Male Privilege and Cars

Ok.

First, let me say that I'm not talking about car repairs or car purchasing (and although I could TOTALLY have held my own when I bought my new car yesterday, it certainly helped having my husband there even though he didn't say a word and was generally a buttface on purpose the whole time to mess with the salespeople). I finally, after like ten years of trying to find one, found a car repair place that won't try to fleece me because I'm a woman and I probably don't know what I'm talking about. Stories for another day (like that time that a repair place told me that I needed $1500 in repairs for my car to pass inspection when my car actually only needed a small repair that cost me about $100. As soon as they talked to my dad, they caved.).

In September, I was away at a conference and my husband called me to let me know that he was broken down on the side of the highway. It was at the end of the day on a Friday, and it was pretty busy on the road, but he was stranded. Alone. I was three and a half hours away by car, and I freaked because I assumed danger.

(Sorry, honey. I'm going to call you out here. Though we won't get into the circumstances under which this happened and I WILL NOT GLOAT because I was right that you should have started to look into trading it in when I said.)

I have been talking about trading in my old car, a 2013 Nissan Juke, for months. Because I was painfully upside down in my financing, I was pretty sure it wasn't going to be an option for another couple of years. And yet...

When the weather gets warm, that car gets GRUMPY. Like, stalled at a stoplight a few times grumpy once late spring came around, and a few times in the morning I've had to really coax it to start. I had none of these problems in the winter, which is weird, but I didn't. It did this last year too a couple of times, and I tried to figure out what was going on at that time, to no avail. So I just let it go.

When things like that start to happen, I start to get nervous. Maybe my car isn't as safe as I thought. I hope I don't get stranded by the side of the road. I hope I don't get stuck somewhere like a sitting duck.

When women get stranded, it's not just stressful. It's dangerous. The last thing I wanted, having been through the experience before of being stranded on the side of a road (luckily, I had someone, a male, with me at the time), it was certainly not an experience I wanted to repeat, least of all running the risk of being stranded alone, which has a much higher likelihood of happening now than it did 15 years ago when it happened the first time.

So a few months ago, I started looking for a car. I went to a dealership that I know well, and they said to me that I'm too upside-down on my car to finance anything new at this point. Fair. So I waited a few months, made a few more payments, and the dealership that I ended up buying from was having this HUGE trade-in deal. Like, $4000 over trade-in value for used cars. I decided to jump on it to see what I could get. To be fair, my husband has been very understanding. And, when it comes to car safety stuff, maybe I do have a hairpin trigger (which I know is part of the equation - I've had a difficult relationship with cars in the past that has been much more stable over the past decade), but in a way, so does every woman I know, as they should. I've heard this a few times from other men that I know too - it's just being stranded on the side of the road - call a tow truck! It's no big deal. Stressful? Sure. But no big deal. Has every man been like that? No. But the vast majority of them have been. It's just this lack of awareness that I sense that it's easier for men in that situation than women because there's a lot that men don't have to worry about if they find themselves stranded on the side of the road.

So, most men in my life, I need you to dig down deep with me and check your privilege on this. It is a privilege to be stranded on the side of the road and to not worry about the person who pulls over to help you and whether or not they are safe, or if they will try to assault or kidnap you. (This worry happens no matter the expressed gender of the person who pulls over to help you.) It is a privilege to be able to call a tow truck and know that the person who is towing your car isn't going to try to assault you. It is a privilege to be able to just call an event "stressful" when the women in your life might characterize it as dangerous.

But luckily, because of my totally badass negotiation skills, I won't have to worry about that for a while. I just bought my first brand new car (it had 41 miles on it when I pulled out of the lot! Snort! It has a nice smell too! And no more hummus stains on the floor of my car when I made a very stupid decision to eat chips and hummus while driving and then had to stop quickly!), I negotiated it all on my own, and I feel really good about the outcome. It's a looker, too, with a kickass warranty. The best part, though, hands down? NO FOB. I STILL HAVE A KEY. FOBS ARE BULLSHIT, FOR THE RECORD. And because I'm Dave Ramsaying the heck out of my debt lately, it'll be paid off a few years early so that if I start to have this problem in five years again, I'll be able to trade in with confidence because my car will be paid off. I've got a great plan.

So now, I have to get schoolwork done while my awesome car sits in our parking lot, just waiting to be driven. :)

Coffee, we are now sworn enemies.

Friday was pretty bittersweet.

I stepped on the scale, as I do every Friday morning, to find that I had lost my 25th pound. Not too shabby two months in, if I do say so myself. I also paid off 2/3 of my credit card balance. Like, went in and cut them a check for 2/3 of the balance because that’s apparently something I could do and have it not totally screw us. I was looking at different ways I could pay it off, and I was going to switch to a card with a 0% balance, the whole bit, and then I was like, “nope. I’m going to just pay it off like we did with the pet debt - throw any extra money at it until it’s gone. I would rather have no payment than a 0% interest payment.” So, that was pretty sweet. I’m looking at having a debt that has chased me since undergrad completely gone by the end of the summer. And then after we pay off our furnace financing, I’m coming for you, car. (As in, all of my revolving debt will be gone by the end of the summer. HOW AWESOME IS THAT.)

ANYWAY. There’s a little bitter to the story of this day too, but only a little because I learned something pretty significant.

I’ve been having some...let’s just avoid being gross and call them digestive troubles, over the past four days or so. Not alarming enough to call my doctor, but I had to figure out what was going on. I was clearly having a reaction to something. Then Friday, by far the worst of the four days, I started dry heaving at work.

I tried two new things last week that I don’t ordinarily eat: macaroni salad (gluten-free and vegan except for the chicken) and decaf cold brew with a splash of unsweetened coconut milk. I had consumed both with reckless abandon for the previous four days because they are DELIGHTFUL. One was filled with soy (because of the vegenaise, for which my doctor gave me the go-ahead - if something is on the line of whether or not I can eat it, I always check), the other was coffee, which I hadn’t had in like two months and then had one regular (decaf) coffee and then went full throttle to decaf cold brew.

It was totally the coffee.

I am also not discounting the idea that it may be because I’m burning the candle at both ends. I left work Friday early and came home and slept for four hours. Then I went to bed at a perfectly reasonable time after eating a can of chicken soup and slept through the night. I’m tired. Two summer classes is hard, especially when I’ve never taught one of them before. I feel like I’m playing catch-up all the time, even though I know I’m fine and I need to just do the work bit by bit, and I have been.

But all that changes in five working days.

Five

Working

Days.

That’s all that stands between me and two weeks of vacation. Granted, we don’t have anything planned except getting a new furnace and I will probably be doing a lot of schoolwork and writing, but I will be shutting off my email and everything. Totally unplugging from my job for two weeks. I CANNOT WAIT.

Also, when I hit a milestone anything, I like to do something special for myself, and for every 25 pounds I lose, I’ve decided to do just that. Also, on a related note, I’ve been thinking about getting my nose pierced for several months, and said it out loud to Rob about two weeks ago. We were home on Sunday trying to figure out what to do with our lazy butts on a Sunday afternoon and Rob was like “LET’S GO GET IT DONE TODAY”

So, that’s what I did. It hurt a lot less than I expected, and keeping it clean is fine - not overly time-consuming, so that’s good. (Also a little entertaining to spray saline up my nose. Just saying.)

Now all I need to do is stop cheating on my diet and “accidentally” eating cheese, and I’ll be right as rain. :)

Time to Rant.

I'm having my first really serious difficulties with this diet. I'm surprised it didn't happen before now, to be fully honest, but here we are. I've been very mad for about two days. It started when I realized that I didn't bring lunch on Friday so I had to go out and get it and I was filled with this sense of dread: go to a restaurant and get a million questions and tell more about myself than I want to, or order something and then pick out what I can't eat (which is what ended up happening), or spend my entire damn lunch break in the store for something that I both want to and am able to eat. Neither is a great option, but it's where I am. I've only escalated all weekend until we went out to do a few things yesterday afternoon and I spent the whole trip home swearing because I wanted pad thai but couldn't have it without asking for ten million changes, so it was rice and vegan pesto for me AGAIN. I was really, really angry. Then I went to bed angry, anger-slept, and woke up angry. The words "this diet is not worth the bullshit and inconvenience it's causing me" escaped my lips last night.

Coincidentally (or maybe not), around this time, I also tried to reincorporate sugar. HOLY MOOD SWINGS BATMAN. I'm thinking it's a nope for that specific reason. It's probably the insulin resistance talking when I get moody after eating sugar, but regardless, I'm all set. I put a sugar packet into a black coffee last week and you know what my first reaction was, to my complete shock? "Ew." I DIDN'T LIKE IT. Also, I guess I'm a black coffee drinker now and I actually like it. I also had a sip of Rob's black cold brew the other day and it was delightful!

ANYWAY, something has been happening with alarming frequency since I went gluten free (for the most part) a few years ago, and I've been noticing it more and more as I get deeper into these changes. It's been more with being gluten free, but it's happened with other stuff too, primarily when I ask for something without egg or dairy that typically has it.

I'll order something (usually) gluten free and the person taking my order will ask, "Is this because you want to eat this way or because you have an allergy or intolerance?"

What I want to ask (but I restrain myself because it's not their fault) is, why does it matter? Why do I have to give a person my protected health information before I get what I effing ordered? Either that, or I wanted to give them the full laundry list of all of my medical shit and make them stand there and listen to it just to prove a point. I understand that they're trying to be extra careful because cross-contamination is an issue, but why not just be the same level of careful with everyone who orders something off of a menu that is gluten free?

Of course I know that the answer to that question is that it would cost an exorbitant amount of money. I get it. They have a business to run, and they can't carefully monitor stuff 100% of the time. I understand that. But there has to be a happy medium. Like, having an exclusively gluten-free toaster or something. Or, the better solution: Not letting people who can eat gluten ruin it for those of us who can't. I understand that this is a personal responsibility issue too. I also understand that the gluten-free fad is happening right now and that even if you can eat gluten, "it's healthier not to eat gluten even if you can." (Spoiler alert: It's actually not.)

PHEW. Anywho, I'm going to go delve into pinterest and see what I can find. One thing is for damn sure though - THERE WILL BE NO VEGAN PESTO AND RICE FOR ME THIS WEEK. NONE.

Positive Reinforcement

As anyone with a behavioral background knows, punishment does not predictably deter unwanted behavior.

You know what predictably ensures that positive behavior will continue? Positive reinforcement.

I went for my monthly naturopath appointment today and she gave me more praise than I was expecting. Things are better! I have to get blood drawn in about three weeks to see how my counts are doing, but the reaction she had to me being down 20 pounds, as well as all of the other stuff that I reported to her, really helped me to be more motivated and feel like I'm moving in the right direction.

It also helped me feel better about the changes I was making and the news didn't sting so bad when she told me that I had to still be on the candibactin for another month.

I'm at the point where she thinks I'm ready to reincorporate cane sugar. I'm to have a hot beverage with one teaspoon of sugar in it twice a day for the next two days, and then take it back out again for three days and see what happens. The purpose, the whole purpose of doing this is so that I don't have to be paranoid if I'm not eating at home. I can have some barbecue sauce on my chicken without feeling anxious about it.

A tall order at this point, the anxiety I mean, but we'll see what happens. To say I've been sticking to my diet with a hypervigilance I haven't seen in a while would be an understatement. I think that it's less about doctor's orders at this point and more about the consequences of eating what I can't and how unpleasant that actually is, and also wanting to maintain my progress. To be sure, I've done a fair amount of internal grumbling when I can't eat that potato salad because it has mayonnaise in it and I can't have that yogurt or it turns out that I shouldn't have eaten those gluten-free chicken nuggets the other day because cane sugar was the last ingredient in them. To say I've gotten pissy about it would be charitable.

But I'm slowly making my way. I discovered vegenaise, which it turns out I actually like a lot. Like, a lot a lot. I also got this machine that makes bananas into ice cream, and with a little bit of a sunbutter swirl, will probably be very doable as the summer comes. This diet does not fall into the category of Things I Cannot Do, it's just a matter of getting used to it. I know people who have been vegan for years (to the point where they forget what cheese tastes like - WHO FORGETS THE TASTE OF CHEESE?) or had very similar dietary restrictions and they went through the same thing starting out. They all say that it gets easier, and I can't help but believe them. I have to have hope about this or I will never be able to accomplish it.

But the best part? I continue to feel great. I know my counts will be better at my next blood draw because I can feel it. So for now, I just keep on plugging sans eggs, dairy, and gluten.

Reincorporation sucks, y’all.

I’ve continued on the road through reincorporation, even though I’ve fully accepted at this point that this is how I’m probably going to have to eat for a long, long time and the whole process has felt pretty pointless because of that. However, because I have forced myself to continue through this journey, I’ve discovered a couple of pretty important things:

1. I think dairy is a migraine trigger, and

2. If I’m going to have a reaction to something, the most obvious sign is sleeplessness, particularly as whatever I’m having a reaction to makes its way out of my system.

(The sleeplessness could also be due to stress, which has been pretty high as of late, but I’m due for a big dip over the long term in about six months, give or take, if I play my cards right. Blog post for another time. In about a month, I’m also taking two full weeks off from work. Not trainings or conferences, though there is a short one in there; vacation. I’m so excited I could practically jump out of my own skin.)

Here I am at 12:50, wide awake. I’m on day one of the “cut whatever you were stuffing your face with back out of your diet” part of reincorporating feta, and it’s not going so great. Feta is going to be a no, just like eggs and cheddar cheese, but this has happened every.single.time I’ve had a reaction to something. I’ll have gross intestinal stuff happen for a day or two, I’ll probably get a migraine, and then I won’t be able to sleep, all over the course of two to three days, and then I’ll be back to normal. Whatever the fresh hell that means lately.

The thing that I’m grateful for, though, is that the sleeplessness usually comes at the end of the reaction, so I know I’ll probably feel better tomorrow.

What does that do for my ability to sleep right now? Literally nothing. But, I will go back to my awesome naturopath next week loaded with information, and that ain’t nothing.