Stupid crap I used to believe

I used to believe so much stuff that was amazingly stupid, and dealing with the consequences of my naivete has been an appalling life-long comedy of errors.

1. I used to believe I was going to get married-- the whole fairy-tale happily ever after bullshit, flying in the face of never having had any success whatsoever with any man I liked at all. After all, he was surely going to turn up just around the corner, foaming at the bit to rescue me, right?

2. I used to believe that you went to college, majored in what you liked, and got a good job that would support you, especially since you'd be part of a two-income family with the good sir who never turned up back in stupid thing #1.

3. I used to believe that when you had your degree, you got a good job automagically when you went looking for it, and even that colleges would help you find one.

4. I used to think the government was mostly looking out for the best interests of the majority of people in this nation.

5. I used to think God actually gave a shit about each and every person and would look out for you if you believed in him, providing satisfactory conditions in each point from 1-4 of my prior stupid things I believed.

Wake up and smell the shitty life I made for myself that way, huh? Here I sit, unable to support myself without living under my parents' roof, fat and manless and stuck with one pathetic teacher's salary, with failing health, and the government wants to turn me into even more of a penniless slave.

Now I look down the barrel of weight loss surgery, and I'm damned if I do and I'm damned if I don't, because either I can be sick and worthless from being fat or I can be sick and worthless from the side-effects of having RNY surgery.

Huzzah.

Rant follow-up

OK, that was a big blorp of serious negativity and I'm sure anyone who put up with it is wondering what I have to offer as an alternative.

I do believe that in order to be spiritually healthy, you have to find the divine; I just don't think it's what people keep trying to force me to accept/believe/think/do.

To find the divine, you have to read both inward and outward. The divine can be in your own inclination to mercy, self-improvement, kindness, etc.; it can be in your relationship with an animal or someone who loves you or in looking at a leaf or a flower or an insect or a river outside in nature. The divine exists in thought, sensation, connectedness, peace, and insight.

To build your relationship with the divine, you need to focus on the things that make you feel good and happy and healthy. You need to move away from negativity and bad patterns and unwholesome energy and focus on good ones. Do I know how to do this? No, I don't; it shows in my unhappiness in a variety of aspects of my life. But I tell you this: there are plenty of fat, skinny, WHATEVER, miserable, hate-filled people who know jack shit about the divine even though they sit in a church every time it's open and think they have all the answers.

They do not.

I'm going to try to learn how to build my own new, improved relationship to the divine in all things without going down their dead-end path of false self-righteousness.

Don't tell me about God.

Long time no post, nonexistent friends-- I've been busy and lazy by turns. Nothing has turned me on enough to make me jump up on the soapbox, though a lot of things have happened.

But today I got my order of post-bariatric success psychology self-help books, and now I'm mad as a wet hen. So prepare for one mother of a rant:

Where the HELL do these authors get off assuming that I'm fat because my relationship with God is busted and if I want to fix it, one of the biggest things I have to do is go back to God?! These preachy proselytizing biddies can take their "Go Back to God and All Your Spiritual Issues will be FIXED" message, and they can cram it, ram it, rotate it, and drive it straight up the good ol' hershey road.

NEWS FOR THESE PEOPLE: They're telling people to use God as a CRUTCH. That's right, a crutch. An evasion of self-responsibility. A big fat shiny placebo that does FUCK-ALL FOR ANYBODY.

I'll tell you one thing: I'm not going back to a one-sided, neglect-based relationship with a nonexistent spiritual partner who is a fabrication of the human mind with next to no relationship to anything that's actually divine, just because some damn holier-than-thou person who managed to crib her way to a PhD at a podunk for-shit school says I have to. And she can blame me being fat for me choosing to leave the Christian religion all she'd like; I'm NOT buying the manipulation.

While I do try to follow the teachings of Christ, that doesn't mean I have to believe in the whole figurative Santa Claus bit and all the dogmatic, oppressive, HATE-based, FEAR-based BULLSHIT that goes along with Christianity per se. As if declaring that I'm all saved and born again and renewed and holy and right with God would do fuck-all for my spirituality! It sure hasn't done SHIT for all the so-called righteous Christians out there who would cheerfully guthole anybody who didn't share all their moral views. It just gives them another kind of mask to hide behind-- from everybody, INCLUDING THEMSELVES.

ARGH. I am so damn mad I could spit sulfuric acid. If God gave a shit about me being fat, he would have helped me when I was still a teenager and I prayed desperately for help with my weight. With that, as with anything else I've swallowed the "just take it to God!" "Trust God with your problems!" "God will heal/fix/help you!" bullshit for, I GOT NO HELP.

This proverb is the best thing I can say about God: THERE MAY BE FAIRIES, THERE MAY BE ELVES, BUT THE LORD HELPS THOSE WHO HELP THEMSELVES. Because guess what: he isn't actually OUT there burning up with eagerness to help people who believe in him. HE ISN'T OUT THERE AT ALL, and if you wait for him to take care of you, you are shit. out. of. luck.

It all boils down to this: you're all you've got, and you have to help yourself, for yourself because no damn imaginary bullshit entity based on people's fear and denial about dying is going to do it for you.

And never the twain shall meet.

My mom. Wow. What a topic. You couldn't adequately expound this topic; you'd have to live it. 42 years' worth of it, so far. Problem is, you sure wouldn't want to.

A short summary of the Rules:

• Rule 1: Mom is never wrong; she is always automagically 100% right about anything and everything. QED.
• Rule 2: When in doubt, refer to rule 1.
• Rule 3: No matter how selfish or misguided something Mom does, decides, or decrees is, that doesn't matter. Because it has been infallibly, carefully planned, calculated, and executed with 100% martyrdom to be For Me, and has been created by a master craftsman as the only thing that could possibly be the best action ever to do me the world's most good. (Refer to Rule 2).
• Rule 4: I exist in order to be told what to do, how to do it, and how to think about it. Difference of opinion over Things That Matter is not acceptable. (Refer to Rule 2).
• Rule 5: I must be in 100% enthusiastic agreement/compliance with all of the above rules at all times. Neutrality, Lukewarm Acceptance, or Qualified Agreement Is Not Good Enough. (Refer to Rule 2).

Of course, these play out in a variety of corollaries and adjunct laws, one of which is that nothing I have to say is important when she has something to say, no matter the content of either's statements, and another of which is that anything I attempt to do will be co-opted and redirected to suit her preferences (this is known as "supporting me,") and when I give up on it as a result, she will stop providing the "support" which was actually control, and she will feel that the failure was all because I was in gross indifferent violation of Rules 3 and 4.

This situation a serious problem and it is, I think, a main contributor to most of the problems I have with self-motivation, rebellion/self-sabotage, and lack of follow-through when things aren't my idea or aren't something I value as a priority, both at home, socially, and at work.

She tries. She really does. (I find her very trying, badumbumCHING.) But she will never be able to understand that I should be respected as an individual, and at this point after 42 years of codependency, I strongly doubt that things will ever change, or that I'll ever be able to put the more pernicious elements of her influence aside or behind me, even after her passing. I know it will dog me for the rest of my life; c.f. one of Stan Rice's better poem/epigraphs from The Vampire Lestat, in which he points out that the dead don't hand their hearts to you; they hand their heads-- the part that stares. She will always be watching, and she will always disapprove and try to control.

Codependency is vicious; we enable each other and our behaviors perpetuate the negative patterns ad infinitum.

I have to try to get through this with small achievable goals and not let her push me to the point of apathy and inaction. Today I used Dad's favorite passive/aggressive tactic of simply falling silent under the tirade and never even bringing up the important matters I have on my mind after she ignored signals that I needed to speak. It's not a good tactic, but I understand why he uses it. He uses it because it is the one way to obtain even a small fraction of victory and individuality-- she can't penetrate it and force compliance with Rule 5. No other tactics, such as reasoned discussion, work because of Rules 3 and 4. It's always that what she's done IS the only right choice and I just don't get it. And if I say "Please don't do/say this because it makes me feel..." her only response is "Well you're wrong to feel that way, so stop."

You can't make someone "get it."

You have to accept that sometimes you can be wrong, and that something that would be right for you might not be right for someone else.

Neither of these things is ever going to be something she can accept with regard to me.

Worst of all, I'm just like her-- I'm pretty confident most of the time that I'm right, and I don't trust anyone else to be right. But I do try to go and admit it to my friends if I learn I was wrong after we disagree. That's an important difference, and it's probably something I need to do a hell of a lot more, because I'm probably not right anywhere near as often as I think I am.

Damned if I do, damned if I don't.

So, my lipids panel and blood tests came back. Evidently I've got some issues.

TSH is high which I've known forever. Don't know WTF to do about it. Apparently doctors don't either.

HDL cholesterol 210 which is only a tiny bit high.

LDL is worse, coming in at 145, pretty high but not "OMG HOLY CRAP YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE A HEART ATTACK AT ANY INSTANT GET THEE TO A HOSPITAL BED FOR AN IMMEDIATE ARTERIAL BYPASS" high, evidently.

Protein a bit low.

Vitamin D levels insanely low.

This is a troubling set of results. The nurse told me that to lower the LDL, I need to stop eating eggs, dairy and meat.

For the protein, I need to start eating more meat.

For the vitamin D, I need to start eating more eggs, dairy, and meat and go outside a lot more.

Uh-huh. Yeah. I'll just.... wind up doing nothing different except go outside more, evidently.

Long time, no post....

I'm still having trouble with that left hip that I mentioned in the last post. Overdo it, sit wrong, sit too long, sit on something uncomfortable, whatever, and it flares up again-- I'm very scared about my Boston trip in a month. :-/ So far, the past month has involved lots of mild pain, lots of NSAIDS, and lots of trying not to aggravate it. Bleah!

I'm writing now because I finally had my first appointment with a doctor at the bariatric program. I weighed in at 355.48 or some fraction thereof, with a small amount of cheaty stuff in my pockets to fudge on the percentage loss they require before surgery (5% or between 17-18 pounds-- I probably only shaved off 3/4-1 pound of it with that stuff). They put me on a machine that calculated the weights of various body parts, but they did not give me the final tally of those weights, only percentages of those body parts that were fat and how much muscle I had and stuff like that. It was really interesting.

They also took my picture, the "before" part of the before and after shots they do. I must remember that I was wearing the blue tie dye DragonCon T-shirt (5x, with yellow decal) and the cargo pants pedal pusher jeans with the tie front, so that I can wear them again to see how they look in comparison. The t-shirt was tight on my stomach and the pants were not trying to fall down.

The machine they put me on said I needed to lose 140 pounds, which would not put me under 200, and that made me sad. The doctor, however, said I should tentatively target 160 pounds as a final weight, which is a loss of about 195 pounds. That's 10 pounds up from the Weight Watcher's estimate, which I thought was impossibly low given my large frame. It was also five pounds more than what the machine said was my current total lean weight. When I brought that discrepancy up, mom said I might lose muscle as part of the process.

I guess that's right, though too much muscle loss isn't desirable. At any rate, I know you'd need less to keep a 160 pound person going than you need to propel one who weighs nearly 356! Anyway, I'd just be happy to go under 200 pounds of weight, and that's a fact. Then I'd have the option to ride down into the Grand Canyon on a mule, even if I don't have the balls! I'll certainly have enough of them to do some of the other things I can't do now, like going to the beach when it's warm, or canoeing or hiking out to take pictures, and the suchlike....

The doctor said I would have to do the roux en y gastric bypass to get anywhere near 160 or even to go under 200. :( I don't like the thought of cutting out the lower half of my stomach, including the pyloric sphincter, but he was very emphatic about me needing to get down farther than the other one would go, and my insurance won't pay for the sleeve gastrectomy.

He was also emphatic about me needing a cholesterol test (shame on my current crappy doc for not having ordered me one already; the bariatric doctor was visibly appalled to hear that he hadn't-- which scared me into fearing that I might keel over and have a heart attack at any moment, without warning) and various other things. He said sleep apnea, which he thinks I have, might cause ankle swelling, which I tend to have lots of. He said I have to quit fast food and sodas and start exercising (a problem, given that damn hip) and try to get down to 2000 calories a day.

Other than that, most of my extra weight is in my "trunk," which I knew. I have the least amount of muscle there, too. I guess all the stair climbing at home and the chainmaille making have kept the arms and legs in some good amount of muscle.

Next up are a battery of blood tests (I've got to go in for those soon, bleah) and another doctor's appointment. Then apnea testing, psych testing, and various other things as the blood tests indicate.

Psychologically, this is all kind of nerve wracking, as my above-normal 151/99 BP at the appointment would indicate. I'm still extremely reluctant to actually have this surgery, especially as it'll be the roux en y; everything around it is intimidating, as is the life-long aspect, and I *hate* the notion of dumping syndrome, which is why I wanted sleeve gastrectomy, since you don't get dumping syndrome usually with that.

And other things come into it too... while I suppose they're saying the psych eval is more to determine I'm not clinically depressed or addicted to drugs, etc. I'm also afraid it will find something bad that bars me from the program. I mean, how much reluctance to have the surgery is too much? I don't want to have the surgery, but I do want the results.... go fig. At this point I have to keep remembering that if I don't get the surgery, I'm going to keel over and die soon. And I'll have low quality of life until I do.

I dunno. I'm very nervous about all these things, including some I suppose I shouldn't be worrying about. I keep thinking "this will be the last time I enjoy a big spread at Red Lobster. I won't be able to go pig out on sushi or Chinese if I ever make it to San Francisco." etc. And I keep thinking "I don't know HOW to be normal-- I don't know how to shop like a normal-weighted person, interact with men like a normal-weighted person...." it's something that makes me really fearful. Being fat is sometimes useful as a barrier between myself and things or people that frighten me.

And I know there are psychological reasons why I got this way. I don't know how they will be resolved. I don't know what will show up when the psych people go prying. I certainly don't have the money to indulge a lot more transfer addiction in the form of retail therapy. :P

This seems to be what I have to say today. More another time....

Why bariatric surgery is so necessary

Here I am, after some days' hiatus, spent on my back in bed thinking sadly that this is why bariatric surgery is really necessary for me.

My hip gave out. Not my back, which it usually is; the joint of my left hip. First stiffness and weakness, then soreness, then a couple days' serious pain, spent in bed barely able to hobble to the bathroom on two canes, struggling with this aging, molasses-speed laptop to cover my classes while knowing my pay will be docked for sick leave for all these days in spite of me working like crazy to take care of the job. And also knowing I'm spending my "boss cred" on this when I didn't even dare take a day for a doctor's appointment-- because I know shit like this happens to me so often. One day I'm fine, and then boom, I'm writhing in pain and stuck in bed for some indefinite period, because my body's skeletal structure just can't handle the load.

It was really miserable this time. I haven't been able to lie on my right side for any duration for some time, because the wide point of my pelvis hurts so much from the pressure. Well, this time it was the left hip I hurt, and lying on it was making it get worse, so I had to lie on that right side, as the lesser of two evils. I could just picture the tissue there turning into a bruise of ketchup-like consistency as it throbbed. And the left throbbed, too, because I pushed through the stiffness all day Tuesday and then rushed it Wednesday night to make it to my once-a-week class. Ice and ibuprofen finally helped, and I can only hope it was enough by Monday.

And yeah, I'm whining, sure-- but I wanted to whine about this one appropriately so I could come back and look at it later, after I get on the liquid diet, and also after I've had the surgery and there's no going back, so I can remind myself about the dozens of times I've been stuck here like this, miserable and not able to do anything but wait the inflammation out and hope that it won't stick around long, and hope that the next time isn't coming soon. But I know it is, and it will be my back, or my knee, or my hip... and I won't fit in wheelchairs, and nobody can lift me to help me, and my body just keeps crushing its infrastructure more and more.

Anyway, maybe when I look at this and remember this, the diet and the surgery stuff won't seem so bad. Because if I don't lose the weight, I know that this ceiling is going to get more and more familiar the longer this goes on, until I have no job and no insurance and no hope of ever losing this damn weight, and there's nobody who can or will help me when I'm down like this.

Bariatric surgery: the humble beginnings.

I've been wanting to talk about my process with bariatric surgery here-- the whys, wherefores, and hows. So here I go, to get down as much as I can before I have to get back to work (I reserve the right to actually do some personal living amidst all the essay grading, dammit).

How did I decide I wanted this surgery? It was actually a set of events that covered several years.

First off, my friend R. had roux en y gastric bypass. She talked about it a lot on her blog. It was a tough process for her, obviously, but she had good success with it. I have never had good success with any form of weight loss, so I was intrigued-- but the horror stories about surgeries gone bad were scary, and roux en y was pretty new, and I was leery. Still, it sat in the back of my mind.

Fast forward a couple of years, to the height of my association with Evil Ex Romantic Interest. From observing his patterns with other people close to him over several years, I knew my weight was likely the only "big thing" (bad joke, right) keeping him from trying out a relationship with me, and despite all that careful observation I had not yet allowed myself to realize what a disaster that kind of relationship with him would have been; I thought I had it in me to make ours end differently if he'd just give it a try. With this kind of faulty thinking buoying me to attempt desperate measures to get inside his britches, I formed the idea that I would go ahead and get the surgery if my current diet didn't work.

Within a couple of months, though, this fellow had changed from handsome prince to evil ex, and as a result of that and ongoing job/life woes, I went into a major clinical depression. Weight loss surgery got put on the back burner again, and I gained a LOT. :P Antidepressants will do that to ya. My pre-existing PCOS, hypothyroid, and fatty liver conditions will, too. Put them all together and you wind up with about three good-sized human beings walking around on one set of very unhappy feet.

After about two years of recovery from my severance of relations with the evil ex, I learned one of my friends, K., had undergone gastric sleeve surgery. She had really good results and recommended it highly; I could see how much better she felt-- and psychologically, too, not just physically. She was a different person, and a much happier one. Definitely food for thought, because frankly, from where I am now, I can see the end of the road coming fast, and it involves a lot of misery, culminating very prematurely in a size 4X coffin and some very unhappy pallbearers.

Then I came in to work one day and my co-worker M. was in the hall. I hadn't seen M. out from behind her desk for a long time and was flabbergasted to see only about 1/2 as much of her as I'd expected. "What are you doing? I need to be doing it too!" I said, and she referred me to the local city hospital's weight management center.

Thus started the long road I've only gone a few steps down, so far.

Right now I tend to think of bariatric surgery as a sort of "magic bullet." That's when a cop gets wounded in a way that puts him on easy street; he winds up not having to fight crime on the street anymore, and he can draw hefty disability payments and do more or less whatever he wants, if he's able-- but wow, there's a lot of serious nastiness you have to go through to get there, and a considerable amount of crap you endure as side effects for the rest of your life. So yeah. I know there's going to be a lot of unpleasantness, but when it all settles out, things will (I hope) be a hell of a lot nicer than they are now, in ways that really matter.

Next time: The First Meeting, plus Big Insurance Companies Are Heartless Bastards.

Bake sales and snow

Bake sales are an inherently flawed method of fundraising. They depend on people who don't have money and time to donate both to making baked goods that cost as much or more as they are sold for by children who nag people to buy this stuff in the name of "raising money"-- and the clientele get fat. Plus, there's all this dubious sanitation on the part of the cook and the people who cut and wrap. So instead of contributing to a bake sale, the organizers and their associates should just skip all the intermediate steps, donate the cost of a sheet cake to the deserving organization, and everyone involved would do a lot better.

It was golden when I woke up, with morning light pouring through my windows. But by the time I got out of the shower, there was only a thick mist of fine snow. There's still some snow, and you can see a fleeting glimpse of blue behind the clouds at times. Not much in the way of sun, though. It was 80 degrees yesterday, so this is a rude and unwelcome change for most. As for me, I wish it had been enough to close school because good GOD, I need a few days to catch up on grading.

Yes, I should be grading right now. And aren't you a keen observer of detail.

Formerly The Cynical Potter, now The Cynical Crafter. I don't know why I'm bothering with a blog; I'm desperately dull and complaint-heavy as a blogger and I don't think anyone is likely to still be following me here (not that I had more than a few following the blog, if any, to begin with), but Facebook simply isn't cut out for longer posts and introspection.

Maybe I'll babble enthusiastically about various types of crafting projects. Maybe I'll complain about the ridiculous amount of vocabulary associated with looms. Maybe I'll get myself in trouble on the job by wailing the agonized, wounded battle cries of an underpaid, overworked teacher whose students usually don't care enough and whose admins don't either. Maybe I'll agonize over impending bariatric surgery. I'll almost certainly swear a lot.

Lessons learned from LiveJournal would indicate that a blog isn't a really secure or reliable forum, but vanity insists flinging self to the four winds is desirable....

One good thing I've done already here is ditch yet another forgotten, long-abandoned association with The Evil Ex-Romantic Interest (who would hastily point out he was never a boyfriend and would even claim he never encouraged me, no matter how much he baited me by dangling implicit possibilities of his attentions in exchange for me working to promote his career). The blog I used to work on sometimes for him is no longer associated with this account. So if you happen to be here, watching me, as a remnant of a different time, one in which I was under the spell of a selfish and dishonest longhaired harper, you'd best defriend me now, because that association is no longer, and any possible future mentions of said harper will not be even slightly polite. So, no hard feelings, but if you're still wasting your time on him and you friended me because of him, don't let the door hit ya on your way to the defriend button.

I had a vague idea of posting something about spring and the way the flowers are already fading, or about how I've got to deal with an ill-conceived and vituperative student complaint today when I have less than no time and energy for it, but I've got to get to work and I've spent all my time already. C'est la vie!