two things
Two things I learned today:
One - How to make vegetarian pot stickers, which is basically just the same thing as making pyrogies, with more soy sauce and less potatoes and sour cream.
Two - I still really really really wish that Bono would have sex with me. I don't think I deify U2 as much as I did when I was a teenager, because I didn't listen to anything else then, but oh god ... I saw some 80s pictures of Bono today and ohhhh godddd. He is just so amazingly hot in all of his incarnations. I just have this enormous intellectual/musical/physical crush on him that will never go away. Sigh...
Yes, K is aware of this, he has resigned himself to accepting my crush, and he just laughs at me.
i can has weight loss?
Blegggg...So here is my declaration to the world, so that in admitting it to others I may admit it to myself: I gained weight. I gained some thesis weight, kind of like winter weight, as it was a kind of hibernation for me. I kept thinking that I didn't really, that it was just PMS, it was just hormones, I just ate too much salt last night, I just have a warped perception of what I look like, I'm just bloated from being hot...and then I tried to wear a pair of jeans that has always fit me on the loose side and they barely barely barely fit to the point that I'm not sure that it is socially acceptable to wear them in public.
*side note: I appear to be sitting outside of some kind of workshop where white (very, very white) people are being taught how to rap. I think they are trying to rap about ice cream to the tune of "My Humps." Yes, this is at Stanford. Oh, now they've just come out and they have bird beaks on their heads. This may also be Harry Potter related but I am not sure. No, I'm not hallucinating. I apologize for deviating from my original train of thought, but I felt that real-time narration was the only way to help you experience the shock along with me.*
But yeah, the jeans, they hurt me. I kept trying to sit funny all day so that one could not see my enormous body trying to escape from its constrictor. ENORMOUS. I've always kind of wanted to weigh myself just to check in, since I haven't weighed myself in almost three years, and I want to make sure that I don't weigh a gazillion pounds, but I'm pretty sure I'd kill myself if I saw the number right now. I think I'll wait on that until I have an idea of what it would be.
This is just so frustrating because I now realize what happened, I've learned my lessons, I know that being so busy has forced me to make really terrible food choices for the last few months, but now that I have repented, I'm still paying for it, and will be for several more months. This is the vicious circle that I've dealt with since I was eleven and realized I weighed a little too much: I come to the realization, realize that it will take me several months to get the weight off, which feels like forever, and flail myself on the bed and think, "It'll never come off, so why try..." And a year later, when I'm still in the same boat, I realize that if I'd just picked myself up and stopped whining and actively tried to do something about it, I could have been at my target weight ages ago. But at the time, several months of trying to lose weight sounds like a lifetime. I keep telling myself that if I don't focus on the weight loss itself but focus on being healthier, that it will come off before I know it, and I'll get into a much better pattern of eating and living, but I don't believe myself.
I never developed a healthy way of dealing with my weight. The words of my father sound in my head, the words that I hated hearing but were so true: "You're completely all or nothing. You either have to go at something full tilt, or not at all." And it's true: I either starve myself or exercise like someone's holding a gun to my head (I preferred the starving), or I just sit and cry and never get anywhere. I can't relate to you how many times I created calorie plans in my head which would give me a magic number of how many weeks it would take me to lose the weight, because I needed to circle a day on the calendar to tell me when I could be normal again. I can't tell you how many times I noticed differences in the scales at home and at the doctor's and how crazy I got trying to recalibrate my home scale. I know this isn't easy for anyone, and I know I'm only trying to lose a little bit, where there are millions of Americans needing to lose like seventy-five pounds, which I can't even fathom. I've just dealt with questions of my weight for so long that I feel like a failure every time it comes around again. But I know that weight/eating will always be a problem for me, whether it goes too high or too low.
a meta question: I always feel so melodramatic (can't you tell?) when I think about my weight problems; whenever I'm trying to lose weight it feels like my weight problems are like my personal cross to bear, my silent struggle, the thorn in my side. The constant journey that no one understands. Stupid whore. Go worry about globalization.
Now I'm playing Metallica in my head:
this thorn in my side
this thorn in my side is from the tree
this thorn in my side is from the tree i planted
oh it tears me and i bleed
and i bleed
Okay, you know it's time for some anti-d's when I start quoting Metallica. I'm not really that despondent about it; I just lose all hope when I finally realize that I'm back in that place again, that I'm back in that same spot I was when I was thirteen, and I haven't learned a better way to deal with it since then.
On a lighter note...
The rappers are back. Now the white rappers are singing about sunlight? Still to the tune of "My Humps"? Is this a high school chemistry summer class about chemistry or something - and they needed a song to learn about photosynthesis? What the hell is going on??? I just heard "Ima block block block the light, block the light out of the sky." !!!! At least they're not trying to Christianize "My Humps" ... "Ima save save save your soul, save your soul from your evil self" I kinda like it; I think I'll pitch it to some CCM musicians. It would be all the rage at the crazy Christian camp!
Back to work.
another time, another place
Hello! I suppose the last time I checked in, I was still in the final throes of the thesis vomit, and now I find myself:
- graduated from Berkeley
- living out of a suitcase
- taking summer classes at Stanfurd (?) boo...
The summer has treated me well so far, though it's been full of moving. I had to:
- move out of my Berkeley apartment (tears stream from my face as I write that)
- go back to my parents' and help them with their even more monstrous move (still in progress)
- go down to SD to help K move (the most hellish experience of my life for which I am still giving him a lot of shit)
- move K and myself up to Stanfurd (boo)
- and after the Institute we'll move back to SD into our friend's house because we don't have an apartment yet
- and then move into our own apartment.
After this summer, I demand to remain in the same apartment for at least four years. I have had way too much moving in my life, especially in the last five years, and I cannot deal with the fact that my parents and I are moving at the same time. Since I like bulleted lists so much, let's figure out how many times I've moved in my life:
- Santa Clara, 1984-1993
- Phoenix, 1993-1996
- Oakdale, 1996-2002
- Berkeley, 2002-2007 :(
- dormitory
- the Piedmont apartment, when it was happy
- the other room in the Piedmont apartment, when it was not happy
- the Haste shithole
- my lovely Elmwood house
And I have two more in the near future...HALP PLZ
At least I have a somewhat more permanent residence at Stanfurd. Stephanie has kindly put me and K up for the month in her adorable townhouse of beauty that I cannot describe. It has such lovely countertops, and a dishwasher...oh how I long for dishwashers. I am glad to be with friends, but I feel quite uncomfortable at Stanfurd...I know a lot of my unease is due to the Berkeley-Stanfurd rivalry, which is silly, but probably explains my initial distaste. But I feel really uncomfortable at this immense private school. It's unnecessarily large, overly manicured, and makes me put up my guard to avoid dealing with pretentiousness. I feel like I'm in a foreign land with an impossible currency system and that I don't even know which language I am to speak. Or like I'm in the Haas Pavilion, which is kind of like a foreign land, because it looks like it is separate from the rest of campus in every respect. I miss how Berkeley was easier to get around, and most of the stuff you needed was centrally located. I feel like this campus is purposefully misleading. Maybe I just feel this way any time I'm in the South Bay, because you're in the Bay Area, but you're kind of not, because you can't take BART and it's hotter than everywhere else. In any case, it's good to be back in the Bay regardless, and we're hoping to make at least one venture into the city to say goodbye to our favorite restaurants, but I still feel really weird and disoriented.
I have noticed a few curiosities about Stanfurd that I thought I might note:
- There are a larger number of very thin white girls than at Berkeley. At Berkeley I could tell myself to relax because all the really thin girls were Asian, and that I had no chance of competing with them. Damn Asians and their fabulous bone structure. (I'll let you win now, but when we're all 65 and y'all start getting osteoporosis, my big bones and I are going to be doing jumping jacks all over the place, and you'll wish you were me.) But now, they're white, and I think, Shit! I have the possibility of looking like them, because I'm white too! But I don't! Are these women just fabulous foreign students at the Institute, or are they just rich anorexics that actually go to Stanfurd? Who are they? Where did they come from? I must find out...
- The buildings have the worst identification system ever devised. Some buildings just have names, some just have numbers, and some have names and numbers, and you just have to know that Building 100,987,445 is also called, I don't know, Monotreme. !!! Then the numbered buildings have numbered rooms, so a room is identified like so: 205-110 (building number-room number). Usually the first digit of the room number tells you which floor the room is on, unless you're in this one building, and then something else happens, and then the crow cries thrice, and you have to bring a newt, a screwdriver, and some ketchup, and then MAYBE they'll tell you where the goddamn room is.
- There are these mysterious mansions on campus, whose purpose is yet unknown to me. Some of them appear to be frat houses, some of them appear to be just nice campus office buildings, but the rest of them I am not sure. They better not be professors' homes.
- If you want to eat in the dining commons but do not have a meal plan, you have to pay $16 (for dinner). !!!
All in all, this fancy private school annoys me, and I just want my scuzzy Dwinelle back. I felt like a really cool old janitor that knew where everything was, knew every nook and cranny of the building. I wanted to stay there so long that I would eventually become part of the building, kind of like The Brain. They could erect a statue of me that housed my ashes, and there could be a plaque that read, "Here lies Siobhan, who so loved this building." I keep telling myself that there will be many other fun things to explore outside of Berkeley, and if I stay there I'll just be that lame person that stuck around Berkeley, like the HappyHappyHappy dude, but it is my home.
I think I'm kind of creepy, but that's okay.
For my next post: am I as annoying as this one person that annoys the hell out of me? I thought about it, and realized that I do a lot of the things that annoy me about this person, and others like this person. Are the things that I do somehow different than their things, or should I really evaluate how I present myself? A potential identity crisis! Stay tuned for this and more stream-of-consciousness nonsense.
