Day 15 (+2): Bless Yer Heart

For all the uninitiated, I currently live in the Old Dominion State, also known as Virginia. My family's Cajun, born and bred, so my Louisiana roots are rampant. I grew up in the middle of the MS Delta, the birthplace of the blues, so that influenced my bringing up. Save for Jan. to mid-May of 2009 when I lived in England, I've always lived in the South

Because of this, I always feel like the apologist to people I know from elsewhere in the States and world. So, here's my explanation list.

• Yeah, Robert E. Lee's birthday (and Stonewall Jackson's too, apparently, according to VA) is often celebrated on the same day as Martin Luther King, Jr.'s. But their birthdays are right beside each other.
• Yes, there are still lots of private schools in the South that have a very small minority population. But for the most part, the students nowadays are more accepting. And it's more about how many minority students can't afford the tuition. 
• Yes, the Rebel Man and Confederate Flag and the song "Dixieland" are still in heavy rotation. And it really does mean Southern pride for a lot. They grew up seeing these symbols as something to be proud of. 
• Yes, my dad is a Civil War buff. No, he doesn't dress in recreation regalia and reenact battles. He doesn't believe "the South will rise again", so to speak. 
• Yes, we do have weird outside hobbies--mud-riding, frog gigging, etc. While I feel the need to remind you that not all Southerners are outdoorsmen (take, for example, me), I'll just say you find fun where and how you can.  
• Yes, there were horrible things that happened to black people in the South. No, you as a black person are not in danger 24/7 in the South (this is based on a true sentiment expressed to me). 

Those are just a few of the things that grind my gears. 

Though I know things aren't rosy. I know plenty of prejudiced people. I had family members that didn't approve when one of my cousins dated a black girl. It's still weird for me when I hear/see evidence of racism from the 60's, those hateful slurs and phrases on posters and yelled into the air. Mainly because I wonder what some of my more conservative family thinks when they see. About how fervent they might see. 

I'm not worried anyone I'm related to will show up on the news for a hate crime. Nor do I think that they will do something super ridiculous. I guess it's selfish, when I think about it--if they have prejudices, what prejudices do I have that I don't see, lying beneath the surface?

And I know there are some I have, but I try and ignore anything my idiot brain says in those situations. It sounds dumb, but I listen to my heart. That's where those that say, "why do I have to keep apologizing for what my ancestors did?" get it wrong. 

Southern apologists like myself don't say sorry because we feel personal guilt. We say sorry for actions of the past because it's empathetic, to recognize someone of another race as the victim of generations of oppression and let them know how I think. 

So here's my apology:

"I am sorry your ancestors where treated like less than people. I, as a person, find that a tragic part of history and do my best to change that within myself, by treating you as the fellow human you are. Because you deserve nothing less."

Yes, I am from South. And that only makes me one thing--Southern. 

So whatever I feel about the horrid past, I can't hate the South, because it's made me me, and given me an understanding of feeling for others that I wouldn't trade for anything. 

Day 11 (+2): And This is Why I Suck

Hi, my name is Samantha, and I have a procrastination problem that affects the rest of my life in horrible ways.
Hi Samantha

So I'm not going to make excuses for not writing this weekend. I just didn't. On Saturday, I told myself I would, after my workout, like I have been. But when you doze off, and don't work out until 12:30 in the morning...yeah, you're not going to write after that.

And yesterday? I vidya gamed for like, 3 hours before I went to bed. I didn't even workout. Which, because my boy is oh so good at being the Jillian Michaels in my life, I'm working out extra today. Ergo, gotta try and catch up for the two days I missed.

I really do let time get away from me. It's my worst habit of all time. And I know it will cause me stress later--either hating on myself, or letting that self-anger out on others, or just becoming a whirlwind of emotions...but I do it anyway.

Why? For starters, I really don't think I have this whole "make good decisions" thing down. Sure, I do something good here and there. But forming habits over time is not my strong suit. And I tell myself, yeah, I'll do it later. But then I don't. And things just settle into the way they were before.

It's why I'm still trying to lose weight, 5 years from starting on my journey. It's why I ended up having to donate my car to charity, because it was too far gone to feasibly get fixed (I'm sure that I could have, but the cost had by then exceeded what I could afford). It's why I often start journals and never finish them.

I suck at forming habits.

I know I'm not alone in this. There are people who make a living helping ne'er-do-wells like myself, who can't seem to get their ducks all in a row.

The sad thing is sometimes, I don't want to change. Even though I know I would be less stressed, and my life would be easier, sometimes I think, Well, I know how to play the 'Woe is me' card. I know this life. It's the "Better the enemy you know than the enemy you don't" sort-of problem.

Which, really, is kinda screwed up, that I would sometimes rather be miserable in the long run than happy.

In a weird way, I think it's misguided appropriation. I assume if I'm happy now, I will be happy later, and I give in to the instant gratification of (more often than not) being a bum. But when I see the over-loaded sink full of dishes, I realized how I picked the wrong decision. Again.

Of course, this causes problems with others, of which my boyfriend bears the brunt of. This weekend, we fought about my being too passive. I had gotten upset for no real reason (seriously), and I just became mopey. I wanted to play a game I have on the desktop, to make myself feel better/forget about the mopey-ness, but I didn't want to intrude on his own downtime by kicking him off [it's his computer, after all]. It got to a point to where we were yelling, and it basically came out that we don't want to bother the other one, or do something that may be seen as an inconvenience--mine being asking him to get off, his being preventing me from playing a game I wanted to.

My first instinct is always, don't rock the boat. If people are content, let them be. And while that's sometimes good advice, it can have the cost of suppressing your own wants and needs.

I often choose the easy way, to not rock the boat. But making a wave is how I grow and learn. Changing is how I get better.

So, I'll try to keep up with my blog better. I might be able to catch up today. Maybe.

At least I'll be working towards doing better.

Day 9: What the Cuss?

WARNING: This post may have curse words. Obviously. It's a post about cursing.

If you've met me in a professional/semi-professional setting, you probably know me as loud but genuinely well-meaning. I'm talkative, for sure, but I try to be polite.

However, one I know the "coast is clear" (in a manner of speaking), I have the mouth of a sailor and the humor of a 16-year-old boy. Usually, if I feel my audience is more conservative, I curb my tongue and word choice.

Cursing (or as we in the South more often refer to as "cussing") has always intrigued me. When I was 10 and worked on my dad's turtle pond [I'll explain later], we girls started a "Cuss Club". Seriously--that's what we called it. Basically, it was an agreement that whenever we were to side speaking to ourselves, we could say whatever we wanted word-wise, and no one would go and tell one of the bosses. This was less of a deal for some of the other girls, who were in their mid-teens and so my dad and uncle didn't care. For me and my sister, this meant we could say those words we were prohibited from saying at home, and the others wouldn't tell our dad. Thinking back, it's dumb in a way. But another part of me is kind of proud, giving myself the place to experiment with word usage without fear of retribution and learning how to code switch at an easy age.

I really shouldn't have been too worried though about much judgement. In 1998, my cousin Ethan introduced my sister and I to South Park. I can still remember the first episode I watched--"Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo". I have a vivid memory of being in my aunt and uncle's driveway on New Year's Eve in the back of someone's truck, singing "Kyle's Mom is a Stupid Bitch". Soon after, we introduced South Park to my dad, the same guy who gave me the sense of humor of a 16 year old boy. We didn't get Comedy Central at the house at home, but my uncle's trailer at the pond did. So on Monday nights when my mom went bowling, my dad would take us three kids to the trailer and do work in the shed, taking a break when SP came on. (We also watched WWF and WCW with my dad. Thinking back, it's strange to think I at one time liked wrestling.) For the most part, it was fine, but I do remember when we realized the repercussions of my little brother, 3 or 4 then, repeated Officer Barbrady after he said in the Barbra Streisand episode, "What a bitch!"

When I got to be in junior high, I definitely continued with code-switching and using curse words. I started to use the word "crap" around my parents,something I wasn't allowed to say before. Cody, ever the goody-two-shoes at that age, would gasp when he heard me and tell me I wasn't supposed to say that. I responded snarkily with, "You get a license to crap at 13." My attitude wasn't overlooked though; people apparently reported to my sister how I was talking. I remember her asking me what I was trying to prove.

That's the question that often comes up when people are arguing against curse words: what are you gaining by using these words? While I feel that there is an appropriate time and place for such language, I see no problem in using it, obviously. It's an expression of self that some have wrongly stigmatized.
Now, let me make this clear--I don't go throwing around God's name with all this. Some curse words are still off limits in my book.

I'm going to end this post with my favorite phrases to use in those professional situations as substitutes for curse words:

• fartknocker
• shootamonkey (said really fast)

Feel free to use them as well.

Day 6: Riding the Rollercoaster--My Weight-Loss Journey (Pt. 2)

[If you haven't read Pt. 1, there you go, hyperlinked and everything.]

So, after getting back to about my high school graduation weight, I wanted to keep losing. And once Fall '09 rolled around, I was fairly good about losing steadily, just by not being a complete bum and watching my food intake.Well, as much as I could with a Taco Bell open late on campus within a 5 minute walking distance. And it continued into the following spring and summer. That summer was really crazy. I was eating sandwiches from home a lot, working out at least 3 days a week. I got down to about 170 at the beginning of my senior undergrad year. It stagnated that fall, but spring rolled around, and I managed to get to 160 by graduation, a loss that was kickstarted by my first attempt at actually counting the calories going into my body and the calories I was burning.

During all this time, it was a struggle. As I talked about before, I never really knew portion control. So when I started counting my calories for the first time, and saw how much I was really eating? Well, I felt embarrassed at the number. But the inverse became true as well--when I tried to eat within my budgeted amount, I felt like I was starving myself. I had to learn how deal with hunger pains. To not eat every time I felt the slightest but hungry. After being raised in a household where my parents had taught me to clean my plate, it was hard stopping.

But somehow, I managed to do it. And I felt awesome. Brett had been weight training with me (I did both cardio and weights during my workouts), so he had gained muscle mass, which had put him above 150. It felt great being within ten pounds of someone who was always so skinny. Disclaimer: I know that our respective ideal weights will be different, and that at 160, I still had a long way to go, but the small amount between us at that moment? Well, I would be lying if I didn't say that I didn't feel splendid.

Then grad school started.

To say that grad school derailed me off the tracks would me a major understatement. I was worried about not screwing up these kids, worried about my assignments for classes, worried about work, stressed to the max by my action research project, missing my boy like whoa [long-distance relationships suck, btw], and dealing with less than ideal living situations (let’s just say that we all were bad roommates to each other, and leave it at that). The only thing that would calm me down was a good Skype conversation with Brett, babysitting my favorite little girls, hanging out and not talking about school, and eating a nice, pre-made meal.
I ate a lot of take-out over those 12 months—some choices were better than others, but most were bad. The worst choice was hardly working out at all.

After graduating and moving to VA, I finally was able to stop and weight myself. I tipped in at 180 again.
While I have managed to lose the grad school weight, it’s still a major struggle. I do well, give my leniency, and then I’ll go up, feel bad, and go up, and down….you get the point.

I’m still on this crazy ride that is losing weight, because I want to look at myself in the mirror, and not make excuse for what I see. To feel comfortable in clothes that are more snug on my body. To match the me I see in my head. To like the physical as much as I like the person inside.

Day 5: The Scales of Self-Esteem--My Weight Loss Journey (Part 1)

Just finished my work-out, so I figure that I can talk about that. My weight-loss journey, that is.

Let’s start off this post with a fun fact: I actually was my mother’s smallest baby, weighing in at 6 lb. and some odd ounces. This was mostly due to her having pneumonia less than a month before I was born. So I didn’t stay small for long—she still says I was her butterball, because I plumped up quick. Though like most toddlers, I lost some baby fat. From about age 5 to age 8, I was a normal size. Probably between 8 and 9 was when I really just outgrew my peers weight-wise. I remember in 5^th grade (so about 11 years old) a classmate of mine was messing around, and pushed on the top of my desk. Normally, that makes it where the desk set goes up in the air. Since I was larger, it took more force. I still remember her response: “What do you weight, like 100 lbs?” And I know she didn’t mean to, but it hurt, mainly because I was 100 lbs. By the beginning of 7^th grade, I was about 120 lbs.

I continued to gain weight as I grew older, mainly because I didn’t know portion control. When we went to McDonald’s, I was getting adult meals as young as 10 years old. I often ate multiple servings at meals. I drank Coke and soda pretty much every day. So it’s no surprise that I was pushing 185, 190 when I graduated high school.

My weight was a big factor on my self-esteem, especially in high school. I played sports and would constantly here my teammates saying, “I’m so fat, ugh”, as they looked in the mirror at their 130 lbs bodies. On one of my more snarky days, I remember that a girl said she was as big as a planet, when she was clearly not. I muttered, “If you’re a planet, I’m a universe.” Part of me was jealous, but another part of me was glad I wasn’t deluded about my size. I knew I was overweight—I just wasn’t sure if I could ever do anything about it.

Flash forward to first semester of sophomore year in college. I’d been dating Brett for a while, so he knew about my self-esteem issues and tried to help motivate me. It wasn’t that effective, to be blunt. By January of 2009 as I went off to England for a semester abroad, I was about 215. But there, something clicked. I was homesick, it was cold, I didn’t like the way I looked…so, I started just dancing around my room in the flat. Not even like Zumba dancing, just moving to music for some time. And because of money, I wasn’t eating a huge amount, and some days, when I didn’t leave my room, I just didn’t get as hungry. So I lost 20 lbs by the beginning of May.

So, tomorrow, I’ll continue with part two of my weight-loss journey. And it’s definitely filled with ups and downs, I guarantee you that.

Day 3: Extra! Extra! Read All About It! Hot Off the Presses!

So, I realized the other day, some you were probably thinking:

How do I know that she's not just writing these before had and scheduling them to publish everyday?

Well...you don't. But here's a screenshot proof. With timestamp!

Well, a timestamp from this morning. Still counts.
And while you don't know if I don't just have them all stored away on my computer, trust me when I say I don't. Though, if you know me, you know that I'm not exactly one to pre-emptively pre-write everything.

Today, though, I'm going to talk about my creative process.
First, once I have an idea (like the idea I had about talk about my creative process--so meta), I write down a short blurb. Like, a few words, not even really a sentence. This entry's blurb was "no pre-written blogs and why". As you can see, pretty simple. I write it down using this great to-do list app called Todoist that I have connected across all the computers/electronics I use on a regular basis. And I can just go to that handy website if I'm using a different location (like if I'm at the local library or whatnot). And I can organize tasks by project, so that's helpful. It's a pretty awesome app. [PS, if you're from Todoist and want to show appreciation for my plug, contact form's on the right-->]

Anyway, after that, I just let the ideas fester internally. True brainstorming, if you will. If I was more precise about my entries, I would have pre-started blogs for each idea, and I would work with them when I decided to. But that would go against the idea behind why I began this resolution in the first place: to write 500 words consistently, on a daily basis. If I had even outlined blog posts, I feel that that is like cheating myself into making my quota, and then leading me to feel guilty about an arbitrary line I metaphorically drew myself. It's dumb and  something I already do more than necessary, but what can I say? At least I'm consistent.

Maybe, just maybe, if I make this a consistent habit, of writing down thoughts and ideas and letting the words just flow every day, then maybe my more creative side will be able to do the same. And that will help me to where I can reach that goal of getting published.

Or maybe I'll just be like 300 Sandwiches Girl, make some ridiculous premise for a blog (like, oh, I don't know, writing a set amount each day or something like that), and get a book deal that way.
[Side Note: Sandwich #212 had Chia Seeds on it. Homegirl has officially left the building, if you know what I mean.]

The point is, I like my process as it is. Unformed. Malleable. Not really a process. I like the spontaneity of writing the words as they form in my head. And while I do some "on-the-run" editing (cutting stuff out later, backspacing out of that brick wall I just hit), most of this is just on the fly. Obviously.

I mean, come on, the clichés in that last paragraph alone make me cringe a little bit. But that's part of my process. It's the progression of ideas, even the really, really bad ones.

Day 1: "And We'll Take a Cup o’ Kindness Yet, for Auld Lang Syne."

Here begins a new year, and with it, a new blog.

I’ve started a good many blogs/journals/ways of keeping up with my life over the years. Thankfully, most of the über-embarrassing stuff is gone the way of the trash. I’m cringing now just thinking about some of those entries.

My point is this isn’t a novel idea during my life. I just thinking that writing in particular is an area that I need to revitalize.

As most of you know, it’s a dream of mine to be published one day. And I plan to make that happen. To do so, however, requires practice. And since, well, graduating with my English degree in 2011, I haven’t done a whole lot of creative writing.
Sure, there was that entire year where I was writing lesson plans and my action research paper, and all the assignments in between, but it’s not the same. I thought that maybe, after a few months of a teaching job under my belt, I would be able to find the time to write again.

And here we are, 1.5 years later, and to say that things didn’t turn out as I planned is quite an understatement.

It’s weird, 2014. It seems a lot more people are reflective on 2013 and how they’re excited for the upcoming year. All I have to say to 2013 is, “Nice knowing ya!”
2013 for me wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t a super awesome year. I didn’t lose the weight that I wanted to. I didn’t find the teaching job I want so badly. I didn’t follow through with plans I made for myself. I don’t feel that I internally grew over the last 12 months.

It’s been fairly sucky (scientific term there) since I moved to Virginia. Don’t get me wrong—I’ve met great people and done cool things here, but it’s really hard seeing my friends getting on with their lives and doing awesome things. To be frank, part of me is a jealous grump when my friends post about their students/classes/etc. I just want what they have, and it’s so hard because I’ve been trying for so long. And when I get that question about why I’m not teaching from someone back home, it makes me want to cry out, “I want to, but no one wants me!”

It’s kind of freeing, letting this out there. I’ve been in a self-esteem slump for a while, which has contributed to or caused the aforementioned things that didn’t happen in 2013. And while I’m naturally a more optimistic person, this past year has been spent mainly keeping my spirit’s head above water.

2014, though. It’s going to be awesome. I’m going to make it awesome. By making time to do more things that make me happy. By doing the things that need to get done before they get to the point of stress-inducing (I’m looking at you, dirty dishes). By taking the moment to relish what I’ve got and knowing that good stuff is still in the horizon, even if it’s not the stuff I’m expecting.

By just stopping and breathing, and trucking on.