Rainbow of Hummus

The recipes to these hummus flavors will be coming soon, but to give you an idea of what I spent my evening working on…

Dear DOA, it’s me, Andrea

Dear Department of Agriculture:

I know, you are a terribly underfunded agency given far too much responsibility. I realize given huge tasks, creating nutritional guidelines can feel like a side job. Something you give to the second-year interns when they’ve run out of filing to do. I know that there are hundreds of people, though, that dedicate themselves to this incredibly important task. All day, every day, that is their job. I also realize that the human body is an varied and wonderful machine, with hundreds of millions of incarnations that are unique. Some are healthy, some are not. Creating standards can be very difficult and means stepping into a debate that most sane people would just simply stay out of.

Still, given all of that, all I can say to you is What. The. Hell.

Seriously, I am sorry to have to say such a thing to you. I appreciate and respect your work, I really do. But here’s the deal. I know I need to lose weight. I am even aware of the fact I have been overweight since … well, since a very long time ago when I was still in school. Like most overweight people, I have been through cycles of loving and hating my body, of working very hard to lose weight and then putting weight back on. Through all of it, I have tried to remain generally active. Sure, I don’t swim 2 hours a day like I did when I was in high school, but I still cut a mean rug on DDR’s workout mode every now and then. I bicycle for my errands in the warmer months. I even occasionally jump on an elliptical machine to watch TV, rather than just sitting there. I know I carry too much weight. I know all the health issues I am at risk for, and think about them pretty regularly.

Even with all of that, the number of the scale recently shocked me a bit. So I decided to start very carefully watching my calories and making more of an effort to move more. After a rough year of being in and out of unemployment, not to mention paying a lot more attention to how tasty (but not how many calories) my cooking was, I had put on some weight. So I decide to take a look at what these new-a-few-years-ago guidelines had to say about healthy eating.

First, finding the recommendations on your website took forever. Nowhere do you say “want to see what we recommend? Click here!” but instead it’s a “My pyramid” link very far down on the side of your website. Once I find your recommendation page, I’m asked to enter my height, weight, age, and gender. This is fairly normal-to-be-asked information when one is looking up nutritional information, so I happily enter it.

And what do I get? Not a helpful page that states “Here are the healthy eating recommendations for someone of your height, weight, age, and gender” but instead this:

The weight you entered is above the healthy range for your height. Extra weight can put you at a higher risk for many health problems including type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. Click here for more information about health risks you may have. Talk with a health care provider about a diet and physical activity program that is right for you. To learn more about diet and physical activity for those who are very overweight, check these websites:
Would you like to see a food plan that will meet nutrient needs for a female, 6 feet 4 inches tall, in the healthy weight range?

Uhm, wow. Thanks. You just told me “you need to lose weight! We can’t tell you what you should eat, you’re too fat for that. But, if you want to see what someone who isn’t too fat and is your height and age should eat, we can tell you that.”

Not only is this particularly unhelpful and provides no new information, but it has a great demotivational effect. I recognize that you have to give some kind of a warning – it’s important to let people know that they need to lose weight. But seriously, telling me how horrible it is that I am fat, and then offering to give me advice for when I lose weight? That’s terrible.

But it got worse. No, DOA, that was not the end of your insult.

I decided to test out your calculator and see what you did consider a healthy weight range (since you didn’t tell me on your demotivational page). I entered various weights, seeing at what point the warning went away. At 250 lbs, the warning got a little more subtle, but still told me I should lose weight. At least at that point you offered *some* nutritional advice. Not until 205 lbs, though, did you quit warning me about how fat I was.

205 pounds. Seriously? 205 pounds?? At my lowest adult weight, when I was in college, being very careful to eat only about 1100 calories a day, living on 90% coffee and exercising an hour a day, I weighed in at 230. I wore a size 16/18 – definitely not skinny, but what I would consider healthy. For reference, my almost-too-skinny-to-be-healthy fiancee is 5′10″ and weighs in at 140. You’re suggesting that someone six inches taller could only weigh 60 more pounds? 10 pounds per inch is barely enough to cover the ribs that he has sticking out.

So, U.S. Government nutritional guidelines, I’m pretty close to giving up on you. I appreciate what you are trying to do, but your attitude just is not working for me.

Sincerely,
Andrea

Poetry : Mourn and Recall

This poem was written on-the-fly at a September the 11th poetry slam that quickly went from a public remembrance to a war-bashing session. While my feelings about the war were, and are not fully explained by this poem, I was very frustrated with the lack of opposing views being presented.

Two and a half years later, all I can say is much of it is still true – this country is in a very public session of moral questioning and quandary. Perhaps I should turn this one into a series

Originally posted September 12th, 2007.

You stand up here
Speaking of revolution
Of those that died
For misbegotten beliefs
In God, Country, and War

You stand up here
Telling me that we’ve got it wrong
That we messed it all up
And all that’s left to do
Is mourn and recall

Mourn and Recall
That day when the towers fell
That our soldiers were deployed
That the world turned upside down

You stand up here
Mourning the lives that are lost
Recalling liberties yanked away
Speaking of revolution

So I ask you
The affected, the teary-eyed
The revolutionaries
The believers in country
Or in conspiracy

Who do you mourn?
Who did you
Who do you know
That you would have,
Should have,
Could have,
Kissed goodbye

Now, standing up here, respectfully
I ask you to recall
Not a president’s blunders
Or the lack of planning
Not the fear of reprisal
Or your political sway

But recall why it is
A Revolution around which you rally
A Revolution for which you mourn
Is it freedoms denied?
Or the hapless, hopeless, senseless deaths?

And I ask you to recall
How much freedom there is
Surrounded in the stifling black
And lost self
Of an unwanted burqua

And I ask you to recall
How many hapless
Hopeless
Senseless deaths
Hidden in mass graves
Came to the Kurds
At the hands of chemical tests

And I ask you to mourn
For the on-mass killings
Of innocents
Bystanders
And the unlucky
Those caught in the crossfire
Of powerful dictators
And their desires

I am not standing up here
To tell you that we are right
That the world operates
On black and white

I simply ask you to recall
That though WMDs are MIA
Our reasons were not
And are not
Quite all that simple
Mourn for those that die
On all sides
And realize

That jihad means personal struggle
Not death
And destruction
That jihad is a holy word
For believers in Country,
God, and Conspiracy all

And we are a world
In a very public expression
Of personal moral jihad

So I ask you
The affected
What is your struggle
The world is not black and white
And we all live
In a world of gray

A world where words
Mean what we are told
And now how they are intended
Where questioning “truth”
A “questionable activity”

Recalling the world
As it used to be
I am forced to mourn
Openness in thought
And inquisitive natures
Willing to ask

Because when you ask yourself
Which direction to go
Or what you believe
THAT is jihad, a revolution in thought
Not a violent, outward
Explosion of emotion
But the slow burn
Of an internal struggle

Where there is no easy
No right answer
Where both sides are right
And all sides are wrong

By ripping away freedom
To restore expression
And soaking in blood
To save an entire people
We are mourning the days
When life was more clear-cut
And recalling the days
When we were not much better

Our world lives in gray
And struggle
The inevitable conclusion
Jihad is the pain of growth
And something good
Trying to happen

So I am standing up here
Waiting for that bright dawn
I stand here
Speaking of the revolutionary mourning
That will allow us all to recall

Making a decision

When I was very young – I’m not sure how old, exactly, but young – I wrote a note to my parents. It’s a note that still sits, framed, on my mom’s desk. In a very large, very child-like scrawl, “Dear Mom and Dad, i have descided to be independant.”

I suppose that should have been a clue for how the next 20 years would be. As long as I can remember, I have been That Kid. The one that planned her Halloween costume in February. The one that ran every single year for class office (and lost every single year, too.) The one that failed math in middle school because they made me do they same problem over and over and over again – but still managed to make it to the honor roll. The one that The one that took every AP class she could in high school. The one that took 19 credits, did competitive speech and debate, and had two jobs throughout college.

I have always been striving, working, just in general worrying very much about what will happen, how I can plan for it, what the next move is going to be and the 6 steps I’ll take after that disaster might be. I make lists. I have excel spreadsheets that would make most accountants cry. I rarely let more than 5 or 6 items sit on my desktop at any one time. At one point, I nursed a caffiene habit that started with 8 shots of espresso in the first hour I was awake.

This isn’t to say I was this uptight about everything. I hate doing the dishes, and more often than not let them pile up. I can be terrible about returning emails and phone calls. I have avoidance skills that (as my exes can attest to) can be quite mighty. I always told myself that’s because I was Stressed Out.

I truly tried to nurture my creative side, and I can honestly say some of the moments I was happiest was when I was awake at three in the morning, madly typing out some poem that wouldn’t leave my brain alone; or contorting myself into some weird, probably dangerous position to get The Perfect Photograph. Far too often, though, I let my Stressed Side get the better of my Creative Side. I quit doing poetry slams because I was frustrated with myself for not having my poems memorized, for not getting better scores. I let photography fall by the wayside because it didn’t Serve a Purpose… and not having a functioning camera made that far too easy of an excuse to make.

A year or two ago, I got laid off from my job – and I wish I could say that’s when the realization hit me. It wasn’t, though. Instead, the nine months I was laid off I spent making sure I had lots of other things to stress me out. I started a business, I made job-hunting a full time job, I stressed out over not getting more housework done, not being the perfect housewife, not gardening more, not getting it Just Right. When I got another full-time job, it was a Big Marketing job that I told myself I would love. I had responsibilities, I had people to answer to, I even got to make spreadsheets. Things happened, and I moved on. To another, even more stressful job.

Then I realized, among other things, that I was in that pattern again. I was stressing out – and doing more of it to myself than I needed to. By this point, I’d been in that cycle so many times that the span between Point A of starting a project and Point C of being so stressed out I avoided the issue was getting shorter and shorter. Working between 50 and 70 hours a week at just one job didn’t help at all either. I gained weight – and a fairly significant amount (though, when you are my size, an extra 20 pounds is a relatively small percentage of body weight to add on.) I stopped sleeping well, when I did sleep. In general, I wasn’t healthy.

Not surprisingly, I ended up unemployed again. About at that point is when it really did hit me. I have spent the last 25 years trying to grow up too quickly. Trying to prove way too much to myself and others. Trying so badly to be A Better Person. Instead of succeeding at all of that, though, I was burning myself out. I saw where I was headed, and it wasn’t good. I hadn’t had a chance to sit back and realize exactly how lucky I was. I had a boyfriend / fiancee who loved me and supported me in most everything I did or wanted to do. I had a beautiful house to live in. I had a family, and a family of friends that were more wonderful than anyone could ask for. So why the heck was I stressing out so much?

A very long and fortunate set of circumstances later, I did end up with another job. It’s a job I don’t have to stress out about. I can ride the bus to work, mostly not worry about what’s going on at work, even if it’s a Big Deal, and enjoy myself after work. I am dipping my toes into waking up my creative side again. I am truly trying to be less stressed and more at peace.

It’s not always an easy truce with my brain. There are days I worry I am not doing enough. There are days I wish I could do more. There are days I think that I am “Not Making Use Of My Talents.” There are still days I drink four shots of espresso, though now it’s more to feel a buzz than to keep myself from falling asleep. I think, though, that I am finally growing up. And growing up doesn’t have to mean being Perfect. Growing up also does not mean getting the great job, the amazing benefits, the great car, and the great house. Growing up means finding a place inside of yourself that is at peace – and balancing with it.

At least, that is what I am hoping. I will always have hare-brained ideas, and will probably always stress more than a Zen master would recommend. Finally, though, I think I have succeeded in becoming independent; it’s just that nobody told me it would be an internal, not external, struggle.

Shoes : A tempestuous relationship

It has been a love-hate relationship most of my adult life. I have a feeling that, given a slightly different situation, I would have much more of an obsession with shoes – cute shoes, cool shoes, comfortable shoes, shoes for every purpose, day, and outfit. However, my obsession with shoes has taken a slightly different form.

Trying to find them.

Here’s the deal – I wear size 13/14 men’s shoes – which translates to a 15/16 women’s shoe. While I have a decent chance, in almost any store, of  finding a pair of men’s shoes that fit at least passably well, there are days a girl wants nothing more than to wear something that doesn’t make her feet look large, square, and masculine. However, most companies don’t even make size 15 or 16 women’s shoes.

The ironic thing is that there are a few companies out there that make lots and lots and lots of women’s shoes in sizes 15 or 16. I can get five inch heels, spike heels, platform shoes, wedges, leather, buckles, and plastic without a problem. I can even get knee-high, lace-up, black pleather platform boots that you rarely see people wear outside of photo shoots and dance clubs.

But a pair of work-appropriate, reasonably comfortable women’s dress shoes? Forget it. For years and years, there was only one company I could find that made shoes that even began to meet that description – and I do, in fact, have two pairs of their shoes. The original pairs were about $200 apiece, and after ten years of hard use (I was in competitive speech and debate, after all, and that meant three full days of running across college campuses in these shoes, three or four weeks every month), I have had to have them each resoled about six times. On top of that, they aren’t what I would call comfortable – they’re passable, and my feet don’t usually go numb after wearing them for five or six hours.

So, for the most part, I have ended up just wearing flip-flops or tennis shoes. Not my ideal, but hey, they fit and they are relatively comfortable. Most of the time, I’m technically violating dress codes at my place of work  – flip flops, no matter how comfy, rarely look professional. Most of the time, I also have not many other options. I do have a pair of boots that look great, but they are admittedly about 2 sizes too small and after just a few hours in them, my feet start to really hurt. I’ve worn those so often they need to be resoled now too – I didn’t really care that my feet hurt, they looked good, gosh darn it!

I’ve also got quite the selection of “cool” shoes – four inch spike heels, check. Big chunky shoes with flames on them and a secret compartment, check. I’ve even got the slip-ons that look like the belong in an issue of Old Man Fashion Weekly – Large Print Edition.

Every once in a while (usually when my latest pair of sandals is starting to wear through), I start looking for shoes. There have always been a few sites that catered to large-size shoes, but for the most part they stopped at size 14 and the shoes were $150 or more a pair. Tonight, though, I discovered that Barefoot Tess, a retailer that usually was just too expensive for my tastes, was carrying shoes that were not only cute, but “run wide” in size 15, and came in under $75 a pair.

I just about jumped for joy. Then I promptly blew a large portion of my first new-job paycheck on two pairs.

and the Barefoot Tess "Doll" shoe

They’re both size 15, but they reportedly run wide. So I’m keeping my toes crossed that they will actually fit. If they do, I will be more excited than I know what to do with myself. So now, it’s on to the obsessive clicking of the “track my order” button.

40 acres (but no mule… yet)

About a year ago, Pete and I, though a very long and fortuitous set of circumstances, ended up purchasing a 40 acre plot in Moses Lake, Washington. The land is completely unimproved, with no power, no water, no shelter, and barely a fence to speak of. During the summer days it is blazingly hot, with barely any natural shade to speak of. During the nights it gets very cold, with a clear sky and constant wind.

It is also beautiful land. When we went out to look at it, I admit I almost cried. It wasn’t so much the look of the land – mostly empty except for sagebrush and a lonely, broken down fence. Rather, it was the smell. We arrived on the land just at sunset, and the sound of the small bugs just waking up for the evening made for a background to the gorgeous scene in front of us. Then there was the scent. Sagebrush, growing strong and hardy in the buffeting breeze.

I grew up outside of town, on a house that had mostly sagebrush behind and surrounding it. Almost every childhood memory I had of being outdoors was tinged with that scent. Standing on the land, smelling the sagebrush, watching the sunset, it felt like… home.

And so, we bought it. Last summer, we did some camping on the land, though not as much as we would like. The first thing we did was go out with our family (some blood related, some not) and ask the land for its blessings in return for its protection. Beyond that, we haven’t done much… yet.

Sure, we have plans. Lots of them. Some of them hare-brained, some of them not so much. Water will be an issue, as it always is in high deserts. We’ll have to drill down several hundred feet through solid basalt to have any hope of reaching the stuff. About 2/3 of the land is former farming and Conservation Resource Protection land, and the other 1/3 is grazing land, full of basalt rocks and thick underbrush. There is a tiny little canyon on the land, and while we own one wall and the basin, the other wall is just over the “border”.  It is a quiet place, a calm place… a place you can feel the grounding of the rocks while feeling the lightness of the air around you. I hope to spend many mornings watching the sun rise in that canyon. A few mornings, we have discovered hundreds of little desert flowers, surprisingly bright in the landscape of brown and sage green.

This year, we hope to possibly complete some kind of shelter on the land – for practical purposes as well as the experience. With no shade, and only bring-your-own shelter, hauling a tent out can get frustrating. Creating your own shade on this landscape takes at least a tarp and a few building materials – and we would love to be able to just go out to the land and enjoy ourselves each time. So, the current plan is to attempt a modern version of a Central Asian Yurt / Mongolian Ger. We’ve got the basics of the plans – now it’s just a matter of buying the materials (we’re planning about $500 for the wood and building materials, and we’ll be recycling the covering cloth). That, among the many, many other things we have planned for this summer (wedding, family reunion, etc), will hopefully be another project completed.

If we complete the yurt before winter, though, doesn’t really matter so much to me. I may very much enjoy living in the city, and perhaps be a little too attached to my coffee, but there is absolutely nothing that beats waking up in the morning, watching the sun rise, and smelling the sagebrush welcome another day.

Welcoming Spring : Eight weeks out

Unlike some of my more brave counterparts, I still can’t bring myself to put plants outside yet. Yes, there have been days of 60+ degree weather, and yes, I am enjoying nothing more than watching the bits and pieces of green that have been spoiled by our incredibly mild winter popping out to say hello to the world once again. It’s the feeling of spring, and it’s intoxicating.

It’s so intoxicating, though, that there are days I want nothing more than to spend the entire day outside, feel the cool soil working its way between my fingers, and to help nurture small plants along. Yet, like all things in nature that know what’s what, small plants don’t survive the frosty weather and all-too-possible cold snaps very well.

The good news is, it’s only eight weeks out to planting season here. So tonight, Pete and I started the first of our garden starts. Tomatoes of six different varieties, bell peppers of many colors of the spectrum, and salad all went into the starter trays tonight. They are joining the pines, onions, and catnip that have spent the winter inside, as well as the pineapple plant, bigger pines, aloe vera, and various varieties of succulents that live inside all year round, greedily drinking in the sunlight from the south-facing windows.

It’s not much, yet. And there’s the constant internal struggle between “I want to grow EVERYTHING” and “we should grow what we will actually eat and use” – but it makes me happy. Spring is on its way, and the plants, like little gifts from the soil, will be reaching their way towards the summertime. I look forward to watching them grow and measuring their progress out of the ground as well as the sun’s progress through the sky.

Spring, I can’t wait for you to get here!

We’re going to be movie stars!

Ok, so more like “supporting role starts” but hey, we can still be excited!

Our friends Ryan and Faythe have hatched a project called “Dick in the Dirt” and it’s a 70’s style women’s prison movie. No, it’s not a porno, though there is apparently going to be an extensively large and inappropriately (appropriately?) shaped roll of bologna that is going to be making an appearance.

Both Pete and I are going to be in the movie – I am the Head Guard of the women’s prison, and will be doing such sinister things as you would expect. Pete gets to be the Delivery Boy – “the only man the women in this prison see on a regular basis.”

Tomorrow morning, bright and early, 8am (which will feel like 7am) we’ll be heading out for the first big day of shooting. I’m so excited! I was always a community theater geek, but there just weren’t many parts other than “Giant Spider” for six-foot-four, plus-sized women. But now there is – and I get to ham it up. It’s Awesome! I even get to wear my platform boots.

Oh, and no, no Wedding Cans movie. Yet. And even if there was, I have a feeling they’d get actors to play us. If they do, this can be “that movie” that gets whispered about when we’re famous.

Poetry : Dewey

I admit, I’m a reader – and for a while, I was trying to be a slam poet as well. Strange things happen when you combine those loves. Here was my first attempt at it.

Originally posted August 13, 2007.

TinyTall : Just A Taste

I find it rather appropriate that I’m writing this “first” entry while sitting on my kitchen floor. In the last 10 years or so, I’ve had a wide variety of blogs and homes on the web. Between 2001 and 2006, I even managed to keep a blog of sorts going pretty consistently. Then… well, let’s just say I took a very long unintentional break. By my count, this is the fifth “I’m back” post I’ve written for a blog. This time, though, I’ve realized that I have been trying far too much to specialize my blogging for far too long.

So here I end up. Sitting on my kitchen floor, laptop on my lap, cats purring on my feet, Pete pouring me a drink. It’s a reset of my day, and this is a reset of my blog.
So here it is – just a taste of TinyTall. You’re liable to see a little bit of everything here. Bits of poetry that strike me at three in the morning. Life updates. Photographs (lots of those, hopefully.) Recipes. Musings on natural living. Gardening. Maybe some yurt building. I plan on posting some of the old posts from years past that I’ve dug up, thanks to the WayBack machine. You might even see a bit about Wedding Cans every now and then. In short, this is going to be a lot of the various bits of who I am – which, more often than not, is a puzzle that only sort of fits together.

Welcome back to my virtual home. Hope you enjoy it here!