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.