No mas pensando

"I have hit a wall." 

I have no idea lo que quiero hacer ahora.  I mean how can you decide want you want to do for the rest of your life.  Ahore me siento un poco atrapada just by thinking that I have to decide something soon, because I can't spend the rest of my life bumming around and jumping from place to place.  It is fun, but it tends to get old.  Pero it scares me just thinking of settling.

BECAUSE I WILL NOT SETTLE.

And there is the root of my problem.  I am always thinking that I am settling, why?  No tengo la menor idea, porque en realidad  I never have, but others have that I know and they just seem so miserable.

Grrr!  I am just rambling again and letting my mind wonder to new careers.  I mean how do people decide?  How the hell did you decided? or have you not?

Something on what happened in Virginia.

Just a little blip. I don't want to spend a lot on it since there must be hundreds comments on this, but I believe that the media shouldn't have played or published what the individual left behind. That was just helping the individual reach his goal of stardom and proving to others that anything will get you in the media. He should have been left behind and not made him the star of his little movie he created.

That is all, otra vez es lo que yo pienso.

Quien hace caso?

I need some respuestas.

¿Que pasa con la juventud de hoy? I know everybody always asks the same question, but do you think that they don’t care or are they just being forgotten. I mean from personal experience (i.e. I once was a teenager and dealing with teenagers, currently) some of them just don’t seem to care. Se meten en problemas and they act como it is our fault. Society might blame the parents for not paying attention to their children, but I have been involved with parents that are involved with their children and they still drop-out, get in trouble with the law, or just don’t give a damn about their future.

I have also noticed that their peers have the greatest influence on them. Example, I know of a teenager that by herself she will do her homework, go to work, and be somewhat responsible, but mix her boyfriend or friends and she becomes this child that is disrespectful towards her family, gets in to fights for the dumbest reason, fails classes and just thinks that her family is getting in the way and doesn’t know what she has gone through. I mean can’t they see that their friends are not helping.

Otra cosa que me choca is when kids say they got into pandillas so they can know what a family feels like. Te la paso that there are some kids out there that are completely forgotten by family but that is not an excuse to be a pendejo, succeed and show them what you are capable of don’t just be another statistic

I have also encountered others that have a loving family that cares about them and still say that they don’t have any family until they joined their clica. Give me a break.

You guys are probably tired of hearing the same stuff, so aqui le corto.

Another thing, I am not saying the whole youth is like this. These might be the exceptions or maybe the ones that succeed, but I just had to vent.

Some facts on Youths in Gangs.

No tengo ganas de hacer nada

Did you ever get the feeling of just not doing a thing?  Just staying in bed and staring at space, or closing your eyes and daydreaming.  Loosing yourself in your thoughts that when you finally focus in on time it has been hours since you started on your journey? 

Well, that was exactly how I felt today.  I didn't do a damn thing.  I woke up very early, trouble sleeping, and decided to read a book. So, technically I did do something, but it really wasn't productive.  Well, I found the book laying around and decided to give it a go.  The name of the book is "Good in Bed" by Jennifer Weiner.  I have never read a book of hers, so, I really didn't know what expect.  So, I read and finished reading it in ten hours.  I am horrible like that, if I like a book I wont be able to put it down and I will just finish it in a day.  That is why when I sit to a read a book I give myself a whole day to enjoy it.  Well, anyways I read it and enjoyed it.  I cried, laughed, cried again, actually I cried a lot.  I am not one of 'those' that cries when she watched a Hallmark commercial, but this book was that good.  I would recommend it, only if you like books that may be considered a somewhat comedy romantic.  Plus, it deals with the weight issue.   And that is all I have to say about the book, and now I am just trying to motivate myself and start cleaning my room.  It's not getting far.  It is a daunting project, since I will be 'moving out' in a couple of day and that room needs to look as if I never was there.  Once accumulates a lot of crap in six months and I have to either send it home or get rid of it. 

Cuerpos

Excuse me while I get on my soap box.

Why are we obsessed with como nos vemos? We want to be thinner or curvier, darker or lighter, shorter or taller. Why cant we be happy? Nunca estamos conformes con lo que tenemos. We can blame it on the media and how we get bombarded with all of these images, but en realidad we are the ones with the power of deciding on how we feel about ourselves. Yo no soy un size 6 or 12. I go between a 14 and/or 16 and I am, I guess you can say, learning to be happy with who I am and how I look. I will be honest, it is not that easy. Especially when you have your querida madre who does love me a lot, pero siempre saying, "You need to loose weight es para tu bien." You know what mom, NO, no es para mi bien. I really don't want to be a size 6. I really do believe I am beautiful how I look and it is difficult when people tell you otherwise. It is difficult when people have prejudice over people appearances. It is no longer that color of your skin or the way you might speak. Now, people are looking at your body weight. This should not matter. What? The more I weight the less brain cells I have? Come on people. We need to accept.

I do believe every body is beautiful in its own way. It is something I have been coming to terms concerning my own body. It hasn't been easy. It hasn't been easy trying to find clothes that will fit me and at the same time look nice, trendy and comfortable. It hasn't been easy walking in to a store and getting looked down because of my body weight. Hispana and overweight. Yeah,not easy. I will not let some industry force me to conform to some stick figure. I am a healthy, curvy, intelligent woman that has more to offer than what my body looks like. And they better start paying attention, because I am not the only one out there feeling like this. One day there will be hell to pay.

I mean why are people so focused on that and so judgmental. They assume that because we are overweight we don't care about our health, our appearance and ourselves. I found these articled on-line and it pissed me off, because even though the citations are dated on the first excerpt they still reflect today's society.

Issues presented in the Handbook of Psychotherapy for Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia edited by David M. Garner and Paul Garfinkel (1985). This section entitled "Prejudice against Obesity" on pages 520-522 states the following:

Women are encouraged to diet not only because of the virtues associated with slenderness, but also because of the unparalleled social stigma against obesity. It has been suggested the "public derision and condemnation of fat people is one of the few remaining sanctioned social prejudices . . . allowed against any group based solely on appearance" (Fitzgerald, 1981, p.223). There is evidence that obese individuals are denied educational opportunities, jobs, promotion and housing because of their weight (Bray, 1976; Canning & Mayer, 1966; Karris, 1977). However, disdain toward obesity begins much earlier. Several studies have documented that grade-school children consistently attribute negative qualities to larger body shapes (Lerner, 1969, 1973; Lerner & Gelbert, 1969; Lerner & Korn, 1972; Staffieri, 1967, 1972). Both normal-weight and overweight children describe obese silhouettes as "stupid," "dirty," "lazy," "sloppy," "mean," "ugly," and "sad," among other pejorative labels (Allon, 1975; Staffieri, 1967, 1972). Earlier studies reported that drawings of obese children were evaluated less favorably than drawings of children who were physically handicapped or disfigured (Goodman, Dornbusch, Richardson, & Hastorf, 1963; Richardson, Goodman, Hastorf, & Dornbusch, 1961). Even more incredible is the finding that professionals, including psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers, also ranked the obese figures as less desirable. In a comprehensive review of these and other studies, O.W. Wooley, Wooley, and Dyrenforth (1979) suggest that these prejudices "learned in childhood no doubt become the basis for self-hatred among those who become overweight at later ages, and a source of anxiety and self-doubt for anyone fearful of becoming overweight" (p.83).

Now, here is another article that was done a few years back. Same thing still happening.

A new generation of insults

By Selicia Kennedy-Ross

Fatso.

Bubblebutt.

Big fat seal.

Tell the overweight and obese children who are called these names that words will never hurt them.

Harassed at school and sometimes even by authority figures, these children often are left feeling powerless and depressed. Even suicidal.

What starts as bullying on the playground can end with discrimination in the workplace - even at the hospital by medical staff, studies show.

Experts say overweight children are more ostracized by their peers today than they were 40 years ago.

"We were wondering if obesity would be more accepted today because of its increased prevalence and visibility," said Janet Latner, an assistant professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

Latner worked on a 2001 study of 415 New Jersey middle school students that indicates stigmatization of overweight children has grown 40 percent since 1961.

Not good news for the 9 million children who are overweight or obese in the United States, where the prevalence of obesity has tripled in children 6 to 11 and doubled among adolescents 12 to 19 since the 1970s.

Latner and fellow researcher Albert Stunkard replicated a 1961 study that polled 458 fifth- and sixth-graders from various backgrounds. Both groups were asked to rank six drawings of different children by how much they liked each child.

The drawings were of:
• A child using a wheelchair.
• A child missing a hand.
• A child with a disfigured face.
• A child holding crutches and wearing a leg brace.
• A slim child.
• An overweight child.

Children in both 1961 and 2001 repeatedly ranked the overweight child as least favorable overall, while ranking the slim child highest. But the Latner-Stunkard study also showed the 2001 group was more strongly biased against the overweight child, ranking that child even lower than the 1961 group had, by 40 percent.

Youngsters who are branded as overweight already likely have low self-esteem, said Joanne Ikeda, co-director of the Center for Weight and Health Nutritional Science at UC Berkeley. That puts them at a higher risk for other problems like substance abuse, promiscuity and suicide.

A University of Minnesota study reported that 26 percent of teens who were teased at school and home said they considered suicide. Nine percent attempted it.

"Few problems in childhood have as significant an impact as being overweight," Ikeda said. "We tend to have this bizarre belief as a society that making obese people feel bad is for their own good because if they felt bad enough or if they just tried hard enough they could be thin.

"When a group of people are stigmatized and treated as badly as fat people are - how could you come out of that? Obviously, they will be depressed. Often our self-esteem is reflected by people around us, and if people around us think we're bad, we begin to believe that, too."

A 1995 study by Finnish researchers at Helsinki University Hospital published in the International Journal of Obesity concluded that obese people are "subject to intense prejudice and discrimination."

Children as young as 6 describe their overweight peers as "lazy, dirty, stupid, ugly, cheats and liars."

The stigma of being overweight cuts two ways - one for the body's appearance and the other for the person's lack of moral character in their "failure on not controlling one's weight," according to the study.

Cultural conditioning is so deep that some 3-year-olds characterize their chubby peers as "bad" and thin children as "good," Latner said.

Nick, a 9-year-old fourth-grader at Smiley Elementary School in Redlands, said he would want to date a skinny girl rather than a heavier girl because the thinner girl was more likely to have "a nicer car and place."

He also said the thinner girl would have done better in school and college because she "listened in class better" than the heavier girl.

Yale University researchers conducted a number of studies documenting how overweight people are discriminated against in the areas of employment, education, health care, adoption proceedings, jury selection and housing.

Among the findings:
• 28 percent of teachers in one study said that becoming obese is the worst thing that can happen to a person.

• 24 percent of nurses said that they are repulsed by obese people.

• Parents provided less financial college support for their overweight children than for their thin children.

"Fat is the last great prejudice we've held on to," said Judi Hollis, a psychologist, family therapist and author of the book, "Fat Is A Family Affair."

"We can't hate people of color any more, but we can sure hate fat people," Hollis said. "We either think of it as something that's not really a problem or something to ridicule."

Parents, however, can take steps to empower their children.

They can reassure heavy children that having a large body doesn't mean they are bad and they can encourage a healthful lifestyle, such as a eating healthful foods and having a daily hour of active play, experts said.

Children who are overweight or obese should act as other children do, Ikeda said. They should get involved in clubs at school, go to dances and be sociable.

"It takes a tremendous amount of personal character to be able to do that in a society where stigmatization of obese people is not only tolerated but supported," Ikeda said. "And to tell themselves that other people are not going to determine their life for them."

Parents also should stand up for their children if they are being teased or discriminated against. Get teachers and school administrators involved, if necessary. While some overweight children are quick with witty or clever comebacks, most are beaten down by society's preoccupation with thinness, Ikeda said.

Carlos Ruelas, a 9-year-old Rialto boy, deals with cruel comments from children in his neighborhood because he is overweight. He weighs roughly 90 pounds and is less than 5 feet tall.
"It happens when I'm outside playing - some people call me `fatso' and stuff," he said. "I ignore them or I walk away. Sometimes I tell them to stop but sometimes they keep doing it."

Carlos plays right field on a Little League baseball team. One of the team's best players, he is good at stealing bases and driving in runs.

He sometimes tries to compensate for his weight by excelling in sports and said the children who torment him are usually surprised when he does well in athletics.

"If I do good in sports, they leave me alone."