I apologize at the start if this entry goes a tad stream of consciousness here & there (when does this blog not though? hmm)…just been thinking a lot and got a LOT on my mind, most of it is stuff that makes me sad, an emotion I inevitably end up steeped in this time of year (a very close friend died the day after xmas my sophomore year…since then the holiday season has rather lost its magic and, dunno if its just me or not, but the holidays just seem to get more depressing EVERY year, to the point where I barely celebrate)…Anyway, lots of stuff goin on and has happened etc, lets sort through some of this jazz…
To start, as I mentioned in my post the other day, I’ve got a new roommate and she happens to be black (half black, half Filipino), I mention this because we’ve been getting a cultural education on black culture here in the states. I’ll confess, I am from a tiny ass, lilly white eastern Oregon town and growing up i knew…MAYBE half a doz black individuals and three of them were my neighbors in the broke neighborhood I grew up in (the other three were a very well off family on the other side of town, we didn’t socialize mostly due to our divergence in socio-economic status, they were mostly very nice…the youngest boy was a real jerk though…but anyway) and what I do know about black culture in our country is pretty out of date (ends round circa the civil rights movement and Harlem Renaissance, a period in art that I have great appreciation for, the art is very amazing) so I’m getting an updated education on things. Namely I’ve been watching documentaries w/my roommate, first of which was ‘Good Hair’ by Chris Rock, which i highly recommend btw. Which is all about black hair and the way that our society has COMPLETELY brainwashed their culture into changing the natural state of their hair to make the white man ‘more relaxed’…i don’t know about the lot of you but this fact, this absurd notion that our society has programed into their culture makes me see so much red i just want to start braining random white people because we have totally screwed this cultural group w/in our country…from what I understand, when it comes to interviews (a process by which frankly your ‘interview’ as such as a black person amounts to checking if your name sounds too ethnic, you come from the wrong neighborhood or if you’re lucky enough to GET the interview, they look at your skin and then give you the brush off…say its not true if you like but seriously, OPEN YOUR EYES and more over, look at the research, it speaks for itself) if you have natural hair as a black person, you’re basically boned…now wtf kind of bullshit is that???? as a white person, i can leave my hair natural, dye it, process it, wtf ever, and in most cases, as long as i show up to an interview clean & well groomed, they don’t give a fuck (there are exceptions to this, i shaved my head when i was living back in eastern Oregon, on two occasions actually, and let me tell you being a shaved head GIRL in a rural area did NOT go over well at all when it came job interview time…NO ONE would hire me and on more than one occasion i was told it was because they were afraid i’d ‘scare the customers’…bitch thats pretty damn rude, for all y’all knew i had fucking CANCER or some shit and maybe THAT was why i shaved my head…i didn’t/don’t but the point remains that they didn’t know and they had no right to treat me that way). but if you’re black, apparently you have to have either treated hair or wear a wig or weave because if you have NATURAL hair, you know, the lovely, tightly curled, hair that you’re BORN with, then NOPE no dice. ???? this attitude is one that largely slipped under my radar growing up in an atmosphere where i was surrounded by racists all the time, i just tried to ignore the racists bigoted attitudes of my classmates, coworkers and moreover my own damn family and get out to somewhere better STAT! which i did. Sadly, ever since seeing ‘Good Hair’, whenever i see a black woman w/hair that is clearly not in its natural state i can’t HELP but think ‘so do you straighten, wig or weave?’ 😦 and then i want to cry because its so depressing. If you’re a member of the black community and you read my blog, i implore you honey, don’t waste time or money on the straightener (which is LYE btw, you’re putting lye on your scalp 😦 not good) and the endless amounts of coin you spend on weaves and if you really REALLY want that straight hair look, get some wigs to wear once in a while but otherwise go natural girls (and men, i know a lot of black men have their hair straightened too), be proud of that BEAUTIFUL and amazing hair you were born with. why would you WANT to look like the people who’ve oppressed you so long (and are STILL oppressing you)…hair straightening and weaves and/or the notion of ‘Good Hair’ is just the new form of the white man oppressing your community. ok fine, the white man can’t enslave your to do labor, so they enslave your minds and tell you ‘ok, we’ll work with you…but only if you try to look like us’ (its like the sneeches up in here, oh Dr. Seuss you were very insightful), and the longer the community perpetuates it, the longer it will go on. I saw in ‘Good Hair’ a three yr old lil girl getting a straightening treatment…talk about heart breaking…and when Chris asks her why, she doesn’t know, she just knows its what mommy does, and grammy and aunty, and its just whats done, they drill it into you until you believe that really, spending the coin on this nonsense is the ONLY way the white man will accept you…ya know what…FUCK THE WHITE MAN (and i say that as someone who is 3/4s European in decent, but really, i’ve never been a fan or our culture and actively work to distance myself from it because it makes me so angry…WTF is so superior about INFERIOR MELANIN??? what about that makes you so special white man?? )…i for one welcome the new demographics that are being realized in this country, in my opinion the fewer white male bastards (and white people in general) running shit the better off we might well be (only one way to find out)….so theres that rant…
another thing that upsets me…our countries attitudes about body image…WTF HELL is up w/our fixation that we need to look like famine victims (i think its so we wont notice when the next famine comes, everyone is already striving to look like disease starved cadaver, who’ll notice?). Speaking as a recovered anorexic I have some pointers for readers feeling bad about how they look, whatever shape they are in-
1- STOP, I repeat STOP reading fashion magazines, they’re nothing but trouble and do nothing but reinforce this absurd standard of ‘beauty’ that is excessively unrealistic and all it does is make you feel BAD about how YOU look.
2- exercise in moderation…when you start working out, take it easy and build up, the most common mistake is to start w/a BIG routine and get instantly discouraged when the results don’t come overnight…which brings me to
3- lose weight for health reasons, work out because YOU want to, not because someone in your life has made a negative comment. the only way for you to make progress in the healthy eating/exercise area is to WANT it for no one else but YOU, if you’re doing it for someone else it hardly ever sticks because the motivation doesn’t last.
4- STOP COMPARING YOURSELF TO FASHION MODELS! they’re that size for a reason- THEY STARVE THEMSELVES, these are women who are diets of 1cal Tab soda and tick tacks ok…and they look like stick figures children draw, coat racks or like female versions of Pops from Regular Show (the man who looks like a walking lolly pop). more over, stop comparing yourself to others in your own life who you feel live up to societies standards of beauty, stop measuring your self worth by their yard stick.
5- ignore the BMI, its HIGHLY inaccurate (ask any GOOD dietitian/physician…according to the BMI someone like Shaq is over weight, when he clearly is not, and my weight is considered mid range when really i’m verging on underweight for someone of my size) the BMI was a measurement system designed by a MATHEMATICIAN NOT A PHYSICIAN, it was used to find the mean average of height & weight measurements in his area in his time period, we have better methods by which to measure these things these days and thusly the BMI frankly needs chucked in the bin. if your doc gives you some schpeel about where you fall on the BMI, unless you’re suffering from health problems caused by being overweight, your doc is probably full of it. The BMI is a highly inaccurate measurement and is not a good way of measuring your health.
6- diet change, cut out the junk…all of it you can, but specifically all forms of corn syrup (yeah that means giving up the snickers & candy bars, boo hoo, you can learn to make your own, far better tasting snacks at home with OUT the corn syrup and junk in them), soda (carbonation is bad for your guts and effects the way you absorb things in digestion, also, air in the pipes makes you bloated so even if you’re not heavy you’re going to feel & look puffy), and fast food (which, if you do the research, is mostly plastic…seriously, ex-roommate dropped a sausage from a mcd’s meal on the floor at our old apt. i found it a min. of 6months later under the sofa, hard as a rock, no mold, no stench…thats how it went unnoticed…REAL FOOD MOLDS FOLKS, if it wont grow mold, its not food), cut all that junk out of your diet…try & do it progressively as going cold turkey tends to lead to a binge session of junk food followed by eaters remorse lol *hugs* (speaking from experience again).
these are my tips i give to those of you suffering from body image issues, the main ones still being FUCK our societies issue w/being size 0…be size you, whatever that size is and commit to healthy eating and exercise…even w/exercise & healthy diet, many of us just aren’t tiny, petite waifs and frankly WE SHOULDN’T BE.
other things that make me sad, not to mention anxious as hell, the recent shootings…one of which happened a mere 8mi away from my flat at the mall where a NUMBER of people i know work, especially during the holidays, i have friends who run kiosks there during the holidays only, was just relieved none of them were there (apparently someone my husband knows from an online forum was and was near enough to feel the shots…talk about instant PTSD…yikes). Its had me so freaked that i’m even LESS interested in leaving the house than usual, which is problematic because it means certain errands aren’t getting done (like going out of the way to get flour because it means taking a main line bus i don’t really like to take much anymore), and i’m going ever more stir crazy because i WANT to go do stuff but i’m like ‘GAH HELL NO’ in my head…my meds help a bit but ya know, no man, i’m NOT going to the down town area to fix my phone until AFTER this holiday insanity is DONE…i’m not gonna risk it, thanks i’ll pass. and yeah, you can color me a coward but ya know what, get bent, i’ve got enough of a problem w/crowds as it is, hoards of holiday happy shoppers i’ve dealt w/in the past and don’t feel like risking poor bozzley getting stomped on at the store because people don’t expect a service dog to be small most of the time…on top of which, i went to ship an order yesterday evening, while i was waiting for the bus i hear a man yelling angrily about half a block up and start panicking, turn to find its just someone yelling at his dog (if you kept it on a LEASH asshole like you’re supposed to maybe it wouldn’t run into traffic UH DUH!!! just sayin…terribly common here in inner SE and one of my biggest pet peeves, i don’t give a flying fuck how well trained YOUR particular dog is, this is NOT a rural area, this IS a city you live in, we DO have leash laws for a fucking REASON and you’re walking your dog, sans leash on some of the BUSIEST streets in SE WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU??? DO YOU WANT FIDO TO GET HIT BY A BUS YOU INCONSIDERATE ASSHOLE???? seriously, just makes me want to punch this dickbags right in the face and SCREAM at them)…but yeah, random men in t he distance shouting angrily, i nearly hit the dirt just on reflex (i’ve LIVED through a drive by before so yeah, when i hear about shooting in my area my reflex dial gets turned up to 11 and i do stuff like that…you could run up to me and yell ‘FLASH’ and i’d hit the dirt…leme know if you get that rather morbid historical joke lol 😛 ).
ok, i’ve got stuff to do, sorry if this is all rambly etc, and i generally only proof for spelling (sorry) as this is meant to be a sort of stream of consciousness sort of blog. enjoy! and please, comment if you have something to input! 🙂 thanks for reading.
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