Food, Health, Weight, and the Freedom to Make Your Own Choices

I went shopping the other day, and it felt like freedom.  It is really, really nice to have the food I like to eat available in the house.

And this is what freedom looks like.

"I found a neat recipe on Pinterest," I told my mom last night.  "But it takes a whole cup of sugar."  

"That is a lot of sugar," said my dad.  "You should use high fructose corn syrup instead."

My mother and I both want to lose weight.  I want to lose weight because I want to feel better, have more energy, and I know it will get harder when I get older.  I gained thirty pounds over the school from stress, eating too much, and not having the time to cook right or exercise.  They say it's important to be a healthy weight before you get pregnant, too, and I want that in my future. I think my mom wants to be healthier too.  We don't talk much about it.


"We should join Weight Watchers together!" says my mom regularly.  She is trying to be supportive.  It feels, sometimes, like she wants to let me know that my weight isn't healthy.  I already know my weight isn't healthy*.  I maintain that university is not a healthy environment: you don't have time to cook healthy food (or exercise), and you don't have money to buy healthy food (or, worse, you're locked into a meal plan.).  It's full of stress, and you don't have financial resources to offset the stress, because you've already paid the university all your financial resources (and then some).


My weight bothers me in part because worrying about weight is such a gendered phenomenon.  You don't hear vitriol spewed toward men with beer bellies, but if a woman is overweight, everyone seems to feel entitled to comment. I don't want people to comment: it isn't my job to look pretty for them, and it isn't their job to care about my appearance or my health**.

I hear it around the holidays, too, from other parts of my family.  "Oh, you look so good-- did you lose weight?" (Sometimes I get this even if I have gained weight.)  Or: "You know, you gained some weight-- that isn't very healthy."  I know when I gain weight, thank you very much, you didn't need to point it out.

And so I do not want to join Weight Watchers. I don't want to hold myself up to an outside standard, even a kindly one.  I know it works for a lot of people, but I have a nifty app on my phone that tracks my calories and my current weight, and that works for me***.  If you want to bond with me on a weight-loss quest, we can exercise together or trade recipes.

I want to feel good, and I don't want to worry about people commenting on how I look.  I want my clothes to fit, and I want to be able to shop for clothes that are not labeled as "plus" sizes.  (I'm medium-tall and I have hips-- anything smaller than a ten is never going to happen for me.)  I want to be healthy, and I want "healthy" to happen on my own terms.


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*My parents are both physical therapists, so they care a lot about being healthy.
**Unless you are my physician.  Then, you may comment on my weight if you would like.
***I know it works for me, because I was able to lose significant chunks of weight when I was away from school on internships.  They key element to the weight loss, in my opinion, was having the time and money to establish a routine.

I Passed My Last Semester

Final grades are in!  I'll graduate!  I can't wait to see my parents and grandparents this weekend.

In the meantime, our entire living space looks a little bit like a tornado hit it.  We're working on it, I promise.  It's just going slowly: K's summer job has already started, and I've started my post-graduation job search in earnest. (Step One: figure out what exactly I want to do.)

I'll spare you pictures: they're not pretty.

It's the Final Countdown

Snippet of typical finals-week conversation:

Person #1: "And then it... duh buh buh buh."
Person #2: "Ah.  And how is that sleep you've been getting?  Plentiful, I trust?"
Person #1: [clearly confused about the concept] "... sleep?"

You can only power through finals week.  It's pretty miserable-- the deadline looms, there's never enough time, and as the hours you can spend in guilt-free sleep dwindle, a haze gradually eclipses your common sense*.  You calculate: will the clarity sleep affords be worth the time you won't be working?

So you take the mood lifts where you can find them.  Right now, for me, it's this:

It may not be a musical masterpiece, but each time it plays, it returns a chunk of my missing perspective, and I am deeply lucky that K puts up with me repeatedly queuing it in Amarok**.  So, bit by bit, my last days as a college student slip away.  There are worse ways to do this.

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*A keen observer might have caught me stroking a small patch of my desk earlier today, looking for my touchpad.  My desktop has an ergonomic mouse, not a touchpad. Also, I hate touchpads.

** He developed a fondness for the song while he was playing Saints Row 2: it's an in-game song, and silly things happen when it plays.  I won't spoil, but if you don't want to play an over-the-top disturbingly violent game, you can almost certainly Google it.

Dead Week

Fortunately, I'm not actually dead-- just buried under a mountain of homework.  Regular blogging will resume after I've finished this pesky "homework required to graduate", because I've got some things I'm saving up to say.

It looks like a prank.

Meanwhile, have a picture I took after our April snowfall.  It melted, mostly, leaving neat rows of snowballs along the sides of the pedestrian walkways.  My initial thought: "Someone has FAR too much time on their hands and a really big freezer", before I realized that the neat lines of snow resulted directly from plowing the paths.

Sleep and the End-Of-Semester Crunch

I went to sleep last night.

I feel like this shouldn't be a big deal.  In fact, the CDC recommends that we --humans-- do it every night. But I'm blogging about it, not tweeting, and blogs are not a place for quotidian updates.

So, why is sleep a big deal for me? I'm a college student.

The usual rule of thumb I see for the amount of time you should spend on a class, outside of class, is somewhere between two and four hours out of class for each hour you spend in class.  Actually, usually, people call this time "studying", which is interesting, because I never use this time to "study", I use this time to do great piles of homework, and there is rarely time to study the material after I've finished doing the homework. Using this calculation, because I am taking 17 credit hours (on paper), I should be working on school work about 70 hours a week -- somewhere between 50 and 85 hours, including class time (but excluding travel time).

This is how long you "should" spend studying, based on how many credits you're taking.

Now, sometimes the estimate figure works.  For example, one of my professors assigns a problem set weekly, unless there is an exam, and a project every two weeks.  Each problem set takes about three hours.  Each project, however, takes three hours of lab time and another nine to write up.  This works out to the nine hours of allotted work per week.  In another class, the professor assigns a one-page writing response due every day.  I spend, regularly, two hours writing each.  There are some miscellaneous other assignments 


These are the classes where the work is regular, I can apply the number-of-hour guidelines and set up a routine.  I love this kind of class, because the feedback tends to be regular, there are concrete things I can do to improve my work if things aren't working, and it isn't a disaster if I don't get one assignment done.

Then there are project-based classes.  I have a couple of these this semester.  Projects, by their nature, work better when one sits down for twelve hours to complete them.  That kind of work session is much harder to schedule.

One such class that I'm currently taking requires that I shovel manure for two hours a week.  I also write a weekly progress report.  That makes up three or so hours of regular work (excluding travel time).  We also present roughly every other week.  However, the rest of the work is hugely amorphous.  Some weeks, I've worked thirty hours on this class.  Others, I've spent my time on other projects, shoveled manure and felt guilty in class when the professor urges us to, in addition to the regular work, push to do all of these other things.  Who would like to volunteer an additional hour a week to feed the other (food) digester?  I wouldn't, but should I volunteer anyway?  Who will write the additional report for this conference?  At what point am I allowed to say "Professor, I spend twelve hours a week outside of your class working on your classwork, you need to stop assigning so much work" or "Professor, I spent thirty hours on your project last week, and I need this week off"?

Anyway, I'm doing my best to keep up with the workload.  There are things I don't get done.  And, with the project classes, I haven't received a grade since very early in the semester.  I don't know if I'm passing, and I'm scared that I won't graduate.  Worse, I don't follow the recommendations all the time. I don't work eight to twelve hours, seven days a week, on school work.  I work around eight to ten* on weekdays and get probably four hours a day of actual work done on the weekends.

This produces an end-of-semester crunch that, this semester, is compounded by interviews. I had an interview that took 14 hours of travel time alone last week.  I have a conference next week that'll take eight hours of travel time next week, and the proceedings will take about six.


So, I've slept a bit less than 4 hours a night for the last week. I had work I should have been doing last night, too, work that, if I fail to complete it, I might not graduate.  Sleep, the kind where I get all eight hours and wake refreshed, is a guilty pleasure for me.


I had some last night anyway.


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*On average.  There are days I wake up at six and work until midnight (18 hours), and there are days that I pretty much go to class (2-6 hours, depending on the day) and that's it.

Philosophy. Also, a picture of a flower.

First off, on my way home from class today, I saw a pretty red flower!

Red flower, suffering from the ill effects of Camera Phone.

If you only come here because occasionally I post pictures, you can leave now, because I'm going to talk about the things I learned in math class from a philosophy professor.

This semester, I get to take MA 451: Introduction to Mathematical Research.  It sounds really spiffy and academic, but it's really about surviving the professional world (as a mathematician).  My mileage with this course varies from class to class, because I've had some "survive the professional world" in my other major and some more in the professional world itself (albeit as an intern). On Fridays, class consists of an outside speaker, about whose presentation we then write a response.

Today's speaker, Dr. Bill Vitek, took advantage of our professor's absence to give a talk about establishing lifelong values instead of the talk about professional ethics we were expecting.  In my opinion, this greatly improved the quality of the talk*.

He talked about a book: If Aristotle Ran General Motors by Tom Morris.  I haven't read it, but he went on to talk about the four points of what he called, in his slides, "A Moral Compass for the Ages": truth, beauty, goodness, and unity.  This resounded with me, as when I was writing an outline for my life in 2008, I put together a set of four postulates of my own to guide me through my plan, through my life.

In light of this new information, I've updated them a bit.  A quick note about the words "stuff" and "things"-- I don't just mean actual physical stuff, like hula hoops and Nintendo DSes, but also the intangible things like new theories in nuclear physics and good parenting.

1. The world is the way the world is. For good or for bad, it's what I have to work with, and I choose to work toward an obtainable improvement rather than to fight for an unobtainable ideal. So, while I would love to see every government implement a solar-powered farm system run on robot labor that provides food to every person who asks, practically speaking, I'm going to get (or create for myself) a job and donate money to the Heifer Project
2.  People are, generally speaking, worth caring about. They are not perfect, or lovable, or even good, but generally they're trying to do their best for themselves and their own, as best they can, and that's both laudable and understandable, even if it lacks vision.
3.  No one really wants equality, and everyone deserves a chance to win. If we build systems where people have the opportunity to win doing neat, useful stuff they love to do, we can fill the world with better neat, useful stuff.  Kickstarter, for example, is a way that people compete for resources to fund neat projects.  Not all the projects win, but I am (for example) looking forward to getting our copy of this game, because it looks all sorts of fun.
4. Absolute demand may be infinite, but people do not need to fill every demand to be content. There are lots of people in the world who like a lot of different things. That said, no one likes all of them (and that's okay).  Personally, I'm not a big fan of bell peppers.  Capitalism seems like a pretty good way to sort out who gets which things.

They've served me pretty well, and I think they each incorporate elements of truth, beauty, goodness, and unity. I think it's a pretty reasonable platform on which I can begin to build a life.
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*Let me summarize the talk I expected so I don't leave you hanging: "Plagiarism is bad, don't lie to make yourself look good, plagiarism is bad, safety is the most important thing, and plagiarism is really, really bad.  We mean it about the plagiarism."

Can I have a recharge, too?

I found some new mom blogs via Pinterest today!  Exactly what I don't need when I have a goal of "getting some actual work done", but I took a couple minutes anyway.

I found this. I could summarize, but I don't think I can say it better, so here is a quote:

"When we left the program, I talked to my son about “recharging.”  I explained to him that sometimes Mama needed an extra hug or kiss and sometimes he might need one.  Recharges are non-negotiable.  If someone needs a recharge, everything else stops and we wrap our arms around each other and squeeze until we have enough power to last us a while."

Can adults do this if there isn't a kid involved? Is this too cheesy for people who are supposed to be all grown up and "know better"*? Because, sometimes, life is scary and confusing and lonely for people who are over four feet tall, too.


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*I am not a fan of "knowing better" when it means I have to pretend I am some sort of mistake-proof never-forgetting super-creature of infinite energy. I'm not, guys.

How Fluffy Animals Make Everything Better

This semester, Saturday is Manure-Shoveling Day.

Let me explain: one of my majors is a combined degree in interdisciplinary engineering and management.  In your last semester, you take a rather ambiguously-defined course in which you're supposed to work, in a team, on a senior design project. When that semester rolls around, your adviser sends you a list of projects, you pick your preferences, and after all the responses are in, you get sorted into a project.

I'm working, along with a team of other people, on a small-scale anaerobic digester project.  In theory, it's a really neat project-- you put all your organic waste in a big tank, the anaerobic bacteria work some bio-magic, and hey presto, out comes liquid fertilizer, solid fertilizer, and methane, which you can use to generate heat/electricity.  The process is also supposed to deodorize the organic material, so if you spread it on your garden, the neighbors won't complain.

In practice, we have an experimental digester, and the process is less magical and more smelly. Surprisingly (to me), collecting the manure from the cow enclosure is actually kind of nice.  The cows at the farm are pretty relaxed-- they come over to you to say "hi" before wandering off to do their cow business, and I'd never before realized how sweet hay can smell over manure.

The miserable part comes once you get out of the cow enclosure.  The wheelbarrow gets stuck on ridges or in the soft ground on the way to the digester.  Once you've either carefully avoided or muscled over the obstacles, you arrive at the real obstacle: the digester itself.  It lives in a little shed.

Somewhere during the design process, the person designing the manure delivery system assumed that manure behaves mostly like potatoes. The person designing the digester tank, on the other hand, assumed that manure behaves mostly like water.  In reality, manure behaves mostly like sticky goop of varying consistencies with bits of hay stuck in it.  In short, the digester doesn't quite work for any consistency of manure slurry-- the hay clogs the manure input, the manure conveyor doesn't convey the manure to the input slot six feet above the ground, and the heater that keeps the manure the right temperature for digestion doesn't heat the tank evenly because the manure doesn't circulate like a liquid.

In order to keep the digester working so that we can get some data out of it, we have a number of workarounds for all this.  We have to avoid hay clumps or pick the hay out of the manure with the shovel. We have to pitch the manure up to the tiny six-foot-high opening, and then when it inevitably sticks to the side, we have to stand on a bucket and use a stick to actually prod it into the tank.  We have to mix the digester for fifteen minutes every hour in order to keep the temperature high enough.  In other words, the feeding process involves several manual steps that should be automatic. In addition to this, the digester shed reeks, and the smell stays with your clothing until you've washed it. Twice.

I do the whole routine once a week, and after I get out, I'm usually splattered with manure and a bit grouchy until I get home and shower.

Yesterday was a bit different.  I had a visitor.

This fluffy white kitty came over to the area in front of the digester where I was pitching manure.

It rolled in the dirt and walked around me as I waited for the digester to complete its mixing cycle.  It didn't seem to mind my manure-encrusted clothes or my habit of talking to the machines I work with, as it stayed in the area the entire time I was working.

I left the farm with a smile on my face.