I'm not worthy

I sometimes like to think that I'm pretty clever.

The other day, my book club decided to take an outing to a bar that was hosting Harry Potter trivia, complete with plastic glasses and delicious vodka-y butterbeer.

After my teammates and I threw around different ideas for team names, I was happy that we ended up using one of my suggestions - The Team Who Shall Not Be Named.

I was also really pleased with one of my other suggestions - Expecto Patron Shots. I don't think anyone else was into it, though.

At the end of the night, the trivia host was reading off the scores, and our team name got a much larger chuckle from the audience than most of the other names, all of which were obviously Harry Potter themed (Whorecrux Hunters, anyone?).

But nothing could have prepared me for the team name that got far and away the best reaction from the crowd. I've been going to bar trivia on and off for about 7 years now, so I'm used to awesome puns or plays on current events, but this had an amazingness that is simply unparalleled.

That team name, my friends, was Snapes on a Plane.

SNAPES ON A PLANE!

I'VE HAD IT WITH THESE MOTHERFUCKIN SNAPES ON THIS MOTHERFUCKIN PLANE.

Sir or Madam, whoever you are that came up with this brilliance, I bow to you. I may never meet you, but you are my hero.

Turning "Can't" Into "Can"

Why yes, I AM wearing a moustache

At a point that seems like forever ago but was probably somewhere closer to 6 months ago, my friend tweeted about wanting to do the Color Run. I replied that it looked insanely fun but that my bad knee prevented me from running. Not just now, but forever and always.

After some back and forths with my friend and some research on the Color Run, I realized that the run is extremely non-competitive and that they don't care if you walk. Or cartwheel. Or crawl. It's about getting covered in paint, not racing. So I collected a team, waited a few more months, and finally, this past Saturday, went to the far reaches of Brooklyn, decked in white and ready to more or less become a rainbow.

My whole team was planning on walking, but when we were released from the starting line we were so full of adrenaline that we all broke into a jog. We all kind of looked around at each other and said, "Are we doing this?" I said I would run as long as my knee held up. Since I sometimes get shooting pains in my leg just from darting across the street to avoid getting hit by cars, I didn't think I would last too long.

3.1 miles later we jogged across the finish line covered in pink, purple, yellow, orange and green, having taken a few brief walking breaks to take pictures, collect lost teammates, or lay down in the paint to make sure our backs were fully covered.

My knee felt...fine. Sure, it's pretty swollen now so I probably won't go running ever again (or at least not until the next Color Run), but that's not the point.

The point, friends, is that the last time I ran 3 miles was in 2005. The reason I stopped running is because I was in ridiculous amounts of pain and went to see my knee doctor, who reminded me that my ACL/MCL surgery in 1999 left me with no cartilage in my knee and "Do not run, at all, ever. Unless you absolutely have to. And don't take stairs. If there's an escalator, use it. Otherwise you're going to get arthritis before you turn 30." So I listened. I don't run and I don't take stairs. And in the 7 years since then I've just grown accustomed to the thought that running is something that I absolutely cannot do.

While the pain I'm in right now reminds me that running is clearly something I SHOULDN'T do, using "can't" as the operative word is just flat out incorrect. I CAN run. And there's a big difference between saying that something isn't a great idea and saying that something is flat out impossible. Because while I realize that 3 miles isn't exactly a long distance, if you had asked me before this race whether or not my knee would hold up for that duration I would have told you with 100% certainty that it would not.

This makes me wonder about what other negative stories I've told myself over the years - ways in which I've convinced myself that I'm incapable or not good enough, when in fact this may not be true at all.

I remember one specific incident in February of this year. I scored some free tickets to a pre-Superbowl party sponsored by Maxim. I was pretty excited to get comped entry to a party with OPEN BAR, but I was also not really looking forward to all the hot Maxim models that would be running around. The friend I took with me to the party thought I was being ridiculous for saying that I wasn't hot enough to go to an event like this, but I truly believed that to be the case.

Obviously I WAS being ridiculous. Because first of all, that night would probably go in my top ten most fun nights out I've had in New York ever, and second of all, WHAT THE FUCK. Like, who makes these horrible self-deprecating comments about themselves?

I think what I've realized is that I need to stop with the whole negative self-talk. It isn't doing me any favors because no one finds self-deprecation all that attractive unless you're doing it for comedy (like Tina Fey in Bossypants - genius).

There are going to be a crapload of people that are going to bring you down. Maybe your significant other doesn't treat you as well as you deserve, maybe your coworker is trying to make you look bad in front of your boss. Plenty of people in life will tell you you aren't good enough.

Don't be one of them.

**This is my new series called Stratejoy Monday. To learn more about all this goodness, see the first 5 months of my Stratejoy journey here. 

Arielle Shrugged

Alternative title for this post: Talking About Stuff I'm Clearly Not Smart Enough to Understand Nor Knowledgeable Enough About to Write a Blog Post On It But That Hasn't Stopped Me Before So If I Sound Like a Moron...Sorry. Just Pat Me on the Head and Carry On Your Merry Way.

If you read this blog post or are my friend on Goodreads, you know that I've been reading some Ayn Rand lately. I wanted to read some of her work not because I have a thirst for conservative literature, but because she's like, famous and stuff? And I feel like as a general rule it's good to read books by well-known authors.

It took me 13 days to power through the the 1200-page tome that is Atlas Shrugged, which I was pretty happy about because I was one day shy of the 14-day library loan deadline and you guys already know about how sometimes trying to read all my library books before they're due is a delicate balancing act where my overzealousness occasionally comes crashing down around my head.

I knew that Rand was something of a Republican icon, but I didn't actually know what specific values her books espouse and I had no idea what any of her books were even about, plot-wise. But after reading Atlas Shrugged, I have some questions about the alignment of her ideology with the ideologies of various and sundry American political parties (well no, really just the main two, but I just enjoy saying "various and sundry"). So, here goes.

For anyone who hasn't read it, here is a really REALLY general summary of what goes on in this book. It centers around the railroad industry. There are railroad company people and copper company people and steel company people. Some of these people are better at their jobs than others. Then there's lots of government regulation that tries to give equal opportunities to everyone in the industry even though some companies are clearly superior to others. It royally fucks everyone over and shit kind of implodes.

So here's the thing. I see why conservatives rally around this book, because conservatives typically hate regulation even though SIDEBAR while I'm liberal mostly for social reasons I still think some good ol' fashioned regulating could have prevented some of our own catastrophes (what up ENRON, LEHMAN BROTHERS, ETCETERAAAAA) but that is not what this post is about anyway.

Right. So Republicans hate regulation and there's lots of regulating in this book and that's why they love it. Check. Moving on.

One of the main points that I got out of this book is that Rand really wants people to earn their keep. Even more than she hates regulation, she hates freeloaders. You don't get something for nothing. If you do well, you get rewarded. If you mess everything up, you don't deserve shit.

This commentary might be coming a few years too late, but throughout this entire book I could think of nothing but, "I wonder what Rand would say about huge Wall Street bonuses. Especially when the economy is in the crapper. DOUBLE ESPECIALLY for the companies that paid out big bonuses even when they were receiving bailout funds." Talk about people messing shit up and not deserving something. I can't imagine she'd be down with that.

Rand also seems to care a lot about blue collar workers - sure, most of the "good guys" in Atlas Shrugged are management types, but it's evident that she respects manual labor and those who work hard at it. I think if this book were written about a white collar industry (like, hey, the financial services sector), her tone would be completely different. Or maybe the book just wouldn't even exist like that. Again, the thing that surprises me here is what seems to me like a disconnect between Rand's beliefs and Republican values which, in this day and age, really seem to be all about pushing the wealth upward (you know, that whole 1% biz-nass). And by "upward" clearly I mean, away from the working class.

The point is, to make another broad generalization (sorry), blue collar + Republicans don't seem to mix, yet Rand + blue collar kind of do. Though I am admittedly a bit confused about her stance on unions. Fortunately, a lot of the internet seems to be in the same camp.

On another kind of side note, there is some really interesting literature out there about why so many working-class people vote Republican despite the fact that it seems to go against their best interests. I didn't collect links while I was researching this but rest assured, if you google it, it's out there.

Okay. So a lot of Republicans are all, "Yay Atlas Shrugged is an awesome book and is a great guide to how capitalism is supposed to work (I've read some stuff about how Paul Ryan is a lover of Ayn Rand, though this post wasn't brought on by any current event aside from the fact that I just happened to read this book recently). My problem here is that this book is sort of realistic but also completely NOT realistic. Like, is there a word that means "extended hyperbole"? Because if so, that's it. Some of the ish that happens here is totally ridiculous and I have a hard time thinking people are taking it 100% seriously.

So after all of this, I'm sitting here kind of like..."What am I not getting?" I couldn't really find anything that talks about these points of disconnect between Rand and the Republican party and while I would love to think that I'm the first person to have this breakthrough thought of "Hey guys Ayn Rand is pretty conservative but maybe not AS conservative as you think she is," the more realistic thing is that there is something here that I'm totally misinterpreting or straight up not understanding because even though I'm sort of intelligent sometimes, other times I'm the kind of person who frantically looks for her cell phone while she's holding it. It seems to me that Rand, if she saw what the Republican party was doing today, might be appalled by a lot of it. But maybe I'm wrong.

End blog post of confusion. Shrug.

The Curse of the Procrastinator

In keeping with last week's theme of "bad habits that are holding me back in life," I need to talk about the productivity killer that is...procrastination.

 

When I have a specific, defined, tangible deliverable to hand off to someone, I almost never procrastinate. I'm the girl sitting next to you in class who can't commiserate about the 10 page paper you have due tomorrow because I already finished it. Sorry! I'm going out drinking tonight and you're not, neener neener.

 

It's the intangible things - the deadlines that don't come with hard specifications - where I'm terrible.

 

Let's say I had an exam in school, or even in life right now let's say I have a job interview (I don't have any coming up, grumble perpetual unemployment grumble). Both of those events are things you should prepare for, and things for which you probably can never do enough preparation. If there's time left, you should study.

 

When it comes to things like that, I like to wait and wait and wait until I have the bare minimum amount of time left to still be reasonably competent/knowledgeable/productive. And then, aha! I only have to put in a teeny bit of effort because HEY SORRY that's all the time I have.

 

Remember last week when i called myself a "lazy sack of crap?" Yup, still true.

 

Sometimes the "bare minimum" is still a lot of time. All the time in the world wouldn't have been enough for me to be awesome at accounting, so I studied my ass off for that final in business school and in fact stayed in during a weekend-long pub crawl that many of my classmates were on (if you know me, you know how big a deal it is for me to willingly miss a pub crawl). So it's not like I was a completely terrible student. I was actually really proud of my 3.6 GPA (it's my blog and I'll brag if I want to!).

 

After job interviews, my second favorite area to procrastinate in is going to the gym. On most weekend days, I'll wake up, check email/Facebook/whatever, maybe catch up on a few TV shows, and then figure out how long I have until I have to be at whatever plans I have for the day. I'll then work backwards, figuring out what time I should leave the house, then what time I need to get home from the gym in order to shower and be ready on time, and then what time I need to leave the gym. Then I'll figure out how much time I would have at the gym if I got ready and left right at that moment. Sometimes I'll be like, "Oh shit I can only work out for 30 minutes, better go now!" and I'll throw on my sneakers and head out the door. Other times I'll realize I have 3 hours, at which point I'll sit around and apply to some jobs or watch more TV until I have less time. Like...30 minutes.

 

Why do I do this to myself? It's ridiculous to work out for 30 minutes when I easily could have worked out for an hour, and it's even more ridiculous to spend 10 minutes doing company research in advance of an interview when I really SHOULD have spent much longer. It's a weird form of institutionalized self-sabotage that is borne of nothing but my [thankfully only occasional] reluctance to really TRY that hard at anything. I'm only hurting myself here, but that's kind of the point. I'M HURTING MYSELF.

 

After blogging over at Stratejoy for 5 months and giving myself a healthy dose of self-love, I've moved out of the phase of my quarterlife crisis where I figure out what the fuck is wrong with me and WHAT IS GOING ON IN MY HEAD ACK.

 

The problem here is that I'm now in the part of the QLC where I need to make changes AKA The Part With All the Hard Work. Blarg.

 

And so I'm trying to take Molly's advice from the Fierce Love course and implement some systems to try and change the bad habits. I've started blocking out time for the gym on my Google calendar, and even though I can (and often do) ignore it, sometimes that reminder goes off and I grump around my room as I put on my gym clothes and then, my bad attitude be damned, I go to the gym. And maybe I'll still only stay for 30 minutes sometimes because I'm tired/crampy/other excuse, but other times I tough it out for longer. And lo and behold, I always feel awesome afterward.

 

At the beginning of this year, I thought that transitioning from being an unhappy person to a happy one would have been the hardest part of this whole journey. But now that I AM happier, I realize just how much work I still have left. My attitude has vastly improved since the beginning of my QLC, but it's time to take that new attitude and use it to make some positive changes in my life. But, like everything, it's a matter of taking it one step at a time. Today, the gym. Tomorrow...the world.

 

 

**This is my new series called Stratejoy Monday. To learn more about all this goodness, see the first 5 months of my Stratejoy journey here. 

Famous lookalikes and my love of JGL

One of the best parts of summer, right up there with street fairs, sundresses & flip flops, and trips to the Frying Pan, are outdoor concerts.

In the last week alone I have been to 3 summer concerts: Cake, Blues Traveler/Barenaked Ladies, and Incubus/Linkin Park. It was a week of high school throwback shows and I never thought I would say this but I'm a little concert-ed out right now.

But this post isn't about that. This post is about a revelation I had during the Linkin Park show.

This is Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park's primary songwriter, guitarist, keyboardist, and rapper (as opposed to Chester Bennington, the guy who does all the screaming. I wrote about him in my post about how rock stars are too skinny).

This is Josh Radnor, AKA the guy who plays Ted Mosby on How I Met Your Mother.

Let's look at them together.

These guys are TWINSIES.

If you like Linkin Park and you like How I Met Your Mother, you can probably understand how distracting it is to go through the entire concert feeling like Ted Mosby is rapping at you. But still - GOOD CONCERT.

Also, I think Mike Shinoda is adorable (Josh Radnor too, obviously). He's half Japanese, and I was going to say something about how maybe I have a thing for half-Asian men because of how much I absolutely adore Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but then I googled it and apparently JGL is very much white and not at all Asian.

Was I the only person who thought this? Anyway, JGL is Jewish, which I probably should have guessed with a last name like Levitt. The only thing this can possibly mean is that SOMEONE PLEASE GIVE HIM MY PHONE NUMBER IMMEDIATELY.

JGL, my mom and grandma will love you! Let's get married.

See? We'd be a totally cute couple.

When Motivation is MIA

Like anyone else, I have a few things I don't like about myself (sometimes it's more than few things, you know how it is).

One of the traits I really wish I didn't have is the fact that I'm a lazy sack of crap. Well, sort of. I'm really good about waking up at ungodly hours to go to the gym, and I will frequently leave Brooklyn to trek into Manhattan when a lesser woman might succumb to the siren song of sweatpants and Netflix.

What I'm trying to say, really, is that I'm straight up terrible at learning new skills. I have zero patience for being bad at things and zero desire to work hard to achieve something when the initial stages of getting towards that goal are boring.

Let me give you two examples. Let's say I wanted to get better at photography (I don't, FYI. There's no need to work on photography skills when the only pictures you take are of the variety where you stick your arm out and take a picture of yourself while wasted with your girls at a bar). I could take classes or read stuff or ask a camera-savvy friend for help, and I'd hopefully get better and enjoy the process along the way. The reason why I would enjoy it is because, even if the pictures I took were god awful, I'd still be taking pictures.

As a second example, let's say I wanted to learn to play the guitar, which I did when I was 19. I spent a fair amount of time teaching myself what I could learn from the internet and eventually graduated to actual lessons. 6 months into it, I quit. Why? Because unlike photography and the shitty starter photos, the beginning stages of learning the guitar don't really involve a whole lot of playing the guitar, and what I really wanted out of it was to be good enough to play a ton of songs or jam with other people and all I was doing was taking too long to switch between chords while trying to keep up with Weezer's Island in the Sun.

I know a lot of people who love the thrill of watching their own progress with a new skill, and I am both jealous of and mystified by those people. Improvement is wonderful, but I have an extremely short attention span and I lose interest in things at the point when the novelty wears off yet I realize how many more hours of work I need to put in in order to be even mildly successful.

I don't mind practicing basic skills in volleyball, because I've been playing for 15 years and while I have tons of room for improvement, I'm good enough to play RIGHT NOW. Yet I know I will probably never take up karate, something I would love to do and that my dad has been saying for years that I would be great at (and he would know - he has a black belt, as does my brother), because all I want to do is break boards and I'm pretty sure they don't let you do that when you're a white belt.

This is why I relish the opportunities that involve being externally motivated, particularly ones that involve specific timelines. Schooling of any kind is a great way to force myself to build up new skills. I'm pretty sure that if someone had just given me a math textbook when I was younger and expected me to do some self-directed learning, I still wouldn't know what 2 plus 2 is. Even when I took bartending classes 3 years ago - I learned how to make all sorts of fancy drinks (all of which I have sadly forgotten) because I HAD TO. Would I have ever taught myself to make a ton of different martinis? Absolutely not.

I don't know how to change this about myself, but I want to. I feel like I'm missing out on so many interests or hobbies that I might enjoy but that I'm too lazy to even think about getting started on because I know how bored I'm going to get. And the thought of how good I'd be at the guitar or karate or anything else if I had just found the motivation to FUCKING DO IT ALREADY just makes me all sorts of sad. Yet I'm doing absolutely nothing to change that.

I suppose there's the option of finding a way to create some sort of external push to learn things, but I can't afford to take classes or lessons for every little thing that I might want to do. And besides, learning to motivate yourself is probably something I should figure out sooner rather than later.

So what do I do here? Do I find a way to become less lazy, or do I just stick to things that, like photography, I can be productive at even while being bad at them? Because it's really the lack of accomplishing anything that drives me away.

Suggestions welcome!


This is my new series called Stratejoy Monday. To learn more about all this goodness, see the first 5 months of my Stratejoy journey here.

Introducing...

I'm very excited to introduce a new weekly series here at Not the Mermaid. It's called...Stratejoy Monday!

If you've read any blog post that I've put up at all over the last few months, you probably couldn't miss my numerous references and links to my Stratejoy blog, where I've been writing every Monday for the last 5 months about trying to deal with the rough patch known as the quarterlife crisis.

For anyone who missed out on all those posts, just know that I started blogging about having no job and no confidence and, through the months of personal development and awesome support from the Stratejoy community and the other 6 ladies who took over the other days of the week, I was able to turn my attitude around and make some pretty big leaps toward getting out of the funk I was in. Over the course of those 5 months I learned to embrace my looks, stop relying on alcohol to solve my problems, and embrace who I am without feeling like I constantly don't measure up. I emerged from this experience still without a job (though I have a temp job, yay), but I have way more confidence now.

For the super abridged version of my entire season, I suggest reading my very first post, the post about the time a good friend called me fat on my birthday, and my last post.

That last post went up on Monday, and to say I'm sad about it is a gross understatement. I got so much out of being forced to write openly and honestly every week, things which are admittedly not always in my wheelhouse. I got SO much out of it, in fact, that I decided to continue my efforts. And so while I won't be writing at Stratejoy.com anymore, I will continue to post, every Monday, right here. I am by no means out of areas to explore about who I am and what I'm capable of and I'm excited to continue growing as a person and hopefully as a writer.

I think it'll be a welcome batch of fresh energy on this blog, which, despite being a personal blog, doesn't always actually get that personal.

And if any of my fellow Stratejoy season 6 bloggers are reading this (Hi Caiti, Jill, Rachel, Camila, Cassie and Sarah!), I hope you guys will do the same!

Just to close everything out, here are the Stratejoy posts of mine that I haven't yet linked to:

- On my quest to become more open and less judgmental toward others

- When I went to Boston for a weekend and it made me let go of some negativity I've been holding onto for years

- Finally, the second to last post, interview week!

See you guys on Monday =)

New York - the smallest massive city ever

On Saturday night I went to a bachelorette party for my good friend and birthday buddy Julie.

As our pack of 15 girls walked the 2 blocks from dinner towards the bar that would be our destination for the evening, I heard someone yell my name.

I looked over and, lo and behold, my sorority sister Laura was standing on the corner with some of her friends. I stopped to chat for a minute and then ran to catch up with everyone else. It was an awesome and random encounter because, helloooo, neither of us live in Manhattan yet there we were on the same block.

A minute later we walked into the bar, and I hear, "ARIELLE!"

This time, it was my high school friend who also ended up going to college with me, Jen. RANDOM PART 2.

On Monday of this week, I had my 2nd day at my new temp job, where I'll be working 4 days a week doing marketing for a small accounting firm in midtown. I was on my way to the pantry to get some coffee when I see...a friend of a friend. This guy is friends with one of my kickball teammates, and while I've only known him a few months, I've had an eventful car ride with him where he spilled tea all over his BMW and we've partnered up to kick some ass in beer pong. RANDOM PART 3.

And people say New York is a big city. Pshh.

Defending my wallet, my food, and my honor

Some of you are probably aware that I just returned from a week-long vacay in Martha's Vineyard. It was a lovely week of getting a completely uneven tan, eating delicious food, and hanging out with 2 guys who are wonderful but who pick on me like I'm their little sister (the fact that I'm a few months older than both of them didn't stop me from calling them "my big brothers" all week).

For some reason, my 2 friends/pseudo-brothers liked to make fun of me because I insisted on taking home my leftovers after we would go out to eat. My rationale was that I don't have a job right now, and so if I were to eat my leftovers instead of paying for another meal, I'd save money. I still stand by this logic, but for some reason they insisted on poking fun at me and pretending that they were never going to let me eat any of the food I brought home.

On one overcast day, instead of going to the beach we decided to play some beer pong. And it was decided WITHOUT MY INPUT that in advance of each game, we would choose one of my leftover meals to be on the line, and the winner of that game would get to determine what happened to that food. They both laughed their evil big brother laughs about how they were going to set my sandwich or my chimichanga on fire.

So I played one guy, and then I played the other one. And I'm sure you know what happened.

Damn straight.