in lieu of posting nothing at all

[oiran]

I tried on some more of my old clothes today. I have two long, simple wool skirts, both quite expensive, that I bought...maybe 8 years ago? I don't remember why I never got around to wearing them then, but I didn't, and then soon I was too fat to wear them anyway. So, today I tried them on and they fit.

I have gone down 8-10 sizes since moving back to Tennessee. I'm rather close to where I want to end up. This makes me quite pleased.

For years and years, when I was Skeleton!Girl, I thought I was fat. Because I was a young woman, that's why. It's just what young women do. Then, oddly, as I started gaining weight, I didn't really realize what was happening. I thought I was still the same size for a long time. But I really, really wasn't.

It's all well and good for people to say that love shouldn't take body size into consideration but, in fact, it does. People like me better when I am thin. This makes me hate people a little bit, actually. And anyone else who has ever had significant weight changes will probably tell you the same.

Five Things You May Not Know About My Time in School:

1. Teachers and administrators urged my parents to allow me to be skipped grades multiple times, but for some reason Mom & Dad thought that it would be better for me socially to stay with my age-matched tormentors every step of the way.


2. I was so full of loathing for institutionalized learning and my peers by the time I was done with high school, that the idea of more school made me physically ill.


3. Finally going to college at age 21 was a huge mistake, for reasons that are too complex to go into here. Plus, I had no money and no one in my family was willing to help pay for me to keep attending, so I stopped. After a month.


4. I went, albeit briefly, to a very alternative college, one which encouraged crazy-ass behavior on the part of faculty, such as fucking students, or telling big whopping lies about one student to others. So, I was probably right when I assumed that *my* teacher would not get into trouble for telling my fellow students elaborate stories about the many painful years I supposedly spent in a mental institution. He extrapolated this from my mentioning that I had been working for psychiatrists as an office manager for a couple of years prior to attending college. I actually only found out about this long after I'd dropped out, when people I'd been in class with would come up to me in the grocery story and congratulate me on my bravery. The first to compliment me, a girl, who had never spoken to me while we were classmates, tearfully hugged me and told me I was the only other person who could possibly understand her inpatient experience. Which, I hated to tell her, wasn't true.


5. If you don't go to college, you don't have to pay back student loans. While I like not having to pay back loans, this is seeming less and less like a socially reasonable trade.

Five Things You May Not Know About the Job (Jobs) I Have (or Had):

1. I never worked retail or food service.


2. My first job was running an insurance claims office after school. I'd show up at about 3:30, and everyone else would leave to go eat dinner together and drink. Sometimes, they'd all come back drunk and hole up in an office giggling. I think the woman who had the office manager title was fucking a couple of the guys. There was a recovered stolen bike sitting around in the hallway for a while, and drunk people liked to ride it up and down the hallway shrieking and banging the handlebars into the filing cabinets.


3. I did all the paperwork. ALL of it. I had the best accuracy rate in the nation.


4. I quit when the owner of the franchise gambled away the payroll at the horse track and tried to get out of paying us. The boss, who worked out of another office most of the time, and was truly a dickhead, tried to get me to come back, but he offered no incentive. Basically, it was: "We need you, but we won't pay you yet, and you won't get a raise or any recognition, either. So come back." Later, I found out that they were receiving CISPES (a gov't job program) money to cover part of my salary, but it was a part I wasn't actually being paid - they were reporting to the state employment department that I was being paid $2.50/hr more than I ever actually got. It's fairly easy to extrapolate that there were probably a few more scams involved with this business.


5. Years after I quit, I got a call from one of the guys I'd worked with there. He'd gotten my number from my (stupid) mother. He was drunk and wanted me to drive ~60 miles to his house to have a "private party" since I was, apparently, his only friend. He became very belligerent when I refused to do so and started threatening me. I hung up. Has a proposition like that ever worked for anyone?

Five Three Things You May Not Know About My Online Life:

1. I've been online since 1991. Things have changed so much…does Usenet even exist in a useful form any more?


2. Despite being online for years and years, I never got around to learning any HTML until I got an LJ and wanted to make it prettier.


3. Other than Mr. Glove, everyone I currently am close with is someone I met online.

Five Things You May Not Know About Where I Live:

1. I don't like it here. Oh, wait - you probably do know that. But when Mr. Glove started talking about maybe moving west-ish with his employer, I started thinking about my friends in the area and how I'd miss them. Besides, the farthest west we'd be able to get is Las Vegas, which isn't remotely like Seattle or Portland.


2. There are worse places in the world, I know. Probably within a hundred miles of this place. But I'm not so stubborn and blindered that I can't see that there is good here. Southern summer nights really can be special. Most of the time, it stinks like river mud and garbage and is too hot, but on rare occasions the air smells like fresh, hot plants and it's just the right amount of humid and warm and it's…really perfect.


3. The uglier the food, the better it tastes.


4. No one really dresses up. Instead, they buy incredibly expensive sportswear. Maybe that's how every place is now, but it seemed very strange to me when we moved here.


5. Although they are certainly beautiful and wild, the Smoky Mountains are not actually mountains. They are but hills of daunting size. Still, very pretty, especially in the fall.

Five Things You May Not Know About My Core Personality:I Really Don't Understand This "Core Personality" Business:

Um…what does this mean? The few people that I've met from online are probably better able to explain what's different between me in person and me online. I try to be as congruent as possible, except I complain more in real life.

Five Things You May Not Know About My Home Life:

1. I don't put away my clothes. Neither does Mr. Glove. They get folded and then sit around in nice, clean heaps.


2. I use the dining room table mostly as a place to put stuff down as I'm walking in the door.


3. I have to have messes pointed out to me. Anything that spills on the counter, for instance, becomes a natural-and-forever part of the counter to my eyes.


4. We have five birds, two guinea pigs and a dog. All of them get fairly elaborate meals, everything organic. Cooking "stew" for birds is the only actual cooking I do on a regular basis.


5. Mr. Glove does 95% of the cooking for the humans in the household. Since we've started eating differently, I make salad for both of us, so at least I'm involved now.

Five Things You May Not Know That I Desperately Want:

1. Pretty shoes. All of the pretty shoes in the entire world. Size 10.


2. A second, hopefully normal, dog to help the first dog relax and enjoy life a little bit.


3. My urge/ability to write anything readable to return to me, pronto.


4. Some sense of my past super-organization skills, or at least an understanding of what happened to them to make them go away…


5. A local (Nashvegas) friend that I can calli> up to go do things. Things like try on shoes, get silly in bars, and watch boys kiss. I don't care if this person is male or female.

FiveJust Two Embarrassing Fannish Admissions:

1. I have a signed picture of Michael Rosenbaum. I did not enjoy getting it - I found the process humiliating. Last time I saw it, it had fallen behind the couch and I left it there. Mr. Glove may have thrown it out by now.


2. I used to make bold statements about the incomprehensibility of anime/manga fandoms. Apparently, my opinion has been swayed.

Five Zero Things You May Not Know About What I Do in a Typical Day:

Oh, I think you pretty much know it all, except for the details (frequency, method) of my masturbatory activities. There are a very few things that I like to keep private.

Five Things That You Might Not Know Are Important to My Character:

This is the same as that "core personality" thing, really, isn't it? Unless by "my character" we're referring to some D&D or RPG character that I'm overidentifying with…

1. I'm a terrible snob. It's just that I'm snobby about things that aren't obvious, perhaps.


2. I'm pro-death penalty. And I don't think everyone can be redeemed. I think plenty of people are broken from the beginning and are never going to work right.


3. I think love should be useful in some way, not just empty words.


4. Injustice fills me with rage.¹ Like, serious, homicidal-type rage. I have always wanted a gun (shooting at targets is a total rush), but this particular strain of anger is why I don't actually have one.


5. I use the word "interesting" literally. It's not a euphemism for "freakish and scary." It's a compliment, in my opinion, even if the thing I am finding so interesting is, in fact, also repellent and/or evil.

¹Yes, I realize that this doesn't go along with "pro-death penalty" for some people, but it does for me...