peanut butter & visas

Tags

exercise, expat, germany, happiness, visa

our little section of the rhine

it’s been a week now since james and i have started our weight loss competition and i feel pretty good. wednesday, i woke up rather late and felt awful – really tired and achy and completely uninspired. of course, it was raining as well, which didn’t help. but i still managed to force myself to do an hour of pilates. i also walked into town to meet james after work and then made a really nice dinner – baked tofu sticks, steamed veggies and mashed potatoes (of course, james has to have potatoes in some form for every meal). i went walking/jogging tuesday, thursday and saturday and went for a bike ride on saturday as well (to the pet store – tropical fish! yay!)

friday, though, i did absolutely nothing.

today is “day one” of the second week in my couch-to-5k program i’m following. i’m hoping it will turn me into a runner in a way that protects my knee. so far so good. of course, one week isn’t all that much…

all of that exercising aside, james won this week. not only did he lose more than i did, he lost more in a percentage (which apparently is what they do on the biggest loser and the like). i’m telling myself it’s because he’s a boy, but that doesn’t make me feel better. he didn’t do any exercise and just sort of changed how much he was eating and it seemed to do way more than my being neurotic did. sigh. at least i wasn’t perfect last week, so i can still improve this week. and then next week, maybe i’ll do the cleanse. which might be cheating, but hey. at least i’ll win one week.

though, if i do this cleanse, i’ll have to give up peanut butter & jelly sandwiches. and i’m not sure if i could do that right now, even for a week. i don’t know why, but i really crave them. i wonder if the germans would think it’s as weird as the catalans did. i remember for the last day of class, i brought in peanut butter and some of the kids wouldn’t even try it!

of course, the most exciting thing this week was getting my visa. after five years, i’m now living in europe legally. no more fearing flying home or being unable to visit england. i have a visa.

and for some reason, seeing the tenenberg crossed out and cope-morgan written in, it sort of made me realize what it meant to no longer be a tenenberg! i am, of course, blissfully happy being married to james and i love the idea of us being a family and being “the cope-morgans”, but there is a bit of an identity crisis that comes along with it. when the woman in the bürgerbüro printed out my visa and i had to say, “that’s not my name anymore”, i’ll admit it was a little bit strange.

and while i’m the same person and i’ll always be a tenenberg and a rose by any other name and all that, it got me thinking: i know who laura tenenberg is, but who is this laura cope-morgan? and just maybe, it means i can choose a little bit who she is. there are things i really love about laura tenenberg, but frankly, she can really piss me off sometimes. so maybe i leave those things behind. maybe laura cope-morgan gets to be anything i want her to be. laura cope-morgan blogs after all, while laura tenenberg turned her nose up at the very idea (computers and the like). mrs cope-morgan lives in a small town in the country, while miss tenenberg always described herself as a city person. past-laura could never really figure out what she wanted and always seemed trapped by herself while present-and-future-laura seems to be rising above a few of those fears and not even noticing some of those traps.

sadly, though, laura cope-morgan spelled her own name wrong at the bookshop trying to order her german book. so she can’t be all that bright, really…

my visa!

mornings

Tags

depression, exercise, expat, germany, happiness, traveling

last week i had three things to do that involved other people. i joined the american international women’s club and i met with them once in cologne for a book exchange and once in leichlingen for coffee. the third was the knitting group and i missed that. three things to do in my calendar, and i space one. how is that possible? here i am, desperate for things to do and people to speak with and i just don’t make it. sigh.

lately i’ve felt like the people on antidepressant commercials. i had always seen my depression as something teen-aged in itself: raw, dramatic, angst-ridden and violent. now, my depression is simply there, quiet, daunting and still imposing itself into my life, but without any of the force of emotion i’d grown accustomed to. maybe it isn’t my depression that’s changed. maybe i’ve changed. maybe now i just roll over in bed and acknowledge that i don’t want to wake up and then a couple of hours later i make my way, silently, to the couch where i quietly accept that it’s just too hard to leave the house today. maybe i’ve lost the desire to do all the self-detrimental things that i used to do: get drunk, get stoned, rail in any and every way against the misfortune that is mine, but i’ve also lost the desire to do all of the creative, interesting, helpful things that i used to do, like immersing myself in an art project just because, creating a package to send someone or writing poetry and making something out of it. i’ve only half grown out of it – i’ve made the decision not to make negative decisions, but i haven’t yet decided to make positive ones.

it’s quite depressing in and of itself, really.

james and i have decided to have a competition for weight loss and i’m hoping the focus on exercise and eating right also helps me become more engaged in my life in other ways. i feel i’ve been given this opportunity here to really make a permanent change. i’m usually so distracted by friends, by work – here, i have the option to really just “work on myself” (a completely new-age, american idea that even i laugh at when i hear my friends saying it) and i’m squandering it. i’m afraid. i lie awake at night, tangibly and palpably afraid of going to sleep because it means i’ll have to wake up the next day. and the next morning, i wake up, suddenly aware that it’s morning and i force myself to go back to sleep for another hour or two – anything to just avoid dealing with the day.

and what is so terrifying? going for a walk by the river? doing the dishes? or discovering that i can’t that day; that that day is just going to pass by like so many others with me on the couch, not even dealing with how devastating it is for me to have spent the day that way until james comes home. because i’m too ashamed and afraid to even look at it all.

the thing in all of this that i don’t ever seem to accept is that it’s so clearly a choice. every morning, i make a choice to accept myself as i saw myself the day before, the month before, the year before – it’s a habit formed out of my refusal to use my inherent free-will. i read yesterday that they’ve done experiments and can prove that there are separate electric signals that are sent in different areas of the brain when a person thinks about moving their finger and when they actually do. when they do move their finger, the thought is first noted and then the action – which comes from a different part of the brain. but even the thought stimulates a reaction, completely separate from the reaction that prompts the doing. what they were proving is free-will – but i think more importantly, it says a lot about thoughts and thoughts versus actions.

i can just see myself every morning in bed with that little part of my brain where thought creates a reaction just surging with all the energy my thoughts are sending out of getting up, of finishing my to-do list, of going for a walk or god forbid, going to the gym. just what happens to all that energy then? where is it going and what am i getting for it? and how to do i transfer it to energy of doing? is it really just down to a choice? and if so, what is keeping me from making it?