100 Things #19: The Library.

I don’t get a chance to go to the library often. The local library is in an area of town where I’d rather not have to wait at the bus stop, and getting my card renewed at my old library, a town over, would be excruciatingly expensive. So I usually have to settle for the library on campus. Normally this’d be a no go too, but I’ve actually been a student at the local college in the past, so no one asks questions.

(Am I now? Well, no. I don’t make enough money on top of these bills right now.)

It’s a nice place to go when I need to get some work done without the distractions of the TV, neighbors, or allure of gaming pursuits to distract me.
( AND ALSO FAKE CUT. )

100 Things #20: Grocery Stores

(OH COME ON, LIKE NONE OF YOU SAW THIS COMING.)

I like food. I seriously like food. Like, as in people sometimes ask me if I used to be a fat kid. For the record, I didn’t, but I understand what they’re getting at. Sometimes I feel kind of like a fat kid in a skinny girl’s body. The shenanigans that my grandmother pulled didn’t help.

Short version: In high school I hit a healthy weight of 120 lbs. The doctors stopped worrying. People quit commenting on my ‘skeletal wrists’ and such. My grandmother immediately began rationing food at me—I couldn’t eat to full. She called me fat. She told me to get thin again. I started working out aggressively. I began to see a fat girl in the mirror instead of actual!me. I got a job so I could afford to eat more—if I bought my own things, she couldn’t keep me from eating (wrong, as I found out). Basically, I wound up with body dysmorphic disorder by proxy: she thought I was fat, called me fat often, and I started believing it.

Eventually I got past this, but my fascination for going through the aisles to find the healthiest tasty things remained. I was fascinated with the ‘new’ diet foods like yogurt and wheat germ, and the exotic fish I could get from stores when I shopped by myself. The combination of my grandmother’s neurosis and my family’s fascination with foods we (usually) couldn’t afford but kept seeing on Food Network conspired to turn me into a foodie. (And, I will admit, maybe a little bit of a food snob on some things.)

I like to wander the aisles a while before I buy anything. I walk in with a shopping list, of course, but I want to know about all the new good things, the new healthy things that are out (Chia seeds? Who knew?), and I want to try as many of them as I possibly can. This is how I wound up with a pound of chia seeds on top of my refrigerator. (For the record, they are amazing. My energy shoots up when I eat them, and they let me do more on less food. Now if only I could get past the gel’s texture…) One of my favorite things to do on the major run to the store is to find one thing I haven’t tried and give it a shot. Goat cheese was the most recent thing I tried. Delicious, tangy, strong but with a smooth finish.

I wonder what I’ll try next month. I want an exotic fruit or something.

100 Things: An Interlude.

So, if you’re just joining in the fun now, I’ve been taking down my favorite things and discussing them one at a time, a blogging challenge that began as nothing but a challenge, but has since transformed into a mission to find the things that make me happy and are also therefore things that give me the spirit to keep living.

(….sweet mercy, was that all once sentence?)

So far we’ve covered the intangibles (that feeling when blank) and my favorite places. What’s coming up next?

Activities.

I realize that this can have some overlap—after all, you go places to do things, which sometimes result in intangible situations—but every thing here has been a major part of what makes me me for a very long time.

Keep an eye out, the first of my favorite diversions is coming soon.

100 Things #21: Blogging.

…if this seems obvious, just hang on a second and I’ll tell you why it wasn’t obvious to begin with. I didn’t begin blogging for a real reason. I was pressured into getting an account on LiveJournal a few weeks into my first semester of college, after having met my first new friends since grade school who liked to write and share things.

I remember being at one of the lounge computers, agonizing over what my username was going to be, and finally resorting to numerology to come up with something. In fact my first entry was sort of a rant about that activity.

It wasn’t for another month that I began to see why people blogged in the first place: having a place to vent a while is useful; and, as I was between computers at the time, I couldn’t keep a diary as I usually did. (Not to mention that the place where I was living at the time didn’t really have a place where I could safely hide a traditional diary without being caught.) So my blog became a refuge for my mind as well as a place to show off my writing.

Three months in or so, I’d begun to really get into it, even if I didn’t have the comments or the reader stats to back up my thrice-weekly (sometimes more) rambles about things going on in my life, my head, and the world at large. It’d become more than just a case of “do it because everyone else is” by then, and I couldn’t think of a reason why I wouldn’t keep doing it.

---

After some time, it became second nature. Blogging became a way to determine who actually gave a fuck about me and who didn’t. If someone didn’t understand what the point of blogging was and tried to make me feel like an idiot if I kept doing it, I had to get them out of my life and right away at that. But I’m still amazed that the one person who I thought would give a shit about it never did, ridiculed it as a waste of time, and consistently called me things like ‘eccentric’ for doing it. …honestly, I don’t know why I stayed on so long with him.

…actually, that’s a lie. I DO know why I did it, and it was stupid. But we’re not here to dredge up such things. Especially with me out of nerve pills.

---

As things have gone, this has become a way to keep myself sane. While I love greeting new readers and sharing things I know (or think), a lot of times, this is mostly me yelling at me, pointing out what I’ve done that could be done better and making sure to drill that point home.

Then there are the times where I really do have something shareworthy, and my closest (in location) friends either don’t get it or don’t care, and I know that there’s at least one or two other people out there who don’t mind listening to a strange woman with a fascination with food ramble about things.

I love that.

And that’s why no one’s going to stop me from blogging even more.

100 Things #22: Cooking

(OH, DON’T PRETEND YOU DIDN’T SEE THIS ONE COMING.)

I’ve said it before. I like to eat. A lot. I like to eat a lot. I love food. I’m a firm believer that one should live to eat, not eat to live.

( INCOMING LONG POST. I can TL;DR about food with the best of them. )