One Last Thing about Middle School

As I told you before, I only spent one year in middle school. Talking with someone on Twitter earlier this morning brought back a memory from middle school. I grew up in the rural South where racism always bubbles just under the surface. Right down the street from my middle and high schools lived a man who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan is nowhere near as powerful as it was during the civil rights movement, but to this day they still have a presence in the South. This man was a redneck of the first order. He lived in a raggedy house with lawn jockeys out front and an old boat with a sign on it. The sign said that the boat was for sending all of the niggers back to Africa.

Well this guy's daughter is the same age I am, and I actually went to middle school with her. Although her father was an ignorant bastard, I never had any problems with her. You would think that with a father like that she'd be carrying a banner for the cause, so to speak, but she seemed all right. She was actually friends with a friend of mine. In the mornings before classes started, if you got to school early, you had to sit in the lunchroom. I remember sitting near her in the lunchroom and she was relatively nice. I found out years later that she was dating a black guy. I'm sure that her daddy was really pleased about that. He actually moved out of that house years ago and the boat is no longer there, but whenever I drive by that house I see the lawn jockeys and the boat in my mind's eye.

Well Whaddaya Know?

Yesterday was my weigh-in day but I decided to dedicate my blog to a more serious issue. I'm thinking about only blogging about my weigh-in on Fridays so that you can feel the anticipation of the build-up and then receive the instant gratification of knowing how things went.

Yesterday when I stepped on my lying bastard of a scale, it said that I was down. Of course I was hesitant to believe it because he's told me that before and I've been up. One thing I did notice was a change in the way that my pants were fitting, and it was a change for the better.

So after work I went to my meeting, stepped on the scale, and found that I was down. I won't say by how much, but if you read my Twitter timeline, you'll see :-). Yesterday's meeting was a good one. We talked about anchors. In this instance an anchor is an object that you can look at or touch to remind you of something that you're working toward or have accomplished. The leader gave each of us a rubberband to put on our wrists and said that it was our magic weight-loss bracelet. She told us to look at it, touch it, or even snap it when we feel the need to do something that's not going to help us accomplish our goals or maintain the results of the goal that we've accomplished. I am currently wearing mine.

Here's hoping that it does the job, hahaha!!! Regardless, it's nice to have something tactile as a reminder of where I'm headed and what I need to do to get there.

When It's All in Good Fun

I don't usually blog on Sunday, but something happened to a friend that makes me feel the need to speak. I've been having a lot of fun on Twitter and have met some very nice and very silly people. I've enjoyed reading their tweets and know that they're just there to have a good time. Because my updates are protected, I can choose who I let follow me. That helps me to weed out spam, porn bots, and people that may not have much of a sense of humor. The people I follow are a great bunch and I love seeing what they have to say. It makes me sad to think that somebody might get offended by words that are meant in jest. It also makes me mad that others would make fun of what someone has to say. If you don't want to see what someone has to say, then unfollow them. It's as simple as that. There's no need to reprimand them if you don't like something they said, and there's no need to talk smack about them. We're all adults here, as far as I know, so why don't we act like adults?