"expensive" is relative

So I dropped off the face of the virtual world for awhile (at least on this site), but I am back. And changed some things. Take a look around.

Really I just wanted to share one thing that I realized. A few weeks ago after I met with Barbara from Building New Hope, I stopped by Whole Foods, that oh-so-tantalizing haven of foods I can't seem to afford, and bought a pound of BNH's organic, fair trade, shade grown Nicaraguan coffee. It was about $12-13 if I remember right (on their website it's $11--Whole Foods obviously marks it up), and I couldn't help cringing as I held my debit card over. I buy fair trade coffee, but it's from TJ's and is usually about $8 a pound. When I told my dad the price of this coffee, the first thing he said was, of course, "Wow, that's expensive."

ra(i)n

Did it anyways. Ran in the rain like a crazy person. Am soaked.

And it was glorious. First time running outside since mid-November. I hadn't been through the neighborhood since people put Christmas lights up. That was a nice little perk.

oh nevermind.

Ix-nay the unning-ray. It's raining. Alllllll day.

In a week the weather has gone from snow and temps in the teens, to near 50 degrees and cloudy, to rain and temps in the 30s.

Mother nature, she's hilarious.

freak weather makes for good running

It got up to 48 degrees today. I knew as soon as I woke up this morning ("morning") that it had to be warm because I had kicked off my comforter sometime in the night. (My apartment's heat, uncontrolled by me, rises with the temperature outside. It's sorta weird, and the opposite of what I'd like, but hey, I only pay 20 bucks a month for it so I'm not complaining.) Got up and found a package on my doorstep, my running shoes that I had left at my mom's over winter break. Thought, okay, God is telling me to go running. But then I remembered I had a hair appointment in a half hour, and every girl knows that you can't mess up that fresh-cut hair do by getting sweaty. (It's not everyday my hair smells like a $30 grapefruit.) So I didn't go.

stir-fry, the ol' dinner fall-back

Bittman over at Bitten- A Good Stir-Fry Hides a Lot of Faults. He talks about how he chopped up leftover veggies in his fridge, some of which were not totally "fresh" by whatever standards, tossed 'em in a pan with some tofu and ended up with a tasty meal.

snowrunners in shadyside!

I would just like to note the abundance of ballsy wintertime runners in the Shadyside/Squirrel Hill area (and how much their ballsiness makes me intensely aware of my lack thereof. Really, how does one decide that it is a splendid and appealing idea to go into the icy wilderness and put unskinned knees and perfectly intact ankles in peril, all in the good name of health and exercise? Power to them I guess, but I'm still going to be bitter and jealous while I do my yoga and Jillian Michaels workouts inside.)

if i only had an MD

Ah! This is what I've been saying! Today on Well, Tara Parker Pope posted about a new book called Live a Little! Breaking the Rules Won’t Break Your Health and the doctor who wrote it:

Dr. Love, a clinical professor of surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, says that failing to live by the various health rules is a major source of stress and guilt, particularly for women. For most of us, “pretty healthy” is healthy enough.

“Is the goal to live forever?” she said in a recent interview. “I would contend it’s not. It’s really to live as long as you can with the best quality of life you can. The problem was all of these women I kept meeting who were scared to death if they didn’t eat a cup of blueberries a day they would drop dead.”

the snow is not my turf

December is riddled with excuses to indulge, and now that it is over, it has taken its toll. I haven't weighed myself, but don't really need to: I can just feel it, that uncomfortableness in my own clothes and skin. I can count on one hand the number of times I worked out last month and cannot even begin to count the number of cookies or Hershey Kisses I had. I know this is common, that the holidays, the stress of finals week(s), and the laziness of vacation all play their roles, but I need to get back on track.

Except I have a problem, one that I've been aware of for awhile, but has come into sharper focus in the past few days as Mother Nature dumped a pile of snow on our dear city and turned down the thermostat: I don't know how to work out in the winter. This sounds dumb. It is sort of dumb. And it's not really all exercises, because the strength and flexibility workouts I like the most are Pilates and yoga, and both of those can easily be done in the home.

It's cardio. I was so pumped about getting back into running this summer and fall, and now I'm afraid it's just going to slip to the wayside. I've ran in the snow before, in training for track and junk in high school, but I just really hate the way it makes me feel: my cheeks and lips get chapped like a little kid who went sledding all day, I get cramps from tensing up and trying not to slip and fall on my ass, and, most of all, my lungs feel like they are turning inside out. Plus there's the fact that you need to buy expensive fancy gear for cold weather running, which makes me cringe because I don't have money to blow on this, but also because one of the reasons I love running so much is that all you need are a pair of shoes and a pair of legs.

So, to avoid the outdoors, I could go to the gym, but besides the fact that gyms bore me to tears, I just can't seem to get into the same rhythm on the treadmill that I do on the pavement. And ellipticals are alright, but I don't feel like they give me the same intense, pure cardio workout that I crave. Plus, of the two gyms that are available to me, one is up the steepest effing hill known to mankind (Who decided to build the Pete on the top of the biggest hill in Oakland? Who? I want to know, so I can sue them when my uncoordinated little body slips and topples all the way into oncoming traffic on 5th Avenue) and the other is in a cramped little room with no TVs or views of the city through the windows, just the shiny sweaty moving flesh of other people to stare at. I could probably dedicate an entire post to my gripes about gyms. Perhaps I will sometime. But right now that would not help me.

I think what I want is a perfect solution, and I'm not going to get it. The running I love is outdoors, through neighborhoods and parks and woods, and not on a track or a treadmill or any other made-for-running apparatus. I know I'm going to have to compromise, but I guess what I'd like to figure out is how to reduce my losses. Like finding cheap, quality spandex/Under Armour stuff, or the streets in Shadyside that are the best plowed/salted.

So, sorry for this post that is essentially one big complaint, but it's just a problem I've encountered every year for awhile now: not just how to keep working out in the winter, but how to love it.

new year's flower man

So. I'm not quite sure what to do with this blog, now that the class I kept it for is over. And if my blog with the Pitt News finally gets off the ground this semester, I don't know how much time I'll have for it anyway, to research and write these posts. Honestly, what I might do is expand my scope a little bit so I'll have a deeper bag of tricks to pull from. I already sort of did this with the last post, which was not about food or health but rather eco-consciousness. But I think these things are all a little related: being concerned with the impact your lifestyle has on your body seems to go hand in hand with concern for your carbon footprint. (See: organics.)

Along that vein, it might be a little bit about money too, particularly gross overspending and overconsumption. And if I'm going to go with that, I'll share something I wrote last night, edited for context and public-sharingness.

January 1st

Driving back from my friend's house today, on 5th Avenue past Craig Street, I saw a man slumped in a folding chair on the sidewalk in front of PNC Bank, surrounded by white plastic containers filled with bunches of flowers. I couldn’t see his face for all the layers of coats and blankets, and if I hadn't seen him there almost every day, I might have not thought it was a person at all.

He is the token Craig Street flower guy, and I think I only noticed his presence today because it is New Year’s Day. As I sat at the light, I wondered why he wasn’t with family or friends, and became sad for him, sitting out in the cold snow trying to sell his flowers. I wanted to jump out of my car and buy a bunch, maybe to put in a vase on my kitchen table, but I had no cash and only 20 dollars in my checking so that stopped that. I somehow thought that if I could buy his flowers all at once, make his day out there worth it, he'd be able to go home. I began to wonder why he was out there, on the street, selling flowers, of all places. He obviously needed the money bad enough to come out on a holiday. He might not have a "real" job but he was out there, man. He wasn't taking no for an answer. He was under the scrutiny of all those passing eyes of people like me who usually saw him while going to class at a fancy university or to work in corporate cubicles on Craig Street. Despite all those clothes, he sat there naked, stripped of pride.

Although I didn’t think of it as I drove away, now I’m struck by the contrast of this man with another I encountered last night. My friend’s step dad had been complaining about how his work might call him in on the holiday, how we were to not answer the phone in case it was them. I knew he had gotten laid off earlier this year, so I didn’t ask what this new job was—although I think it might be for PennDot or something since he kept on talking about the snow and how the roads weren’t that bad and they’d only need so-and-so people. Whatever it was, his body language and disdain indicated that it was bad, that whatever he was doing was below him. He rolled his eyes at the phone when it rang (my friend's grandpa calling, not her step dad's mysterious employer) and tilted back his glass of whiskey, rubbing his belly full of the crab legs and shrimp cocktail and fondue that his wife had made for the occasion.

I wouldn't want to work on New Year's Eve or Day either. I'd rather sit inside and drink champagne and sleep in and go in the hot tub with my wife in the middle of the day because those are the things I have and I want the things I have. It's hard to give it up, even if you know you should, even if it's the difference between income and debt. Which is why I love the flower man and his little fold-up chair and mismatched bouquets. I want to sit cross-legged in front of him after I buy one and say "Teach me."