and foam rolled for the first time in ages. And man did my body need that foam roller. The first time I ever did it in my physical therapist's office, it felt like I was rolling over massive bruises. As my PT told me it hurt so badly because of the built up scar tissue and adhesions between my muscle and fascia. The more I rolled, the less it hurt. After a while it became a good barometer for how my muscles were doing, because certain spots would hurt every once in a while, after a long run or if I was feeling particularly tight. Anyway, I digress. Today it felt like one big bruise. Sorry muscles. I promise to take better care of you.

-Made these little oatmeal balls off of my new favorite blog, Kath Eats Real Food. It's written by an RD who actually lives in Cville, and I'm obsessed. I always am more inspired to cook things when I read about them on people's personal blogs rather than simply in a health magazine. When there's a story behind it, plus awesome photographs, it's just more fun you know? I'll copy and paste the recipe straight from the blog. It is as follows.

Ingredients (21 balls)

Dry

• 1.75 cups rolled oats
• 1 cup brown rice puff cereal
• 1/4 cup sunflower seeds
• 1/4 cup buckwheat groats (or any other seeds/nuts)
• 1/4 cup chia seeds
• 1/4 cup coconut
• 2 tbsp ground flax

Wet

• 1/2 cup brown rice syrup
• 1/3 cup sunflower butter (or any drippy PB – don’t use a very dry, clumpy one)
• 1 tsp vanilla

Instructions

• Mix dry.
• Mix wet.
• Microwave wet for 26 seconds.
• Stir wet into dry.
• Wet hands and roll into balls.
• Freeze
• Lick bowl!

 So I made them pretty much exactly like above, only without the chia seeds (couldn't find them) and with EnviroKidz Organic Koala Crisp Cereal (because I couldn't find plain brown rice cereal, I'm sure they have it at Whole Foods because half of whole foods consists entirely of brown rice products, but it's too far away). But the cereal is low calorie and is chocolate flavored. So I think it's a win win situation. 

The sticky balls (tehe), turned out like so:

Delicious and almost disgustingly healthy. In fact they should not taste this good they are so healthy. But I'm super excited to be able to take them to school with me to have as healthy snacks. I never pack enough snacks with me, and then I get hungry and my only options are whatever is in the vending machine. So this is much better and better for me. I individually wrapped them and put them in the freezer and they're so darn cute all snuggled up together I had to take another picture.

-I was going to make kale chips but I ran out of time so that will have to happen tomorrow. I also made a healthy dinner (also inspired by Kath Eats Real Food) of eggplant pizzas. I chopped an eggplant into discs, drizzled them with EVOO, salt, and pepper and baked them at 400 for 20 minutes. Then I flipped them over, covered them with Trader Joe's pizza sauce, feta and shredded, light mozzarella cheese (real mozzarella would be better, but it doesn't keep well and I always end up throwing half of it out, which makes me sad, because good cheese does not deserve to go in a trash can). I sliced up some roma tomatoes and put those on as well, then put them back in the oven and baked for another 10 minutes until everything was all gooey and melty. As a finishing touch I added a sprig of fresh basil to each "pizza."And that turned out like so:

So let's face it. Eggplant pizzas are never going to be the same as gooey, greasy pizza pizza. But they're delicious in their own right (I like to think of them more as mini eggplant parmesans without as much cheese), and the healthiest pizza you can eat (especially if you go light on the cheese, which I did). 

So that was my Sunday, 7:30am-10pm. I have desperately needed a catch-up day like this, and my sanity needed a day like this (I tend to reach unhealthy levels of stress when things pile up). So now I'm going to watch the end of the Oscars and do a little light Pathopharmacology studying, maybe with a mug of hot cocoa to satisfy my sweet tooth (I also had gotten into the bad habit of giant bowls of cereal after dinner-which are delicious, but I'm trying to keep post dinner snacks below 150 calories). And then I'm going to sleep. Very well.

Pre-NYC!

I am going to NYC with the boyfriend for three nights during my spring break (which is 11 days away, not that I'm counting). I am beyond excited, because it has been at least five years since I was last there. Plus then I was under 21 and only really interested in shopping (I bought pink Uggs, and yes this is my proudest moment). Speaking of shopping, I had to do a little for NYC. I mean I can't just go to New York wearing any old thing. I don't want people to think I'm a yokel. So I did a little bit and got two perfect NYC dresses. We're going to two shows (Chicago and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying), and meeting up with my best friend and her husband another night (that sentence just made me feel really old). So clearly that's three nights in need of three new dresses. Right? Anyone? Do I sound like a shopping addict, maybe just a little bit?

But anyways, I restrained myself (for the moment), and got two. I also saved $50 by asking if Ann Taylor Loft had a student discount (which they do, 15%, and HOW DID I NOT KNOW THAT UNTIL NOW?!), and opening up a store card. The best part-after going through the whole thing the very nice sales attendant found out I already had one (whoops!), but still gave me the 20% off that new card members get. So my dresses cost $50 less than they would have, simply by the virtue of being shady and thrifty. Here they are:

Oh, how I love an excuse to shop.

Theaterisms.

I am not going to lie. I am so stoked to see My Landmark Theater etiquette article  get so many comments (and the fact that it's been the number 1 most read article on Richmond.com the last couple of days doesn't hurt my writerly ego either). I think it touched a nerve with people like me who a) are guilt-ridden rule followers (damn you Catholic conscience!) and b) people who believe very deeply in the importance of manners, who believe in old-fashioned behavior in public places, things like holding doors open and getting up to let people past. I know those people are out there. In fact I think the majority of people in this city are in that vein, and I think they're the ones who are responding most vociferously to my post, because we aren't just annoyed by rude behavior, we're hurt and affronted by it. It bothers us deeply, because we were raised to believe acting inconsiderate is wrong, and it's hard to understand why anything thinks it's right.

My favorite part about writing for an online forum is the feedback. Whether good or bad, I love being able to engage with readers. You can't do that with print (well I suppose you can, it's just delayed by a few weeks and shows up in the comments page), and it's just a really great facet of online journalism.

One other theater related thing. I saw August: Osage County last week at Barksdale's Theatre Gym. And let me make a quick preface. Go see this show. It is incredibly well acted, beautifully staged (the set is a textbook example of how to make the most out of small spaces). It is thought provoking, and Tracy Lett's writing is just unbelievably strong. It feels old fashioned in the sense that the script has the power of the old playwrights, Williams and Miller, writers who crafted this distinctly American vernacular of theater, language that is raw and forceful but still gorgeous enough that you want to curl up inside of it.

So go see it. Please. But here's my quibble. It may be that I'm feeling particularly sensitive toward women's issues right now, betrayed by my legislators and my state, who came very close to passing a bill that would have mandated an invasive, medical, intra-vaginal procedure without medical reason or the need for consent (sidebar: this should offend any human being, but as a health care professional in the making it is abhorrent, it goes against everything modern medicine stands for, where patient consent is not simply necessary, it is the one, unmovable, fixed benchmark we have).

Maybe it's that little alarm bell that goes off with the voice of my college Women in Shakespeare professor, who urged us to stand up for the women in our stories, to fight for their voices. Maybe my take is just way off from the Pulitzer Prize committee who awarded Mr. Letts that honor.

But I have a problem with the portrayal women in August: Osage County. I understand that female characters are characters, and that as characters they have the right to be mean and ugly and cruel. I understand that women in real life can be mean and ugly and cruel. But nearly all of the women in this play, at one point or the other, are one, if not all, of these things. And the other women are often small and shallow and foolish. The women drive their husbands to drink or suicide or affairs. The women pair up with completely unsuitable partners, because they don't want to be, horror, middle aged and single. Barbara, one of the leads, is such a strong woman, and for most of the play she seemed like the moral compass, the one who was made of steel. But then she ends up crying, asking her adulterous husband if he'll ever come back to her, as if she were the one in the wrong. And in that moment he is the sympathetic one. He's the one with the choice, the power of keeping the relationship going. And I just hated that. I know affairs are complicated, it's not simply one wrong person and one right. And many women might do just that, beg their cheating husbands to come back to them. But this character has been so strong up until that point, so moral, and it bothered me tremendously to see her reduced to that.

In contrast, many of the men in this play are sympathetic and decent. They are funny and polite. They try to stop fights and soften blows, while the women around them shriek and rant and go off the deep end. And yes there is one absolute creep of a male character in this play, but Letts has the female character stay with him even after he has tried to force himself on her fourteen year old niece. Which, I'm sorry, but no. Just no. I don't buy that. I don't buy that any woman, no matter how desperate or scared, would stay with a man if there's even the possibility of that. I'm a woman, with a niece, and it's just bullshit. It's not creating a flawed character. It's a flaw in character creation.

It's frustrating for me, because I love so much of the characterization of the women in this play. They are the strongest characters absolutely, in terms of how developed they are. I don't think Letts is intentionally sexist. I think it's just a very talented man, writing women, and getting aspects of it wrong because of a fundamentally flawed but deeply ingrained view of women in American society, which is in a nutshell the history of famous American plays and literature.

Maybe I'm the only one who feels this way. Maybe you could have the opposite opinion. And like I said before, you need to go to this play and form your own opinion because it's so worth seeing. The sexism I found here isn't obvious or outright or probably even intentional. Instead it's the subtle, insidious kind that permeates so much of our world, still, even in 2012, the kind that lives inside people (men and women), without them even knowing it.

We've come so far, but we're not there yet. The only way to get there is to question and challenge and ask yourself if things are fair, if women are given a real and honest voice, whether in life or in a play.