Muscle Memory

There is still enough baby fat for me to believeably incite a conversation between my daughter and my navel. I have not yet begun "walking away the pounds," as I had hoped I would by this point in the new year. My schedule is beginning to move in that general direction in the mornings, but I just have to tweak my evening routine so that I will get to bed earlier. There is no way I will ever discipline myself to get up extra early for exercise when I haven't had enough sleep. I will rationalize in my drowsiness that sleep is just as important for my body as exercise, and I will grab the alarm clock while pressing the snooze button and proceed to hold it in my hand in the bed so that I can just effortlessly press it again in my quasi-sleep every nine minutes until Ava cries out "Mommy! MUCK! MUCK!" shortly thereafter.

I feel so irresponsible when I really think about how difficult self-discipline is for me. I have always been like this. By junior high, I was the kid who could never get up in the morning, even after her mother came in and abruptly turned on the lights and threw back the covers, yelling obnoxious cliches like "RISE AND SHINE!" or "UP AND AT 'EM!" I would convince her I was awake, and then I would get up only long enough to turn on the news and lie down on the foot of the bed, "waiting to find out what the weather was like" or to open my closet door and lie down on the foot of the bed staring into the closet "to decide what to wear." Naturally I would fall right back asleep with the covers pulled backwards over on myself, all cozy warm, rationalizing that these events were perfectly reasonable. In a few minutes, Mom would come blustering in again, this time yelling "CAROLE DIANNE! I TOLD YOU TO GET UP! NOW GET UP!" It was miserable for both me and my mother daily (and my dad on all those days when we had to chase the school bus along my route, and he was inevitably late for work because of me). I never had my homework done by the time Sunday nights rolled around either. It totally stressed me out that it was looming in the future, and I might run out of time to get it done, and yet I had no mechanism for making myself do any part of it like I should have before Sunday after evening church. That sure didn't leave much time to get things done. And being a diligent contact lens wearer was quite a feat for me during the college years. It was hard enough to get out of bed and to early classes within ten minutes of on time. Ginger saved me from certain doom in Old Testament our freshman year simply by ensuring that I was "up and at 'em" before she went to class. She eventually just resorted to waiting on me so that I would hurry to keep her from being late, which in turn helped me get there earlier than I would have on my own. The wise old professor soon fell savvy to this scheme and no longer marked either of us tardy. He trusted that Ginger would get us both there. But I should have been able to get there on my own! This has plagued me forever, and I am fearful of the pending personality closure that I'm told happens around age 28-30. Here I am, staring 28 in the face and desperate to counter all my worst qualities before I get too old to care, or to have the drive to change myself, or whatever happens that makes you stuck like you are.

On the positive side of my ordeal, I recently realized that I can't remember the last time I slept without my bite plate (a device for combatting my bruxism and therefore my TMJ syndrome). I have employed it consistently for probably the better part of a year without slipping up, and evidently without thinking about it too much. There was a time when I never would have thought it possible. I finally trained myself to do certain things before bed until they became automatic. It seems that if something actually provides enough of a benefit for my disciplined effort, then I really do eventually get it programmed into the good ol' muscle memory. I'm desperately trying to put some things there now (washing dishes and cleaning up the kitchen after supper, putting Ava's toys away each evening, managing all the paper that accumulates in our home, etc.), and I have to believe that if I benefit from doing them enough times so that not doing them feels even more uncomfortable than the nuisance of doing them in the first place, then (and probably only then) perhaps they too will enter the muscle memory and become automatic. That would be so liberating! I think life would feel easier if this stuff happened "automatically" for me. I know it means I will be doing consistent work to keep everything maintained, but that was my goal all along. I love being at home, but I want my home to feel like a nice place to be--a peaceful retreat after a long day, somewhere friends could drop by on a whim without embarrassing me. I'm getting there, slowly but surely.

Excess

Why is it that name brand English muffins get to sit in a little cardboard box inside the plastic bag? Bread doesn't get a box in its bag. Bagels don't get a box in their bag. Crumpets, tortillas, pitas (well, that one might get a plastic box inside its bag)...all nakedly exposed to the plastic bag. So what makes English muffins so special? Probably just to keep them from positioning themselves haphazardly during shipment, I know. But isn't it wasteful to have them in a box and a bag? The cheapo brand I used to buy back home had them stacked up in a plastic bag. No box. No need for one. Just stacked up and sitting tall on the butt end eng muf (as we like to call them). Where's the shame in that? Couldn't the Thomas people just print their logo on the bag and stack 'em up too? Seems like it would save them time and resources, as well as saving the world from a little unnecessary paper trash.

Beans

No one could make pinto beans like Mema. There are experiences in every person's life that are so ordinary and often that we don't make much of them until years later when we realize how they fit into the backdrop of our lives. Mema made great beans. Often. I could smell them cooking when I opened the front door after my long walk home from the bus stop. That's when I was older and didn't get home from school until late in the afternoon. During my grade school years, I was already home from school when Mema would take down the big plastic jar full of pinto beans. The splash of beans on the kitchen counter was my cue to come watch her sort out the good beans from the bad ones and occasional rocks. (I was always perplexed by the rocks.) She would flatten out a palm-sized amount of beans, take a look at them, separate out any losers, then cup her hand behind them and slide them off the counter into the big plastic bowl below. The repeated CRASH! of her progress invigorated me. I don't think I realized at the time how exciting it was, but it seems to be something of a fond memory for me now.

There are quite a few things that I had always done the way Mema did them, just because that's the only way I had ever known, and I hadn't given it much thought. (Mema knew everything, after all...why question her methods?) And there are also quite a few practices I have reevaluated and altered over the last nine years of life on my own. So the other day I was making beans, and I decided to try a different way of sorting them (I think my kitchen counter wasn't clean at the moment and I was too hurried to clean it or something). I can't even remember now how I was doing it, as I quickly saw the genius of Mema's method and rectified the situation. I never realized until that day the inherent satisfaction of the CRASH!...CRASH!...CRASH! of progress, Mema style. Oh how I miss her, but she is within me.