people observation #25: Row Mans & Relation Ships

Notice the gum on my cup. I have
 no intention of chewing that later.

I'm currently sitting at a Starbucks window seat in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Coffee shop window seats provide prime location for people watching. One can eavesdrop to ongoings inside, but also watch some awesome people outside. I find a great deal of enjoyment in inventing stories for passersby.

Whenever I see people going on jogs, I pretend it's actually because he or she is running from the next jogger behind them, and depending how soon this next jogger comes, I determine if the first jogger makes it where he or she was going safely.

A Jeep pulls up to a man on the corner and asks for directions. I pretend the man giving directions takes them on a five mile detour passed his small sandwich shop he just opened up, because he's all about nonchalant and passive advertising, pun intended.

The longer I stare out the window, the more complex my stories get.

The person standing right outside the window from me is dressed fairly well. He's bald with decently stylish glasses, but he also has his septum pierced, a very thick metal hoop through both nostrils, with a two iron balls the size of large peas on the ends. I imagine he's a generally conservative fellow who, in a phase of self-searching, dated a free spirited hippie-chick a couple years back that made him do it, and now, he being the low-risk individual he is, is afraid to remove the metal out of fear that it's actually holding his entire nose together. He can make that excuse all he wants, but when he's really being honest with you, he'll confide that it brings back good memories of that strange, strange girl.

As Pandora picks my playlist, I pretend that anyone with headphones on is listening to the same song as me. (Unless they're wearing Beats by Dre. Then they're just sooo hardcore, and I couldn't imagine what explicit Jam they're pretending they wrote. But because the only headphones I could find are the jumbo and ear-sore inducing ones that came with my iPhone, I'm also kind of jealous of anyone's squishy Beats earpad.) Whenever a mildly embarrassing song comes on, I take out my headphones to make sure nobody can hear.

What is the most interesting to watch out the window and inside of Starbucks are the couples. Love is fun to observe, and I can also get the most creative with my stories. An elderly couple passes holding hands. I pretend they are both widows, but fell in love at a local church's BINGO night six years ago and despite the rarity of falling in love so late in life, they have become best friends.

 As a college couple passes, I lock eyes with the girl. She grabs her boyfriend's hand. I thought about hissing at her, just for dramatic effect, but I decided that their relationship is really struggling because she has jealousy problems and he has intimacy issues, and they didn't need some makeupless, messy-bunned, Starbucks writer who's had to pee for thirty minutes but doesn't want to leave her MacBook in an unknown place coming between them.

I watch co-ed groups pass and it seems that I just naturally divide them into couples. If there's an odd number of individuals in the group, I joke to myself about third and fifth wheels. Poor Bryan, he's going through a rough break up and the only thing he could find to do today is hang out with his bros and their clingy girlfriends.

But really, relationships are so weird. We naturally just put so much complexity into them. I mean, no, relationships may not be as simple as a random stranger creeping through the window having the ability to dissect then point out all strengths and weaknesses of a relationship in one passing, but they aren't as difficult as we make them out to be. Reading Cosmo may make me want to buy every single color in the Kardashian OPI line, but I refuse to believe that my boyfriend is cheating on me because he bought me flowers. And when it tells me that a guy's liking of the rounder parts of a woman is directly proportionate to his need to be hegemonic and controlling, I'm going to take it with a grain of salt.

Girls are the worst at over-analyzation. A girl angry at her boyfriend, when asked if something is wrong, may answer "I'm fine," When she is (woah, curveball) not actually fine.  And girls, when a guy says he doesn't want to talk, he doesn't have problems with speaking up or knowing what he wants or a fear of admitting the truth or just an overwhelming feeling because this girl is just the greatest girl he's every met, he probably just doesn't want to talk.

I initially sat down at this Starbucks to write my Gender and Politics paper, a review of several journal excerpts of university studies about masculinity's role in romance. One can study it as much as they want, but when it comes down to it, I think romance is a pretty simple thing. It comes in different forms for everyone, but every single person on this planet likes when they feel special because someone's expressing a care for them. Romance is necessary for first dates. It's necessary for marriages of fifty years. Of course, it evolves and a relationship's definition of what a romantic act is changes through time, as is one different for each couple.  But without it, a relationship will fall apart.


I like to think that Valentine's Day is stupid because we should be romantic and do special things for the one's we love more than one day out of the year. But that being said, time takes advantage of us, and all of a sudden it's been a month since we did something thoughtful for the person that we care about. It's nice to have a designated day to remind us about why we fell for that weirdo on the other side of the bed in the first place.

Two pieces of advice to leave with:
     1. Do thoughtful things. Going out of your way to do something nice for someone is so great.
     2. Don't be annoying about relationships. Just be honest. Don't make it so complex.

Also, when you're watching people through the Starbucks window and making up life stories for them, which I'm sure everybody does, I'm sure is completely normal, try to look at people and find positive things about them. It's very self-esteem boosting when you're being kind to others, even just in your thoughts.

Thanks to Instagram for making me feel like I can take cool pictures. 

you are what you eat, and you aren't what you don't

Being healthy physically involves that balance between sleeping enough, exercising enough, and eating enough of what you should be eating.

I never realized how little people cared about their physical health until I came to college.

People come up with excuses like they don't have enough time, or taking care of themselves is too expensive, when the irony is that getting sick and not being healthy takes a toll on your time and your wallet far greater than keeping up with yourself.

Why is taking care of ourselves not a priority?
     Example, dumb example, but example nonetheless: I also did not realize until I came to college that some people didn't wear seat belts. Like, here is this free piece of fabric that could save your life in the incident of a car accident, but if that car accident doesn't happen it doesn't bother you.
     And yet, people still don't click it. (unless I'm driving..then you better be buckled up before the car even starts) Two options: Wear the seatbelt or don't wear the seatbelt.
      Pros of not wearing your seatbelt: none/ Cons: YOU COULD DIE.
      Pros of wearing your seatbelt: You could live, you feel safer, if you don't get in a wreck, it's hardly        noticeable that it's even there/ Cons: There are no cons.
     See what I'm saying? I don't CARE that the law doesn't require people in the back seat not to wear a seatbelt. The law doesn't require me to wash my hands when I'm done dropping a duece but you hope to God that I do. For the sake of your health right?

Taking care of yourself should be a priority. If you were told that your food was poisoned every time that you were about to take a bite out of it, you'd stop yourself right? But that's the thing, by putting a bunch of crap into your body, you are poisoning yourself. With every bite. Our bodies have to work that much harder to fight the disease we're already fighting, as well as the crap it's trying to digest.

I made scrambled eggs for lunch today with peppers and spinach and salsa. A friend of mine walks in and tells me that my meal "grossed him out." (This is the same person who refers to my organic cuisine as "dirty hippy food.") The thing is that he literally eats nothing but absolutely unhealthy things. Who knows the last time he had a VEGETABLE! That's what grosses me out! I am absolutely disgusted every time he brings some 5.99 combo meal into my living room and procedes to wash it down with a Diet Coke (oh, how healthy of you). The fact that his body is FIGHTING to get rid of the toxins he's putting into it every time he's thirsty or hungry, that's what grosses me out.

And sure, I can take a hit every now and then. He doesn't understand the importance of being healthy. I get it. But why not? Why is that not a priority in everyone's life?

And what grosses me out more is that America is SICK with this disease. Instead of thinking of McDonald's as a treat, as something we can enjoy every now and then, it is a daily option for every meal. (FoodMatters: watch)

I have yet to come up with a conclusion to this problem. How do I get people to care about themselves? How do I get people to realize that there is a direct correlation between the fact that they are dehydrated, malnourished, sleep-deprived, and out of shape and the fact that they feel like shit. Treat yourself like crap, and that's exactly how you're going to feel.

start your engines

Over the course of the next couple weeks I'm going to start a series on health; I'll be looking at the different aspects of our lives where we can all stand to give ourselves and each other a little more tender lovin' care. 

The different segments I'll be focusing on include:

• physical
• emotional
• spiritual
• social
• helping others
• mental

I'm no expert in any of these fields, so there will be a lot more going to the people who know what they're talking about. For the time being, these are great sites:

Healthy Recipes

ExperienceL!fe Magazine

Bob McCauley's blog

people observation #20: customer service, please serve us.

I am currently sitting in the health center getting a check-up, and experiencing the inevitable frustration with the system that is the campus clinic.

Clinic: we all know the connotation associated with this word. In the same way the word moist just seethes off the tongue if you're a girl, the word clinic really makes us cringe. We could go for a more appropriately-connotated word, like "health center" to be more politically correct or we could say "infirmary" if this were Hogwarts, but regardless of what you call it, when you're at college, going to see a doctor is a nightmare to say the least. It's on my top-five places I'd least want to be in Athens (probably somewhere between the back of an OUPD squad car and the bottom of the Hocking.)

It's as if clinics were designed for inefficiency. That's another blogpost, though, for another day. I do, however, give OU props for the changes they seem to be making to their health services. (Unless it's like the Pennsylvania turnpike, of course, and it's never actually finished with construction).

I sit here and listen to the nurses and technicians discussing something to be of great importance (gossip), and from below me the sounds of hammering vaguely make out the rhythm to Katy Perry's Firework as it plays on radio 105.5. There's some Japanese kids engaging in what I think is bickering somewhere close outside.

Because the first floor is getting new carpet or something, the clinic has been "temporarily" squished onto the second floor. Sidenote: The waiting room is divided with signs separating the sick people from the healthy. Like a smoking section in a restaurant, the flu-infected runny-nosed Sophomore won't affect you because you're sitting on the far east "healthy" corner of the room. Viruses can read too, you know.

So I have just passed through level one of the appointment.

Are you a Smoker? No.

Are you allergic to anything? No.

How tall are you? 5'5'' if I'm not slouching.

Your blood pressure reading is outstanding. I'm a bad ass.

Now I am sitting in the 2nd waiting period, as if the first awkward calling of the names isn't painful enough. Alright, Erin, Phase One complete. Why am I nervous? I feel like I'm sitting outside an audition. Boy, I sure hope I made the cut!

Because they're making renovations to the main entrance, people enter through whatever sidedoors and cracks in the walls they can find. I find myself sitting on an arbitrarily-placed bench in the hallway where I'm stuck between a green-faced girl in the fetal position on my left and a desk of nurses doing paperwork on my right. After memorizing the eye chart placed on the wall in front of me, and being informed that I can do my part in preventing the flu from the hand-washing PSA next to it, my mind starts to wander, and the eavesdropping begins.

Nurses' conversation seems to be dominated by the topic of several patients' confusion as they walk in side doors and attempt to find the waiting room with few, if any signs. Being in the position of these disoriented patients earlier that hour, I found myself empathetic to their situations. A student would walk up, give some rendition of the "is this where I check in?" and the nurses would explain to them that it was further down the hall. After each student would leave, the nurses would gripe about how irritated they were at the students for not knowing where to go. I began to lose patience, pardon my pun.

I started thinking about how many times this happens to us as people. We are in a different position than others, and forget that their experiences do not mirror ours. So when a student walks in to the clinic, already in a state of feeling thrilled to be there, they aren't necessarily going to know the remodeling situation let alone where they are suppose to go, even if there's an 8.5x11 Scotch-taped up to the door.

I see a student, stomach in hands, walk up to the desk and ask a nurse with stethoscope-wearing cats on her scrubs where she can find the check-in desk. Folks, don't be fooled by the cuddly sea-foam green felines on her attire. This lady snapped back with total sarcasm and cruelty to someone who was clearly a freshman (lanyard) and clearly ill, "you're in the wrong place!" She my as well had laughed in the patient's colorlessly clammy face and called them an a hole.

What happened here was the nurse failed to recognize that although several other patients had come in and asked similar questions, this particular bewildered student did not know those other kids. The nurses could have easily fixed this problem and put a sign up that said "check-in" with an arrow on it, but instead they proceeded to get ruder and ruder with every passerby. Instead, they chose to question the college kids' intelligence.

The thing is that this happens all the time. Everywhere. When you call the gym and ask if their hours will be cut short for the national holiday coming up, you don't know the other people calling in to ask similar forms of that question. When you walk up to the host's station at Red Lobster to ask how long their Saturday night wait is, you don't know that the seventeen-year old hostess had just answered that same question for a middle-aged man holding a screaming toddler just two minutes prior. When you ask the TWA officer at DFW whether or not it's alright to bring your ak-47 on board, who were you to know that there was just a recent ban on assault rifles on airlines?

My point is, when in the shoes of the gym representative (probably sneakers) or the hostess (probably dress shoes) or the nurse (crocs?), every person that comes to ask a question does not have the knowledge that you do, hence, the whole purpose of asking questions: in hopes for an answer. In a customer service position, one is to understand that they are providing exactly this, service to their customers.

I don't care if you are seventeen or seventy. I don't care if it's just a part time job you picked up for a couple extra bones. I don't care if you're stuck working this job for the rest of your life and you're miserable.

The ability to understand things from the perspective of other people is crucial to literally everything. What I learned today in the clinic is that when people keep coming up asking some form of the same question, realize the only thing that can be done is flash that million-dollar customer-service smile and answer their questions. I also learned that washing your hands is important. Do that too.

Eventually, I made it passed the check point and into phase two of my appointment. I sat on the cold crinkly paper rolled out over the table. The doctor had me take deep breaths as she listened to my heart and lungs.

"Are you allergic to anything?" She asked.

"No," I replied, shaking my head in disappointment. Stupid doctor. Doesn't she know I already answered that to somebody else?

people observation #13: because it makes you feel good. legitimately good.

There is one and only one reason we should be engaging ourselves in a healthy lifestyle. Because it makes us feel good. All the other consequences we usually initially aim for will follow suit.

Experience Life Magazine has started their latest volume with a mantra Being Healthy is A Revolutionary Act. The idea of it is that our society has been obsessed with things that are bad for us far too long, some of us so surrounded by the sickness that they have no resources to even take up a healthylifestyle. And for those of us who have embraced a life of fresh air, eating right, and healthy exercise: it has truely become a revolution.

I have always been a healthy person, but I attribute my consciouseffort to taking care of myself to when I started working at Lifetime Fitness my sophomore year of high school. Here was a community of people, all different ages and sizes, and on all different fitness levels, and I loved it! We can set goals for ourselves, like lose this amount of weight, look that particular way, or don't eat anything unless it's celery, but that will never work! We're human, and if we simply start taking care of ourselves, the other things that we've always wanted will fall into our laps (or in some cases off of our laps).

If you go to revolutionaryact.com, you can read about what other people are up to, and how we can learn to take care of ourselves and our community. Below are a few examples of their 101 Revolutionary Ways to Be Healthy.

If you are not typically a person who considers themselves healthy,

I encourage you to take a week to eat right.

Eat three different colors with every meal.

Carry around a water bottle.

Keep your body moving.

Tell me how you feel.

legitimately good