National College Media Convention This week has been a great week, but to top it all off, I have been asked by the editor and chief of the school newspaper I write for to attend this event. Attending the National … Continue reading
my heart is almost as warm
as the heating blanket that soothes my aching back
as the blackberry syrup I told you all about
when we spoke on the phone.
there is nothing that feels better to me than the feeling of knowing you’re miles away,
that you’re two hours back in time from me,
but yet we are both lying here thinking about each other
about blackberry syrup
about travel plans and future breakfasts
about spring desert picnics
about the idea that someday we’ll lie down together
and won’t have to think about anything.
Before I start writing what I want to write, I just want to give a nod to all the people who have followed me the past couple weeks. I really appreciate that you all care what I have to say; it means a lot to me, it really does. Secondly, I want to give another nod to whoever read/liked my last post regarding my body image. It makes me feel like I actually have some supporters out there.
In lieu of the fact that I was a very good girl today who did not overeat and went to the gym despite lingering Zumba-legs. It is really nice to know that I can eat a limited amount of calories (I’m trying to lose a couple pounds mostly so I can fit into my old pants. I’m a broke college student; I do not have money for a whole new set of chub pants like I sometimes have to get when I gain weight) without starving myself/going hungry. I ate a reasonable amount. One helpful part being that I didn’t eat dinner in the school cafeteria because I had a meeting during my usual dinnertime. The cafeteria at my college is probably the #2 factor in my weight gain since getting here; I always over-indulge on the variety of buffet-style food FYI to anyone who cares, I’m going to say that’s #2 because I believe the #1 reason is my EXCESSIVE snacking on things that are not supposed to be snacks. Like whole loaves of Dominos cheesy bread. Yikes, Sarah.
I digress. After discussing this issues I have with my body, I thought I would discuss a few things I like about myself.
My confidence is getting better. I have really pretty eyes, and despite the decrease in my health since getting to college, I’ve been taking better care of my hair, and it’s looking better than it ever has. Honestly my face is not terrible. It’s grown into a nice shape and with a little blush it seems like I actually have some okay cheekbones. I can’t complain about my face at all, which is huge step up from where I was a few years ago.
In regards to my body, it’s not all bad. I have really nice skin, and my figure is really well proportioned. I wish it would shrink down a little bit, but nevertheless.
It is really nice to be able to sit there in front of the mirror and not constantly think that I’m ugly, or even average. Sometimes, I can be really pretty. I feel like the more I work on my inner self, the more it will reflect upon my outer self. I know, I know, that sounds a lot more oddly spiritual that my normal trains of thought, but that’s just the way I’m feeling right now.
I alluded to this a couple weeks ago, and now it’s finally here: the time where I write about the issues I have with my body. There are many individual ones, and there are a couple big ones.
Everyone experiences body insecurity at some point in their lives. My insecure period has been ongoing since I was 12 and my figure “filled out,” as my mother likes to put it. I am a curvy girl, there is no denying that. I’m not overweight, and I am not a person you would look at and immediately think “oh, she’s fat,” as if that was my defining trait. However, I am locked in a constant and terrifying battle between the part of my mind who sees the cute, sexy hourlgass girl with the bright green eyes who can rule the world, and the other side, who constantly magnifies the parts of myself that I hate the most and almost can’t bear to look at.
This tug of war is ongoing and never seems to let up. Even when I was at what I consider my most attractive, that was incredibly bad because the summer I looked hot was the summer I had an eating disorder. I’ve long gotten past that (thank goodness), but the insecurities about my weight are almost overwhelming. The fact that I’ve definitely gained weight since getting to college and finally being able to eat without the constant judging eyes of my mother does not help whatsoever.
Sometimes, it’s really difficult to hate yourself when your friends constantly say you look fine, when your boyfriend always tells you how gorgeous he thinks you are, and on those days where your outfit and makeup are just spot on and you feel like the world is at your feet. However, it’s possible. My feelings towards my body can fluctuate dramatically within a day, even within a couple hours. I feel a little better with every one of those nice comments, yet still the doubt always remains.
Here’s one straight-up fact: I don’t need to love myself. I know that loving myself all the time is completely unrealistic. All I want is to accept myself. To accept the fact that I’m not perfectly skinny, and I have flaws, and be okay with that. It seems like a tangible enough goal, but then again, it’s always just out of my reach. I am somewhat of a perfectionist and cannot accept my own flaws. I want to fix them, I want to mold myself into the person I really want to be.
On that note, I am feeling extreme self-pressure at this very moment. This morning I woke up and noticed new stretch marks. Again. I am telling myself now: this has to stop. It just has to. I’m not only making myself feel more and more self-conscious, but I’m afraid for my health because there is absolutely one thing to blame in this situation and that is my very poor eating habits since getting to college. I know it’s common, but today, this morning, I have reached my breaking point.
Just to let you know: I do not judge people on their weight. I believe everyone has beauty in them, and it’s up to them whether or not they want to let it show. The flaws I see on myself are ones I know I’m blowing out of proportion, but they plague me nevertheless. I do not see these things when I look in other people. It’s a problem I have, I know. I have made it my mission since I got out of middle school what feels like hundreds of years ago to see the best in people, and in all the years that have passed, that outlook has worked. However, while I see the best in others, I only seem to be able to see the worst parts of myself.
I just wish I had a clear view of myself. I wish I could look at my body from the outside, see myself how my boyfriends see me, see myself how strangers see me. I just want an honest view of myself from another perspective, so maybe I can see the best in me, too.
Today has been a very calm and fairly antisocial day. Besides doing homework with my best friend in her room and playing some anxiety-filled few games of Jenga (the most stressful game of all time I swear), I spent the day in my room or in the tea room downstairs listening to The Beatles and the new Young the Giant Album, Mind Over Matter.
Oh, I bet you guys thought this post would be about the Grammy’s. I did not get a chance to catch those, but no artists I’m very devoted to were up for any awards, besides the ever-lovely Vampire Weekend and their nomination for Best Alt Album of the Year, which they won because they are absolutely lovely lovelies and that is my new favorite album of theirs. So besides that small point, this post is not about the Grammys. There we go.
This post is mostly about my musical thoughts as I sit here at 1:15 a.m. waiting for my blanket to get out of the dryer so I can get to bed. It’s a school night, and three things I’d love to do tomorrow morning are
-Actually go for a walk/run
-Take a shower so I can do my hair and look cute
-Eat breakfast food with Galen (best bud)
all before my first class, at 11. That seems pretty doable, I think. Unfortunately I never seem to actually wake up in time so I half-ass my hair and skip exercise altogether. Bad, Sarah. I’m really going to try this time though. At least for the shower, because I already promised breakfast with Galen so that seems to be concrete.
Anyway, music. Young the Giant is another wonderful band, and I’m just now giving their new album a listen-through. I like it so far, especially the first two songs (including the little album intro). I feel the more I listen, the more the different songs will start to individually grow on me. This happens with a lot of new albums: the more I listen, the more certain songs just come out and suddenly stick with me. The first time I listened to the (award winning! ack!) Modern Vampires of the City I immediately was drawn to the upbeat “Finger Back,” it was a classic VW sounding song. Then after a couple listen-throughs I realized “Everlasting Arms,” especially when played with “Hanna Hunt” is a really lovely song.
Same with Young the Giant’s first self-titled album, I immediately loved “Strings,” and the upbeat “My Body,” and of course “Apartment,” which was the song that attracted me to them in the first place.
But three years later, my favorite song on that album is the originally overlooked slow and river-like song “Islands.” Something about listening to it as I drove through the barren but beautiful moonlike landscape of central California really made it stick. I think locations and songs and emotions can be all tied up with each other. The out-of-body memories of the Blue Ridge mountains I get when listening to “Dear Prudence” by the Beatles, the calm and jovial mountain lakes I remembered driving past as I played The Lumineers over and over again.
So yes…musical things. Yes. I could probably talk about the way music intersects and weaves its way through every section of my life for hours on end. I’ll stop now though (I’ll post more about the new YTG album after I’ve listened through a few times and have gotten a good feeling for it). If anyone wants to here more of my musical musings, feel free to comment. I’m going to go check on my poor damp blanket in the dryer.
This post is true and lovely. Also I love this girl, so everyone should check her blog out. Her posts and photography make my day every time! Ack!
I didn’t start this blog wanting to post things like this; I want everyone who may be reading it to get that straight. Also on that note, shoutout to the few people who have followed me the past week. I just want you guys to know that you guys are really cool and I’m honored that you’re interested in things I have to say.
This post is mostly me “getting things off my chest” because lately my friends are driving me nuts. I know I’m a lucky duck white girl and all that stuff (I posted about that earlier, trust me, I get it). Also I want to unleash this tiny rant onto the world, and all my other social media outlets are followed by my friends that I am referencing here (this is getting deleted from my tumblr the second it auto-publishes because I’m too dumb and frankly too lazy to know how to turn that function off from this page). Everyone is just being extremely petty and catty and nobody has any patience for each other. We went an entire semester without this happening, so I do not know what everyone’s deal is with each other all of a sudden. It’s like something clicked in everyone after we got back from winter break and suddenly everyone has a huge problem with someone else in the group and I don’t know where all these negative feelings have come from.
People are constantly ragging on each other and snapping at each other. Suddenly no-one has any tolerance for even the small little annoying quirks we all have. I feel like maybe we all shouldn’t even be real friends if we can’t tolerate those kind of small things, really. This level of just…extreme bitchiness is something that needs to absolutely stop. People will talk about another person when that person is literally mere feet away. Not to even mention what people say to each other behind backs. We even had this little group powwow last Monday that was supposed to let everyone air their shit about each other and someone that was supposed to help. But really, I don’t think it helped anything, because less than a week later we are back to the exact same bullshit that we had last week.
Honestly, I’m not going to name names here (no point anyways, none of you lovely readers know these people), but now that I’ve been writing about this and thinking about it, it’s kind of just one person who has been acting extremely toxic lately. She has been personally attacking one or two other people and then attempting to get other girls on her side. This level of high-school dumbassery is not something I am cool with at all.
Unfortunately, I’m a huge coward. I will freely admit it: I am a huge damn coward and I do not have the guts to talk to her about this. Because right now, I’m on her good side, and after 12 years of schooling in which I was picked on because I absolutely refused to be on the good sides of all the head girls at school because they were vapid and their personalities were bland, I am on someone’s good side and I want to stay there.
I don’t even know where this post is going anymore. I’m just very frustrated and I am glad I have a close-knit group of friends because I have never been in a group of girl friends before, but I wish I had branched out more.
I’ll post about something cool and relevant tomorrow, guys. I’m sorry.
Right now, I’m having one of those moments where I really feel like I have to get this written down and if I write it in my journal it will be all scribbly, because the fast I write the more my handwriting declines in quality. But, when I type, even when I’m typing at rapid rates, it still comes up looking just as legible. What an invention, the typewriter. Ha.
Anyway, the important statement I want to make: first of all, I should be doing a lot of other things right now. I have a short paper due tonight that I have not even started yet; I should be writing that. I need to take a shower and get ready to go to lunch with my friends in less than an hour. I need to spruce up my room a little before my parents come visit later on this afternoon (to keep them under the illusion that I am both a very clean and academically successful person, which in my case is kind of more of a give-and-take than a best-of-both-worlds situation). Most of all, I should REALLY be brushing my teeth because I woke up within the hour and I’m sitting here in nothing but my fluffy robe with my hair doing whatever the hell it wants and brushing my teeth seems like an urgent thing to take care of for some reason.
Which really does bring me to the point of this completely spur-of-the-moment post: I have a damn good life. Yes, I have problems, emotional hardships, car troubles, my eyebrows grow too fast, I miss my boyfriend, etc etc. But my life could be so much worse. I am upper middle class white girl going to a nice private school, who has a solid group of friends, a good GPA, an iPhone, and a really cool ceramic pig in my room (his name is Marshall). My parents are still together, and even though he’s a couple thousand miles away most of the time, I have a really great boyfriend.
To put it bluntly, my life is probably what most people would consider to be great. The only real and genuine problem I think I have is that because I have clinical depression/anxiety, my mind does not seem to see it that way. It goes around and picks out all the worse things and brings them to the surface, when all the great things, that greatly outnumber them, sink into the back. I could be very sick, or financially destitute, or not know my father, or have to sell my body to live, but I don’t have to do any of those things. And that, pardon my french, is fucking fantastic.
So yes, I’m not that skinny. I struggle with my body image a lot. But I am healthy. While my mind is a little strange sometimes, my body itself is healthy enough to do whatever I want, and I am extremely lucky for that. I intend to hike and run and climb all the stairs to my room and classes with great vigor from now on, because I can! I am blessed to be able to climb stairs and should enjoy climbing stairs while I can still do it!
So yes, I miss my boyfriend a lot. To give more background (although I’ll probably talk more about him soon in another post, we are best friends and it’s hard for me to describe how great he is here), he’s a US Marine and has been in the corps for a year now. It’s very difficult for both of us. I miss him almost all the time; having your very best friend who is also the guy you’re definitely in love with be so far away all the time is not an easy thing. But it’s not all bad. Our relationship has only gotten stronger this past year. We now know how to cope, and make each other feel better even when we cannot physically be there for the other person. We saw each other 27/365 days in 2013. It’s not a lot of days, but it will only get better from here. 2013 was boot camp, he didn’t have a lot of money or leave saved because yes, he’d just started up. It’s only going to get easier from here on out, because we can plan to see each other a little more often, and most importantly, we know how to cope. I love this guy like crazy, but our relationship is so much healthier because of the things we’ve learned apart: he has learned to be more attentive and willing to share, and I have grown a newfound sense of independence, both of which will help us in our relationship and for the rest of our lives. Many of the girls I met whose boyfriends got to Parris Island the same time my boyfriend did are now single, or more commonly, already with someone else entirely. Their relationships were just not compatible for the long distance. It’s a tricky situation, and the only reason Alex and I have not only made it but made the most of it is because we are best friends and we have been for years. A relationship started purely off of physical connection is not likely to last being apart more than 300 days of a year, because if you have nothing to talk about, it’s basically over. Do I miss sex? Yes. Can I live without it? Definitely, I’ve been doing it all year, and a lot of men and woman have to go a year or two years without seeing their special someone, so it’s completely possible. When we actually get to see each other and have some alone time, is it exceptionally great? Yes. Yes it is.
That’s that, I suppose. I am a very lucky woman in this world. I could have been born somewhere else, born with some disease or gene or awful parent that predisposed me for a much more difficult life. But I wasn’t. So, little rant about my boyfriend aside, this is what I am trying to say:
Is my life easy? No. Life isn’t easy for anyone. Even the richest white girl in the world has her own set of problems. Even Oprah has bad and confusing days. Life is hard. One of my favorite bands, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, sings a very good song about just that. Life is hard, that’s how it’s always been and that’s how it will be, that is what life is in its very nature: a rewarding struggle. So my life isn’t easy, but the point of all this is that my life is good.
The most important lesson I have learned so far is that life is hard, but nothing worth doing is easy.
I don’t think I will ever feel quite like a normal internet user, because I personally have yet to see the appeal of Twitter, and I also feel like a jerk, because all my attempts to explain my complete and utter apathy towards Twitter just results in more question marks. There are so many social networks, all of which seem to rise and fall in popularity over time as well as in my own personal favor (sorry myspace, I missed the myspace boat entirely). Besides tumblr and facebook, the reason I end up joining a lot of things is because of recommendations (and yes, peer pressure) from friends. Everyone I know has a Twitter. Celebrities have Twitters. Even the Pope tweets. I myself do have an account, but every time I try to use it, I just stare at the screen of my laptop or phone unable to come up with anything witty or meaningful to tweet about.
I’ve heard lectures and testimonies and as Elaine Benes would say, yadda yadda yadda about Twitter time in and time out, but honestly I just do not get the point. There’s already enough blurbs of unnecessary information about people I only half-care about all over facebook, and I feel like twitter is almost promoting the idea of “let’s post every time I tie my shoelace” even more. In one of my classes we learned about how Twitter was an “essential” part of the Arab Spring, some Egyptians even nicknaming it “The Twitter Revolution.” How? How can a site that’s 99% blurbs of useless and unneeded information be that vital? I understand that it was a fast, easy way to spread information, activist ideas, and even all-too-real videos and photographs about the political atmosphere but..come on. You can literally use almost any other internet platform, the information is spread just as quickly (well, depending on your wifi connection), and guess what, you can write more than your average oldschool text message.
I mean yes, I see the upsides. Short and concise can really be nice. But I feel like most of the tweets out there should be things that never should really even be posted and probably wouldn’t be had the opportunity to quickly spurt it out on a whim in 140 little letters and spaces had not been there. One thing I’ve learned in my short adult life is that you should never post anything public or answer an email when you’re angry. You will no doubt write things out of anger that then will essentially be out there for the rest of your life and beyond. Oops. Then, imagine reading back over all your old spur-of-the-moment, I’m-pissed-at-my-boyfriend or I’m-drunk-let-me-share-the-shape-of-my-excrement tweets (or facebook posts, for that matter. It just seems to happen a lot more on Twitter).
It’s quite surprising the amount of annoying frivolity one can fit into 140 characters.
There is this “thing” I do (thing being in quotation marks because I don’t really like the word, I’ rather use a different term instead of “thing” at every opportunity, but this morning I’m just too tired to think of a good enough replacement word), where I manage to participate in running three or four open tabs at once. I’m writing this post, I’m updating tumblr, and I have an episode of Bones running on Netflix, mostly just because I like TV background noise and because I don’t have access to the morning news shows I usually watch while at home.
I do this all the time, and like regular multitasking, I feel like it’s not good. Every single person who has ever written anything about multitasking ever has said that all the tasks suffer when you cannot concentrate on just one at a time. However, I don’t see it as me doing multiple things at once because I’m trying to accomplish things (although later I will be answering emails while still on tumblr and netflix, that’s semi-productive), and everything I’m doing tends to not require a large amount of attention anyway, just like many internet time-passers.
The problem here is, while I’m doing three simultaneous pretty-much-pointless internet tasks, there’s a laundry list of things I should be doing in my minimal spare time before class starts that I’m definitely not doing (one of which is literally my laundry). I should be taking a shower, I should be attempting to get dressed or eating the one cereal I have left, the latter of the list I’m avoiding because it’s the seriously mediocre Special K Chocolatey Delight.
So, internet multitasking. Does anyone else have this problem? I know I cannot be the only person on earth who does this, what with the internet being an ever-present entity in my life and those of others. Really, I’m curious to know.
Hiding Behind her Typewriter 