My biggest challenge

I am only 24 years old, and up to this point, I guess you can say I have had my share of ups and catastrophic downs. I feel that over the past 5 years, I have grown and changed as a person (since I have been on my own, not by choice though). I had to change schools in order to get my bachelors degree, had to disengage from certain family members in order to stay sane, decided on stalling going to work in order to get more education and so forth. But I think the biggest change I have had to deal with is facing the issues I have with my weight and my health. For the most part, I have been blessed not be affected with any serious health ailments. But I worry everyday about having too high cholesterol and somehow an early onset of cardiovascular diseases and hypertension. This is mainly because those 2 diseases are prevalent on my mother’s side of the family. And by me not knowing anything about the side of the family of the sperm that created me, makes me worry at times even more what other health conditions I could be more inclined to getting. That’s why, after I had spent a summer in Purdue for this research program, to change the way I eat. And even though I have not reached all the health goals I am aiming for, I feel that I have at least started down the right path. I have been trying to eat more fruits and vegetables in my diet everyday, cut down on fast food, and cut down on other foods high in sugar and fat. I do admit that a weakness I still have is eating burritos, particularly from Chipotle, but I am working on it (as my budget tells me so). I have for the most part stopped eating pork, cut down on the amount of red meat I eat, make most of my dinners from this healthy living cookbook I bought, and eat more turkey (turkey lunchmeat, turkey bacon, turkey burgers etc). And I have been trying to feverishly and passionately cut down on the foods that contain high fructose corn syrup (that stuff is the devil, even if there isn’t anything substantive that validates my claims of the pure evilness of this stuff) I do think at times I may eat too much at a meal setting and when I do run out of the healthy food, either because of lack of funds or time at the moment, end up resorting to eating food in the food court or Chipotle like foods to get by until I do get back to the grocery store. (At least at my last 2 grocery runs, I have not bought or ended up buying 1 thing at the most that HFCS in it, yay me!) But the one thing I have not been able to incorporate on a consistent basis is exercising. I feel that for me to have productive workouts I have to workout 2 hours everyday at a rec center, walking a mile on an inclined treadmill, doing the elliptical, arc trainers and sometimes bike, while doing many reps of triceps press, biceps, pull down, shoulder and chest press. To me, this is the kind of workout I could, even though I have to admit I don’t know how to exactly keep the intensity up after my body becomes adjusted to the workouts that I create. But that is beside the point, my biggest issue since I have been in grad school is overcoming the mentality I get when I get to working out like I do. I feel when I workout like I do intensely, I feel that I am not putting enough time into studying, because I seem to clock out early at night than I would usually do. So when I have this workout regime, by time the middle of the semester hits, I already feel behind in my class work or the workload has increased ridiculously that I feel I have to sacrifice working out, taking breaks during the day, or even reading the news in order to feel as if I am being productive doing my homework. And when I let this mentality set in, I end up ceasing to workout for weeks at a time, until something forces me to go back to the gym until the next round of my schoolwork mentality kicks in (usually finals or conclusion of major projects). So what is going to force me back to the gym this week, even though I have a ton of work to do? Stepping on my digital scale today, I somehow gained 8 or 9 pounds from the last time I was on there. And I have no idea how that happened, and its pretty startling just because the amount I weight now, I would be labeled by some as very overweight. But then I have this particularly linebacker type built body since I was a kid, and I don’t know. The only part of my body I feel insecure about is from my stomach on up, because I stopped doing sit-ups and now my gut just pushed out and I have the flabbiest arms ever. I do know that once for all, I want to feel better with the way I look, and at least be heart and cholesterol healthy if I can’t just drop the pants and shirt sizes. I said all that to say-um-well…other than I am actually pretty insecure about my body, which is totally the opposite of how I usually act (which is usually without a care in a world) and that once and for all I want my upper body to be muscular and not flabby like my lower body is. I know it won’t happen overnight, and I have to fight the urges of wanting to spend money on fast food and/or eating out, and for me and most importantly, exercising everyday, even if I can’t get to a rec center to workout. I am thinking that for the summer coming up while I am my internship, I am going to be on a salad diet, like all summer and see what happens. Well, my journey continues in trying to revolutionize how I eat and how I exercise. Stay tuned and wish me luck.

That pesky...

That pesky demon that has always affected me for as long as I can remember. Self-esteem issues. Its funny because people that know me would have no idea how I really felt about myself sometimes. I always come off as the wise-cracking, sarcastic asshole with a sense of humor that sometimes catches my friends off guard (because of my usual deliberation to not try to make the joke in the first place, it can be kind of uncanny at times). Or most people that meet me think I have this great confidence with self, but its crazy because when I am alone, reflecting about things (which I do alot), I am very self-conscious and critical of myself. But aren't we all? Perhaps. I just know that the main thing I am very conscious about is my weight. When I asked my friend today to guess my weight she guessed that I must be at 200 pounds. Now when she told me that, I was pretty stunned by her guess. Most of my friends have no idea or always guess wrong. (I weighed at the clinic today at 270). Last time I saw a couple of doctors just to get checked out, they made it a point to ask me what kind of foods I eat and how often I exercise. Which is pretty funny because I end up working out at least 3 times a week minimum and when I having my moments I hit the rec center here at school 6 times a week. And yet when I do that, I still feel I don't see results. But regardless, I have always been conscious about weight since I was in elementary school. It seem that I would somehow work out the lower body but never kept my upper body in control (i.e. love handles and gut). But needless to say, I used to fall in the habit for going for fad diets, starving diets, barely eating diets, then switch it up with exercising like crazy. The crazy part was I would start, but would never remain consistent with it, so I would eventually go back to my old eating habits. Now part of it when I was growing up, my folks basically bought foods that we could afford, which at times ranged from processed foods to fast foods. I don't blame them, they had to do what they had to do to try to feed me. I remember eating alot of fried foods, especially chicken and fish Fridays (aw man homemade quality fried fish). When I was in high school I managed to control my weight in one aspect because I was playing sports but in other aspects not so well because of what I ate and the error of my ways and not knowing that you shouldn't try to bulk up on the weights unless trained properly and you are going to be devoted to weight training. Needless to say, I would gain weight even though I had started to watch what I eat because my dumb ass lifting heavy weights (not no punk stuff mind you) so that by time I was getting ready for college, I pretty much stopped weight lifting and you can guess what all that muscle I bulked up on started to turn to. I was even teased one time in high school for being shaped like a linebacker ready to take someone out. So fast forward to college and the horrendous eating habits I engaged in and its no surprise that I added my freshman 15 and then some. It wasn't until my senior year of college that I decided to start get serious about my health lifestyle. So I started by trying to change drastically what I ate by eating more salads. Then I started to cut out fried foods in my life (no more Popeye's, Old Navy Seafood and so forth). Then I decided to stop eating pork (it was my Achilles's heel for the longest. And some steps in between. I am nowhere near where I want to weight or in my ideal dress size (currently 18, I want to get down to at least a 12). Now is that possible for my body physique to reach that type of goal? I learned that diets don't really work and that I have to change the way I eat slowly but surely. I think I am getting there but not quite yet. I have found it hard to totally and entirely give up on fast foods. Every once in awhile I will sprang for a burger, but usually my weakness is Chipotle burritos. ( I am trying to wean myself off that too). Then if I really don't have time to cook or have no groceries or expect a long night in the lab, I end up grabbing Chick-fil-a (which I presume is really no better than a burger joint). I have stopped eating pork, and starting to turn my inner self to give up beef (getting there). There a bunch of little things I am incorporating into my diet everyday (more fruits everyday, veggie omelets and turkey bacon for breakfast now), but I realize that I have to be patient with myself and fight through the urges and gnawings for going back to certain clutch foods that aren't good for me. Even though I hit up a rec center, I have been inconsistent for the past month once school projects started to kick in. I feel I don't have a productive workout day unless I do so for 2 hours on cardio equipment and arm benches. I have to find a way to do effective workouts when I am in my apartment or lab and when I can't get to the rec center. So you see, I have in place, even though moving at a snail's place to improve my health overall. I still get down when I look at myself in the mirror and examine closely my arms, my chin(s), and my gut, because I feel that it makes me unattractive and causes my mind to signal out to me why I have issues with dating (but I digress and diverge all at once). So till next time, I will continue on this path of better health slowly but surely.

Look Out Now, This Post is a Doozy!

So I watched this movie tonight on lifetime television. And let me tell you, I usually don't watch movies, usually Reba and Still Standing during the week during my break, and so for the past couple of weeks or so they had been advertising like ridiculously their new movie called "America". I had my doubts, but I decided to check it out anyway tonight. And I actually have to say I actually enjoyed the movie. The gist of the movie is this biracial boy who ends up in the foster care system and gets lost,and went through some traumatic events in his young life, and the therapist at the foster care facility that he is sent to works with him to deal with and overcome his problems. (I enjoyed the movie so much that I am watching it again on Lifetime). In a way this movie made me realize a few things. First, that even though I perceive to have bad luck and rough patches, that I should be grateful to God and fate for allowing me to get where I am at today. Not a lot of young people at my age have been blessed to even finish high school, let alone go to college I have been able to. The movie made me realize also how grateful I am to have had a grandmother and uncle who cared so for me, who took care of me, who filled so many roles as best they could (i.e. mom, dad, brother, sister, aunt, uncle) with as few resources and limited funds that they could because by all rights, if it was not for their love and support and them taking care of me, I don't really know where I would be today. I used to think that I would end up in the foster care system because our house's condition wasn't exactly the best and I thought some stranger would call CPS or something and remove me from their care. Even with this, I would be at times more afraid to have to go with my mother. When I was younger, she was only able to visit at my grandmother's house. I used to remember she would try ways to get me to always come with her, come stay with her. I don't even know if she ever had a place to live at, but anyways, I remember how my grandmother and uncle use to tell me if she tries to make me go with her, to not go, to yell, to run away from her. She tried to drag me away when my grandmother was inside the house and we were outside. They used to watch her as a hawk when I was like a toddler and a young child whenever she came to visit me. She used to always give me $5 or $10 here, as if that was to suppose to makeup for her not being a mother. I have this one vivid memory in which I was like 3 or 4 years old, she somehow grabbed my hand, and me not knowing any better started walking with her. And I remember that we walked prolly for like 15, 20 minutes, across some train tracks. I think we were waiting to catch the metro bus to somewhere. Then I remember my uncle coming up on the train tracks in his brown pickup truck, and when she saw her brother coming our way, she literally ran away and my uncle grabbed me and brought me back home. Then after he brought me back, he got sick, because he was scared and worried for me terribly. Shortly after that, I remember he had to sit down on a couch because he wasn't feeling good. He ended up having a major heart attack. He got to the VA, and was there for like 2 or 3 months I think. I remember I went to go see him a couple of times when he was in the hospital. I remember vaguely that my birthday had came around too shortly. Its amazing when you are younger, there are just certain events that happens when you are really really young and it feels that when you think about those moments its still perfectly etched in your mind in vivid memory, as if it just happened yesterday, never mind if it had been 21 years and counting. Every time I see this Polaroid pic of me when I was like 4 years old or so on my birthday and it kind of reminds me of time when things were simpler and I didn't think there was alot wrong with the world. After awhile, I guess she realized that I never wanted to go with her and she left me alone, and after awhile she stopped coming to visit me, and after while I kinda just forgot about her. When I had found out that she had died from another one of my uncles, I just shrugged my shoulders.I didn't even bother to go to her funeral. I know it may seem wrong and everything, but I just did not have any love in my heart for her. Does that mean that there is something wrong with me? Later on as I got older, I was told that she was diagnosed with a mental illness (either bipolar or schizophrenia) and when I found that out, I used to worry alot (along with the many things else I used to worry myself about, I swear instead of acting like a 10 year old, I had the mindset and thought level of a 40 year old, and that's not a good thing, so I have been told by my friends) that I might end up being diagnosed with some kind of mental disorder. I mean I realized it prolly ran in the family, my uncle was severely depressed, had been after he came back from Vietnam. I was told that my mother had did drugs, even when she was pregnant with me. I was also told later on that they believe that she had been raped once and perhaps more than once in her lifetime. There is so many things about her that I have no clue about, or could understood when I was younger and may never understand. Don't even get me started about the guy who donated the sperm that ended up creating me.
But I said all of this to say that there are so many kids in the U.S. in foster care, its really sad and pathetic. And I feel most Americans feel that since they are damaged goods that hey its not my concern and to just wash my hands of it. It hits hard for me because of the possibilities and the chances that I could have easily ended up in the system. I have thought about before adopting kids and raising them and showing that it is possible for an adult to care and to love and to nurture; who wasn't a bad adult who had either other ulterior motives or only cared about getting a check. This is partially why I have a problem with critics who do not advocate a woman having and exercising the right to either have an abortion or not. Because the same critics who denounce a woman receiving the abortion, I don't see them jumping up and breaking down the doors eagerly with their arms wide open to adopt and to take care kids who ended up in the foster care system because of neglectful, irresponsible and just downright wretched parents who were more useless than a lump of coal. It sometimes gets my blood burning to even think about it. When I see that there is a guarantee of a child born into this world will be born to 2 loving parents (whether heterosexual or homosexual couples) and that every single child in the system won't ended up aging out of the system and there is no longer a need for it because there is no child left for foster care, can I really question the continuing need for abortions as an option.

Stubborn McGEE:

I am a very stubborn person, period. The heater could break down, my pen dries up, my computer goes out and the window in my office could break and let in wonderful rain and cold biting winds, but I tell you I wouldn’t leave until I finished a homework assignment. I used to think my stubbornness was really a measure of my never die and never quit attitude but I come to realize I was probably just being dumb back in my heyday. And the thing about it is, I rather do things the hard way and my way than change them up or try something different, or at least not right away. Oh well, when will I learn? Beats me but I learned a long time ago that things will never come easy for me, whether its school, life, finances, whatever. And I think this attitude that I have has let me enjoy knowing that I have to work for every single thing that I want for my life and not altering the path that I am trying to use to get there. I had a good talk last night with a good of friend of mine’s as I was telling him how I really felt about being in grad school where I am right now. Its been no secret with good friends of mine’s that I have for the most part very unhappy here since school started. Now I guess most people would quit or give up but see, I just plain refused to, no matter how much I complain, how bitter I become, how angry I can get or how frustrated I can become, its just not in my blood, not in my soul and not in my psyche. Of course depending on what I want to do with my life, I might have to go back to the drawing board but hey, the lofty goals I set for myself got to get achieved somehow. And it means that after I get my first master’s, I have to goto an entirely different school, retake some of the classes I have taken here to get a 2nd master’s in what I really want to do, then so be it. I have not come all the way, this far, to be deterred and not encouraged to go after the dreams I want. So see, I suppose me being a stubborn McGee really can come in handy. Especially to help me to get through the rest of my time here.c

Valentine’s Day-the 09 story (part 1)

So its technically early Saturday morning out here on the east coast, and I am sipping on my favorite alcoholic drink (cranberry juice and vodka), listening to the The Brothers Johnson and Strawberry Letter 23 (they don’t make music like this anymore, sadly). And of course today is Valentine’s Day; with my given track record when it comes to relationships, its easy to see why I think Valentine’s Day is just plain evil. But enough of that, I came to the realization when I went home for Christmas break that I have no game whatsoever, which I guess is somewhat normal for a female not to have a game whatsoever. But it got me thinking why have been so habitually single? Now don’t get me wrong, for the most part, (I say 85% of the time) I enjoy the freedom I have to roam wherever I like, whenever I like and however I like. There is never any need for me to commit to another human being, (i.e. a Man) because I have gotten so use to be single. But there are times where I have these thoughts that creep up slowly behind me and question my extended single status. To get all technical and stuff, I have never had a real boyfriend. Never have been in a real relationship nor engage in all the warm cuddly relationship type stuff. Perhaps my philosophy when it comes to the opposite sex is different than most: I rather become good friends with a guy, he gets to know me and all my quirks and eccentrics and I get to know him for who he really is (which I found most guys don’t do for some reason). This is one of the reasons why I have so many guy friends in the most place. I grew up as a tomboy, never had a motherly type figure in my life for the longest, so I didn’t get the memo of how to talk to boys, that you was suppose to start shaving your legs at a certain point, and that wearing flannel shirts just wasn’t fashionable. But needless to say, I grew up being me and me only.
Where am I going with this? Hell if I know. But I do know that I used to get rejected all the time from guys. After awhile I began to think there was something was wrong with me. I was never skinny, I wore glasses, I am pretty much a nerd, I had 0 fashion sense and everything else. Then sophomore year, this guy had to put in some real serious work before I agreed to be his girlfriend. Only reason I agreed because he was the first guy in high school to ever show me any kind of attention. But we were only an “item” for a week. I guess when you worked that hard to get the girl she’s just another conquest. And since then, no guy has showed me that kind of attention or to ever make me feel special. So for the longest, I would wear this brave face (or mask) that never let on how much I wanted to get in on the trials and tribulations of romance, first love and teenage-dum. And after awhile, I began to learn how to accept that perhaps there was no such thing as love at first sight and finding a guy who likes me for me. And now that I am approaching 25 this year, I feel now that yeah I wish I had a boyfriend, or even a boy toy from time to time, that I should really begin to accept that it wasn’t meant for me to fall or to ever be in love. Oh well. I guess I just need to focus on making the world a better place somehow.