Life as Betsy

But I decided to upload the disc tonight to my iTunes and had to search the song titles and artists by Google tonight. I started to notice a pattern in your song choice:

Forever’s As Far As I’ll Go
Close Enough to Perfect
Alabama
Live Until I Die
Everything That Glitters Is Not Gold
You Never Even Call Me By My Name
Love A Little Stronger
I See You In A Different Light
The Man In Love With You
Texas
I Love the Way You Love Me
Amy’s Back in Austin
Blame It On Texas
Same Old Star
What’s Forever For?
No Doubt About It
Big Dreams In A Small Town
He Left A Lot to Be Desired
Some Girls Do
You Can Dream Of Me
Keeper of the Stars

I’ve embraced the reality tv surge and taken guilty pleasure in watching shows like "America’s Next Top Model" "A Shot At Love with Tila Tequila" and "Rock of Love". I was a fan, at one point, of "Survivor", "The Amazing Race", "Big Brother", "The Bachelor", and even "Dancing with the Stars". But season after season has pushed me to a point that I can no longer manage to watch an entire season of those CBS shows.

So I turned to shows like "Nip/Tuck", "Dirt" and "The Riches". All, at one point, were edgy, provocative shows that pushed the envelope in some manner and I loved that. But in their fifth and sophomore seasons (respectively) they have already grown soft and made me wonder "What happened to the show that I so eagerly looked forward to each week?"

"ER"?? What happened? It lost it’s heart when George Clooney and Julianna Marguiles left, and it lost it’s soul when Anthony Edwards left. It’s painful to watch these days, because the charm and focus of the show is gone and we are left with these third and fourth generation characters that no one gives a damn about. Does Michael Crichton even have any ties to the show anymore? Is he still proud to say he created that show?

As for "LOST", as much as it pains me to say it . . . I’m lost. Torn somewhere between wanting to carry on, hoping it will regain some direction and clarity and wanting to just say goodbye before I’m left with more questions than answers and a fuzzy memory of the first season and Boone’s dreamy blue eyes. I still am leaning toward pushing on with the show, because I have faith that a show that can start out so radical will finish out in the same manner. I can only hope.

You know what really sucks? How quickly the networks pull shows these days. And they pull the ones that were good and had promise and just needed more of an audience, but they leave crappy shows like "Cavemen" on the air. "Journeyman"?? Great show. Miss it. They just don’t give certain shows a chance anymore.

There are the gem sitcoms on NBC, like "30 Rock", "My Name is Earl" and "The Office", as well as "How I Met Your Mother", but the lot of the shows that are on the air are a waste of space, time and money, in my opinion.

Television’s saving grace, or rather, general cable for a girl who can’t afford HBO, is AMC’s "Breaking Bad", with such a modern and outside the box premise that I purposely stay up late to watch each week. I usually catch an episode of "Mad Men" that comes on right after it and find it charming as well, but my butter is currently churning for "Breaking Bad". If you, like me, are tired of predictable plots, vague shallow characters and cannot even stomach the idea of watching "The Hills", then I urge you to take a look at "Breaking Bad".

When using chapstick, Lianne Hill on the school bus home. Her lips were so chapped and irritating her that she smother her lips and the surrounding area of her lips in the waxy substance. Hardly anyone would have noticed, except that she used Cherry Scented Chapstick, which also had a hint of red to it, leaving her mouth (and face) looking somewhat Ronald Mcdonald like.

When listening to Garth Brooks’ "Standing Outside the Fire", Sophmore year,  Honor’s english and Liz Harper. Early into the school year, we were assigned to break down the lyrics to a song and write paper about what we thought they were about. I chose ‘Standing Outside the Fire’ because I thought it would be fairly easy to write about. I took my time and chose the perfects words to describe what the song was about and proudly traded the following day with Liz Harper when we were instructed to have a fellow student read it over before we turned it in. Liz read it, looked at me and said "It’s well written, but that’s not what it’s about." Ms. Stanek went a bit easier on me than Liz did; possibly because she didn’t listen to country music.

When baking cookies, Kate spinning circles in my mother’s kitchen. She’d come over and we’d start to mix up a batch of cookie dough. The long kitchen with hardwood floors were too much for Kate to stand and soon she’d be up on her toes, spinning circles up and down the kitchen. Generally, we’d get half the dough baked and we’d end up sitting on the family room sofa, watching tv and eating the rest of the dough with spoons.

I noticed one at Nordstrom that I actually could see myself wearing and somewhat comfortable in and then - I saw the label and the price. Of course I could be comfortable in it; it was a Juicy Couture and it was $170 dollars. Now generally, I don’t like Juicy Couture. I find it tacky for the most part. But this suit had a vintage twist on it and came it fabulous colors . . . I at least had the smarts not to try it on or I would have found myself wanting it even more.

Naturally, I’ll want to look good at the reunion. This is my mother’s side of the family and there are family members I haven’t seen since I was 17 or 14 or even 10. The majority of them were unable to fly out for my wedding last summer, so there is a good chance they still remember me as the little girl with curly hair in the Laura Ashley pink dress with poof sleeves and lace overlay. Yeah . . . time to update their recollection of me. Not to mention that there are new children of cousins that I have only ever seen pictures of.

It’s just item 12 on the list of reasons why to stay on the diet and lose the weight, no matter what. As if the reasons before that aren’t enough . . .

There are issues that I have to consider with my bathing suit, because A. I don’t have a toned enough tummy for a bikini and even if I drop another twenty pounds before I board that plane, I still won’t have a bikini-ready body. I don’t care what SELF magazine promises . . . every sit up in the world wouldn’t get me confident enough to be seen in something like this:

However, I do find something like this extremely do-able:

As for the pasty white skin, I will be stocking up again on the Neutrogena Ultra Sheer Helioplex Sunblock. I actually spotted it in SPF 85 a few weeks ago . . . so sweet.

Here we are, five years past my return from California and this week that we are currently in (April 5th - 12th) is what I would probably refer to as my "Hell Week", if I were to compare it to the "Holy Week" of Christianity with Palm Sunday through Easter Sunday. Because at that time and still looking back now, I don’t think I have ever been as miserable as I was in that specific week of my life.  The end of the end was unbearable and I know now that I am only that much stronger and smarter because of it. But had you come to me, five years ago today and told me about my life currently, where I am, who I am with and what all I am doing, I never would have been able to comprehend it. Seriously, I couldn’t see past getting up in the morning, going to work, coming home and not entirely falling apart. Which I am sure I did, more than once.

1. Reach and maintain my personal goal weight

2. Clean up my credit and live within my (our) means

3. Learn and master as much of my chosen career as possible

4. Buy a house

5. Buy a Nikon camera

6. Take photography classes

7. Get a (shelter) dog

8. Put together my own scrapbook

9. Go to Hawaii with my husband

10. Meet Mike’s relatives in California and North Dakota

11. Spend a weekend with my work email buddy, sipping wine and having plenty of good laughs

12. Go to Vegas as a legal adult

13. Learn to let some things go

14. Stop criticizing myself so much

15. Spend a weekend in Phoenix with Jenn

16. Maintain a more organized house

17. Continue to grow my recipe collection

18. Keep my hens and chicks collection growing

19. Keep blogging my heart out, especially with interesting topics and not just lists and surveys

20. Get a cholesterol test. It’s been too long.

21. Go on a weekend trip with Sarah and Vanessa, if I can pull them away from their families for that long.

22. Pay off our debts and feel more secure about our finances.

23. Write my novel. Seriously.

24. Clean out my wardrobe of anything I haven’t worn in the last year. What’s the point in keeping it?

25. Become better at managing my time.

26. Read more books.

27.  Stay in better contact with my long distance friends.

28. Become the kind of person that people want to know.

29. Keep the fire burning between my husband and I.

For about two months, we were attending WW meetings on Wednesday evenings and one of our local success stories was attending the same meetings as us. In a year, he had dropped nearly half his body weight and now he is a tall, lanky runner who last I had heard, had run five marathons. A year. November of 2006, he was over 300 pounds and now you’d never know it. But one night, at one of the meetings, even he said that he struggled at times with realizing and accepting that he was no longer that big guy who hadn’t eaten a piece of fruit in over six months.

It’s nice right now because I constantly have something to focus on - getting to that smaller weight. Whether it is two pounds, twelve or twenty, I have my eye on the prize and hardly let it wander elsewhere. But will I really see myself the weight I am when I reach my goal? Will I accept that when I look in the mirror, I have actually reached the destination that I was looking for? I try not to compare my weight to anyone else’s. I attend school with a girl who this week was struggling with her appearance in general. But one of the days, she kept asking us if she really looked like she weighed 160. She’s shorter than me and more round then me in general, but its strange to think she only weighs less than 10 pounds less than I do. I can’t gauge where I am with my own personal weight by looking at her, can I?

Of course, another side to this entire mental breakthrough for those who have finally lost the weight is the judgemental side. You finally lose the weight and find that it was easier than you had dreaded it would be. Suddenly, you start to notice all the other people around you who could stand to lose their extra weight buy don’t and you judge them. You feel this sense of superiority, because you are no longer them. I am not saying everyone who loses the weight becomes that kind of a person, but sadly, it is easier to fall into that mentality than one would like to admit. Several years ago, someone even sent a postcard into Postsecret about it: