Gymno

succumbing to peer pressure

Saturday, August 27, 2005

I have a problem with this paragraph from the NYTimes (re: the morning-after pill):

The announcement infuriated Democrats and abortion rights advocates, who said the Food and Drug Administration allowed politics to trump science. Abortion opponents, however, said the application should be rejected.

Why do I have a problem? BECAUSE THE MORNING-AFTER PILL IS NOT AN ABORTIFACTANT! A nit picky criticism? Perhaps. But with words as controversial as abortion, we should be precise in their meaning and use. Also, the current argument is over how to make the pill available only to those 16 and over. Yes, because clearly younger adolescents would be much better off having an abortion or raising a child!

Thursday, August 25, 2005

TV

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Starved are my two new favorite shows. FX is a good thing.

Oh, and because Steve asked - the meal: organic oatmeal pancakes with peach compote, rosemary dusted potatoes, chicken sausage, and biscuits and apple butter, all from The Flying Biscuit. An Atlanta Institution, conveniently located a block from my apartment. Not eating for like 8 hours and hitting the gym beforehand heightens the experience.

Whoa. I just finished a meal that bordered on orgasm-level satisfaction. I'm sure some of that had to do with the levels of hunger I managed to reach pre-meal, but nevertheless, damn! that was tasty.

In other news, suddenly it's the 1800s again. And nowhere even a whiff of a mention maybe IQ tests aren't accurate measures of intelligence, or, I don't know, biased? And of course, we all know intelligence is linked to brain size:

Professor Lynn argued in a letter to The Psychologist this month that differences between the sexes were explained by a link between IQ and brain size.

"Men have larger brains than women by about 10 per cent and larger brains confer greater brain power," he said.

"So men must necessarily be on average more intelligent than women."

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Happy Rex Manning Day!

That actually has nothing to do with what I was going to post about, but Jennings im-ed it to me, and it made me smile. So there you go.

Anyway, what I was going to say was that my previous post was rather passive-aggressive, despite the fact that I pride myself on rarely resorting to such methods. You see, the previous post is the kind of outburst that would ordinarily get relegated to my private journal. The thing is...I haven't really been ok this summer. Some days I've been closer to ok than others, but overall I've been fairly messed up. And I feel like I've been talking about that a lot here, too much actually, but maybe I'm too nonchalant about that in conversation, maybe I'm not good at expressing myself. Some people are good at calling me on such bullshit, others, not so much. Either way, the situation is, I'm not good at saying no to people, I like to be there for my friends, but I'm just not in a place where I can keep doing that right now. Please don't misinterpret me - if there's a crisis, I'm still your girl. You know I answer the phone anytime, day or night. But if it's perhaps something less than a crisis...well, I just can't be strong dependable Megan right now. (in fact, I'm sort of trying to learn how to be someone perhaps slightly less strong and dependable) So rather than having a series of awkward, uncomfortable conversations, I'm simply making this (perhaps inappropriate) public disclaimer. So there you have it.

I miss me! I miss being able to walk into a crowded store and not feeling overwhelmed. Hell, I miss being able to get out of bed in the morning without feeling overwhelmed. I miss breathing as an automatic, involuntary activity. I miss a body that feels normal, not full of headaches and chest pains and general off-kilter-ness. I miss being able to drink and smoke and relax and not fear freaking out. Fuck. Ok Megan. Get a grip. Go back, read the entry from right after NYC. Remember that this is just a bad day...a bad few days. Remember that just earlier this afternoon you felt like dancing. This too shall pass.

So I've been in a funk lately. This never-ending cold has kept me out of the gym for about three weeks, and if I'm going to stay off the Lex, I have to make some serotonin the old fashioned way. I'm a little slow on the uptake, but it finally dawned on me yesterday that maybe the reason I've been feeling like I can't breathe is because I haven't had a decent work out in ages. So I beat myself up at the gym for a while yesterday, repeated that this morning, and already am feeling better. Now, if I can just kick whatever this thing is (latest theory is allergies - apparently swollen, pale nasal passages means allergic reaction, swollen and pink means other infection), I'd be doing great.

In other news, therapy is going really well, if a bit rough. Funny how post-epiphany the thing about which you had such a startling realization begins to seem so obvious. Anyway, the short version is, apparently I've been dragging around a lot of family issues that I thought I had put away years ago. Now I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to really put them down for good that doesn't involve a painful conversation with the parents. Maybe if I keep writing down the hypothetical conversation, and make some more progress on imagining what they would say...