Hesitant, Hopeful

...that's what I lost this week.

It may not sound like much, but it's a pretty big milestone for me. Which probably doesn't make much sense and I don't actually plan to elaborate--someday, when I look back at this, I'll know what it means and that's good enough. For now, just take my word for it, those two pounds are a big deal. They're the beginning of an even bigger deal.

Here's the thing. Earlier this year, I wrote about accepting myself. It turns out that was both a good and bad decision. Good because it was soothing to my self-esteem and the issues I have with positive body image. Bad, though, because that acceptance led to a whole lot of mindless, unconcerned eating that led me to gain a lot of weight. And when I say a lot, we're not talking about 10 or 15 lbs. We're talking about 55 lbs. That's a pretty big issue and I'm not blaming the whole deal on my self-acceptance, but a lot of it boils down to that.

Well, that and I'm an emotional & compulsive eater, which is something I am seriously struggling with. Something I battle every minute of every day because, well, I think about food every minute of every day. I want to eat every minute of every day. Some-days it's so bad that all I can think about is food, without the ability to concentrate on other things. This is an issue I have no idea how to effectively overcome. I can't seem to control my own brain, but I'm trying really hard to adjust my relationship with food so that this isn't an issue.

In order to do that, I've gone back to SparkPeople, which the community is really supportive and the tools are really helpful. I've been trying to think about my attempts to get healthier as a lifestyle change and not a diet. I've been trying to get more exercise--which I missed this weekend because my knee is a bitch, and which I actually missed doing. To that end I've been walking and using RunKeeper to keep up with said walks--a really good app that is very accurate as long as you have good GPS on your phone. Works amazing on iPhone, even in our tiny little town where we can get 4g but not LTE connections.

I've been eating better and cooking at home. Since I love to cook, this is a win-win. It's much cheaper to eat at home, and I know what's going into my food. But, on the downside, I think it feeds my agoraphobia a little bit since I'm going out of the house less (Matt and I used to eat out pretty much every day), an issue that going to walk is helping to balance a bit. And, eating better is making me feel better. Which is a positive for my mental health.

I'll be back to walking on Tuesday, since my knee is feeling a bit better. I can't wait to get back to the company of my best friend and this morning view...


Until then, I'm going to have a sandwich and watch the football game (Seahawks/Texans), and be happy knowing I'm trying to do something to improve my well-being. Have a nice weekend!

Something you may not know about me is that I'm a huge nail color junkie. Okay, that sounds pretty strange, actually, but that doesn't make it less true. Sometime in the last few years I started picking up polishes at Walmart whenever I found one I liked, mostly Pure Ice polishes, until I realized I was accruing a heck of a lot of colors. Mostly, I just used them to pain my toe nails because, for a long time, I had acrylic nails. Well, that and I have a pretty hard time making polish keep on my fingernails. It usually just chips away in a matter of hours, so the hassle of painting them and waiting for them to dry, became not at all worth it.

But... I've finally found a polish that will keep on my fingernails! I discovered Julep by accident, when my friend Jennifer had posted about them on Facebook. I took the Julep Maven quiz to find out which style I was and signed up, getting my first box for free (I paid only $3.99 for shipping) since Julep sent me a coupon. Since their polish retails for $14.99 per bottle and their beauty products are often $20+, to get two bottles of polish and one beauty product for the cost of shipping was a deal. It took forever for my box to arrive, something like two weeks, but the colors inside were absolutely gorgeous. My style is "Bombshell" and in the starter box I got an orange polish, a gold glitter, and the 4 oz. Mint Condition Pedi Creme.

This was my first box. I say first because, after I realized how much I love their polish and products, I ordered the Mystery Box mid-month with $9.99 worth of mystery add-ons--I think the total price for those was about $50 (then I ordered two other polishes, which raised the cost). Check this out...

There's something like 12 polishes in there, a box of facial stuff you can't actually see, a hand & cuticle stick, and the rock star hand scrub & cream. This stuff is an addiction, I'm telling you. This month, I'm getting the October "Bombshell box" with a polish called "Casper," which is a glow in the dark polish. I can't wait for them to come.

But, since I've been getting these boxes, which are $20 per month, I've been doing some experimenting with my nails. Unfortunately, I don't have pretty nails, in general. They're a weird almost square shape and won't grow worth a darn. When they do grow, they just break and peel. It's irritating, but I'm coping. So far, I've tried a few styles, but the one I did today is my favorite. It's a silver polish called "Amity," made by Julep, with a Pure Ice color called "Tame Me Now." I think it came out pretty good for a first attempt at ombre...

[IMAGE REMOVED]

What do you think? I shake a little bit, so pardon the slight blurriness. In addition to the above mentioned colors, I use Revlon #005 base coat, Julep Freedom top coat, and Essie apricot cuticle oil. This is my first fall look. I chose the silver polish for the base color because the orange glitter has silver flecks. This picture doesn't much do it justice. I'm very happy with it. I think glitter in a clear base is the easiest to ombre. I once tried ombre with solid colors and it did not come out well--I only did one nail before I gave up on that attempt. Fortunately, I have lots of different glitters, so I'll probably be doing this look more often.

Another look I attempted, using two Julep polishes, "Karmen" and "Tatiana," is this one...

[IMAGE REMOVED]

Man, my hands look crazy dry in that picture. Anyway, the colors are so complementary, it could only be seen in direct natural light. So, it was pretty subtle, but it took a really long time. I used scotch tape to make the lines, but in order to do that I had to make sure the base coat was really, really dry. I actually pained them one color one day, then the other color the next day. It was okay, I think, but not my favorite. As we've established, the orange ombre is my favorite!

Still, I thought it was pretty and the scotch tape thing is a trick I'll definitely be trying again sometime soon. Maybe to tape off the tops of my nails, sort of the way the ringer finger is, so I can paint the tips a different color. Not for a while though, I'm thinking the orange & silver ombre look will keep for a while as one of the beauties of glitter polish is that it it doesn't come off easily. Amen for that!

Anyway, if you're interested in joining the Julep Maven program, it's $20 per month for two bottles of polish and a random beauty product. Mavens also receive a 20% discount on products on their site, which is pretty cool. It makes everything just a smidge more affordable. You can follow the "I'm a Bombshell" link below to take the quiz. If you do, make sure you come back and tell me which profile you are!


** Please note: This is not a sponsored post. I just really, really like their products. However, by way of full disclosure, I get incentives--in the form of free boxes--if I sign people up. 

I took this picture from the terminal windows at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas. It was in July and they were calling for boarding on this flight.  When I tried to board they told me I was an hour early. This wasn't my flight, even though it was going to my destination.

The next time I see something like this will be in December when I go to California. My mom's having a pretty major surgery, so I'm flying out to help care for her the following week. Although, I'm not going to Vegas this time. I'll be flying from Dallas to Ontario on Monday, December 2 and returning via the same route (the other way around) on Monday, December 9. I'm happily flying American Airlines again. Hopefully, this time I won't try to board the wrong plane. ;)

It's no secret that I struggle with a pretty severe case of manic depression. I have my ups and downs, but lately it feels like, in general, I have more downs than ups. The thing is, I don't want to live like that. I want to enjoy my life and make others around me happy, rather than making them miserable, which seems to be the status quo of late. And by other people, I mean Matt. Poor guy has enough on his plate without my attitude and mental health to muck things up or make things harder. So, I've been thinking that I need to cultivate healthier habits, both mind and body, if I plan to make positive changes in my life. I'm 35 years old, it's about time.

So here're some things I've done and some I'm planning to do.

Drink more water: Huge deal for me. I'm not much of a water drinker at all, but I've managed to start getting down more than the recommended daily amount. Go me!

Take vitamins: Gummies, you see. When you make vitamins into candy, I'm there.

Get more exercise: Melanie and I have been getting out and walking a lot lately, which really seems to improve my state of mind. I generally feel better, both physically and mentally, when I've gotten out and had a walk.


Meditate: Not in a spiritual kind of way, but in a time out to get inside my head and acknowledge what I'm thinking and how I'm feeling kind way.


Write regularly: Would you believe blogging has actually made me a more competent writer? Yeah, crazy right? I'd like to continue to write here regularly (at least 3x per week), but also to get into a more regular writing schedule with regards to my creative writing projects.

Practice active happiness: They say the whole 'fake it till you make it' thing works. I'd really like to work more diligently toward trying to keep a more positive frame of mind.

Apologize: I hate to say I'm sorry, so when I'm wrong and I know it, I tend to get angry rather than contrite. In turn, I cork it up and it eats at me. I'm down enough without that to make it worse.

Watch less television: Pretty self-explanatory, but I tend to find a show then watch every single season on Netflix, non-stop, until it's done. This amounts to hours and hours of TV time. Hours and hours I could spend doing other things.

Eat more meals in & learn portion control: Eating out is not only fattening, it's crazy expensive. Not only can we not afford it, it's not as healthy as cooking your own meals. If I cook for myself I know what's in the food. Now if I could just learn some moderation, I might have a chance at cultivating healthy eating habits.

Get organized & de-clutter: I read something the other day that said a messy desk is good for creative productivity. I get that, I even like it, but I need to de-clutter my life and keep a cleaner house. Less chaos means a calmer mind, I think, which can only be good for my mental health.

Right now, the above ten things are what I'm working on. While some of them are in progress (water, vitamins, getting more exercise), others are harder. I don't know how to be actively happy or how to apologize gracefully, but I want to learn. That's what the whole cultivating healthy habits thing is about, after all, right? For now, I think just putting it down in black and white helps to cement these things in reality, where I can see them. Where they can't hide or be forgotten. Because, really, no one is better at denial or self-delusion than I am. Maybe I should have put "stop deluding yourself" on that list, too? ;)

In my junior year, I took a women's literature course with Dr. Mallory Young that completely changed the course of my education. Eventually it, together with Dr. Young's work, would influence the direction of my master's thesis. This class would also introduce me Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, a work that would become my favorite of all time. Before that class, I had always understood the concepts of  feminist literary criticism as abstract concepts. For me, it was just one approach to literary criticism, significant but no more concrete in my understanding than, say, reader response or the plethora of other approaches to understanding literature.

Though feminism had always interested me,  its use as an approach to understanding literature was new territory. This one class changed everything for me. So much so that even though I've managed to misplace a lot of my university notebooks over the years, I still have all of the notes I took for this course. It wasn't just the feminist approach, but also how the novel is constructed, the different sorts of narrators, the types of novel genres (bildungsroman, for example), all of it was new territory for me. I'd been an avid reader for years, but before this class I'd never looked at my novels like a collection of parts, brought together expertly to create not just a story but an atmosphere and mindset.

But back to Pride and Prejudice, because it was this one book in particular that introduced me to the regency romance novel--it was also my favorite of the class, with Edith Wharton's The House of Myrth and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre trailing not far behind. This is where my love of all things regency began. This book was so influential for me that I strive to experience every single way it's presented. I love all the different covers (some more than others), the movie and mini-series adaptations (again, some more than others), the spin-off novels (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies would be the exception). I love everything the genre, because Jane Austen might certainly be considered a genre all of her own, offers.

So, when I saw that Marvel had issued a Pride and Prejudice graphic novel, I bought it. Just the cover was enough to convince me, though the graphic novel also recieved a whole lot of praise on the notoriously (un)reliable Amazon.com.



I love that it's presented like a teen/woman's magazine cover. The presentation is remarkable, but the cover really doesn't do the work justice. Elizabeth Bennett is presented as an unassuming Miss on the cover, but inside she's rendered as a comic book beauty--though she's not as pretty as most of her sisters, Jane in particular, but prettier than Mary (poor girl!), which is particularly true to the story.

Still, I was concerned that Marvel might have done the work a disservice. Looking it over, though, that doesn't appear to be the case at all. Rather, Marvel has attempted to remain as true to the spirit of the work as possible, including dialogue that fits the original. The first page offers readers the traditional opening where in Lizzie warns that, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife" (Austen 3) [1. From the Norton Critical Edition Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (2001), edited by Donald Gray.]. Overall, the presentation manages to be very much Jane Austen, while remaining very much Marvel, something that cannot have been easy to accomplish.

I enjoyed it so much, in fact, that I bought the hard copy paperbacks of both the Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey graphic novels, which I might not have done had the latter been offered as an ebook (as was the former, which looks spectacular on my Kindle app for iPad, I might add). In fact, Northanger Abbey is even more significant to my thesis, in a direct way, because in writing it Jane Austen relied very heavily on Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho,  the most significant primary source used in my thesis. The cover for that one is beautiful, too, if less magazine-like.



Notably, Northanger Abbey is Jane Austen's most humorous work. It's something of a Gothic parody, wherein Catherine Morland is pursued by one gentleman while loving another, all the while allowing her Gothic imagination to overtake her common sense--I can't wait to read it!  It was also her first work completed for publication, though it wasn't published until several years after Pride and Prejudice.

I simply cannot wait to receive them in the mail. Thank goodness Matt's Amazon account has Prime. I should get them sometime early this coming week. In the mean time, I may re-read the original P&P, pick up NA, and read the ebook version of the P&P graphic novel. That should keep me busy when I'm not cleaning my house or writing my own regency romance novel. On second thought, I may dig into Northanger Abbey first, which I recall Dr. Young telling me required a bit of context, suggesting I finish Udolpho first. With that done, I have quite enough context, having now read both Udolpho and one of the books that have come be to be know as  the "Northanger horrid novels," Regina Maria Roche's Clermont. Both works I used to complete my thesis.

It's been absolutely beautiful here lately. Rather than suffering triple digit heat, its been in the 80s the last few days. Today, it only made it to 70 degrees and it has been raining all day. It's been a long time since it did that. I'm feeling a little bit down again, but I'm trying to soldier on--my Mexican chocolate coffee with caramel Bailey's is helping, if I'm being honest.

But, the fact that we're having an early autumn here is making me feel a bit lighter. You know, I say that now, but it's probably going to go back to sweltering before fall really, truly arrives. For now, I'm choosing to believe it'll stay nice. The weather is innocent until proven guilty. Besides, autumn won't technically arrive anywhere for two more days, since the autumn equinox isn't until September 22 this year.

That said, in an effort to embrace the lovely weather, I decided to ring in the autumn season, which happens to be my favorite. Screw waiting until it's really fall. And, there's no better way to do that than baking. Even if baking gets me into trouble with my scale, which scolds me by suggesting that I may have gained a few (*cough*) extra pounds this year. But, screw the extra pounds too, that can of pumpkin puree has been mocking me for too long. It was time I whipped it into something edible and I saw this recipe on Facebook... who doesn't bake recipes on the word of Facebook people? So, I tried it.

Delicious.


It's one of those two recipe cakes. It called for yellow cake, but I used white because that's what I had, and a 15 oz. can of pumpkin. It makes an 8x8 cake, and it should have been cooked longer than the 28 minutes the recipe called for, but it came out really well. Even Matt liked it and he doesn't like pumpkin, at all. Though I think it was the caramel apple glaze he liked the most (1 1/2 c. powdered sugar, 3 TBSP. apple cider, 3/4 tsp. pumpkin pie spice, 1 tsp. caramel extract). So it was a hit and it made me feel like I was celebrating the approaching season. Wich, in turn, made me feel a bit less gloomy.

Now that I've baked something seasonal, I want to bake more seasonal goodies, which isn't necessarily a good thing since my clothes seem to be shrinking... eh hem, yeah, that's it. But, I'll probably do it anyway, screw the calories. I've been getting more exercise lately. Fortunately for my thighs, I can't bake anything else until I go to the grocery store. I'm mostly out of baking supplies, since I don't much bake all year. Oh, I also made my own pumpkin pie spice from a recipe I found online. I halved it, since the full recipe called for 1/4 c. cinnamon, which is a heck of a lot of cinnamon. I was pretty proud of myself, but now I have to buy all the spices that go in the pumpkin pie spice, which will probably cost more than just having bought the pumpkin pie spice to begin with. But, whatever.

So, it's almost eight o'clock and I've been up since two-thirty this morning. I think it's about time for me to get to sleep. Weird schedule, but it seems to be working for me. Awake all day and half the night, it just happens to be the wrong half of the night, but again, whatever.

Good night.

PS. Before I forget, it's looking like I'll be going to CA again during the first week of December as my mom's surgery is scheduled for the week of Thanksgiving. More on that later.

I took this picture along the route where Melanie and I walk. Well, Matt was with me that day, but still. These little wildflowers grow up along a broken fence near the .7 mile marker. They're quite pretty, I think.


Okay, maybe I should come clean. The picture is my attempt at a distraction from what I'm about to say. Maybe, looking at the pretty pink flowers, you'll be more understanding when I confess that I didn't go to counseling. Did it work?

I cancelled my appointment the morning I was supposed to go, on Monday. I'd been thinking about it all weekend, I wasn't feeling well, and it occurred to me I was about to have to pay out of pocket for the whole appointment because my deductible hasn't been met yet. I've been feeling better, which might (does?) sound like a cop out, but I can't justify paying $120 out of pocket for counseling, when I feel okay. Besides, I can't really afford it right now.

I think, at least partially, I'm feeling better because the fluoxetine is out of my system. You're not supposed to quit that stuff cold turkey, but I did. As a result, I was really unstable for a long time. But, gradually, as I do things to make myself feel better... I, well, feel better. I'm writing again, sleeping better (or at least, trying to get my sleep under control), and am getting both more sunlight and more exercise. I'm also getting my house cleaned up, slowly, which is helping a little bit. I'm also reading slightly less than I was, that is to say I'm not reading a book a night, which seems to be a good thing since I can't bury myself in fiction and forget about the real world quite so easily.

I suppose we'll see whether cancelling the appointment was a good idea, or a bad one, but it can't be undone right now. So, I'm hoping that it turns out okay and that I keep leveled out as long as I can introduce some structure into my routine. That always seems to help. :)

I've been trying to decide whether I should avoid this topic, but I've decided a little bit of information couldn't hurt. So, I thought I'd share a few things about my new novel project. Just a few things, mind. Nothing fancy, not too much information, just a few basic things.

The first would have to be that you won't see a title, mock cover, or general synopsis for this particular project. None of that stuff with be available until after I get the first draft done and am onto the editing phase. This is, by far, not my usual mode of operation. I have a "Novel" page on this blog because I normally write synopsis blurbs and make mock covers for my projects. But you know, while chatting on Facebook with a friend it came to my attention that I've never actually finished a project when I do too much extra stuff for it.

Case in point: Love's Daughter and Remembering Tomorrow are two pretty prime examples of this particular thing. Both have titles, mock covers, and blurbs, both are on the back burner. Even my Dark Hearts project, which I still hope to start--and, of course, finish--at some point, has failed to launch because I spent too much time doing extraneous work for a book that fails to exist at all (this reminds me of you, Jodi, writing about making a website for a book that doesn't even exist, ha!).

But I will share a few things. You can find the counter-dealy-ma-jigger on the sidebar over yonder. I'll regularly update my progress, if you're interested. Mostly it's for me. I like to see that thing moving, to see how many words I've written, and what percentage of goal word count that represents. Of course, 75,000 words is a guess, not a hard and fast rule about how many words I'll have. I could have 100,000 for all I know... but I doubt it.

I'm writing, as the widget says, a "Gothic Romance" novel. I really want to reject romance as a genre, but doing that has gotten me nowhere. So, I'm embracing it. Not just that but historical romance. The work is set in London during the Regency Era, my favorite era and genre to read. Since coming back from CA, I've read almost 20 regency romance novels. I'm pretty obsessed. So since I love them, I figure I'll try my hand at them, even though historical voice has never before been my strong suit. This one, though, is coming out really well, I think.

I can also tell you that I'm really, really happy with what I've got so far. I've never been more happy with a project... like, ever. Except maybe my thesis, but this isn't that. This is fiction and I've never felt better about a fictional work I've written than I do this one.

I can also tell you that no matter how much you think you know about an era, you're wrong. I'm a huge regency fan, but when it comes to small details, I've had to do some pretty huge research. For instance, do you happen to know how fast a carriage travels? Or, how mail was sent and delivered in the early 19th century? Or what about what sort of paper people used for letter writing? Oh, or what sort of pens people used to do said writing--quill or metal nib? Or any number of other factoids responsible for authenticity? No, me either. At least, I didn't. Thank the heavens for Google and the ability to bookmark--and export said bookmarks across computers. Else, I'd be in trouble.

All in all, I'm proud of what I've got so far. I've got a pretty good plot-skeleton, I've been carrying around a little notebook to take notes when ideas strike me (because I can't ever remember that stuff), and tonight I made myself sit down and work even though I wasn't feeling wonderful. Now that I have, even though I only managed to write about 1,350 words tonight, I feel really good about it. And about what I got out, which I think manages to introduce a significant part of the plot.

And now, it's six-fifteen in the morning and I'm tired. I've been sleeping like crap so I think I'm going to curl up and wait for Matt to come home--he gets off work at seven o'clock. Good...er... night... or would that be morning? (~.^)

PS. Editing is beyond me at this point, so I hope what I've said makes sense.

I took this photo this morning, with my iPhone, at Bosque River Trail here in Stephenville. It was about 68 degrees out.


Melanie and I decided we'd start walking together again, but since it's too hot in the afternoons, we've decided on the mornings. The only problem with that is the humidity, which literally made me sticky, but it's far more tolerable than heat. This morning, it was so humid, there was a light fog covering the pasture beside the trail. I stopped and snapped a picture. I haven't added any filters, so this is what we saw straight from my phone. So pretty out this morning. Although, by ten o'clock it'll be sweltering--thank goodness cooler (slightly cooler) weather is on the way. We walked 1.4 miles.

Oh, and before I go. In the hours before we went to walk this morning (you'll remember seven o'clock is the end of my day, not the beginning) I managed to write a touch more than two thousand words. I've recorded them over there, on the sidebar. What's better: it's a new project and I feel really, really positive about those words. Not that I think they won't need editing, but I feel good about the tone, rythm, where my story is going so far. All that good stuff.

So far, between writing and getting out to walk, Sunday has been a great day. I hope to have more like it as I work on my new project, go walking regularly with Melanie, and seek counseling for my issues. Things are certainly starting to look up. :)

I took a pretty big step for myself on Tuesday. I thought about talking about it then, but I wasn't sure how I was feeling about this particular thing, so thought waiting a few days might help me sort out my thoughts. And, that was ridiculous because waiting hasn't helped me at all. So, I'm just going to talk about how I feel about it at this point, then maybe again later. I don't know.

On Tuesday afternoon, after having a really, really bad weekend, I made myself an appointment to see a therapist.

Originally, I was going to go to my doctor and see who she recommended, but have since decided to skip over her and go straight to making a decision on my own. I'd asked her, my doctor, about whether I should see someone before and her answer has always been "not necessarily." So, I checked with my insurance to see who they paid for and came up with a huge list of practitioners. Hmm, practitioners? That word makes therapists sound like witch doctors, but whatever. Seeing how many there were made me feel a little bit overwhelmed, so I narrowed it down to doctors in Stephenville and our neighboring town, Granbury (about 25 miles from here). That helped, but there were still tons of them, everything from Master's level therapists through psychiatrists.

Rather than being overwhelmed, I just started Googling them. It's the best way I could think to learn more about them. I finally decided on the one who seemed most competent based on what I could learn about them online. So many of them have zero web-presence, but without something out there how am I supposed to learn about them and their approach?

The woman I'm choosing to see, with whom I have an appointment at 3:00 p.m. on the 16th, is a cognitive behavior therapist. Since she's master's level and a licensed processional counselor she's not going to try to give me meds, which is a good thing for me. I've tried the meds and though they made me feel better for a while, there came a point when I stopped feeling better and couldn't stop taking them because the side effects of quitting cold turkey were substantial. Besides, I figure if she's not helping me, or if she's not a good fit, or if I end up needing to see someone who can prescribe meds, I can always seek someone else. But, I'd rather try this approach first and see where it gets me.

And, I'm not just a little bit nervous about it. I never know what to expect, but I definitely expect it's going to be hard to talk to a stranger about my issues. Of course, I know that's exactly who I need to talk to about my issues, someone who doesn't know me personally. I just hope this helps me. I haven't seen a therapist/counselor in years. Not since I was 17 years old, and back then my psychologist saw me once before telling me I needed a psychiatrist. That psychiatrist diagnosed me with schizoaffective disorder (with bi-polar disorder and manic depression--can you have all those problems at once?), put me on Depakote (after learning that Paxil made my issues worse, not better), and suggested that I should consider leaving my then-fiancé, who she thought was making my problems worse. Clearly, to my detriment, I didn't listen to her.

This time, I'm going as an adult, making the decision to seek help for herself. I hope that I can see inside myself enough to make this experience a fruitful, helpful one. I'm pretty tired of being so low. Wish me luck.

Have you ever heard something that, at the time, didn't bother you but later gnawed and gnawed at you? That's what I'm going through right now and, really, it's irrational. This morning, I was feeling particularly sensitive about it, so I talked with Matt and though he tried to straighten it out  it's still bothering me. And it's making me feel absolutely horrible about myself.

So, last week, when we were on our way to DFW we were talking about some people that he knows, but that I don't. He was telling me about this girl he knows, and how many of his guy friends seem interested in her. It's a pretty common topic because, for whatever reason, hearing about this girl's drama interests me. Maybe because I don't get out much or know many people. But, he left out, as he always seems to, another girl who, I think, is much better looking. He never talks about how anyone is trying to hook up with the other girl. So, I asked him why. Here's what he said:

"It's because she's, um, heavy."

Okay, at the time I didn't think anything of that remark. I took it at face value. I was feeling particularly okay that day, we were together and getting out of the house, which always brightens my mood. Besides, it made sense to me in a sort of misogynistic kind of way. The idea that fat girls don't get the guys isn't all that foreign to me.

But this morning, I ran across some pictures of said "fat girl" on Facebook. First of all, she is not fat. She's healthy. She's also absolutely gorgeous--an issue all it's own because after Matt met her, I asked him (sort of idly) if she was good looking and he lied to me. He said she was, "eh, okay," then promptly changed the subject. Of course, I realize that he probably skirted the truth about it because I have a tendency to be an irrationally jealous bitch sometimes, but the fact that he lied doesn't set well. And, later, he admitted that she's more than just "eh, okay," but that her attitude is crappy and she's not particularly capable which makes her less attractive. Still a pretty weak explanation, but whatever.

Anyway, seeing this gorgeous girl and remembering that my husband said she was fat made me quite upset. The fact that I've been pretty low for quite a while now didn't help anything either. Mostly because, well, this girl is much, much, much thinner than I am--and much better looking, too. So if my husband thinks this girl is fat, what must he think of me? The fact that, well, I am fat--and getting heavier, I might add, because I can't stop compulsively eating--did nothing to help matters. So when he came in I asked him about it. He said that he, himself, doesn't think she's fat, but that the guy who is recently hitting on the first girl isn't interested in the gorgeous girl because he thinks she's fat.

And thinking back on the conversation, in the context in which Matt said this girl was fat, his explanation makes sense. But here's where it gets most irrational, I just realized. I can't both be upset because I think my husband thinks this really good looking girl is fat/ugly, and be upset because he lied to me about how good looking she is. It's either that he thinks she's unattractive because she's fat--and let me just say Matt has never been one to think heavier girls are unattractive--or he doesn't think she's fat. It turns out, it's the second. He told me he doesn't think she's fat at all... but he still thinks she's pretty irritatingly incapable.

I just wish, now that I've pretty much accepted his explanation, that I could get the issue out of my head. Clearly, I have a complex and maybe I'm just deflecting, or trying to find some way to justify why I might think my husband's not so much into me--even though he's never been anything but complementary and our sex-life is still amazing after 14 years together (TMI? Sorry). I don't know, hopefully the feelings will pass and soon. Otherwise, it's liable to make me crazier than I already am. As if that were even remotely possible.