Defining Moment

Word Association.       I say ____________________ and you say ______________________. 

• More
• Less
• Hungry
• Full
• Weighty
• Light

These are all powerful concepts, and depending on the interpreter, can evoke different, even opposite responses. They can be good things, bad things, things you wish you had or felt, or things you'd wish would leave you alone and forget where you live.  Like it or not, these are concepts we deal with on a daily basis.  But is it a matter of better or worse?  Is More really better?  Is Less truly worse?

Words, it seems, are flexible.  People, often, are not.

We define ourselves in concrete terms.  We use numbers for our age, our weight, our salary and our grade point average.  We use GPS coordinates to identify where we are all the time: where we live, where we eat, where we work.  We use mascots for sports teams, colors for school pride, and corporate symbols for all that we eat, drink and drive.  We define ourselves politically and religiously.  We wave flags and wear lapel pins and advocate for causes important to us.  If there's one thing we know, it's all the minutiae of data that make up the sum of our individual whole.

And that's all fine and good, until...

It's fine and good until we take all that data and apply it to everybody else.  Now there are sides.  Now there are absolutes.  If Option A is good, then Option B must be less-good, which, as we all know, is bad.  The sliding scale feels more like an anvil of judgment, and words once so flexible are now tools used to rule on the value and worth of everything and everybody.  It's brutal.  Or, it can be, if we let it.

And that's the key.  If we let it.

Over the last several months one of the things I've been doing is taking stock of some of the things that I have let define me and rewriting the script. The driving, concrete (boring) bit of data is that after five months there are 40 less pounds of me, or about 17%.  To answer questions quickly: Yes, I'm proud of myself.  I worked damn hard.  What did I do?  Unglamorous answer:  ate less, moved more, counted nothing, aware of everything. Where did I go?  Privacy of my own home.  Family supportive, cats alternately annoyed and amused.  Do I have more to lose?  Yes.  How much?  No idea.  Ultimate goal?  To continue to feel better, and get stronger and healthier.

So, there's less of me, and that is a very good thing.  It wasn't a vanity decision, it wasn't a doctor yelling at me decision (which would be entirely justified), it wasn't an upcoming reunion or anniversary or social engagement where I felt the need to impress people.  It was frankly, a sudden, middle of nowhere decision that I had just had enough of the way I was.  And while you could rightly use many words to describe me, the one that was the most harmful and destructive was apathetic.  I had let apathy define me, and I knew, or realized, or maybe just remembered that's simply not who I was.  I decided I wasn't going to let my sedentary job kill me, so I run the stairs and the library stacks every day.  I decided that I wasn't going to allow my too-busy life to be an excuse, so I go at it at home four days a week.  Religiously.  No excuses.  No missing.  Period. Ever.  I knew that buried under the apathy was an extremely strong and strong-willed woman.  I wasn't going to be afraid of numbers, or data, or words that defined me.  I stared them down, I jumped, I ran, I sweated, I swore (a lot), I made zero excuses and reminded myself every day that I who was was my choice and nobody else's.

So today, I'm so much more, partly because I'm so much less.  My life is full but now I feel so much lighter and more hopeful.  I would describe myself as weighty because I am strong and determined.  And as for hungry?  Absolutely I'm hungry.  But it has nothing to do with food.  I'm hungry to do and be the person I choose to be on my own terms. And I hope to never forget that being hungry is part of who I am, because the opposite of hunger is apathy.  And I intend to never let that word define me again.

Da Capo

 

We're Idiots

©2008 GreenTuna 

This is the story.

In the summer of 2008 I was traveled to England as chaperone for teenagers who saw the major sights of England and then spent a week studying at the Royal School of Church Music.  While they were in school, the chaperones were free to go wherever and do whatever.  Being single parents and on a budget, we decided to take a quieter, less-touristy route, and we spent the week in the Cotswolds.  With our B&B serving as home base, we'd climb into our teensy rental car with our trusty GPS and tootle around the countryside.  It was my job to drive the car (manual transmission, stick on the left) and not have my head explode.  It was my friend's job to remind me to STAY LEFT.  We did well.

One of the things we'd do nearly every day was go on a geocaching adventure.  For those who don't know, geocaching is nerdy hide-and-seek.  You are given a set of GPS coordinates and a clue of varying degrees of helpfulness.  That's it.  It's your job to find the cache, but equally important is that you find it secretly.  Nobody else should see you find it or know what you're doing.  You have to find it replace it so it remains hidden and no muggles (non-geocachers) are any the wiser.  The size of the cache can vary greatly, from an old Army ammo box to a tupperware sandwich container, to something the size of your thumbnail.  Caches can also come disguised as fake rocks, fake pinecones, fake bolts or fake birds, to name a few.  They can also be magnetic and hidden in street signs, lamp posts or park benches.  It's very Forrest Gumpity.  You never know what you're going to get.

Because the Cotswolds contain hundreds and hundreds of miles of public walking trails, it's the perfect place for geocaching.  You can take a hike, see the countryside, discover interesting historical landmarks, learn something about the area, and play with technology while you play hide and seek.

There was a geocache near here,

but this sheep was no help whatsoever.

In fact, I think he was laughing at us.

Our entire trip had been more than a little rainy, and one day as we were out geocaching, the weather was pretty sketchy.  As we finished up, it started to rain, but we had to find just one more.  Obsession?  Table for two.  We drove as close as we could to our goal, and got out of the car and assessed the situation.  What stood between us and the cache was

A field.

A cow field.

A cow field with cows in it.

A cow field with cows and cow pies in it.

A cow field with cows and cow pies and cow ruts and holes.

A cow field with cows and cow pies and cow ruts and holes that was a boggy swampy nightmare.

Awesome.

Off we went, with me stupidly leading the way.  I attempted walk slowly, to run fast, to jump, and to hop-skip in order to avoid the millions of cow pies and individual sized bogs that filled the field, not to mention steer clear of the cows so we wouldn't have to play tag with irritated bovines. When we made it to the other side, it was obvious from  knees down that we were entirely unsuccessful in the staying dry department.  The good news, though, was that we found the cache and felt very pleased with ourselves because we were so clever. And then we had to go back again. 

This time I tried a different direction and I walked, ran, jumped and hop-skipped back across the field.  It didn't work any better than the first trip, and in fact, I think it was worse.  It didn't matter.  By the time we got to the car, the rain was in full gear and we were soaked and didn't care.  So what did we do?  We grabbed a camera and went BACK OUT to the middle of the bog to take a picture.  Why?  Because we were there.  We just had this great, unexpected, hysterical, messy, wet, smelly adventure and we wanted to remember. 

Which brings me to now and this new house on the Monopoly board of the Internet.

I started Tuna News ten years ago on a whim when blogging was just a feisty kid, and coincidentally I had a feisty kid.  It was a way to chronicle the ups and downs and ins and outs of parenting and childhood and all the great, unexpected, messy, wet, smelly adventures of life.  But kids grow up (as she did), life gets hectic (as it did) and finding the time to compose coherent thoughts in the middle of life and two jobs became as tough as crossing a field without landing on a cow pie.

Now seems a good time to return for a million different reasons, some of which I am probably not even consciously aware of.  Something told me it was time, so I think it must be.  But I'm in a different house now with a different address (NEW URL!).  I'll post cross-links on Tuna News and over time I'll probably be migrating some old writings over here.  But all the content on the old site will remain there, at least for the time being.  If you visited me before, I think things will mostly be the same -- some silliness, some thoughts, some happy and undoubtedly some sad.  It will be a chronicling of the great, unexpected, hysterical, messy, wet, smelly adventure called life.  I want to do it because I was here -- I am here -- and I want to remember.

Thanks for finding your way here.  I hope you'll want to come back.
We can have a blast and discover some treasures together.
I'll distract the cows.