Health and Beauty

So I signed up for new health insurance, right? Because it had gone up every year and I thought I could do better, and I figured, new house, new school year, new insurance, clean slate. And I go online to the site recommended by Dave Ramsey, and enter some info and pick the one I like best, and it's, like, eighty dollars less than what I currently pay! Excellent! So I sign up for it officially and wait for them to approve it. A few days later, I get a call saying it's approved. Yay! But it's about fifty dollars more than what I'd been quoted online, after putting in all of my information. Wanna know why? My height and weight. Yeah. If you know me in person, I hope you, like me, will find this ridiculous. No, I'm not very tall or very thin. But I'm well within the range of healthy normalcy. To be fair, I do see why the insurance company does it, but a) they should have been able to show me the new quote online instanty--I know Blue Cross did when I signed up there. b) They never asked me, online or on the phone, about my lifestyle. I never got to tell them I'm training for a triathlon. They don't care how much meat or sugar or fat I eat, what my cholesterol is or my blood pressure. No, all they look at is height and weight. Which are just two coordinates in an intricate system that is health. The kicker is that I was only seven pounds "over," and I had just guessed at my weight, so I thought there was a good chance I was in their range of acceptability. I weighed at student health and was only three pounds over! So my plan now is to lose three pounds and then buy the new insurance. Not without anger and frustration over their methods, but as my mom pointed out, that's what health insurance companies do. And she said it wouldn't get better when I have a normal-people job with normal-people benefits, but I said, "But then I wouldn't be paying for it," and she said, "Oh, right." So I do think it'll be better, or at least different, or at the very least cheaper, in a year. Ish.

I am still, after a couple of months, suprised by how much I like to exercise. Today and yesterday I biked and then ran, to practice doing more than one thing in a day. It's a very accomplished feeling to come into the AC and pound a glass of water and have your clothes completely soaked. Completely. Soaked. And then maybe take a dip in the channel before your shower. I must say, it's the life.

You know how people you've met only once are the easiest ones to imagine dating and marrying? Because you know so little about them that you get to plug in only great things? Like, "I bet he loves ________ just like I do," or "Of course he has the most wicked sense of humor." And there's none of that pesky reality there to contradict you or make them go against your sovereign will. Well. Sometimes I google these types of guys. (Don't act like you don't.) I googled one of them last night. And I won't go into specifics, but I now know that he cares (at least almost) as much as I do about spelling, and that he's a good writer and that he's very very smart, though I pretty much knew that already. It was the final nail in the coffin of my rationality. We are now married in my mind, and if I do ever see him again, I'll probably just work so hard to seem like I don't know anything about him or think about our long-term future together that I'll forget the outside-my-head part and not make the best impression on him. But maybe not. Who knows. Whatever happens, I can always google someone else.

A few of my favorite things: noncompetitive soccer, New Yorker cryptics, A. J. Jacobs's The Year of Living Biblically, the lavender honey ice cream that Chris made, my porch, this itinerant cat that I won't call "mine" or even "ours" because we're supposed to be looking for a home for her, roommates who spend a lot of time with their boyfriends (even though I like them and wouldn't mind if they were here a lot, I just prefer having the place to myself), and getting an email today asking if someone could audit my class. I've been struggling with a lot lately, and my enjoyment of things like these is what reminds me that I'm not sinking, that I'm not hopeless, that the good outweighs the bad even if it has to be a lot of little good things trumping a few big bad things.