Literally No Idea What I am Doing

This is a sort of follow up to my last post. It's not about writing though. It's about my friends. I am going to tell you about four of my dearest friends. For privacy reasons, I will be referring to them as M, E, A, and L. Which I didn't notice until right now spells MEAL. That was accidental. A couple of them do have an online presence, but since I am not telling them about this post, it is not my place to reveal their identities. If you know me personally, you probably will know to whom I am referring when I start talking about them. I will be talking about them in the order that I met them. This means nothing beyond the fact that I have known M longer than I have known L. M So M is first. I have known M for a very, very long time. We met in middle school. For someone who moved around a lot as a kid, keeping in contact with a friend for that long is nothing short of a miracle for me. When I say that M and I have been friends since the moment we met, I am not ex...

Look, I am going to be blunt here. Blunt and honest and completely frank. I have never, ever, openly talked about this, and honestly it is hard. But I am at a time in my life where I am recognizing the things that need to be changed and implementing plans on how to change them. So, here it goes. I am obese. I have been for as long as I can remember. When I was a teen, I was told I'd grow out of it. But I didn't. It's a problem that has plagued me my whole life. Though it may not have been a primary focus or concern, it was always there, lurking. Silent, but present. I know that I have been incredibly fortunate. I was never, as far as I recall, bullied or teased about my weight in any of the numerous places I lived and attended church. I don't even think my sister teased me about it. I have also never suffered any true adverse effects on my health because of my weight. I do not have diabetes, which I am especially thankful for due to my family history. The worst prob...

Now is the time of year when people go off on long, nostalgic rants about the ending year and the one that is eminent. They recant the things they have done, the things they have learned, and their goals for the next twelve months of their lives. This makes sense; one year is ending and another is beginning. It is a time of rebirth, starting over, and getting a clean slate. It is just like how every morning is the start of a new day, but on a bigger scale. It literally happens once a year. Overall, this past year has been mixed, as I am sure it has been for most people. There have been some goods, some bads, and some in-betweens. Should I judge the quality of the year by the events that have transpired? That does seem a bit arbitrary as very often life events are out of our control. Instead, I would perhaps prefer to critique my year based off of a quote from Parks and Recreation : “Are you better off?” Am I better off than I was a year ago? The answer is, undeniably, yes I am. ...

Another Side of Being Female This is something I have wanted to talk about for a while, but a recent post I read helped me decide to sit down and share my feelings. This is not a pity party or an attempt to steal the spotlight and honestly I don’t even care if it gets any attention whatsoever. I just want my voice out there, even if it is lost in the crowd. I have seen many beautifully written and heart-wrenching pieces detailing how difficult it can be as a female and dealing with daily sexual harassment and/or abuse their whole lives. I do not in any way intend to take anything from those stories because those are real people who were really hurt, abused, offended, and degraded. Their emotions are 100% valid and I wish everyone had more awareness of the kind of behavior those brave women have endured and overcome. All I want is to provide perspective from my own experiences, which are quite different from theirs but I feel is underrepresented as far as I have seen, and just ...

So it totally still counts as Wednesday, especially if you take into account time zones, which you totally should. Those people out west have to wait so much longer to get to the end of the day! Poor people. Anyway, I did decide that I would talk about why TV and movie adaptations of books never work. So here we go. Or something. I will have a LOT of examples here. Some of these are stories and movies I've seen all the way through, and some are either book series I have not finished, TV shows I couldn't sit through for more than an episode or two, or the Avatar the Last Airbender movie, which I watched fifteen minutes of before quitting. I also have not seen the new TMNT movie because I have STANDARDS and a childhood I actually enjoyed and don't want to ruin. Let me set the stage for you. It was June 4th, 2004. Ten...years ago. Geez. Anyway, it was lined up to be a great night for me. I got the opportunity to sit in the pit of a performance of Les Miserables becaus...