...and, then life happens.

This is the last week before school starts for me. I'm super excited about this coming semester. I'm going to learn Perl! But, of course, since its the last week before school, its not my last free week before school. We had a Welcome Party for the incoming graduate students (I made peach pie). There was a teaching conference (where we were served pizza for lunch every day.)


And, I've not written a damn thing down I've eaten since Breakfast on Tuesday. *sigh* I was on such a roll.


Here's the funny thing about this: writing everything down made me feel a little like I had some sort of disorder; that I was sliding down the slippery slope towards ED. Not writing things down makes me feel a little chaotic and out of control. (Also, I feel like I've lost three days because I don't have dated journal entries for them.) I don't know if this is a good thing, like I'm getting used to the notion of keeping track of things as part of my life or if its a bad thing. I suppose only time will tell. So, I'm back on the wagon again this morning (it was a morning of bacon and tea. Lots of tea.) . I suppose it will be easier once classes actually start as I will be bringing my own lunch. Which reminds me, I need to pick up some bread and lunch meat.

Obsessive Journaling

I have been food journaling this summer because I have read that the best way to really stay on top of your weight is to keep track of what you put in. I'm not going to say that I have been wildly successful with this tactic, but more often than not I remember to write stuff down and the general trend for the summer has been weight loss. This is good.


I have a problem, though.


I feel like I have a disease when I do this. Seriously. Writing down absolutely everything I eat makes me feel neurotic or like I'm trying to suss out an allergy or that I may be slowly skipping down the path to anorexia. It freaks me out a little. And, I don't know what to do about that.

Body Image and a Project I'm working on

So, I've been working on this thing. I joined one of those Flickr, 365 self-portraits in 365 days on my birthday this year. This is picture 43. The idea for this project grew out of a "powerful women" idea that I had way back in the day when I still lived in Iowa City and worked at a bookstore shelving magazines. The original thought was that people in general are involved in many narratives and we use these narratives to build our conception of ourselves. And, I'm interested in women in particular because I feel like one of the things that smart, strong, successful, powerful women do is perform the parts of their identity that they think are the most important, that they want to be the most salient in such a way that it can't be ignored. That you see what they see because, for lack of a better way to put it, they are such masters of appearance that they allow their interpretation of whatever feature is relevant to be not only a violable option, but the most likely option were you to talk or think or come up with a notion about them. So, How do you do that? And, how do we, as individuals decide (if we decide consciously at all) what is most important about ourselves and how do we then make that something other people see and think is important, too. This interests me.


So, the original idea was to sit down with awesome women that I know and interview them and discuss image and how they like to be perceived and how they try to make their ideas about who they are known, but for now I'm my guinea pig for these 365 days and then we'll see where things go after that. This picture is the furthest out on a limb that I've been during this project. I hope to get more adventurous (and better at lighting and angles) as time goes on. The idea behind this one was stple, I find a nice soak in the bath with a book to be a most enjoyable experience. And, part of that experience is adding a little extra hot water to the tub when it cools down a bit. For some reason, it makes me think a little bit about Marilyn Monroe in the Seven Year Itch, only she'd be sitting in a cool bathtub because it was just so hot in New York. I guess this means that the photo (since, yes, I just compared myself to Marilyn Monroe) may be inadvertently sexy. But, that wasn't the intention.

True Story.