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This is a Fancy Quote

Rook Behr

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Soylent GreenChef

I’ve always struggled with food choices and emotional eating, often using food as a way to kill boredom, smother sadness, and connect with people (sitting & eating is easier than sports). I’ve been tortured by my weight my whole life. While I’d occasionally sink so low into depression that it would spur me back towards some sort of healthier trajectory, the yo-yo eventually drops back down and things don’t stick. Frankly, it’s a lot more comfortable to be fat than not. I travel for work a lot and that triggers all sorts of old habits. Life gets busy or I had a long day or whatever, and its easier to order in. And besides, its tough to maintain negatively driven motivation when when you’re happily married to and living with someone who accepts you and your body because they love you. Yeah, anyway. 

When living with my hubs, I always had to balance food and menu choices. I never felt right subjecting him to perfect versions of my diets du jour. So there was always snack food, alternative choices, sugar, ice cream, etc. And we would watch TV, get the false munchies, snack. 

Nutritional willpower is not my strong suit. It’s the suit I drop off at the cleaners and forget about until a last minute crush of dread as I realize they close in 5 minutes and I’m woefully underdressed and overfat. Oh well have a cookie. 

Rigidity in approach would help build habits, but rigidity and relationships don’t go together. But flexibility made it easy to waver when my willpower waned, and so the cycle continues. Now that I live alone, however, I can do all sorts of crazy things in my kitchen (food play, anyone?) and not impact anyone else (food+impact play, anyone?).

Plus, if I’m honest, I hate meal planning. It takes me a good couple hours, or else I’m just repeating the same things every other week. Worse than meal planning is the grocery story. I hate the grocery store. I hate mine in particular. I hate the people that go there, the managers, the selection, the utter disorganization, and the low quality vegetables. Gods it’s awful. When we lived in NYC I had groceries delivered to us via FreshDirect, and I still have some of the boxes and sigh in loving reverie when I see them in the attic. 

Enter GreenChef. Yet another meal kit delivery service which focuses on organic ingredients and is based in Denver. I actually applied to work there, but I think I accidentally insulted their CTO and didn’t get the job. Their loss, but good food. I'm using the vegetarian plan, and its tasty and filling. 

But GreenChef is only a few meals a week, and that leaves 14+ other meals that need to be dealt with. So what better than prepackaged pouches of ground up people nutritionally complete food powder. I’ve been intrigued by Soylent since they started, and now that I don’t have to plan around any one else’s preferences, I can subject myself to weird meals like Soylent Smoothies and whatnot. 

So far, the reaction to my Soylent experimentation has been “ew nasty” but I gotta say, it’s not bad! Actually it’s pretty good. I bought a bunch of fruit and veggies and some almond milk (via AmazonFresh, because, ugh grocery stores), and now I’m a couple days into this idea, and I’m actually impressed. I'll write the occasional update as I go 

I should say, I’m not doing some crazy fad crash diet. I’m being healthfully lazy. And I’m not going to live the rest of my life on Soylent and pre-diced dinners. This is more of a kickstart, and an experiment. I am working on my life in so many different facets and directions. This is an easy way to realign myself nutritionally without a lot of extra effort or—shudder—grocery stores.

So we’ll see how it goes, I guess.

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Change is Not Starting Over

I’ve restarted a lot of things in life. Blogging. Jobs. Budgeting. Craft projects. A few friendships. Fitness regimens. There’s nothing wrong with recognizing something is wrong and choosing to start again. Lessons learned, refine, and try something new. 

But change does not always imply something is wrong. Sometimes, change just happens. Slowly. People change. Usually slowly, sometimes quickly. If we don’t acknowledge that, embrace it, and ride that wave wherever it goes, we’ll just be miserable. And I don’t choose to be miserable. 

Twelve years ago I met my husband and fell in love. Ten years of that was just a regular old heternormative-ish relationship you’d see anywhere. We had adventures, we did big ambitious projects, we knew each other better than anyone. 

Two years ago, we began transforming our relationship into a power exchange dynamic, and he became my Sir and I his boy. He was new to kink and BDSM, I was not, but we explored what it meant. It was something I always wanted. It was something he wanted to explore. There are so many different dynamics in that journey, so many ups and downs and lessons learned and psychoanalysis that would take me a couple of bottles of wine to explain it all. But it’s actually not that important right now. 

This year, we realized we are different people than we were twelve years ago. We weren’t entirely happy with ourselves, either. And while we tried to grow, twelve years creates a lot of bad habits—and a lot of baggage. We were getting in our own way. Our relationship was stagnating. We were two half people, each in our own way, each stuck in different ways. 

We agreed to take a break at the beginning of July. It was painful. But it was amicable. It was scary. But it was necessary. Necesscary. But if we didn’t take this risk, how much worse would things be? If we didn’t embrace the fact that we were stuck and needed something different, if we didn’t allow ourselves to be scared and invest in ourselves in a great big unknown sea of gods know what might happen, then we’d just end up hating ourselves and each other and if we were going to end we never wanted to end like that. 

So, a lot has changed. For the first time in our lives, we’re effectively on our own. 

But change is not starting over. Starting over would imply failure. It hints that somebody did something wrong.  It makes you think that I’ve lost everything. But I haven’t. Not even close. When you start a new chapter in a book, it’s not a completely new story. It’s the same story, building on what came before. That’s what this is, that’s where I am. 

This is an opportunity to explore and become exactly who and what I want to be. There are no responsibilities or opinions or preferences or budgets or anything outside of myself and my dogs. 

There is so much to say, so much that I’ve been thinking about over the last three months, a wealth of revelations, and thousand trains of thought intersecting and looping and crashing and aligning. New people in my life, a ton of work at my day job and nonprofit, a redecorated house, new ideas and places to explore. 

This site is my journal for the foreseeable future. I want to share the things I’m learning, the things I’m wondering about, the pain and fears and happiness and other stuff. 

So here we go.