My sweet sweet Harold.

You make my days brighter when I see you.

You make me smile and make me extremely happy.

I know you probably don't even know who I am, you see so many faces day to day.

But, Harold, you have truly made my life better.

You always deliver my pizza so quickly.  You never ever forget my ranch dressing.  You always smile and say "You have a nice day, ma'am."  

This world needs more Harolds.  And more thin crust pepperoni, onion, & mushroom pizzas.

Damnit... now I need to call Harold and order a pizza.

Harold... you da man.

Loving you is reminding me why love hurts.

Sitting back, waiting for you to decide you would like to actually be present and talk to me is reminding me why it is better to just be alone instead of being alone next to someone you are supposed to feel connected to.

Knowing you are a good man, but that you cannot love me like I need to be loved is breaking my heart.

Love is a fluid language.  Some people need love that touches them.  Some need more love that sparks their soul.  Some are perfectly content with little to no words and being apart more than you are together.  The thing is, people have to find those who love like they do.  No amount of feelings, compassion, physical touch can fix something broken if you don't love the same.  You must speak the same language when it comes to the love needed.

As I sit here, I am memorizing the way your eyes crinkle when you laugh at a stupid video on your phone.  I am watching how that one tiny mustache hair is crazy and dances when you breathe.  I am noticing that little scar above your eyebrow and how it looks like the moon.  And I am realizing that you'd never take the time to sit there and notice any of those little things about me.  You'd never just stare and feel like you could listen to me breathing for hours and be happy with it.  You'd never ask about how I like my coffee, or what my favorite color was, or how I got that scar on my knee.  Because you don't care about the details.  You don't care what tiny particles in life came together to shape who I am like I do about you.  You don't care to think about me when we can't see each other for a week.  You don't care to miss me at all, and if you do, you don't care to tell me.  You say you love me and call me beautiful, which I used to swoon over.  Now I cringe because I know you're saying it just to say it and there is no real meaning behind it. 

I am beginning to understand that no matter how much I love you, it can't fix the gap between us.  It can't make us better.  It can't heal the wounds you carry with you.  Sometimes, two good people are just not good for each other.  I've felt more alone next to you than I have by myself.  And that hurts.  Instead of repeatedly hurting myself with you, I realize that it is for the best to walk away.  So you can find someone who loves like you do, with little to no effort put forth.  Someone who can be content never having a conversation, never having to hear from you, never excited to see you even if they just saw you yesterday.  You'd enjoy that because that is how you love.  My love is different.  I show it.  I will go above and beyond to make sure you feel safe, protected, wanted, and respected.  I will give all that I can give if you need me too.  But by giving and giving and giving I am becoming empty.  With you as your number one priority, and you (and us) as my number one priority, no one is putting me first in any way.  I need to now put me first.  As hard as it will be to let you go, to never see those crinkles around your beautiful eyes again.  To never hear the laugh I love again.  To never hold your rough, working man's hand again.  It will hurt for a long time.  But it will hurt less knowing that I was brave enough to fight for myself.  To let you go find what it is that would make you happy, and let myself one day find a love like mine.

People always say they see life or light behind the eyes.

That glimmer of hope, they say, that's the prize.

But what of darkness?  Of lost faith and pain?

Why are these never spoken about or go unseen?

I saw a girl, her mouth curved in a smile.

But I could see that she had been dark for a while.

Her outward appearance was masked with fun,

But behind her eyes, you could see she was done.

There was no life seen inside those green eyes,

All I could see was the death inside.

I am fat.  Pleasantly plump.  Curvalicious.  Round-ish.  Shapely.  Rotund.  Chubby.  Whatever people call it now a days.  

And ya know what?  I don't care.  Let me see if I can share some common misconceptions about me and my fellow fatties.

1)  You must eat all day.  

Actually... no.  I have to remind myself to eat most of the time.  Just the other day, I didn't eat anything at all until 3:30 PM, after I fainted at the library from low blood-sugar.  I know, this is terrible.  And no, I don't do it on purpose.  I simply don't like eating when I'm not hungry, and I'm usually only hungry around 4:00 in the afternoon.  This is me most days.  Setting reminders on my phone for every few hours to eat something, granola bar, whatever.  Then, I have a few days every month that I want to eat EVERYTHING.  My go-to fat kid snacking day is typically full of pickles and pickled foods.  

2) You probably only eat food that's bad for you/processed foods.

Do I want a cheeseburger sometimes?  Hell yeah I do.  And I get one.  What about tacos?  Um, yes... Taco Tuesdays.  And my favorite fast-ish food?  Hot Wings.  The hotter the better.  But on regular days, my cravings include pickles, asparagus, salads, watermelon, cantaloupe, broccoli... I think you catch my drift.  I've literally had people tell me "Oh wow, you eat so healthy for someone on the plus side."

3) You must have high blood pressure/diabetes/etc.

Nope, my blood pressure is perfect, no diabetes, no high cholesterol.  My doctor, the first time I saw her, came in after running all these tests and blood work and had this stink eye look on her face.  She says, "I don't mean to be rude, but you are really healthy for someone so overweight."  Never start a sentence with "I don't mean to be rude..." because that in itself is rude.  Haha.

4) You are sad you aren't skinny.  You must dislike skinny women.

Um... no.  I think one of the most glorious things about humanity is that we're all different.  We come in all sorts of shapes and colors and sizes.  I love that.  We are art.  I think that society tells us we have to do this or that or look like this or that... but who cares?  Are you happy?  Then be happy.  Do you want to lose weight because it would make you happy?  I will be right behind you supporting you every step of the way.  Do you want to gain weight because you'll be happy... then hell, let's go eat.  I believe that we are so focused on what people look like, we forget to see who they are.  We become completely blinded by how much someone weighs or what kind of clothes they wear or how they fix their hair, that we don't even take the time to see how amazing they are inside.  How funny they are or how nice they are or how innovative and adventurous they are.  We miss out on this totally awesome person.  Why?  Because they don't look like society's standard of beauty.  Screw society.  What has it ever really done for you besides bring you down?

5) You'll never find a significant other/someone to date.

Erm... if someone didn't want to know me because I wear a size 18... then I don't really think that not having them in my life is any kind of loss.  I see it as a plus.  (haha, see what I did there?)  Also, have you ever been on awkward dates?  For real, though... blind dates can show someone just how lovely it is to be single forever.  The person who will eventually come into your life?  They'll think you're freaking amazing and wonderful and that rainbows and butterflies shoot from your arse hole when you fart.  Trust me.

Now, the word fat.  It doesn't bother me at all.  And I LOVE when people try to use it to insult me.  "Well, you're fat."  I always laugh and say "I know right?"  Because... I am.  Fat is a descriptive word.  It's like saying "She has black hair."  If you choose to see it as just another word, it doesn't offend you.  It becomes powerless and truthfully?  Kinda funny.  Fat.  Fatty Fat Fat.  Fatty Kins.  I love that word.  Fat & Fabulous.  

Also, let's not body shame anyone who doesn't look like us.  Because, HELLO, why do we want everyone to look the same?  That would suck.  We would no longer be art, we'd be copies.  That's just shitty.  How about, we just let people look how they want to look and be happy.  I like that idea better.

I consider myself somewhat funny.  Enough so, that I plan to try my hand at stand up this year sometime.  I love making people laugh.  There isn't as much laughter in today's crazy world.  I am truly convinced that if more people laughed, this world would be better for it.  After all, love may make the world go 'round, but it's the laughter that keeps us all from getting dizzy.

That being said, I do have moments where I need to stop and be serious.  I am a mess.  My life is a mess.  I moved away from home at the age of 17 and supported myself (more scraped by for myself than fully supported myself at times) ever since.  I was unable to go to college more than one semester after high school due to needing to work a few jobs or weird hours and pay bills.  Gradually, after hard work, I found what I thought might be a career for me.  Unfortunately, after five years, that came to an end.  I decided to go back to school (as seen in my previous post).  As my job was going down the drain, I found my life following in the same fashion.  I was in a terrible relationship with a person who was not very nice.  Those two big happenings in my life led me to here.  Looking for work, but that is proving to be unsuccessful.  (I'm going to be honest here and say that the lack of job offers really does surprise me.  I thought I would find work fairly quickly.)  I am doing well in school, thankfully.  Honors Institute, all As, 3.89 GPA.  That part of my life is awesome, sometimes a little on the difficult side, but overall I'm happy with school.  I'm starting to grow worried about bills.  What if I can't find a job?  I've gone through quite a bit of savings already to keep the bills up to date.  

Also, I've moved from my old place with my not so nice ex, out to the country where cost of living and life in general is less expensive.  That also means that most of my friends don't live close, nor do they keep in touch.  I sometimes feel very isolated and sad.  I'm generally a quirky, happy person.  Weird, too.  I like my Weird flag and fly it high!  So to be so melancholy at times bothers me more than it should.  I have a great life, a few great people in it, a good head on my shoulders, a roof over my head.  There are so many people out there who have had more troubles and deeper woes than I have, and I should not complain.  I know this.  But I do think, also, that letting it out is necessary at times.  You have to be able to breathe out, talk out, remove somehow that negative energy inside of you to be able to let the positive energy back in to take control.  I like this quote I read once.  It said "It's okay to have a breakdown sometimes, just don't stay there."  It's true.  We, as humans, have been conditioned to believe that having moments of doubt or moments of actual emotion means that we are weak.  I disagree, having emotion, showing that we ARE human?  That doesn't make people weak.  It makes them strong.  Strong enough to feel.  In a world so empty of feeling something, anything we need to learn that feeling is okay.  Feeling happy is great, feeling sad or angry, well that's human and it's great, too.  As long as we can understand how to process those feelings in a healthy way and not become destructive, we NEED those feelings.  This is why people are so angry in society today.  Anger is a reaction of being unable to process and understand what emotions you are actually feeling (typically sadness or fear of something).  Let's be human.

So, this post went an entirely different route than I thought it would.  But hey, writing from the heart here, scattered as though it seems.  May this post help someone in some way today.  It definitely helped me to write it.  :)

HOW TO SHOWER LIKE A WOMAN

1) Take off clothing and place it in sectioned laundry hamper according to lights and darks.

2) Walk to the bathroom wearing robe or large t-shirt.  If you see husband along the way, cover up exposed areas.

3) Look at your womanly physique in the mirror - making mental notes about working out and eating better.  Criticize every little detail.

4) Get in the shower.  Use face cloth, arm cloth, leg cloth, long loofah, wide loofah, and the pumice stone.

5) Wash your hair once with cucumber and sage shampoo with 43 added vitamins.

6) Wash your hair again, just to make sure that it's really clean.

7) Condition your hair with grapefruit mint conditioner enhanced with natural avocado oil and coconut oil.  You don't really know what the coconut oil does, but everyone talks about it working miracles all over the place.

8) Wash your face with crushed apricot face scrub for 10 minutes until your skin is a nice shade of red.

9) Wash entire rest of your body with ginger nut and jaffa cake body wash.

10) Rinse conditioner off of hair.

11) Shave your entire body.  Twice.  Damn goosebumps...

12) Turn off the shower.

13) Squeegee off all wet surfaces in the shower and spray mold prone spots with cleaner.

14) Get out of the shower, dry with a towel the size of a small country.  Wrap hair in a super absorbent towel.

15) Check entire body for any zits or small stray hairs.  Freak out.  

16) Return to bedroom wearing towels.

17) If you see husband along the way, cover up any exposed areas.

HOW TO SHOWER LIKE A MAN

1) Take off clothes while sitting on the edge of the bed and leave them in a pile on the floor.

2) Walk naked to the bathroom.  If you see your wife along the way, shake wiener at her making a "woo-woo" sound.

3) Look in the mirror, look at your man-hammer and scratch your ass.

4) Get in the shower.

5) Wash our face and armpits.

6) Blow your nose in your hands and let the water rinse them off.

7) Make fart noises (real or artificial) and laugh at how loud they sound in the shower.

8) Spend majority of time washing privates and surrounding areas.

9) Wash your butt, leaving those coarse butt hairs stuck on the bar of soap that smells like auto air freshener.  New Car scent.

10) Shampoo your hair, make shampoo mohawk.

11) Pee.  Twice.

12) Rinse off and get out of the shower.

13) Partially dry off, fail to notice water on floor because curtain was hanging out of the tub the entire time.

14) Admire wiener size in the mirror.

15) Leave the shower curtain open, wet mat on the floor, light and fan on.

16) Return to bedroom with towel around your waist.  If you pass wife, pull off towel, shake wiener at her and yell out "helicopter!!"

17) Throw wet towel on the bed.

2016 was a year of change for me.  I lost my youth.  (I turned 30.  Ask most women, this is a big deal.)  I decided to go back to school to one day teach art and history.  I still FEEL young most of the time.  Then, my classes started, and I found myself surrounded by young men and women under the age of twenty. 

For the most part, age hasn't been discussed too often.  But, of course, the first days of classes everyone is curious about the person sitting next to them or the Professor decides they want to know a brief version of who we are and why we're there.  During one of my Humanities classes, the Professor told us that she would need all the money up front for the field trips we were going to take this semester.  She said she took PayPal and also checks.  I pull out my checkbook, write the check, then jot it down in the register and balance it.  The young girl next to me, she is 19, gasped.  "Oh my gosh!!  I've never seen one of those in real life!" (talking about my check register) "You even do all the math stuff and everything!  That is so cool!"

My eyes got wide and my face went to a lovely shade of lobster.  In that moment, I felt like shit for ever calling anyone old.  I do remember what it was like to be 19.  I remember feeling like people who were older than 25 not only were old, but that they must have really had their lives together.

Now, I'm the old one.  I'm a Freshman in college, I have no real career, no children/family of my own (well, except for my dog), and I do not have my life together.  It's a complete mess at the moment if we're being honest.  But it's my mess, and I'm learning to embrace the season of changes I'm going through.

I guess the moral of this whole post is this:  I spent my younger years yearning to grow up.  I imagined exactly where I would be and what I'd be doing when I turned 30 (I was way off).  There have been a whole lot of moments where I got depressed or angry or frustrated that I was nowhere near where I had wanted to be, but I've come to realize that no one has their life together.  Not really.  Life is just this crap shoot of good and bad.  We get what we get, and it's up to us to choose how we react to it.  If we choose to let it make us bitter and grouchy and sad, well then that's what we'll be.  If we choose to be thankful that we get any moments at all in this fragile thing we call life, then we see quite a bit more of the good than the bad.

So, I'll be happy that I'm old and decrepit to my young classmates.  I'm a much better student at 30 than I would have been at 19.  I'm more hungry to learn than I would have been.  

Class starts soon, so I better get my Depends on and my cane.  ;)