The Myth & The Majesty

Disclaimer: I am not a dietician, doctor (yet), nutritionist, or personal trainer. I have no official expertise in this area. I don't know everything (although don't spread that one around). I can only relate my own story and opinions. Some of this may be more information than you really wanted, but it's all part of the story. And let's face it -- you don't have to be here if you don't want to. The inspiration for this comes from another blog I occasionally read. I'm not a runner -- I read her blog because she's family and she happens to have some interesting things to say to non-runners here and there. The post I linked to got me thinking ... and now, here we are. I have never been tiny. When I was little, I had the typical gangly build of a kid that spent her days running around the yard with her sister. Aside from that, it could always be said that I was my grandmother's granddaughter -- my hair, my facial features, my bone structure large...

My first real run-in with girl power, as far as I remember, didn’t happen till I was 21 years old. There may have been instances before that, but it wasn’t until I was in Russia that I really caught one. While we were digging holes for fenceposts at a school in St. Petersburg, the man in charge of the renovation kept trying to stop me from helping dig holes. Suddenly, the empowered girl inside me rankled. I was just as capable as the guys doing the work. As with so many things in life, I found out later that my gut reaction was a bit off the mark. It turned out that the gentleman was more concerned about the fact that I was sitting on the ground; it is a Russian superstition that a woman who sits on bare ground will become infertile. Yep. That one caught me off guard. The cover story for Time magazine this week is “The State of the American Woman” and examines, in essence, the lasting effects of women’s lib. It seems that, while we have more power than ever before, we are less happy; w...

Do you have any enemies? I do. Or I did. It's possible he's indifferent now, but for awhile there his hatred of me was strong enough that I could feel the heat if I got within fifty feet of him. It's interesting how that works. How you can go from madly in love with someone to picturing his or her head exploding and enjoying it. Or madly in love with someone to almost fearing him or her. I checked out his former blog today ... It will be disappearing from the Internet soon, if I remember Blogger rules correctly. (Two years without activity and it's gone. Kind of a long life, actually.) I was surprised that I could remember the address, but there it was. I was more surprised when I read a couple of his entries from the time right after us and felt ... nothing. Nothing, where I used to feel guilt. Mild irritation -- an eye-roll at best -- where I used to tear up. All of those big emotions are just plain gone now, and I'm strangely comfortable with that. Let's face...

I spend roughly 3.4% of my waking hours driving to and from work. It doesn’t sound like much, but that equates to about four hours a week of “alone time,” which is plenty of time to catch strange things. For instance, when I get out of my apartment at the right time, I can see no less than three short buses on my trip to work each morning. Given their respective locations they even have to be three separate vehicles. Now, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that many in one town, much less in an under-20-minute drive. That’s a lot of short buses. I’m not a particularly speedy driver. Not to say I’m slow; generally, I just go the speed of the traffic around me (about 5 over the limit). Regardless, there are always a few cars that pass me as though I’m standing still. And, not surprisingly, these are the same cars day after day. Since this is such a regular thing for these people, I’ve reached one conclusion. They’re probably...