Chipped Polish & Wornout Jeans

Sometimes I think I want too much out of life. And I don’t mean little things like the fact that I’d love to have more readers on my blog (although I really would) or finally mastering some recipe or losing the fifty or more pounds I need to lose. I want to do so much with my life, and some of it is all so different.

I want to change the world, make it better, and I want to practice law. For so long I’ve wanted to be a lawyer, and I’ve done as much as I can to make that happen. I’ve given up so much to do it. I feel like I lost Jake to my own ambition because I left before I should have; if I had stayed in TN just one more year instead of rushing off at the first change I got, maybe things would have turned out differently for us, and then maybe I wouldn’t be so lonely. But that’s not the point. The point is that I so desperately want to be a lawyer, and I’m so afraid that I may never become one. I don’t what I’d do with my life if I couldn’t go to law school and become a lawyer. I’d give everything to be able to do that.

But I also want to bake; I want to make amazing cookies and cakes. I think it would terrific to be able to make these fabulous creations that make people smile when they see them. How does that add up? I mean becoming a lawyer and owning a bakery, or maybe just a small shop that sell custom orders only. I love baking, and I love being able to be creative in the kitchen. I had so much fun baking my niece’s third birthday cake, and I would love to keep improving. My Grandmother offered to send me to classes to learn stuff, and I’m really tempted to take her up on that offer. It would be great to be able to really decorate cakes and to make those beautiful and adorable cookies I see on other food blogs all the time.

When I said that I want too much out of life, I meant it. You see I want to write. I mean really write. I’ve always been passionate about the written word both reading it and writing for myself. It should come as no surprise that I have read thirty two books towards my goal of reading one hundred books in the year 2012. Someday I’d like to be published. I’d like to write something amazing and brilliant, something worth reading. I have folders full of unfinished works that I just haven’t been able finish. I have so many ideas, and I just want to write everything.

I want so much, and I’m so afraid that I want to much. I want to write and bake and practice law. I want to be happy most of all. I want to be happy.

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In other news I have a new obsession. You can find me on pinterest! I don’t know what makes it so fabulous, but I love it.

Don’t you just hate it when you find a brand of clothing that just fits perfectly, only to have it discontinued? I have been wearing Arizona jeans for years, mostly because they are inexpensive while still looking nice. Well it appears that will no longer be the case. If they stop making shirts, shorts, and skirts, I’ll really be in trouble. Most of my wardrobe is Arizona, which is probably not a good thing, and I only own a few nice long sleeves shirts and sweaters. I have no clothes for warmer weather. I have two nice tank tops and three nice short sleeve t-shirt type shirts; I have no shorts, and no nice tops. Meanwhile I think I own one skirt, a short white eyelet number I bought while dating Jake because I wanted to be a girl for a change. I’m not even sure that the skirt will still fit me, and in any case, my thighs are so fat and my legs so pale that I highly doubt that I will be able to wear it ever again. Besides, I have no reason to dress all girl again at the moment.

I mentioned the fact that Arizona may be discontinued. Well, this leads to any number of problems, one of which is the fact that I have had to seek other brands for jeans. I went two Saturdays ago on a hunt for jeans, and I wound up with Levis. That is not the point of this entry. The point is that I had a minor breakdown over my body in the middle of Dillards because I felt fat and ugly. Let’s put it this way; I hate having to hear the words ‘we don’t have that in your size’ or any variation of that sentence. It never means that everything is too big. All my life I’ve dealt with it. I’ve put on a brave face and pretended it didn’t bother me for a long time. But lately my body image issues have been so terrible that putting on a brave face doesn’t exactly work for me. Sometimes I just can’t. Two sales girls asked us if we found everything alright, and I lied and said yes, even though I wasn’t having an easy time finding pants in my size at all. My grandmother was with us, and of course she tells the girls no that I’m having trouble ‘finding jeans to fit me’. From there it was go go gadget emotional breakdown, and I exited the store through the nearest door to avoid sobbing in the middle of the juniors department.

Here’s the deal, clothes for women my age, early to mid twenties, are generally one of two things: expensive or cut too small for me. I’m a curvy woman with wide hips, a big butt, and a decent bust line. I’m also built tall and long, meaning that everything is too short. I have to buy jeans labeled ‘long’ and unless I flatten my stomach shirts are impossible because my torso is long too. I have broad big shoulders and a wide rib cage, which makes me feel like I’m built like a man most of the time. I don’t feel pretty, and I’ve never felt pretty. It isn’t fair, but it’s what I deal with daily. I want to dress in something other than t-shirts and jeans, but it’s very difficult when clothes are cut narrow and short. My wardrobe staples are jeans, t-shirts with either sponsors for the race cars or my nerdy vintage green lantern t-shirts, and tennis shoes. None of that is remotely feminine or sexy at all.

I started to want to look more feminine when I was maybe a junior in high school, but I’d always been a tomboy. I love clothes and I love doing my nails now, but when I was thirteen and fourteen, all I cared about was four wheelers, horses, and the great outdoors. I didn’t know how to balance it, and I still really don’t. Suddenly I wanted to feel pretty. I wanted boys to like me and think I was pretty. But most of all, I wanted to feel like I belonged. By the time I was in college I was completely on my own again. My boyfriend lived in another state, and I was scrambling to make friends. I had no reason to dress up other than for mock trial, and that only required a black suit and heels.  When my boyfriend returned I wanted to be pretty again, remind him of why he started dating me, but I wasn’t very good at it. I’m still not good at it.

I’ve improved some I suppose. I know how to put on eyeliner and make up, and I know what does and does not flatter me. I like to paint my nails, and I don’t mess them up as much. But I still feel unattractive most days, and I feel like my clothes make me look even worse.

The ugly honest truth is that from a young age women are taught to be at war with our bodies; we are taught to hate their appearance and to want to be prettier, thinner, and more perfect. We are bombarded with images of rail thin women, shamed for being overweight, and told that feeling fat or unhappy about our appearance is a silly problem that can simply be handled by eating less and working out, even if it isn’t that simple. If we don’t conform to a certain image we are often shamed and mocked. Worse than that, we are taught to judge other women by their appearance; we are taught to hate those prettier than us, seeing them as competition, and mock those who do not conform to the predetermined and predefined concept of attractiveness. It makes for difficult for women to form relationships with each other, and it’s a recipe for eating disorders and self esteem issues.

It’s something I struggle with constantly; I am nearly twenty-five, and I have severe body image issues. I’ve had them since I was perhaps sixteen, and they’ve gotten progressively worse. They can be absolutely crippling, and there are days when I can’t stop myself from crying for hours; I have trouble looking in the mirror, and I rush to get dressed so that I don’t look at my reflection. I’ve had days when I’ve fallen apart because of my weight, and nights when I’ve cried myself to sleep. It’s exhausting, and the longer it goes on, the worse I feel. The sad thing is that society sets us up to feel dreadful about ourselves, and instead of fighting it we fall in line. It’s hard to fight back, especially when you feel worse everyday.

It’s easy for people to crack jokes and say it’s a ‘first world problem’ to feel fat and ugly and want to hide your body because you hate it so much. Especially when they don’t feel that way every day. It makes it hard to go about your life when you can’t stand to see your own reflection. I don’t want to look in the mirror or get dressed because I don’t want to see my body. I wear giant hoodies that three sizes too big so that you can’t see how big I am, and I literally cry myself to sleep some nights because I’m so afraid I will never be pretty enough and that I will always be too fat and too ugly to be wanted. And then you hear or read things where people say that you’re being too sensitive about your size or a fat joke or that you’re just upset because you’re not skinny enough to wear something made for someone so much smaller than you as if that means you’re just jealous and that you should just eat less and stop being a fat ass.

Hating your own reflection is like carrying around a massive weight on your shoulders, and everyday it gets heavier until you collapse under the pressure. That is the ugly honest truth. I wake up in the morning and when I look in the mirror all I can see are the flaws. I see fat and stretch marks that will never go away; I can’t see anything else, and it breaks me a little more every day. I have never felt pretty, never felt beautiful, not once, and I'm exhausted. I’m so sick of being fat; I’m so sick of hating my reflection and never feeling pretty enough. Anytime I lose weight, I just gain it back and then some. I can never wear cute clothes.  I’m sick of my reflection making me cry; I’m sick of finding new stretch marks on my thighs and stomach every day or seeing them get worse. I look like I’ve been pregnant or something, and those things may never go away. I’m fat, and I have ugly marks all over my body. And this is what I deal with on a daily basis.

One of my goals for this year is to read one hundred books; Kushiel’s Dart is the first among them. I will be tracking my progress on GoodReads, and I am going to make a conscious effort to broaden my reading horizons. And now, without further ado, here is my first review.

I've read a great many reviews of this book, and many of them were very off-putting. They all said the same things; sex seems thrown in at random, the writing is repetitive, Phedre is a whiner, word choice is very poor. I will admit that Carey abuses the word phallus as if it is the only word she knows for male genitalia, and I also freely admit that Phedre was an initially whiny narrator who can get rather repetitive. The book does start off slow, as Phedre provides an information dump that lays out her parentage and explains the Houses, but once she reaches the age of ten, the story begins to pick up and move at a decent pace. However, none of this deterred my enjoyment of the novel.

I particularly liked that Phedre wasn’t your typical heroine; she isn’t a princess locked in a tower who picks up a blade to defend her home, and she isn’t a girl masquerading as a man in order to fight. From the beginning she is completely honest about who and what she is, and I loved that about her character. She is a woman, through and through; she is a courtesan, in a world full of finery and pretty that hides darkness. Behind the beauty and sensuality of her world and lifestyle lurks treachery and danger, and Phedre uses her wits and her skills to survive.

I thoroughly enjoyed the refreshing change of having a female protagonist whose sexuality and femininity was empowering and important; so often we see female characters tossing aside their femininity to masquerade as men or having their femininity treated as a weakness. Sexuality is rarely portrayed as a good thing, and there is often a great deal of shame thrust upon openly sexual female characters. Such is not the case here. Instead Phedre's sexuality is embraced and is in fact a powerful and important aspect of her character; having a hero who is a sexual masochist was daring, and I applaud Carey for being able to do so without turning Phedre into a slut. I was particularly impressed by the way that she humanized Phedre and showed both the positive and negative sides of her life as anguissette, especially when she was forced to become a bed slave.

The sex scenes were well done and were handled in a tastefully, though those that were graphic in detail are not for the faint of heart, Phedre's experience with Melisande and the flechettes for example; many of the scenes were simply fade to black, implying what took place instead of spelling it out in graphic detail. None of her encounters seemed thrown in for the sake of adding eroticism to the novel, and each served a purpose toward forwarding the story and developing Phedre as a character. Even her relationships with others, especially her companion Joscelin, are shaped by these encounters, and by allowing Phedre to be trained as an extremely keen observer, Carey is able to show us how other characters' views are shaped by Phedre's role as courtesan and spy.

Often with first person narratives, the protagonist is developed at the expense of other characters, but such was not the case here; through Phedre's keen observations we are able to learn a great deal about the individuals she encounters. Her friends and companions, as well as her teachers and enemies, were well developed, and because the reader learned about them as she did, the development felt more natural and less like an unceremonious information dump.

The world building in the novel is exquisite, and Carey creates a world of both beauty and  darkness; it is fairly obvious that she is building using Europe as a base, with her primary location of Terre d’Ange being based in France. A good world build is as important to me as good character development, and Carey does not disappoint. The D’Angelines have a rich culture with a religion based upon angels fallen from grace, all following an angel known as Elua; The central idea behind their religion is “Love as thou wilt” embraces sex as a spiritual act and not just a physical one, and Carey does an excellent job of handling this idea without turning it into a tawdry idea of sex everywhere.

I do wish to address what many have complained is the pedobear seal of approval on this book, in that children are accepted into the Houses at the age of ten, where they are trained to become courtesans. Do I approve of the sexualization of children? No. However, one must remember that this is a fantasy novel, set in a time period that harkens back the medieval period; children matured much faster during that time due to shorter life expectancies. Also, since the primary focus of the tale is Phedre’s journey it is important to remember that she is brought into the Delaunay house at ten, but she does not begin her training to become a courtesan until she is fourteen when she dedicates herself as a servant of Namaah; she does not lose her virginity until she is sixteen.

The novel was rich in detail, and while normally I am turned off by first person narratives, Phedre was an engaging narrator for the most part; she does begin as sort of a whiny brat, but as she matures, so does her voice, making her more relatable. The political intrigue can be very dense and hard to follow, and I found myself wishing I had taken note of which characters were enemies and which characters were allies. Kushiel's Dart is an engaging and lush novel, filled with intriguing characters and sharp plot twists and narrated by a unique and captivating woman who's emotional growth rings true.

Vain and Gratuitous Picture to update you on my appearance (edited in photoshop out of boredom)

But the problem with a blog when you have no life is that you have nothing to write about. Most of the time my life consists of playing in Photoshop, occasionally writing on novels that may never be finished, tons of reading, and cooking (lots and lots of cooking). Just a reminder, I talk about my culinary adventures at A Taste of Joy, and I promise to update that blog more often. In fact, my goal is to blog more from now on, and hopefully I can manage that.

Before I start with the updates on what little has transpired in the life of Nic, let me begin by saying that this blog will hopefully become a lot more interesting. I’m not going to be blogging about major political issues or anything like that, though I may talk about important issues that have been on my mind a lot, but I am going to hopefully talk more about life as I experience it. This includes blogging about the books I read, the movies I see, things I see, and things that happen in my life. Whether or not that will be interesting or worth reading is yet to be determined, but writing used to be a great outlet for me; I intend to let it be that again. So on with the blogging.

As I mentioned earlier, I have been doing a lot of reading, and you can find my Goodreads updates both on my sidebar and by visiting my account. I’m open to book recommendations and friends there. I plan to blog more about my literary adventures, including reviews of sorts of the books I’m reading.

Currently I am halfway through a re-read of George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones so that I can move on to reading A Clash of Kings, and it’s one of those books that is so dense and rich that reading it a second time gives you more to love. Let me take a moment to talk about this book in general, without giving away too much, and then when I’ve finished I will write an actual review.

Martin’s writing style is very heavy, and he tends to be very wordy; however, for me that is not a deterrent so long as the story continues to move forward at a decent pace, which for the most part he does. He has a sort of Joss Whedon wickedness about him, in that you will fall in love with characters only to have them viciously taken from you via death. But his characters are deliciously human, and even the villains are realistic. I absolutely love that there are characters to love, characters you’ll love to hate, and characters you find yourself cheering for despite misgiving. The story rotates through their various points of view, which can be very daunting, and some of his chosen narrators leave a lot to be desired (I’m looking at you Sansa Stark, you little simpering whiner); however, each narrator weaves a brilliant portion of the overall tapestry, bringing their subplots and motivations.

The world is richly developed, and while there are underlying elements of high fantasy (dragons, direwolves, magic, and the mysterious Others), the fantasy aspect is cleverly worked into the overall story without bombarding the reader. It is not a book for the squeamish or those uncomfortable with sex, violence, and death, but I highly recommend it for fantasy lovers who want something thick and detailed to feed a need for heroes and villains.
Other books I’m reading:

• Eona by Allison Goodman
• Brisingr by Christopher Paolini
• Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey

The only update I have for now is that I have two mapped out but unfinished barely started novels. One is a futuristic dystopian work called NeverWonder and the other is a historical fantasy work that has yet to be named.