Daft Punk @ Wireless Festival,2007 Pt.1 of 2

AHHH SO GOOD.

easter sunday

i'm not feeling terribly religious right now. having talked about god for a solid day, im taking a break.

i think all of the energy i could spend thinking about the world or god or social justice is instead spent worrying about how i look or what im eating or what i weigh. imagine what i could do if i weren't so self-obsessed. its mind-boggling the amount of time i spend thinking about my body.

Girl Talk - Bounce That (Best Fan Video Ever)

No words.

the energizer bunny

today was one of those days that just kept going... and going.... and going.

waking up....eating breakfast....going to biology....getting a huge cup of coffee...skipping lecture to read for tomorrow's discussion....going on a forced library tour....going to the biology discussion i never go to...going to my russian history lecture...heading to the review office...calling lawyers and public relations offices...editorial board meeting...staff meeting...deciding on editorial board for next year...driving to north campus and the hill to distribute issues....getting my second coffee-related beverage of the day...writing a response paper in the grad stacks...walking home...eating soup...talking to shaelyn...sitting here.

that is what i did today from seven thirty AM to.... twelve eleven AM.

that is a very long day.

i suspect i will not study for biology this evening.

i hope this weekend makes up for my complete lack of fun this week.

i think i use the pronoun "i" too often.

saint patrick's day, part 2

so after cleaning the kitchen (except the floor, which will be left to the roommate who promised to assist but then regrettably had to postpone) and, more importantly, knocking back three Irish car bombs (i.e. baileys and Guinness, no Jameson's because i couldn't find it), i feel much better about life and the state of the world in general.

and i received an email of interest that made me really happy because... uh.... it did. i don't really feel like explaining further.

and the new york gubernatorial inauguration went on without a hitch. and the Nikkei still sucks. and the people who care about that sort of thing are still caring.

on that note, I'm going to go do things ill regret staying awake for at seven thirty tomorrow morning.

time to move on

i thought i was hugely fat in this picture.

i was five or six.

i didn't smile with my teeth because i had
recently realized that my teeth were really
crooked, and this would result in my wearing
of braces until my sophomore year of high school.

i thought i was as huge as huge could be. elephant sized. ballet-dancing hippo sized. moo cow big.

funny how things never really change. only now,
after having gained about two hundred pounds
from the time this photograph was taken, and then losing nearly one hundred of those pounds, i know my mental view of my appearance is really, really fucked up.

for some reason, i always thought that being thin would solve everything. if i were thin, i'd do better in school. if i were thin, my mom would stop drinking and like me more. if i were thin, people would want to talk to me and be around me and hug me and care about me and love me.
my sister used to keep all of her issues of seventeen and ym (a not-very-good teen magazine that doesn't exist in print anymore). i folded over the corners on all of the articles about weight loss. i was, like, nine. and completely and totally obsessed with my weight. which, of course, didn't make me lose weight. i ate vast amounts of food, and exercise was boring and for attractive people. volleyball players and such. there are no fat girl sports besides rugby, and i didn't know what rugby was at the time. so i did absolutely nothing but believed that someday, i'd lose weight. and everything would be perfect.

woops.

so i eventually lost a lot of weight. got down to a size that is admittable in public without people looking at you like you're roseanne barr circa 1994. and then i realized that there are so many other things wrong with me. my feet are really flat. my underbite was noticable. my neck is too short and and too thick. my shoulders are out of proportion. my hair is too weird. my nose is too wide. my voice is terrible. i lisp (i can barely record a cell phone answering machine message without going into OCD panic). my forehead is really big. and im still not as thin as i want to be.

i remember not thinking about this as much freshman year of college. i guess i was busy, and i lived with a girl who was my size and who had an actual social life, so i realized i could too. but living with the people i live with, realizing im really, really behind on a lot of social normalization (ie: normal people had their first "relationship" when they were like, eleven. i was busy being fat and getting made fun of during that time. that takes up a lot of valuable time.) is making me worry about my appearance more than ever. its like i think that my appearance is the number one thing about me people don't like.

its not that i'm really, really irritating or really, really immature or really, really self-involved (or haven't you noticed?) or anything like that that could be the actual answer for why people have to be drunk to try to get with me. its not like i have thousands of really annoying characteristics that are off-putting and could possible mark me as having autism. i don't know why i assume people look at me all the time-- granted, i look at other people all the time, but that can't be everyone. can it?

when do i get to start thinking about something else? when can i stop looking up prices for orthognathic (jaw) surgery and nose jobs and other various plastic surgeries that i would have to take out loans to get (though the jaw surgery may be covered by blue cross/blue shield)? when do i get to just... live? when im eighty?

the truly horrifying thing is that this is probably the best that i am ever going to look. at age 20, i have peaked, and im awkward as shit.

fabulous.

sitting in class

i really enjoy the fact that my GSI and most of the other members of this class are fairly convinced i pay attention. little do they know...

today is saint patrick's day, a day reserved for wearing green and drinking. people are stumbling out of Buffalo Wild Wings and Good Time Charlies like they're escaping the fall of Saigon. But not me. I am stone-cold sober, wearing a black button down, a vest, jeans and sneakers. no green to be seen. here is a list of things i have to do today:

go to the library and check out military strategy books
clean the kitchen
talk to my editor in chief about staff selections for next year
avoid going to work and doing pots and pans
read And the Band Played On because it might be the longest book ever written

Machine - 'There But For The Grace of God Go I'

Go on, tell me this isn't the greatest disco song of all time. I dare you.

Signs of Life

When I said New Life was happy and enthusiastic. I meant it. I've seen college football fans with less fervent belief.

nlc commercial

enthusiasm. weird.

new life church

so the last two weekends, i have attended new life church in ann arbor. it is, according to its website, a non-denominational church "Emphasizing faith-filled prayer as the key to unleashing the supernatural power of God in (their) lives and in the lives of those with whom (they) are involved." and yes, i got some of that. but mostly what i got was balls amount of happiness.

i hate happiness.

let me explain. i'm all for being happy. i did the depression thing. it involved being desperate for attention and cutting myself and going to a shitty therapist who thought i was an idiot. but i like a nice, steady, unexciting level of happiness with no ebbs or bumps. i cannot handle people who are so thrilled with life that they have to raise their hands and praise a god who i'm not entirely sure exists. and if he does exist, i don't think he likes me very much. i couldn't even think of it as a cultural event-- it was just a bunch of white preppy kids listening to a praise band and acting as if they had contracted some nervous system disease.

they talked about god being active in their lives. they talked about how god had pulled them through a difficult time, or guided their family, or provided them with answers. i can think of one incidence in which god did something i asked for directly. no, i'm not dead. nor do i have some life-threatening disease and i haven't been hit by a bus. neither have anyone in my family. but if i had prayed, and that did happen, would that disprove god? i have all these questions, and no one seems to have the answers i'm looking for.

i stopped going to church last easter when i got a call from my sister that my mom was in the hospital. she then didn't wake up for a month. granted, it forced her to deal with her problem and she's better now (even has a new hip and everything). but i don't take blunt irony well. easter= happy, mom nearly dead=not happy. to which i responded: god, fuck you.

now i live in a house of agnostics/atheists, and they seem (to some degree) to not have gone completely off the deep end. i don't know what i expected. once again, because i am internally twelve years old, i am at one end somewhat sad for them (like my belief is so strong) and envious of their ability to live without guilt.

i think that's my problem. i'm really, really tired of the guilt. i want to do something, anything, without feeling like there is someone sitting on my shoulders telling me not to do it. i want to not have to be shitass drunk to stop thinking and start doing.

i hope this doesn't screw me over in the end. i'll be kind of ticked if it does.

i don't want to be your black friend

no, i never post here. but i need to improve my writing and stop sounding like a douche, so here goes.

i don't want to be your black friend. i wouldn't want to be your female friend, or (four years ago) your fat friend. i'm terrified that your opinion of me is what your opinion will be of any future black people that you meet, for better or for worse.

i used to watch that cosby show spinoff a different world. you know, that show with a southern girl named whitley (she sounded like a black, young blanche deveroe from golden girls) and some dude with flip-up glasses? thats what i think of when i think of "black". they went to a historically black college and watched step competitions and argued about malcolm x (thats also where lisa bonet went from cute to not attractive).

i, oddly, don't think of the black friends i have at michigan (which are few and far between, and for that i feel terrible) or the black friends i had on my street. i don't even think of my father as black, for some reason. i mean, he is. i know that. but he's.. different. my sister has much more caucasian characteristics than i do (she's on the left of me, and yes, she's much more attractive than i am, no need to remind me. i blame my underbite and excess of jaw).

to me, black seems like it should mean what it means to be indian-- that you know all these people and share these traditions and think similar thoughts and know what its like to feel different in the exact same way. but it doesn't. not at all. being black, in some ways, is kind of what its like to be catholic or jewish. yeah, you can be born into it, or baptized it. but you don't really have to do anything to identify yourself as it or be identified with it.

people seem to notice that i'm black far more than i do. they look at me to see if i'm offended by photographs or images (to be honest, i'm usually not). they tell me i'm being too black, or not black enough. they point out other people who might be "less black" than me. this is all very strange to me.

if i were white, i don't think any of my characteristics would be all that odd. the music i listen to, the clothes i wear, the things i like to do, none of it would be all that out of the ordinary. sometimes i wish i were white. i do love to be different and thus the center of attention, but i like defining that role on my terms. somehow, i feel as if i walk into a room and opinions are already formed about me. im sure the same thing occurred when i was fat-- assumptions made about what i did or what i are or what people thought of me. but i can't make myself a blank slate if i have an immutable characteristic with enough baggage to take up three spike jones films attached.

sometimes, i want to forget, just blend in and be me and have no opinion on civil rights or affirmative action or anything just because i'm "supposed" to.i just want to be here without anyone making assumptions. i want to live my life without having to do so for an entire racial group that i have very little contact with. but i guess all i can do is try to be myself. yeah, that'll work.