New Things, New Thoughts, Empty Wombs

Admittedly it has been far too long.

Readers, I am on the precipice of testing for my black belt.  I'm less than a year away from entering the hallowed halls of testhood, and join the exclusive club of black beltdom.  I'm not going to lie, the prospect is exciting, but it is also terrifying.  I've seen terrible things at those tests.  Terrible things.

Sky and I both started school this past August.  This, by far, has been my favorite semester.  Evenings hulled up in our apartment, both doing homework, have been magic to me.  It makes me incredibly happy to see him working to better himself and our situation.  No lie, it is also really hot.  I know it sounds weird and perverse, but watching him pouring over his books and writing his English papers just gives me a total lady boner.  He has been working so hard and making me so proud.

Sky comes from a family where you work by the sweat of your brow, and hard work will get you places and eventually, after paying your dues, you will get your cushy job, or you will still be working yourself into the ground, but making a decent wage.  But we made the decision that if we both got our college degrees, we would not only be providing a better life for our future family, but we would also be showing that getting a college education is not just an option, but it is important and will raise the standard of living to a level that it has never been.  We want to be able to travel and see the world, and expose our future little ones to that world.  We want to see things in real life that we have only actually seen in textbooks or in movies.

We are both officially registered for spring semester, and after getting STRAIGHT A'S this semester, I am a shoo-in to have my financial aid reinstated.  I am all kinds of nerding out about my classes, and I'm loving it.  I love having a buddy, a school buddy, that is not only a friend, it is my hot sexy lover man.

Sky has been nominated to host next year's WTSDA Region 2 tournament.  He is the youngest studio owner in the region, and the youngest host I think ever.  He has been chosen!  This sounds like nothing, but this is a huge deal.  When we pull this off without a hitch and with BITCHIN' t-shirts to boot, then he will likely get his invitation into the extra super exclusive club that is the MASTERS' clinic.  That means rubbing elbows with the greats of the association, invitation to test for his 4th degree, and then invitation to test for his master's belt.  This is huge, and if anyone can do it, it is TEAM FREAKIN' GUBLER!

Now on to the empty womb.  Yes, Sky and I have been married for about 2 1/2 years now, and we don't have any tiny people or tiny people on the way.  No, we aren't trying.  No, we aren't having any "issues" with trying.  We want to be done with school and we want at least one of us to have a job that is solid and has insurance so we can take care of our children ourselves and not rely on the state to take care of them for us.  We love kids, we want kids, and we are excited to have kids, but we are waiting until we are prepared.  We also have a 26-year-old man roommate who is currently inhabiting our second bedroom, so space, needless to say, is lacking for a nursery and a tiny person to be in it.  Yes, we are doing it the right way.  It is happening when we are prepared.

Well, it's late.

Keep it real readers.

shrinking, Shrinking, SHRINKING!!!

Take a moment to take in the irony of my title, readers.


Love it.

Anyway, yes, I have begun a new weight loss project.  It is called "Project KA."

I should explain the name.  Sky has this t-shirt from our honeymoon from when we went to the Cirque show "KA."  It is a small men's medium, and Sky, in all his awesome manliness, has begun to outgrow it.  It is still a bitchin' t-shirt though, and I decided that it would be awesome to be able to fit into it.

So as of the first of the year, changes started happening.  I stopped eating late, I cut out sweets (except for Girl Scout cookies, but who can say no to those?)  I started pushing myself harder in karate, especially since while my foot was broken I happened to gain eight pounds.

I felt like a bloated, puffy, sad version of myself.  I felt uglier than my usual amount of feeling ugly, and I needed to stop these feelings.

The end of February rolled around, and after an old coworker of mine told me that this nodiet.com stuff actually worked for her and a few of her coworkers, I decided what the heck.  I'm going to try it.

I started taking it a week ago, and I have to tell you, it does actually work.  I lost an inch and a quarter off my waist alone.  In ONE WEEK.  I'm trying to slim down so that I can start more high impact supplemental exercise without worrying I'm going to blow out my knees or my back.  (example:  running impacts your knees and feet with 5x your body weight with every step)  Plus, a sweaty average-to-thin person looks considerably less pathetic than a sweaty fat person, right?

Right.

I feel like this is something I can do.  It's something I can control, since I have so little control everywhere else in my life.

In other news, my mother gave art back to me today.

For the longest time, I wanted to be an artist.  I wanted to see things that I had made hung up in various places, that I could take pride in.  I wanted to explore my own experiences and emotions and share them with others in ways that words couldn't.  But alas, as a child, Richard was the artist in our family.  He would draw all day and his work would end up on the refrigerator.  Then we got to be older.  I won a few little contests in my classes for drawing contests and coloring contests, and I thought I was pretty good.  Then Robert brought home his first welding sculpture.  Now Robert was the artist, and all though high school, and now in college, Robert is the artist in the family.  He is studying art photography, and he is currently the artist in residence at Zion National Park.  I went from the singer, to the violinist, to the brain, to the martial artist, to the married one.  Never the artist.  All this despite the fact that the artist in our family still asks MY advice on his work on how to make something better.  When I mentioned I thought about being an artist, I was laughed at by multiple family members, and told that I could never do anything worthwhile with it.

"It's more of a hobby.  You should major in something you can make money in and then do art in your spare time."

I didn't realize how badly those words hurt me, and led me down a path of eight years worth of indecisive undergrad work, because I had to find something I could "make money doing for a living" that wasn't going to suck the life out of me.

Then today, my mom was looking at a piece that I had done in one of my art classes a few years ago, and asked me something that jarred me to my very core.

"Did I take your art away from you?"

Tears welled up in my eyes as I realized that I never felt more passionate about my studies than when I was making art.  I stopped taking art because I felt like, as the "brainy" one, I had to get a degree in something scientific or lucrative in order to gain or maintain any respect from my family.  I had to "buckle down," and "stop having fun and get serious."

She told me that if it was something that I was passionate about, then I should go after it.  Money wasn't an issue as long as I was chasing my passion.

I feel so free, and so conflicted now.

Keep it real readers.

Hate, Venting, Self-Loathing, Etc.

Well readers, I admit it has been far too long since my last post.  As all of my postings are, they are too few and far between.

I've been lost in a sea of my own thoughts, and I find that if I immerse myself too long in the slow, lazy waves of that huge sea of introspection, I have a tendency to get all kinds pruney in the form of wrinkly introspection.

I find myself looking in the mirror for a ridiculous amount of time.  Why?  Why do I do this?  Why do I have to stand and analyze the different things about my face and my body?  I don't necessarily look at the things I would change, or the things I hate, or even the things I like about myself.  I just....stare.

Geez I sound so self-absorbed.  It seems the time I get the most self-loathing done is during times when I can't actually see myself.  Lying in bed, showering, driving, checking the mail, just random times like that.

This is the asinine truth of it all.  I hear at least once a day from random strangers that I am beautiful.  I have beautiful hair, deliciously smooth skin, a wonderful smile, a nice rack, I've literally heard it all, and continue to hear it on a regular basis.  I think I was an ugly, chubby little girl, and then an ugly, awkward teenager for so long, that when I finally grew up and my acne cleared up and I started to curve out, I guess I missed it.  I would have loved nothing more than to have woken up one day and noticed it all.

I suppose when you are teased and your life is made miserable by multiple people over the course of several years, you just start thinking that well, maybe their right, and no amount of makeup or silly clothes or loud laughter or batting eyelashes will change the way you feel about yourself.

I kind of hate that I hate myself.

I hate how people feel like they have to be defined by something about them.  People go to conferences and workshops to be with people who are defined by this one thing.  I have cysts on my ovaries, that hardly means that I will attend conferences so I can embrace this single facet of who I am.  I know I could stand to lose a few pounds, but that hardly means that my feelings of self worth are wrapped up in a few digits that flash on the scale I'm standing on, and I have to sit in a circle talking about the things I eat every day.  I have reddish hair, but that doesn't mean I have to attend a ginger convention.

I am a complex human being.  I don't believe in participating in certain activities merely because they have to do with a singular fact about me.  Why can't I just enjoy who I am, and do things that maybe have nothing to do with me just for the sake of doing them?  Why do I have to pretend to be interested in every crash diet that some girl comes to me bragging about because she lost four pounds of water weight in three days and she feels like it's actual fat?  I'm sorry I don't feel this sense of sisterhood with other overweight women.  I just don't.  I never have.

Alright, I feel like this post is going nowhere.  I just had to vent somewhere about what has been going on in my head so I can feel a sense of relief from what has been inside me for a little too long.

Keep it real readers.