Category Archives: Self Discipline (My lack of it)

Musings on Paula Deen While Eating Ice Cream

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Saturday was a really, really hot day, and Penelope and Hank and I spent much of it packing and toting boxes between our house and our storage unit in preparation for our upcoming move. At the end of the day, to reward ourselves for all our hard work, we stopped at a local market for ice cream cones. While waiting at the counter to pay, I encountered this latest issue of People magazine:

I immediately called Penelope over and pointed it out to her. At this point, my indignation had rendered me momentarily inarticulate, so I couldn’t explain exactly what I wanted her to notice.

“You know she only did that because she caught so much heat for the diabetes thing,” Penelope said nonchalantly, accepting her ENORMOUS “small” ice cream as the cashier passed it across the counter.

I don’t care why she did it. I know from grim experience that losing weight is hard, whether you’re trying to lose five pounds or one hundred. When you are battling a lifetime of deeply ingrained habits, even your own livelihood, as Paula Deen is, it’s even harder. I give her props for her progress so far, and I wish her all the luck in the world in keeping the weight off, because that’s the hardest part.

No, here’s what annoyed me about the People cover: the “Wow! Once a size 18, now a 10!” that hangs in the air beside Paula’s newly-svelte thigh. I have also lost thirty pounds this year, and I also started at a size 18, and I am now… a size 16. Several years ago, I lost 60 pounds and went from a size 20 to a size 16.

Because I am part of a huge online community of people losing weight (livestrong.com — if you need to change your lifestyle, eat better, and drop the pounds, I totally recommend their Daily Plate calorie tracker: better and more accurate than Weight Watchers, and totally free), I know that my 30 lbs = 1 size is a lot more typical than Paula’s 30 lbs = 4 sizes.

Sure, Paula probably has one or two items in her wardrobe that are a size ten. My wardrobe ranges from size 12 to size 18. Penelope’s ranges from size 4 to size 12. That’s the problem with the way women’s clothes are sized: unlike menswear, which is sized by measurement, women’s clothes are arbitrarily sized by a number that has absolutely no standard meaning. (Women’s sizes start at 0, for Chrissake! That’s not a size!) Women’s sizes are not at all standard between brands, and they change over time: “A woman with a 32-inch bust would have worn a Size 14 in Sears’s 1937 catalog. By 1967, she would have worn an 8…Today, she would wear a zero,” notes Alaina Zulli, a costume historian in this excellent NY Times article on the subject.

Sure, people carry their weight differently, and lose their weight differently. Maybe Paula dropped all of her thirty pounds at her waist, thus dropping sizes quickly, while I tend to slim first around the face and feet. (I’m not kidding: for me, 30 lbs = 1 clothing size, but 20 lbs = 1/2 a shoe size.) Still, I think People’s cover is misleading at best and at worst, potentially discouraging to those who drop pounds without dropping sizes.That’s not what we should be focusing on, anyway. Since clothing sizes are completely arbitrary, who cares what size Paula’s wearing? We need to give her credit for making a huge lifestyle change, and celebrate the fact that she looks great and is (probably) much healthier. We need to make her success accessible to all of the rest of us who need to make the same changes: if she can do it, so can you, and so can I (if I stop going out for ice cream!)

-C.

Time to Unplug

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Hank and I drove home tonight in a deluge, wipers slapping at their highest speed, rain pounding on the roof and windows, puddles sloshing against the wheel wells. I opted for the back roads rather than the highway so I could take my time, and I’d long since turned off NPR so I could concentrate on getting us safely home.

Hank started talking in the backseat, but against the roaring storm and the road noise, I couldn’t hear him. -And suddenly I caught myself with my thumb on the Volume + button on my steering wheel, trying to turn him up. I was actually trying to turn up the volume on my toddler.

Yes, it could have been worse. I might have been trying to turn him down, or trying to turn up the radio to drown him out. I suppose I can take some comfort in the fact that I was trying to listen to him even in the midst of my white-knuckled driving distraction. But it got me thinking: I now turn to gadgetry to solve every day issues in a way that is so automatic, so reflexive, that I don’t even think about it… and maybe that’s not such a good thing.

“Phone” was one of Hank’s very first words, and he knew how to flip through photos on my iPhone before he knew how to walk. I’m not proud of that. We derive a certain amount of smug satisfaction from living in a TV-free home, but the lack of a TV doesn’t stop us from logging too much screen time. This very instant, I’m blogging at the dinner table while I supervise Hank’s meal. (Penelope’s out at our home inspection tonight: more on that another time.) Penelope is addicted to the New York Times Crossword app on her iPad. I check Facebook on my phone the very instant I wake up, most mornings.

I definitely notice that with all the time I spend plugged in to my various gadgets and digital distractions, the less activity there seems to be going on in my mind, even when I unplug the external noise… and that can’t be a good thing, no ‘maybe’ about it. So while I’m not ready to cut my digital umbilical cord and swear off the internets entirely, I am going to try to seek a better balance. I can’t turn up the volume on my toddler, but maybe if I unplug the noise, I can turn up the volume on my own thoughts.

Wish me luck.

-C.

All We Need is Just a Little Patience

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Hank and Willow, watching for helicopters

Whenever I hear the saying, “Patience is a virtue,” I always add, “but not one of mine.” I am, and always have been, an instant gratification girl. I love the internet, because the moment a question pops into my head, I can get an answer in seconds. This need for instant gratification takes a toll on my wallet, of course: I shudder to think how much money I could save if there were no such thing as Amazon’s One-Click purchasing option.

Yet even as technological advances make it ever easier to indulge my every fleeting, consumerist whim, there remain many things in life that happen in their own time, and no amount of wishing and hoping and bashing my impatient head against the walls will speed up the process. And so, with very little grace and a great deal of frustration, I wait.

Hank is also learning about waiting and patience, with roughly the same levels of grace and frustration as his Mumma. We live about a block from a small regional hospital, which is visited on occasion by a life flight helicopter. When this helicopter takes off and lands, it flies directly over our neighborhood, filling our house with a racket similar to the noise made by an off-balance washing machine, only much louder. Penelope and I had always considered this noise pollution one of the drawbacks of our current address, until Hank took notice of the helicopter’s visits, and then it became a perk.

Whenever he hears the “copter,” he runs to the door and starts begging to go outside and watch it fly overhead. We bring him out onto the porch or lawn, and he erupts into paroxysms of delight. He points and shrieks with excitement, and he will spend hours (even days) enthusiastically retelling the story to anyone who will listen, reciting his entire helicopter-related vocabulary: “copter,” “loud,” “high,” “up,” “watch,” “fun,” “fly,” “vrrrroooom!” His excitement is infectious, and now when we hear the distant lub-lub-lub of the approaching chopper, we all drop whatever we are doing and run out to the lawn to watch the show.

The only problem is that Hank doesn’t understand that the helicopter doesn’t come and go at his mamas’ command. His nascent personality is developing a strong tendency toward perseverance. Unlike most toddlers, he is not easily distracted by another toy or activity, and he is not easily persuaded to wait: like me, when he wants something, he wants that thing, and he wants it Right.Now.

Sometimes, he wakes up in the morning with the helicopter at the forefront of his thoughts. We wake to hear him over the baby monitor, babbling in his crib: not the usual cheerful, chirping chorus of “milk” and “monkey” which are generally his first concerns upon waking (he has a monkey lovey from which he is inseparable, at least when he is tired), but a more plaintive and insistent “copter, copter, copter.” Days like that tend to get a little rocky, because there is no reasoning with him. If the helicopter doesn’t happen to visit, he will spend hours standing by the door hopefully, waiting, while his mamas try to interest him instead in breakfast, stories, music, toys. Any distraction we manage is only temporary. Sooner or later, he goes back to the door to ask, once again, for his “copter.” It breaks my heart a little bit not to be able to give him what he wants, or even to bargain with him as we do so often in other circumstances: One more story, and then it’s time for bed. Eat your broccoli, and then you can have more blueberries. Today is Tuesday; we go to the pool on Fridays. We can’t tell him, “It’s time for lunch, now, but the helicopter will come when you finish your carrots.”

I know that too much instant gratification makes for a spoiled kid with a nasty sense of entitlement. I know it’s good that Hank is learning that he can’t always get what he wants, and that some good things are worth waiting for. I know I can stand to keep learning those lessons, myself. It’s just that waiting is soooooooooooo damn HARD!

-C

Confessions of an Undisciplined Scribbler

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It’s too bad that soap operas are a dying breed, because I think they may have been my calling. I have been writing fiction since middle school, but I never finish anything, because I lack discipline. I usually don’t bother to map out my plots before taking pen to paper, and when I do, I quickly toss the roadmap out the window at the first sign of an intriguing plot diversion. I am always sending my characters off on unforeseen detours without considering the long-term ramifications on the story, and it makes for a messy result: sometimes the decisions a character makes to end up on such a boondoggle is not in keeping with her values or motivations; often, the diversion is not in keeping with the themes of the story up to that point; always, always, always the detour sends the plot-train careening off the rails. However, some of those detours bring the plot to places that are better than I could have planned and imagined, and in that case, careful editing/re-writing of the beginning can salvage (and generally even improve) the story.

No, here is my real downfall: my inability to master (or, if I am honest, to even truly attempt) the art of the dénouement. Almost everything I have ever written ends in one of two ways. Most of my stories are truly soap-opera-esque, with a huge cast of characters who  flit from one adventure or crisis or romance to another over the course of thousands of pages and the span of decades of fictional time. Occasionally, characters will die off — sometimes as a result of peaceful old age, but more often as part of the drama — but never, ever, ever, does the character arc reach resolution. Just when it looks like there might be a conclusion on the near horizon, there’s a car crash or a meteorological catastrophe or someone will get knocked up, and there goes the crazy plot-train, derailed again. This is the first option, and these stories always end with cliffhangers — not because I plan them that way, but because the plot detours have become so complicated and convoluted that I can’t begin to unravel them, and so I give up and go on to another project.

A few years ago, I decided that I am a grown-up and if I’m going to spend untold hours engaging in a hobby as self-indulgent as creative writing, I needed to be more disciplined. When a new story line would pop into my head, I made myself write it down, map out the dramatic structure, sketch the characters — what do they look like, sound like, what motivates them, what are their backstories, what fears make them lie awake at night, do they have annoying tics or charming quirks, et cetera — and most of all, Plan. The. Ending. Because, without a satisfying conclusion, what’s the point, right? We’ve all read books that are fabulously written, totally absorbing, exciting and delightful and transporting… right until the author gets lazy and writes a slapdash ending that falls flat and kills our pleasure in everything that went before, right? There is nothing sadder, more frustrating, more infuriating to a reader than that! It’s like getting food poisoning from a rich delicacy that tasted fantastic going down, but once it turns on us, our enjoyment of that dish is spoiled forever.

Alas, my efforts at plot discipline often turn out even worse than the stories that just go on and on, careening from climax to catastrophe and nadir to pinnacle: usually, these are the stories that bore me until I give up and abandon them, half-written. I will start with piles of notes about the characters, research about the settings and the plots, sketches of important places and people, and the most beautifully plotted dramatic arc, in which I know in advance the purpose of every single scene of every single chapter, and exactly how everything that happens in the story will lead into the next scene, and the next, and the one after that, until we reach a conclusion which is both surprising and thrilling and yet also, in retrospect, somehow a bit inevitable. -Weeks and months of prep work, in which planning and researching the story has taken all of my free time, has consumed my every thought so that I am wandering around in a distracted haze, and yet….

And yet, somewhere along the line, no matter how promising the story seems to be, no matter how carefully planned, no matter how rigidly I resist the impulse to let my characters tiptoe along the primrose paths of plot diversions, I always become convinced in the middle of the writing that the story is turning out to be utter shite. Boring, lifeless, pretentious, uninspired, ridiculous, embarrassingly horrific drivel. So I give up. Rather than burning themselves out in a blaze of credulity-straining action that is (sometimes) glorious in its absurdity, these stories trip along haltingly until they sputter and die, sometimes in the middle of a sentence.

Anyway, it’s too bad about soap operas, because if I could have been a soap opera writer, I wouldn’t need to bother with plot resolution. I could happily send my characters on wildly improbable adventures, let them fall in and out of love on a whim, lift them up and send them plummeting, toy with their emotions, and never worry about where or when the crazy train would reach the station. Best of all, I could have gotten paid for it!

-C