News Of The Old

Well the walk went well this morning in the new shoes. They are more like ballet slippers in weight and structure than the shoes I've walked or run in for the past thirty-something years and they are incredibly comfortable. The knee which I have injured before is talking to me a little bit and I need to remember to listen to my body and quit worrying about pedometer apps and miles and so forth because to ignore what my body is saying is to risk injury which will require healing time, etc. and there is no need to be stupid. It's not like I have to fit into a wedding gown in two months or something.

I am as guilty as anyone of wanting to lose weight and be fit RIGHT THIS SECOND and that attitude will not cut it, Little Missy! That attitude leads to nothing but feelings of failure and discouragement and in this instance, at least, there is no destination, there is only a journey and merely to be on it is the thing.

So. Okay. Now I've given myself a little pep talk. How are you this morning?

I see that the beauteous Isabella Rossellini who is now sixty years old will be starring in (starring in?) an ad campaign for Bulgari. Now I will never own anything Bulgari but if I had money to burn, I would might go pick up some jewels or something from them just because of this ad campaign.

Annie Leibovitz is the photographer and by golly, that sounds like quality and delight to me.

Speaking of other news of the elderly and yet beautiful (in a completely weathered, leathered and deeply wrinkled way), the Rolling Stones may actually be getting a tour together for next year to celebrate FIFTY FUCKING YEARS OF PLAYING TOGETHER!
God DAMN!
Despite my intense dislike of crowds and so forth, I would actually go to great personal discomfort to attend one of those concerts. I mean surely, this has to be the last time, right? I saw the Stones back in 1982 or something like that in New Orleans and we thought they were old then. We thought WE were old then.

Okay. I just looked this shit up. (I love the internet.) It was 1981.

Honestly, I don't remember a great deal about the concert. And no, I was not completely fucked up. I hardly drank then at all and I think I would remember if I was tripping or something. It was just a strange time in my life.

BUT, hell, if they can get their creaky, skinny old asses up onstage to play some damn music, I can certainly figure out how to be in the audience. Right? Right?

Maybe.

Can you imagine the squealing which would pour forth from me when I saw Keith Richards? Forget Mick. I'd be there just to see Keith, my darling Rastafarian ex-junkie boyfriend.
One love, y'all.

I feel a little tingly just thinking about it.

Okay. I have things to do today. Like- renew my driver's license. I'm going to Monticello to do this because I doubt they have the traffic at the DMV there that they have in Tallahassee. Luckily, we had pork chops last night (as healthfully as I want to eat, there is no way I am not going to eat at least one pork chop a month and that's all there is to it!) and I think I feel the better for it. I sometimes wonder if I am not of a people who were meant to subsist on pork and rice with cream gravy. Or chicken, beans, and tortillas. I guess I'm a fucking peasant and that's that.

As with the walking, I am listening to my body although when it tells me that I REALLY need pizza, I am ignoring it.

Yours truly...Ms. Moon

Problem

After I take that good, hard, fast walk in the morning all I want to do is eat and fall asleep.

This can't be right.

Another Good Reason To Exercise

And one that I've discussed before but it bears repeating:
It completely satisfies my daily need to suffer, leaving me much freer to actually enjoy my life.

Just think- if I'd been raised Catholic, I'd probably be an Iron Man athlete.

Fitness Fest Or Torture Test?

I have been a mostly regular exerciser since I was in my mid-twenties. It's just always been a part of who I am, although it wasn't until I hit my forties that I discovered my inner jock girl and really let her take control. It was awesome! I think I realized at the beginning of my forties that really, it wasn't ever going to get any better than it was at that moment and I got things UNDER CONTROL with the help of Jock Girl. I even worked for Weight Watchers.
And actually, my forties were probably my best-looking decade. I'm serious. I actually, for the first and only time in my entire life, liked the way I looked.
And I didn't feel so bad either.

And then came my fifties. Ah-yah, as I say.
I got a bum knee and it took quite a while for that to heal although when I couldn't walk, I started bicycling. I hated it but I did it.
But I just wasn't as obsessed as I'd been before. Maybe because we moved here and I was just...happier. Who knows?
Then a few years ago I got a wake-up call in the form of a cholesterol test and I went back into obsessive mode. I exercised very regularly and I just ripped my diet up and reworked it. I ate GOOD. I followed Michael Pollen's advice before I'd ever heard it:
Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.
Honey chile- I gave up CHEESE!
And I got fairly happy with the way I looked and felt again.
And then...oh dear. I don't know what happened. I stopped paying so much attention. One tiny sin led to others. My foot got fucked up. I got stuck in traffic. The check got lost in the mail.
You know.
And actually, I believe that one of the things that happened was that as my fifties progressed, I realized that I'd hit a point where no matter what I did, my body was just not going to be what it had been. Every day brought new revelations of the pull of gravity, the weight of age.
It was discouraging.

And the weight has crept up and the arms have lost tone and the, well, really. I don't want to sit here and target all the things which disturb me so greatly about my body because hell's bells! I'm fifty-five years old and I'm just not as concerned with it all as I once was.

BUT, this is not to say I want to slip quietly into old-age spread. I love having muscles, even if they're hidden beneath drapey skin. I WANT to be able to wear clothes that, when wearing, I look and feel okay in. I'm never going to be Miss America and I'm never going to be Miss Body Builder USA and I'm never going to be Madonna either and I'm aware of that but there's nothing wrong with being the best that I can be, or at least not the WORST I can be. You know?

So I've dusted off the hand weights. I'm back to doing the crunches. I have actually walked fairly TWO DAYS IN A ROW! Ha-ha-ha! And I realized today that the main thing I'm going to have to do is get up earlier and not spend the first two hours of my day here on the internet and I'm going to have to make that walk my first priority every day because it's just too damn hot to wait until ten-thirty in the morning to get out there.
How hot is it?
Well, it's so hot that the only way I know I'm having a hot flash is that I have that horrible urge to pee.
TMI?
Well guess what, my little chickadees- I'm talking about YOUR future. Unless you're one of those blessed ladies who doesn't have the hot flashes. Ever.
Or a man. In which case you picked the wrong day to visit Blessourhearts.

So there I am in the woods, so hot I think I might explode or melt or just fall over, trying to figure out where to pee, so damn hot that if a bear suddenly burst through the trees I'd merely lay down and let him rip my guts out.
"Take 'em!" I'd tell him. "I'm too hot to run."

So. Must change my routine. Must change my life. AGAIN! Because dammit, every time in my life that I have thought for sure that I'd gotten this whole exercise and diet thing down, I've had to come back and ruefully admit that no, I had not.
Not forever. Not by a long fucking shot.

Sigh.
Well, as I told Jessie today, going for a walk in this heat is sort of a physical fitness test I can take daily. If I can do THAT, then surely, I am not about to die.
It's crude. It's unpleasant. But it's probably true.

And again I must say BUT. This is no way to run a life. After a walk like that I am mostly ready to lie down and pass out. Okay, not really. But two hours later? Oh boy. I sure am. When my core temperature approaches normal, I'm not good for shit. Which sort of defeats the purpose, don't you think?

All right. I'll let you know how this life-altering plan goes. I sure hope it works. Because honestly? Once again I am forced to admit- it's not going to get any better than this and if I don't work at it now, I'll be one of those people limping around a dead mall clinging to my walker with The Greatest Hits From World War II playing on my iPod. Wearing the ugliest polyester work-out clothes you've ever seen. Size Gazillion. Thinking to myself, "Really, Ms. Moon, it's not going to get any better than this."

And I can almost bet that I'll be having hot flashes and honey, you can't just squat and pee in the mall.
Well, you can. But they arrest you. And then put you in a nursing home. Where they make you do chair aerobics. Wearing Depends.

It's never going to end, is it?

Jock Girl VS Chubette.

I was a fat kid. I also wore glasses and and was a dorky nerd before the words "dork" and "nerd" had been invented. You can only imagine the teasing I got, although teasing is too tame a word. Unmercifully and cruelly taunted would be a better description for what happened.

Fatty, four eyes, teacher's pet.

These are but a few of the witty names thrown my way in grades one through five.

Good times, good times.

It wasn't until I reached the sixth grade that I lost a bunch of weight and no longer had to buy my clothes in the Chubette department. And yes, that is what they actually called it- The Chubette Department. The way I lost weight was somewhat unique. Being a southern child, I got a sort of hookworm parasite in my foot called ground itch, or, to be more medical about it, cutaneous larva migrans. I would show you a picture but you don't want to see it. For some reason, my ground itch did not get successfully treated and spread all over my foot causing agonizing itching, a bacterial infection which oozed pus and serum, and the need to get from one place to another by hopping on the unaffected foot.

The combination of these things resulted in a rather large weight loss, which of course made it all worthwhile.

I spent my high school years doing every thing I could not to become fat again and mostly, I succeeded. This involved flirting with (although never entirely falling into) eating disorders because in those days, that's what a girl had to work with. I don't think the concept of fitness had really been invented back in those days and only athletes were expected to play sports and girls were definitely not supposed to be athletes.

It wasn't until my twenties and I was trying to lose baby weight that I started independently doing anything physical beyond digging ditches and chopping down trees. I read Jim Fixx's book on running, which was a huge revolutionary book in those days, and began to force myself to run three miles a day. I hated it, so it was good for me.

After a while, though, I realized that hating something wasn't exactly a great reason to do it, so I started walking instead of running and I have been walking ever since. I walk fast and I do it regularly, which works for me.

It's harder to enjoy walking in the summer than it is in the winter, I have to admit. Summer has found us and it feels like she's squatting over us with her powerful hot thighs, so walking has become more of a test of my endurance than of anything else, but I am glad, at the age of fifty-three, to be able to endure it.

I am not, let's face it, an athlete, although besides walking I lift some weights, do some exercises, and go to yoga three times a week.

And I do these things religiously. Not only because if I didn't, I would be as big as, well, someone who has to shop in the Chubette Department, but also because when I was in my forties, I realized that inside of this body there lives a jock girl.

Yep. That's what I call her.

Jock Girl.

She looks a little like me and a lot like Jackie Warner (see above) and instead of groaning when it's time to lift those weights, she cheers. When it's time to go walk, she's so happy. And when I finally learned that I could do real, big boy push-ups, she was ecstatic. She wishes I could do more, but that's another story.

The funny thing is, is that I feel like Jock Girl has been inside of me my entire life. I've always known I had a strong body, especially after giving birth to my babies without the aid of drugs or medical interventions, even the one who weighed over ten pounds. And it feels right to appreciate it by pushing it some, by letting it be strong.

I will never have a body like Jackie Warner's and I grieve that.

But it's okay. I may not even look as good as I could, but I take Jock Girl out for exercise regularly and I know she's making sure I don't get osteoporosis, she's watching my cholesterol and weight, she's helping me keep on a more even keel, emotionally, and she's keeping me as strong and flexible as I need to be.

I think that I'm actually going to have to get up and go walk a lot earlier now that it's so hot and I hope I have the self-discipline to do that because it can't be healthy to turn as red and sweat as much as I do, walking in the heat of the mid-morning. Honestly, sometimes I'm so hot I'm not even aware of having a hot flash except for the fact that instead of the sweat dripping off my face, it begins to run in rivulets.

I don't really want to get up earlier and I really don't want to have to stop wasting a bunch of time before I walk by reading the paper and checking out any new blogs that might have appeared overnight, but Jock Girl says I must.

And what I've learned is that when Jock Girl makes demands, I should listen because her demands are far less cruel than being called fatty.

And because I never, ever want to have to buy my clothes in any department resembling the Chubette section again in my entire life. I'll always wear glasses, I'll always be a dorky nerd, but dammit, I refuse, I simply and absolutely refuse to be a Chubette.

Truth be told, there's still one of those who lives inside me too, right alongside Jock Girl. She tells me to eat more peanut better, she tells me to go lie on the couch and read, and she always tells me that I don't have to walk today; I can do it tomorrow.

I'll never entirely get rid of her, that Chubette Girl. But I don't have to listen to her. Not if I don't want to.

And I don't. It's as simple as that.

I don't.