new! the top ten secrets to weight loss that you've never heard before!

1. stop eating so much.

2. keep a log of what you eat, so you know when you're being a fat pig.

3. remember, liquid things have calories too (i know, right? who would've thought?). this includes soda, alcohol, lattés, juice--basically anything that's tasty is probably loaded with calories. 

4. exercise, duh.

5. exercise even when you're not exercising (i.e. take the stairs, park at the farthest end of the parking lot, walk around in circles, etc etc).

6. don't do things that keep you from exercising, like watching t.v. or just generally sitting on your ass.

7. stop eating so much. seriously.

8. if you must eat, don't eat shit that's unhealthy or fattening.

9. get a weight-loss buddy for accountability. just make sure it's someone who won't lose as much weight as you; weight-loss buddies are only good if you can use them to make yourself feel better. 

10. if all else fails, there's always meth. 

oh hai

so, running in the winter is not as bad as i've always envisioned it to be. it's even kind of good in a bitingly cold sort of way. as long as you wear the right shit (read: underarmour) you really don't get that cold. sometimes my lips go numb, but i could buy a face mask or something if it ever got too bad. i think i have found my limit, though, which hovers somewhere around zero degrees fahrenheit. with little to no wind. that's really the deal-breaker for me. which is unfortunate, of course, because madison seems to have a god-awful percentage of days that are windy as fuck. and it's always exponentially worse by the lakes, which is also unfortunate because it is almost impossible to make a good route that doesn't encounter a lake. you know, that whole isthmus thing. 

at least i'm no longer scared of tidal waves. i used to think that they could happen in any body of water, so when i was a kid i would always get super freaked out whenever we drove over the bridge that crosses the puget sound. 

in other not-exciting news, i finished grading portfolios last night, and for the most part it's been fairly easy. i basically flip through to see whether they either fucked up royally or did something surprisingly awesome, and then proceed to give them the grade that i knew they were going to get before i even opened the damn thing. 

except for this one kid. before the last portfolio, he was hovering somewhere between a and ab, so i had to read a little more carefully in hopes that he would wow me with his revisions. so his final draft of his final paper is okay; he could have done a bit more but he did make a lot of improvements from the first draft. as i'm thinking i could probably give him an a ('cause, whatever, i like this kid), i flip to the back where he has his 2 other papers (from earlier in the semester--papers i've already seen, commented on, and graded) and WTF MARGINS. his margins on these two papers is not even the stupid word default 1.25--they're like, at least 1.5 inch margins, and they're that big on all sides. okay, i know this must sound excessively trivial, but you have no idea how many times i told them how much i hate hate hate margins that are not 1 inch (not to mention that 1 inch margins are in the syllabus across the board for all english 100 classes). i've told them in class, on their paper drafts, in email, and in their portfolio comments. i would say that on average it came to their attention in one form or another at least every other week. i even went so far as to compromise my image as a fair, objective grader in order to tell them that when i sit down to grade a paper, and the first thing i see is fucked up formatting and fucked up margins, i get grumpy. and when i'm grumpy before i even start reading the thing, i am much more nitpicky and much more inclined to grade low. maybe it is stupid and ocd of me to care about formatting so much, but goddamnit this was, like, the only thing i was ever a hard-ass about (aside from citations. i told them that if they didn't have a works cited that actually works in their final paper i would give them a straight up zero.), and for fuck's sake it takes like 2 seconds to change your margins. and, for an extra second, you can even make it your default setting, so they stay 1 inch FOREVER. 

so seriously, was he trying to piss me off right before i turn in final grades? probably not. but the thing that irritates me the most is that i really wanted to be able to have an excuse to give him an a, because if i'm really honest with myself, he probably deserves an ab, margins aside. but he's always been great in class, he's really creative, and his papers are actually not boring. but compared to other students, even those who got ab's no question, he just didn't put much time into revision. to top it all off, i'm pretty sure he's the kind of kid for whom an a is almost indistinguishable from an ab, so now i'm even more irritated that i've spent so much thought-energy on his grade when in reality he's probably going to be just as happy either way. 

oh, and i have 15 pages left to write in the next 48 hours (not to mention shopping and packing for the trip down south). fuuuuuuuuuuck.  

i'm just gonna go fuck myself

for someone like me (i.e. someone who really likes eating past the point of fullness), thanksgiving is a pretty fucking awesome day. on thanksgiving, my tendency to overeat (a tendency that is normally looked down upon) is not only excused, but strongly encouraged. on thanksgiving, i don't have to hold back the inner fat person whose sole desire is to eat until my stomach feels like it will explode. 

as far as thanksgivings go, yesterday was the best one i've had in a while--for many different reasons. the first reason, of course, is alcohol. sweet, wonderful, beautiful alcohol (i feel more like lucille bluth every day). aside from one year in college when my grandmother let me have a few sips of brandy, this is the first thanksgiving in which it was okay to drink all day. and considering my usual m.o. of drinking as much as possible in a couple of hours and then either passing out or getting sick, i think did a pretty good job of pacing myself (i'm sure the ridiculous amounts of food didn't hurt). speaking of food. reason number two for why this thanksgiving was phenomenal. i think this is the first year since childhood that i was able to have banana cream pie on thanksgiving. granted, i suppose i could have made one any other year, but since i've never before been responsible for providing food, i guess it never occurred to me to do so. and since apparently banana cream pie is not a staple thanksgiving dessert (who knew?), the various relatives i've spent thanksgiving with in the last seven or eight years have not provided it for me. 

this is all just a really roundabout way of saying that although yesterday's thanksgiving was spectacular for many reasons (i forgot to mention emily's drawing game, which involved the drawing and narrating of various scenes involving, among other things, penises, cannibals, and luaus), there is something irreplaceable about my mother's thanksgiving dishes. maybe it's because we stopped celebrating christmas when i was 9 (and even before that, christmas dinner was never a big thing with my family), or because i have strong emotional attachments to food anyway, or because i regret growing up, but for whatever reason, i have a very strong nostalgia for thanksgiving and the way my mother's food tasted (and how comforting the memory of her food is). and even though i know that i'll never be able to feel that way again, there is always a part of me that hopes to re-experience childhood feelings on thanksgiving. and, of course, i am always a little bit let down. 

(but seriously, thanksgiving at the reeder's was awesome. it makes the idea of being in madison for another 5 or 6 or 18 years not quite so horrifying.)

room for squares

i'm having a quarter-life crisis. i was going to write about it, but i don't feel like it anymore. 

i do, however, feel like writing about the things i miss from my childhood. i keep being reminded of shit from when i was a kid, and since i don't know what the fuck my future looks like, i might as well dwell on the past. 

when i was like 10 (if you don't already know, i was homeschooled, so my memories are in ages, not grades) my mom helped me sew the most awesome dress ever. it was a spaghetti strap, a-line, knee-length dress (as were all my dresses at that moment), and was my second (and last?) sewing endeavor. but the best part wasn't the quality time i spent sewing with my mom, the cut of the dress, or even the fact that it was a birthday dress; the best part was that the whole dress was covered in sunflowers. big, yellow, beautiful sunflowers. i used to love sunflowers. almost obsessively. i totally forgot about that dress until the other day when i was watching an episode of ugly betty and she had on a t-shirt with sunflowers that looked very much like the ones on my dress. the sad thing about that dress was that, unlike all the other clothing i got attached to, i didn't wear it for years until it was too tattered or small and my mom put the veto on it. no, this beautiful dress had a tragic ending. after only having it for a few months, one night i fell asleep (with the dress on, of course) on top of a black marker (i'm going to assume i was coloring or something). by the morning there was marker all over the dress and, try as my mother might, the stain wouldn't come out. i was devastated. alas, i think if i ever come across a dress with big sunflowers on it i'd be tempted to buy it just for the sake of nostalgia (personal nostalgia. not borrowed.). 

i take back what i said about my memories being catalogued according to age. well, they are to some extent, but more accurately, my memories are stored according to where we lived at any given time. my family moved around a lot, so naturally, my memories are inextricably linked to the home in which they occurred. sunflower dress, for instance, happened when we were living in everett. that was the house where i had my first and only tree swing (installed by my dad). i frickin loved that thing. and tropical flavored mr. freeze bars from costco. and snow that only stays for a couple of weeks. and spending whole days in the front yard reading nancy drew 'cause man that shit was so riveting i couldn't stop until i finished the whole thing. 

but that was only my second favorite home. my home home was our apartment in the u-district in seattle. i miss everything about that place. except maybe my wildly unruly hair. but i miss almost everything. i miss riding down hills in the back of josh's toy dump truck. or playing in the rain and splashing (sometimes even laying) in the puddles that formed in the parts where the sidewalk was all fucked up. i miss playing sorry with my mom and josh and feeling more competitive at that game than i've ever felt about anything. i miss going to the park or taking the bus downtown to go to the dollar store. i miss nasai teriyaki (seriously, the best teriyaki on the face of the planet). i miss riding our bikes with my dad down to gasworks park and playing freeze-tag. i miss freeze-tag. i miss being taken care of when i got sick and getting to eat pudding and watch my favorite cartoon of swan lake. now when i get sick i have to suck it up and still do shit. now i have to make huge life decisions and feel the weight of wondering if my next decision is going to totally fuck up my life or if it's going to make me the happiest person ever. or maybe i'm just never going to be happy doing anything. 

time is a mindfuck.