This is it, kids, we're going to live forever. We're part of the story now.

In twelve hours, I will be staring at a podium. I will stare at that podium for two hours, with only the occasional break to look at my friends and share a knowing smile or a glance that manages to sum up "God, when is this going to be OVER?!" in a split second. I will get up from the chair, I will hear my name, I will walk across a stage, it will all be over.

And when that's done, I'll pose for pictures, I'll give hugs, I'll meet parents. I will do it all as a different person.

I will do it as a college graduate.

I have spent the past two months of my life living like someone I don't even recognize. I spun in and out of bars between 32-hour design benders. I double-fisted PBR and screamed that I was going to live forever, and though the words were a joke, I kind of meant them. I was ten feet tall, I was bullet-proof.

I was scared. I was defeated. I stayed in one chair for 32 hours not because I wanted to work so hard on my thesis, but because I knew I was going to break down as soon as I left the room since I lost the job I really wanted. I hurled my keys across the studio, I cried, I collapsed in a heap in a friend's arms because it was finally too much to take.

I finished my thesis.

I detached from the entire world around me and made new friends. I shot what felt like a hundred games of darts. I forgot how to hustle at pool. I played in a Friday poker game because I thought it was easy money and good practice and then I bought everyone beers with the money they had lost to me.

When I wake up tomorrow, I will look in the mirror for the last time as a college student. When I go to sleep at night, even after a night of dancing and screaming at the top of my lungs, I will be a college graduate. I can't figure out if the phrase I want to use is "I just want it to be over" or "I wish I could do it all again".

I would give anything to re-live the last five years of my life. I would do some of it differently if I was convinced I could come out the same way, but I know I couldn't. I am five years of mistakes in the making, but every single one of them led me to where I get to be tomorrow.

I have been privileged enough to spend these five years in a room with 18 of the most creative, talented people I can ever imagine meeting. It seems only appropriate to end with a toast. So here's to the last five years - to dollar nights, to euchre, to bolt actions and sniper rifles and camping. To riding rockets, flicking caps, Abe Lincoln, to Bone. To 4 a.m. recording sessions, to hard drive crashes, to moving cross-country every three months. It's been a good run - here's to the rest of it.

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It is no secret that I have a soft spot in my heart for Jeff Ruby restaurants, ever since the fabulous experience we had at The Waterfront back in October. I have a rule with restaurants lately: if I can cook my food better than you can cook my food, I'm probably not a happy girl. I make a mean steak - but Jeff Ruby's are, well, meaner.

Even though I guessed my birthday present nine days early (and he still gave it to me!), my husband still decided to take me out for a nice meal when I turned the big 2-3 last Friday. He made an 8:30 reservation at The Precinct. The Precinct is sort of "the" steak restaurant to go to in Cincinnati. There are others that are very good - hell, all the Jeff Ruby restaurants are known for their steak - but if anyone asks where you can get a good steak here, they're probably going to end up at this one.

I suppose I should be embarrassed, in hindsight, that I ordered basically the exact same thing I ordered when we went to the Waterfront. I'd be embarrassed if it wasn't so fantastic, but luckily for me, it is fantastic. I had the Steak Collinsworth, the Cincinnati version of Steak Oscar (filet, two sauces, king crab and asparagus), and John had the Steak a la Roth (pepper-crusted filet). We also ordered the shrimp and crab saute as an appetizer.

I have to say that the shrimp and crab dish was the most disappointing part of the meal. Neither one of us likes mushrooms (the horror, I know), and this had significantly more mushroom than seafood in it. The seafood was fabulous, when you could find it - and even as a mushroom hater, it was still fairly tasty. I just wish the mushrooms had been mentioned ahead of time.

The steaks were, of course, amazing. Both were cooked to perfection. While I am rarely a fan of sauces with my steak, I could have absolutely licked my plate. There was a generous piece of king crab on top of mine - enough that I didn't mind giving John half - and the asparagus was delightful. The steaks come with a side salad and your choice of potato. John and I both opted for the garlic mashed potatoes. Tasting these made me feel like I should modify my recipe - I use minced garlic in my garlic mashed potatoes, but the roasted garlic in theirs is a really nice, rustic touch.

We each had a glass of wine - a Zinfandel for me, Shiraz for him - and two drinks at the bar before our table was ready. As per usual, I'm a little ashamed that I didn't write them down, but I never remember to do that. We passed on dessert because we were absolutely stuffed.

Also, Jeff Ruby's restaurants serve bread with two kinds of butter. One of them is a mushroom butter made with what tastes like a little bit of white truffle oil. They should probably start selling this so I can buy it by the pound. Mushroom hater or not, I cannot get enough of this butter. It's lovely.

Our bill wasn't nearly as expensive as The Waterfront, but we also just went with steak instead of adding on seafood. It's definitely still a nicer restaurant, but not unreasonable. Most steaks are in the $35 range, and the appetizers are about $10. Seafood will cost you a pretty penny, but as we learned with our last Jeff Ruby experience, it's worth it if you can spare the change. Their wine list is extensive and includes many bottles at decent prices, but they have a good selection by the glass as well. We were so stuffed from the food, we could barely finish our wine as it was - we never would have been able to finish off a bottle between the two of us!

A fantastic experience - perfect for a special occasion. I can't recommend it highly enough.

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After lengthy pool trash-talk from me, I shoot one of John's few remaining solids in.

John: See, now it's awkward. You got me a present, but I didn't get YOU anything.

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Oh, internet. It's college basketball time, and that usually means I'm ignoring you. But with St. Mary's, Gonzaga and Drake losing today, and with UConn currently trailing, I just don't have the emotional ability to handle watching it right now. (Just so everyone knows, I only lost two teams out of my bracket yesterday, and 14/16 right ain't half bad. But today, today is another story.)

Instead of telling you about how awesome basketball is, I'm going to tell you why you should be jealous of me. And the reason you should be jealous of me today is because I recently discovered BlakeMakes.com, and you probably haven't. And since you haven't discovered it until today, you haven't eaten any of his Peanut Butter Dulce de Leche, and you haven't had any free Tcho chocolate.

Since I discovered him already, I have done both. THAT is why you are jealous of me.

First of all, the food blogosphere is currently blowing up about him, so it's not like I'm the first to promote him. Google around and you'll find entirely too many of us swooning. The real beauty is in the recipes he posts - the extra bonus is the fact that there are food giveaways.

I first found him through twitter - or, to be more appropriate, he found me. He added me as a friend, and I added him back. When I posted my valentine's day menu, including peanut butter ice cream, he asked me if I had heard about the Peanut Butter Dulce de Leche that he had been giving away free samples of. No, I hadn't, but I was about to. I was lucky (read as: obsessive) enough to have a fast mouse button on a day that he was giving away mini samples. Shortly, a little white box containing a little glass jar came to me.

BlakeMakes Peanut Butter Dulce de Leche

Honestly, the possibilities were staggering. What would I DO with it?! Do I mix it in with something? Make a glaze or a sauce or something? Stick my finger straight into it as if my mother didn't raise me right and I was still eight years old?

BlakeMakes Peanut Butter Dulce de Leche

I don't want to give it away, but perhaps the finger-size swirl in it is enough of a hint.

All I can say is that Blake got it right. It is delicious. And it has to come along with a short confessional disclaimer: I don't really like peanut butter.

There, I said it. I just don't. Reese's are okay. I throw down the occasional bag of peanut butter M&M's when they call out to me from a vending machine. I ate peanut butter sandwiches as a kid. But really, I can take it or leave it. Peanut butter sandwiches make my mouth feel all funny, which is why I dipped them in milk when I was little. (Toast the peanut butter sandwich, grab a cup of milk. Feel seven. Thank me later.) My husband LOVES peanut butter, and I LOVE chocolate. This means we don't compete for one another's desserts - which is for the best, because I'm bigger, but he's scrappy. It also means we don't like the same things, ever.

This dulce is different. It's just peanut butter-y enough, you know? It's not knocking you in the face with peanut butter. It is enough for those of you who love it, but it is also a perfect amount for people who are sort of apathetic. It is pleasing without being overly sweet, and it has this smooth texture with just a little bit of grit to let you know that it was handmade with love. It is amazing, and when he decides to start selling it, I'll be keeping a jar on hand at all times. It will make a fabulous addition to anything you want to eat, ever. I'm just saying, it's a good thing that Bridget already snatched him up, because the competition for a man who sends you jars of this would not be a pretty one.

Tcho.

The other contest I was lucky enough (again, obsessive) to win was for Tcho chocolate. People, I'm really serious about my chocolate. My former roommate turned me on to Scharffen Berger and I have never looked back. I made my mother drive me 25 miles to buy a bar when I was in Kansas City because I was making chocolate mousse and I COULD NOT make it with anything else. Do not. stand. between. me. and. chocolate.

Blake suggested eating it with a tall, cold glass of milk, so I did. Hey, when someone is responsible for getting you free chocolate, you do what they tell you to do. First of all, I'm a designer, so let's chat about the packaging. It's brilliant. I agree with Blake - I would buy anything that came in packaging like this. There were three cards with it describing the Tcho philosophy of chocolate, which you can read about at their website.

Tcho.

It is delightful. It is dark and if you can keep yourself from just shoving it in your mouth, it melts down to this creamy consistency that can only be described as "pure". I used to think I didn't like dark chocolate, but it turns out I'm just picky about GOOD dark chocolate. This isn't really bitter, but I wouldn't describe it as overly sweet. If I had to guess, I'd put it at 60% or so, but I've never been terribly good at guessing that sort of thing.

This is the perfect chocolate for my hot chocolate obsession of 2006. Tcho is definitely one to watch - they're "beta testing" their chocolate now to keep tweaking it, and I think that's a fascinating process. In a world where we're so concerned with carefully guarding recipes and formulas, Tcho wants to make the consumer a part of their product, and we're all the better for it. Go support them, buy a bar, and thank me later.

Tcho.

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Me, upon seeing Duke win and therefore not completely screw up my bracket: That's how we do it! SUCK ON IT! (makes lewd gestures toward the television and punches couch)
John: Classy.
Me, still on entirely too much of an adrenaline high: You knew this when you married me! You knew that when it was March Madness time...
John: (interrupts) It's just madness time.

I have all sorts of stuff to talk about, but you won't get any of it tonight because I'm still cheering on West Virginia. Also, in case you were wondering, my championship game is Kansas vs. Texas, and Kansas will be coming home with a title this year.

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I don't think I've mentioned this before here, but I don't see myself ever having children. Say what you will, but be warned I've heard it before. Any combination of "you're young", "wait till you're older", and "it's just because you're in college" has probably been launched at me by mothers nationwide.

It's not that I don't want kids because I hate kids. I think kids are really awesome. I'm not very good with them, but that's probably because I didn't have a lot of experience with them when I was growing up. My mom is the baby of the family by a lot of years, and that makes me the baby by a lot of years. (About six and a half, or so, and I only know this because I just called my mother in a state of panic and asked if all my cousins except me were finally in their thirties.) There were no moments of me taking care of the kids, unless you count a very short babysitting stint when I was 13 or so. (12? Who knows.)

So, sure, life plays a part in it. When it comes right down to it, though, I honestly don't have a desire to be a mother. I have friends, and have had friends for years, who knew they didn't want kids RIGHT NOW, but knew it was coming and they were looking forward to it. Even back in high school, there were people with desires to be mothers. They weren't keeping their fingers crossed for it any time soon, but even at sixteen years old they were telling me how great their kids were going to be, the type of mother or father they wanted to become, and so on. My best friend wants children more than anything, and I have always respected that.

This was cemented for me when he and I were in Central Park a few years back (I am getting the strange feeling that I've told this story before, but I'll go on) and a few kids involved him in their game. The game has been lost to time now, though he might remember, but it was a game like all kids make up. Someone's good, someone's bad, we all have to run, and we should probably squeal a lot. He was so into this game, and I just sat there on my slightly detached hillside, and I realized this was the way I wanted to be involved with kids. I felt this feeling that I honestly couldn't understand at that very moment. It was a feeling of love, combined with a vision of what I wanted my future to be. I really, really want to be a cool aunt. I want to visit and bring sweet presents (P.S., Nathan, your kids are going to be raised on Cincinnati chili and chocolate.), I want to be the one that kids run down the front steps to jump up on, I want to swing them around in the driveway and pretend I didn't bring them sweet presents. But these moments, they are special because they are fleeting.

I don't have the desire to be the main influence on a child's life. I don't want it to be me and one child forever and ever. Much to the potential grandparents' dismays, I just don't have a desire for my own kids. But to be honest, I can't wait for it to be about ten years down the line so I can convince kids of how super cool I am.

I am also not envious of parents in any way, because to be honest, kids today scare me. Hell, if I was being honest, I'd admit that my generation was probably kind of scary. High schools are filled with little 14-year-old adults that are sure their parents are stupid. I don't think I realized my mom was smarter than me until I was 18 or so. I read stories like this about 1 in 4 teenagers having an STD, and it freaks me out. I am only 22 (pushing 23), so let's not forget that I only graduated high school five years ago. It was not like that when I was in high school. I seriously, honestly did not know anyone with an STD. I'm not even saying that for my mother's benefit because I know she's reading this. Sure, I knew people who were having sex (sorry, mom), but STD's? We had a few girls in our graduating class who were pregnant and had children very shortly after or right before graduation. I went to a "smart" high school, but it was still in a very urban neighborhood, so it's silly to pretend that we were "better" than anyone. Hell, we were probably worse in a lot of ways.

I've been reading a lot of feminist blogs, and a lot of mothers' blogs, because I'm doing research for this capstone where I talk to parents about educating their little girls. I am never once envious of their situation. I can't imagine what I would say to a little girl who was thirteen years old and crying because she slept with some boy who broke her heart. It breaks my cold little heart to read stories like that. I have a friend of a friend who works at Planned Parenthood. For confidentiality's sake, I will not be sharing any specific stories, but the ones about the really young girls just hurt. A girl here in Cincinnati just had a child at ten years old (it was all over the news here if you want to look it up) and cried because she couldn't keep it.

TEN YEAR OLDS CANNOT BE MOTHERS. I do not care how you want to spin it, they just can't. As far as I'm concerned, honestly, ten year olds should be clinging to their childhood and screaming to not let it go, not looking toward being adults. I have friends whose mothers were very young when they had them, and those friends are turning out to be brilliant, amazing adults. So I'm not judging in any way, but I am scared.

In researching for my capstone, I've come across some things that make me so angry that I have to turn off the computer and go for a walk to clear my head and then come back to view it objectively. T-Shirts that say "I left my brain in my locker", "Excellent growth potential" and "Who needs brains when you have these", all directed at teenagers. Panties from Wal-Mart found in the junior's section that say "Who needs credit cards". They are enough to turn my stomach and make me cry.

I graduate in just over three months, and I really feel like I need this upcoming break. My capstone is inside my head, and I just need a couple of days to not think about it. This is the last week of classes. My preliminary capstone findings are due by Monday at 1:00, and I have one final presentation on Wednesday. Then it's a week and a half where I don't have to do anything except go to the gym and lay around the house. I'll come back to my final quarter as a 23-year-old designer, I'll get my project done, my whole family will come to see me walk across a stage, and it'll be July before you know it. I'd expect "Where did five years go" posts sometime in the future.

Also, as a complete sidenote, I finished my portfolio and it's all ready to go. You can check it out at http://www.jenrizzo.com.

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The DAAP Digital Design capstone process is a funny one. We meet with our adviser once a week in the winter quarter, which is based around research and concept development. At the end of Week 8 (out of 10 weeks in the quarter), we meet with a panel of professors and give a 20 minute presentation of what we've done so far and what we plan to do in the next quarter.

Twenty minutes isn't terribly long, especially if you're someone like me that doesn't know how to shut up. My presentation lasted about 15 minutes, which only left 5 more minutes for them to discuss my topic with me. Instead of "discussing", it was more of a rapid-fire series of questions that I didn't get any time to respond to. I didn't mind, really. If we only had a few minutes left, it's much more beneficial for me to listen to them talk than for me to spend another few minutes telling them what I already know.

The problem is that I walked out of my review feeling less confident than I have in the two months I've been developing my topic. The general consensus is that they're worried, and I guess they have good reason to be. My topic is huge, and I haven't made any decisions as to how I'm going to accomplish my project. Do I make one three-minute piece? Do I make a series of little PSA-type pieces? Is it video, motion graphics, 3D, some hybrid of all of it?

I graduate college in three and a half months. It's sort of starting to set in that this is really my last project that I'll ever show at DAAP. My second-to-last quarter is over in two weeks. I'd ask where all the time went, but I know that answer. It went to five years of incredibly hard work, late nights, angsty tears over coffee, and happy times over beers with friends. Here's to the rest of it.

P.S. Thank you so much to everyone who responded to my last fitness post! As an update, I've lost 9 pounds total, and I'm kind of at another plateau. I have a feeling this is going to be a long struggle, but it'll all be worth it when it's over. I'm still going to the gym like crazy and making changes that I think are really going to benefit me. Also, I'm taking an extended hiatus from my job, which gives me all the more time to try and develop a healthy lifestyle. (And more time to face my elliptical nemesis.)

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Here's my confession for the day: I kind of hate healthy people.

It's not that I have anything against them as people. I'm sure they're all very nice. I can admit that a lot of it is jealousy. Them with their stupid gym bags and their 5 a.m. yoga classes and their healthy snacks in their desks in case they have a "craving". Jerks.

If I haven't made it clear over the past couple of years in this blog, I'm not exactly an example of good health. If there's food to be had, make mine "comfort". If there's alcohol to be had, make mine wheat-y and calorie-filled. If there's salad, make mine caesar, and could you add some extra cheese to it? You see, I come from a family of barbecuers who might as well be carnivores. Our staple vegetable is a casserole with rice and cheese and butter... and broccoli. (Also: spinach dip.)

But lately, I have been moaning a lot about the fact that I am unhealthy. I work in a seven story building, where I am on the fourth floor, my boss is on the fifth, and the place I take my timesheets is on the third. Print timesheet, run upstairs, get timesheet approved, run back downstairs, print submitted timesheet, run upstairs, get boss to sign timesheet, run down two flights of stairs, drop timesheet off, run back upstairs. This little routine ends with me at my desk, where I sit next to healthy people, and I try to not seem like I am so out of breath I'd like to borrow some of theirs.

So, I sucked it up. Started eating less, joined a gym, became friends with an elliptical trainer, started drinking 8+ glasses of water every day. Over the course of three weeks, I lost 7.5 pounds.

The thing is, I'm still sort of doing what I want to do. I'm still going to the bar, I'm still eating the occasional greasy snack. But people, I am not kidding you with this - yesterday at the diner in our neighborhood, I saw the girl across from me get cheese fries, and they DID NOT LOOK APPETIZING. Does this mean I'm becoming one of you people? I woke up at 10 to go to the gym before my husband woke up, and then agreed to help a friend move out of her second and third story apartment without a second thought. I went to the gym four days in a row and then felt guilty when I had class the next day and couldn't make it. Are we KIDDING?!

While 7.5 pounds is not a ton for a person my size, the way I feel is a little ridiculous. I'm making healthy choices because they're actually the ones that appeal to me rather than feeling like they're what I "should" do. I'm motivated not by the number I see on the scale, but by the fact that I don't get winded halfway through my little timesheet dance. (Though I'm not going to lie, the number on the scale helps.) Yesterday helping Amy move, I didn't think about how I was out of breath, but instead focused on breathing the right way. Today, my legs hurt "the right way" - my thighs are sore, but my knees are perfect.

So, what's up, health world? I'm interested in making your acquaintance. And maybe for you, I'll even try to order light beer next time.

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Also, I know I talk about work sometimes, but never show anything I do. The reasons for that are pretty simple. I work on 3D visualizations for stores that won't be built for probably another year. The designs are not only unfinished for the most part, but they're strictly confidential. 

I won't say anything about this project, but here's a shot I worked on a couple weeks ago. It's been rejected, not because they didn't like my shot. We just decided to go another direction with what we were doing. But, I still really like it, and it was a fun exercise for me. 

This is a model of the Paloma Picasso cufflinks for Tiffany. Modeled, textured & lit in Cinema 4D, rendered using the Advanced Render module. I just think it's pretty.

Paloma Picasso cufflinks

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First of all, I would like to thank those of you who have responded to my internet-wide call to give me your thoughts on "women and numbers". Your responses meant a lot to me and every single one was presented to my professor, who was impressed with the number of responses I received and the amount of thought that clearly went into them. Since some of you have asked, here's a little more information about my project. I'm in the process of putting my presentation together to give to my classmates tomorrow, and a refined version will be given to all my professors next Friday, so this seems like the perfect time to ramble out some thoughts about it. How it started Last quarter at my job, I was working on a store targeted mostly at young teenagers - think "Limited Too" generation. (I can't say much about it, because it's still very confidential information and this is the internet. Professionalism and whatnot.) I work in 3D animation, as some of you know, and I was seeking pictures of merchandise to use as reference images. I ended up at Limited Too's website, looking through their clothes, and realized that these clothes were definitely not the clothes of my youth - they were things my mother would have grounded me for. Padded push-up bras. "I left my brain in my locker" t-shirts. Low rise jeans. None of this is to say that I'm some sort of prude, or that I don't remember what it was like to be that age. Of course I do. But somehow it just got to me. I'm an adult woman, or close to it. The reason we wear padded push-up bras and low rise jeans is to make those parts of our body look more attractive, and whether we're doing it to feel good about ourselves or so that other people will notice it, these are not things that ten-year-olds need to be doing. If I had a daughter, I wouldn't keep her locked up in the closet until she was 18, but I would try to give her the sort of environment that allowed her to explore who she was as a person without feeling like she had to be pressured to be sexy before she was out of double digits. And she sure as hell wouldn't be wearing a t-shirt that said she left her brain in her locker. I started wondering where all of this comes from. I can remember a friend of mine in middle school who was the first one of us to buy anything at a junior's store instead of a kid's store. She had this little jumper that was from 5-7-9, and it was a size 5. For whatever reason, she thought that was important - it was a size 5 - and I still remember it over ten years later. I remember it because it might have been the first time I thought size was really important. When shopping for outfits to wear to an eighth grade dance, I remember my friend Claire not being able to find anything that would fit her because it was all too small. Me, I was trying on medium and large shirts. I wasn't a big girl when I was 13, but I wasn't tiny either. All of a sudden I was ashamed of my size, and it didn't have anything to do with Claire. She helped me look for shirts and cute things to wear and I don't remember her ever passing judgment on me for one second, but I was so unhappy to be looking at a totally different rack of clothes than she was. And to be honest, she was a tiny, tiny girl. She had a sort of metabolism that I will never see in my adult life that was totally natural for her. We were different body types - but I didn't really understand that at the time. I read heartbreaking stories that day at work. The killer was a teenage girl who said she wouldn't ever wear a size 6, because boys wouldn't like her anymore. A woman who bought a dress she hated just because she was so happy to fit into a size 2. These are not numbers that anyone sees. They. Do not. Matter. I got to thinking about one of my biggest pet peeves: beautiful, healthy girls that stuff themselves into pants two sizes too small because they're convinced they have to be that size, and therefore make themselves look much, much worse. But it's not entirely their fault - they really believe that a 10 is not pretty but a 6 is, and they're clinging to the days when they were a 6, and hey, they can fit into it, so what does it matter? The more I read, the more people I talked to, I began to realize that this isn't just about a dress size. It's about numbers. It's about people feeling "old" on their birthday as if a whole year just passed, as if they were more than a day younger yesterday. It's about tying your health to a number on a scale instead of how good you feel or what a doctor tells you. It's about uploading your picture to a website and basing your self-worth off of how people on the internet "rate" you. Where I am now Through a ridiculous amount of revising one or two sentences, I decided to focus on "women and numbers". I'm fascinated by the way women define themselves by numbers. I "am" a size 12, rather than "this dress is a size 12". We take on these numbers as a characteristic of ourselves. That's why it's so hard to let it go when we try on the 12 and all of a sudden it doesn't fit. We panic at the BMV and lie about our weight as if anyone other than bartenders (and perhaps the occasional police officer) will ever take one look at the license. We can tell dirty jokes at bars and tell embarrassing stories about ourselves, but people aren't allowed to ask how much money we make or how old we are. We're jealous of people who can fit into a size 2, even if we're a perfectly healthy, fit size 10. There are a couple things I want to make sure of in my approach. Number one, I want to make people laugh. Because honestly, the more I think about my own capstone topic, the more ridiculous I think it is. A woman actually spending money on a dress she hates just because the label says it's a size smaller than she's been able to wear in years? It's laughable! Who does that? People do it. She left the store that day feeling like a million bucks, like she finally did something right. She got to define herself as a size 2 that day, but nothing had changed since she woke up that morning. I want to make people laugh, and I want to make people feel comfortable. I don't mind talking about this, but I know a lot of people do. I'm creating a motion piece that will be somewhere between 3-5 minutes long. If there's a group of people sitting in a room, and they're all different sizes, ages, etc., I don't want someone to see it and think "I wonder what so-and-so is thinking?" just because they're bigger. I don't want that bigger person to think "Oh my god, I wonder if everyone is looking at me?" Priority number two is all about being comfortable with who you are and doing things for the right reasons. That's the whole point. I think we've lost focus of what's really important. I'm all for being healthy - I've been to the gym four days in a row this week, I drink my 8+ glasses of water every day. But I'm not going to the gym to fit into a different size dress. I couldn't care less what it says. I'm going because my knees hurt, because I hate being out of breath after three flights of stairs, because I know I'm unhealthy and I'm sick of having no energy. There is no fantasy in my mind that I'll ever be a size 2, because I just don't have the body type for it. But I can be healthy. I can be pretty, and confident, and I can feel good about myself. My job is a lot of fun and I'm proud of how I do it, no matter how much money I make. I can talk about all this for hours, of course, but I'm starting to lose focus here. Once again, thanks to everyone who gave me such great information. If you want more information, stay tuned here, or you can check me out for periodic updates on twitter. (You'll also have to sift through a lot of babble about my job, the gym, and food.)

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