Ya mon!

At midnight, instead of sleeping like normal people, I am up photoshopping dreadlocks onto pictures of my boyfriend. Try not to be jealous, coolness of this caliber is rare.

Eating Disorders are Stressful.

My little sister is anorexic. And not because she was pressured to be skinny, cause she’s always been slim, but because she scared herself into being overly healthy. Yea. She became so paranoid of eating unhealthy things that she wouldn’t let herself eat at all, because NOTHING is 100% healthy. Almost EVERYTHING in excess CAN be unhealthy. She dropped from 87 pounds last fall (which is already quite light for her 5′2″ frame) to 70 pounds. That gives her a BMI of about 13. How frightening is that. It’s just unfathomable. She refuses to eat, and whenever my mom, my dad, or I bring up food, she gets angry. She says she never even feels full anymore, although she has also admitted that it may just be psychological and that she just forces herself never to eat. She doesn’t even know if she likes fries/mash potatoes/yummy goodness anymore. She hasn’t gotten her period since December.

It is just so far beyond me how she let herself do this. Food is great. Being healthy is great. Indulging every once in a while (or even a whole lot of the time) is perfectly OKAY!

And she stresses herself out all day, keeping a “food journal” obsessively because the doctor told her too. But it doesn’t help much. In fact, I’m not sure if it helps at all. Now, at every meal time, she scrutinizes her servings, trying to figure out how many grams of chicken she has eaten, how many servings of grains she has had that day, or how many cups of broccoli she has had. Every meal is a battle. And, although she always acts like she’s the martyr, eating food when we ask her to or make her, she’s not helping herself at all! Until we no longer have to force her to eat, she will always be anorexic, and she will always have an eating disorder, and she will always be mentally ill.

But another part of her stress is that she feels constant guilt for worrying all of us. (But even despite this, her eating habits do not change. Once again, she needs to be eating right for HERSELF, not for anyone else. I don’t think she understands.) My mother is always losing sleep over her not eating, and since my father does not do so well as a father, she has to commute to New York City every day for work from New Jersey (about two hours of commute daily), come home and cook (and have my sister basically not eat anything), finish up her endless amounts of work, struggle to make my sister eat, and then stay up until who knows when worrying. And my grandfather, the sweetest man you will EVER meet, whom I call every day, is also worried SICK. One of the things he asks me every day is if my sister is eating more. I haven’t the heart to tell him that “No, she hasn’t really improved that much at all,” so I always assure him that yes, she’s improving and that no, he needn’t worry. But I know he does. We all do. And I worry doubly, both about her, how skeletal she looks (Even kid’s size 12 jeans are baggy on her for heaven’s sake), how really, if she keeps this up, she could very well die, and about my parents and grandparents, because they shouldn’t be under this much stress right now, they shouldn’t have to worry ALL THE TIME.

It just makes me sad. Truly, truly sad. I wish I could fix it all.

risqué? oh please.

Apparently, Miley Cyrus is all embarrassed about these new pics, taken by Annie Leibowitz for Vanity Fair, because some members of the public have suggested that the magazine is exploiting a 15-year-old girl for sales.

What?!

Really?!

Seriously?!

This is so far from alluring, it’s amazing.

And it’s especially dumb because there are some (oh-so-scandalous) pictures of her looking like this everywhere.

Oh god, could there be any more unnecessary hype about her?

Oh wait. She has a deal to write her MEMOIRS. MEMOIRS. AT AGE 15. YES. YOU HEARD ME.

Lies

So I asked my mom today if I could go out with my boyfriend (she doesn’t think we go out, but I’m pretty sure she knows we’re dating and she’s okay with that. Which is odd) and she wouldn’t let me go to the movies with him… Which is dumb, because I could’ve easily lied (as I usually do), and then she would have let us go out. But I didn’t. So basically, I didn’t lie, and I got screwed over, and if I had lied, I would have been able to go out.

Funny, isn’t it.

A New Kind of Designer Baby

Fact of Life #8: A mother’s diet can influence the sex of her unborn child. Link

And here I was thinking that the only way to choose the sex of your baby was to wait until you were rich enough to afford to pay someone to genetically engineer a designer baby for you.

That’s crazy stuff, isn’t it? How cool is that.

The article has a bunch of stuff about how this has implications in developing countries, where mothers eat less, which correlates to more girl babies and less boy babies. And it also has a little bit of speculation as to why this is. From an evolutionary standpoint, it benefits more to have boy babies when the conditions are good, because a male can father far more babies in his lifetime than a female can produce in her lifetime. On the other hand, it benefits more to have girl babies when the conditions are bad because females reproduce more consistently.

Woww. That’s pretty rad.

Never.

Fact of Life #7: You should never, ever put pictures like this up on the internet. Not on facebook. Not on myspace. Nothing. It doesn’t matter how much you loved She’s The Man.

That’s just creepy. I have nothing else to say.

NYC, April ‘08

My cousins came over from California during their spring break, which was last week. So we went to NYC last Sunday. It sucked. A lot. Don’t get me wrong, I love NYC…… But not when I have to sit on a bus for FOUR HOURS taking a BUS TOUR. Also, it was freezing. And I was sitting on the top, with the wind messing up my hair, and nearly getting frostbite. It was possibly the farthest thing from fun.

As soon as we got out of the subway and onto the streets, a guy from a tour bus group attacked us. I don’t know what exactly screamed tourist about us, since I wasn’t even brandishing a gigantic camera, or anything, and I was dressed entirely normally, but I’m thinking it may have been the fact that we were a big group of Asian people. (I’m half-joking.) Anyways, he kept on talking and talking and talking and when we didn’t want to go on his bus tour, he followed us for maybe a block and a half. I think being aggressive is good, but only to a certain extent. I mean really. Don’t follow me around man. When I say no I mean no. Don’t make me go all psycho on you.

So then we found another tour bus group. And the tour guide of the first half of the tour was not incredibly good. She basically told us, for two hours, the same things over and over again. We’d drive by some nice (expensive) looking apartment buildings and she’d tell us some famous people who live there and how much they paid to live there, and then she’d say “That’s what it takes to live in NYC”. Okay. I GET IT. IT TAKES A LOT OF MONEY TO LIVE IN A PRETTY APARTMENT IN NEW YORK CITY. DUH!

But then the tour guide of the second half of the tour was pretty cool. He had some sort of british-australian accent (I have a huge thing for accents. I think he could’ve been talking about nothing and I would’ve been like OKAY! ACCENT!) and some cool stories too. Like how he met Will Smith and Robert DeNiro. I love Robert DeNiro. Will Smith too, but DeNiro! Oh my god!

Anyways, I’m talking about my trip to NYC, a week after the fact, because I was just looking at the photos I took. Photography is one of those things I love to dabble in. It’s also one of those things that a lot of people think you don’t need much skill for, or one of those things that a lot of people think they’re skillful at. So these are some the pictures I took, the first four of which I took from the top of a moving double decker tour bus that I paid $47 to freeze and be bored to death on.

I’m not sure what building this is, but it looks cool, doesn’t it?

Apparently that’s in Seinfeld. I wouldn’t know, I don’t like that show, but I thought that was pretty rad anyways.

Supposedly, that restaurant’s a big deal. But whatever, OBAMA!!!

RIP, John Lennon.

The golden statue thing at Rockefeller Center! I’ve been skating there twice, and it looks a lot prettier at night when it’s all lit up. The skating rink looks a hell of a lot smaller than it does in Serendipity, though.

Tree People

http://www.georgesteinmetz.com/index.php?section=11&page=view_photos

My fave pics:

Wow. These are absolutely breathtaking. I can’t seem to find much about these people, but I did manage to find this…

http://www.journeys.travel/destinations/pacific/indonesia/559/

Which basically means that as soon as I have 10k lying around, I’ll be going to Indonesia to see these tree people for myself.

But seriously, how cool is that?

I can’t even begin to fathom that kind of lifestyle. That’s craaaaazy stuff. But also, how cool a job is that? For George Steinmetz? I guess I’ll just have to add “freaking kick-ass photojournalist” to my list or dream jobs.

Life Goal: Live with the tree people for a while. And be a photojournalist.

Ouch

So we ordered take out from Macaroni Grill today, which is great, cause pasta is yummy. And I was all excitedly opening up the lil take-out container, you know the kind that’s aluminum-y and that you have to like flip the sides open for, when I gave myself a gigantic cut. Yea, from the take-out container.

This is what happened to me..

Except in real life, it’s even larger (covering about the entire width of my thumb), and deeper. And it’s not bleeding because I washed it and stuck a band-aid over it.

So, the moral.

Fact of Life #6: The metal take-out containers that you might think are so convenient and user friendly can severely gash up your thumb or other parts of your body. They’re dangerous. Be careful.

Miss USA 2008

I’ve always loved beauty pageants, and always love to tune into to Miss USA and Miss Universe whenever I catch them. And I usually happen to catch them every year. I think they’re so much fun!

However, I read about how girls put vaseline on their teeth (yuck, that doesn’t sound too fun), and tape their boobs together (haha, I tried this once to see if it worked. It wasn’t too comfortable and I don’t think it was incredibly effective), which makes beauty pageants seem not so glamorous.

And I really disagree with child beauty queens.. Or maybe just the child beauty pageants highlighted in Little Miss Sunshine (One of the best movies ever. Ever. If you haven’t already, go watch it now. Now. Go.) That seems a little too much. This also kinda has to do with the question one of the top 5 contestants was asked earlier. I can’t remember who it was, but she was asked what she thought of cosmetic companies targeting pre-adolescents (Like, pre-ten-year olds). And she gave an extremely incoherent answer about how it was good. Uh, HELLO. NOT GOOD. I highly doubt a ten-year-old needs any makeup for her unblemished skin! And I don’t think they need to get their hair chemically relaxed! I am all for a little fun experimentation with mommy’s makeup, but nothing too extreme… What kinda world do we live in!? Trying to sell children cosmetics?!

Anyways, I’m straying too far from the topic here, haha. Miss USA 2008 from Texas, Crystle Stewart.

I don’t always agree with the girls they choose, in fact I usually disagree.. Like I do this year. She’s undoubtedly pretty, but I preferred some of the other girls there. Like Miss Oklahoma. But it might just be that I have a thing for tallness and Southern drawls.

Isn’t she cute? Cuter than Miss Texas? She also got the highest ratings in both the swimsuit and evening gown competition… So I’m not sure why she didn’t win.. The questions they were asked didn’t seem very astounding at all.

Also, Miss Texas had the prettiest dress there, in my opinion. I wasn’t a fan of Oklahoma’s, or Miss USA 2007’s dress.. Rather shapeless. But anyways. Now to wait til July for Miss Universe!

Also, on a kinda completely different note, CHRISTIAN SIRIANO WAS ONE OF THE JUDGES FOR MISS USA 2008!!!! Oh Christian, how I love thee.