Moving Essay Draft on Anorexia

This is my final draft on my moving essay, I hope you all enjoy it and learn something while watching it. Some of the picture are a little graphic, just so you know ahead of time. Enjoy!

- Katie

What Is This Feeling?

This moving essay is killing me. Not because it's so much work, but because of what my topic is. I decided to do a very personal essay, one about my struggle with an eating disorder. Looking at all these images of emaciated girls and boys is bringing back a lot of really tough memories. For someone who hasn't personally gone through the life-altering terror that is anorexia or bulimia, it is truly horrifying to recant your life from that time. When I was looking at photos in class one day I almost started to cry; not necessarily because the photos were so disturbing, but because I still feel some sick desire to be as skinny as the girls in the pictures. It made me feel sick to my stomach when these terrible thoughts ran through my head. How could I let myself think that emaciated look is beautiful? It is vile and unnatural, and so unbelievably bad for your body. With my friends, I was able to stop hurting myself and get better. Hopefully, my moving essay will help people with ED's see that they can get help if they just tell people they have a problem.

- Katie

MAXimum Disclosure

So the trick here would be for you guys to see if you can figure out what my poem is about...enjoy.

MAXimum Disclosure

Distracted by wandering eyes, so

Deeply set in penetrating judgmental flare

How does one become invisible, in

A sea of an-Other’s perception?

Protected by steel, the heart’s enclosed

And has not stolen the love in which

Dear Maximus might bring down his mighty sword for

Taking back the primary seat of his literal right.

Intensions of the innocent (internally) resonate, and

Spill from the (internal) lips, to

Offer a (silent) plea of empathy, for

Here he is friend and not foe, like the

Great Maximus sees as being so, so, so…Evil.

But open thine eyes, their Maximum width,

To observe the interests of literal left,

Where roosts the real reveler of ambulatorious* action,

Although secretive by way of her own reasoning,

Completely unknown to dear Maximus

And Me…his faultless enemy.

So what is the Great to do to the

Idler that dare take his literal left?

His anger is hidden by a pretence that

All is well…but anger never hides true

For any half-wit, such as myself, can plainly see

That Maximus, with his sword at the ready, wants to kill me.

-Chucho-

*Latin spelling of ambulatory (missing the accents over ‘a.2’ and ‘o.1’)

I actually recorded me reading the poem out loud for those of you who are better with seeing and hearing the poem as it was written...

Hint: Really pay attention to the word choice in this poem (or riddle?) if you want to figure it out...

On Time: To Myself

It is not wasted time if you have the time to waste to begin with. There is a thin dotted line between thinking about doing something and actually doing it, but since you have so much time to waste what keeps you from doing anything and everything? If you think that there’s no reason to do something when you have time to do anything, then how is it that you will most likely talk yourself out of doing everything? Instead of wasting time, you are now just not following through with those things that you could be doing. After coming to terms with your conscience, it dawns on you that the day has been dulled down to this cyclical pattern, that you created, where you don’t do the things you could be doing because everything else that you’re not doing is now considered “wasted time”. Then comes the guilt of turning everything into something, something into nothing, and nothing into anything that you could have done, but didn’t.

With that in the past, the future holds only the same time with different things to do, which you probably won’t do, whether you want to or not, and so begins a new day where possibilities seem endless, but time has now become useless. It does not slow down; it does not tire itself, but rather it continues droning on, cutting a new possibility of opportunity with every passing minute. And you are just standing in the middle of this time wondering what it is trying to prove by never stopping. Impossible is a word that comes to mind, but who are you to tell time that it should “give it a rest”- it being the minutes, and a rest being what time needs the most.

But then you start to question the integrity of time, when time only offers you to do something, when you only offer time to do nothing because you want some answers from time before giving in to its insatiable reputation of making people use it. Silly time, thinking it can trick you, but you are smarter than time…or is it that you become smarter over time, which would imply that you are using time--cheaply hoarding it for your own personal gain--until you don’t need it anymore; until you begin to waste it again. That, ultimately, is time’s worst folly, the fact there is so much time and yet it can be so easily thrown away. Hopefully, someday you will find the spot where wasted time is kept, and the secret will be revealed that you are allowed to use it however you wish. But before you start your search for more time, there’s something you should know…

It’s no secret-time is all you have. Use it wisely.

Through A Fresh-Man's Eye

And with a disdainful mind I realize that I am nothing more than a poor college student…

Busy, yet cautious of overloading what one would perceive to be a simple day-to-day drudge of being, the binary becomes evident between having a heavy workload and thinking I have a heavy workload. Although related in a sense, these two mindsets couldn’t be more opposite, and have a never-ending eroding effect on the brain in a daily life setting-one that couldn’t be more easily described then as a wonderful way to live-independent and intrusive, but by those who I choose to be around, and insightful in the way that a ball is to a puppy, which never succeeds this previous notion of understanding that falls into the category of: ignorant bliss.

Often I have been asked how my time is spent here in college, and for most I give the obvious earful of difficulties and expectations that is somehow bought by the masses of relatives and loved ones, who still, by the end of the conversation, have no idea exactly what it is that I’m doing here. But that may also raise the question whether I really know what I’m doing here, so in the integrating splice of intuitive reasoning and mere bullshit, I make sure that there is some sense of conclusive thought or mention of the fact that I “do college to better myself”, and whatever that may entail becomes the imaginative responsibility of the observer and is no longer my burden. Still, there is nothing that I can say other than what they want to hear, for when the time comes, in the mutual gathering of family, to tell of the stories and experiences gained over the previous semester’s fallacies, my reward becomes the very thing that grants me the ability to continue to exist in the altered realm of time that is college…the tuition check.

I never imagined that such power could come from the end of a ballpoint pen, a power that I won’t understand till later in life. Right now, only a fool would hand over wealth to someone who doesn’t know what wealth is, and my parents are quite aware of this, which is why I don’t see a dime of the money contributing to my education. If given the chance, I would follow the popular advice of the Steve Miller Band and “take the money and run.” Those people who know me would probably say different and although they are warranted in their thinking, I would say-“try me”. Laughter ensues, and by the time the din dies down their watery eyes open only to find an empty couch and a gaping front door, left with the astounded deliberation of whether they will ever hear from me again. The thought has crossed my mind, but I have no means to go anywhere, which brings me back to reality and I soon realize that it wasn’t a dream, it’s not a dream, and it isn’t worth dreaming about. I believe that dreams should be left to things that could actually become realities. Everyone works towards something in life that they may or may not ever attain, but the thought of getting that one thing that would seem to make it all worthwhile is motivation in itself. Each person’s dream is different, and some dreams are more realistic than others. It’s better to think that all dreams could come true, but that is never the case. The important thing to remember is that giving up on your dream is easier than actually getting it, and that my friends, is usually the case.

Most of what I’m expressing is overrated, only because I don’t know yet what the world has to offer me beyond the confining glow of my computer, but I strive through the day knowing that it will eventually end and another day will begin, and that somehow brings ease to my mind which seems to constantly be on the move; much more than I can say for my body. The world seems to be constantly moving, and just when I think I’m the last one standing, there is someone right behind me ready to get up. C’est la vie, as the French say, but I’ve been to France and most of them had their heads up their asses, so the vitality of that statement remains dormant in my “closet of cliché”, as I like to call it anyway. Beyond the tackiness of that previous statement, I would like to reiterate the fact that getting ahead of the game isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. If I’ve learned anything so far here at school, it’s that playing the game as it lays itself out is sometimes the best way to go. Many people, or students I should say, get off by putting themselves in impossible situations that, more often then not, lead to internal breakdown, which is the last thing you want during game play. For those of you who haven’t yet caught on to the metaphor, I’m talking about business vs. pleasure, education vs. socialization. One of the reasons why so many kids don’t make it through the first year is because they don’t get the fact that they are being tested. That’s what it comes down to. The University of blank, whatever State University, or “Hello Dolly” private college wants to know if you have the chichis to make it through freshman year, and they’re not going to sugar coat it like most of high school. Colleges will throw subtle hints that you need to rethink game plans like: academic probation, good-bye such-in-such scholarship, or sorry you are no longer attending our school, but those with half a brain in their head can look at people around them and pick out who isn’t coming back the following semester. It’s not hard to figure out.

Don’t get me wrong, I came pretty close to getting academic probation myself first semester in college, but I was also smart enough to realize that I couldn’t continue to do whatever it was that I was doing, and that I needed to start doing a lot more of whatever it was that I wasn’t doing. It didn’t take long for me to find that I could actually get stuff done and have fun at the same time. After expressing this to a couple of older friends, who I had become close to by second semester of my first year, they shook their heads as they saw me going through some of the same crap that they went through years before. Everyone has to experience it for themselves, there isn’t going to be someone to hold your hand; parents packed you up and dropped you off, and the only thing holding your head together is the thought of hundreds of thousands of other kids across the country going through the exact same thing…welcome to college.

Crazy to think that that was only two years ago…

zen calligraffiti is AweSoMeee

So I was bored and playing around on google images looking at different types of font because I think art through the form of words is so cool and interesting. Anyways I came across this picture of what seemed to be a word but I couldn't quite understand what it meant because the lines were so intricate and detailed that the letters formed into one another. I looked into it more and found out it was called zen calligraffiti. It made sense that it was calligraphy and graffiti combined. I thought that concept of combining some form of writing that has been around for so long with a pop culture sort of type of writing was awweeesssoommme. Anways I wanted to share my find with you all because I L-O-V-EEEE art.

Instead of repeating what I, and my fellow bloggers, would say to be our goals , I will just delve into a quick example of what we might mean by "reaction writing" (if you will)...

---Personal connection lost even through the simple pronunciation of a name----
Let us identify first that the internet has taken our ability to actually talk to someone (for those of you who don't know what I mean are welcome to join me for coffee tomorrow morning at my place so that I might explain it in detail, but that is beside the point, and so we return to the agenda at hand). Now knowing that, it can be taken into account as evidence towards the decline of the spoken language and our ability, as social creatures, to speak to one another, in even the simplest form, i.e. being able to pronounce someone's full name. Sure we can reduce the fact of the matter, that knowing how to pronounce someone's name is (in a more modern translation), "No big deal, man", but can also be seen as the extreme opposite...the lost of personal identity. Our names were given to us at birth (obviously not by choice, it's not like I can control a parent calling their kid "Blanket", as South Park (the greatest ongoing satire to ever be created by the way) was quick to respond to with their Michael Jackson episode a few seasons ago) and should be held sacred, regardless of how ridiculous you and the rest of us think it may be....

What does this say about our heritage; our respect for our own names? When did we start caring so much about what other people think that we are starting to throw away (what may be) one of the only things left that noone should be able to take from us?

Good question... [. . .] (couple extra for those just now catching up)