I really should get my assignment finished, but I just can’t seem to find the motivation. I am more interested in trying to decide whether or not to get my hair trimmed when I get my fringe cut tomorrow, what to wear to the gig I am going to tomorrow night, and whether or not it is an acceptable time to go to bed even though I am not really tired. Procrastination without purpose, possibly the worst kind out there. Usually I do something like clean out my room or a thousand errands or change my sheets when I am procrastinating; stuff that has a practical purpose and conclusion. But not tonight. Just blah tonight.
Facebook is boring too. Why are you all boring? Become interesting, dammit, and entertain me!
I was going to post a picture of my current general surrondings for your amusement but my phone won’t connect to my computers bluetooth. HGOUEHAGOU. The universe is mocking me tonight.
You can tell summer is on its way when EVERY teeny bopper, tween, and stuck up bitchface in the western suburbs hits the gym.
It is so damn crowded at my usual time of about 4pm. I had to resort to the dreaded treadmill to do my cardio because the lone crosstrainer in the womens section (I couldn’t face the mixed gym today) was being used, and the bikes were all taken. The worst part is, these skinny little moles move in packs. They come in pairs or groups of three, mill about doing nothing, sit on the floor and chat, sit on the exercise balls and chat, sit on the bikes not moving a muscle and chat. WHY CAN’T YOU GO TO A CAFE AND CHAT?!
Grrrr.
I guess I will just have to change the time I go. Maybe aim for a pre lunch work out. All I can say is, I hate them all! ALL OF THEM I SAY!
…when the police walk in just as you arrive to shut the party down.
I went to what I classify as a fairly awesome party last night. It was a dress up party with a theme of ‘politically incorrect’. I only found out about the theme the day before, so I didn’t have a chance to come up with a suitable costume, so I just wore my awesome new ‘wizards’ jacket that I got from the op shop. It is black velvet and covered with neon rainbow embroidery and has a hood. Epicness.
Anyway, so back to this party. There was much substance use, copious amounts of alcohol consumption, and some very questionable outfits. A teletubbie in lingerie. The birthday boy in a hookers get up with tampons hanging off his ears. A sub/dom pair complete with a leash. People put a lot of thought and a fair amount of effort into their outfits, and they were all really cool.
I think what really made it an epic party though, was the reason why the coppers came in the first place. 14 separate complaints about the noise from surrounding houses. Epic.
Makes me want to have a party just to get it shut down.
At the end of this year I will finish my studies and will officially be a nurse. Scary thought, considering in the simulation activity today at uni I not only killed my patient by shocking him with the defib without knowing whether or not he was in a shockable rhythm, I also hypothetically electrocuted my two fellow nurses. Awesome. I am going to be a great nurse.
Anyway, that is so boring. What is more exciting is that some cool students decided to organise a nursing ball! Woo! We will be the first graduating group of the new course (aka new CRAP course) so it is well worth celebrating! We made it! Huzzah! We are amazing!
Swoooon...
However, it did make me think of something.
So far in my short and uneventful life, I have been to several ‘formal’ events. Four cousins have gotten married. I have been guests at two debutante balls. I have been to three high school formals. And I have never had a date for any of them. (Well unless you count the year 10 formal at our brother school, my friend PAID [oh the shame!] her friend to take me because she really wanted me to come too, everyone else was. How embarrassing!). So anyway, besides that particular event, in which a guy I didn’t really know took me to a formal just so I could dance with my girlfriends, I have never had the opportunity to take a plus one.
I know that no woman should let herself be defined by the fact she has a man in her life, and for the record, I am very happy being single, and would probably be just as equally happy in a relationship: it doesn’t matter to me one way or the other. But I do feel a bit forlorn at the fact that once again I will be riding solo. I know half of my extended family think I am a wee bit weird because I never have a boyfriend. Not that I care about their opinion, I barely see them anyway. But I sometimes wonder, am I weird? -shrugs-
Oh well. I will just drink all the free grog, get absolutely shiggered, and have an awesome time!
My dietary exploits are challenged by the continuing presence of cheesecake in this world.
Nom nom nom!
Tomorrow is weigh-in day, and this week has been a shocker. I had originally hoped to lose 800 grams this week to bring me down to my first goal loss of 5kg, but after this weekends terrible efforts it is not looking good.
I did have a good week exercise wise. Four days at the gym last week with various amounts of weights, and a consistent 30 minutes of torturous cardio on the cross trainer. Today I even managed to slog it out in the stuffy confines of the women’s gym in 29 degree heat without succumbing to the temptation to turn the fan on to cool down. I was drenched and sore and it felt amazing.
However, over the weekend I have a massive blow out diet wise. It started with not one, but THREE slices of pavlova on Saturday. I will blame my Aunt Zoe, she brought the damn thing to our house. She did not hold me down and force me to eat it, but she may as well have. Then last night I had fish and chips for dinner, nom nom. And tonight I went out for dinner with the lovely Clarissa and had a gigantic serve of calamari, chips and salad, washed down with coke, followed by a slice of chocolate cheesecake (to share!) and hot chocolate. Unghhhhh. So much fried-ness and sugar-ness.
Definitely not good for my waistline. All I can hope for is a maintenance for this week, but even the possibility of that is looking slim. Ahh slim. Something my arse will never be at this rate.
I feel the chill of something blown in on a breeze…
I love Andy Bull‘s song ‘Dog’. It uses the image of a sneaky black dog to describe depression, something I can completely identify with. It has been 10 years since I became acquainted with the dirty D word, so I feel it is kind of fitting to have a little ramble on about it, especially because at the moment, I feel pretty crappy.
When I was in my first year of highschool, my dad was diagnosed with cancer. And not just a Joe Blow cancer (not that any cancers are Joe Blow, really), but a highly aggressive form of non-Hodgkins lymphoma that had spread from his bowel to his spine, and that they could only identify when they sent pathology samples to America, because no doctors in Australia had ever seen it before. Dad was given 3 months to live in the March of 2001, he told them to hit him with the hardest treatment they had, and he was in remission in December of the same year. We Egan’s don’t do anything by halves, that’s for sure. We have always had a tendency to be dramatic.
So as you can imagine, for a 12/13-year-old, such a fucking shithouse journey is not the easiest thing to go through. Not only was I starting a new school, not only had I left my friends behind, not only did I feel like a social outcast, but I also had to watch my dad wither away to a skeleton, vomit and cry, lose his hair, get so close to the brink so many times, and somehow also adjust to the demands of secondary education. I snapped. I bullied other students, I didn’t do my work, I failed at least one class, and I spent a good portion of the year on the school counsellors couch. It was a foggy mess of a year, but somewhere in about October as I sat on Vivian’s couch and we looked at each other, the realisation came that I didn’t need to be there anymore. I had made it through to the other side, and probably gained a helluva lot of maturity and perspective along the way. The universe dishes out shit for a reason, so that year wasn’t for nothing.
So I came out of 2001 with a fresh start, applied myself to my studies, and started to enjoy my life at highschool. I thought feelings such as the ones I experienced in 2001, the despair, the loneliness, the apathy, the mind crushing numbness, I thought they were behind me for good. Now I know better. I think once you have depression, it always lurks there in the recesses of your mind. The only way I can describe this is to compare it to fat. When you put on weight, your body generates new fat cells. When you lose weight, the fat cells empty of the fat, but the outer casing of the cell remains. This is why it is so easy to put on weight again. Only liposuction can get rid of that outer casing. I feel it is the same as depression. I feel I now have depression cells. I may spend 98% of the rest of my life happy, but every now and then, those depression cells will fill with the blackness and despair and I will have to crawl my way out again.
…
And the worst part is trying to explain it to you
And the worst part is knowing there’s nothing to do
Explaining depression to other people, friends and family alike, is quite difficult. In fact, with my family, the subject is not one that has been broached at all, although I am sure my mother at the very least has been aware of it over the years, particularly during my latter high school career. I went through a particularly rough stage when I was about 16 that involved spending endless days sitting listlessly in my bedroom doing absolutely nothing, a brief foray into self harm (I still have the stupid scars on my wrist, including, very faintly now, the word DIE), and at least one intentional suicide attempt. In a way it was almost an unfortunate time to be a teenager suffering depression, in the early 2000’s, as the rise of Emo’s was huge, and so I think a lot of teenagers were not taken seriously. You weren’t depressed, you were emo. Like a gigantic wholesale sweeping under the rug of a problem that society didn’t really want to deal with, and still doesn’t. But back to the point. Aside from realising that I was a gigantic sack of malcontent sitting on my bed, I don’t think my parents clued onto too much during that period. My friends were a little more cluey, and expended a lot of energy forcing me out of the house on numerous occasions. Bless their hearts. That is what true friendship is all about, people!
In 2007, after I had graduated from highschool, I got a tattoo on my lower back, the obligatory tramp stamp. It is an excerpt from a song by My Chemical Romance, who to this day are still my favourite band. The song is called ‘The Sharpest Lives’ and the quote in question goes like this: ‘If it looks like I’m laughing, I’m really just asking to leave.’ Here is a picture of the tattoo:
Please excuse many things, including my butt crack, copious amounts of fat, and the general shitness of the photo. It is super hard to take a photo of your own back. To me, this quote typifies how depression feels to at least me. It screams ‘See this fucking smile, this laughter? It is a LIE! Don’t believe it! I am not really happy, I am just pretending because I don’t know how to tell you how I feel, I am afraid you won’t understand, and I fear your rejection!’ All very dramatic and what not, but that is how it feels to me. Which is probably why I identify with ‘Dog’ so much as well, it is like exactly what I would tell someone if they asked me how it feels to be depressed. I would just send them a link to Andy’s MySpace page and leave it at that.
…
I try to outsmart him but somehow he knows
Wherever I am, that fucking dog goes
I’ll kill him the next time I swear I won’t fail
I’ll kick in his ribs and rip off his tail
I have personally given up on the idea of ‘killing’ my depression. I have accepted it as a part of me, that will always be one of the facets of my personality. I recognize the signs of when it is creeping back in, and I know what to do to send it slinking off with its tail between its legs. I am proud to say I have never taken medication for my depression. Having said that, I don’t think less of people who do have to take medication for whatever type of mental illness they suffer. Every journey and every person is individual, and you have to do what you have to do to get to the other side without losing it altogether. I guess I never went on medication because as a teenager I relied on my mother to take care of my healthcare, and there was no way I was going to admit to her I needed that sort of help. So by the time I graduated highschool and took over my own healthcare, I had realised that I could beat it off on my own. So that is what I have continued to do, with the bout that caught me after I dropped out of uni and worked full-time, and then last years horrible blur. I will just continue to inflict enough injuries to my black dog to get him to go back into whatever cave he hides in, and then enjoy my life until he cames out again for another round in the boxing rink.
Last year was particularly nasty. I spent the whole year in a funk. I hated living at home, I was fighting with my mum a lot, I couldn’t be bothered with my course, and I just generally didn’t want to play. I was over my friends (sorry guys! I do love you!), and had a brief ‘relationship’ that in hindsight was a stupid stupid idea. I was messed up and in no fit state to date anyone, and I guess used the whole thing as some sort of emotional escape. Mind you, the whole thing falling apart did rouse me out of my apathy a bit, and I got my indignant rage on and felt some good healthy hatred. In about September an opportunity came up to do an exchange to Mexico over the summer for my degree, so I jumped at it. I needed to escape, and I was so glad I did.
Mexico taught me many things. It taught me how to make friends even though it is terrifying. It taught me a degree of independence. It taught me I couldn’t be petulant with people who haven’t known me for a long time (Sorry, Kate!). It taught me that friendship can transcend state and country borders and that you don’t have to see people or even talk to them on the phone to think of them often and fondly (I miss you Ash!). It also brought to my attention a few home truths about myself. Like the fact that the Year of the Fog had manifested some pretty poor habits. Looking at photos of myself in Mexico and LA, I realise how much weight I put on in 2010. My depression and my eating habits are intrinsically linked. I get depressed, I eat. I then get depressed because I ate. Then because I am depressed because I ate, I then eat more. It is a stupid vicious circle that allows me attach all sorts of silly emotional messages and meanings to food. It also allowed me to stack on 10 kilos and realise how close I was to the dreaded triple number on the scale. When I got back from Mexico and saw how close I was to hitting 100kg I knew it was time to stop letting my emotions dictate my eating habits. It was also time to stop putting off my goals to not be a fatty any longer. So I have embarked on a very slow health and fitness journey (A big shout out to Luka, Ann and Victtoria for spurring me on!), and have so far lost almost 5 kilos. I have realised what an awesome part exercise can play in controlling my depression as well. I feel amazing when I exercise, and depressed when I don’t. Pretty simple really.
…
Anyway, that was a whole lot of ramble, but I guess I almost felt it was time to come clean. Like this weight loss mission, this fitness obsession, the purge of my body, can only work if I purge my mind also, and be honest about how I feel and how it affects me. I don’t know, but maybe it will also strike a chord with other people who feel the same way, and give them a warm fuzzy feeling that they are not alone. And so we shouldn’t be. It is time the stigma of mental illness gets destroyed once and for all, so that people can be honest about their problems and don’t feel like lesser people because they suffer something they never asked for.
I will leave you with Andy Bull’s song, purely because it is awesome, and it was the fact that I felt like listening to it randomly this morning that spurred the writing of this entire post.
And the worst part is thinking it’s something it’s not
Yeah the worst part is thinking it might never stop
Oh if I can pull myself together I’ll try
Oh but I can’t explain the tear that sits in my eye
Pretty uneventful as far as birthdays go. A friend was going away this weekend, so I went out with my friends last weekend, for drinks and bowling. It was fun, but I so hate the focus of an event being on me.
Today I went to Maribyrnong Maker’s Market with Mum. We have always wanted to go, and it is only on three Sundays a year, so off we trotted. Nice stuff, but so, I dunno, Yarraville yuppy parents. The clothes were not my style, and the jewellery, while nice, was expensive and kind of boring. The only stuff that caught my eye were homemade soaps that smelt so good I could have eaten them, and old-fashioned toys. All in all, slightly disappointing.
Moving on to lunchtime, and my Great Aunt Zoe came over. She is about 86 years old, very crazy, and puts every birthday person on edge. She is the bearer of gifts, more commonly known as the infamous ‘squishy packages’. She ALWAYS buys you clothes, that are pretty much exclusively ugly, at least four sizes two big, and in us girls case, from Millers. She delivered, right on cue. A boooootiful baby shit brown puffer jacket in a size 40 billion. Thank god she gave me the receipt. I know I sound ungrateful, but as my Nanna said when I told her about it on the phone, Great Aunt Zoe has been giving squishy packages since my Uncle Matt was born 57 years ago, and they have never been any good. I guess you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. She did bring a gigantic store bought pavlova smothered with cream and strawberries, and while it was nowhere in the league of my favorite aunt, Aunty Val’s homemade pavlova with coffee cream and peppermint crisp, it was sufficiently sweet and delicious to force me to scoff down two huge slices. It’s my birthday, alright! I am allowed to be a pig!
So now I am just sitting around writing an assignment. What a way to spend your birthday!
Oh and I would like to send out some special thankyou’s to my old friends, Mother Nature and Father Time. Thankyou Mother Nature for waking me up at 7am with every woman’s favourite time of the month. I just love PMSing like a crazy bitch all day on my birthday. And thankyou Father Time for making that lunch the longest feat of endurance known to mankind. Greatly appreciative of both of your efforts, totally top-notch.
So thank god that is all over for another year. Except Christmas is in the middle. Don’t even get me started…
Did a smattering of floor work and weights at the gym today with my favourite asian, Ann, and man oh man am I feeling it already. Probably because it is the second day in a row I have done quite a lot of ab related exercises, but still, phwoar!
My shoulders, arms and stomach are suffering that delicious post exercise burn that screams ‘fuck I’m sore, but fuck I’m awesome!’ Loving it. An excellent incentive to get back in there tomorrow and do it all over again.
I am determined to weight 70kg by the very latest, end of 2012. I have been a fatty for far too long! One day I will post (full clothed, I promise!) so called ‘before pics’ of me when I was the fattiest I have been. Nothing like holidaying to force you to get in a whole lot of full body shots! Usually all my photos are of my face!
Anyway, I better go to bed and stop rambling about nothing in particular. Mum is dragging me to the shops tomorrow to buy me a birthday present. All of a sudden because I am older it is like I get to pick what I want for my birthday. I don’t want anything, except maybe the suprise of opening something and not knowing what is going to be inside. How ungrateful I must sound! But I guess it is just a little bit of mourning for another little bit of innocence and childhood lost.
I shall leave you with my favourite exercise motivation ever.
I was snooping around on The Daily Post contemplating whether or not to participate in post of the day/week, when yesterdays topic caught my eye:
‘How do you decide how to decide?’
Unggggg
I think this is a ridiculously valid question for today’s society, given the high levels of choice we are presented with on a day-to-day basis. We live in a highly consumeristic society. You have to choose what fillings go in your sandwich; which colour out of about 100 you want that pair of jeans in, after you have decided what cut you prefer; you can choose to change doctors/dentists/degrees/homes/cars/cities in a blink of an eye. Everything is readily available, and we thrive on the joy of instant gratification. But has this actually helped or hindered our decision-making process?
Sarah Wilson wrote this interesting little piece for the Sunday Life supplement magazine that comes with the Sunday Age in Melbourne, and also posted it on her blog. It goes into a little bit of detail about how as a society we are suffering decision fatigue, and are unnecessarily burdening our children with decisions they are not really capable of understanding. I personally don’t remember being asked as a child what I wanted for lunch at school, I just ate whatever was put in my lunchbox, then went and played, whereas I have seen younger cousins being quizzed at every possible moment on what they would like to do. They want to roll in the mud, that’s what.
I just want bread, fuckin'!
The major problem with decision fatigue is because we can no longer be bothered making new choices, we just stick to the default ones, which may not be in our best interests. Can’t decide between having the caesar salad with or without chicken? Oh fuck it, I will just get a parma instead. The wardrobe is so bursting full of clothing that it takes you at least half an hour to decide what to wear, and when you eventually clean it out you find clothes you thought you sent to the op shop years ago? Get rid of most of it.
Sarah details three ways you can make decision-making in your life easier, and thereby reduce your chance of decision fatigue:
Set up your life to make less decisions.
Do whatever grabs you.
Spend an hour making choices.
By simplifying your life in such a way that leaves you with a tolerable amount of choices (everyone will be different on what is tolerable), you will be less likely to make default choices. Sarah uses the example of how she is currently living out of a suitcase and therefore rotates between three outfits. One dirty, one clean, one being worn. Simple. That wouldn’t work for me unless I was travelling, but I can use her analogy to take a good hard look at my wardrobe. I take FOREVER to decide what to wear every day, simply because I have soooo many clothes. It is completely unneccessary, as I wear the same ones over and over. While I am not quite ready to tackle the wardrobe, I have been cleaning out my space and preparing in general for life as a full-time worker next year, by de-cluttering and thereby limiting my choice of distractions.
Sarah also promotes the idea of doing tasks which appeal to you the most. Instead of sitting there with your to-do-list ho humming over what should have priority, just do all the things first that most appeal to you, or that won’t seem like a chore. This idea may not appeal to some people as it means you could be leaving the most onerous task to last, but it also means that you won’t have any excuses because it is the only thing you have left to do…so just get on with it!
Lastly, Sarah advocates the idea of just sitting down, and getting a whole lot of stuff over and done with in a short space of time. Things like emails, bills, letters, and all those other little annoying things that require our attention and a decision on. Instead of deliberating over them and making a mountain out of a molehill, just make snap decisions, get it over and done with, and move on with life.
By reducing the stress decisions cause in your life, not only are you getting the decision-making over and done with, you are also leaving yourself a lot of free time to do whatever the hell you want with!
Chill, like this super awesome sloth.
So in my maiden voyage into the art of quick and effective decision-making I made a snap decision (well after about a week) to move out next year. My friend Creepy Krystal had already asked me a few times to be her roommate but I had never really taken the idea too seriously. I always made excuses to myself about saving money, living close to the hospital I want to work at, being able to travel, being reluctant to leave my parents and brother and the very unique family life we live. However. I will be 23 next year. My parents have supported me through five years of tertiary education. They have paid for all my food, the majority of my bills, and for all my living expenses in this last year that I have been unemployed. We are also starting to get cabin fever. I am fighting more with my mum, becoming more intolerant of some of my brothers usually cute but often annoying mannerisms and quirks. Dad is probably the only person I stay constant with, he tends to be like a leveler between us all. The decision to move out also ties in, believe it or not, with my desire to lose weight. My mother is fiercely protective of her kitchen, and as yet I have not had the opportunity (or one could say the permission!) to learn how to cook. As a result I eat my mothers, while excellent, delicious and nutritious, cooking, I also eat her ridiculously oversized portions that are often laden with carb dense foods. I feel moving out with give me the freedom to cook what I want and change to a clean eating lifestyle. But most of all? It is just time. Time for me to become a real adult, to become independent, to make my own home. I can’t wait. 🙂
A wee cottage...such a shame I live in the city!
Hopefully I will make many more good decisions to come. Like finishing my last assignment, which I decide to do right now!
I R PATHOGEN 