People Who Choose to Be Obese are Stupid

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Alone in my house: Summer Edition Finale

Ok... so alone in the house time was restructured into alone in the house but very busy outside the house. Dinner, dancing, 10 hours in the record store. I envied no man.

However I did have ONE night out of the original five where I was alone... in the house. Last night.

I left work at the hookah lounge around 2am having stayed late to talk and enjoy a hookah like everyone gets to. Upon arrival at home I engaged in many boring activities, feeding the cat, washing my face, eating my roommates hummus on my other roommates tortilla standing by the sink like a 35 year old bachelor who's become to accustomed to not going out he's completely forgotten the comforts of sitting at a table in a chair with either conversation or at least a book to keep him company.

Then I finally took advantage of having an entire house to myself. I played my cello for hours as loud as I possibly could. And this is what I discovered.

Covering Billy Idol's White Wedding as a slow jazz number is a either recipe for awesome or disaster.

I need another week of practice before debuting Canon in D at Joanna's wedding.

If I attempt fast slides after a week of not playing... I will cut open my pinky on my D string.

But now my roommates have returned from Bonnaroo and things are back to normal.

OH MY FUCKING GOD I GET KICKED OUT OF THIS HOUSE IN JULY!! WHY HAVEN'T I PACKED?!

Alone in my house: Summer Edition part 1/2

I swear to no one and nothing I will chronicle my whole time alone in this house.

It's summer and with summer comes sun, swimming and music festivals. In particular (at least as far as I know) Bonnaroo. I've never been to Bonnaroo (as much as I'd like to) and this year I put all my spare money into Comicon in July. However, all my roommates bought tickets and Stingray is filming out of town for the same amount time which leaves me... alone... IN THE HOUSE. This has happened before over Christmas and with so much time on my hands, I tried to blog each day to see what I ended coming up with and how I spent my time... alone... IN THE HOUSE.

I think I got two posts in 5 days.

But I'm going to do it this time. I don't promise.

Day 1/2: The First Night

Really alone time began at midnight when I got home and realized it was just me in the house. I promptly removed my pants and stole food from my roommates to make fried rice. Then I meditated on how to spend all this time deciding on composing some music and drawing some sample pieces... then I watched hulu for two hours and started updating my blog.

Good night!

Overly-Opinionated People Make Themselves Look Stupid

I'll be honest, I'm extremely opinionated. I have an opinion on everything from my love of corn to the abortions Michael Bay squeezes out. And I express them. Often. However I recognize that there is a time and a place.

Allow me to set the scene. I'm at my record store job as the mid-day. At the store there's an opener, a closer and a mid-day who works basically as the overlap between the two. Every shift I have the opener leaves an hour early and the closer leaves an hour late which leaves me two gloriously uninterrupted (except for customers) hours for me to play whatever music and watch whatever movie I feel like. No worries that my suggestion of Henry Rollins or the documentary Hell House falling flat or a coworker politely tuning out Rasputina or Pink (yes I said Pink). Plus it gives me time to catch up on stfuparents.tumblr.com and stfumarrieds.tumblr.com. There is a downside to this sweet deal. The two hours fall right at my dinner break. Luckily there's a pizza place, Gumbys, right next door. Not the best pizza in town but good in a pinch. The pizza was coming, it would have banana peppers and it was cheap.


It's so beautiful

I danced to the front when it arrived and did my happy pizza dance in honor of my dinner. In front of me was girl, blonde hair, black t-shirt, combat boots, seemed to be of the punk persuasion, renting out some dvd's. She took one look at my highly anticipated meal and remarked,

"Never eat Gumby's food,"

I was stunned at first, my pizza rug almost pulled from under me and hesitantly responded,

"Well if you're going to have that idea... then you really can't eat anywhere in town,"

"I used to work in their kitchen. I could tell you some stories,"

Now mind you my pizza from said SUSPICOUS store had just arrived RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME. I continued to passively argue,

"Well I've worked in almost every kitchen in this town, I pretty much know what goes down,"

I was getting a bit defensive of my poor innocent pizza, sitting there vulnerable and exposed the lid hanging open, it's warmth drifting away in the air-conditioning.

"I only prepare my own food,"

What? WHAT? Do you have a farm? I wasn't aware you slaughtered your own cow and made your own mountain dew from fresh fucking dew of the early morning rolling down the mountainside mixed with your stash of meth!


garfieldminusgarfield.net is the shit

I'm sure everyone's had that person. That person who waits until the Big Mac is in your mouth to state all of McDonald's atrocities. That person who tells you the funny internet story you're recounting rots the brain. That person who responds to your excuse of car trouble with "That's why I ride a bike,". That one quick syncopated loaded sentence is enough to make you set a field on fire rather than let them see they got under your skin so easily. I hearby declare all such people are to be referred to as a Gumbys Girl.

Here are the rules of sharing your opinion as I see it.
1) Don't challenge a person with your opinion. Facts are concrete. Opinions are just what you think. They're not solid weapons you can wield and expect everyone to respect.
2) Don't get short and nasty if someone doesn't go with your particular train of thought. I'm of the opinion that sloths are terrifying but I don't expect people of the street to take my pamphlets on Sloth Awareness. Their funeral.
3) PICK THE RIGHT FUCKING TIME. The time to express your opinion is not when a person in engaged in that activity. You don't tell a friend driving you to work "Thanks, if my knee wasn't shot I wouldn't need a ride. I try to walk everywhere because cars just add fuel to the fire burning in the middle east... get it?" Fuck your pun, you're an ass.

Now I think I know what someone might say to Rule 3. "But anonymous internet stranger, what if that person is doing something that hurt them or something around them? Shoudn't you say something?"

There are activities that are dangerous and we know this because it is a fact and stating a fact is not stating your opinion. If a friend is smoking meth and you say, "Meth will alter your brain with the first try" that is a proven fact. If a person is lighting a bush on fire and you say "You could set this whole forest on fire where is that unicorn?" that is a fact. A bush fire can spread and ignite the things around it and you probably shouldn't be tripping with matches in the first place.

Fact:Proven

Opinion:You own ideas so follow the rules.

Don't be a Gumby's Girl and fuck with my pizza.

l

On the Subject of Friends: Losing Friends is Stupid

It's been awhile since I've updated this but now I have a subject close to my heart and familiar to many.

It's recently occurred to me that the two people who defined and molded my formative years through adolescence are no longer my friends.

I met Shannon when we were toddlers and we lived around the corner from each other (if you can consider the wooded and cornfield spotted area we lived in as having corners). I met Ginny through Shannon in middle school latin class at the age of twelve. From then we did everything together and hit growing mile markers separate but always with the other two present. Shannon was the first to start dating boys, Ginny was the first to excel at school and I... was the first to have a car. I'm sure there was something I hit first but being the late bloomer I was... it's a little doubtful.

Anyway, we remained close friends on to graduation. We had fights, times when two thought they were closer to each other than the other one, but we still had the common ground of growing up together in Mechanicsville. Staying out all night at the Walmart, Veneral Disease mall (a dying one level mall with an ever present feeling of scuzz) choosing movies to see together based on our personal criteria (me: comedy, Ginny: hot man action, Shannon: no subtitles), inside jokes (eating at the new Tai Kwan Do place, the blonde joke that blonde Shannon didn't get for two years), eating an entire cake together by first eating a path through the middle to divide the cake.

But things change as we say to explain sad changes. After graduation, Ginny and I went to separate colleges and Shannon stayed at home using her cosmetology license to fix my nest of a hair when I came home.

The story is the same, everyone has lived it. We were close through the first year but feelings changed as we did. Ginny found what excited her at school as did I though they became increasingly separate. Shannon began building a life finding a boyfriend and looking to long term plans.

There was a point in between my crazy schedule of working and studying for the GRE (another post in itself), Ginny struggling between keeping the shitty job that offered great benefits and quitting to do what she really wanted and Shannon getting married and moving into a new home to share with her husband while earning a CNA certification that we stopped speaking to each other. In fact, those last tidbits about their lives I gleaned from facebook.

And then you come to question of whether or not to keep trying. People grow apart. While there are still hints and bits of who I was four years ago still in me like tints of red at my split ends from dying my hair, I've changed a hell of a lot. And so have they. Would trying harder to keep the friendship be worth it for all three of us if the relationship that held us has so morphed it can only be seen in the right light? Would continuing to try and to have expectations be akin to keeping the ripped posters of Jack Black and Jimi Hendrix that hung in your teenage bedroom?

Hard to say, isn't it? And for me, that's the difference between childhood friends you held for years and college friends. In college, you come in with the expectation that most of these people who know about your crappy childhood and fear of ketchup at some point will leave. You're at least slightly prepared for late conversations on a futon turning into once a month emails and the pictures online no longer being the two of you together. But childhood friends feel like they should always be there even if logic and rationality tell you otherwise. How can the first people to know you lost your virginity be the people who disappear from your life?

But it's the natural way of things. If two people aren't present for the changes happening in your life, even if they were the closest people to you, how can they or you be prepared for how different things are when you finally get to sit down with a cup of coffee with them? How can they have a frame of reference for why you're so excited for a short film you worked on and how can you understand how excited they are about the new house they bought in the area you've never been to?

I'll still give them both a call this weekend and I'll still text when I'm in town just in case one day they see it and think "What the fuck, I'll have lunch,".

But I'm not going to think of it as the great loss. Rather, it's natural to grow apart and doesn't mean the memories aren't still there.

Taking the GRE makes you seem stupid.

The purpose of this blog was to create a sort of following so that I could begin to add pieces of my book of short stories so I can throw them at an agent as I scream "THERE! PROOF that at least a few people will read my writing! PUBLISH ME!"

Unfortunately I haven't been able to put as much into this blog as I hoped. I'm thinking of adding random photos of cute animals and zombies to increase traffic but we'll see...

Anyway the main reason I haven't been able to put as much into this blog is the bane of many Grad school hopefuls.

THE GRE.

What's a GRE you ask? Think of the SAT but make a giant bear/shark with anger issues and a loaded gun. It's scored somewhat like the SAT, 1600 is the highest you can get, but structured to exacerbate anxiety disorders and depression. There are three sections of doom, writing (you're given your choice of topic in two areas, argument and something else), verbal (analogies, reading comprehension, that jazz) and... QUANTITATIVE, the math portion.

The first two sections are not that bad. I looked up writing examples before hand and the pattern of what gets a 6 (the highest score on writing) and what get's a 1 (the lowest) is pretty clear. Open with a quote and support it... you're done. Verbal is pretty straight forward. Have a wide vocabulary and you're there.

But the quantitative.

Oh the quantitative.

Every area of arithmetic, algebra, geometry and basic statistics you can remember and beyond.

As I already stated, the scoring is LIKE the SAT in that the highest is a 1600 but, again, the structure: bear/shark anger gun.

Unlike the SAT, if you take the computer-based test (and you will unless you're willing to drive a day for a three hour test on paper) does not allow skipping around if you can't figure out the answer. Each question comes as you answer the preceding one. And they increase in difficulty as you answer them correctly. The higher number of difficult questions you answer right, the better your score. Get a question wrong, you're slapped back down to rung one questions. You could made it as far as an equation that requires both Standard Deviation and the Pythag Thereom only to get it wrong and the next question be a simple fraction division.

And did I mention it's timed?

So quick recap, three sections, no skipping questions, higher scores the harder the question and it's all timed.

My experience.

This was my second attempt my first being last year when I panicked and started my period in khaki pants in the middle of the test. You see, when you start the test you cannot stop the test. For three hours, you are to be the test's bitch. The test does not like you leaving to pee or find a tampon. The test feeds on knowledge and is impatient and will not be denied.

Anyway, my first attempt total fail. Terrible score terrible confidence.

BUT I decided to try again and THIS TIME I would make it MY bitch. I studied for four months nonstop. There was a lot of math I didn't remember like... multiplying, adding, dividing and subtracting fractions. Even the verbal was terrifying with the trick answers and repeating of words in first the questions then the answers to trick into picking what was familiar... what you had seen two questions earlier. Tricky, tricky.

Amanda drove me the forty minutes to the testing center as Final Countdown played in my head. I stepped into the building nervous but convinced it was just an online game not the test that determined entrance into Grad school. I was padded down before I went in and warned if I was going to keep my earrings (two white plastic hoops that were grandmother's I wear for luck) I'd have to leave them for the duration of the test.

There are camera's all over that room. Pointed into every little cubicle because God Help You if you try to cheat. First is the writing portion which is the only section I ever have time left over on. Give me a topic and ask me to build argument, consider it done by dinner. Show me a question with five answer choices and expect me to second guess every. single. one. They offer a break between the writing and the last two sections. This time I opted to take it. Fifteen minutes of reading a dated issue of US Weekly. Tiger's wife is pissed and Jersey Shore is getting renewed. Take me back to the GRE PLEASE.

Back in. Nerve wracking but fun when I realized what questions I was getting right. Besides, at that point why freak out? I'm already in the test, better just keep going so I can leave.

The scariest moment. You get your scores immediately on the computer-based test. You have this brief moment after the final timer has disappeared and the screen offering to show your scores sits in front of you. It's THE moment. Four months of studying. $120 to take the test (yeah you pay a fuckload for this shit), and three hours in the over air-conditioned room and the result of all of this is one mouse-click away. So I right-clicked.

1100

BOOM! AVERAGE! EXACTLY WHAT I WAS AIMING FOR!

That's right. I AIM for average. That is my goal because this whole standardized thing, while I understand the need and use of, is total BULLSHIT. Getting a high score only means you can take the test. In my mind, if it's possible for me to blindly guess for three hours and get a perfect score then the test itself says diddly squat about my intelligence.

For example, when I received my detailed score report (where the percentiles and writing scores are listed) I was 80th in the verbal, 30th in the quantitative and had near perfect scores in the writing. If I were an idiot, then I'd think the writing would reflect that.

But Kest Lay Vy. The damn thing's over.

I suppose the lesson here is while these tests matter they really don't which seems like a lovely analogy to life.

bear/shark

Marijuana makes you stupid... if you're already stupid

Makes sense that eventually I'd write something about pot. I've spent a lot of time researching the effects of marijuana and the legal issues surrounding it and I've smoked since I was 19.

Backstory for clarity.

Throughout middle and high school, when drugs and drinking first came on the scene for me, I was "straight edge". Not the irritating straight edge where you turn abstaining into an ideology with half-assed punk references and hideous black splotches of tattoos, I just didn't partake. I was friends with many people my age who did and I didn't get on my high horse if they offered, I just didn't take. And I'm glad I didn't. The brain during puberty is already a hotspot of chemicals, the last thing a teenager needs is an outside influence. However... with my obsession with Jimi Hendrix and love of the surface 60's culture, it's pretty amazing I stuck to my guns.

Flash forward to college. My freshman year, I never even took a drink much less tried drugs of any sort. Hell it was hard to get to take advil. But I am a very curious lady and by the time I was 19, again I'd made friends who drank and smoked pot. Now no one ever pressured me (something I've always appreciated) but they did offer and at the beginning of my sophomore year, living off campus and having declared my psychology major, I embarked on a semester long research project into the effects of marijuana on the brain. With that knowledge, I tried pot and found it not the demon elementary school DARE had made it out to be.

Because here's the thing. Marijuana doesn't MAKE you lazy, uninteresting and a waste of human life. Chances are, when you start smoking pot, you already are lazy, uninteresting and a waste of human life. People will turn to drugs for two general reasons. Curiosity and to escape. Marijuana causes brain damage like alcohol, in extreme heavy doses over a long period of time ie dependency. Now that's to say a person can't become addicted to marijuana. Each brain and body is different and a normal person (if any of us are normal) can become addicted to really anything. Drugs, alcohol, bread, sugar, caffeine, video games, Big Love (I freaking love that show). It depends on a myriad of factors from biological to environmental. Predicting addiction is like predicting the weather. We have a good idea of how and when it can happen but you can always be caught by surprise.

Anyway, the first time I tried pot was at a good friends house on my terms. He said to me one day "We're going to watch Xena tonight and you should come over," I knew what Xena meant and I went nervous and excited. I'd only tried to hit a bowl once in my life but a whole lifetime of never smoking anything meant I did not know how to inhale smoke into my lungs accustomed to only "pure" oxygen. Back at my friend's house, the bowl was passed to me and I looked around confused flummoxed as to what I was supposed to do with this contraption. My friend immediately whipped out a lighter, instructed me to hold the bowl to my lips with my thumb over the carb (a hole in the side of the bowl) and held the lighter over the pot. I coughed, a lot. The rest of the night was a blur with the bowl continuously finding it's way into my hand and his lighter poised over top. I got very high and I enjoyed it. But it wasn't like I'd been told. I didn't have a freak out though I couldn't follow what was on TV and at the end of the night I went home and woke the next morning... well... normal. From then on, I smoked recreationally usually with that same friend. A few times I hit a joint at a party but usually we'd meet at his place, smoke and play chess. Because we're so cool.

And I admit, smoking pot did open the door to me trying shrooms (another demon that I had a wonderful time with) two years later and acid a year after that (which was not fun but that's a different story) but never have I considered trying anything "harder". I still find powders and needles disturbing and have never been so scared by a drug as I have meth and coke. My pot consumption increased over the years and while that would seem like burgeoning problem to most I'm sure, I still hold down three jobs and graduated with my B.S. and a certificate of completion on time. I still finish film projects I'm consigned to and perform (when I'm not performing as a wage slave).

What has brought all this to mind lately is Lent. I'm a recovering Catholic, confirmed but non-practicing for many reasons but I do recognize Lent every year. This year, having already done cheese, alcohol twice, cursing three years running (I have a dirty sailor mouth), meat, chocolate... basically most my vices I decided to give up cursing and pot. Since giving up pot, I haven't slept well in days. I've been an insomniac since I was 5 literally. My circadian rhythms are completely off for a normal functioning adult. I've tried exercise, sleeping pills, meditation, yoga, hot showers which all worked for a short period of time but in just a matter of time I'd find myself talking to invisible people in my room again and watching my clock slowly count up. Marijuana has been the only drug to shut my brain off long enough for me to sleep over five hours for longer than two weeks. And now... I can't sleep. Maybe it'll get better. Maybe my body will become exhausted enough over time I'll eventually conk out like a normal person but if you've never gone weeks without sleep, you probably don't understand the immense stress that comes with no sleep over and over again.

The other down-side. I have generalized anxiety. And I don't like pills. When I'm high on pot, I know I'm high. When it's a pill, you may have no idea that you're changing as a person. In your head, you're the same. Outside, you're withdrawn, or spacey or whatever side-effect that pill has on you. I noticed that when I smoked, I could engage people easier without tightening up or overthinking. I was actually a more gregarious person when I smoked.

I suppose you assume that what I'm getting at is RAH RAH legalize pot MAN! What's the big deal? That's not what I think at all. Legalizing pot means government control. Government control means possible additions to the plant and forcing "legitimate" growers out for government sanctioned pot farms. The best example there is of that is farming. With government controlled farms, we have the use of random pesticides, animal abuse, and industrialization. Carrots weren't always orange and tomatoes are not supposed to be the size of your face.

This is really just an explanation and exploration of one individual's experience with an illicit drug. Yes, a lot associated with drug culture is annoying. I don't think Doug Benson is funny (though he seems like a really nice guy), I hate patchouli, and I don't listen to Grateful Dead. But assuming that anyone that smokes pot doesn't bathe is like assuming anyone who gets a beer after work every night beats their wife.