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Lengthy weekend rambling rant

2003-06-08 - 9:27 a.m.

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I feel really fat today, and pretty damn disgusted with myself over it. Which is why it makes NO sense that I�m sitting here eating cold pineapple-ham pizza for breakfast as I type this. Well, actually, the sense it makes is from a financial standpoint... I�m not about to let four slices of perfectly good, expensive pizza go to waste. Because obviously I�m better off having it HANGING from my waist, right?

I really, really need to get back on Weight Watchers. I have no idea what my problem is at this point. Well, I guess I do have an idea, really... it�s just a lot of little things. Like the fact that I get bored with my diet menu after a few weeks, but it just seems like too much work to come up with new stuff to fix. And I really don�t like to cook, and if I�m going to go out to eat or to get takeout, I feel really deprived if I have to order something �low points� instead of my favorite high-calorie treats. And far be it from me to deprive myself...

At various times of my life I�ve had valid reasons/excuses why I couldn�t lose weight, but right now that�s not the case. I know what I need to do and I know that it works if I do it... it�s purely a matter of self-discipline at this point.

I�m on my way to getting back on plan. I went through my online food journals at the WW website and printed out a month�s worth from early in the plan when I was doing good. Now to go through and plan my current menus around that. My first steps need to be drinking more water and, once again, getting off the sugary stuff! Once I�ve got those two things under control the rest should be a lot easier.

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I talked to my grandmother in Ohio on Friday. I love my grandma to bits and pieces, I really do. She�s like a mother to me... which is great in some ways but which also means that we have a lot of those fun mother/daughter issues between us. I know she loves me, but she disapproves heartily and vociferously of many of my life choices. She is particularly horrified by my rejection of her fundamentalist Christian beliefs. She�s utterly opinionated when it comes to her religious beliefs, and those beliefs strongly influence what she believes about everything else in life. She�s right, she knows she�s right, and anyone who doesn�t believe the way she does is just too stubborn to SEE she�s right.

My grandmother disapproves of my religious beliefs, my long hair, by my multiple marriages and, as it turns out, my political beliefs. And while she loves my husband because a) he treats me and my daughter well and b) because he�s just a likeable sort of guy, she thinks HE�s opinionated and blames most of what she doesn�t like about me these days on his influence over me.

This is far more amusing to me than infuriating, but it does aggravate me a bit that she thinks this. Ever since I was a kid, she�s blamed any new ideas I had, or anything I did wrong, on the �bad influence� of some other person. She just can�t wrap her head around the idea that I might think about things and come up with... gasp... different conclusions from hers! Because obviously any smart, thinking person would just naturally agree with her, you know.

My atheism/agnosticism bugs the shit out of her. She raised me to be Christian, and despite my long periods of indifference to religion as I was growing up, underneath it all I did believe mostly as she did. It never occurred to me not to believe, because Christianity has a lot of built-in safeguards to discourage questioning. That whole �you�re going to hell if you should happen to die in a moment of unbelief� thing is damned effective at keeping the hard questions at bay, let me tell you. As is the threat of being �left behind� after the Rapture. Talk about brainwashing! It took me a long time and a lot of work to deprogram myself from my lifelong Christian indoctrination, and it really annoys me that my grandmother thinks I could easily cast it aside to please a man. (And the man in question, while interested in my views, couldn�t be less interested in influencing my religious beliefs or lack thereof anyway.)

My husband HAS influenced me on certain things since we�ve been together. The long hair is directly attributable to him... it was semi-long when we met and he�s encouraged me to keep growing it because he likes it. There have been times I�d have liked to cut it off, generally on some impulse, but I�ve resisted the urge largely because I know the Prince wouldn�t be happy about it. And most of the time, I DO like my long hair. I�m about four inches from waistlength now and I�m really pleased about it because I�ve always admired ultra-long hair on other women. I just never thought I had the patience or the right type of hair to have it myself. Now that I see that it can look pretty long, I�m hoping to grow it down to my butt.

The atheism had absolutely NOTHING to do with the Prince. First of all, he�s not an atheist. He�s got some, er, rather unique beliefs about God and religion and the afterlife, but while he rejects organized religion and Christianity for the most part, his beliefs are not too far out of line with traditional views. I would think that if nothing else, the fact that the Prince and I MET on an online atheist message board would clue my grandmother in that even before I met the Prince I was questioning the religion I was brainwashed into as a child (why else would I have been hanging around there in the first place?) But although she doesn�t come right out and say it directly, I know she thinks I became an atheist because the Prince is one. Because, you see, if he�s not a Christian or a Catholic--who she sniffily believes have got the Christian religion all wrong but are going to Heaven in spite of it because in amongst all the extraneous bullshit they do hold the belief that Jesus died for their sins--then he must be an atheist or at the very least some sort of a heretic. (At least he�s not an idolator like those damned Buddhists.)

And even though I�ve explained to her many times the history of how the Prince and I met, I KNOW she still thinks I broke up my previous marriage because of meeting him. The honest-to-goodness truth is that I did meet him before Dick and I were officially over... we were in marriage counseling at the time due to the rift caused by my online affair with another guy. But the Prince and I were just friends... he sent me some jokes in email, we chit-chatted a little, nothing serious at all. In December Dick and I officially declared our marriage over, and it wasn�t until January that, as a free woman, I started flirting with the Prince which ultimately led to our meeting in person and the whole rest of the story which followed. I did not break up my marriage for him, but even though I�ve told my grandmother the entire sordid tale of what really led to the breakup, she pretends to believe me, while her facial expression says, �Uh-huh, sure, whatever you say.�

I have my brothers and cousins to thank for the fact that she doesn�t harp on my marital history more... they keep her plenty distracted with their own relationship antics. I may be a black sheep, but in my family I�m only one of an entire herd of them. Thank you, cousin who is going on his third marriage which will put us in a tie for �most married grandchild� status; and thank you other cousin who married a Native American woman 10 years his senior and absorbed himself into her tribe and culture; and thanks also to a third cousin who had quite a reputation for being a man-whore but who finally settled down with a wife only to find out their baby wasn�t really his and who is now back to being a man-whore again--to the point that he actually slept with my brother�s estranged fiancee; and thank you brother who is contemplating sleeping with the man-whore cousin�s ex-wife for revenge and who once had three paternity tests pending at the same time; and many thanks also to another brother, who is married to a contentious woman who has been mad at our family for YEARS and who does not come around us much to avoid having to fight with her about it. And last but not least, thank you, mother dear, for setting the gold standard for the rest of us with your four marriages to and numerous shack-ups with the kind of men that normal, sensible people fear meeting in a dark alley (but whom you inexplicably decided were suitable for bringing home to live amongst your children.) Thank you all, for you are much higher up on Grandma�s shit-list than I.

But I digress. The point is, I talked to my grandma on Friday, and practically the first words out of her mouth were, �Oh, Ann Coulter is on... I love her...� and apparently she found the gagging noises I made in response to be offensive. (Some people are so sensitive.) We proceeded to argue heatedly about the war, and about why it�s a BAD thing for a president to lie to Congress and to the American public about the reason he wants to go to war, even if the war did turn out to have the positive effect liberating the Iraqui people from an evil dictator so they could enjoy rampant crime, internal strife and freedom from such things as electricity and food.

�I think the Prince has brainwashed you,� my grandma said, disgustedly. �You never used to think this way.�

Grrrr... how the hell does SHE know what I used to think politically? The subject never came up, as I never used to think about politics at all when I lived in Ohio. With the exception of the first Clinton election, I rarely ever bothered to vote. At the time I felt like, why bother? Asking me to choose between your average Republican and your average Democrat is like asking me if I�d rather have beets or okra. I hate them both but if I have to have one, I guess it doesn�t really matter which so just pick one already. But then a presidential election was hijacked by a power-mad liar and some of our nicest tall buildings got knocked down by people who hate our foreign policy and our economy tanked and the Patriot Act passed and a bunch of crazies in influential places in our government are playing �Pinky and the Brain� behind closed doors and a classical nude statue in the Hall of Justice became �offensive� and and the president declared a national day of prayer and fasting for success in war that a whole lot of us in this country never wanted and Roe v. Wade is being eyed by an ultra-conservative Supreme Court, causing conservative Christian-fundie breeder-types all over the country to cream their white cotton granny-panties in glee and suddenly, the okra is starting to look a hell of a lot more appetizing than the beets, ok?

Yes, my husband has influenced my thinking on these issues, but mainly because he is a dedicated seeker of truth who searches out the best, most reliable sources of information and delves deeply into what he finds. He has taught me a lot, but I don�t blindly accept whatever he tells me. I read. I think. We argue and debate and discuss and while our political views are similar, they are quite far from identical. Brainwashed my ass. I guess I will forever be fourteen in the mind of my grandma.

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Yeah, I know I�ve been going on way too long, but what the hell. I wanted to add this shocking little anecdote, in case you weren�t already worried enough about the economy. I talked to my dad on Friday and found out that he got laid off from his new job after only three months. (Thank you, nepotism. Hope the boss�s son is enjoying himself in the spiffy new job he stole from my dad. Fuckers.)

But anyway... he was telling me all about it, and mentioned that at least he didn�t have to feel bad for making a wrong choice in leaving his last job. He said that he�d have been in the exact same position (laid-off) had he stayed at any of his last three jobs. The job before the one from which he just got laid off is in dire financial straights and recently demoted a 22-year sales veteran back into the sales position my dad had held. And the company he worked for before THAT is going to be closing its doors at the end of the month. We�re living in a scary, scary economy, people.








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Last Five
Crappy job crap, weird neighbor, and someone whose baby I apparently want to have - 2006-05-08
Live from the dump - 2006-04-09
Kind of like a muzzle for your brain - 2006-03-29
...and then she fell ass-first into my cereal bowl - 2006-03-28
Playing catch-up - 2006-03-27





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