Twitterpated November 7, 2008

 

Heh. Yeah, I said that too, Bambi. Just you wait…

 

I don’t want to turn into one of those chicks that only ever talks about the cute boy. I think it’s stupid, because there’s more to life than that. And if that chick ever gets the guy, he’s still all she talks about, and she stops hanging out with her friends and only ever hangs out with him… and then they break up and her whole world shatters. Thanks but no thanks. I’ll wait for the next train.

 

But seriously… I think I’m at least slightly messed up in that regard. I think about CFB a lot. When I see him, I get butterflies. I know that I talk about him at least once at every meal, and when he talks to me I think about it all day, analyzing it. Mostly trying to make sure that I let him know I like him without flinging myself at him like the girlies in his harem.

 

WARNING: If you do not want to read what is basically a twelve-year-old’s diary entry, stop here and have a nice day. You do NOT HAVE to read what is below. Not even you, Miriam. I’m only putting this down for my own mental health, in the hopes that I get it out of my head. Feel free to consider this the end of the entry.

 

But today I can’t stop thinking about him at all. Today in class he complimented my hat (not important, except that I was wearing one and don’t usually) and made me kind of giddy, but then class proceeded as usual from there. We always talk in class, but it’s usually about silly stuff. He mentioned it was his roommate’s birthday and I told him to pass along birthday wishes from me. I complimented his No-Shave-November scruff, and he said he was getting a haircut. Blah blah blah… then later he flirted with me a tiny bit, but that wasn’t unusual. It was after class that I got my surprise.

 

On a typical day we’ll either leave the classroom together, and then walk to lunch, or one of us will end up leaving first and we don’t walk together. If I leave first, and he’s right behind me, I’ll slow up a little and wait under the pretense of asking about his plans for that night. Obviously that’s a delicate thing, because I don’t want to be sketchy. But today he left first, so I figured that was the last I’d see of him.

 

When I got to the stairs, I was a few people behind him. I saw him look back up the stairs, looking for something/someone. To be honest, I told myself it was for another girl in class who is a part of the flock of groupies. I did consider that it was for me, but I’m trying to be pragmatic. To my utter and total shock, I got outside and he was standing there, waiting. When I walked over, he fell right in step and asked about my weekend plans. He walked with me to lunch.

 

I’m so surprised. I did not expect him to do that. He never has before. I always thought he was kind of a passive friend– he let me initiate because I usually did. But we’ve gone to lunch separately a lot recently because I’ve been hesitant… I didn’t want to fling myself at him. But then today he initiated. Which has pretty much boggled my mind. I’ve never seen him seek out one of his harem-girls… this is good news. Very good news.

 

So that’s my story for today. Also– the eye infection is totally gone, but I have a tiny scar on my cornea. But I can wear contacts again! CELEBRATE!

Rebellion October 28, 2008

In my childhood, there was one thing that was indisputably forbidden. There was no argument, no bargaining, and no amount of guilt-tripping that could get my mother to back down from this issue. Luckily I never found myself strongly desiring this item, but the fact that it was the ONE AND ONLY thing that my mother would NEVER IN THE WORLD allow me to have lent it a certain appeal.

 

That one thing was black nail polish.

 

It’s ugly, it’s not flattering to anyone’s nails, it’s associated with goths and punks and emos, and there was no reason in the world to buy/use it. I was fine with the ruling for eleven months out of every year. But on October 1 I start gettin’ a hankering for Wet ‘n’ Wild’s creamy black polish… there’s just something about the Halloween looming in the near future.

 

Last year, my very first act of rebellion was to get an AIM screenname. Then a Gmail account. Followed shortly by painting my (very long) nails pitch black. I borrowed the bottle from a friend, and took great joy in people’s stares when they noticed my claws.

 

This year, I have taken the rebellion one step further. This morning I paid $1.06 for a bottle of black nail polish. I own it. I used it. I like it. It won’t see the light of day for another year after this Friday. I painted my nails black, and then drew a spiderweb on my thumbnail with white polish and a paperclip. I feel very sneaky, and quite gothic. It’s strange. The polish is coming off on Saturday morning, but still. It’s rebellion all the same. I consoled myself with the fact that I am a year and a half into my college career, and I have yet to smoke, drink, do drugs, or have sex. This “rebellion” wouldn’t even register on the college-life richter scale.

 

But I’ll try nonetheless.

 

IN OTHER NEWS:

 

~ The Fall Party is two weeks from Friday… AAAHH! I did bring back my little black dress when I went home for the weekend… tried it on… it looks good. (If I do say so myself…)

 

~ The nasty bugger of an eye infection I mentioned in yesterday’s post turned out to be iritis…go ahead. Laugh. It’s a lame name for such a pain in the ass. But it apparently can be fixed with a half-ounce, $20 bottle of eyedrops. Yay-hooray.

 

~ Weather forecasters are morons. I’ll bet the twenty bucks I had to spend on the eyedrops that the two inches of snow we’re supposed to get today/tonight never show up. These jerks couldn’t predict a thunderstorm during monsoon season. Grr.

 

~ Taylor Swift’s new single “Love Story” is amazing. I know, this will forever brand me as a pathetically hopeless romantic, but seriously. It’s amazing. Go here and watch the video.

 

TTFN!

 

If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; But if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.

  – Don Marquis

Girls Are So Weird… October 19, 2008

Honestly. Speaking as one of them, and as one who more or less understands that everything I think or do is either controlled by my brain or my hormones (but never a combination) I can honestly say that we are the weirdest things basically ever.

 

One minor example of this is the collection of boys that my friends and I have developed at college. Not only are there boys of various builds, colors, backgrounds, majors, hobbies, sports, and sizes, (though they all seem to have a pretty similar musculature… ), but WE GIVE THEM CODENAMES.

 

That’s correct. You didn’t suddenly develop some kind of visual impairment that makes you read crazy where there is none. That’s not a typo. WE GIVE THEM CODENAMES. Like it’s freaking Top Gun or something. And the best part?

 

We think they’re hilarious codenames. Because we’re so stinking clever we name them after characters. My one friend had a crush on Strider, who was a shaggy-looking upperclassman who cleans up surprisingly well on fancy occasions. We both have a bit of a soft spot for a boy with jet black hair and piercing blue eyes– our idea of the sexy vampire boy, who therefore (unwittingly) goes by Edward. Then there’s CFB, whom we’ve nicknamed Aladdin, for his dark skin/hair and his propensity for being shirtless… :3 And the Hobbit, a boy who triggers that odd motherly instinct– he makes you want to go over and pinch his cheeks and make him a ham sandwich.

 

What is wrong with us? This is insanity, and it’s a pandemic. There’s so much more to rant about, but I’m in a rather tired/crabby mood, so I think I’ll just leave this as is for now. Maybe I’ll come back to the Girls are Weird thing. More than likely next time you hear from me it’ll be Battle of the Sexes part 2, and I’ll be ranting about how boys are dumb and girls are weird and why won’t CFB just ask me out?

 

Le sigh. Good thing fall break is fast approaching.

 

“A woman need know but one man well in order to understand all men; whereas a man may know all women and understand not one of them.”

-Helen Rowland

There’s that word again– ‘heavy’. Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the earth’s gravitational pull? August 28, 2008

Heh, it took me a while but I found a BttF quote that fits my topic.

 

Boys and girls, today I am going give the obligatory blog-rant about Body Acceptance. Or as most blogs want to call it, Fat Acceptance. <See blogs like How to Eat a Cheeseburger (howtoeatacheeseburger.wordpress.com), and Shapely Prose (www.kateharding.net).>

 

Truths I hold to be self-evident:

• I do not have the ‘perfect body’.
• I do not want the ‘perfect body’.
• I am lazy.
• I  love food.
• The first two mean that I do not care about having the ‘perfect body’, nor do I want to put in the effort to attain the ‘perfect body’.
• The third and fourth mean that I will tend toward the rounded, or ‘fat’ body type.
• However, I do not desire to be ‘fat’ because personally, I find ‘fat’ unattractive.

 

Author’s Note: I emphasize personally because I know that there are others who find that curvier is better, and would disagree that ‘fat’ is unattractive. I do not make the blanket-statement that fat is unattractive, merely that I personally find it to be so. I also hate the word ‘fat’, but I refuse to be politically correct about it and use terms like ‘heavy’ or ‘plus-size’. So instead I will ‘quote’ it, to remind everyone that the term ‘fat’ is subjective, and there is no general definition. I will not assign a dress size, or pound quantity to determine what ‘fat’ is.

 

So while I may seem hypocritical, the truth is that I hold with body acceptance, but not fat acceptance. Personal philosophy is that if I am comfortable with my body at a certain weight, then that’s fine. If at any point I become uncomfortable, or the clothes that fit at the comfortable weight cease to fit as well, then healthy diet and excercise is acceptable. I also try not to go by the numbers, because I think I weigh about 10 pounds more than I look like I weigh, therefore striving to weigh 115 pounds may be a bad life choice. I like who I am, and I don’t want to be unhealthy, or to look like I just survived the Holocaust.

 

So I guess while I have moved beyond striving to look like death warmed over, I have fallen short of fat acceptance. Does that put me at the happy medium, or do I need to seek to reach that next level of celestial understanding? I feel guilty for dieting, and I feel guilty for not dieting. I can’t accept being ‘fat’, but I can’t agree that we should all look like MK Olsen. I think that there is a curvy, healthy, happy place that we can all strive toward that is not a standard weight, or BMI, or dress size. And when magazines describe a model that is slowly and painfully dying as her insides consume themselves out of want for food as sexy and hot, but then make a point of the statistic that most men prefer curves, they leave us all wondering what that standard of beauty that we are all striving toward actually means.

 

According to every single man I’ve ever asked, men like proportional women. We need to be able to stand up straight, without breaking our spines because there’s not enough muscle in our 18-inch waist to hold up our 40-inch bust. It seems to me that most men instinctively understand that our bodies were created with purpose. No one can deny that biceps are for lifting, hamstrings and quadriceps, are for walking, and fingers are for fine detail jobs. In the same way, hips were intended to cradle unborn children, not just to swing about whilst we stomp up and down a straight, elevated walkway in order for people to admire our clothes. Our waists are muscled to help us lift, and walk, and to do work, not just to cinch and shrink and use as bait for men. And everyone knows what the purpose of the part-of-us-that-requires-a-bra is. (I’m not being immature, I just don’t want creepy people searching for that certain anatomy on the internet to hit on this site just because that keyword is here.)

 

So I think that people who work out in order to reach their physical peak, and to be in the best possible form have the right idea. I admire them, and their determination to take the best care of the only body they were given. There is a certain beauty to a body that is well cared-for, and that is healthy.

 

SOPHOMORIC REASONING: There is nothing sexier than being healthy, confident, and comfortable with yourself. And that goes for guys too. As a girl, and even more so as a college sophomore, I totally get the whole pressure-to-look-a-certain-way. I get it better than most adult women do, as far as I’m concerned. But even if I want to try to deny that there is a certain human form that is more attractive than others, I have to admit that I am neither comfortable nor confident when there is an inner tube of fat ringing my waist and hips. So it’s pretty hard to think you’re attractive when you feel ‘fat’.

If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour… you’re gonna see some serious shit. August 26, 2008

My love for Dr. Emmet Brown knows no bounds.

 

Anyway, the first day of classes went off without a hitch, and the second day is looking good too. I sold some of my books from last year and I’m working on getting all the ones I’ll need for this year. Most of my classes seem interesting, but the Transitional Spanish I’m taking seems pretty remedial. It’s the reccommended course for people who took it in high school, but maybe took a few years off in between. It’s basically a ginormous review course. Hopefully that means an easy ‘A’. The Public Speaking class is off to a fast start- speeches on Wednesday. I was like O_o SRSLY? But yeah, we have to introduce our partner to the class as a practice speech. Accounting class has homework due Wed, and the Civ Arts class I’m in seems really fascinating. The basic concept of the class is to explore ‘beauty’ and to disprove the concept that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, because that then assume that beauty can be denied which is inherently wrong because God created all things. That’s only my summary, so if you feel like bringing it up to argue semantics with me, don’t.

 

Other news, awesomesock #1 has been completed for a while, but awesomesock #dos is well underway!

The Awesomesock Pair!

 

I’m also starting on a little surprise-thingamajig for my Little Sis (a frosh I’m mentoring) and for fear of infiltration due to the fact that this is the internet and she has a computer, I will not describe nor photgraph until after it has been presented.

 

And now I present to you a new type of philosophical junk. The word ‘sophomore’ (according to my high school English teacher) actually means ‘wise moron’ or something like that. So using my own wise-moronic reasoning, I shall attempt to explain crap.

 

SOPHOMORIC REASONING: The reason I chose that quote for today’s title is that I can’t believe how quickly things are getting underway here at school. Already we’re full speed ahead with tests and quizzes and homework. So once this year really gets going, the rest of it’s gonna fly. It’s gonna be nothin’ but the future, with no rewind button in sight. Ergo, “If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour… you’re gonna see some serious shit.”

The Great American Melding Pot. August 17, 2008

Watching the Olympics always puts odd questions into my head. It throws the ridiculousness of our wars into sharp relief, it makes these boundaries that we’ve thrown up seem preposterous, and it brings out odd senses of loyalty in us that don’t exist as strongly otherwise.

 

I found myself cheering for Constantina Tomescu-Dita yesterday in the Women’s 25 mile Marathon. It wasn’t because she was about a half a mile ahead of the other ladies. It wasn’t because she was 38 and was about to be the oldest marathon champion in history. It was because she is Romanian, and being a little more than a quarter Romanian myself I wanted to see her win. Honestly, those were the thoughts in my head. I cheered for her because she was Romanian, and I wanted her to bring that honor to her country.

 

It’s stupid, really. I’m an American. I’ve never left the United States in my life. I am four generations down from the ancestors who came over on the boat. But my paternal grandparents are strongly Romanian, with my grandfather being 100% and my grandmother half Romanian-half Ukrainian. So where does this loyalty come from? It’s not like I know anything about Romania, other than what I learned in school with everyone else. I’m not Ukrainian Orthodox, and I don’t think there’s anything particularly Romanian or Ukrainian about me. I look very much the Irish-German I got from my mother’s side. But that’s the other thing. What is it about Americans that we’re so proud of coming from everywhere else in the world?

 

Immigrants who land on our shores fight to be able to say “I am an American.” (Or in most cases, “Soy Americano”…) We are of the most sought-after nationality. But we pride ourselves in being from everywhere else. You don’t hear people in Italy saying that their grandparents were Albanian. You don’t hear the English bragging about their French ancestry (although who would?). No other country is so focused on being from all the other corners of the world.

 

I have a professor in college who is Irish. He says all the time that he cannot believe how many people say to him, “Oh you’re Irish! I’m Irish too!” And he has to keep himself from saying “No, you’re not. You’re American. Because you’re not Irish unless you were born in Ireland. You may have Irish ancestors, but you’re an American.” Why do we focus so much on our geneaology like that? Is it a method to stand apart from the crowd? Am I proud of my Romanian blood because it makes me a little more unique? Or is it because we’re Americans, and we are plagued with nothing ever being enough? It’s not enough to be American; we have to be everything else too. We have to be able to claim the world in ourselves, to be able to pretend that in all our American majesty we’ve united the global bloodlines, and brought everyone together.

 

We brought the world’s people together, and we’ve made them fat. How’s that for world unity?

Attention is like bills. August 15, 2008

I pay neither, nor do I know what to do with them.

 

Suddenly in the last two days, I have recieved three comments from two readers THAT AREN’T MIRIAM! I don’t think it ever really occurred to me that eventually other people would comment.  I’ll never admit that I secretly hoped and prayed that people would read and let me know what they thought. It may have started that way, but by the third post it became a kind of journal-sharing thing with a best friend who moved away. So while I understood that this was on the internet for everyone to read, I remained convinced (and disappointed) that only my friend was reading any of it.

 

But now I have readers! I feel an odd obligation to start talking about issues that you guys might care about, but then I realize that I know little about current events except for which Olympians are totally buff and delicious, so I should avoid talking about current events. (BTW James Blake = teh hotness.)

 

So for now at least, I’ll keep talking about the things in my life that I think need to be brought to light. I think there’s more to be said about the life of the average teenager than anyone gives them credit for. And I don’t mean Meg Cabot’s versions of teenager-hood, in which all the girls are misunderstood, pretty (and convinced otherwise) and always wind up getting with the quarterback next door. There are no happy endings in teenager-hood, because there is no ending. We go from pimpled thirteens to less-pimpled nineteens, and the geekiness, the awkwardness, and the need for reassurance go nowhere. If I could turn my life into a Meg Cabot book, you can bet I would be dating a cute little dork up at school, and we’d already have ridden off into our sunset. But things keep moving and changing and there are things we have to learn from the moving and the changing. And I like to put all of that into words. It’s kinda what I do.

 

So this post, for example, has metamorphosed from “HAY COOL I GOT READERZ!” into a philosophical discussion of happy endings and why there are none.  Even when I try to approach something seriously, I mess up and wind up babbling about something entirely different. But that’s the beauty of having a blog. You guys can’t shut me up!! MWAHAHAHA!

 

Except, maybe you should be able to. For the good of mankind and all that jazz. *shrug*

Pockets. August 13, 2008

This is an old rant that I wrote a long long time ago (maybe at the beginning of summer…;)) that I recently rediscovered on my computer and decided to upload for your enjoyment!

~~~

I’m not going to pretend to be all cool and disaffected. I do care what people think of me. I care a lot. But I can’t see why what they think should outrank what feels right in the moment. (AUTHOR’S NOTE: I am NOT trying to advise that one should always live ‘in the moment’ and always ‘do what feels right’. That type of thinking can lead to bad things like DEATH. I’m just saying that if you’re at Macy’s and there’s a really cute top on sale, and you try it on and it fits PERFECTLY, then it’s ok to do an eighties-throwback type of happy-dance in the dressing room. Or in the store itself, if the Spirit moves you.)

 

So while I would love to stand on my soapbox and shout to the masses that we need to individualize, and think for ourselves, and not care what others think… I can’t. Hypocrisy doesn’t sit well with me. I care a lot about what people think of even the shallowest things about me. Every morning when I get dressed, I face the intense self-scrutiny of my mirror self. Do I look fat in this? Do I have too much makeup on? If my boobs look big, does that mean this top is skanky? And if my eyeliner is too thick, will people think I’m a skank– especially if my shirt’s too tight? OH MY GOD LOOK AT THAT ZIT! What the hell was I thinking, buying these jeans in size eight…

 

And eventually I leave the house in a baseball cap, jeans, t-shirt and sneakers. Because I care too much, and I’d rather look like a slob than a ho.

 

But the problem is not that people care what other people think, it’s that other people think. Or they think they’re thinking. Really they’re jumping to conclusions, which requires no thought whatsoever. What happens is that we have created pockets for people. Everyone’s mind has tons of pockets, and everytime we see someone, we pick them up and put them in a neat little pocket where we think they fit the best. Even if that has nothing to do with the person in reality. Just because her shirt is a little tight, and she’s wearing skinny jeans, Converse sneakers, and heavy eye makeup, we think she’s a skater, or a rocker chick, or a groupie for some emo boy band. We put her in a pocket. And that guy in line in front of us in the cafeteria who is eating sixteen slices of pizza, and has biceps that look like he stuffed baseballs up his sleeves– I for one am guilty of being envious of muscle-man’s metabolism. And I’m sure others are too. We look at the muscles, and the way he packs away that pizza, and we sigh with envy and push our salad around on our plate. But the honest-to-God truth is that EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US could look and eat like that if we put in the same effort. But we put him in the muscle-head group, with the NASCAR metabolism and the magically-appearing-overnight biceps, and the lack of a future outside of professional athleticism or teaching high school gym.

 

I know I do it too. I categorize people. I give them characters in stories that I haven’t written yet. I make them into the caricatures of themselves; I allow one or two of their personality quirks to overtake my view of them. I think of them forever as Dragon-Breath, or That Guy With The Scooter. But I hate thinking that others toss me into pockets like Girl-Who-Eats-Everything-In-Sight, or The Scribbler, or Doesn’t Pay Attention In Class. I’m more than those. It sounds all emo, but no one can be only what we see of them. There are forces at work behind the scenes, that little spark that sets the clockwork in motion, the little things that make people tick.

 

So I suppose I’ve ended up sounding exactly the way I never wanted to sound. I am encouraging people to look beyond the superficial, and to get to know everyone for who they really are. But honestly, that’s not my message. I know how utterly absurd a proposition that is. It’s impossible to spend that kind of time and energy on everyone we meet. All I ask is that people keep in mind that THERE IS MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE. Don’t spend a ton of time or thought or energy to find out what it is, but maybe spend a few seconds remembering that maybe rockerchick with the mullet has a good reason for her terrible hair, instead of assuming that she’s retarded and doesn’t own a mirror. Maybe she would rather have hair that doesn’t care if it’s ugly, so she doesn’t have to worry about making it look good.

 

I dunno. I’m just a kid pretending to be a grown-up. Or maybe a grown-up pretending to be a kid. I’m not the Dalai Lama or Ghandi or Mother Theresa. I’m not trying to change the way the world operates. I just want to explain it, so that I can pretend there’s a method to the general madness.

 

Why Do We Bother Calling Them ‘Personal’ Lives? August 3, 2008

Where I work, there is a thing called gossip. Apparently, it keeps the place running more than the food, the paychecks, or even the electric company. When I started dating a cook last week, suddenly everyone wanted to know everything, from where we went, to what ice cream he ordered, to whether or not we kissed, and did I like him, and did we want to go to the same school in the fall…

 

It got me wondering why I even bothered to be surprised anymore. I mean, not that there’s really any comparison, but we do this to celebrities everyday. We want to know every detail of everyone else’s lives, so that our own lives don’t have to keep us entertained anymore. We can live everyone else’s too.

 

But don’t we call them personal lives because they’re our own and not everyone else’s? Our public lives are separate– I don’t run around in a t-shirt declaring me to be Jason’s girlfriend. I think it’s idiotic that people take all the details of everyone else’s lives and make them into public phenomenons or wildfire gossip topics. I just wish there was a little more respect for privacy these days. People bitch and moan about the government invading their lives; they should just ask the celebrities how to deal with it. They’ve been putting up with it for years.

NO! I REFUSE TO SUCCUMB TO THE APATHY! July 12, 2008

I always do this! I start a blog, I think to myself, “Wow, this one’s gonna be a keeper, for sure. There’s no way I’ll ignore this one for three months and then forget the password like I did the last fourteen.” And then three months later, there’s blog number fifteen, gathering cyber dust.

 

I won’t do it this time! I won’t do it! I refuse! There may be no one reading this, but eventually there will be! Because I am epically delusional, and under the impression that SOMEONE SOMEWHERE wants to know what’s going on in my mind! I don’t even care if it’s for a case study! Also, apparently blogging is therapeutic. I wouldn’t know, because I’ve never done it for a long enough stretch of time, but I could certainly use any free therapy I can get my hands on.

So my resolution for the next month, until I leave again for school, is to post SOMETHING every day. It’ll probably just be me bitchin’ about my job, or the madre, or various uninteresting things (like my hobbies…) but I WILL DO IT. TODAY IS DAY ONE. THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF MY LIFE. I REFUSE TO LET APATHY MOVE IN ON MY TURF AND TAKE MY LIFE FROM ME.

 

I know it seems like I’m making a mountain out of a molehill– I mean, come on Jackie. It’s just a free weblog. No one’s even reading it. But to tell the truth, Apathy and I have been locked in an epic battle for my life for a little while now. I have recently preferred sleeping to living, and I have a hard time getting up to go do things. I prefer to sit. On my ass. All day long. That’s not good. So this is step one of my eleventy-something step program to taking my life back from the apathy monster. I can do this. I will do this. And I will love life again. It’s gonna happen. Just you wait and see.