So, I’m watching tv the other day, and I saw something that I found very disturbing.  (Not quit as disturbing as Extreme Couponers, but more disturbing than Toddlers and Tiaras.)

It was a commercial for Nutella.  The commercial features a mother in her kitchen with her three children.  She talks about how it’s so hard to get her kids to eat breakfast, but luckily Nutella makes it easy!  Nutella is (apparently) full of nutritious hazelnuts, skim milk, and just a hint of cocoa, so Nutella is a nutritious part of any healthy breakfast.  She slides Nutella smothered toast in front of her kids, who immediately chow down on it as she smiles motherly.  (There’s probably more to the commercial than that and I’m not quoting it verbatim, but I can’t find the commercial online so I’m going on memory. The point is the overall message.)

And later I viewed another equally alarming advertising.  This one was for the PayDay candy bar.  (I couldn’t find this video either, so bear with me, people.)  The commercial shows a swarm of little peanut halves charge across the screen.  A deep voice asks (something along the lines of,) “What could we use to harness all the natural energy of peanuts?”  At that moment this herd of peanuts gets caught on a turd-shaped lump of caramel.  “Caramel will do!”  The commercial ends with the same deep voice speaking some statement about Payday being a great source of energy so you can be super awesome.

For starters, let’s get one thing straight.  Nutella and PayDay’s will never be health food.  Ever.  Ever ever.  Perhaps in a parallel universe where things are opposite, (and I’m a size 4,) but only maybe then.  While yes, peanuts are a good source of protein, they are also relatively high in fat.  Also?  They’re covering fucking caramel, so I’m pretty sure any health benefits you might get from peanuts are canceled out by the fucking caramel.  And Nutella?  Is essentially chocolate pudding in a jar.  I’m pretty sure at least 75% of it by volume is pure sugar.  Anyone who tries to sell either one of these products as a health food is fucking delusional.

But here’s the thing: what pisses me off isn’t the fact that marketing executives are trying to sell Nutella and Payday’s as health food.  I mean, yes, these advertisements are essentially lies, which is its own barrel of bullshit.  Not to mention the fact that by pretending that they are, they’re insulting the intelligence of the consumer.  But what really pisses me off is that Nutella and Payday are trying to be something they’re not.  Don’t misread me here: I fucking love PayDay’s, and I would trade one of my cats for a case of Nutella.  (And the other cat for a case of sweetened condensed milk; I can drink that shit out of the can!)  They are both absolutely delicious in their own ways, and fantastic desserts.

But that’s just it: they’re desserts.  And wonderful ones that that.  We don’t need them to be health food; there are many, many other foods that do that job much more admirably.  We love them because they’re bad for us, because they’re forbidden, because they’re something we know we shouldn’t be eating.  I’m pretty sure that’s were half of the flavor comes from.  Sure, there are many healthy foods that are also sweet and delicious: mangoes, dried apricots, grapes of the raw and frozen variety.  But they don’t satisfy the soul the way that a slab of bread covered in chocolaty Nutella or a rich, chewy, caramel-y candy bar does.  They fulfill a basic need in us: the need for a treat, a reward, a little moment of sensory joy.  And once they bear the label of “health food,” they no longer fill that oh, so important purpose.

So PayDay, Nutella, please, come out of the junk food closet.  Stop pretending to be something that you’re not and be who you really are: the junk food that we’ve always loved you for.  Because at the end of the day, you’re not just lying to us; you’re lying to yourselves.

So, Kyle and I are lying in bed last night.  Kyle’s dicking around on his computer, (and ignoring me,) so I decide to do a bit of coloring.  (Don’t fucking judge; it’s soothing and it’s a hell of a lot less destructive than porn or Etsy.)  So I go to the office and grab the necessary supplies: coloring page I printed off the internet,* two packages of Crayola markers, and a large, hardcover book to use as a lap desk.  The most suitable candidate for this last position seems to be one of my old high school yearbooks, so I grab one at random and return to the bedroom.

As I’m settling myself, Kyle notices my yearbook and grabs it from me.  This one happens to be from my sophomore year.  Kyle flips through the pages, looking for pictures of me and making judgements about people pictured.  (Such as, “He was a huge douche, wasn’t he?” and, “Oh, she looks like she sucked a lot of cock.”)  I confirmed and disputed his judgements, and periodically pointed out people of special interest, like my best friend at the time and guys on which I’d had various crushes.  I hadn’t looked at my yearbooks since, well, probably since I’d packed them up before college.  It was interesting to look at my sophomore year self because while I knew that girl to be me, that girl resembles my current self in so few ways.  Even though that was less than a decade ago, she’s practically a stranger to me.

Kyle quickly grew bored with my sophomore musings and gave me my yearbook back.  I went back to coloring, and we shared a peaceful evening.  But I couldn’t help but think about that 16 year old girl.  And later that night, while up trying to pace the insomnia away, I took another look at not only her, but her 15, 17, and 18 year old sisters.  Looking back for the first time, I found some of my reminiscents made me smile.  Remembering things like that “LYLAS” stood for “Love ya like a sister,” and that apparently Jr year not only was I interviewed for the Serenade! choir, but there was an entire feature on my dancing.  (And the truly surprising part?  That I was eloquent.)  That in sophomore year I was an entire head taller than everyone in both of my choirs.  But it was also fascinating to look at many of the young faces of my friends an classmates and know the twists that many of their stories would eventually take.  It was like watching a movie when you know how it ends but the character still has no clue.

But surprisingly, flipping through my high school years also made me surprisingly uncomfortable, like I very much wanted to flip to the next page and forget what I’d seen on the first page.  I think a large part of that has to do with the confrontation of some of the less pleasant details of high school, things we all wish we could forget.  Seeing myself through the lens of others, instead of how I like to remember things.  Things like the fact that I apparently didn’t figure out until sophomore year that I look ridiculous when pictured with my hair in a ponytail, and didn’t figure out until senior year that I look only slightly less ridiculous with my hair pulled half up.  That Senior year I wasn’t mentioned or included in the photos for the Christian club**, (of which I was the secretary,) the dance team, (of which I was co-captain,) Serenade! choir, and Women’s choir.  That Freshman year the “well wishes” one of my “best friends” wrote in the back of my yearbook actually more closely resemble “passive-aggressive backhanded bitch slap in the face.”  And no one likes to be forced to see the reality of our past.  It’s much safer to think about the happy memories of best friends and accomplishments instead of frenemies who made you cry and embarrassing rejections that prevented you from ever asking a guy out again.

But a lot of my discomfort came from looking at that teenage girl and knowing just how very little she knew.  She’s pretty and thin and so full of hope and dreams.  She knows where her life is going, what her goals are, and knows that all she has to do is want it more than anyone else and she will one day arrive at those dreams.  She is filled with light and air.  But that’s not how the world works.  That’s not how life works.  Life is not a perfectly straight line from Point A to Point B.  There are twists and turns and challenges that never entire your mental realm of possibilities, that you can never foresee.  But she doesn’t know that.  She doesn’t know any of the challenges that we as adults in the world have to face.  She’s sitting in a little town in Michigan, dreaming of leaving this little box, when the reality is that she can’t even begin to imagine outside her box.  Her dreams are clichéd and one dimensional; she’s decided what she wants from life without even considering what fulfillment  would require and what that kind of life would entail.  “I’m going to be on Broadway!”  It’s not that she didn’t dream big enough; shit, she dreamed bigger than she had any business doing so, as most teenagers tend to do.  But she didn’t dream deep or full enough.  She didn’t even know to want anything fuller than she could.  She and all her dreams are so fucking shallow and she doesn’t fucking know any better.  And I look at that teenage girl, and I feel sorry for her, because she just doesn’t know shit.  She just doesn’t know.  None of us did.

And yet, we all owe our teenage selves a little credit for getting us where they did.  For as naive and naive and clueless as that teenage girl was, she somehow managed to accidentally stumble her way into a great life.  At several critical points, she managed to show up at exactly the right place at exactly the right time and say exactly the right thing, and for that I’m incredibly grateful.  I wish I could go back in time and give her some advice, (like, “Tell more people to fuck off,” and, “Wearing clear heels to Jr Prom is not advisable,”) but truth be told, she probably wouldn’t listen to me even if I could.  Nor would she believe me if I told her about all the ridiculousness to come and where she would eventually end up.  I suppose I just have to be thankful that she did what she did and got me where I did.

So thank you.  (You skinny little retard.)

*Believe it or not, googling “adult coloring page” brings up some disappointingly benign results.  Seriously, not one link for nude coloring pages.  Sad.

**Oh, how my membership makes me laugh…

A moment of silence for my running shoes.

They were good shoes.  Nothing special, but significant because they were my first serious pair of running shoes.  Sure, I’d owned previous pairs that I would haul out once every couple of months or so in a half-hearted attempt to get “in shape.”  But I was never emotionally invested in any of them the way I was invested in these shoes.

These shoes have carried me a long way, many, many miles.  When we began our journey together, they carried me a mere 2.25 miles, but at the time that was a reason to be proud.  Over the months we went further and further together, a little at a time, exploring and expanding the boundaries of my physical and mental toughness.  They’ve been witness to both moments of victory and moments when I wasn’t sure I could keep going.

But I think we grew the closest, emotionally, during the winter.  My shoes and I pounded the sidewalks no matter what kind of weather assaulted us.  Armed only with a pair of those rubber shoe grippy things with the spikes on the bottom, my shoes dragged me through every variety of snow, slush, ice, and mud, and I never fell once.  (I did once trip over a crack in the sidewalk, but that was of no fault of my shoes.)

Don’t get me wrong, our relationship wasn’t perfect.  My shoes, like so many pairs before them, abused my arches and left countless blisters in their wake.   And strong and valiant though they were, they were no match for the sneaky mud puddle.  Nothing made me more miserable than to feel the cold water seeping through my shoes and wetting my socks.  (Seriously, I hate wet socks.  I can handle a lot of physical discomfort, but wet socks instantly turn me into a Super Bitch.)

But for better or worse, they were my shoes, and they were good to me.  And now, over 500 miles later, their time has come to an end.  I know they would have liked to carry me through my next major milestone, a half marathon in September (I hope,) but they just won’t make it that long.  They’re dirty, they’re tired, I can see both of my big toes through the holes, and worst of all, they’re starting to hurt my feet.  And so they are laid to rest in my big bin of second string shoes in the bottom of my closet, where they will find new life as “painting shoes.”  Rest well, sweet running shoes.

Meet my new running shoes.

I drove aaaaaaall the way to Utica to get them.  (About two hours, give or take.)  Why did I drive aaaaaaall the way to Utica to get them?  Because I was actually hoping that my new shoes would be a different brand, one that the closest place they’re sold is in Utica.  Obviously, I did not end up with that brand, (something having to do with my arches and where my foot locks in, I don’t remember it all,) but I was fitted with these instead.  (Which is cool with me.  I don’t pretend to be a running shoe expert.)

Allyse checked them out, and they are completely clear of all ham, cheese and chicken.

Due to the shitty-ass weather lately, I’ve only been able to take them out for one run, but they’ve definitely got potential to be just as fantastic as their predecessors.  They’re so springy!  And not in a squishy kind of way, in a way that felt like they were driving me forward with every step.  I felt strong, and even though I kept telling myself to take it easy and go at a comfortable pace, I ended up running faster than I have in a good while.  And I felt good.  (Minus the part where they make my feet go numb even though I have them laced as loosely as I can without them falling off.  This is pretty worrying, but I’m hoping it’s the kind of issue that will remedy itself as I break them in.  I hope.)

Whatever issues my new shoes have, I know that I can get them worked out.  (Or taken back to the shoes store for help and maybe a new pair.)  Regardless, I still have a lot of miles to cover, and I’m very excited to get started.

(As soon as it quits fucking raining.)