a work in progress

panorama of Vancouver/English Bay in summer

Month: April 2015

Green Smoothie

The Newest Member of the Spice Girls: Breakfast Spice

Green Smoothie

Photo by Joanna Slodownik / CC BY

I hate leafy green vegetables. They’re boring, largely flavourless, and my lips inadvertently purse into a weird scowl when I have to buy them at the grocery store (fun fact – this appears to be not entirely psychological, since apparently my brother & uncle have the same reflex, but they LIKES them).

I’ll eat an interesting salad (ideally ones with spices nuts & some sort of strongly flavoured cheese crumbled in) but it’s always an effort of will. Which is Bad, of course, because leafy green vegetables fall clearly in the Good category.

A couple of years ago, on a lovely hot summer day, I was walking around trying to decide what to have for lunch. I wasn’t very hungry and I definitely didn’t want anything cooked. I decided to try a green smoothie at (what is now) LeafyBox.

It passed the first test: I didn’t go blind.

It ALSO passed the second test – it was actually quite pleasant! But I have no idea what they put in it, and I wouldn’t swear that it didn’t have a lot of sweetened juice in it as well.

[two years passes]

About a month ago I was at Costco with a friend and saw some GIANT bags of spinach. Me: “I should eat more salads!”. Cut to a week later and a bunch of very limp spinach in the drawer at the bottom of the fridge. I had a LOT of ginger in the freezer from Sunrise Market and thought “well, maybe that would make it more interesting.”

It does! I’ve now tried them with and without LOTS of ginger and the ginger makes a big difference – it’s fun to drink instead of just a slog. So here’s my new daily breakfast. Give it a try!

Kara’s Spicy Green Smoothie
  • 4c baby spinach & kale mix (~40 cal according to the bag, ~80 cal according to MyFitnessPal)
  • 1/2c regular yoghurt (100 cal)
  • 1/4c coconut milk (~80 cal according to MyFitnessPal)
  • 1c carrots (~50 cal)
  • 2c frozen fruit (~120 cal)
  • 1/2c ginger (~50 cal – I keep it in the freezer, which will affect when it goes in the blender)
  • ~1c water

Start by  blending the yoghurt & coconut milk with the greens until they’re well mixed.

Break the carrots into thumb-sized pieces & blend them in (‘chop’ is fine – we’re not going for ‘fully liquid’ yet.) If your ginger is not frozen, add it now.

Add the frozen stuff SLOWLY. I use the ‘crush ice’ setting on my blender, but if you put it all in at once, the liquids freeze and you end up creating a cave at the bottom of the blender that nothing falls into. If you add the frozen stuff in batches, you don’t have to poke the contents down into the blades as much. Add the water in batches as well when things start freezing together.

Once it’s relatively smoothly blending, step up the levels until you get the consistency you like. Me, I like ‘liquify’ – there’s always going to be a bit of fibrousness left from the ginger, but not much.

Makes about 2.5 SOLO cups of smoothie. So, that’s… what, 40 oz? And you’ve started the day with probably all the vegetables & fruit you need. I’ve now had more leafy green vegetables in the last month than I have in probably the previous 6 months. And it doesn’t feel like ‘work’.

The Last Day

2012 Tulip Festival @ Agassiz, BC

Photo by GoToVan / CC BY

Today, I have lived as many days on this planet as my mother ever did.

[That is, assuming Excel’s date math handles leap years properly. Yes, I made a spreadsheet.]

There are many things I could write about my mother’s life, and our family’s life together, but I don’t feel comfortable writing about people I love without their knowledge and permission. The only thing I will say about that is that I don’t think she spent very much of her life doing what she wanted to do.

I’ve spent a lot of my life being angry. Reactive, hurt, feeling powerless and wild inside.

Last spring I realized that my next birthday would make me the same age as my mother was when she died and I began to really think about death – MY death. How it was a certainty. How I didn’t know when it will happen. Not just for me, but for everyone. And a while after that, I actually started to understand it. Not just rationally (of course we’re all going to die, everyone knows that) but emotionally.

Last spring, I was working in an office at a company I didn’t respect very much and becoming increasingly miserable (and this for a person with a pretty damn high baseline miserableness). I saw friends withdrawing from my constant perspective of disgust and complaint. I heard that someone I used to work with said he wouldn’t want to work with me again because I complained too much (at that time, he wasn’t wrong). The feeling I had at all times is “EVERYTHING IS WRONG, PLEASE MAKE IT STOP BEING WRONG.” I changed roles at the company I didn’t respect very much – hoping that maybe it was just the aspects of the job I was doing that were the problem.

It wasn’t. And when I realized that, I knew I was never going to be happy there. So last spring, I quit my job.

Let me just step out of this story for a minute to note a few things – I know that not everyone has that option. I’m well educated and have a marketable set of skills, I have a very supportive partner. I don’t have children that I need to support. I am financially secure. Not everyone could do what I did and I am grateful for the things that gave me that option, although I wasn’t particularly grateful for them at the time. I didn’t really understand that I was doing much better than a LOT of people are because I was so wrapped up in pain and anger and self-hatred. I only began to recognize how lucky I am to have those supports when I relaxed and let myself use them.

That’s part of why I quit: I felt like I was trapped, like I HAD to stay in the career that I was in. That’s the rule, right? If you’re what other people would describe as successful, even if you don’t feel it yourself, then it would be ungrateful to not value and cling onto those things that ‘they’ all want. [A contrasting perspective is that means you’re ‘taking up’ a job that someone else might actually want & be happy with, so as a conservation of resources dimension, quitting is a net happiness gain]. Although I had made some choices in my life that had led me to where I was, there were a lot more situations where I just went along with whatever the next easiest step was. I certainly wouldn’t say I was where I was because I planned to be there.

Three realizations are what got me moving. Like I said above, I really understood that I am going to die. Not (necessarily) imminently, but at a time most likely not of my knowing or choosing. Secondly, I realized didn’t need to be making as much money as I was. That based on my own situation, I have a lot of freedom to explore new alternatives and still be ok. And finally, I realized that I didn’t want the company I was working for to be successful. That I had enough concerns about its values and business practices, and the impact it was having on society, humanity, and the planet that I wasn’t rooting for it.

[The day you realize that you don’t want the company paying you to be successful is the day you think to yourself “If I keep accepting money from them, how is that different from stealing?” Or it was for me, anyway.]

So I quit.

I’ve spent the last 9 months working on changing my perspective and attitude towards this short life of mine. I have been trying new things, learning, discarding, keeping, adapting. Often I meditate. Sometimes I exercise. I meet new people. I reconnect with people I’ve lost touch with. I’m gradually learning what is good for me and what I need to avoid. Sometimes I make mistakes and do the things that make me feel angry or hopeless, but increasingly I’m recognizing when that happens and more importantly, I’m starting to react with a sense of humour and compassion towards myself when that happens. It’s not just an immediate descent into self-loathing and shame anymore. That change in myself is more than enough to pay for this past year of not working.

So today I am going to a meet-up to learn how to come up with a talk to give at conferences. I’m going to a friend’s place for a birthday dinner. I’m going to meditate and, weather co-operating, I’m going to go for two 45 minute walks. I’m also going to think about the last day my mom was alive and remember that I’m going to die and know that that’s ok. I have a lot of choice in how I live in the meantime.

Where’s Kara Been (So Far)?

I don’t travel as much as I’d like (given that I’d like to always be travelling) but I have done a decent amount of it. Bill & I sat down a few weekends ago and dug through our travel folders full of tickets, maps, journals, receipts, and non-digital photos to catalogue where we’ve been (so far).

I do plan to flesh out posts for each of these trips, with photos and stories (and hoo-boy, do some of them have stories!) but this list is a great start for me – it serves as an outline for what I need to write and backfill as well as reminding me of how lucky I am to have had these opportunities and acting as a ‘gratitude’ prompt.

Here’s a list of the places (other than regular trips to cities within Canada*) that I’ve been (mostly with Bill, a few without), since 1996.

Feb 2015 Cozumel, Mexico; Ambergris Caye, Belize
Apr 2014 Roatan, Honduras; Ambergris Caye, Belize
Nov 2013 Playa del Carmen, Mexico
Oct 2013 Minneapolis, Minnesota
Jun 2013 Kawartha Lakes, Ontario
May 2013 Placencia, Belize; Ambergris Caye, Belize
Feb 2013 Laguna Beach, California
Dec 2012 Laguna Beach, California
Feb 2012 Placencia, Belize; Ambergris Caye, Belize
Nov 2011 Papagayo, Costa Rica
Feb 2011 Turks & Caicos
Nov 2010 Varadero, Cuba
Feb-Mar 2010 Lembeh Strait, Indonesia; West Papua, Indonesia
Jan 2010 New York City, New York
Jul 2009 San Francisco, California
Jun 2009 Honolulu, Hawaii
Apr 2009 New York City, New York
Nov 2008 Puerto Aventuras, Mexico
Oct 2008 New York City, New York
Dec 2007 St. Lucia
Jul 2007 San Francisco, California
Mar 2007 Cozumel, Mexico
Sep 2006 Chicago, Illinois
Aug 2006 Washington, DC
Feb 2006 Cayo Santa Maria, Cuba
Nov 2005 Cozumel, Mexico
June 2005 New York City, New York
Feb 2005 Cayo Largo, Cuba
Jan-Mar 2004 Malaysia; Thailand; Burma
Apr 2003 Cozumel, Mexico
?? Missing data – will seek further. I’m sure there was a trip in here
Jan-Jul 1999 Indonesia; Malaysia Thailand; Singapore; Hong Kong
Feb 1997 Barbados

* I’ve done the North-American-centric thing of using states & provinces as the ‘qualifier’ in NA locations but countries in other ones (except Mexico). My apologies – I’m assuming that most of my readers will know that California is in the US and Ontario is in Canada, and it keeps the line lengths shorter.

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