Authentic Living: Clothing

I bought new clothes a few Sundays ago. I haven't bought new clothes since, I don't know...last fall? I think I bought a coat and some yoga pants then. That Sunday? I bought three shirts (hello Target 3 for $20 sale) and a pair of long back yoga pants. It was hard for me. 

I don't like clothes shopping for a lot of reasons. First, I have to reconcile spending the money (which the Lord has given me, but which I often feel guilty using for myself). Second, I have to deal with choosing the clothes. Some people think it's easy to be a smaller size, and I know that thin privilege does exist, but I have to confess that I'm not comfortable in my body a lot of the time. Contrary to popular opinion, not all clothes look good on you when you're thin. They sag and gap and hang in all the wrong places. I also feel self-conscious wearing clothes that expose a lot of my long, gangly arms and legs. Finding clothes that cover me is difficult. Third, I recognize that I am "small" for my size, so I always want to buy clothes that are too big for me, arguing that I'll "grow into them." I want to buy for the future so that I won't have to experience the pain of getting rid of clothes that get too small.

But you know what? When I buy clothes that don't fit, I'm not living authentically. I'm not living in the now.  I recognize that I probably "should" gain weight to be a more healthy size, but this is where I am for today. So I'm embracing it and buying clothes that fit. Then I can enjoy wearing them and not leave them hanging in my closet. And if and when these clothes don't fit, I'll have to acknowledge that pain, process it, and purchase more clothes. Maybe Target will have another sale....

The Great Big Burrito Search

Some of you probably saw my recent Instagram post about digging Mexican food. Yeah, I've been craving it lately. But I'm also on a personal mission to find the best burrito in town.

Before you get too excited, I should clarify that I'm pretty picky about my burritos. I want a bean burrito without cheese. (I like cheese, but not with beans.) I don't label myself vegetarian, but I'm not a big fan of meat, or the spices used on meat at Mexican restaurants. So I'm looking for a bean or vegetable burrito. I like avocados, but only in chocolate banana pudding, so hold the avocado and guacamole. (Plain avocado tastes soapy to me.) Enough criteria? Okay, okay. Moving on to the burritos, here I'll review each burrito's ingredients, tortilla, price, and overall flavor. Then I'll give a star rating. I am a BIG fan of salsa, so restaurants with good salsa get extra points!

1 star: Blah. I wouldn't go here for a burrito again.

2 stars: Okay, but not overly flavorful, or having some off-putting element 

3 stars: Getting there, but lacking some of my favorite flavor components.

4 stars: Yum! I'd go here again.

5 stars: The perfect veggie burrito. (I'm not sure this exists.)

Bean burrito (no cheese) at Garcia's (Prescott Valley, Arizona)

Ingredients: Refried beans inside the tortilla, topped with red enchilada sauce and a side of lettuce and tomato.

Tortilla: Run-of-the-mill food service.

Price: Don't remember, but I thought it was too much.

Flavor: Lacking. I took most of this home to doctor up. After adding chili powder, garlic powder, onion powder, and more salsa, it was decent.

Overall: 1 star

Bean burrito (no cheese) at Oliva's Mexican Food (Prescott Valley, Arizona)

Ingredients: Refried beans inside the tortilla, with red enchilada sauce on top and a side of lettuce, tomato, and an olive.

Tortilla: Likely traditional food service. Large and soft, but nothing special.

Price: $7.50 for an a la carte burrito

Flavor: Decent when I added salsa.The beans were a bit liquidy, though, and the enchilada sauce was too plentiful.

Overall: 2 stars

Bean burrito (no cheese) at Plaza Bonita (Prescott Valley, Arizona)

Ingredients: Refried beans inside the tortilla, with red enchilada sauce on top. I asked Dad for his pico de gallo, too.

Tortilla: On the small side and tough enough to have come from a store-bought package.

Price: I don't know. Dad paid for this burrito as my birthday dinner.

Flavor: Great!

Overall: 3 stars for the burrito, but knocked down to 2 stars because of poor service. If I ordered this again, I'd order to go.

Vegetarian burrito (no avocado or olives) at Cafe 51 (Ahwatukee, Arizona)

Ingredients: Lettuce, tomatoes, chopped bell peppers, and cilantro, with sides of sour cream and salsa

Tortilla: Not homemade, but extra-large, flaky, and soft

Price: $6.39

Flavor: Excellent, given that this burrito contained no beans. The cilantro balanced perfectly with the veggies.

Overall: 3 stars

Vegetable burrito (no guacamole) at Alfonso's Mexican Food (Prescott Valley, Arizona)

Ingredients: Rice, beans (refried with a few whole pinto beans), green pepper, onion, and pico de gallo).

Tortilla: Definitely homemade, or at least cooked fresh on the grill! Thick and hearty, but a bit crispy in places.

Price: $4.95

Flavor: A little bland, but authentic. The peppers and onions were crisply sauteed, which I appreciated.

Extras: Salsa bar with red and green enchilada sauce and three types of salsa, plus radishes, limes, and pickled carrots and peppers.

Overall: 4 stars

Veggie burrito at Riliberto's (Prescott Valley, Arizona)

Ingredients: Refried beans, rice, lettuce, tomato, and some kind of sauce (possibly avocado based, but I didn't mind it).

Tortilla: HUGE! (I could only eat half of this burrito). Probably food service.

Price: $5.99

Flavor: Excellent! The sauce added good flavor and the balance of fresh lettuce and tomatoes to beans and rice was excellent.

Extras: Salsa bar with red and green salsa, a green sauce, and a creamy red sauce, plus some pickled vegetables. I went back probably five times for more.

Overall: 4 stars

Veggie wrap (no avocado) at Sweet Potato Cafe Restaurant (Prescott, Arizona)

Ingredients: Black beans, tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, and chipotle sauce. This isn't technically a burrito, but it had similar ingredients. 

Tortilla: Factory made, but soft

Price: $7.99

Flavor: Not a traditional bean burrito, but great as a wrap

Extras: Served with excellent sweet potato fries!

Overall: 3 stars as a burrito, 4 stars as a wrap

Veggie burrito at Los Taquitos (Ahwatukee, Arizona) 

Ingredients: Super smooth refried beans and rice (mixed together) with tomatoes, peppers, onions, potatoes, cilantro, and pico de gallo.

Tortilla: Possibly homemade. Soft and yummy where wrapped around the burrito, but a bit hard on the edges.

Flavor: Excellent! I didn't even need to add salsa.

Extras: The red and green sauces pictured were spicy and bitter. Luckily, I only tried them on the end of my burrito, and the burrito itself tasted better without them.

Price: $5.00

Overall: 4 stars

Winner so far? Alfonso's!

Arizona friends, what other burritos do you recommend I try?

Authentic Living: Makeup

My parents bought and allowed me to wear makeup after I turned 16. For a while, I was ascetic and didn't use it. Then I really got into the light blue eye shadow and the glitter. As a senior, my friend showed me how to wear liquid foundation and I enjoyed Thursdays, the day I didn't have early bird and could spend more time on my hair and makeup. Next came college, when I wore makeup most of the time and usually only didn't wear it when I felt crappy about myself.

Fast forward to my early work days and then a Mary Kay party that taught me how to better care for my skin, and how to best apply foundation (with a brush, hello!). But somewhere in there, I stopped liking wearing makeup so much. I felt self conscious that makeup would make my face look splotchy, like in this photo:

In grad school, I only wore makeup and dressed up on days that I had clients. I believed they would respect me more if I did. On days I didn't have clients, and on church days, I skipped the makeup. Slowly but sure, I wore less and less. I got to where I didn't want to wear makeup, where I felt inauthentic wearing it. But I wore it anyway.

This past year, I wore makeup every.single.day to work because I worked with high schoolers and thought I needed it to show that I was older and more mature than them. I really hated it. Towards the end, I started just wearing mascara, cover-up, and a little bronzer, and it felt right.

My mom and I had a discussion that wearing no makeup at all seems very noticeable (since makeup is a societal norm), but that maybe I could wear less. So I've continued on with the foundation as a cover up under my eyes and on red spots, a little bronzer, and my favorite Maybelline mascara. With this heat, less makeup has been a blessing, as foundation isn't dripping off my face or smearing on my phone or getting any other place it shouldn't be.

Might my makeup tastes change? Yes, and they probably will. But that's okay. For the present, this is me, where I am, and the makeup I wear.

Summer Festivities

If you don't think about the heat, summer is a pretty awesome time to live in Arizona, especially because we live close to Prescott, which was once the territorial capital. Old cities mean festivities!

Here a few festivities we've enjoyed lately: (Sorry for the poor photos)

The World's Oldest Rodeo! There's debate about whether or not Prescott really has the oldest rodeo, but I don't care because it's an awesome show! Pro riders come from all over the United States and world (one from Australia this year!) to compete, and points count towards the pro rodeo championship. Plus, the half-time (if you can call it that) shows are pretty cool. Wild Child performed the night we attended, and he jumped his motorcycle over a full truck and trailer! That takes skill.

After the rodeo comes the rodeo parade, a full two-hour affair with lots of horses, my favorite. Seriously this is one of the best parades I've ever been to. Someday I might go to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade or the Rose Bowl parade, but this is as good as it gets around here.

Cookout, fireworks, and flag cake! These are Fourth of July traditions in our home.

Cookout foods vary from year to year, but this year, it was hamburgers with sides of baked beans (one of my favorite cookout sides), lettuce, tomatoes, and veggies with homemade ranch dip. Yum!

Our city was the only one of the three cities in our area that had fireworks (due to the Goodwin fire). The show was pretty awesome with multiple mortars shot up at once, various shapes, sizes and colors of fireworks, and an intense grand finale. 

Flag cake is a layer of pound cake topped with a layer of blueberries and strawberries, whipped cream, and another layer of blueberries and strawberries to form a flag. We've made it every year since I was 9 or 10.

And this year, I got a candle in my piece of flag cake to celebrate a year of my adventures here. Here's to many more!

Toward More Authentic Living

I read a lot: blogs, books, signs, cereal boxes, you name it. It's a hobby, I guess? Lately, the topic of intuitive living has crossed my path more times than once. (See "How Eating Intuitively Helped Me Live More Intuitively" by Alexis Joseph, "How Intuitive Eating Changed My Life" by Kara Lydon, and "Movement vs. Exercise" by Robyn Nohling.) Then I read this in Present Over Perfect: 

The fact that numbing becomes a lifestyle hit me. I realized that numbing is the way I've been living my life, not intentionally, maybe not even purposefully. Numbing is a coping tool, a way of surviving, a way of getting through. But it's not a way of thriving.

Some of you might remember my birthday goals post from May and how I wanted to improve my life by eating satisfying foods, sleeping better, and moving in ways that feel good. The purpose of those goals was to learn to love myself and my life better. I'm realizing now that those goals were signs of me wanting to know myself, to really live out and engage in life. Somehow, I've just been going through the motions.

I've had moments of joy and excitement and fun this past year, but it's also been a hard year, one of not knowing myself or where I fit, one of struggle, one of new (and to be honest, scary) opportunities. I've spent a lot of time trying to live up to the expectations of others and of myself.

I've been living completely by myself these past two weeks, staying in a hotel for work training. The first few days of that experience were rough, but then I started asking myself, "What do I need to get through this day?" and I tried to give that thing to myself without judgment. Doing so often meant sacrificing money, or time, or my own ideals about life. But you know what? I did better. I was more present. I felt more like myself. I felt a lot, to be honest: emotions, pain, bodily sensations, etc. But I realized that I wanted to live more of life this way, to embrace the joys and the struggles of life, to be me, and not the ideal self that others or my own self wants me to be.

Have I got this authentic living thing figured out? By all means, no! I'm just on the cusp of the journey. But I want to work this thing out. I want to be myself and let opinions and judgments and obsessions and compulsions go. And I want that for other people, too, to get rid of labels, to live truly and with integrity, to relate to others in real ways. Living authentically is going to be painful, but I'm choosing to embrace that in hopes of more fully embracing the joys in life that are to come.

Afghan 51

 Here's the latest in the afghan train:

This is Joyce Nordstrom's summer lace afghan in Red Heart's gold yarn. (Yes, I used the same color for afghan 47.) I had some leftover yarn and wanted to use it up.

I don't know if my hand is better or worse after the last botox injection, but I've needed to crochet. Moving my hand helps quiet my mind, and with a new job and the fire and life, my mind's been busy. I actually finished this afghan while listening to a Chasing Joy podcast. It's a new favorite because of its focus on joyfully living your own life.

That's all for now from me, but what about you? Do any readers want to share an activity they do to quiet their mind in times of busyness and stress?

Biblical Affirmations

I waffle back and forth on whether positive affirmations are biblical. So when asked to write a letter to myself describing why I'm unique, I decided to make a list of verses that tell me who I uniquely am in Christ:

1. God created me in His image to showcase aspects of His infinite character (Gen 1:27).
2. I am fearfully and wonderfully made (Ps 139:14).
3. God has a specific plan for my life (Jer 29:11).
4. God's love for me is everlasting (Jer 31:3).
5. God delights in me (Zeph 3:17)
6. I am not condemned (Rom 8:1). Harmless quirks and preferences aren't sin.
7. I have roles to fulfill as a member of the body of Christ (Romans 12).
8. My brokenness allows Christ's glory to shine through (2 Cor 4:7).
9. In my weakness, Christ exhibits His strength (2 Cor 12:9).
10. I am a minister of God's grace in its various forms (1 Pet 4:10).

Now to you, readers. What do you think about positive affirmations? What are your favorite scriptures about identity in Christ? Please comment below.