The Eye of the Storm

It's been raining in DC and Northern Virginia for days. Yesterday and today it has been downright COLD! It feels much more like early fall than late spring around here. I keep thinking I have washed my old college hoodie FOR THE LAST TIME DAMMIT. I keep having to pull it out of the back of my closet. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing better than gray, chilly, rainy weather and pulling on a sweatshirt to get cozy on the couch with some tea. That is what I did all afternoon yesterday! (And what I wish I was doing today, even more!) But it does make my walking commute suck considerably more than it usually does on a normal day of suckage.

I had to brave the wind and sideways rain this morning without my rain jacket, since, in a stroke of brilliance (ha), I left it at work on Friday. With, mind you, my KEYS IN THE POCKET. Left. In my office. This becomes even more of a pain if you live, as I do, in an apartment complex with gated entry ways and garages that require a key fob to scan into. Yes. So you have to fob into the garage, then once you are in the garage, you have to fob in to the elevator shaft! I spent all weekend harassing the concierge to let me in.

Ahhhh, I'm sad to be at work today. My boss has been in a wretchedly pissy mood for the last week and a half or so. He seems to want to yell at me every time I see him, so I am trying to lay low. Problem is if I don't bother him with questions on some of my tasks, he will get pissy anyway when I don't handle it exactly how he wanted me to. Half the time I think he invents arbitrary "rules" in order to get pissy in my direction. He is an energy vampire, a perpetual negative ion floating around. I am the only person on our team who will stand up to him when he's being unreasonable, so I tend to take more heat than anyone else. I'm trying to stop confronting him since it does me no good to be argumentative. As sad as it is, I'm trying not to assert myself. In this situation, it is for the best. He never backs down. Not ever. If he can't argue his righteousness by merit alone, he will resort to sayinig, "Because I'm the boss." I want to punch him in the face when he says that.

Anyway.

The Bikini Project is going great! I may have been hallucinating but I swear my ass was looking tighter this morning. I know I will accomplish my goals because I am really having fun and just enjoying myself, and it doesn't seem like a struggle at all! Amazing.

I hope no one thought that video I posted the other day was weird or out there. I'm listening to Oprah's Eckhart Tolle webcasts and thinking about all this mental stuff! Tolle talks about how he came up with his ideas for his books (The Power of Now, A New Earth) when he was on the verge of suicide. He says he was laying in bed and he had already made the decision to kill himself. He was thinking, "I just can't live with myself anymore." Then it occurred to him, who is this "self" I cannot live with? He realized that inside him there was an "I" and there was this "self" and that the self was not who he truly was. All the chattering in his head and pain he was feeling were not who he really was -- at his core, he was at peace. Most of our thoughts throughout the day are repetitive and not really helpful. We are not our thoughts. However, thoughts become things. With our thoughts we make the world around us. That's why I thought that right brain/left brain description on the video was so interesting because she totally described the left brain chattering and organizing and thinking that we need to remember is not, in the end, who we are.

Interestingly, Tolle talks about how when people do intense physical activities, they tune into that right brain inner core "self" - exactly why I love to lift weights. When I'm putting up 150# on a bar on my back, it's the surest way to turn off the incessant chattering and get my head to just shut the hell up. I'm totally in the moment, totally in my body, totally centered. I'm in the eye of the storm.

Alrighty, enough expounding for now. Back to the gamut!