Yet Tearyne Is Ambitious…

So I’ve gone ahead and signed up for two classes for the fall semester that I need: English 1301 and the first political science class. The cost is $2,134.11.

I can pay a third down of the balance and end up on a plan that would go as follows:

08/22/2011 – $712.11
10/03/2011 – $711.00
11/03/2011 – $711.00

Which I guess isn’t a bad plan for atoning for my sins of lackluster grades and performance. I am only taking 6 credits right now, because that’s all I can afford out of pocket. I might have a gig/interview around the corner. I’m still very hesitant to sign onto something completely full-time, but that’s pretty much all they’ve got for me right now. It’ll help, not having to worry about the expenses associated with a full-on apartment. Should reduce the stress and help me to pay back the federal aid that’s keeping me from being assigned an aid package, on top of paying back some other debts that I owe… After a successful semester, I might be eligible for Pell Grants again. Here’s hoping…

Both of the classes are online, so that’ll keep me free for work. Just gotta keep focused.  I posted my Craigslist ad and I’ve gotten a response. I’m just seeing what’s out there right now…

Okay. Back to resumes and things like that.

So I had an epiphany right now. I am motivated by competing against and doing better than others. I am planning on entering more contests related to my chosen creative fields to capitalize on this…

I just have to stay on that.

Does anyone have any painting, writing, or game design contests that they know of?

The freelance writing is going mostly okay. It’s been kind of a struggle to stay positive and to write no matter what. I have some sort of anxiety, I think; typically I assume that it’s performance anxiety, because when it comes to doing, I stall on things pretty frequently. For some reason, even though I know that I’m good at something, I freak when it comes time to prove that I’m good.

Things didn’t used to be that way. You couldn’t stop me from showing off. I was great at everything, and there was no stopping me from showing it.

I hope to get back to that.

I lack discipline. This is what has been keeping me from excelling. This post was actually started around the first or second of April; I’ve just been having THAT much of a difficult time getting back to it. Partially, I didn’t write it because I was afraid it might turn up in a search engine and expose my flaws to the world. Part of it has been, admittedly, because I was busy with temp assignments/working in the “real world”. But the thing of it is…

If I don’t get myself together, I’m not going to be able to excel. I want to be a stay at home worker. An artist. A writer. If I can’t keep myself focused on doing a task and executing it from start to finish, I’m never going to be able to achieve this. I don’t have to be told it twice and upside down to recognize that reality. I found in the last three to five years that there were no immediate consequences to dropping things (i.e., I wasn’t going to burst into flames). So I dropped a commitment here, dropped a commitment there….

When I started listening to Dave Ramsey, I started dropping commitments altogether. Hey, I had to buy groceries and pay the rent, so screw the credit card bill! (Note: Dave Ramsey’s approach only works for people in desolate situations. In all other situations, it will totally wreck your credit and a lot of other prospects, like your relationships with people and businesses.) This obviously wound me up in a lot of trouble, and along with taking care of a full-time boyfriend, I dropped my commitment to being a full-time student.

I could always make up the classes later, right?

Not so much.

Right now I am having to pay for classes out of pocket, meaning that I might end up taking 12 course hours at the local community college this summer so that I can get back to being eligible for things. I’m supposed to be an independent student this next school year, which means more student aid, but I have wound myself up yet AGAIN on academic probation, due to my habit of not finishing things ever. Yeah. It bites. I have a bunch of incomplete grades that need to be completed, and to be honest, considering how many fail grades I have now in art history, I am really thinking about forgetting this “University Studies” major option, going back to Art History, and cleaning up my mess.

I switched out of Art History, if you’ll remember (which most of you won’t) because I wanted to go into health and fitness. Gag.

Anyway. I need to repair those Incomplete/Fail grades on my transcript. I know it will at least partially bring my GPA back up. I’d love to get back into the studio art program, but I received a rejection for my first portfolio review. This wasn’t really my fault; it was due to the fact that all of a sudden now, BA students have to submit to the portfolio review, and I did not know this. I switched from the BFA to the BA so that I could avoid this hitch, because I quite frankly didn’t have any of my work with me when I moved here.

(Biggest mistake ever, by the way: if you are an artist, your work IS your resume. KEEP IT.)

So I’m going to probably be doing a lot of thinking and then talking to my partner, who really is my pace setter. He’s very successful, and so I’m going to try and match his speed. Please cross your fingers and toes for me. I’ve got an idea about the direction that I want to go (like I said before, I am going to do game design), but I really need to stay on the course. I know that this typically isn’t  a personal-ish blog — well, that wasn’t my intent — but I’ve got to keep track of my journey somehow. Publishing it for other’s eyes seems to help me a ton.

Thanks for reading, if you did.

So after a year of avoiding my calling to what I loved, I am returning to video game design. I think that I was mainly avoiding it because it was so much apart of my last relationship… that, and it dealt with discipline, a blog post that I’ve been working on but haven’t entirely completed. I’m very glad to be going back into game design. I was still always writing, and when I was thinking about the whole fitness modeling thing, I kept regretting that I’d never see a game published with my name on it. That should have been a huge red flag.

It was a very long, tear-filled conversation of regrets that brought me back to this decision, which I believe is the best that I’ve had in a long time. I want to help the world, but I guess I can only do it through donations and supporting those whose aims support the causes I believe in. I have a certain set of strengths, and I need to focus on those.

Photograph by Jen SFO-BCN

Across the African diaspora, you can see the foods adopted and adapted by former slaves and black transplants to foreign nations that have become apart of our modern lives. They are foods that reflect the cultures of the homeland (like watermelons, which were brought to the Americas from southern Africa) or that of our mixed heritages (the paratha in Trinidad and Tobago, resulting from some Trini’s Indian heritage).

Not all of these foods, though, have wound up so healthy for us in the long run. According to The Office of Minority Health, “ African American women have the highest rates of being overweight or obese compared to other groups in the U.S“, “about four out of five African American women are overweight or obese” and “in 2009, African Americans were 1.5 times as likely to be obese as Non- Hispanic Whites”. Call it “thick” if you want, but being overweight and obese isn’t a good look, and it comes with a long string of health complications, including diabetes and heart disease.


Sure, a call into being more physically active is great – I believe in it myself for a number of reasons aside from weight loss - but time and time again, researchers have stated that diet is much more important when it comes to weight loss; exercise is more critical in keeping the weight off and building muscle tone.  I think that by examining our food culture – the past and why it happened, and examining its effects today – we can take a step forward into changing this trend. This is a three part series, so feel take a look at the first part – the history of soul food after the jump.

Soul Food: Our History

Photo by James Emery

In North America, our variety of culturally black food is mainly what is known as “soul food”; I know that the majority of my readers know EXACTLY what I’m talking about. Collard greens. Cornbread. Macaroni and cheese. And of course, fried chicken. These foods from the black American past were usually the result of the fact that the finer cuts of meat were not available to the field hands; we got the leftovers. Southern plantation owners fed their slaves as cheaply as possible. Ironically, it turned out that some of these foods were better for us – the brown sweet potatoes that slaves typically ate that turned into our candied yams are actually more beneficial, health wise, than starchy white potatoes, for example. Greens were obviously a boon, rich in their vitamin and anti-oxidant value.

Photograph by Gveret Tered

One of the biggest adaptations to this condition was the use of various parts of the pig that slave owners didn’t want in African-American slave culinary practices. Pig ears, feet, intestines, and lard were re-purposed into things like chitterlings. Back fat, neck bones, and bacon were added to greens; pigs feet were boiled and eaten as an accompaniment to the greens. In order to survive, the slaves adapted; when you are a slave and prone to someone else’s whims, you don’t really have much of a choice in what you can eat. Sometimes slaves were afforded plots of land on which they could grow their own little field gardens, but this wasn’t always the case. What master said was good enough for you to eat, you ate, and you made do with what there was.

The biggest thing to understand is that the majority of these foods were high in both fat and calories. If you have ever done hard labor outside, then you know how much energy it requires and takes out of you. A slave was lucky to get in a meal in the morning and one at night, but between those two required periods of rest, it was work, work, working in the hot southern sun from sun up to sun down. This need for a high caloric intake wasn’t just with African and black Americans in slavery, but followed after the emancipation to the times of sharecropping. We were still doing the hard work from dusk until dawn… just under more of “our” terms. Eventually, too, blacks moved North, transitioning into the into the industrial workforce and labor zones. These jobs were also very intensive in nature as far as the energy need was concerned.

But what about in today’s world? Be honest – we live in a much more sedentary, sitting-on-our-behinds world than our ancestors did. The slaves, sharecroppers, and industrial workers of the Black American past didn’t work in an office from 9 to 5. (I’m not even going to mention the sector of us that just plain don’t work at all — and that goes for people of all ethnicities.)  In the next part of this post, we’ll look at how our old school soul food diet is hurting Black Americans today.

Right now, though, let me know: what’s your favorite soul food? How often do you eat any of it – only on Sundays, or a bit here and there throughout your week? How has it impacted your weight loss goals, and has your love of it made it hard for you to “start a new diet”?