staycation

My current job is the first one where I've ever had paid vacation time. Every previous job, if I wanted to take time off, I had to sacrifice the money I would have made from working. Which is one of the reasons I, sadly, have never seen Tori Amos in concert: years ago, around the time of The Beekeeper, one of my very good friends suggested we drive to Chicago to see her. The trip would have required me to take off three or four days of work, and I just couldn't do it because I needed the money. I can't tell you how jealous I was, or how much I regretted that decision, after I saw pictures of my friend with the lovely Ms. Amos in the Windy City.

Maybe because I'm not used to having it, I've tried very hard to not use my vacation time. I've taken a day or two here at random, then took a few days off for when my family went to Las Vegas in August, and then some more last week for my birthday. The point is, every time I have used my vacation time I have done it with a purpose, whether it be my cousin's wedding or a family trip. The idea of taking time off just to take time off is completely foreign to me.

Yesterday at lunch the discussion of Thanksgiving came up and who was taking off the Friday after. One of my coworkers asked me if I had enough vacation to be able to, and I said I do, but I was hoping to save it for around Christmas. But as soon as the words were out, I wondered whether or not that was true. Honestly, I hadn't even looked at my schedule yet, although I know both Christmas and New Years Day fall on a Friday, which means I'll get that day off but have to come back to work the next day (ah, the pitfalls of having to work on Saturdays).

So it was after lunch I did a little investigation and realized that if I sucked it up and worked both the day after Thanksgiving and the day after Christmas, I would have enough time accrued to be able to take off from Sunday December 27th through Monday January 4th, with the exception of December 29th where I'd have to work 11-4:30pm. That's right, ladies and gents: eight glorious days with absolutely nothing planned. Maybe I'll finally get around to making an eye doctor appointment or catching up on all of my reading. Maybe I'll take some road trips and visit friends I haven't seen in awhile. Maybe I'll take myself on a date to The Christmas Story house. Maybe I'll get enough sleep during the week to be able to actually stay up past 9pm on New Year's Eve. Maybe I'll spend the entire week curled up on my couch watching Season 5 of Lost, which is currently the only thing on my Christmas list, although, let's be honest, at the rate I go, it'll probably only take me two days. So maybe I'll just have a weeklong Lost marathon, seasons 1 through 5, and any of my friends who want to can just stop on in and watch an episode or two and we can drink and discuss our theories into the wee hours of the morning.

Oh, yeah. This is gonna be good.

the one where tudor rose brags her getting-littler-every-day butt off

As of this past Monday, I have lost just over 30 lbs. (30.4, to be exact, and while I had a coworker make fun of me a little for counting the .4, I am because every little bit counts.) But what this means is that I, dear and faithful readers, have lost 10% of my original body weight. Ten freaking percent. Actually, I've lost about a pound and a half over my 10%, which is even cooler.

I think one of the reasons all my previous weight loss attempts have failed is because I was only focused on the end, the final number, the goal weight. When you weigh what I weigh hoping to weigh what I will eventually hopefully weigh, that can be very indimidating. Oh sure, at the beginning you feel invicible and totally in control. You clean out your cabinets and fridge, stock up on fruits and veggies. Food is no longer just food but a math problem: you weigh and count and measure. Sure, it's a pain in the ass, but one that is necessary if you are going to succeed. And, at first, you do: 3 or 4 lbs a week becomes standard, but after awhile it slows down, as it is supposed to. 1 - 2 lbs of weight loss a week is considered a safe and healthy amount, but after two months and you find you've only lost 10 lbs, that goal weight seems awfully far away. Impossibly far away. Almost a year away, maybe more like a year and a half. Do I really have the motivation and drive to see this through? And if I don't, well, then, I might as well have that extra piece of cake after all.

And suddenly this isn't just a physical game, but a mental one, too, and you are losing. And not in a good way.

This time around, I decided I would do things differently. Approach weight loss differently. Yes, I have an ultimate goal weight that I want to reach, but I have also accepted it's going to take me a long time to get there and, so, have set up three mini goals along the way, the first one being to lose 10% of my initial body weight. These mini goals are twofold: on the one hand they act as markers of progress, but they also allow me to reward such progress. To feel accomplished and motivated to keep going. Which means, of course, that earlier this week I finally broke down and bought a pair of the Save the Ta-Tas pj pants that I had been eyeing at Torrid for about a month now. But, I did have a 10$ off coupon and, well hell, I deserve them. (Plus, when teamed up with my now-oversized Playboy bunny t-shirt, they make for super comfy (and super sexy) loungewear.)

Up next is my second minigoal, which is to have lost 50 lbs. Best part about this one? The arrangement of the first mini goal means I'm already more than halfway to my second. (My own brilliancy astounds even me sometimes.) After that is ONEderland (that lovely wonderful world where the first number in my weight is a 1, something I haven't seen since, well, honestly I couldn't tell you when, although my guess is, sadly, 8th or 9th grade). And then, finally, whenever it may be, getting on that scale and seeing that magical happy number that I will, hopefully, be able to maintain for many years to come.

But I'm not focusing on that number right now. I'm focusing on today and tomorrow. I'm focusing on Saturday, where I'm attending a vegan Thanksgiving potluck dinner and the six lbs of sweet potatoes I have to cut up. I'm focusing on the fact that my face looks thinner in pictures, that clothes fit better and I can buy smaller sizes than I have in years. I'm focusing on the fact that I'm starting to see the weight loss when I look in the mirror and starting to feel the weight loss on a day-to-day basis. I feel thinner, like I take up less space. For the first time in a very long time, I am happy and confident with how I look in a very real way.

Because while the 10% is awesome, it's only the beginning. And while the number on the scale is great, it's not the big picture. The physical changes are obvious, to me and to others, but it seems like I'm finally winning the mental game, too. And that is worth more than a million pieces of chocolate cake.

(But, just in case, I leave myself a few extra Weight Watchers points at the end of each day just in case I want to eat some more the super yummy vegan birthday cake left over from my party. Because a girl can only say no to sweet chocolately addictive frosting for so long before her once-a-month hormones take over. So, sure, still sometimes having to fight myself on the mental game but at least I'm playing smart.)

it's never too late to have a happy childhood

Growing up, my little sister and I always got to have themed-birthday parties. The kind of parties with cups and plates that matched the tablecloth and napkins, although the pièce de résistance was always the appropriately decorated birthday cake. I couldn't tell you any of the themes from when I was really little, although I do know that in fourth or fifth grade I had a Where's Waldo party (complete with a scavenger hunt for my guests that I put together myself) and then in high-school I had a Star Wars themed party, where the decorations on the cake were all of the toys that had been in the Taco Bell kids meals that I had painstakingly collected for weeks.

Over the past few weeks whenever I told anyone I was having a Hannah Montana-themed party, I was usually told their niece or granddaughter would love to attend. And how they had recently watched the HM movie with said niece or granddaughter and thought it was cute. To which I would respond that my mom was buying me a the HM movie as my birthday present (she also got me a Miley Cyrus birthday card. And I have watched the movie twice so far since getting it last Thursday night). When I went to Torrid yesterday to use my $10 off Birthday Coupon, the cashier asked what I had done for my birthday. When I told her about my party she laughed and admitted, almost shyly, that she finds Miley's song Party in the U.S.A. to be quite addicting.

The thing about having this kind of party at 28 is that you get to remember the fun of being a kid, of growing up, while also remembering the benefits of actually being grown-up. You get to drink wine and show off your apartment while eating off a brightly-colored star-shaped plate that features a preteen pop princess. You spend a good two hours getting ready so you look all classy and cute for your crush, but then turn into a giddy middle-schooler a few days later when you have two different friends point out how chatty he was with you. While one friend tries to decide which Harry Potter movie of yours to borrow for after the party, the evening turns into an old-fashioned salon for a few minutes when you consent to give a reading of your soon-to-be-published poem. You try to explain the complicated logistics of Harry Potter Clue while everyone tests their literary knowledge by asking questions from Book Lovers Trivia Pursuit. And after everyone has left and you decide to leave the clean up for the morning, you crawl into your bed overlooking the city skyline and reach for the stuffed animal you have spent years sleeping with, full of birthday love.

I think Hannah herself would agree: it was the best of both worlds.

siren song

While in my personal life I am absolutely terrified of rejection, as a writer I consider myself quite fearless. In sixth grade I wrote to the William Morris Talent & Literary Agency asking them to represent me based on a novella I had written as a fifth grader. And I haven't stopped since. In fact, since I started seriously submitting my short stories and poems back in college, I have kept every rejection notice I have ever received. Well, kept every one that arrived before electronic submissions became so popular and you started finding rejection notices in your email or could keep track of the consideration progress of your poems with a simple log in to a submission manager. Truthfully, while I love the green aspect of online submissions and how easy it is, I miss the days of painstakingly putting together cover letters and packets of poems into big ol' manila envelopes and filling out those SASEs. Of dropping them in the mailbox after a hesitant moment of lost confidence, only to then spend the next few days, weeks, and months waiting not-so-patiently to find out if someone outside of your creative writing workshops finds your voice worthwhile.

I've sent to the big names: The New Yorker, Paris Review, Atlantic Monthly because I figured, hell, I didn't have anything to lose. As it happens, of all of the many, many rejection notices I have received over the years I have three personal favorites: one is from OSU's The Journal which contains a lovely handwritten note from the editors (a personal message on the standard rejection form is quite a coup for any writer), the second is a rather encouraging paragraph-long letter from the editor of The Georgia Review (an even better coup), while the third is a rejection notice from Playboy because, well, who wouldn't love to be able to say they were in Playboy?

So it was back in late January, I submitted a small selection of poems to three different literary journals. I heard back from two of them within the past few months and had consequently forgotten all about the third, which is why I was very puzzled when I opened my mailbox last night after work to discover an envelope from Potomac Review. Had I signed up for a newsletter? Gotten on some random mailing list?

What was inside the envelope was something I haven't seen since I was a senior in college and working as an intern at a literary journal and was on the other side of the process: a publication agreement. That is, a contract/acceptance letter. Yes, dear and faithful readers, Potomac Review wants to publish my poem "In Ithaca" in their upcoming issue and is paying me handsomely with two free copies of the issue it will appear in. But not only do they want to publish me, I found out on my birthday. I mean, really. For a writer how could there possibly be any better present? When I went back to their submission manager and logged in (for the first time since submitting), I saw there were comments from staff regarding my submission. They described my poem as "wonderful" and said they would like to publish it if it was still available. As if the poem is so wonderful, they figure some other journal has already snatched it up.

And now I get to do the one thing I have always always always wanted to do: write my author bio. The life and times of Tudor Rose in 50 words or less. I haven't been this excited since I was in high-school and props mistress for the fall play and got to write a bio for the program. If this is any indication of things to come, it looks like 28 is going to be one fucking phenomenal year.

on this day in history

Since mid-June I have been utilizing a little whiteboard in the entrance of the library to daily post a new "Today in History" event. I love little historical factoids, and aim for a good balance of important historical events, such as the bombing of Hiroshima and Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon, to things that are more fun to learn about: I started this on June 16th, and the event for that day was in 1884 when the first roller coaster in America opened at Coney Island. I pick events from all over the world, as well as years. The earliest is 1540 when King Henry VIII married his fifth wife (admittedly, I threw that in for my own love of the Tudors) up through 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit. I elect to use three different sites to choose my event: History Channel website, New York Times website, and MSN Encarta and, between the three, I can usually find one really good event to post. I especially like choosing things that have happened here in Ohio; Cleveland especially, as that is the nearest metropolitan city (for instance, did you know that on July 11, 1914, Babe Ruth made his MLB debut in a game against the Cleveland Indians?) Because of where I work, though, I do show some discretion. For instance, the History Channel's website has a section on crime related events for each day. I generally skip that, if only because I want this part of the library to be a positive experience for the inmates, and while, sure it might be interesting that Jimmy Hoffa went missing one day and no one knows what happened to him, such a fact doesn't quite meet my ultimate educational goal. Along with that, because of the few times I have been asked if my library owns Mein Kampf (really? Inmates expect to find that in a prison?), and because of the racial diversity present in the prison population, I elect to stay away from any direct references to Hitler or Nazism, because, quite frankly, I don't want to start anything. Religion, too, is tricky because of the wide range of religious beliefs present among the inmates. There have been times I've toed my own line of rules: Einstein's immigration to the US for instance, where I elected to omit the fact that his decision to leave Europe was because of the Nazis. August 28, 1774 is the birth day of Elizabeth Ann Bayley, who went on to become the first American-born saint.

In terms of things related to where I work, on September 10, 1897, a London taxi driver became the first person arrested for drunk driving. As I work in a drug and alcohol treatment facility and many of the inmates are in here on DUIs, I thought that factoid fit my over-all goal (and the inmates who did stop to read it on that day all got a chuckle out of it), along with when the US prison population topped 1 million in late October 1994.

In honor of today, my birthday, November 12th, I have decided to post some interesting factoids for all of you. (Bet you didn?t know you?d be getting a history lesson today, huh?)

1799: American astronomer Andrew Ellicott Douglass witnessed the first meteor shower on record, the Leonids meteor shower, from a ship off the Florida Keys

1864: Union General William T. Sherman ordered the destruction of Atlanta, GA to begin

1892: Pudge Heffelfinger became the first pro football player

1927: Josef Stalin became the undisputed ruler of the Soviet Union as Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party

1946: The Exchange National Bank of Chicago, Illinois, instituted the first drive-in banking service in America

1954: Ellis Island closed after processing more than 20 million immigrants since opening in New York Harbor in 1892

1971: President Richard Nixon proclaimed the end of the U.S. offensive role in the Vietnam War and withdraws 45,000 troops.

1980: Voyager I came within 78,000 miles of Saturn

1987: The American Medical Association issued a policy statement saying it was unethical for a doctor to refuse to treat someone solely because that person has AIDS or is HIV-positive

2004: A jury in Redwood City, Calif., convicted Scott Peterson of murdering his pregnant wife, Laci, and dumping her body in San Francisco Bay

2006: Gerald R. Ford surpassed Ronald Reagan as the longest-lived U.S. president at 93 years and 121 days

And, of course:

1981: Oh-so-awesome librarian and blogger, Tudor Rose, was born