Upper

So, in light of my depressing self-pitying entry yesterday I have decided to end my short-lived mild depression and do something about the problems n my life.

1. Parents: hard to change...I will try to be more thick skinned and sickly sweet to my sister and my parents and maybe if I always act nice enough they'll leave me the fuck alone.

or I could always resort to physical violence and just fight Anna: Winner gets our parents undying affection.

2. Friends: I am going to hang out with as many people as possible whenver possible...for instance: I have plans to hang out with different people every night this week until saturday!!!! Anyone down to hang out sunday? I also have monday off...perhaps we could have a bbq (weather permitting) ?

3. Stress: I'mm continuing the job hunt today at lunch and after I get home from Jodie's and I am going to talk to my Aunt Kathy for some advice on medical experience that would be good for PA schools.

4. My fat ass: I am going to really stick to my diet and work out like my personal trainer taught me....except even more often!!! Who wants a gym buddy?? I belong to 24hr fitness and I want to go at least 2 days a week for at least an hour plus Im starting a Yoga class at Chabot next wednesday.

Also! I'm gonna be coordinating with Lexi to take walks around lake chabot or the San Leandro Marina hopefully once a week at least...I think it would be nice to get a few of us girls together and just exercise and chit chat...let us know if you are interested!! It'll be fun!!!

Warning: Downer

I don't want to be a downer or a whiner. I try really hard not to be so negative, and I try to be optimistic and positive and cheerful and bubbly, but its getting to the point where I can't anymore. Things are just too hard right now for me to act happy all the time. I need to let it out a little. If you don't like negativity, then don't read this. I just need a little time to vent.

I am unhappy. I guess that's the first step right? To admit it. I've been trying to figure out why I'm unhappy and I've come up with a myriad of reasons.

1. My parents have been riding my ass my entire life. I led a sheltered childhood where I was grossly overweight and unpopular and mildly intelligent and terribly depressed. No one ever noticed, they just continued to ride my ass academically and behaviorally and expected me to be perfect. My sister on the other hand, they never treated like that. In their eyes she is perfect and no matter how hard I try and how much I accomplish I will never ever outshine her. ever. She can be a complete bitch to me with her underhanded comments and her spiteful, nasty jokes at my expense and my parents just laugh. When I strike back, I end up getting ganged up on for being "a miserable bitch" which is a direct quote both from my sister and my mother, and a "spoiled rotten brat" when in actuality, it is Anna who always got what she wanted, I just rode her coat tails. My father tells me that I need to be more understanding and tolerant of her behavior and her teasing and her slights and her generally hatefulness. He tells me that I need a thicker skin. To me it seems that as a father he is teaching the wrong lesson. Perhaps Anna should learn to be more understanding of how I feel and how what she says makes me feel rather than telling me to tolerate her meanness. Now, don't get me wrong, I do understand the fact that in life people are not always going to be kind and I can handle that, but doesn't it always seem to hurt more when its your own family intentionally hurting you?

I could talk about this for days. I should probably move on.

2. I have lost almost every friend that ever meant anything to me. Ask anyone on earth who their best friend is. Not one person will say my name. That sounds really petty, but not being a best friend to someone really is painful especially because I consider a lot of people to be close friends who probably don't consider me one. It makes me really sad.

I understand that friendships are two way streets and that both parties need to work to keep them, but that doesn't make it hurt any less. In fact, knowing that its probably my fault makes it hurt even more. I went to UC Berkeley and I struggled a lot, so studying took up almost all of time when I wasnt in class, at work, or at my various interships and volunteer placements, plus I have been in a relationship for most of my college career and relationships take time and energy, so of course I spent a significant fraction of my free time with whatever boyfriend I was with at the time. I feel like that is understandable and forgivable, but perhaps other people don't. There are only 24 hours in a day...far too few to finish all of the things that I had on my plate and make time for a boyfriend and a social life. Maybe now that I will have a bit more free time I can repair those relationships, but thats only if the other person tries, too. I've neglected my friends and now I don't have many of them left.

It's just hard to feel so alone sometimes.

3. I'm stressed out like you would not beleive. I thought graduating would make me less stressed, not bump it up a couple hundred notches. I need to findd a vocational school to go to to get medical experience so I can apply to a PA Master's program, but I don't know what kind of experience is better (Medical Assistant versus Surgical Technologist) and I honestly still don't know if I really want to go to PA school instead of Medical School and that is really stressing me out because I have to decide NOW.

I also am 2 days into my last week at my job at UC Berkeley and I don't have a new job lined up. I'm freaking out about bills and school books and how Im gonna afford to go on the cruise and all that nonsense. Its really stressing me out. I need a job, but no one seems to want to hire me. I guess I just can't give up. Perhaps I'll spend tonight looking for jobs after I check on my grandma to see how her surgery went this morning.

4. Im am once again. terribly overweight. I was huge in high school and I managed to lose 100 lbs, unfortunately I have gained a portion of that weight back and I have been trying really hard to lose it and I am having a really hard time. I have struggled with my weight my entire life and I have never really won the war. I'm beginning to lose hope, that maybe I'm just destined to be fat for the rest of my life.

I have this mindset that if I lose weight all my problems will be solved: my family will accept me, my friends will come back and want to be around me, and I'll be happy. I guess thats not really true, buts its a lifelong feeling that I've had.



Thats all I am really feeling unhappy about right now, but those are 3 or 4 huge parts of my life that are going very poorly. At least I have Jarrod, Ashley, and Christine to keep my mind off of things and make me smile.

Vaccines, Autism, and Organics

So I listen to a wonderful program call "This American Life", which is produced Public Radio International and today I listened to one called "Ruining It for the Rest of Us" which had a segment on parents who choose not to vaccinate their children. This is an issue that drives me crazy. I understand that people are scared and they don't trust the "system" and that they may not have all the facts. I have a very easy solution for those people. GET. THE. FACTS. Yes, doctors may give a one sided view of vaccines, but so do the people who are spreading rumors that the MMR (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) vaccine causes autism. The one study that I have ever personally seen that "proved" that the vaccine caused autism has been RETRACTED. Measles is DEADLY.
By making the decision to not vaccinate their child against it, they are not only putting their children in danger, but other people's children as well. When considering the Public Health impact of a vaccine one must look at Herd Immunity. This is the idea that as long as a certain percentage of the population or "herd" is vaccinated, the entire population is protected. When the percentage of people vaccinated falls below that required for herd immunity, epidemics happen. I really don't think that people consider Public Health safety when making vaccine decisions, they only think about their child and the negligible chance that the vaccine may cause autism or other diseases. They hear people talking about autism and vaccines and danger and they immediately trust rumors ahead of the "system", which is obviously out to get them and their children. The only thing that I have heard that is in a vaccine that has been a proven medical danger is aluminum, which is a proven neurotoxin. So why do people use aluminum foil to cover their children's food? It doesn't make any sense to me.
These parents are probably the same parents who insist that their families only eat organic. And yes, eating organic is good to a degree, many of the nasty pesticides are avoided, but there are also negatives. All plants have natural inseticides to kill predators and to stop them from continuing to feed on them. Well, by using pesticides, we save the plants the trouble of developing and manufaturing these natural toxins. Why, you might ask, does this matter to humans? Because many of the these natural plant insecticides are deadly to humans, neurotoxins, carcinogens, allergens, you name it. We don't have a lot of information on a lot of them, either, whereas in many places that our food is grown (in the US andd Europe in particular) pessticides are closely monitored and regulated. Natural plant toxins are not.
It seems as though people see "natural" things as healthy things, and in actuality, some the most poisonous, deadly things we know of are natural. Botulism, for example, is a natural product of the bacteria clostridium botulinum, Anthrax is also a natural product of the species anthracis when infected with certain bacteriophages. Natural by no means is healthy. Keep that in mind at the grocery store.


Moral of the story: Take everything with a grain of salt, don't listen to what people around you are saying. Do some research for yourself...you might be suprised at what you find.

Reassessment

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I am going to do for the next 5-10 years of my life and I’m starting to think that perhaps I am making a bad decision. I feel kind of like I am just settling or going the easy way. I mean, why shouldn’t I work my ass of and apply to Stanford Med? Harvard Med? Or Yale Med?

Why am I settling with a career as a lowly Physician Assistant? Is it what I really want? I really can’t tell what I want right now. I have a really great boyfriend who seems to be in it for the long haul (for now at least, you never know what is going to happen in the future). I want to do the whole family thing and I feel like PA is perfect for that. I want to work a 40 hour week and not be on call all the time and be able to cook my family dinner every night and take my kids to soccer practice and stuff. I want to be able to support them, too, though, and I have this weird mental hang up that if I’m not a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer I’m not going to be able to do that. I want to have a beautiful house with a big yard and a dog and the whole nine yards. And I’m kind of scared that I won’t be able to have that if I don’t make more sacrifices and go to medical school or marry a doctor or something. Is that weird? Am I just being crazy?

I don’t know what to do with my life. I wish someone could just tell me what to do. Like when I was little.

My Hero

So yesterday was thanksgiving and it was really fun. We went to my Uncle Jim's house where is new-ish wife Rebecca made an amazing dinner in their gorgeous house. It was pretty picturesque. We drank expensive wine and went hot-tubbing after dinner. My cousin Brad brought his girlfriend that he met when he was living in France. She was really sweet and really pretty. I'm happy for him.

I also learned a lot about my grandpa frank. He died in December of 1999. He was one of the most amazing, kind, gentle, selfless, generous people I have ever met in my entire life. He never really talked about his life very much, though...and as a little kid, I never really questioned it or wondered why. I knew he was a marine and I knew that he was stationed in Okinawa. I knew that he met my grandma sometime after the war when his car broke down and she helped him push it. He took her to dinner that night to thank her for helping him and the rest is history.

A show came on TV last night on the history channel about cities of the underground (which is a really cool show, and I recommend it, there is always cool shit on that show) and the particular episode was about the Battle for Okinawa and the underground tunnels, bunkers, and hospitals that the Okinawans and Japanese soldiers hid and worked in. My grandmother did not live in Okinawa at the time, but her best friend Fumiko, who was at thanksgiving dinner last night, was telling us about her and her family fled to Taiwan when the battle began.

Now I always knew that my grandfather fought at the battle for Okinawa, but I had no idea what he did or what happened to him until after he had died. My cousin Taylor wrote a report about the battle that included a fact sheet about my grandfather, most of which i had no idea of. and I wanted to share that story with you. It's pretty amazing.

Francis T. Cahoon (my amazing grandfather) was a Sergeant in the 6th Marine Division and he entered Okinawa to fight on April 1at, 1945. His platoon was called "Rat Patrol" and he was part of a team that used flame throwers to flush the Japanese soldiers out of caves (They also ended up freeing many Okinawan civilians who were being held in the caves for many weeks ,starving, thirsty, and riddled with illness. The Japanese soldiers even killed babies who made noise so as to keep their positions secret. The survivor that they interviewed on the show last night said that the Japanese where far more frightening than the Americans and that when the Americans came they gave the Okinawans food, water, and medical care). After coming under heavy fire my grandfather's entire platoon was killed save him and one other soldier. They were hit by a mortar and flung into a ditch, and his dog tags were blown off. the other soldier tried to stand up, my grandpa tried to pull him down, but it was in vain; the other soldier was shot and killed, leaving my grandfather as the sole survivor in his entire platoon. He went into battle shock and lay in that ditch for 3 days unconscious. A medical team searching for survivors found him critically injured by the mortar and with no identification. He was taken to a military hospital where he remained for an unknown amount of time. He woke up not knowing where or who he was. Eventually he was identified by his cousin Frances who happened to be a nurse at that same hospital. Because of the mortar he was deaf in his right ear (which i never knew until last night) and was left with heavy scarring on his upper right leg and buttocks.

How is that for an amazing story? He is so amazingly lucky: he was the only man to survive the battle of his entire platoon, he was found by a medical team in a sea of bodies and carnage, and he just happened to be in the same hospital that Frances was in and she found him and was able to identify him. The way I see it, God was either watching him very closely or He blessed him with extraordinary luck. I think that he knew what a gift he was given to be alive and he really incorporated that into the rest of his life. He did everything he could for people who needed it and would give you the shirt off of his back if you asked for it. He was an amazing person. He is my hero.

<3

Changes

I didn't know what to title this. Maybe I'll think of something as I write.

It's almost kida sorta hitting me that I am about to close one of the most life-changing chapters of my entire like in less than 3 weeks.

It's sort of scary. This week is thanksgiving, then next week I have 1 final and then the week after that I have 4 finals and Im done. On december 12th I will be a Berkeley graduate. How crazy is that? Berkeley really has had a huge part in making me who I am today. It chalenged me and forced me to work harder than I ever have before. I made a lot of sacrafices for this moment, and I have lost a lot of relationships along the way. I think thats what makes me so melancholy about the whole thing. All the people I lost along the way. I have had some amazing friends in the last 5 or 10 years and I only really keep in contact with a small number of them. It makes me kind of sad to think about the past and all of the memories that I have because I feel like I gave a lot of that up. I mean, I know that it will pay off eventually, but it just seems so far away. I don't know why Im being all emo. This really is a good thing, I mean I'm almost done!!! This has been so hard and I'm almost done.

Im just sort of scared of what comes next. I mean, I know what comes next. Chabot, the medical assisting, then PA school, then being a PA. But it doesn't seem that simple for some reason. There is a really deep dark uncertainty that I keep feeling in my gut. Like, maybe things arent going to go the way I have planned things...and if you know me, you know I like structure. I like plans and schedules and lists and uncertainty and change scare me. Where am I going to work while Im at Chabot? The economy is terrible and I need a job, a good job, one where I can make enough money to move out. But then moving out will also be a big change and I don't know if I can handle that. Jarrod really wants to move in together, but Im scared to ruin what we have. I'm scared to change everything. I'm scared to fail. I'm scare that all of my hard work was in vain. I'm scared that I really don't know what I want to do in life and all of this was for someone else.

I know I'm going to cry on December 12th at 11am in front of everyone, because I'll finally be finished, and I'll be happy, and I'll be releived, but mostly I'll be scared.

Politics.

So, I've been really busy lately, but I've been meaning to write about a couple of political things that have really been getting to me.

First off: I am so disappointed in California. How could prop 8 have passed? I really am ashamed and disappointed. How could we take the right of marriage away fom a group of people simply because we don't agree with their lifestyles. In that case, why isn't divorce illegal? That certainly effects the sanctity of marriage, and the Catholic Church certainly looks down on it. So why are people still allowed to get divorced? If we placed the same standards that we place on gay marriage, then a lot of people would not be allowed to be married. Interracial couples would not be allowed. my grandparents would not have been able to get married, and I wouldnt even be here if it weren't for people who stuck up for what is right and fair. With every civil rights battle, the majority has been against it, wether it be interacial marrige, women's rights, and the ending of segregation. The constitution protected those people's rights. Why doesn't it protect the rights of the LGBTQ community? I think that is so wrong.

I love the argument that gay marriage is wrong because it's unnatural...yeah, i know, right? We Americans hate unnatural things like cars, airplanes, breat implants, hair dye, tattoos, nail polish, makeup, fake tans, computers...honestly the list could go on forever.

I'm just really saddened by this decision. I really hope that the supreme court rules this proposition unconstiutional, because it really is.

On the other hand: Fuck yeah, Obama. I'm so proud of America for deiciding that change is a good thing and really making history this election. The first black president...I don't know if you guys are as inspired by this as I am, but this is huge. I really am proud of our country for pulling together and electing someone who is our president, not just the republican's president or the democrat's president, or the top 10%'s president. I think that he really has the coapacity to stand up for us little guys. and thats a nice feeling.

During his speech after he was elected, I was really moved. And the most interesting part about why I was so moved is that it wasn't because I was so nuts about Obama (he's great compared to McCain, but probably not going to be the best prseident we've ever had), but because I felt patriotic. For a large part of the past 8 years I have been really cynical about America and I was really beginning to internalize the hatred of Americans that so many other countries feel. I haven't been proud to be an American in a long time, but all of the sudden, when he was giving his speech something clicked, it literally brought tears to my eyes. I felt proud, patriotic, and hopeful for America. I was moved. and it felt good.

One of my favorite lines from his "Yes we can" speech is this one: "We've been asked to pause for a reality check, we've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America there has never been anything false about Hope."

That line runs chills down my spine. What a beautiful assertation. and think about how true it is, how America really was built on hope, without hope, we would have nothing.

Go check out Will.I.Am's video called "yes we can". It'll move you.