The Weight of Gratitude

Dear Amanda,

I usually don't like to count my blessings in terms of it could be worse. I'd rather list the beautiful things than list the things that aren't ugly. As in "I'm so grateful for this delicious orange juice" rather than framing it as "I'm so grateful that my family isn't starving." I take it as a challenge to celebrate whatever is going right in my life, to purposefully be positive in my thanks. And, it ends up making me feel lighter and more cheerful--which to be honest is the reason I count my blessings most of the time.

via János Csongor Kerekes

But sometimes, we need to embrace the heavy side of gratitude.

Sometimes we need to approach the alter of life and examine the depths of suffering that we could be suffering but aren't. In the sincerest humility acknowledge that through luck or providence or anything besides own merits, we've been spared. It's a sad gratitude that weeps for the child brides, the lost soldiers, the refugees, the helpless witnesses to disease and addiction. Deep gratitude for loving parents, for a safe childhood, for never needing to choose who in my family will eat tonight, can only be realized in light of the grave reality that there are many who cannot be grateful for those things.

 

We can't always be aware of the water we swim in. No one can go through life with the weight of human suffering  constantly on their minds, but we can only be half grateful if we never think about it either.

My life is a precious, gilded gift I do not deserve nor will ever deserve. The lack of ugliness is itself breathtakingly beautiful, which makes the good things all the more exquisite. Like music, the major cadences are much more brilliant for the darkness of the minor chords. I know it's a cliche, but it's a profound one.

One of my favorite aspects of 1984 was how the words were stolen to keep people content-- double-bad, bad, good, double-good--- four words (well 6, actually) to describe the entire range of emotion. Without the words to frame emotions, people lost the ability to perceive their own feelings. Likewise if we limit our emotional life to the upper end of emotions--- a bad day is when we've lost our car keys. In that, we've lost the meaning of the word bad and we've lost something about our perception of goodness as well.

That's the long-winded way of saying that like everyone, I have problems I'm dealing with, but that doesn't diminish how double-plus wonderful my life is.

I were but little happy, if I could say how much

--William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, 

I'll leave you with more transcendent music to ponder to

The best of Fridays,
Stephanie

The Hot Girl's Guide to Wearing Pantyliners

Hey Amanda,

I'm 3 years late to the Pinterest party; I know. It's simultaneously far more brilliant and exactly as inane as I thought it was.  At some points its solving life's most persistent questions, but there's lots of things on there that beg questions of the letter F. 

Not least of all:

Pantyliners in armpits. 

Now, I hate pit stains. But, pantyliners. Really? The correct answer is chemistry.

The active ingredient in your antiperspirant is an aluminum compound-- aluminum zirconium or aluminum chloride. And aluminum is also used to produce bright yellow dyes such as FD&C Yellow 5 Aluminum Lake. Coincidence? I think not.

via Etsy

So if you hate pit stains to the point you're willing to put scratchy paper under your arm with adhesive that's definitely not strong enough to hold it in place and risk shedding a pantyliner out of your sleeve in the middle of dinner.....maybe you should switch to deodorant. 

Deodorants sans antiperspirant are, unfortunately, a lot harder to find as a lady than as a man. You can certainly find some in the wealthy-hypochondriac section of your super market like Tom's of Maine or Crystal brand deodorants. But if you're cheap like me, you can snag some Old Spice when it's on sale for $2. 

Now, I think it's kinda weird that we have gendered smells at all, but don't worry. There are some Old Spice scents that have gotten in touch with their feminine side. Names like "PunchaShark" are definitely compensating. 

There are two kinds of Old Spice

Currently on my dresser is Wolfthorn which to my nose has notes of pink grapefruit and pineapple. Bearglove is also decidedly on the Posh side of Old Spice if you're looking for suggestions. It's hard to label things in the scent saturated deodorant aisle, but I thought it smelled like coconut and citrus. Most of the Wild series are fruity smells. 

I haven't used antiperspirant in over a year and half, and I can honestly say I have never noticed being any wetter. I have noticed that none of my undershirts have any pit staining. And I never wear pantyliners on my shirt. 

Happy Friday, 

Stephanie

Complicated Solutions:n. Usually synonymous with bad solutions, especially in cases where the problem is relatively straight forward. see also Occam's Razor.  

By the way, the "American's space pen/Russian's pencil" story isn't true. 

Please Don't Tell Me I'm Looking Skinny

Hey Steph,

When I'm really stressed--I mean the kind of stress that feels like your life is spiraling out of control, not the I've-got-tons-of-stuff-to-do-and-not-enough-time-to-do-them-all kind of stress-- three things happen:

1. I don't eat.
2. I don't sleep.
3. I read tons and tons of scriptures.

I guess my brain thinks that I might as well be spiritually fit while I slowly kill myself through lack of nourishment. :) Fortunately, this response is very, very rare for me--though sleep is sometimes a harder task to achieve during normal stressful periods. But a number of years ago, I was sitting right in the middle of this state. In the midst of being emotionally unwell, I began to lose a lot of weight. Week after week, month after month, the weight came off. I didn't notice. My mind was on surviving the next hour of class without crying in the middle of it. 

But people sure did. 

"Amanda, you look so good." 

"Wow, girl, you're looking skinny. How did you do it?" 

"Girlfriend, you are gorgeous. Keep it up!" 

And later, like a switch, I went from being called "as thin as a model" to people asking, "Are you ok? You look too skinny." 

They didn't know. They didn't know that I wasn't eating, and fortunately, it wasn't because I was anorexic or their words could have promoted the continuation of my quick weight loss. They didn't know that as bad as my physical health was at the time, I was incredibly unwell emotionally. 

They didn't know.

Fast forward a few months later when I was eating and sleeping and not inhaling scriptures like a drowning person does air, I was eating lunch with a dear friend I hadn't seen for years. We had both known each other a long time and had both never been particularly petite girls. She knew I had had a rough year but could see I was doing better. She looked at me and asked, "So, how did you finally do it? How did you lose so much weight? You look great." Behind her question, I could see the frustration of dieting and the daily disappointment of looking in the mirror. I could see all those feelings I had felt my whole life emotionally filling her eyes. 

After explaining that my route to weight loss was something I would never wish on my worst enemy, she looked at me and said, "I'm sorry it happened that way. . . . It must be nice to not feel fat though."

I laughed. "I do feel fat still, sometimes."

I share this rather personal part of myself because the perspective of this experience has changed my life forever. 

First, I learned that the BMI is bogus (seriously, completely bogus! Read this article and you'll never care about those numbers again). At my lowest weight I was still just in the normal weight range on the BMI scale. But I was sickly thin--so if you're aiming for the bottom number on the healthy BMI weight, it might not be a good weight for your body.

Second, I owned that I was never going to be physically enough. After the fact, when I actually started caring about what people had said to me about my weight during this whole period, I got kind of angry. I was cheered on to keep it up and that I was "looking skinny" as if I was on my way to being actually skinny. And then one day, I was sick looking. There was not a time that I was perfect, where my weight was no longer commented on because it was just right. The arbitrariness of the whole thing just ticked me off. Since then, I've decided to just not care. I have been every pound that is healthy for my body. Not a single one was enough. Now I just aim to take care of my body and be healthy. Looks are a terrible gauge.

Actually lots of things do. It's incredible how good food tastes when it is not combined with guilt. Also, skinny is kind of boring day in and day out. 

Third, I found that self-esteem is completely outside of your weight. When I looked into my friend's eyes that day at lunch, I realized that the only difference between me and her and the way we viewed our bodies was that I had journeyed into the land of skinny and I now knew personally that that belief we had our whole lives that at some magic number on the scale, we'd finally feel pretty and attractive was a complete and utter lie. That number didn't make me feel pretty or attractive at all. I realized that if I was going to believe I was attractive, I needed to do it some other way. The number meant nothing.

This is basically what the first image is saying. 

Fourth, I began to see that I am more than my weight. As everyone commented about my weight, I remember thinking, "Why do you even care about that? Life is terrible, and you want me to care about the fact that I carry around less weight than I did yesterday?" The compliments just seemed like such a stupid thing when I was trying to figure out basic things like how to be happy and how to pass my classes, oh yeah, and how to sleep. It made me realize our focus is off. It's easy to compliment someone's looks, but we've got an intellect and a personality and a soul to compliment too. We'd be best to notice those things too.

No, I'm not going to be ticked off if someone compliments my weight. I'll admit it feels nice, but I've trained myself to remember at the same time that it doesn't really matter. And I'm not saying that you should never notice that someone has lost weight. I've had impressive friends work for months and months, day after day, working out at the gym and eating healthy to lose a lot of weight. That's a huge deal--and something we should celebrate! But a compliment like "You are such an example to me of hard work. That's really impressive." means a whole lot more than "Dang, girlfriend, you look hot!"

Cheers,

Amanda Kae

3 Reasons Invasive Species Aren't a Big Deal

Hey Amanda,

Life couldn't be better. Dogwoods and azaleas are blooming everywhere. Yesterday, I saw a blue heron catch a fish in the creek. Wisteria is forming little bundles of smokey purple in the pine trees all over the place, and the smell is fantastic.

via Virginia Sanderson

They tell people around here that wisteria is a super destructive invasive. In my mind I'm thinking, "a  weed that is fragrant, beautiful, and attractive to bees...where's the negative here?" Seriously though, dividing vegetation into two categories-- native and non-native-- is a stagnant way of looking at nature. Nature has been introducing and exterminating "invasive plants" since the Devonian era. Here's three reasons why invasive species are a non-issue in the gamut of things affecting native ecosystems.

1) Self-contained  ecosystems are a fiction.
There are no hermetically sealed acres anywhere on the planet. Globalization does not just apply to Coke, but to parasites, fungi, and viral infections. Case in point,  the entire East coast of the US used to have its own version of the redwood. It was 50 feet tall and 5 feet in diameter--the American Chestnut tree.

Family standing in front of American Chestnut, circa 1901
viaThe Roanoke Star

By the first decades of 1900's, global trade introduced Asia-endemic Chestnut Blight to the Eastern seaboard, killing every American Chestnut in it's native range with so few exceptions that they're listed on the bottom of the wikipedia page. Efforts to save the American Chestnut from extinction all revolve around out-crossings with Asian chestnut species, because the American Chestnut does not have the genetic material to survive the modern world. To argue that we can import goods without importing unintentional consequences is silly. And it's ridiculous to suggest that we're going to return to continental isolation of our own volition.


2) Native Ecosystems Include Animals

Yeah, I heard the smell of human hair really scares the deer away....
via Alex Berger

Native species thrive in a specific circumstance where predation and regeneration are in balance. Plants evolved with particular predators and pollinators in mind. The fact is the landscape acts nothing like it did in 1700 so why insist that the same plants thrive in it.  Deer populations are three times as dense as they were in the 1700's. We have an out-of-hand deer population that eats a lot of seedlings, because we don't have many wolves.

We spay and release stray cats because it seems inhumane to kill them, ignoring the fact that we're  artificially inflating the number of small-game predators in our area. And that's how we end up 3 billion birds poorer. Birds are one of the main, and in some instances the only way seeds are spread.

Humans irrevocably change the fauna that lives around them, and that means changes in the flora.

3)Maybe Invasive Species are One Way Nature Adapts to Change

"Invasive" is just the another way to say well-adapted. Much more has changed since 1700 than the animal populace. Hardiness zones have changed. Rainfall patterns are different. Streams and rivers no longer follow their natural course. Nature does just fine with adapting to all of this. But adapting, by definition means change. A lot of plants do better in milder winters; some do worse. Some need wet springs. Some need hot, dry summers. Some need snowfall. Some need humidity. The thing is that most plants are persnickety about how they germinate. It's not just competition from foreign species that makes things difficult for some species to grow where they use to thrive.

The destructive and beautiful Kudzu.
via Kitten Wants

"But, kudzu."

Let's be clear, I wouldn't wish kudzu on my worst enemy. But...it's drought tolerant and nitrogen-fixing. It's edible. Livestock love it. Ecologically, there are much worse things than kudzu. I'd rather have acres of kudzu than asphalt. Both inhibit the germination of hardwoods, but one of them also increases soil erosion in surrounding areas, provides no oxygen, and releases toxins in the air. Just sayin'

tl;dr Frankly, I don't care if a species is invasive.We should be preserving native species from extinction because biodiversity is important, not because they were here first.

If we're playing the "I was here first" game, the Dinosaur snack Ginkgo biloba wins by a landslide.
Too bad the female trees literally smell like vomit.
via University of Wisconsin-La Crosse ...via Berkley

Your Irresponsible Plant Lover,
Stephanie