Sunday, No Funday

Working today.....I guess that has become the story of my life. Yesterday was one of the more difficult days I have had lately. Working on re-working my ten year plan, because I am working on different goals. I don't want to hold myself back, which I sometimes think I do by taking so much on at one time. I don't know why I do it, I guess it's to keep my mind busy, or to keep my mind off of other things, who knows. 

I have been working on getting my vegetable intake up with different kinds of smoothies, so on the health end, food wise, things are going well. Working out is going okay, not an every day thing, but it is a more consistent thing than it used to be. Especially with Alayna being more active each day, I have to keep up with her some how. I figured it was about time that I get back into a routine and working on making my body a better place. And also to making my blog back what it was supposed to be originally. 

I feel like sometimes I share too much of my personal life on here, and that maybe I should either create a new, secret blog, or I should just stop sharing so much on here. But one more plug before I go, because I am keeping this Sunday blog short. I have officially purchased my own website and will be having a show soon. The website is bekephotography.com and it is no where NEAR completion, but it will soon be everything I dreamt it would be and more. I would love to hear any feedback, and also would love any opinions on the personal issues...new blog or leave them off?

Have a great Sunday everyone. I will be troubleshooting phones and telling people that yes, they can't upgrade because they owe $1,000 in past due payments....I love my job, I love my job, I love my job.......

TGIF, Oh Wait....I Work Tomorrow

I still am fired up about this Friday thing...but I won't drag on about that today. Something I really want to talk about is something that has been on my mind for quite some time. Anyone that knows me, knows that I am openly obsessed with older music, anything ranging from the Beatles to The Who, to Bob Dylan, and Creedence Clearwater. They have much more to say in their music. It's not all useless nonsense. So I did decide to listen to some music on Pandora that was "Today's Hits Radio", and was just repulsed by what I heard. Are "artists" really allowed to speak like that on the radio? 

I would call myself a free-thinking, still fighting for rights, feminist thinker. I believe in things that others really oppose me on. I find it hard living in the south, because people definitely don't have as open of a view as I do. I think going to Art School opened my mind up to a new way of thinking about things. So when I do listen to songs that call women, "Bitches, Ho's, and other such vulgar names" I don't get it. There is a certain part of my that is hypocritical here because I know as a teenager that I listened to this same kind of music, but now as I have begun to age, and raise my own daughter, I want her to know that it is not okay to be called those things. Men are not permitted to say such things to women, and it be okay. I don't think I have ever been so offended by what I was hearing on the radio. 

So I immediately changed my station to the Bob Dylan station, where artists like Elton John, Paul McCartney, The Beatles, and Bill Withers plays. Call me old school, but I just prefer to listen to music that was written with a meaning behind it. 

I know, everyone's thinking, "Bethany, what the heck does this have to do with it being "not Friday, or even fitness". And give me time to explain. So I used to listen to these stations to work out to, because they are up beat and have a faster pace for me to work out to. And I realized that I would get so frustrated from what I was listening to, that my workout wasn't even working well for me, because I was so focused on this "garbage" being fed into my brain. So after some internet research and some soul searching, I am now moving to classical music or meditation music while working out. No more words. Just sounds to move me. I hope this makes sense, and I hope you consider the same. Music today, sounds like noise to me, and it's not the noise I want to listen to. 

So next time you go to put on today's hits, look into something new. If I hadn't listened to something new, I wouldn't have found out how happy I was with older music, that had lyrics that meant something.

Have a good day, and switch your stations today!

Coffee Kind Of Morning

So today was definitely a coffee kind of morning. I try my best not to have any but I just couldn't get up and running. I have been having just the worst kind of nightmares and they wake me up out of a dead sleep. So I just didn't sleep well and had to be up nice and early. And when you are half asleep, you tend to get startled pretty easy (hopefully this isn't just me), and I was minding my own business getting my shower before I got Alayna up and dressed for school. As I am washing conditioner out of my very tired and now stinging eyes, I hear a light sound of the shower curtain moving and a small voice say "Hi Mommy"...I screamed, for obvious reasons, and then had to calm her down because I had obviously scared her just as much as she had scared me. So that's how MY morning has started. 

So after I get her dressed, I go to get my uniform, and I figure, I'll wear a shirt I haven't tried wearing in a long time, because I know it doesn't fit, but heck, why not make the morning worse than it already has been. So I put a red long sleeve shirt on under my soon to not fit polo, and then I put the polo on, and I look in the mirror, and rub my eyes, maybe there was still conditioner in them, because the shirt fit the person I was looking at in the mirror. Could it be? I haven't been doing much. A little (devil machine) biking, and rowing. Walking and on my feet all day at work has to help too. And I have been eating as much protein as I can. So I guess something is working. 

Hayden has been working night shift, so he is usally going to sleep when I get home from work, or leaving as soon as I get home. So it has given me a lot of time to work on things, and I decided it was finally time to buy a .com. It's insane how much some punctuation and 3 letters cost. That is neither here nor there. The point being, I think it brought back some of that Bethany I have been looking for. Now it is under construction, and by no means done. I have a lot of things to do to it, so I will not be revealing it just yet. I have let few family members see, and if you just have to see it, message me and I can give you the address. I know it sounds silly, but it makes me feel so creative to be formatting, and writing html (which who knew that would stick from college). It's fun and makes me feel like I'm doing what I paid, well am paying, all that money for. It all just comes so natural to me and I love it. I feel like I'm back in the digital lab in college building my first website. Although templates are really nice to have. It's wonderful not having to build ALL the html yourself. 

I hope that you have all been feeling challenged these last few days to do what you love and what makes you happy. Who knew something as little as moving some pictures around on a website would bring that back for me. What is it taking for you? You know a lot more people used to comment with answers on this blog, you should start that again. I love hearing if I am motivating at least oen person! 

To wrap up, I think the lesson here, is get your child up before putting conditioner in your eyes, both for her and your sake. Go out and find something that made or continues to make you happy. And don't lose who you are. That's so easy these days, but remember who you are and why you decided to do the things you do. It will be incredible how happy you find yourself even through the stinging conditioner eyes!

I Think I Can....No...I KNOW I Can

Too often I put myself in situations where I use the words, "I think I can do that...". And then people say that I don't have enough positivity in myself. But, I do. So I have been working on saying I know I can instead. Knowing and thinking you can are two totally different things. I think I can jump off a cliff and be okay if I am strapped to a bungee chord, however I know I can watch someone else do it safely from the top of the bridge with nothing strapped to my ankles. Odd example, but you get the point. I have always had an assumption that people are out to compare me to others, when in reality I do it by myself in my own head. No one else is doing that. 

I can distinctly remember when I was in High School and not getting the grades that my parents were hoping for, and not doing cheerleading, and I wasn't involved in the newspaper, that I assumed my parents just wanted me to be my sister. That she was the perfect daughter, and I was nothing but a let down. But they didn't feel that way. They actually told me the complete opposite, that they supported my art career and that they thought it was a good direction for me to go. I had made up the whole scenario in my head that my parents wanted me to be a person that I wasn't. Yet they had no feelings like that at all.

So as I grow older, and I got better at not comparing myself to others, because I am my own person. I began growing my own opinions, and my own thoughts about things. I became who I always wanted to be. When I was in college, I had my own mindset. People took my feedback and realized it was good feedback. I was heard, and not as what someone else wanted me to be, but as myself and as an artist. It was the first time in a long time that I felt that my opinion mattered, and that I was my own person, not someone I thought people wanted me to be. 

But now, as I come into my own as an adult out of school (well Undergrad at least), I find it more difficult. I find myself constantly being compared to other people and it makes me not want to work harder. It makes waking up in the morning painful. It makes putting on my uniform exhausting. Each day I wake up, look at the ceiling and pray that we win the lottery so that I can quit my job and stay at home every day. But that doesn't happen, and it never will. I have to get up, put on my uniform, and go to work so that I can pay the bills and feed my family. 

As I was extremely uncomfortable and even more so angry about the way certain things were being handled, I found myself, for the first time, sticking up for myself. I never have liked confrontation, but enough was enough. I stood up for myself. I put my foot down to the things that were going on and said that I don't respond well to being compared. I don't respond well to comments I don't find suitable for the work place. I work with integrity and care about making the customer happy and working with them as long as it takes to make sure they are fully set up. I don't lie, or keep things from them. I believe in full disclosure. I wish everyone in the world would take this advice and use it for not just a sales job, but in life. 

Don't be something you're not, just to get the results you think are required. Work with integrity and pride. If you don't, you won't be true to yourself, and you will continue to be compared to others. Who cares if those others do not work with the same work ethic you do, you know you are true to yourself. It has taken me a long time, a lot of lectures, and a ton of tears to figure this out. But I know who I am, and that I should not care that I am compared to others. I am proud of the person I am. I have worked hard to get to where I am in life, and I will let no person tell me otherwise. I have fallen over and over again, and I have been mocked, teased, pushed down, told I couldn't do it, de-motivated, bullied, and in the end.....I always come out on top. 

So I challenge you....be YOU. Not the person someone wants you to be.....be you. I am finally realizing, that that's the best person I could possibly be!

So Actual Monday, Feels Like Actual Monday

For once, I am actually feeling like it's a Monday morning. I'm tired, stressed, and feel like going back home and curling into a ball in bed. It's not been a good morning. Family left yesterday, so the house is extra quiet, and Alayna is extra sad that they are gone. I know I talked last week how some days don't even feel like Monday's, but this one does....very much so. Maybe it's the rain. 

Either way, the point I wanted to make today, seeing as it is still Lent, is the art of what a Sorry means. My brother-in-law made a really good point about it. He said look at the great plate in my hands, and then drop it on the floor (he's a teacher, this is a student lesson, consider yourself my student). What happens when you drop the plate? It shatters, and can't be put back together without showing some marks. It's always going to have those marks. Same with a sheet of paper....look at a plain peice of paper...now crinkle it up. Done? Straighten it out now....does it look exactly like it did before? No, it is left with scars and marks that can't be removed.

My point with both of those examples is that once something is hurt or broken, it can not be fixed. Sorry doesn't make the plate put itself back together, and make the paper flat again. Sorry's don't fix things. They may temporarily alleviate the situation, but never truly fix it. You'll always know the pain of why that sorry was needed. I'm at a point in my life where I'm tired of sorry. I'm tired of hearing "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that". That doesn't make it better, if anything it makes me more upset because it means you did hurt me, and I will forgive you because it's the person I am, but I won't forget it. 

I don't know why this point was important to me (well I do, but doesn't need to be public), but I think it's a lesson we could all take something from. Sorry doesn't fix things. Sorry doesn't heal wounds. Sorry is a temporary glue that will make you feel better for a second, and then could potentially fall apart again. I challenge you all to try and not do things to hurt people so that "Sorry's" are not necessary. I don't feel like writing a longer blog today, and maybe later today I will write some more, but for now, I'm signing off and starting my Monday Morning.

Just One More Shift

So I just need to make it to 5:15 pm today and I will be off until monday! Something about that feeling of knowing you're off the next day gives you an almost senioritis like feeling. It's a strange nostalgia, but I enjoy it because i know that only relaxation remains for tomorrow. 

I find as I am preparing for school that I am getting more and more nervous for it. It's like I feel like I need to pack a backpack, with new highlighters, pens, number two pencils, a trapper keeper, and some loose leaf paper. Stand at my front steps for a first day of school picture, and then just walk back inside for my online MBA in which I need none of the aforementioned things, okay maybe the highlighters and pens and maybe even the paper. But mostly a computer and the books I need for my course. I was never one for the "first day of school". I hated it more than anything else. And in all honesty I always hated school. I didn't want to fit into a system that everyone else was in. Worse of all I hated standardized testing. 

When I took my SAT's, the essay we had to write about was "Why is Standardized Testing Necessary for the Development of Young Adults Moving to a Higher Education?".......Really? I will openly admit, I did terrible on my SAT's, surprised I even spelled my name right to be honest. But the essay, I could have written for weeks on all the things I have to say about why "Standardized Testing" is not necessary, and in some cases, not fair. As we have established in previous blogs, I am not the cookie cutter person meant to live in a normal fashion. My home is covered in all things elephants, and Doctor Who, the occasional Walking dead statue here and there. I argued in my essay that how you can you judge a "standard" you want everyone to fit in, when not everyone is standard. When you ask a fill in the bubble question that says, "in your opinion, which answer best fits this question....". And when I do answer the question with my opinion, it's wrong. But you asked me what my opinion was, not what the right answer was to you? They aren't meant for everyone. And I wrote very angrily in my essay how right brained people think differently than left brained. A left brained person has no problem doing a test like that. It's what their brain is more conditioned to understand and excel at. If there was a drawing section, or it was an all essay test, than maybe I would have had a fighting chance to pass on a better level. I did however score the highest possible score on my essay section of the SAT's. Did I make some huge impact on the Board of Education to change the format of the SAT's, absolutely not. Not even sure they even read them, or just feed them through a machine, and the machine counts the words and decides if that's enough to make some sort of difference. 

My real point to all of this is that I have found a new set of projects that I am ready to take on and even excited to start. I'm excited to photograph again. It's going to be fun and bring a glimmer back into my eyes like a child who has seen Toy's R Us for the first time. 

I know I said yesterday that this is and will always be a fitness journal at the core, but isn't brain activity fitness just as important as regular exercise? I think it definitely is. If I don't challenge my brain as much as I challenge my brain, than I won't grow intellectually as I slim physically. If that even makes sense. 

I will openly admit that when I got accepted and started getting ready for my MBA program, I began to think to myself, "Bethany, you're selling out!!!!". I went to art school, one of the best ones in the country, and I am getting an MBA??? What does that have to do with my BFA in any way? So I sat down and wrote about it (yes, I have another super secret blog where I just write on and on...even worse than this one!). I wrote how it would benefit me in the future. How "Future Bethany" will truly appreciate the lessons learned to eventually open her own business and know how to actually run it appropriately. It may not be an MFA, which I know I always wanted. And at some point even wanted to get my doctorate in photography...why you ask....to say I had one. To challenge the idea of a doctorate, and what it means to be TRULY educated in a fine art so well, I received a doctorate for it. 

Ridiculous I know, but no more ridiculous than the other things I spoke of as a child. I had high hopes, and to this day remember when I was a child in grade school, and they asked us all, "What do you want to be when you grow up Timmy? John? Kate?.....Bethany?.....An artist!!!" I always responded with this. It was always my hope to make it big. Artists didn't have to follow rules. They didn't have to color inside the lines. They didn't have to listen to the rules of poetry, they could make up their own rules and follow them according to their own standard. And that's what I wanted out of life. Maybe that's why I never wanted to do homework, or listen to the teachers when they would teach me long division and social studies. I wanted to be an artist, was I going to follow long division at any point in my artistic endeavor? I would love to say I never needed math, but there was the strange occasion I sometimes did. But for the most part, in my college career, it went how I wanted it to go. I took the photography classes I wanted to. Started to take the one required Math or Science class required. It was called "The Art of Math"......I walked out in the middle of the break he gave us on the first day and moved into a class called Bioethics. Different, and it made me question things, and I loved it. It was informative and denying it at the time, an excellent class. 

I wish I could tell you today's blog was different than yesterday's but I don't think it is. I think it is just an extension of what I really wanted to say. Things I thought of after the fact. I think after I get back into what really makes me happy, get back into my work, finish my new website, and start school....everything in my life will fall into place. Then, things will start lining up properly!

I'm sorry for the long post today, just an abundance of things on my mind over the last few days that I needed to talk about. I appreciate everyone who reads every day. And as I said earlier in this blog, I hope that I have inspired in some way, some of you to find who and what you love to keep you motivated. The person you once were that made you happy. Find your happy place or thing or activity....you'll see a difference. Have a good Saturday, may it be full of dreams come true and revelations of things past and hopefully future!

Friday....You Tricky Devil

So I don't know about any of you, but if you have ever worked in retail, you would understand that there are no weekends, so Friday, hardly ever exists for me. And when it does, it is usually on a Sunday or Monday, and if I ever have two days off in a row, I immediately think the first day back is Monday. So my life never really has a TGIF, because I couldn't tell you the last time I had a Saturday AND a Sunday off. It never happens in retail. But, we do have family in town, so it gives me some motivation to get up, get the job done, and come back home.

I never thought, that at 25, I would be working in retail, and not living out my dreams of opening an extremely new age photography gallery in New York City. Somewhere that new photographers show their work, and eventually famous artists pick up on this strange little hole in the wall gallery and want to show there. But instead, I'm chasing escaped hamsters around the house, getting an almost 5 year old dressed for school with my eyes half-way closed, cleaning vomit off the floor and my clothes, and waking up for a job that sucks a small amount of my soul away each day. I just am not where I saw myself. I read my ten year plan from high school and I am nothing like that ambitious person that I wanted to be in High School or even in the beginning of college. I miss that person. I just haven't seen her in a long time.

I think a very small part of that creative Bethany lives inside this blog each day. With her snarky remarks and negative attitude about all things retail and corporate america. But I just want to have that paint covered jeans, hole-y t-shirt from high school, and long crazy thrown up hair girl back. I miss her. She was motivated at all times. She was positive at all times. She was happy at all times. I try to be here through these small writings each day, and to whoever reads them every day (the few people that I know of), I am grateful that you put up with the rants and "boo hoo me"'s all the time. I know there can be quite a few of them. But my intentions when I started this blog was weight loss. Not life sharing, just what I ate, what was motivating me, and what I lost each week. 

But, life threw me some curve balls that I tried my best to swing at, and surely missed. And this blog has become somewhat of an outlet for me. Don't get me wrong, it is still, at it's core, a weight loss journey and the pages do consist of that. But this has become so much more for me. I have shared more than I ever thought I would. I have cried writing some of these more times than I can think of. I have been so grateful for comments people have made when I write. You all do push me to be a better me and a more complete Bethany. So right now, in the midst of all this hectic insanity that I am suspiciously calling "life", I am going to try and find a little bit more of that Bethany I lost in college when vomit and diapers became the main concern. I know she is inside here somewhere, just feels like the right time to dig her out. 

I hope I have not made anyone else question their days, or maybe I do. I think it's healthy to question what you are doing with your life every once in a while. What some may call a "reality check". If you do choose to have one, I hope it is for the positive. Maybe you used to bike all the time, and realized that made you happy....well why did you stop? Maybe you used to make art in the basement and stopped for job purposes....make the time! I am actively going to make the time to find that part of myself again, and now I encourage you to. In a positive way. Question things from your past....it's the only way to make your future new and exciting again. It also may bring back some happiness, because I know mine will, that you didn't know you still had left in you. Have a good day, not Friday, because those don't mean anything to me anymore, but just a good day. Embrace it, and remember what made you happy...bring it back!