10 Reasons You Should Date A Girl Who Lifts

Hello all! I hope your weeks have all been better than the thought of a thousand gerbils tap dancing to Cake's "The Distance!"

This week Life is a Pirate Ship Run by a Velociraptor received another five star review! Amazon reader Eclectic wrote, "I have never laughed so hard while reading..." 

Thanks for the awesome review Eclectic! 

Remember, save an author, write a review! 

So I have seen a million posts about why you should date girls who do yoga. Okay, so maybe not a literal million, but I have had seventeen different ones pop up on my Facebook home page in the past week.

I have also seen five 'why you should date' articles for girls who dance, seven who spin and four for girls who zumba.

You know what, not every girl does the stereotypical 'girl' workouts. So in response, here are 10 reasons why you should date a girl who lifts weights.

1. Girls who weight lift are in it for the long haul. 

 Weight lifters know that anything worth anything takes hard work and patience.

We understand that there will be plateaus where nothing seems to be improving. We understand that sometimes something needs to change in our routine to get where we want to be. We understand the idea of working hard and having patience to reach goals.

Dating a weight lifter means you have someone who already has the dedication to make something hard (which, let's be honest, relationships are hard) work.

2. We can open our own stupid jars...

...And move our own furniture, and help you paint that shed and get all the groceries in the house in one trip.

This doesn't mean that we won't ask for your help if we need it, it just means there are a thousand little tasks that you're less likely to be asked to deal with and more things you're likely to get help with.

3. We eat like normal human beings.

Do I want just a salad and half a Saltine cracker? Heck no! I just did 105 pound cleans and 300 pound squats! I want protein! To the chicken teriyaki hut we go!

4. Say what you want about yoga practitioner's flexibility and spinner's abs, weight lifters have all the booty.

Between the barbell squats, the deadlifts, leg presses, the goblet squats, the calf raises... we have the most toned legs and tushes you could imagine. We make pairs of jeans happy that we're wearing them.

5. We are totally fine if you want a day here or there to spend on the couch, because in all likeliness we will need that day too.

Worried about dating someone who will never let you have a day to be a sloth? There will definitely be days where all we want to do is order a pizza, lay on the couch and let our muscles recover as we binge watch Netflix.

6. We aren't overly competitive.

We aren't going to feel threatened by your mother, sister, random casual female friend. Weight lifting is all about being in competition with yourself, pushing yourself to that next level and encouraging those around to do the same. We don't have time for petty comparisons with other people.

7. We're naturally ambitious, but not going to set ourselves up for failure.

"I'm going to be able to lat pull 175 by the end of this year, even though I can only do 120 right now," pretty easily translates into, "I'm going to work myself into that manager promotion."

We set attainable goals and then work our butts off to get them. None of this, "I'm going to set some incredibly impossible goal, not really put in the necessary effort and then whine and moan when it doesn't happen," crap.

8. We always have chocolate milk available. 

 What better quick protein recovery source for post-lifting is there?

9. We're excellent at mental math. 

Need to quickly add in increments? Easy. Converting kg to pounds? No problem. Finding rough percentages? We can do it in our sleep. Need that tip calculated? No problem.

10. We know how to parcel out our time. 

You can't spend too much time on legs and not enough on shoulders. You can't ignore your chest in favor of only back exercises all week long. Weight lifters know how to spend good time on all important aspects of life without ignoring anything.

My fellow lady (and guy) lifters, what other reasons would you say you're datable? 

Don't forget, if you want to follow my strange brand of crazy I can be found on Facebook and Twitter (@Allison Hawn) and my books can be found on Amazon!

Squirrel!!!

Hello ladies, gentlemen and any single-celled organisms that may be reading this! I hope everyone's weeks were more splendid than the thought of a bunny on a unicycle!

It took me an inordinate amount of time this week to figure out something to write about. Why? Mostly because every time I sat down to type my mind would be whisked away in a million different directions.

I have ADHD. No, I'm not one of those people who says, "I'm so easily distracted, I must have ADHD!"

I actually have ADHD.

Let me, quickly, dispel a couple of myths about ADHD for you.

1. ADHD is a made up diagnosis invented for people who can't control their children or own behaviors.

False. It is actually an issue with the physical matter of the brain. Without using all the giant words that I learned to get my degree in psychology, basically ADHD means that one part of a person's brain is not communicating effectively or more slowly than the rest. Our brains, being the wonderful machines that they are, try to compensate by speeding everything up, but all that really does is create more of an imbalance. This is why stimulants, like caffeine, help. The stimulants help along the part of the brain that is not firing quite right to even things out.

(Disclaimer: This is a very brief explanation so that my blog post didn't become laborious to read, so no one kill me. If you wanted to read a 90 page dissertation on ADHD I'm sure I could find you one.)

2. If you have ADHD, you should be medicated.

 False. That's a little bit like saying that because the fourth Blade movie was terrible, the previous three were awful too. This is untrue, the fourth movie was a travesty, sure, but the previous three have made many a nerd's life just a little happier.

You can't just arbitrarily group people together by diagnosis. I have several friends with ADHD that truly do need the medication that they take to focus. I am lucky to have a rather mild form of ADHD that I can mostly self-medicate with coffee and exercise. Some people need meds, others do not. It's that simple.

3. ADHD means that you're just super fidgety, right?

False. Due to our lovely little neurotransmitters not firing the way they are supposed to, it means that we can be fidgety (I have a tendency to take apart any pen that's in my hands), but mostly it means we have issues being able to focus on a single task. Imagine that you have your computer browser open, and have 1,000 tabs open at once. Your computer, at random, switches tabs about every 10 or so seconds. That is basically what your brain on ADHD feels like.

So, what does ADHD look like on the inside to a person with it? Follow along, oh wayward adventurers, down the trail of what my un-caffienated brain does when I try to write a blog post:

OK, I need to focus and write this post.
Post, post, post-y, post, post...
At what point does bread officially become toast?
I wonder if someone answered that on Google.
I bet someone did, everything's on Google.
Did I remember to lock my door?
Do gerbils dream?
Maybe I should write a blog post about gerbil dreams!
Wait, aren't gerbils the ones who eat their own young, or was that mice?
I wonder if my friend's pet snake is over it's cold.
I really should make some coffee.

Gets up to make coffee. Returns five minutes later with no coffee, but has washed the dishes in her sink.

Now, to write this blog post.
Why do I feel like I'm forgetting something?
Crud, I think I need to laundry again. Did I do laundry this week already?
Did I remember to lock my door?
Oh, and I have to remember to send that e-mail at work on Monday.
I wonder what the coffee special will be on Monday at that one espresso stand.
Right, I was going to make coffee!
I wonder if they will have that red-velvet latte this week? That was tasty!

Goes to make coffee. Successfully starts coffee maker, then picks up a random book from the bookshelf, reads three pages, sets it down, before wandering back to the computer. Sits down, stares at toes.

Why aren't toes just called mini-fingers?
I guess toes is easier to say.
Unlike the word "discombobulated," which really describes what it does to the human tongue.
Did I remember to lock my door?
I wonder how one says "toes" in German?
I'd love to learn how to speak German.
After all, a lot of English has Germanic roots. 
Maybe that's something I should add to my to-do list, after I... oh yeah, this blog post...

Twenty minutes later I will finally remember that I made coffee and go get some. With caffeine stimulating my brain, and another hour or two, I will have a blog post. It is unlikely that I will ever figure out when bread officially becomes toast. 

And that, folks, is what living with ADHD is like. Does that help explain parts of "Life is a Circus Run by a Platypus" for anyone?

Don't forget to check out my randomness on Facebook, Twitter and Goodreads!