Jan
9
Did you ever see the movie Safe with Julianne Moore where she plays a woman stricken with a bizarre sensitivity to chemicals? Doctors find nothing wrong with her and ship her off to a psychiatrist, while she claws at her face and turbo-horks whenever she’s near someone wearing perfume and wonders if she’s going insane, or, like, what the fuck?
I’ve been thinking about that movie lately because I started smelling this awful, fetid aroma wafting from the vent in the floor of the furnace closet—the vent that opens straight into the crawlspace below our house—and I’m basically the only one in our house bothered by it. JB dutifully shimmied under the floorboards to check things out and discovered a long-dead rat, at which point I celebrated and banged an imaginary gavel and declared the mystery solved, but the (dried-out, non-gooshy) corpse has been removed and O god, it still smells.
The furnace circulates heat throughout our house and I’m convinced the smell is now everywhere—coating my tongue, somehow—but particularly in this closet area and hitting you like a rotting, zombified Mike Tyson when you walk in the house.
JB, naturally, can’t smell a damn thing.
So either I have a brain tumor; the bloodhound-like pregnancy Dog Nose has randomly returned despite me being, I assure you, most definitely NOT pregnant; or JB has a typical male inability to detect when something disgusting is present and in need of being taken care of (see also: refrigerator spills, tracked-in poop, liberal sprinklings of beard hairs coating every surface of the bathroom sink, etc).
The whole thing has led me to believe there is a very small but eager market for objective sniffers-for-hire. A nice dependable person you can order off the internet who will arrive at your house, take a deep whiff of the questionable item, and tell you definitively one way or another if the smell is enough to knock a buzzard off a shit wagon or not. This could work for milk gallon containers, your breath, one of those diapers where things aren’t Incredibly Obvious, and that workout shirt you didn’t have time to wash before heading to the gym.
Seriously, though, I’m a little desperate. What on earth could make the underneath of the house suddenly smell like Satan’s Taint, when it’s essentially dry and barren and as far as we can tell, carcass-free down there?
If you’d like to advise me on a different subject entirely, Riley’s kindergarten registration starts at the end of the month and I see there’s an option to pay extra for a full day of school in addition to the regular 9-11:30ish schedule. My inclination is to stick with the half-day, for a number of reasons, but I’d love to hear what some of you think about it. If the parents’ work schedule doesn’t come into play, and there’s no academic catching up to do, is there any real benefit to doing a full day?
Jan
5
It’s the time of year for self-improvements of various kinds, and don’t even let me hear you open your whine-hole about how laaaaaaame and superfiiiiicial it is when people talk about diets in January, because 1) get back to us when you’re done volunteering in Haiti, Mr. Deep and Meaningful, and 2) maybe you should ask yourself why people feeling motivated and having goals makes you so uncomfortable.
Anyway! I have some lame and superficial things I’ve been thinking about lately, starting with my face.
I’ve been pretty unhappy with my skin for a while now. Somewhere back at the beginning of the summer I started getting this rashy sort of breakout around my chin, which I assumed was a rosacea flareup of some kind possibly associated with switching to cheaper skincare. I went back to the higher quality makeups, moisturizers, cleansers, but nothing helped, so I finally saw a dermatologist. (Leading to an amusing first visit where he carefully asked, with female assistant present, if the issue I was there to discuss was above or below my waist.)
The dermatologist thought it probably wasn’t rosacea but some kind of dermatitis, although he wasn’t really sure what it was. He gave me some antibiotics which in turn gave me nasty headaches, so I went back and he prescribed a different round of antibiotics which made my stomach unhappy.
Fuck this, I thought, and resigned myself to shitty skin.
It’s gotten worse in the last couple months, though, so when I saw AndreAnna talking about the Oil Cleansing Method I decided to give it a try. You can read about it on her site (and there are some handy additional links at the bottom of her post), but basically the idea is to clean your face using a mixture of castor oil and some other vegetable oil.
(I notice that many people who are fans of the oil cleansing method have pretty bottles of organic castor oil, but I bought mine in the drugstore. The bottle said STIMULANT LAXATIVE FOR RELIEF OF CONSTIPATION in very, very, very large letters.)
After trying it for a few days, I’m a new fan. I’m using about 30% castor oil and 70% grapeseed oil, mixed together and rubbed into my face nightly. It sounds so awful, doesn’t it? Rubbing oil on your face? But I swear to god my skin feels like a baby’s buttcheek afterwards. My pores are smaller, my face looks smoother, that bullshit on my chin is less inflamed and not raised like it was.
I also got a Clarisonic Mia after hearing more and more rave reviews about this device (plus it’s made by the Sonicare folks, and I am purely addicted to my Sonicare), and I’ve been using that in the mornings. No soap, just a quick buzz over my face in the morning during my shower. This, I think, is helping with some of the flakiness I am also prone to.
It’s too early to unreservedly endorse the expensive Clarisonic, but I think I’d recommend the oil method to anyone, even if you just try it as an occasional facial.
These aren’t very good before/after photos, but the first is intended to show the Chin Yuck from a week ago, the second was taken this morning with minimal makeup.
Okay! Next thing: diet.
I’ve been having a really hard time breaking out of an ongoing habit of dieting followed closely by wild junk food abandon. It would probably be okay if I could keep the junk binges under some sort of control, but they’re getting much longer than the stretches of healthy eating. I’ve gained a fair amount of muscle in the last few months thanks to CrossFit, but I’ve also piled on some fat. My jeans don’t fit, I don’t like the way I look, I don’t like the way I feel.
To help me stay on track with meals, if only to force myself to be more thoughtful about food before mindlessly shoveling it in, I started a daily food diary. I’m not entirely diligent with this, but I try and document meals via photo, and more recently, CrossFit workouts.
At total cross-purposes with the obsessive food-journalling, I’m reading Geneen Roth’s When Food is Love. It’s often a little too . . . touchy-feely for me, but there were some passages that sort of reached out and grabbed me by the collar.
I’m going to post them without comment on what they mean for me personally, because that’s probably a whole different blog post.
Love is the willingness and ability to be affected by another human being and to allow that effect to make a difference in what you do, say, become. […] Compulsion is the act of wrapping ourselves around an activity (…) to numb our experience of the moment.
We create drama by externalizing our pain, by making things hard between ourselves in relationships instead of being honest about how hard it is inside ourselves. […] Compulsive eating is fabulous theater. It is replete with all the elements of good tragedy: rage, frustration, grief, sorrow, fear, happiness, hope, exhilaration, excasty.
You never have to do anything but go on extravagant binges and rigid diets (…) to experience the vitality and intensity most people define as being alive. You never have to let another human being come close.
Something is wrong when we feel we have to deprive ourselves of foods we love because we believe we would abuse them—or ourselves—if we allowed them in our lives. Something is wrong and we are using food to express it.
The choice is exactly the same for all of us—alcoholics, drug addicts, smokers, compulsive eaters: Do I want to live while I’m alive and embrace what sustains me or do I want to die while I’m still alive and embrace what destroys me?
Really interesting and insightful stuff. I’m going to read more of her books.
Lastly! I’ve decided to try and take part in Flickr’s Project 365, where the idea is to take a photo a day throughout the year. It’s been, you know, all of five days, so we’ll see if I can keep it up, but so far it’s a fun daily activity. No rule that says it’s too late to join, should you feel so inclined.
Jan 1:
Jan 2:
Jan 3:
Jan 4:
Now, tell me: what’s new in your 2011? Any personal improvement goals you’re working on, however superficial?
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