It's all about me.

We all have aspects of our personalities that are shaped by our past experiences. While I don't believe that we are the things that have happened to us, I do think that we have to make a conscious effort to recognize those aspects of our personalities that have been shaped (good or bad) by our experiences. Realization of this, ironically, can only come from within, not from outside input. This blog is, in some small way, my way of working through who I am. It is all about me.

From time to time, I may glibly approach subjects that hit other people very close to home. Maliciously rubbing salt in somebody's wound is not my modus operandi. I may be cynical and my sense of humor tends to be as dry as month old toast, but I'm not hateful. In fact, there are very few times that I have shot venom in the face of anyone that I knew personally. I'm a fairly easygoing person. If you know me, you will probably find things in my posts that make you wonder whether or not I'm talking about you. I'm not. It's all about me.

Because this blog is all about me, I open myself up to a lot of criticism. There will be people who criticize my parenting, my marriage, my weight, my face, my writing skills, my religious beliefs, and the list goes on and on. If a gave a steaming pile of crap for other people's opinions, I would have conformed to their vision of right and wrong a long time ago. Chances are, I have probably thought about it in depth, examined your point of view in one form or another and found it lacking and therefore decided to discard it. It probably didn't fit in with what I know from my own personal experiences. Critical people are as common as pennies and not worth nearly as much. Those who can criticize creatively have somewhat more value to me but chances are that's not you. So unless you are convinced that you can either convince me with your rock solid reasoning skills that my p.o.v. is wrong, or you can criticize me in a way where I think, "I'm gonna have to steal that line and use it when I feel especially mean." Shut your cake hole.

We all have choices, my particular brand of cyanide may not suit you. It's okay not to subscribe. I'll still write the blog anyway, even if nobody reads it. Why? Because, it's all about me.

A cynic is born

It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment when I became cynical. I can point to a number of humiliating experiences and will probably share them when I run out of other things to blog about, but if you think of my cynical nature as a jigsaw puzzle, this event that I am about to relay would be one of the center pieces of that puzzle.

The year in 1989. I walked through the halls of Kirby Junior High with my pants tight-rolled to my ankles and my bangs matted and sitting six inches above my forehead. My generation decimated large swaths of ozone by resolidifying our mile high bangs between each class period with Aqua Net. If you would have touched my hair, I have no doubt that it would have shattered like the bad guy in Terminator 2 after he was dipped in liquid nitrogen.

The day was like any other day. I was dreading my daily humiliation session in second hour, P.E. When I walked in the gym, however, I knew that something was amiss. The rest of the girls were lined up against the wall in their "street" clothes. Some, toward the front of the line were weeping softly. As soon as the bell rang, the masculine-looking gym teacher, Mrs. L*** started calling the girls into the locker room one at a time. Within minutes, the girls would be dressed and take their place on another wall, rocking in the fetal position and mumbling to themselves. "What's going on?" I asked the girl in front of me, "Scoliosis exam" she replied. Not wanting to look stupid, I didn't even ask what Scoliosis was. When it was finally my turn, I entered the dungeon-like locker room. Water dripped ominously from the showers. "Take off your clothes, leave your panties on!" Mrs. L*** barked. My mind, failing to comprehend this order, would not allow me to follow this suspected-tranny's instruction. "Do it, I haven't got all day!" I did as I was told. "Turn with your back towards me and touch your toes!" She barked. My mind screamed, "WTF is going on here???" Within seconds, the exam was over. I wasn't sure what this woman was checking for since I was on one side of the locker room touching my toes and she was on the other side of the locker room and hadn't seemed to look up from her clipboard. I was instructed to get dressed and did so quickly. I sat next to another girl who was still mumbling and rocking and tried to evaluate what had just happened. I figured that scoliosis was some type of anal parasite, which explained why the teacher never left her post on the other side of the room. What I couldn't figure out is how someone with no medical experience whatsoever was qualified to check a whole school-full of pre-teen girls for butt trolls (BECAUSE I DIDN'T YET KNOW WHAT SCOLIOSIS WAS). Later, I found out that Scoliosis was curvature of the spine, but from what I could tell, our gym teachers weren't qualified to judge that either. It was then that I learned that people in authority could degrade you. A crucial lesson in Cynicism 101.

The reason that this horrible life experience comes to mind today is because my daughter's gym teacher decided that she probably had scoliosis and wanted us to take her to the doctor. She doesn't have it, much to my husband's dismay. He thought that dressing her up like a turtle/human hybrid would reduce the number of boys who would want to ask her out. I'm sure that it would temporarily, but I know a girl who had scoliosis that now looks like a 35 year old Jessica Simpson. Regardless, I know why the unqualified, non-medical professional thought that she might be afflicted. My daughter slouches like Quasimodo. What is more disturbing to me is that even though I pay for a physical examination every year by a guy with M.D. behind his last name, they are still forcing kids to go through this "exam." Another generation of cynics is born.

Thank You Farmville!

I may not believe that you can accomplish anything you set your mind to but with a little concerted effort, I do believe that you can move significantly in the right direction. I have accomplished some things in my life that I'm pretty proud of: losing weight, maintaining an above average gpa while working and going to school full time, raising 3 great kids. These are all things that I wear like a badge of honor. Yet if you were my "friend" on facebook, you would have to wade through multiple posts about my Farmville accomplishments before you ever knew any of these things about me.

My previous posts have been as follows:
Maggie found scissors
Maggie found fuel
Maggie collected strawberries
Maggie needs chocolates (for a goal on farmville)
Maggie just got an award for harvesting avocados
Maggie posted "Who does your taxes?" on a friend's page.

Then there's ten more posts about what I've accomplished on Farmville.
If you were to ask my closest and dearest friends, they would tell you that on occassion, I can be funny and engaging. In real life, that may be true, but on facebook, I'm just another Farmville junkie. The worst part of it all is, I'm not the best "farmer" out of all my friends. Their little patches of land are overflowing with little squares of awesomeness. In the meantime, I can't get enough fake chocolates sent to me to acheive the Farmville goal of matching a ewe with a ram in time to get an amorous animal badge by Valentines day.

My awesomeness level diminishes with every crop I harvest. Thank you Farmville.

Not my farm :(