I changed my mind

I will take back everything I said about not wanting kids, if I could be guaranteed that this would be my kid:

How I gained 10 pounds and became skinny-fat.

I bought new running shoes the other day in hopes that if I wore them I could motivate others into actually thinking I work out. If they helped me in wanting to work out, that would just be an added bonus. But today I put them on, with two different style socks, and I actually did physical activity. It started out because I wanted to change my diet. I’ve been feeling like, for lack of a better word, absolute crap. And I’ve been feeling like that for a while. I feel bloated all the time and I’m pretty sure if I walked around rubbing my belly it would be only a matter of time until someone asked me when I was due. I knew that it was because I’ve been eating horrible. Soda, fast food, and ice cream sandwiches like nobody's business. I figured that since my job is pretty physically demanding and I’m running around all day that I probably just burn it all off anyway, but apparently that’s not how it works. 

So my sister started telling me about “clean eating.” It’s what Jillian Michael’s describes as, “if it doesn’t have a mother and it didn’t come from the ground—don’t eat it.” I thought that seems like a pretty good guideline to go by. Eat simply and primitively. Of course, it’s easier said than done. I then heard about the app called MyFitnessPal that calculates how many calories you should be eating per day and it lets you catalog everything you eat to hold yourself accountable. I figured this could help keep me on track. So I downloaded it and was creating my account when it started asking me the typical questions: my age, my height and my weight. I was going to put in the weight that I last remembered being—112, but then I thought I should probably make sure it was completely accurate so I weighed myself to make sure. That’s when I stepped on the scale in the bathroom and looked down in complete horror. The little pointer was bobbing in between 123 and 124. What?! I knew that I looked like I was in an early trimester of pregnancy, and at some point my “fat pants” had just become my regular pants that I couldn’t zip up, but ten pounds?! I was legitimately shocked. I even picked the scale up and moved it to a different part of the bathroom in case maybe the floor wasn’t completely level, but the ten pounds followed me.

 I know that 123 pounds is by no means overweight, and that some people would love to weigh that, but I’ve never been over 120 pounds in my life. I already had to enter my “mid-twenties” this year; I didn’t need my metabolism to quit on me now too. Granted, it’s been awhile since I was completely satisfied with my body. Of course not unsatisfied enough to actually do something about it, but enough where there was always that little voice in my head telling me I should probably eat right and exercise.  I know that I’m not fat, some might even consider me skinny but I can’t help but think I’m more of a skinny-fat. My body looks skinny in clothes, but in a two-piece bathing suit it's obvious that not a single muscle on my body is toned whatsoever. I would go so far as to say that I look more like a soft, doughy woman from a Renaissance painting that is draped in silk and surrounded by cherubs.  So I made the decision that I wanted, nay, needed to tone up. I don’t even care if I stayed at 123, honestly, if I could fit into my regular jeans and actually feel good.

 

So that’s when I put on my new running shoes and turned on the treadmill. Don’t be fooled by the word “treadmill” because I didn’t run. But I did walk at an incline for 20 minutes. Then I rode 3 miles on the exercise bike that is unfortunately located in my garage and it was like 100 degrees today so it was like I was doing the Tour de France in a sauna. After losing at least a gallon of sweat, I just started doing random calisthenics in my garage. I did some crunches and some jumping jacks. I grabbed a random hula hoop and started hula hooping for a while, wondering why there was a hula hoop in our garage. Of course after I went back inside and got in the shower I was already pissed I wasn’t seeing immediate results. I exercised! What more did my body want from me?!  Why didn’t I already look like the “after” picture on all those motivational fitness pins on Pinterest? Why did I still look like I should be lying on an ornate sofa rolled in soft fabrics and being fed grapes?  I let out a long, deep sigh when I realized that I’m going to have to do this consistently—forever. Or at least for a really long time. I wish I could be that person that wakes up at 5 in the morning and goes for a run, but I'm not because I have an irrational fear that I'm going to get kidnapped or get dehydrated and collapse on the side of the road and nobody will be able to find me. But I also have an irrational fear that I'm going to need to have a crane to remove me from my house one day, so I guess I'm going to have to man up and get a move on. But like Paul McCartney sort of once said, it's going to be a long and windy road. A road that I will walk at 3.0 speed and at a slight incline.

Oh, Baby.

I've been thinking about babies a lot lately. Not really baby fever, but more like the baby plague. For as long as I can remember I'd always wanted kids. I had this glamorous idea of motherhood in my head where I would dress them in fun and quirky clothes and we would dance around the kitchen to vintage Louis Armstrong records while baking cupcakes. There might even be a rainbow outside of the window, who knows. But the day my sisters started having kids was the day I stopped having this fantasy. See, I'm the youngest of four kids. I never really knew anyone significantly younger than me, let alone lived with them. I was never around babies. I didn't grasp the full reality of motherhood.

  After my sister had her first baby, I started to see that there was no dancing around kitchens in matching aprons licking cake batter off of beaters. Instead, there was a lot of feeding and crying and changing diapers and crying and not sleeping and crying and I realized that I didn't want any part of this. Don't get me wrong, she was small and cute when she laid there quietly and while she slept, but other than that, I quickly realized I had no idea what to do with her. I had no maternal instinct whatsoever. It's easy to imagine that you're maternal when you're never around babies or kids, but as soon as you're around them, it's the most foreign concept you can think of.  I started asking myself if this was something I actually wanted at some point in my life. Did I want to go through the sickness of pregnancy and the pain of labor to the sleepless nights of infancy and the chasing after toddlers to the defiance of teenagers? No, I didn't. I just wanted something that I could dress up and play with. Actually, that's a lie. Even playing with them would have taken up too much of my time. The more I thought about it the more unappealing the whole thing became to me.

  I am a selfish person who can barely take care of myself, let alone be responsible and give my 100% undivided attention to someone else. I thrive on downtime. Whenever I feel overwhelmed or anxious I go to a quiet place and just lay there to calm myself down. You don't get to have a break like that with children. You don't get to do anything. And I wouldn't want my kids to see me laying in a  fetal position dealing with a panic attack anyway. I wouldn't want to pass down any of my neurosis to my children. I don't want to know that I'm responsible for another human being having my shy, anti-social, hermit characteristics. So I decided that I would never have kids. There wasn't enough pros to outweigh the cons in my mind.

  So I started to think: how important is having kids to people? I went on my Facebook and asked my guys friends: "Would a woman's inability to have children effect whether or not you married her?" I got answers like, "Not if I loved her" and "There's always adoption." Then I posed another question: "Would a woman's choice of not wanting to have kids effect whether or not you married her?" The response was an almost unanimous "Yes." Guys wouldn't mind marrying a woman who was unable to have kids as long as there was an possibility for adoption whereas most guys wouldn't marry a woman who didn't want to have kids at all. Though when I told this to my brother he responded, "You can't take what the same five guys that always comment on your posts have to say and think they're the general consensus." Which was true. Maybe I didn't poll enough men. But even just polling a handful of guys, it seemed like they were all on the same page. They all wanted kids. (Perhaps because they weren't the ones who had to push them out of their vagina.) They wanted kids so badly that they would not marry someone because of it. They would ultimately walk away from someone they love because of procreation.

  People always tell me, "you might not want kids now, but when you find someone you love, you'll want to have kids with them." Maybe. Maybe that will happen, but that isn't a guarantee and therefor I can't assume that's going to happen. I can't even find a guy that I could see myself spending more than a week with let alone someone who I want to make another human being with. Why is having kids so important anyway? Why do people feel like kids are the only joy their life has? Is it possible to feel you have a fulfilled life without having kids?  Of course you can. Look at Kristen Wiig, or Betty White, or Oprah, for goodness sakes. It is possible. I love what Margaret Cho says about not having kids, "I do not want children. When I see children, I feel nothing. I have no maternal instinct. I am barren. I ovulate sand ... I look at children and feel no pull toward them, no desire whatsoever." That is the point where I'm at right now. And maybe in ten years I'll look back on this post while cradling a baby or in between driving my kids to some organized sport and I'll be that person. But right now I'm pretty happy with the thought of not having any of that. So if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go selfishly read a book (with no pictures) in a quiet spot and have no obligation whatsoever to help anyone with a project due tomorrow.

Also check out Esquire's list of The Best Mothers Who Never Had Children.

Love your street

    How awesome is this pyramid studded wall made of old yellow pages at the London Festival of Architecture?

Source

Life while I've been gone

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An American Experience

As an American, you have to look at the opportunities and advantages we are given as citizens of this country in order to overlook the nastiness these advantages can sometimes create in our society. The summer after I graduated high school my family took a trip to Massachusetts. Being born and raised in California, none of us had ever been to the east coast before. Even though it is only on the other side of the country, it seemed like a world away. (I think I remember even asking on the car ride to the airport if we needed to exchange currency. Again, I had just graduated from high school.) We planned on staying a few days in Boston, then drive up to Cape Cod and finish our week vacation in Hyannis Port, the home of the Kennedy Compound.

On our first day in Boston, we decided to walk around and explore the city. While we were leaving our hotel, located in the heart of the financial district, I remember being amazed at how clean the city was. Since Los Angeles was really the only “big city” I had experienced up until that point, Boston seemed like the complete polar opposite. We found a trolley down by the harbor that took you around the entire city, letting you get off at different stops throughout. We got off to explore places like Paul Revere’s house, Independence Hall and walked some of the freedom trail, a red line painted on the sidewalks leading to different historical places. I was mesmerized being able to see all the places I had read about in history books and learned about in school since I was a kid. Experiencing this made me proud be an American, a country whose forefathers wanted nothing but the best for their people.



After a couple of days, we left Boston and headed to Cape Cod. On the way, we visited Plymouth Rock and Salem, Massachusetts where we went to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of Seven Gables and saw a reenactment of the Salem Witch trials, where 19 women were sentenced to death because of suspicion of witchcraft. Realizing how intolerant and judgmental Americans used to be, or so I thought, started to put a damper on my newly-found patriotism. On our second day in Hyannis Port, we woke up early to catch the ferry over to Martha’s Vineyard, an island about 50 miles off the Massachusetts coast. Visiting Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket was what I was looking forward to the most out of the entire trip. Going to an island in the middle of summer made me feel so swanky and Kennedy-esque and I made sure to pack my favorite summer dress, an orange and purple sleeveless Isaac Mizrahi wrap-dress, for the occasion.



As soon as we docked, I felt like I had stepped off of the boat and into a Ralph Lauren ad. Everyone seemed to be wearing Polos and khaki pants, linen dresses or cut off shorts over their designer bathing suits. Even though I am from California, and am used to going to the beach in the summer, this was a completely different experience. In California, people are a lot more laid-back and casual, where the east coast seemed to make going to the beach an event. We practically went straight from the boat onto a tour bus that was going to take us around the entire island. My family and I piled into the old school bus with about 75 other tourists and were driven past the beach where they filmed Jaws, the restaurant Ted Danson likes to eat at when he stays on the island, and a little bluff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.



After the tour was over we were starting to get hungry and had remembered seeing a little pizza place on the main road by the harbor. The street was filled with people going in and out of shops and restaurants and I was trying to stay as close to my parents as possible as not to get separated from them. All the sudden a girl not much older than me stood right in front of me and said, “Oh my gosh, your dress is so cute! Where did you get it?” I was a bit taken aback from the suddenness and flattered at the compliment and I managed to smile and reply, “Oh, thank you! I actually got it at Target.” I saw her look at the guy next to her and then both of them start laughing and walk away. I just stood in the middle of the sidewalk, in disbelief, wondering if this girl had really just laughed in my face because of where I had gotten my dress, that two seconds earlier she was saying was cute. I looked over at my family, who had also stopped when the girl had approached me, and saw them all giving me a quizzical look. “Did she really just do that?” my sister asked. “I can’t believe that just happened,” my dad said in astonishment. Suddenly, I felt like I was one of the witches on the Salem Trials, being judged and humiliated in front of everyone. My face was burning so much from embarrassment that I may as well have been up on the stake. That is when I realized that as much pride as I was starting to have for being an American, I was also starting to understand how judgmental us as Americans still are. A few days earlier I was looking at the places where people fought for our country to be a place of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and now I was realizing we had become a country that judged each other on how we looked and on something as trivial as where we shopped. I had always heard of other countries thinking we were materialistic and superficial, but for the first time in my life, I actually understood what they were talking about.

I took away so much from that vacation. I found a new respect for my country and the forefathers that dedicated their lives to creating a land where people could live their dreams and prosper. I also found a new sense of duty, that as an American to always be an example of what this country represents: equality, tolerance, and an open mind. Looking back now on that girl on Martha’s Vineyard, I am thankful that I was able to experience something that humbled me and showed me how I never wanted to be as a person. Because at the very core of the American experience is the ability to change yourself for the better and to thrive as the person you have always wanted to be. I also wore the shit out of that dress that summer because screw her.