why i decided to delete my facebook... then make a hasty return.

Facebook gives me a headache. I'm not even joking. I've been back for 24 hours and already it wouldn't let me delete half my "friends" without trying to get me to add more, it wants me to add my phone number (um, no.) It won't work on my iphone without some serious patience. It's... horrible.

I deleted it because I was sick of the drama, sick of the people, sick of people knowing where I was at all times, what I was doing (because seriously, if you have it, you need to update this shit). So it went away. And maybe for like a day I kept trying to look for it to check into places but then? I really did not care.

Word to the wise- people will not be okay with this decision.

It's so much easier to put your life news on facebook so everyone can just read it, instead of sending a text or picking up a phone to update the people you care about. I get it, I'm not the only one in your life that you need to update. You have 235876580+ friends who need to know too. But seriously, when did we all rely on social media to keep people involved in our lives? I feel like I'm closer to people I don't even know, who live thousands of miles away, because I read their blog, than I am to people who live right in town.

SO I protested and left.

Another life lesson- if you're deleting Facebook, and you don't have a back up of your 700+ photos since 2006, back them up. NOW. or you'll be going back and doing just that.

I don't know if I'm going to keep it yet or not. If you're reading this, and you were my facebook friend but suddenly aren't, seriously, don't even trying starting shit with me about it because I will laugh in your face and probably tell you to go fuck yourself. It's FACEBOOK. Not real life.

But I do know, having a photography 'business' is hard without it. And apparently you can't keep your pages if you don't have an active account. So I may be stuck with it. I have learned though, that I refuse to rely on it. Is it good for a few laughs from the fan pages? Heck yeah- but nothing I can't get off of pinterest. Do I enjoy seeing friends' baby pictures that they post in a haste? Duh- but I do have picture messaging capabilities.

It is what it is. But I decided that this summer I was gonna rid myself of the clutter and the drama and I intend to stick to that. I just may have an active account that I don't use while doing so.

don't be falling in love, as she's walking away.

Summer of jail cells and iced coffee.

What do I do with my time?

I work. More than you, most likely. (No offense...) I drink a lot of coffee. I take pictures. I'm a faithful Instagram checker and Pinterest pinner. I dream about tattoos, when im not searching for them. I watch weird stuff on Netflix and ondemand. 

But now, it's summer. I deleted my Facebook, gave up some bad habits, and overall I'm attempting to be a more functioning member of society instead of being cooped up in my house all day everyday. Life is really weird. I was laid off from my primary income job meaning there's a good chance my bills won't get paid and ill end up in a jail cell by summers end. But whatever;I'll deal with that when the time comes. 

So instead of spending this summer taking kickboxing classes and working on massive DIY Pinterest projects and perfecting my wardrobe and getting all the tattoos and going on long road trips with friends to dinoland and the beach I will be here. Finding non expensive ways to get out and have fun. Going to the lake instead of the beach. Working full time hours in a non air conditioned box in the middle of a mall that I can't stand for slightly more than minimum wage. 

My extra cash will go into my tattoo fund and be spent on iced coffee. (You know times are rough when I give up my daily dunkin runs for homemade coffee in a to go cup.) 

This summer I'm not making any promises, I'm not playing by any rules, and I just want to have fun. In whatever ways i can find it.

why i wasn't cut out for teaching.

For a really long time after I made my decision to stop grad school I felt like a failure. I had been so excited and so hyped up about it since I made the initial decision that it made me feel crazy for even considering not just finishing what I started. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I would make a kick ass teacher... I just wouldn't be able to in the world we live in today.

Not where academics are so focused on standardized testing.

Not where memorization takes such a precedent over exploration of content.

Not where the college professors teaching future teachers are teaching us to do one thing then telling us that that just isn't how schools work.

I think memorizing is stupid.  The world is designed nowadays that information is readily available with a flick of the unlock screen on your smart phone. Why spend so much time focused on memorization (except for basic math...) when you can be focusing on teaching kids how to go about finding the information they need. Teach kids the difference between reliable sources and not reliable sources.

Because as I've learned, textbooks are not reliable sources. (Any teacher who hasn't read "Lies My Teacher Told Me" should go find it right now...

So yeah, let's continue to teach generations straight from one textbook, filled with writer bias, as well as Proud to be an American biases, and have students not remember anything 5 years later, and be appalled when they finally learn that everything that was taught to them was just a hoax. That makes complete sense, because giving the kids time to research their own findings and then form their own opinions, is completely trashy.

So am I saddened? Yeah. Am I being practical, though? Hell yea. Because in a world where charter schools are so controversial, this degree would serve no purpose to me.

I guess I'll just stick with behavioral psych. Because there's nothing like going to work everyday and never knowing what type of heavy objects are going to come flying my way.

do i have to do everything myself?

Most days anymore, that's what I end up doing.

Sometimes I think if I didn't have people around me I'd try to jump from a building and fly. Not really, but I tend to think I'm a superhero. Superheroes can fly. It's a good excuse to wear a cape.

Not working as much gives me way too much time for self reflection.

Fuck yeah.

Lately I've been big on women rights and us sticking together. So here's another subject that relates-

Equality.

I've never been one of them girls who would not ask a guy out "because I'm a girl". Tradition states that it's the man's job to ask the woman out. But we don't live in the 1900s anymore. We're independent and we're awesome and if we like a guy we should have a right to go up to him and be all "hey i fucking like you, let's date and shit."

Right?!

Yet, I'm also a hypocrite. Cause courage? Courage does not come in liquid form unless you're Harry Potter. And if I knew Harry Potter I'd totally be having him hook me up with Ron and I wouldn't have any sort of guy dilemmas ever again because we would be married and building our own Burrow with a million kids and dogs.

I dream big.

This has always been my mantra and always will be. I will never come down from the clouds and I will never be normal. I need someone who is okay with that and who's willing to fly alongside me, not try to rope me and bring me down to earth. Or maybe, that's exactly what I need. Gravity, stay the hell away from me. Unless you're grounding me to a life better than what I'm flying from.

So what happens when you find it in the form of someone who basically will never suck it up and ask you out, even if he does like you? Do you sit idly by and wait for some other bird to come and swoop him up? Do you say something and look ridiculous if he actually doesn't feel the same way? What's worse? Losing someone you love because they don't love you back in the now, or losing someone you love down the road because you never bothered to ask and someone else did?

Sometimes I'm not so sure.

Unbreakable

Nobody can have it all together all the time, right?

Well I guess some people can. With perfect conditions and circumstances.

Those people suck.

Tonight, on my journey home, I made some revelations about myself and my life up until this point.

One, I'm a big fat liar. I never knew what I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing because there were so many things I wanted to devote my life to. But that's not acceptable. You're supposed to go to college and pick a major and then find a career dealing with that major and do that until you're 65 and then retire with your 401k to a nice village in florida or california and reflect upon how much good you've done. This is bullshit. There are people making more money that I am without even a high school education. I'm not programmed to do one thing for the rest of my life. What if I want to spend my mornings working in my bakery and then go and work at a day care in the afternoon and spend my evenings teaching yoga and kick boxing classes? How do I do that? With college loans and debt and car payments. With this awesome degree I worked so hard for. This is why I made the decision to not continue grad school. It's paid for, sans loans, so I'm no worse in debt.

Two, people just suck. Sometimes I think I'd be better off without people in my life. They leave and lie and move on with their lives and there's nothing you can really do. You can't control others. What's the point in trying to keep someone in your life who doesn't make equal effort? There's maybe one person I become distraught over the thought of losing, which is another revelation I made tonight. That can't be good. Apparently I've gone from forming entirely too close attachments with people to not being able to form any. My psych senses are tingling.

Three, sometimes you just need to get away. This is what I'm striving for this summer. I need to get away.

Four, it's okay to fall apart sometimes. Life is hard. People place so many demands on us everyday. We may be unbreakable but we're not bulletproof.

Five, I'm psychotic. And not just because I can't end lists on even numbers.

Size is just a number.

This is just a perfect quote for something that I wanna address tonight. I usually don't do topics, but this is something that I feel super passionate about and something that I've recently been getting more involved in.

Women and their weight.

I do, but apparently not too many people do, women especially.

I struggled with weight my entire life and I still do to this day. I was a "fat kid" and sometime around mid high school I got sick of it and started walking. Thats it. And I dropped a ton of weight. I felt better, I looked better. College rolled around and I gained some back, but I hit the gym up and was soon even thinner than before. Then I graduated and it kind of all went downhill, though.

I will preface this by saying that I am not saying that I'm fat. I could afford to lose some weight, gain some muscle, get into better shape. But all in all, I'm fine with the way I look weight wise. We all have our days when something doesn't fit right or we look in the mirror and groan but seriously, WHO DOESN'T? Some of the "thinnest" people I know look at themselves in the mirror and see a "fat" version of themselves. 

What pisses me off is that women feel the need to be skinny. They're going to any extremes to not see any fat rolls, not have any curves. Anorexia, diet pills, excessive exercise, sometimes all combined. Am I the only one who sees something wrong with that? What are we teaching our younger generation of women? That they're only going to be loved if they're a size zero and can see their bones through their skin? I've been there. I've also gotten over that.

It's like, when you accept the fact that you're going to have curves, that you're never going to be a size 2, 4, or even 6, that a weight itself just lifts from you. Size is just a number. I've realized this recently.

Weight is just a number, too. It can't measure how you feel about yourself. It can't measure how healthy and fit you are. It can't tell you how much muscle you have. 

The Biggest Loser is challenging America to get fit and I couldn't agree more with that. We do need to get fit. There are people with food addictions and people who fall under this 'obese' category who need to lose weight to save their lives. But that's not EVERYONE. That's not middle school kids skipping lunch. 

We need to support each other, as women. Taylor Swift said something like "there's a special place in hell for women who don't help other women." She completely takes that to way too high standards but this is definitely something in which that applies. I think it's sickening to see women making comments on other women's pictures about their weight. I think it's appalling when women post before and after pictures of their weight loss transformation and women are commenting 'wow you're so beautiful!' NO. NO NO NO. She was beautiful before. She's beautiful now. But now? She's healthier, she's more confident, she has less of a risk for heart disease. But beauty? That's ALWAYS been there.

There's so much wrong with how women treat other women and how women perceive the models and celebrities they admire. And this scares me for the future. For my future daughter, what kind of world is she going to live in? What if she has the same weight issues I did? Will she get picked on like I did? I'd fight anyone to death who'd say anything negative to her, and she's not even real yet. 

Sigh. SO yeah, I think we need to challenge America. To change their mindset. To take down all those pictures of models who have absolutely no figure. To start exercising and to start eating healthy because they want to take care of their body and mind, they want to be able to chase after their kids without getting out of breath or take the stairs without issues. Not because they want a number on a scale to tell them they're beautiful. In case no one's told you lately-- you're already beautiful.