Autumnal Things

I've been admonished by several individuals for not blogging lately.  It is apparently how people "stalk" me "from afar" so I truly and deeply apologize for letting all the creepy stalkers down.

I feel like lately every entry is me apologizing for not blogging...it's a vicious cycle.  I apologize for sucking, promise to write more often, then inevetably I do not write more often and have to apologize all over again.  Bleh. 

After thinking long and hard about this while brushing my teeth at work today, I have identified the following reasons why I am not writing as often:

1. Stress.  I know this is such a lame answer but there has been a LOT going on lately.  I hope to write more about the stress at some point, because there are pertinent points to be made about life and yoga and whatnot, but it might be a couple/few weeks before that happens.
2. I hate computers.  Now that I spend the vast majority of my day staring at a computer screen, the last thing I want to do after work is stare at a computer screen even more.  It was all fine in grad school, when I was staring at my professor while also having side convos with my classmates, but now...by the end of the day I am computer-screened out.
3. I'm a little unsure as to the direction of this blog.  Not that I really feel like it needs a direction, but I started this as mainly a food/recipe blog and have since become too lazy to write down and post my recipes.  I'll still try to post when the inspiration strikes, but honestly I think the real recipe creation is better left to the experts.  As a result, this will probably never happen again.  You're welcome.
4. ...life.  I work 45+ hours a week, and when you add in yoga (5ish hours) running (2-3 hours), cooking, cleaning, spending quality time with friends and husband, there is just much time left for writing.

All of that being said, I really, really love writing.  My job basically requires me to communicate in bullet points, and having a blog motivates me to occasionally throw down a few complete sentences.  THROW IT DOWN.

OK I am clearly delirious.

I've learned some things lately, about life:

Thing 1 that I have learned:  Sometimes when you accidentally stick your neck out where it doesn't belong, good things happen.  I'm not really a self-promoter.  At all.  My single, recurring piece of 'constructive' feedback on my last performance review was that I need to be more assertive. Duh - this is not news to me. In the rare case when I do overstep my boundaries it is usually by accident.  This happened recently, and good things came out of it.  So I'm thinking I need to accidentally show up where I don't belong more often.

Thing 2 that I have learned: I need to get a damn handle on my existential crises.  The speed with which I go from "I don't understand this data" to "WHY IS LIFE??!??" is sort of alarming.  The thought process goes like so:

• Can't understand the data in this damn spreadsheet after 10 seconds
• Obviously this means that I fail at everything
• My contributions are meaningless
• How does this spreadsheet matter, in the grand scheme of all the things?
• This spreadsheet is meaningless
• What am I doing
• WHAT IS LIFE WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF ANYTHING EVER WHYYYYY

This all takes place in the span of about 2.5 seconds, and then poor Ben has to deal with it when I come home from work and start rambling about my purpose in the universe while simultaneously trying to cut up a butternut squash. I  imagine that my holding a huge, sharp knife is not too comforting in this situation.  Anyways, this is meant to be funny, not to make you feel bad for me.  Spreadsheets ---> existential crisis.  This is the way of the world.

WOW.  We have gone down a path here.  This is not what I intended to write about at all.

Whatever.

Here are some pretty photos of autumn in St Paul.  A couple of weekends ago we had one of those perfect, mistly fall weekends so obviously I took pictures.  Oh, also I finally bought a new battery charger for the DSLR (the old one vanished on one of my many travels this spring/summer) so expect photo quality to improve drastically in the near future.

Also this browser is the worst and will not let me change the size of my photos.  I'll fix them later but for now, all of these pictures are going to appear annoyingly huge.  Deal with it.


This is when they tore the street up and we couldn't park in front of our house for several days.  It was lovely



Either ghosts or Sherlock Holmes should probably appear at this point



Pretty Colors

 Also, this little gem just opened up down the block from us.  Macaroons are basically impossible for me to resist and now that they are 2 seconds from my home, I'm not really sure what will happen.






...and here is a random shot of my family having dinner at Everest on Grand - probably my favorite neighborhood dinner spot.




I am also proud to announce that I have gotten my parents hopelessly addicted to BBC Sherlock.  It's kind of adorable yet also somewhat terrifying.  The most terrifying thing is probably that Series 3 won't air for another year, so I have to endure 12 months of listening to my dad 'predicting' how the cliffhanger will resolve.  Awesome.

That is all for now.  See you again soon I promise!!

The dumbest thing I have ever heard

Lately in "things that make me embarrassed on behalf of humanity," a California mom has successfuly sued Ferro over the shocking fact that Nutella is not healthy.  Apparently she was surprised to find that the chocolate-hazelnut spread, which tastes like candy and magic, contains both SUGAR and CALORIES.

So...let's talk about this.  Healthy is trendy right now, and everyone and their mom is trying to 'healthify' what was previously deemed unhealthy.  You have General Mills adding whole grains to their sugar-filled, processed cereals and foods that never contained carbohydrates to begin with now shouting from the rooftops that THEY HAVE NO CARBS!!! Not to mention that Vitamin Water is out there acting all "oh I'm so healthy I have vitamins and shit" even though it's basically colored sugar water.  And don't even get me started on sugar and preservative-filled "healthy" granolas and yogurts.  Bleh.  So basically, Nutella is hardly alone in this effort nor are they the worst offender.

Were the ads implying that Nutella is healthy somewhat misleading?  Meh. Probably.  Know what else is misleading?  This:

(source)

Also this:

(Source)

Should anyone be surprised that Nutella is not sugar-free and low-calorie?  No.  Take some damn responsibility and read the label.  Does Nutella have 200 calories per 2-tablespoon serving?  Yes.  Know what else does?  Peanut butter.  Almond butter.  Any nut butter really.

Also, here is a list of things that Nutella on whole-grain toast is healthier than, which are also things I witnessed parents feeding their children for breakfast when I was working at the YMCA:
- Donuts
- S'mores pop tarts
- Pudding
- Twinkies
...yes Twinkies.  One mother diligently and lovingly packed two packages of Twinkies for her son's breakfast every day.

COME ON PEOPLE.  With all of the crap we eat, and feed our children, a little Nutella is hardly going to hurt anyone.  An entire jar of Nutella? Maybe.  A little Nutella on toast?  Of course not.  Anyways sorry, it just gets me all worked up when people refuse to take responsibility for their own choices and lack of due diligence.  Believing everything you see in ads is just ridiculous, and if you don't do your research it's your own damn fault.  End of story.

WHAT ARE YOU?!?

This might become a thing on my blog.  I'm not sure - I am hesitant to make promises because I get distracted so easily that this might be the one and only WHAT ARE YOU??!? entry ever to exist. 

While I don't think WHAT ARE YOU??!? is something that is necessarily appropriate to yell out of your pickup at someone's dog while driving past them on a lovely afternoon, It is sometimes a reasonable question. I come across a lot of things whose very identity and existence on the earth just confuse me.  Peeps, for example.  Also colored jeans.  I personally would not include my dog in this category, but the random dudes driving down Grand Avenue may beg to differ.

Here are the current top 3 items on my WHAT ARE YOU list:

~1~
The 1089 Grand Building

There is no deeper, metaphorical meaning to this question - I very literally want to know what you are.  For the last several weeks you have been taunting me with you cute yet ambiguous posters and vague ridiculousness.  Repeated google searches turn up nothing. It's almost as though you don't exist.  But, you do exist and I walk past you every day.  I seriously can't wait until the end of May, I need to know NOW. After sneaking a peek through the open door during construction hours, I see that you are probably awesome.  Please be a bar that serves delicious beverages.
 

If you are not a pub, I will be very upset



~2~

The Minnesota Opera

Minnesota Opera, I really like you.  I have season tickets and I think you put on amazing shows.  That being said...what the hell with the hipster tweeting? 

There's so much going on in this one facebook post, I don't even know where to begin.  For starters, if you have to say something is super hip, it probably isn't.  Secondly, 'hipster nomeclature?'  This whole post sounds like something my grandma would write, which is not a great start if you're trying to be hip and relevant.  Secondly, your tweets tell us nothing about the opera itself or why we should want to watch it - mostly they just seem to be mocking hipsters.  I mean, I have been known to write rambling expliative-filled opera reviews, but I generally do this while drunk at 1am, and I have no illusions that what I'm writing is good or that I should get paid for it.



what??



So...are you an opera company that wants to make itself relevant to a younger population by leveraging social media?  Are you an actual hipster?  Are you making fun of hipsters??? WHAT IS HAPPENING.   You're just....you're doing it wrong.

In all seriousness though, the way to use Twitter to be relevant to a younger population is to use the platform correctly.  Cake in 15 has an excellent entry on how MNOp could have actually executed this well, so I'll leave that part to the experts.

~3~
The FSN North Girls

What is your purpose.  You seem to have no marketable skills other than a) having white teeth and b) informing me that I am watching the Twins on FSN North, which I already knew.  Overall, this does not bode well for you and your career options.  Your existence simultaneously confuses and irritates me.



...why?



Also, after finally practicing yoga yesterday for the first time in over a week, I feel much better about life.  On the more philisophical "what are you??" level, I think it's sometimes easy to get wrapped up in one aspect of who we are - usually the aspect that's stressing us out the most, which for me right now is work.

I tend to just assume everything that goes wrong is somehow my fault, and that there was something I could have done to fix it even when this is totally not the case.  I just need to remind myself that 1) just because many things are crazy right now does not mean that I am a failure - it just means that sometimes, things get crazy, and 2) I'm not defined by any one part of my life - it's the whole picture that matters.

And on that note, happy Wednesday!

Big Shiva, little Shiva. And also, pants.

Have you ever seen someone walking down the street and wanted to yell at them: "Hey! You should put on some pants!" If so, you, like me, are probably of the opinion that one should leave the house without appearing to violate indecent exposure laws. The fact that you happen to be wearing hot yoga booty shorts under what appears to be a Lululemon Savasana Wrap is irrelevant if I cannot see them - if you look like you're not wearing pants, you are, for all intents and purposes, not wearing them. Put on some damn pants.

And in other news, Shiva is cool.

This giant Shiva hangs out at CERN, the European center for particle research in Geneva. Shiva is the symbol for creation and destruction - the metaphor for cosmic dance, which, for modern physicists, is the dance of subatomic matter. Pretty neat. My Shiva is much tinier, but still brings all the benefits of big Shiva:

I just picked this guy up today, from the Metaphyiscal store on Lyndale... kind of a kooky place, but probably one of the only shops I could walk into and ask "do you have those little Shiva Nataraj dudes?" without them looking at me like I was nuts. I will probably pass on their wide selection of tarot cards and voodoo dolls, but they do have some interesting meditation candles and salt lamps that I might look at. One of the things that keeps me feeling not so sad about leaving my apartment, which I love, is thinking about how I'm going to fill the new one...and one of my plans is for a yoga room/sacred space in the second bedroom, so I'm starting to slowly collect things to decorate it with. Tiny Shiva Nataraj is my first addition - welcome to the family little dude.

Right now he's hanging out on my kitchen table next to Ganesh, who came home with us from India. They can be buddies.

Well, back to the daily grind! We have a marketing network event tomorrow morning that I'm really excited for, and some more project work...and my Business Ethics class starts this week! Our professor referenced Harry Potter in the syllabus, likening his class to Defense Against the Dark Arts. Love it already. Have a great start to your week!

If the dress fits....

...wear it in your wedding!

Yep that's right - my dress is here!!! I was SO exited to try it on yesterday for the first time, but a little bit nervous too. As ridiculous as it sounds, I was scared that I wouldn't fit into after all the baklava I ate in Turkey...but luckily, no such worries were necessary and the dress fit perfectly. Phew.

I've been feeling a little off the last day or so and I'm not really sure why - maybe it's the stress of the impending wedding, or something else entirely but I just feel... not quite right. Like Michael Scott in the office, I'm going to attempt to divide my life into a Happy Box and a Sad Box and see what happens. We'll do the sad box first to get it out of the way:

Sad Box
- I am super excited for the wedding - BUT - when all the little details keep rolling in and everyone keeps making these teeny requests that all add up, it just starts to feel overwhelming and I know I can't possibly accomodate everyone. As grateful as I am that my parents are helping us out so much financially with this wedding, I really want it to be about me and Ben and our lives together - and I realize that it's also a huge family event but... we can have other family events. This is my ONLY wedding, and I don't want to spend it worrying about whether everyone else's needs are being met. End rant.
- Night classes are not my cup of tea. AT ALL. 3 hours of healthcare history? No thank you.
- Why was I even worried about fitting into my dress? This is not something I should be stressing about right now.
- General feelings of inadequacy.
- Minneapolis declared another snow emergency.
- I am out of quarters for laundry.

Happy Box
- I LOVE my dress. And Ben. Pretty sure I love Ben the most.
- I have delicious pear-ginger butter and Great Harvest bread in my pantry.
- puppies.
- Reggae and other happy music - I just made a whole playlist of Matisyahu, Collie Buddz, and Save Ferris which I will now proceed to listen to on repeat for the rest of the day.
- Last night my friend and I resorted to making bets on whether or not the prof would say certain words. It kept us entertained, it helped keep me awake for 3 hours AND now Pete owes me lunch.
- I have amazing, supportive parents who are there for me even when I am a spazz.

Keep calm and make some tea. And maybe go to yoga. And maybe also take a bubble bath. But first, finish the paper that is due tonight...yes...

So misleading...

Could you get mad at this face??No? Never in a million years could you be upset with this adorable fuzzy kitty face?

WRONG.
Yes it is nice to have a furry friend who follows you everywhere and is in desperate need of your constant attention. However, before you enter into such a relationship KEEP IN MIND: this friend is also capable of:
- tracking kitty litter EVERYWHERE
- puking all over your floor
- drinking your beer
- staring at you while you sleep
- preventing you from sleeping by sitting on top of you and kneading you forcefully with her paws while simultaneously drooling in your ear, then acting like a kitty boomerang when you shove her to the end of the bed in an attempt to stop this behavior
- purring and looking at you confusedly as if trying to understand why this makes you upset

You have been warned.

Yoga Pet Peeves

Normally I'm not a ranter... OK that's totally false I love a good rant... but anyways, Monday night Yoga class was like all of my yoga studio pet peeves in one place.

1) There are only two bathroom stalls in the locker room. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what they're there for. I get that some people are really shy about being seen without clothes on, but please when the locker room is packed and people are going to and from class, just suck it up and change in the changing area, because I really have to pee and my class starts in 1 minute. Seriously... everyone else is changing out in the open. You can too. I promise no one will judge you.


2) Dear couple in back of me - you're in love. I get that. I'm in love too, it's fantastic... but please for the love of god keep the PDA out of the yoga studio. It's super distracting when I'm just trying to stretch out my legs in down dog to have to see you behind me, making out and invading each other's mat space. I assume you have other places to go where you can be all over each other.... so save it for later kthx.


3) If you are so sick that when you breathe it sounds like you are dying, do not come to class. This one should be pretty self explainatory. I don't want to get sick because of you.

So I realized I haven't blogged about my 365 day yoga committment in a while... it's still going. One thing I've noticed is that my yoga mat has pretty much taken up permanent residence on my living room floor. Usually I go to class or practice by myself at home, but a couple of weeks ago, several friends and I went to a cabin for my friend Emily's bachelorette party. My friend Katie is also an avid yogi, so we both brought our mats... and luckily Katie had an extra, so we did an Ashtanga series with Emily, who was a yoga newbie! (Below - Emily, me and Katie enjoying some chocolate peanut butter cake)

School is going quite awesomely... this year is so much less stressful than last year! I'm really enjoying my classes (especially Corporate Strategy), and am loving my extracurricular leadership commitments, too. I'm especially excited for an event on non-profit marketing I'm planning for November.

Fall has definitely arrived in MN. I broke out the fall table runner and bought a little pumpkin that's hanging out on my kitchen table for decoration. Pictures forthcoming :)

To Creepy Dudes Everywhere

Dear creepy dudes,
From women everywhere - please stop being creepy. I know you think you are paying us a compliment when you yell from the window of you old child-molester-looking car in the parking lot at Rainbow and say "Hey, thank you! Thanks for bringing those legs with you to the store today!" ... but really you are just making us feel violated and like we never want to leave the house in gym shorts again ever.

I'm sure you think that when you see us reading a textbook on the beach, it would be a nice gesture to call out "Wow - beauty AND brains...that's VERY attractive," thinking that we will feel more beautiful and also think that you truly appreciate us as human beings... but you are wrong. Let me outline very clearly for you the huge gaping hole that exists between your expectations and reality:

EXPECTATION: (what we will say) "Oh wow! I am reading a book so I am probably a nerd and also insecure, and therefore am now a melting puddle of goo at your feet because you paid me a compliment. Not only do you think I am beautiful (who me??) but you also appreciate my intelligence and so you obviously have a deep and meaningful understanding of me as a person. You also ride a bike so you must be very cool and athletic. Let's do it under a tree RIGHT NOW."

REALITY: (what we are thinking) "Ummm...seriously? You honestly think anyone with have a shred of self-respect will buy this? Just walk away, stop staring at me and waiting for this conversation to continue (because it isn't going to) and leave me to my gazillion pages of reading I have to do for Monday. The bike and spandex shorts indicate that you want the ladies such as myself to think that you are athletic and outdoorsy, and why would such a specimen compliment a nerd such as myself?? But, you're not fooling anyone. Run along now. And stop being a creeper."

So creepy dudes, with your biker ponytails and cutoff t-shirts - please just do us all a favor and don't talk ever. Thanks!

Love, the women of the world