Changing my life: TMD is ruining my life.

I have TMD. Here's a link to an article about it. Basically, it's the worst pain I have ever been in, and your face says Fuck You, I'm going to be unbearably painful and keep you up at all hours of the night no matter how much ibuprofen you take (for the record, I'm averaging between 2000 and 4000 mg a day. At some point, I'm sure my kidneys and liver are going to reject all of this and my stomach is going to start bleeding, but on the upside, maybe it'll lead to death and then I won't be in this kind of pain anymore. Yes, it really is that bad).

As I was telling my husband this morning, it's the kind of pain that makes you think really crazy things, like if someone took a hammer to my jaw and broke it and we wired it shut and just started over, maybe that would be better (and hey, as an added benefit, I'd have to be on a liquid diet, so I'm sure I'd be skinny).

And since it's Halloween today, maybe I can find a zombie to just bite off that part of my face. The downside is, then, wouldn't I be infected with a zombie virus and I'd be inclined to prefer brains over, say donuts?

And unrelated to all of my problems, because I have an awesome boss, and I work at a company where you can, in fact, go to the cafeteria and get not only a costume, but also face paint, my boss went there to get zombie face paint (maybe to help me with my TMD problems, despite the fact that he's dressed up like a pumpkin), and came back with a wizard hat for me. Which is sort of funny because this morning I took a shower. (Go with me on this.) I normally shower on days I work out, which is really fine, because I exercise almost every day. But yesterday and today I didn't make it to the gym because I was up half the night in pain. So I totally wasted time showering today, because everyone knows Merlin never took a shower.

So, what I have found works best for managing the pain for TMD is two Vicodin and a shot of tequila. Which is the way all healthy, well-adjusted adults deal with their problems, right? Because it causes the pain to go away COMPLETELY, and I sleep through the night, unlike the rest of the time when I wake up between 1 am and 3 am praying that my face explodes and ends the misery. And I know I sound like I'm being dramatic, but I'm really not.

And for extra fun, another coworker got me a Captain American face mask. So now I'm wearing both a Merlin hat and a Captain America mask.

Captain America mask

Merlin hat

Captain America mask with Merlin hat

My "magicy" face to go with my Merlin hat

Um, yeah. There's really no reasonable way to end this post. 

I'm going to change my life

On my drive home from work today, I decided I needed to change my life. I'm really bored. Like back-in-high-school bored. And so I fill up my time with a lot of things, like going to the gym (which is actually good, because it's healthy and because it exhausts me so that I don't remember that I'm so bored). And then I started thinking about how much fun I had last year with NaNoWriMo, and how much I'm looking forward to it this year, too. And I thought, maybe if I spent more time writing, I'd be less bored. Which got me thinking that I need to change my life.

As maybe weird (or maybe not) as this sounds, I think the first place to start is with my diet. I love to exercise, but I wouldn't have to do quite so much of it if I ate just a little better. Which, of course, to me, means I should first focus on eating up all of the stuff I shouldn't be eating that's sitting around the house. Or I should just be eating up all of the random stuff in general so that I can start this program with a clean slate. Which is how I ended up eating mystery soup for dinner.

A few months ago, when I was feeling totally overwhelmed by the amount of random food being provided by my CSA, I chopped it up, mixed it with some olive oil, salt, pepper, and herbs, and roasted it. Then I froze it, figuring at some point in the future I'd want soup (by my calculation vegetables in liquid equals soup). I did date the bag (from May). So tonight, I dumped that bag of roasted veggies into a pot with some frozen broth (I'm not sure you can freeze broth, but I did, and we'll see if I'm still alive tomorrow), tracked down my immersion blender, blended the shit out of it, and called it dinner. (This sort of activity might be why my husband hesitates to leave me home by myself).

So then, here are some other random things going on. So my company is giving away a free super bowl commercial, and all the employees get to vote on the top 20 finalists. I realize I just did a very bad job of describing the contest, but whatever, you'll have to deal. The point is, I'm super excited about the finalist I voted for, Goldie Blox, because they make engineering toys for girls, and I really think I should have been an engineer if anybody had ever told me that there was some other math-based career path than teaching. But I'm old, and I have two non-math related degrees, and a bunch of student loans, and going back to school sounds like the worst thing possible to me right now, so I'm just going to bitch about missing out in some other alternative universe future. But I don't want that to happen to your girls so check this out. (By "this" I mean the link I posted above.)

So then, my coworker shared with me this thing she bought to sit on that makes her chair so much more comfortable, so I have to have one. And while I was Amazoning (yes, that's a verb), I figured I should do some white elephant shopping. Last year I totally scored big time and received a Black Santa Pornament. It is awesome. So I thought I'd regift it and get him a girl. You know, so he wouldn't be lonely. But the only one I could find on Amazon looked like this, and I didn't want to spend $20 on her. Because I have standards, people. So then I did some more internet searching and discovered that there's an insane amount of this sort of stuff that you can't order directly from the manufacturer. Instead, like the perv I've apparently become, I have to go to some other third party to buy my girly pornament.

So then I thought, what else would make an awesome white elephant gift? Tactical Bacon, that's what! But I didn't want to spend more than $20 on that, so I started looking at some cheaper options. And I found Zombie Apocalypse Survival Kit in a Sardine Can, Canned Unicorn Meat (that you apparently can't actually eat, although based on the Harry Potter premise that unicorns are more or less sacred, you probably shouldn't even think of owning their meat), and Zombie Jerky, that you can apparently eat, but maybe wouldn't want to.

So now I have too many white elephant options. And I haven't technically been invited to a white elephant party. Oh boy. This might be why I need to change my life.

In the event of a zombie apocalypse...

In the event of a zombie apocalypse, you're going to have to kill some people, or at least former people, in order to survive. This is what every zombie movie ever made tells us. And this was my first thought when Captain America told me that a box had been stolen off our front stoop.

My second thought was that the fucker who stole it probably wasn't even going to use the DVDs, and that's just really wasteful. (But then I realized that all theft is wasteful.)

So here's what happened:

A while ago, upon the advice of some friends, I purchased the Insanity set of DVDs. I did the first month of workouts faithfully and noticed NO CHANGE WHATSOEVER. So I decided to stop. I didn't loose weight. I didn't loose inches. I didn't even gain stamina. And according to my heart rate monitor, I burnt only about 50% more calories in an hour of Insanity than I did in an hour of yoga, and about a third of the calories I burnt in an hour of running. I decided that it was simply not the workout for me. It took up too much time, and was producing no results.

But I kept the DVD set because I paid for them, and I figured I could take them on trips or something and watch them on my laptop if a gym wasn't an option. Or maybe I'd try them again later and have better success.

So fast forward to a few days ago when a girlfriend asked me if she could borrow them. Of course I said yes. I told her I'd leave the box on the stoop for her and she could stop by whenever and pick it up. (I realize there is always an inherent risk that something will be taken off your stoop by local delinquents.)

All day long the box sits on the stoop. Captain America comes home from work. I come home from work. I leave to go to yoga. A few minutes after I leave, Captain America comes around a corner in our house and sees the back of a woman walking away from our house carrying the box.

The back of the woman doesn't look like our friend, but it does look like our friend's best friend. So Captain America assumes that our friend was busy or tied up at work or something and sends her friend to come get the DVD set for her. (In hindsight, of course, this is a little silly, but the mind can invent fantastical scenarios when needed.)

I come home from yoga and notice the box is gone, and figure our friend stopped by, like she said she would.

Captain America says, "I don't want you to be mad at me. I'm mad and you have every right to be mad, but I don't want you to be mad."

Captain America frequently gives such prologues before delivering news of any sort, but especially bad news. He is also a bit of an overexplainer. There are worse people to be married to.

Anyway, he proceeds to tell me that the Insanity DVDs were stolen, and how he's mad at himself because he saw the person who took them, but because he had assumed it was our friend's friend (now a seemingly odd mental concoction), he didn't stop her. He's mad at himself for being so trusting (again, there are worse people to be married to). He says our friend showed up about an hour after the theft, rang the doorbell and asked for the DVDs. Which of course, we no longer had.

But I didn't get mad that the DVDs were stolen (apparently it's been that kind of week where thefts from my front stoop just go along with everything else). My first thought, evidently spurred by Captain America's comment on being trusting, was that in the event of a zombie apocalypse, he'd have to shoot some people. You CAN NOT trust zombies. They WILL eat your brains. My second thought was that the person who stole the DVDs probably wouldn't even use them. Of course, when the zombies come for her, she's going to regret that bad choice, as she won't be able to outrun the zombies.

Oh, karma will get even with her...eventually.

Lessons from crossfit: the way to prevent a zombie invasion is to properly stretch your shoulders

Today I took my first full-length real crossfit class at a real crossfit gym, CrossFit 858. (When I was in Hawaii, I noticed that there were all sorts of places called things like Bikes 808 or Burgers 808. Apparently no one could get more creative than their area code. And apparently the owners of my crossfit gym think that's very original. It actually seems like the kind of name you'd come up with when you couldn't think of a name, and you were all, well, we have to call it something, we can always change it later, and then everyone started calling it your silly fake name and that's what stuck.)

Anyway.

We did a lot of shoulder work today. The instructor was walking us through how to properly stretch our shoulders and he commented to the girl who was clearly a chemist (I say clearly because she had a chemical tattooed on her rib cage. I'm pretty sure this is the sort of thing only a chemist would want permanently etched on their body). The instructor, who's name, I think, was Reggie, said we needed to properly stretch our shoulders. He said he didn't want Ashley, the chemist, to be reaching for something and accidentally knock over a bottle of chemicals and create some bizarre new disease.

"Zombies" said Ashley.

"Zombies," said Reggie, "we do NOT want that. Folks, the way to prevent a zombie invasion is to properly stretch your shoulders."

I think I'm going to fit right in.