Some Updates on MY Life Which Might Affect YOUR Life

Hey team, I won't keep you for long. I know I already convicted you with my last post on laziness, so you're trying to have a productive day, and here I come along providing yet another distraction. Sorry about that. I just wanted to alert you to some cool things that are happening over in my world -- things that you'll probably want to be a part of -- and then you can get right back to crunching the numbers or whatever it is you do at work.

1. Dwell - An Advent Guide

Artwork created by Tim Bauer

Over the last month, I have been collaborating with Matt Popovits, lead pastor of Our Saviour New York, on this devotional guide for Advent -- the season in which we look forward to the arrival of Jesus on Christmas and reflect on what his birth (as well as his death) means for our lives. Matt has written a great foreword at the beginning of the guide that should definitely get you pumped for all of the messages ahead. Advent begins on December 1st, and I've written four long-form devotions for each Sunday as well as small daily reflections to read throughout the rest of the season. 

To take a gander at the guide, you can download it from this blog post from OSNY's website. It's totally free, and it's totally worth it for you and your family. 

2. Winter is On My Head

Artwork created by Tim Bauer

Winter is On My Head is a collaborative album which features music on the theme of winter (perfect for those of us who seriously cannot wait for Christmas to arrive). It's a completely volunteer-based program from some talented people who really just want to help make the world a better place. The proceeds from this year's album go straight to City Harvest, an organization that helps feed the hungry here in New York City. It's a wonderful project which includes some really fantastic music. You can download previous volumes on the website until Vol. 5 is released on December 2nd.

On December 6th, there is going to be an album release event at Our Saviour New York in Queens (92-14 63rd Drive, Rego Park). It will feature talented local musicians as well as some winter-themed storytelling from various comedians. I will be doing some singing (sometimes I make music with my mouth, guys! I wasn't sure if you knew that.) and some storytelling, so come check it out. The event starts at 7:00 PM and tickets are $10 in advance or $12 at the door, and each ticket comes with a free beer.

For more information, head to winterisonmyhead.com


3. Sponsor Avoiding Atrophy

Thanks to the good folks at Passionfruit, I now have an online store where you can easily purchase a variety of ad spots on Avoiding Atrophy! Just head to my Advertise page, and check out your options. If you're a fellow blogger looking to grow your audience, or really anyone who could benefit from some exposure, OR you just love the site and want to make a contribution, you'll want to check this out. 

Click here to learn more! 

Alright, you've heard enough from me, guys. Now, come on, get back to work. 

7 Ways to Just Get Stuff Done

Today we're going to talk about laziness and the things we can do to combat it. Of course, I have basically no frame of reference for what it means to be lazy, so I will just have to make some speculations based off of the lives of other, less-evolved people that I've met.

Wait...confession: none of what I just said was true. I know, shocker. The truth is I understand laziness. I understand laziness HARD. I mean, if it weren't for certain societal pressures, I would basically live my life like this here slow loris:

I'd just sit there with my ball of rice, thinking about life's greatest mysteries such as why people are suddenly up-in-arms about the prevalence of pumpkin spice lattes or why anyone would actually want to be a contestant on The Bachelor.

The positive way to spin this is to say that, much like Plato or Socrates, I am simply inclined to a life of introspection. That's really nice of you to say, but we both know that's not true. I'm just a person who has got herself a touch of the lazies, and is that really so bad? I feel like it could be way worse. 

The trouble is that life never seems to allow for laziness to win. In life, you have to do stuff and be places and if you don't, then sometimes you starve and die. So for people like me, people who sympathize with sloths and napping cats, what happens is that in attempting to do the things that life requires, frustration just creeps up. Suddenly, I'm doing stuff and I'm being places, but it feels so laborious and I'm so frazzled that I don't actually feel like I'm making any progress in life.

Because this is such a cycle for me, I've learned some methods along the road to help me out that I'd like to share with you today. So, if you're living like a slow loris, it's time to put down the rice ball and listen up.

Here are a few things that help me out. Maybe they'll help you too.

1. Channel Beyoncé

Via Etsy (you can buy this, and I suggest you do.)

While you were binge-eating Wheat Thins and watching Netflix, Beyoncé just burned 10,000 calories dancing to "End of Time" for an entire stadium full of people who burned 5,000 calories just from the sheer joy of watching her. I talk about Beyoncé a lot on this blog, but the truth is she is a person just like you are a person. She's got nothing that you haven't got, so if she can get stuff done, then you can too. Stop letting the clock run out, and get out there and make it happen.

2. Make a plan

I'm a big list-maker. Lists help organize our thoughts and they serve as excellent reminders for the things we would ordinarily forget to do. Sometimes, however, I think they can become another way to stress myself out. Once I get started, I just can't stop adding things (fold laundry, call mom, pay utility bill...let's see, what else can I do? Paint the ceiling, write a novel, create sculpture in the likeness of my husband). 

It gets far too ambitious and just flat crazy. For this reason, I usually structure my to-do lists with 5 things that I HAVE TO get done that day and 5 things that COULD get done (and probably should, but I'm not going to freak out if they don't. They're like my rollover tasks). 

If you're wondering what this looks like, let's take a look at an example. The following is Beyonce's to-do list:

It's short. It's simple. It's manageable (for Beyoncé anyway). 

I like to write my list out the night before, so that I know how to plan my next day accordingly. I don't know when Beyoncé writes hers. If you see her, could you ask her for me?

3. Don't snooze

Does anyone else's alarm clock look like this?

Setting your alarm clock to "snooze" is like the worst thing you can do. This article confirms it and so does my life. By constantly being alarmed in tiny increments, your body doesn't enter the waking cycle and it affects your memory and your wakefulness.

But, if you're anything like me, this advice will not help you at all because your Awake Person and your Snooze Person are two entirely different people. The tragedy is that Snooze Person is conscious enough that Awake Person is forced to remember all of the weird things that happen during snooze mode. I once pressed snooze like thirty times, and each time I would say OUT LOUD, "You know, they say, when you snooze you lose, but guys, this is awesome." Guys?! Who was I talking to? I said that multiple times. To myself. Out loud. And I thought it was SO funny. And then I was late for everything and hated everyone for the rest of the day. WHO IS THAT SNOOZE PERSON?! SHE IS THE WORST.

Guys, don't do snooze. You're basically setting yourself up for failure for the rest of your day. 

4. Move immediately

I thought this GIF was too weird not to share. I googled "waking up gif" and this is what I ended up with, and I am not going to pretend that waking up with a hairless cat isn't an actual nightmare for me because it is. 

Anyway, don't do what this lady is doing. Get your ass out of bed and get moving. It will get your blood pumping and clear your mind for that busy to-do list you created. Whether you run, clean, or just play a quick round of Just Dance, you can't just lie naked in bed all day with your terrifying cat until it's time to go to work. That's no longer an option for you.

5. Set timers for yourself

So your ass is out of bed, and now you're getting down to bid'ness. Whether that means you're at work crunching the numbers or home organizing your junk drawer, you'll need something to keep you motivated. I like to set a timer that I keep by my desk (it's in the shape of a bellpepper, and it's very cute, but it mostly doesn't work). For me, the stuff that I need to get done is usually writing-related, so I'll set my timer for thirty minutes, and I will write so hard and so fast that my fingers bleed, and when the timer goes off, I know it's time for a short guilty pleasure. I'll set my timer for five minutes, and I'll peruse Twitter and Facebook until that timer goes off. Then it's another thirty minutes of finger-bending, wildly aggressive typing.

6. Close out of all of your tabs

This piece of advice is more for those of us whose professions involve using a computer. Pictured below is a hot mess of open tab insanity.

If you really want to get work done, close it ALL. Everything except what you need. No excuses. 

6. Put in the effort required

Sometimes when I'm doing chores around the apartment, I will suddenly catch myself completely half-assing everything, especially if I'm in a particularly bad mood that day. For example, if I'm picking clothes up off the ground, I'll pick up a single shirt, practically crawl to the hamper, drop it in, crawl back to the mass of dirty clothes, and pick up another solitary piece of clothing. 

Sometimes our bad attitudes can make tasks seem so much more arduous than they actually are. It's like we are trying to spite the world with our terrible work ethic, but we actually only end up hurting ourselves. If you've got something you really need to just get done, put your body into it. By this, I mean, use two hands, lift with your legs, do things that will logically help make it go faster. Don't be like that weird cat up there. That's insane.

7. Realize that your work has meaning

This girl gets it.

As innocuous as the feeling of laziness sometimes seems, I would say it is one that is closer to evil than it is to good. Laziness robs us of realizing the great potential we have as human beings. It is my belief that we are people created with a purpose, and we all have the ability to execute that purpose in different ways. It's difficult to see the intentionality of the mundane moments in our lives, but if you believe that your life matters, then you have to believe that even the moments that feel small can actually make a real difference. You wake up early to drive your daughter to school so that she can get an education so that she can get even more education so that she can become a lawyer and then become a governor and then become the president. It's that kind of thing. 

You are on this earth to do big and small things that are all part of a much bigger story, so do each and every one of them joyfully. 

For more on this, I definitely suggest listening to these words on procrastination by Matt Popovits. 

How about you? How do you fight laziness?

Review - Just Dance 2014 (Spoiler Alert: I love it)

I kind of don't even know how to express how pumped I am for the things that are about to happen in this post, so I'm just going to jump right in. No cat GIFs or anything.

My husband, Daniel, and I recently added Just Dance 2014 to our short list of video games! For those of you unfamiliar with the Just Dance video game series, basically, it's a rhythm/dancing game that combines some sick choreography (sick in the positive sense, by the way) with an eclectic mix of contemporary music and some classics (everything from Applause by Lady Gaga to the Flashdance theme song). We play it on our Kinect for Xbox 360, but it's also available for Nintendo Wii, and anyway, it's kind of revolutionized our lives forever. Just to give you an idea of what we're dealing with here, here's the official launch trailer:

The first time we really gave this game a spin was on Halloween with a few friends. As the trailer depicts perfectly, you can play Just Dance with multiple people at the same time, which makes for amazing photo ops such as the following:

Your eyes do not deceive you. That is Harry Potter, a piñata, Kermit the frog, and someone not dressed up (and therefore unworthy of being mentioned) ALL loving their life playing Just Dance. I remember distinctly that we were dancing to "Prince Ali" from Aladdin. I was dancing as the Jafar character which accounts for the wickedness in my eyes.

It was a blast of a night, and I still find myself laughing about these grown men all dancing to the Ghostbusters theme song.

It's seriously one of the song selections! And someone gets to dance as Slimer. Amazing.

We all agreed that seriously anyone can play this game. Whether you are Beyonce...

Via

or James Van Der Beek...

Via funnyordie.com

...you're going to be just fine. And you don't have to be a gamer either. This game is very intuitive. You'll get the hang of it in no time. 

So yeah, it's a no-brainer. Just Dance is easily the world's best party-starter, but it's also legitimately the most fun workout of your life. I use the "Just Sweat" function of the game, which sounds like it would be a little awkward....you know, just me dancing alone in my living room...but no, it's awesome. It strings together a bunch of songs for the duration of 10, 20, 40, or 60 minutes. I'm not a totally hopeless case when it comes to physical fitness, and this game honestly leaves me embarrassingly winded. I straight up love it.

But my absolute favorite thing about Just Dance is the joy it brings to our marriage.

I love this quote by Samuel Beckett that says, "Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order." In marriage, or dating, or any seasoned relationship, we are compelled to do a lot of thinking, and it's easy for us to get bogged down in details. Is the rent due? Can you meet me there at 5:30? Did you rinse your plate? -- All of that boring junk has the ability to pile up and make life feel less special.

Dancing is the opposite of that. It's this mostly-foolish, sometimes-impressive, phenomenal expression of freedom. Silly as it sounds, playing this game and just having all-out-fun in our own home has been a real gift to us. We're just playing like kids, and of course we're still paying our rent on time, but these little dance dates just make life feel a bit more magical. Yeah, I said it. MAGICAL.

Anyway, as a real expression of freedom, please enjoy this video of our best Just Dance moments. Hopefully, it will inspire you to either get this game and revolutionize your life, or at least it will serve as my audition tape for Juilliard.

If you want to learn more about Just Dance 2014, you can check out the game's website (http://clvr.li/15JzNvu) and also visit Ubisoft's blog (http://clvr.li/1fdPVJ0). And if you're ready to get your hands on the glory that is this game, you can head to Amazon.com or Gamestop.com.

So let's see, today we've talked about dancing, joy, romance, and living life to the fullest. On that note, I think I will leave you with the following GIF (my absolute favorite), which perfectly encapsulates all of those things.

May your life be more and more like this every day!

By the way, if you've ever played Just Dance, I would love to hear your thoughts on it!

I was selected for this opportunity as a member of Clever Girls Collective and the content and opinions expressed here are all my own.

Throwback to My Halloween Costume

I realized this morning that I never posted my Halloween costume on here, and I'm kind of super proud of it, so that's ridiculous.

Here's the Instagram that rocked the nation:

If you can't tell, I was a piñata and Daniel was a "birthday boy". I snatched this idea up after seeing this lovely tutorial from Camille Styles. I kind of followed it, but I mostly winged it because I have zero patience.

I got a bunch of streamers and spent hours hot-gluing them to a cheap little shirt-dress. The second I put it on my body, it all fell apart, and after a mini breakdown, I just decided to put it back together while I was wearing it. It was quite a process, but this was the final outcome.

That's a piñata, right?

We spent the evening with Kermit, Harry Potter, and a warrior of sorts.

And we laughed a lot, and took blurry pictures on the B train.

 Aaaaaaand that was Halloween. Anyway, I just thought you should know.

What did you dress as for Halloween?

10 Things Texans Take For Granted

In the past four weeks, I have taken two trips down to my home state of Texas, and in that time, I have realized that I took so much for granted growing up there. I'd like to share some of those things with you now, and regardless of whether or not you've been to Texas, hopefully this list will inspire a deep appreciation for this great state in which Beyonce was born.

Spoiler alert: this list is mostly food-related.

1. Kolaches 

Good morning! Here, have some sweet, doughy, sugar-coated bread with a pool of fruit in the middle. Oh, you want something more savory? Great, we'll just wrap this deliciousness over some sausage and cheese. Now you're all set for the best day of your life. 

I don't understand why these bad boys don't exist everywhere. Kolaches should be the most ubiquitous food on the planet! 

2. HEB

Via hillcountrynews.com

It's just...it's the best, okay? I had no idea I had it so good. 

3. Whataburger ketchup

Via kbat.com

Whataburger is everything that is good about the fast food industry, which is very little, but still...shut up. I'll take a Whataburger Junior over a steak from a five star restaurant any day of the week. It's that good.

Texans will never take this kind of burgery goodness for granted, which is why I'm instead focusing on the ketchup. Whataburger's ketchup tastes like a potion crafted by some kind of witch scientist. It is the absolute perfect balance of flavors (tomatoey, salty, smokey a little?) that there must be some kind of dark magic behind it. Who cares? People of Texas, never forget how good this ketchup is. Never. 

4. Cheap rent, food, and pretty much everything

Via craigslist.com

I've obsessed over this fact in the past, but man, I had it cheap when I was living in Austin! Why didn't I use my wrap-around porch more often? Why didn't we roast s'mores in our fireplace? Why didn't I kiss my dishwasher every single morning?

But it's not just the rent that is cheap in Texas. Tacos, movie tickets, gas -- everything is infinitely more affordable. I'll never forget the first time I bought hair ties in New York City. I nearly wept in front of the Duane Reade clerk.

5. Breakfast tacos

This, my friends, is the Don Juan from Juan in a Million in Austin, Texas. I was introduced to it by my friends Michael and Emily. You are looking at a mountain of potato, egg, bacon, and cheese on top of warm, fresh tortillas. This is kind of like an avant garde example of a breakfast taco, but still, you get the idea. Eating tacos for breakfast is something I did throughout my entire childhood, and it never once occurred to me that people in other places don't think to wrap tortillas around their eggs and bacon.

But they don't. I've brought the concept up to some people up here in New York, and they look at me baffled. BAFFLED. Like I'M the insane one! It's become one of the most significant bummers of my life. 

6. The Alamo Drafthouse (plus, all other Texas movie theaters)

Via tbd.com

Look, I know that the Alamo Drafthouse has non-Texan locations, but it is definitely a Texas institution, and you know it. If you don't know what the Drafthouse is, imagine eating a burger and splitting a pitcher of your favorite beer while watching either a newly released film, or better yet, an incredibly rare B movie from the 1970s in a movie theater where talking and cell-phone usage is discouraged and leg room is plentiful. 

That's the Alamo Drafthouse. But seriously, all movie theaters in Texas can get it. Cheap and enormous just the way they should be. 

7. Texas winters

This is me and my husband before we cut down our first ever Christmas tree in Elgin, Texas. Note that at this point in winter, we are wearing light jackets and smiles on our faces. Today, on November 12 in Brooklyn, I woke up to snow and had to ewok-it around town in my hooded puffy coat and boots. I never knew how anti-winter our Texas winters were when I was living through them.  

8. The glorious hill country

Via jefflynchdev.wordpress.com

I mean...come on.

9. Shiner Beer and Margaritas

Via esquire.com

Shiner has made it's way to New York (praise the Lord), but I've seen narry a Shiner Cheer this winter, and I'm starting to get worried. Ruby Redbird was here in the summer, and we all rejoiced, but please, Texas, be a friend and send us some Cheer beer. 

Also, I'm going to say it...New Yorkers cannot make a decent margarita. I don't know what it is, but something is off. Give me a Texas margarita from Chuy's and some chips and salsa any day. 

Man, Texas is so great. 

10. The fabulous people

This is one of my favorite pictures taken during one of the best summers of my life. Scenes like this are plentiful in Texas -- a place where people love their freedom so damn much that they just dance about it. 

But there are wonderful people everywhere, some of the better ones of my life I've met right here in New York, but still, I have got to give it up for my fellow Texans and the many times they have made me smile. 

I'm sure I'm missing something. What would you add to this list?

Feelings Friday: Sick

One of the greatest superpowers that I've gained since being married is my ability to see into the future. This became true a few nights ago when Daniel woke up sick. I'll spare you the details, but basically I immediately thought to myself...yup, that will be me in the next couple of days.

Aaaaaaand I was right. 

I mean, I guess it doesn't actually take a psychic to make that prediction. There is literally no one with whom I share more germs (and no one I'd rather share those germs with...aw). If that guy falls ill, you just know it will be me next. This is because I am exceptionally good at getting sick. It's not my sexiest quality by a long shot, but it is one of my most reliable. 

My immune system is a joke. I imagine it as a club with an overly-lenient bouncer at the door who lets seriously anyone in regardless of how much they will harsh the vibe of the room (I obviously go to clubs all the time).

"Oh, you're a Rhinovirus? By all means, come on in. Swine Flu? Please, stay as long as you like."

Given how often I get sick, you'd think that I'd be able to handle it with grace and dignity, but NOPE. I complain at least once every hour, and I spend the rest of my time channeling the sassiness, sulkiness, and obsessive eating habits of Michelle Tanner.

I become fairly ornery,

and blunt with those around me,

and just overall useless, really...

And instead of writing blog posts, I just post a bunch of GIFs.

How do you act when you feel sick?