Jan

25

Day 6 of “The Shred”

January 25, 2010 | Leave a Comment

So update. On Day 2 I could barely move. I don’t mean that figuratively, I mean quite literally that every time I had to sit and stand I winced and made a little whimper noise. My THIGHS WERE KILLING ME. Of course, Day 2 was the day that I had to carry five large art books and several DVDs to work with me. That’s from my house to the Art Department. Two flights of stairs with extra weight. Yeah, I took the elevator. Don’t judge me. You don’t know the pain.

Day 3: Still pain, but less. I didn’t do The Shred, I instead did the 40-minute DVD I had gotten. Still strenuous, but less focus on my thighs. And if there WAS focus on them, I jogged in place until that exercise was over. Hey, at least I was still moving.

Day 4: I got my hair done at 9 in the morning and decided not to exercise so that I wouldn’t have to wash my hair and mess up the prettyness my stylist had created. You can judge me a little for that one.

Day 5: What day was day 5…oh, right. Sunday. Yes, I did the 40-minute thing again. Awesome, my legs stopped hurting!

Day 6: (That’s today!) Took on the Shred again. It didn’t hurt as bad, and I didn’t even have to swear at the TV or nothin’. Three hours later and my legs don’t feel completely devastated. I’m looking on this as progress.

Also progress: Have lost 3lbs! My red boy-hoodie, which was always a little snug because boys don’t have hips, is feeling all loose and comfy. Not even a week into this routine. Love it.

Jan

20

Day 1: Jillian Michaels’ 30 Day Shred.

January 20, 2010 | Leave a Comment

My mother reiterated to me over the winter break that as great as it is that I’m doing well in school, the fact that between class, homework, and work I refuse to find time to dedicate to my own health isn’t, well, healthy. And so given the amount of difficulty I seem to have in finding time to go to the gym (or rather my constant layering of excuses for WHY I can’t find time to go to the gym), and the increase in said difficulty given that it’s winter and I just don’t feel like walking there in the cold/dark (weather is always a great excuse), I was on the lookout for a workout DVD that I could force myself to do at home.

I was discussing fitness/diet routines with a friend of mine and happened to mention this. She recommended Jillian Michaels’ 30 Day Shred. Very intense, only twenty minutes. If I can’t find twenty minutes to dedicate to myself, then obviously something is wrong, right?

So fine. I bought the DVD and two other Jillian Michaels DVDs (I thought I bought one other DVD, but apparently not as I received a total of three today), just in case I got bored with one. (Boredom is, as you may have guessed, dear reader, another of my many, many, many excuses for not keeping up with things. Ie: My Blog.)

Point being: The DVDs arrive in the mail today. Now, I’m excited. I MISSED exercising. Not enough to go out and do it, but enough that I waited anxiously to hear the UPS truck and that little *clang* of my outer door as the box was put behind it. So I put my little exercise outfit on, tie my ADORABLE Sketchers sneakers, unroll my workout mat that has been rolled up so long without use that I had to use my hand weights to keep it unfurled, and pop in the 30 Day Shred.

Okay, warm up. That’s cool. Jumping Jacks, no problem.

Cardio? Holy fucking hell. All those fitness tests from elementary school gym class came wheezing back to me, and I’m pretty sure that the kids downstairs heard me yelling at my television. A small recap:

JM: [Something along the lines of...] We’re right there with you. We’re feeling it to.

Me: No you’re not. YOU’RE not fucking FAT. *wheeze* YOU HAVE NO FUCKING… *WHEEZE* …FUCK.

I felt better once the cool down started and apologized to the Jillian Michaels in my TV for calling her and her two helpers “torturous bitches.” I may retract my apology when I do the workout again tomorrow, but we’ll see.

All in all, it IS a good workout, especially being that it’s only 20 minutes. My heart rate was up right away, which is what I wanted. Even when I work out at the gym, I don’t run. I don’t do jumping jacks. Why? Because it’s a small gym, and the number of large, square-headed, overly-toned muscular jocks who are admittedly on steroids make me feel self-conscious.

At least here at home my inner (and outer) fat kid can happily(?) bitch out the woman making her want to curl into a ball and die.

30-Day Goal: 15 Pounds.

Aug

20

Twitter Me This

August 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment

In another tab I have Twitter.com open with all of my info plugged in and ready for me to hit “Create my account.” Once I finish this I’ll close it without ever hitting that button. It was a close call, though. I mean, what is a girl to do at 1AM when she can’t sleep and her roommate is in Vermont and there is just no fun to be had anywhere?! Tweet, that’s what!

I took a shower. That seemed to help. And I have Everclear playing.

I also read an article about how flip flops can kill you because they are covered in so much bacteria that after about thirty seconds of wear, it would be a miracle if your feet haven’t fallen off due to infection. It was pretty gross, and if I were one of those people that had to squeal in panic at every little RIDICULOUS HYSTERIA that came along, I would probably have run into the hall and thrown all of my flip flops off the porch. OR! Even better, I could have flung them at the houses of people I don’t like while screaming, “A PLAGUE ON YOUR HOUSE!” (I know the Shakespeare quote is “A plague o’ both your houses!”, but that just wouldn’t make sense!)

After that I checked all my friends’ blogs, because I haven’t done that in a while. I mean, reading for pleasure? That is so last year. So I caught up. And when reading Meg’s blog, I decided that I want to be crafty - as in arts and crafts crafty, not cunning and deceptive, because anyone who knows me will tell you that if you ever manage to hit my evil side I’m already pretty slick and could pretty much verbally DESTROY YOU. True story.

But anyhoo: Meg is crafty. She makes tons of neat little things from practically nothing. I mean, look at how cute this card is! Who wouldn’t want to make cards like that? I don’t want to learn how to make curtains, or clothes or anything like that, but cards and scrapbooking are high up on my CraftSkillz wishlist. (No, I don’t know why I typed it that way. Blame the hour.)

After I saw the card, that’s when I almost made the Twitter. [Insert shameface here]. Meg’s blog had her tweets, and I realized I hadn’t read any Twitters in a while, so I checked out massive amounts of Tweets from friends and thought, “Hey, I could totally be witty in 140 characters!” (Which isn’t true).

Thank goodness for buddy systems. All I have to do is say, “That’s it! I’m making a Twitter!” and my guys just go, “NO, KAY! PUT THE ALCOH-” I mean, “TWITTER AWAY!”

I decided to update my blog instead, which took a LOT longer than making and updating a Twitter. But at least I stuck to my beliefs and kept my soul from being defiled by the evil that is “tweeting.” More importantly, I didn’t let Matt win. BOO-YAH!

Aug

9

Something

August 9, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Later, after the tavern closed, Norma and I sat outside on my car and shared a cigarette. I should say that we pretended to share a cigarette since neither of us smoked. But we both thought the other did and wanted to have all that much more in common.

- James Many Horses, “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor” in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie

Jul

17

Angel

July 17, 2009 | Leave a Comment

I stepped out of Crosby’s tonight, met with a wall of wet air, thick and warm like a blanket. Across the parking lot a man sat outside the Laundromat with a harmonica, his tune sad and soft and slow. I held myself back from my usual fast scurry back to my car, listening even as a raindrop fell on my shoulder. And as I climbed into my monster, I wished that I could have sat there, just for a while. Because I felt it, too, that it’s a night that drips with molasses, smooth and languid. A night to be sad and soft and slow.

Jul

16

Numbers

July 16, 2009 | Leave a Comment

I have:

15 days until I get a new roommate,
20 days until I turn
23,
22 days until I celebrate.
25 high school teachers I am responsible for (only a slight exaggeration) for
4 weeks,
2 classes, each just
1 week,
17 books I am required to read–
12 by July 20th,
5 by August 3rd,
10 completed,
7 left.
42 articles to read,
7 for July 20th,
0 read.
237 raw photographs to skim through and edit,
1 giant migraine.

Jun

16

Top 5 Update

June 16, 2009 | Leave a Comment

It’s been over six months since I last updated my Top 5 (Freebies List), and so now I’m updating again.

The shocker: I’m bumping Hugh Grant.

I know we all thought this day would never come, but I felt the same away about John Cusack until I realized that it just had to be done. Now it’s Hugh’s turn.

The list is now:

1. Shia LaBeouf

2. Matt Damon

3. James Franco

4. Jason Segel

5. Patrice Bergeron (who also may be bumped in the near-future…sorry, man)

Same-sex alternate: Megan Fox

Jun

14

The Thrill is Gone

June 14, 2009 | Leave a Comment

I’m in the process of trying to import all of my Dad’s CDs into iTunes, a program about which he knows nothing except that it plays music and now and then his computer prompts him to update it. Such a prompt popped up on Thursday or Friday night while I was here, and I got to watch as he watched the little blue bar crawl with epic slowness across the screen. It was like listening to a little kid in the back of the car, “Are we there yet? Are we? ARE WE?!”

Dad: “Wow, [20-30 something] megabytes. That’s a lot, right? It’s so slow.”Me: “Yeah. Well, you probably ignored a thousand bazillion updates lately so….”

Dad: “It’s taking a really long time.”

Me: “You can do other stuff while it updates… it’s not going to yell at you.”

Dad: “I know. It’s just slow. That’s a lot of space.”

Me: “You have NOTHING on your computer. Believe me, you have PLENTY of space.”

Dad: “That’s a lot of megabytes!”

Me: “YOU HAVE A LOT OF GIGABYTES! DO YOU KNOW WHAT A GIGABYTE IS?!”

I’m embellishing the conversation a little bit for my amusement, but you get the gist. At one point or another we did go over that a gigabyte is a thousand megabytes and that with 200+ gigabytes of space he was certainly in the clear for a 20-30 megabyte iTunes update.

So, back to my point. I’m importing CDs. My mum and I got Dad an iPod Classic (120GB, that’s a LOT of MB!) for Father’s Day. Last night before he got home from work I had to rifle through all his stuff to find the BB King, Eric Clapton, Santana, etc. CDs. They were on the top shelf of a cabinet above his desk, so I knelt on the desk and pulled them out stack by stack. Then they all fell out of the cabinet ONTO MY HEAD.

Today I wanted to continue, but every time I went into the office I was followed not only by Dad, but BY THE ENTIRE PACK OF THEM. Mum and Nora, too, both of whom know what I am trying to do and instead of DISTRACTING THE MAN like I kept making mean eyes at them to do, they chatted in the office until I gave up and went upstairs. At this point Mum finally decided to take Dad to Manchester for a while so I could finish my project.

All I can hope is that while they are at Sam’s Club they remember my subtle hints over the last few weeks of what I want for my birthday, specifically that I, too, would like an iPod Classic because my iPod is slowly but surely getting ready to kick the bucket.

Jun

12

Smells like Teen Spirit

June 12, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Sometimes—very rarely—I get this urge to organize. It’s just this kick, a spurt of organizational power that comes from nowhere.

Last night at 11PM I got such an inkling. Of course I’m at my parents’ house, so cleaning my apartment wasn’t really an option. However, there is this entertainment unit in my room that has two cabinets just stuffed with, well, crap from before I moved out for college. So I decided to sift through everything and found several embarrassing photographs, poems, scribbles, etc. depicting the melodrama that was my teenage years.

A brief overview for you, Dear Reader, because I’m sure that someone besides me must find these little horrors to be amusing.

+ I was going to have a photo here of me at Disney World when I was 16-ish, but I have no scanner. But man, what style! Jeans and a huge Roca Wear hoodie… I think this was after my brief bout of Hot Topic, fishnets, and over-sized pants with nonsensical zippers. The large hoodies phase lasted through my first or second semester of college.

+ Apparently I was quoted as having said, “The monkeys are in the hills. Tell the general.” If you knew me then, it wouldn’t seem so strange.

+ Another example of such lunacy, a scribble on a random blue piece of paper: “Dear Rabbit named Joe, I like rabbits named Joe because they are rabbits. And they are named Joe.” No, I never touched drugs in my life. Amusing to me and perhaps no one else is that if you consider Chinese astrology, I technically pseudo-dated a rabbit named Joe several years after the estimated date of above scribble.

+ A letter addressed “Dear You” discussing a stuffed hippo and my being disgruntled at being asked, at 16, to help in the planning of a friend’s wedding that myself and all other mutual friends knew would never take place. The letter ends mid-sentence. I’m assuming the second page was lost somewhere over the years.

+ Poems about death, about love (which I had at that time not yet experienced to any extent), to my ex. All angsty, poorly written. There is one titled “Gay Pride and Mangoes” that I may try to do something with.

+ Fake postcards from a project in 8th grade. We had to “travel” across Europe and send postcards we drew home to our friends. My favorite is one I wrote “from” Dublin:

Dear Lauren,

I’m in Dublin right now. I saw my aunt and cousins. I went to Phoenix Park and the Dublin Zoo. There was a baby kangaroo. He was so cute. I also went to Kilmainham Jail. That’s where the 1916 leaders were killed. Well, I gotta go! –Kayleigh

I hate writing postcards. Apparently I hated writing fake ones, too.

+ When I was 16-ish, I had a website with outrageously nonsensical info and quizzes. One had to do with which deranged mind-of-Kay animal you were. I found one of the responses. Again, I would post the image, but I have no scanner. So here’s what it said: “You are a Rabbit! You’re a bad ass fuzzy critter with a bob tail! Almost everyone bows down to you because if they didn’t, you’d beat the shit out of them! You took over Froggie Island and you’re working your way in on those stupid little monkees. You rule the world and you know it.”

I remember people who didn’t know me or my friends leaving comments like, “What the hell is this? It makes no sense.” Which was the point…. I want to be crazy again.

+ Episode descriptions of the home-made movies we called DPOA (Different People of America). My two favorites:

Episode One: A girl falls in love with her Beanie Baby. What happens when the Beanie turns its back on her and has an affair? Watch as host L. Bass interviews the couple, as well as Osito’s mistress. (I believe episodes one to five are lost).

Episode Six: Meet Bin Rah Hah Bin Laden, his pregnant girlfriend, the Queen of some little-known country, and male/female…thing, and be amused by the most interesting DPOA yet! (Includes special guest appearances).

Kara still has that last one somewhere, but I believe episodes one to five were lost. The last is the funniest anyway…. While Osama was busy with terrorism of whole countries, Bin Rah Hah (played by Deidra, better known these days as porn actress Lanah Layeau) was more interested in taking over Burger King.

Enough teenage craziness for now. I’m sure I’ll find more when I go through my closet tonight…

Jun

4

I’ve been awake for twenty-nine minutes.

June 4, 2009 | 2 Comments

I started going to the gym again. I went twice, actually – two days in a row. Be proud. My arms now hurt all the time, and if I reach above my head I wince and sometimes whine. I blame this machine. Which, you know, the nice old fellow in the photo seems to be enjoying just fine. But it’s all a LIE. It’ HURTS. In all honesty it’s more like a modern, legalized form of torture that one willingly subjects oneself to because they’ve been drawn into the EPIC. LIE.

The thing is that I have this problem with “working my way back up.” I want to be able to do the workouts I was doing by the end of last summer — 30-40 minutes on the treadmill at 15% incline, 20-30 minutes of weights, 300+ crunches, five days a week, etc. But, you know, I can’t. Not after eight months of my most vigorous exercise being dancing on a Friday night. So I’m stuck with 20 minutes at 10% incline, 20 minutes of weight, 300 crunches — maybe three days this week, four tomorrow. Slow and steady wins the race, yadda yadda. Sigh.

My small goal: 30-35 lbs by the end of August.

My overall goal: 45-50 lbs.

In all of this my hope is that I don’t lose my ass and start looking like the McDaid side of my family. I’m not offending them, don’t worry — they’ve heard it all and know that they all got nothin’ back there. It’s a sad, Irish thing, the McDaid ass. I actually laughed out loud once while reading Love is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield. He was describing his wife and him on a trip to Ireland (although I’m not sure if at this point they are married or not):

Around that time we went to Dublin (the one in Ireland, not the one in Pulaski County) to visit cousins of mine. As we walked down the street, she said, “You know, I’m starting to understand this whole Irish boy/southern girl thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I have the only ass on this entire street. Look around.”

“I’ve seen your ass before.”

“Look at the men. The men are walking into walls.”

“That’s true. I thought they were staring at me.”

“I have the only pair of hips as far as the eye can see. They have never seen a girl before. Holy shit!”

“I thought it was my new Suede T-shirt.”

“None of these women have any ass at all. This is fucking awesome.”

Beautiful. I stopped reading right there, called my mum, and made her listen while I read the passage aloud.

So anyway. After the amount of torture I’ve put my female relatives through regarding their lack of a behind, it’d be a sad thing for mine to go because I worked out too much. I’ll have to be careful. And when all is said and done, if I have lost it… I’ll just have some overpaid plastic surgeon move some of the deadweight from my boobs into my ass. There’s plenty to go around.


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