New School Year Means New Goals

The idea of cracking open a textbook has always, oddly enough, pleased me. Whenever I look at a page that has been higlighted, with notes tucked away in the margins, I feel satisfied. Which is why, although I dread starting school and would much rather sleep till noon instead of making a mad dash to the lecture hall, I’m excited to go back to school. And, moreso than ever mefore. I think it’s because I have a chance to start over and prove myself.

All my life, I’ve been told by everyone – teachers, peers, parents – that I’m intelligent and bright, yet, embarrassingly enough, all I have to show for it is an incredibly low GPA. Something like 2.7 by the time graduation rolled around. Of course, no one ever believed me when I told them since all my fellow classmates were absolutely convinced that I was dangerously close to a 4.0, and was just being overly modest about it all.
Everyone I would look, there were ditzy blondes whos top priorities were who was dating who and what was the best way to max out daddy’s credit card, and yet, they were getting much better grades than me. They could barely speak proper English, yet they made the honor roll each year. Nevermind having the brains to do it – how did they have the time? They must have snuck the English essays in between shots. It completely baffled me.

Anyway, as I was walking out of the college the other morning, dragging my textbooks behind me, I saw a wall near the entrance with plaques of students names on them – all students who had achieved high honors and had outshone the rest. The second I saw it, my mind was already made up: I will get my name on that wall, or at least very close. I will be invited to join the honor society.

I need to do this because I know that once I transfer to UW-Madison, my chances of outshining anyone else is absolutely zero.

My goals for the 2007-2008 school year:

• Get above a 3.5 GPA, for starters. 3.75+ is preferable, while anything below a 3.0 is grounds for suicide. (Joking, maybe.)
• Get in better shape
• Become more responsible with everything – especially time and money, which means I need to save money for a car and refrain from blowing all my money on my sweet 40% employee discount.

Oh yeah, that reminds me – I got the job.

As if this day couldn’t possibly get any worse…

• My dad somehow forgot that I needed the car today, so I had to go in with my mom and pick the car up. Which was almost on empty because, for some reason, he didn’t get any gas.
• The university bookstore hadn’t processed my order yet, so I have to go pick up the books tomorrow.
• The car died. Three times. Which messes everything up. It would be fine if my dad had listened to my mom for the past few months and gotten it fixed right way, but for some reason, he wants to run the car into the ground. How stupid can you get? That’s the ONLY other car we have. If that goes, he can’t get to work anymore and I can’t get to school.
• I’m a complete and utter moron, and I spilled coffee all over my Macbook. Now the “a” key, the number one key, and the delete keys don’t work. I don’t know how I’m going to pay for this shit. The computer itself isn’t even paid for in full yet, and spill damage pretty much guarantees they’ll refuse to cover anything else in the future, because it might be from the spill. But at least it’s still working, right? Knock on wood.
• The boyfriend and I almost broke up over some stupid crap. He’s way too jealous.

Insha’Allah nothing more will happen and this can all get resolved. And I’ll get that job…

I need to organize this crap!

Before school starts (Monday), I’m absolutely determined to get my crap organized and my room clean. I’ll post after pictures – never before pictures since, to be honest, it’s shameful.

I really need to redecorate, and paint the walls. I wanted to go yellow, orange, or red – something crazy – for one of the walls and do the other three walls white to avoid actually having to move my book case and stuff to paint the other walls. But, the paint job now is probably 20 years old and it’s gross and yellowed, so I have to paint them either way. I fully admit to my laziness. The major problem is that I just got around to hanging the green curtains after about a year. Yellow, orange, or red walls combined with green curtains will either result in vomit, or Christmas.

Story of My Life

The story of my life is, to put it not-so-simply, Skye.

I haven’t talked to Skye since graduation (which she refused to walk at), and last I heard she was on more drugs than I could count and was planning on moving to Chicago with her boyfriend of a few months, where they’d live off his salary as a construction worker and she could be a tortured artist. They, of course, broke up. I’m sure she’s moved out by now and is probably living with some guy she just met. She’s destined to be a crack whore, literally.

I remembered in middle school, Susan, her and I went sledding – back in the day when she was still called Chey. Anyway, she had a steep incline up to her front door so we went sledding to pass the day. I asked if I could use her inner tube and she said no. I thought she was a bitch from that day on. Her mom scared me, too.

In 8th grade our lockers were next to each other and she had this chocolate candy that looked like rocks.

In 11th grade, when I got busted for smoking pot, my mom called her mom to tell her things she probably already knew. I had to talk to her mom, but she didn’t seem mad at me. She kept getting busted, weekly it seemed like, for drugs or drinking, but her parents never really did anything about it. Maybe that’s why she’s the way she is now.

We also had English together that year, with Mike. We did our Shakespeare skit and filmed it in one of the study rooms at the new library. Afterwards we accompanied Mike out back for a cigarette and proceeded to rip the warning labels off of the new air conditioning unit. After poking around at the scrap metal and soldered cubes (one of which is still sitting on my bookshelf), he took me on a ride and we got high, and that was the best high I ever had. On the way home, after laying in the grass with sober Skye (for once), he drove us home. The sky was green and everything else was yellow. It was beautiful, and still, to this day, I don’t know what I saw in him. I wanted him so much, but he was all over Skye. And I don’t know why I wanted him, because he was a swastika tattooed Nazi with zero hygiene, but I guess I trusted him enough to not lace the drugs with anything worse, and enough to consider getting him to do a tattoo for me.

Senior year we had Creative Writing together, and it was probably the only class that she was better at than me. Now, I feel like a fool for unloading everything on her about the ex (crazy Palestinian #1). I’m sure she got sick of it just as I got sick of hearing about “her angel”. But I remember walking out of the classroom and out of the building every morning with her.

She’s beautiful only because of her ridiculous excess makeup. She’s strange and obsessive, creative and a little demented. But she’s easy, that’s for sure, which is, I’m sure, what all the guys see in her. I can’t help but hate her a little bit – even when I loved her.

And she’s the perfect representation of my life. I’ve always been inferior to her, despite her having to repeat sophomore biology twice. And I always will be inferior to someone, somewhere. I want to be good enough. Maybe even the best. But someone is always better than you at something. That’s the rule.

Fat acceptance is a cop-out

I found this community on Livejournal that’s about “fat fashion” – I can’t remember how, I think someone linked to it somewhere else. Anyway, I hear a lot of shit about “fat acceptance” on it and it bugged me, a lot. I didn’t say anything till this one gem of a user posted a topic about how the only control fat people have is over how they dress.

My response was:

I disagree with your remark that all we can control is how we present ourselves and how we dress. Most of us, baring people with legitimate medical conditions, can control our weight. We don’t have to be thin and wear a size 2, but it’s possible to be a healthy weight for our body types that just doesn’t fit into the stereotypical concept of thin. Being a size 24, 26, 28, etc., for example, is not healthy for anyone.

I’m all for “fat acceptance” if you maintain a healthy lifestyle and the healthy weight that your at might not be a size 8 – it might be a plus size (14, 16, etc.). But “fat acceptance” when you’re grossly obese at a size 28 is just fooling yourself and making excuses for being too lazy to exercise and eat right, and making people who have a legit reason for being a little fat look bad. And I say a little fat, because I’ve never seen someone with thyroid problems or PCOS weigh over 300 lbs if they watch their diet carefully and exercise regularly.

Within a few minutes, I got a whole host of “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!” and “Oh dear” comments, along with two mods saying I was banned because “No one likes a fat hater.”

Yes, because I totally hate fat people, right? No, the point was I hate lazy fat people who make excuses for themselves. People have different body types, but no one is meant to be 300+ lbs. So stop making excuses and get your ass on the treadmill. This does not mean I walk around judging anything that isn’t a size 4 – that would be hypocritical. My biological mother and my grandmother are both well over 350 lbs. Do I hate them? No, of course not.

If they were so big on fat acceptance, why does a little dose of reality (my comment) offend them so much? Respect your body my ass. If you respected your body, you would maintain and healthy diet and exercise routine so as not to end up 400 lbs, alone, with heart disease and diabetes.

I’m hardly a size 0, but I watch my diet and exercise as much as I can (and more because college = free gym), and if you stick to it and you don’t puss out, you can get healthy. No it’s not easy, but it’s certainly not impossible. Hell, I lost 20 lbs in just 3 months earlier this year. And I have a disease that makes it literally twice as hard to loose weight and twice as easy to gain it – so what’s their excuse?