Labels

There is a new law being passed in several states that requires all chain restaurants to put the nutrition information on each of their dishes right on the menu. The hope is that people will realize that the "healthy" salad they were about to order actually has 450 more calories than the basic cheeseburger, or that the saturated fat in the pasta sauce could sink a cruise liner. The thought was that the information could be used by people so that they would make smarter choices.

Surprisingly, or not, the label thing isn't working out so well. In fact, some restaurants have seen an INCREASE in fatty food consumption. It's as if people look at the labels and say, "what the heck, today is as good a day as any for a heart attack" Personally, I think we just get discouraged, so we give up trying to be better.

Labels, of any kind, are human nature. We like to know where things fit in our world. So we look at everything and place it into a category. For my boys right now, they sort by boy and girl. That Tonka truck? boy's toy. The pink tea set? girl's toy. As we get older our categories get more detailed and extensive. In high school I had hang-out friends, hallway-during-passing-period friends, sleep-over friends, wish-I-could-be friends, and only a couple secret-telling friends. We all do it, so don't act so innocent. We all look at the new person at work and make a snap judgement or two. It's okay as long as you allow yourself the flexibility to change your mind as you get to know them.

And yet, don't you get angry when people slap a label on you? I do. I remember in college I wanted to do something a little out of the ordinary, so I decided I'd get my eye brow pierced...not exactly sure what kind of doors I thought a hole in the head would open, but hey, I was young. My stepdad didn't talk to me for weeks after. It was as if my label in his head had changed from "good, never been in any trouble, daughter" to "rebel child". All for a $35 silver bar and bottle of antiseptic. It made me so angry that such a temporary thing would cause such an overblown response. I took it out, we never speak of it. I must be getting old because now when I see a young girl with a hole in her lip, I make judgments too. Unfair, yes. Inaccurate... maybe.

We label ourselves too. Just look at Facebook and other social sites. Within five seconds on a person's page you know their political stance, religion, martial status, and slew of other unhelpful, surface information to help you determine what? If they will be a suitable cyber-friend? One of the reasons the food legislation is tanking is that is a dang hard to label all the contents of a plate of food. Serving sizes vary, individual cooks vary. The same holds true for labels on people...we vary.

Be careful what you label yourself with. You leave very little room for maneuvering. If you label yourself an environmentalist and then use a plastic bag, people might call you out. If you call yourself a rebel and then pay your taxes you'll be laughed off your anti-government blog. Don't pay and end up in jail...also a government institution..so you've got no options.

I really don't want to go any further on this topic, but I started this blog to help other people so stopping now wouldn't be fair..I haven't left much room for manuevering I guess :) I wish I could say more now, but I just can't. I will tell you all everything, just not today. Sorry if this post has seemed disjointed. I've re-written it about a dozen times. I'm going to stop now. Lucky...out.

Progress

Progress. It looks different for everyone. For a runner, progress looks like shaving 3 minutes off their previous race time. For a someone in business maybe it's that the bottom line is a few dollars higher than last year's. For a student maybe it's a few points higher on their dreaded math exam. For a woman in labor a few centimeters is HUGE progress. For me, progress is a deep breath. Simple right? Not in the middle of an attack its not. (For more on why check out the Panic Attack link above)

For whatever reason crowded rooms get the best of me right now. I think it's the sensory overload that I'm sensitive to. People talking at once, dishes clanging, smells permeating, waiter moving in a blur. Being in a restaurant makes use of all of the senses. I used to love that. I felt so alive in a big crowd in packed restaurant. Good food, good company, music, madness.... But yesterday my pulse kicked, my breathing got shallow, the world got dizzy. I can't even tell you what I ate, much less if it was any good. All I could think about was escape. I had had a week of near nothing as far as anxiety, so to have it come creep quietly back in an environment I was used to enjoying felt like defeat. But a funny thing happened on the way to therapy...

She told me that was progress. Uhhh, okay, sure. Work function, food, freak out...all part of the normal day. Maybe, but that's not what I WANT my day to look like. I don't WANT that to be progress. "What DO you want it to look like then?", she asked

Good question. I guess back to the way I was before all this started. I might have dealt with depression but at least I could run, I could eat in a restaurant, I could drive without thinking about it. But that would mean going backwards, right?

A 15 year-old with dreams of the NFL may see the draft as progress, but he's got a few steps in between before he can get there. Making his varsity team, becoming a starter, scholarship to a good school, etc. I keep looking at this like a sprint. I want to fast forward through all the work and end up the healthy girl I sometimes still get glimpses of. But if the 15-year-old was put on the NFL teams of his dream just because he wished it, he'd likely find himself flattened to the turf before he had a change to take in the scenery. Point A to Point B requires a few steps in between. Skip them, or get there too easily and you might miss the point of the journey.

Progress for me was the fact that instead of letting the panic take over I took a deep breath, then another, then another. It didn't make it all better, but it kept it from getting worse. My day went on, more or less as planned. The therapist says that's progress. I don't really feel that yet, but maybe I will, maybe that, in and of itself, will be...progress.

Too Hip to be Happy

Curtains and coupons and clutter, Oh My! I just visited a site, a rather large and intricate site, all about cleaning. This lady invites you to squeaky bliss by following her routines of "zone cleaning". You separate your house into zones, clean, then somehow within weeks, your whole life is better. Not kidding. She actually claims that by cleaning your house, you can increase your overall happiness. And YES, there are products for purchase. Harmony and Pine-Sol are just a click away.

Dave Ramsey, financial guru, claims that you can "live like no one else, by living like no one else". Meaning scrimp and save now, and when your old...oops, I mean, mature, you can be set up to live the life of your dreams. It's no big deal really, the way you stop spending like an idiot is to spend your entire life obsessing about your money. Wives, you spend 20 hours a week, clipping coupons, making meals from scratch and hand stitching all your children's clothes. Husbands, take on as many jobs as possible, don't worry, you'll have plenty of time for your kids once you've ensured that college is covered..about the time they leave for said education. Bummer, well maybe you'll have time for your grandkids if the stress of three jobs doesn't put you in an early grave.

There are diet and health books that claim that if you eat nothing but vegetables grown in composted soil in an arid climate that you will be a happier, healthier person who will likely live to be 110. You are probably going to sacrifice serious cash and probably personal hygiene in order to accomplish this, but hey, think about how fun it will be to be a decrepit 110! Hope they have chocolate in Heaven because if you eat it while you're here you'll take your longevity down to a mere 90. And I hope you don't mind being broke, because you can't live like that and follow Dave's plan. He'll tell you the proper diet is one of rice and beans.

For the record, I have read all of these books, been to the websites and chugged the Kool-Aid, and it JUST NOW occurs to me why I'm half outta my mind?! I'm an idiot. I am also a disciple. I am scared and a little weak at the moment, so anyone who claims that my life will be better if I just do what they do, eat what they eat, go where they go, I'm packed and ready before I've closed their latest book. Guess what?

I'm not happy.

Nor should I be.

Happiness is fleeting, life is momentary, and beauty can bottled. Sound depressing? It is if you have no hope that this isn't the only life, the only future. C.S. Lewis who is now one of the most celebrated Christian authors of all time, was once a staunch agnostic. One of the things that eventually lead him to faith was the stirring in his soul that he said could not filled by anything else so that the only conclusion left to this brilliant scholar was that he was meant for something else..somewhere else. No one's book is going to make life better because we are meant for paradise, not earthquakes and clogged arteries.

I am not trying to bash any of the above-mentioned folks or their legions of followers, obviously people have had some success and more power to 'em. But for me? It's just another stone tossed into the anxiety bowl of my life's scale. One more rule to follow, one more way to fail. Even the Bible, if it's only read through someone else's lens (i.e. the numerous Bible scholars out there today), can add anxiety and fear. I think even Beth Moore would agree. I think the Jews of Jesus' day were feeling this kind of pressure. I mean just take a perusal through Leviticus or Deuteronomy and you'll see the colossal list of do's and don'ts they were up against. It makes a Miss Manners book look like a cake walk. It's no wonder people were so fascinated by Jesus. He assured them that it wasn't the rules that God was after, but their hearts. The rules were there, in part, for their protection (we still don't eat raw meat and now we know why, but God had it put in there way back when salmonella was probably a person's name, not a deadly bacteria), but the religious elite had turned them into measuring stick and had been beating folks regularly with it. Jesus took the blows, and the law, and hung them on a cross. With scars on his hands, and eternity sealed, he left us with this:

"And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age"-Matthew 28:20

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind...Love your neighbor as yourself" - Matthew 22: 37, 38

"Go and make disciples of all nations" -Matthew 28:19

Love God, love people. No where in there does he say the greatest commandment is to have the healthiest 401(k) or the tidiest living room. I know nothing about anyone else's relationship with God, but I know that I have become a disciple of too many things instead of the only person who has offered and actually can lighten my load.

I do know that budgets make sense, healthy living is a smart idea and a clean house is nice, but spending all of my time stressing over those things makes no sense, is a stupid idea and is terribly unpleasant...for ME. Maybe it's not like that for you. I'm trying really hard not to wish I was you, but oh, sometimes, I really, really do. So that being said: I hope you still read my blog, just don't take my advice, or at least all of it. Learn from my mistakes and make your own.

Much Love,

Lucky

Quiet

I've been meaning to write. I've sat down in front of numerous computers in the last few days with my fingers stalled over the keyboard. I guess I've been hoping for inspiration to hit. In the past, words have just flowed from me, but currently I feel...quiet.

It's not bad necessarily, sometimes quiet is good. For example when you live in a house with two toddlers, quiet at 9pm is a very good, and currently very rare, thing. If you live next door to a crazy teenager and their never-there parents. Quiet at midnight, instead of pumping bass and reeving engines, is a very good thing. My quiet is one of confusion. I'm just not sure what to think right now, so writing seems nearly impossible, but hey it's me your talking to so here I go:

I haven't had another panic attack, or at least a severe one, in about a week, but the anxiety about having another keeps me on constant vigil. I'm told for people with Panic Disorder (you caught that huh? Yep, this is a full-blown disorder) that kind of anxiety is normal. I was given a packet by my therapist about panic disorder and one of the greatest things in the world was to see solid, black and white evidence, that EVERYTHING I think and feel when I go through these is "normal" for people with this disorder. Normal. I really hate that word. What is normal other than the distance between boring and insane...but I digress.

There are also other diagnosis flying around me. Hurled from different directions. Different professionals, with different degrees on their walls with different opinions as to what I need to be doing. Cognitive behavioral therapy, prescriptions, diet modifications. They all agree on exercise. Tough sugar though as that's the ONE thing I'm not willing to do after my last ER visit.

That's the other thing that keeps me quiet. I don't WANT to tell people about all the things I'm scared of now. I don't want to talk about the fact that I can barely drive, I can't run, I can't dance with my kids, I can't drink cold drinks...the list goes on...because I don't want to be afraid. But this is the hard part for my family to understand, I CANNOT HELP IT! I've tried. I AM trying, but I don't know how to make this better.

So I may get quiet. I may not share as much. It's not because I don't want to share, but it's just hard right now. Hopefully the next time you hear from me, there will be good news. News about how I'm winning the fight now, or better yet, news about anything other than me and my mildly irrational brain. We're getting a little sick of each other..does that sound crazy? Oh well, maybe I can make crazy the new normal. What was that? Lady Gaga is already on that track? Damn.

Underdog

Wilson and Grant have a favorite story right now. For those with toddlers, you understand the slight annoyance a "favorite" brings. Favorite, to a toddler, is synonymous with stubborn. They find a favorite and they REFUSE to see any alternatives. So when it's a favorite story, it's read until mommy and daddy start reciting it while they sleep, or twitching when they hear the familiar phrases. Right now the favorite is the Biblical story of David vs. Goliath. Grant, in particular, loves to tell me about how David gets that bad 'ol Goliath. He wants his shot at that giant. Not all of us face our giants with that kind of fervor.

Like many I know I was rooting for Butler in the Championship yesterday (Sorry Ashley, don't hate me). My Facebook page was teeming with like-minded friends. It's not because any of us went to Butler--though for the record, most of them live or have lived in Indiana--but because it was a fun story to follow. Why? Butler is a tiny school school. Duke has Coach K for crying out loud, no one doubted their presence in that game. They have been there before and will no doubt be there again before I'm old and gray. For Butler, it was special. They were the underdog. The David, taking on the Blue Deviled Goliath.

We get sucked in by the little guy. We root for the improbable. We want little David to win. I think about the kid who played back-up all year, knowing that NEXT year would be the beginning of his legacy. He came to the big game excited to take in the sights, and take notes...not to take snaps. But he got called in, and suddenly he went from Legacy-in-Waiting, to Here's Your Chance, Try Not To Blow It. The wrap-ups in the paper the next day, spent about two paragraphs on the winner and about 5 on the freshman.

If a movie is ever made about either game, I'd bet my books that it won't be about the guys who took home the trophy.

So why the fascination with #2 when our country defines second place as the first loser? For me, it's because I more often feel like David than I do Goliath. More like Butler than Duke. I think we all face giants that look larger than life sometimes, and statistics would put odds against us. For some the giant is visible. Maybe it's cancer, maybe it's an exam, maybe it's an actual giant (would love to hear that story if it's yours). Some people can't see theirs. It's a fear of something intangible, or it's worry over something unseen. For me, it's anxiety. This giant beast that lives inside and tells me I'll never win. It tells me it's been here before and I'm small and unprepared. It's got cannons and I'm armed with a slingshot and bad aim. What's an underdog to do?

Take a tip from those who know. Ignore criticism. Counter "you can't's" with "why the heck not?" Focus. Trust those around you. Trust Him above you. John brought me a great quote today. "Don't tell God how big your storm is, tell your storm how big your God is." Don't tell the ney sayers who you aren't, but who you are.

We are often called to do things when we don't feel like we are prepared. I don't feel like I'm ready for this particular battle just yet. But I remember that sometimes the victory isn't in the win, it's in making it to the game in the first place. It's showing up to an uneven playing field packing a slingshot made of courage and stones filled with hope. If there is anything I hope Wilson and Grant remember when they face their giants, it's that, in the end, statistics are just numbers, a "W" is just a letter, and God is bigger than any storm.

(For those Duke and Bama fans: these were just analogies, I'm not dogging your team :)

Music Therapy

I originally posted this sometime last year, but it fits again. When life gets tough I zip back in time. Where's a dang Delorean when you need one?

I love listening to music from the 50s and 60s. When I was a kid I’d spend summers with my dad. There were no bedtimes, no rules, lots of car trips, and non-stop music. My dad had earphones in before dawn, music blasting while he worked around the house, and a radio on to lull himself to sleep. He never quite left the 60s so his musical tastes were the soundtrack to my childhood summers. Thanks to iTunes, Pandora and other such virtual juke boxes, I have been able to ride the musical highway back to those lazy summer afternoons by his pool. Sam Cook, The Surpremes, CCR, The Beatles, all remind me of my childhood, even though I was decades removed from their original fame.

These singers and songwriters (yes, they could all technically be call musicians back then, whereas today we just produce Idols) knew a thing or two about love.

Sam Cooke didn’t know what a slide ruler was for –who does?—but he knew that one and one are two and if this one could be with you what a wonderful world it would be. Fats Domino found his thrill on Blueberry Hill and Diana Ross’ mama warned that you can’t hurry love, you just have to wait. Tell that to ABC Family and their impregnated child stars.

“Love” songs today seem to deal more the act of love than being in love; the thrill of the fall rather than quieter joy of the romance, the initial passion and not the fight to keep it burning, and the various parts of the body rather than the heart and soul. Is it any wonder the divorce rate is astronomical anymore? Once your lady’s apple bottom begins to resemble a rump roast and your man loses his halo, it’s bye bye bye and off to find a lover that won’t drive you crazy.

Frankie Valley got it. He knew you had to just hang on to what you’ve got. There are going to be downsides to a love story. There are going to be struggles but what fun is a rollercoaster of love if you are constantly going up? The dips and spins are what make your tummy tingle, your breath quicken and your heart beat faster. That feeling is called adrenaline and you won’t feel it if your body senses no danger.

Why am I writing this? Music affects us. It can cheer us up when we feel like the world has got the upper hand and cheer us on when we are the champions. Music and those writing it can influence us (you know you’ve tried to moonwalk) and make us think about the world around us..Imagine all the people. I’m writing this because I was once a little girl who wanted to fall in love and thanks to my dad and his music I wanted a man who would stay on my doorstep all night and day just to keep me from walking away instead of a guy who just appreciated the various junk in my proverbial trunk (please note the just). Even though it didn’t work out for my parents I truly believe that you can stay in love forever and ever, amen, but it takes more than lust, more than stares across a dance floor whilst loaded with liquor.Love is a battlefield and if you want to last your going to have to fight for it and like mama said,you just might have to wait.

and if you didn't get all my wonderful musical references than I have no r-e-s-p-e-c-t for you.