On my pageant bio page that is located here but not yet updated, are questions that each contestant will answer. The first question is ”What are the three (3) hardest things about being a Miss?“ In this case, Miss means a grown and unmarried woman.
I thought this was such a fabulous question, and I already have my answer but I don’t want to post it until the page is updated. So for now I want to ask you ladies…
What is the hardest thing about being a Miss in today’s world?
There are lots of things people do that I will just never really understand. Let’s start with the ladies.
When you say, “I’m fine.”
There’s a chance you might mean this, but most of the time when a guy asks you this, you are not fine and you were made even more not fine because he had to ask you this instead of knowing what he did wrong. Just tell him what your problem is and don’t expect him to already know. You are just setting yourself up for more disappointment. Men have be often be told anything in very plain English.
“Does this make me look fat?”
Why? Why ask this? It makes you seem so insecure.
Go to the bathroom in groups.
The only time I have done this is at a crowded bar or club and feeling like parting ways with my group even for just a few seconds will leave me vulnerable to being approached by man I don’t want to talk to. It’s happened to me before and it can be nice to have your team help you keep them away. Otherwise, I don’t understand why women have to go together to check themselves out and go, “Omg did you see what she was wearing?” or “Ugh I look like shit.”
Wear heels every day.
I’ve seen this where women overdress on a daily basis. They wear heels at the most inappropriate times and they almost always looks ridiculous. If you are going grocery shopping, you don’t have to pretend you are going to be walking the red carpet. We all know you are dying to get back into your sweat pants so don’t pretend like you are glamorous because you don’t fool anyone.
Continue to declare your love for your boyfriend in facebook statuses while none of his statuses are about you.
I see this all time. Everyday it’s “I love so and so forever!” or “Can’t wait to be Mrs. So and So” and you go over to his profile and his updates are “Gotta love those Giants” or “Goin to Bubba’s Bar after the game. Txt me.” You wouldn’t guess he was in a relationship with Miss Clingypants. In fact if you didn’t know any better, you’d assume he was single.
Try to change your boyfriend.
It’s like you take the first guy that bats his eyelashes at you. You think he’s cute enough but he’s got no job, has a drug or anger problem, and plays video games 24-7 and you think that he is magically going to change all this for you. He might change his underwear a few times through your relationship, maybe, but that’s all he’s going to change.
Dieting.
You obsess over ever calorie, torture, and deprive yourself. You go back and forth between that and saying “F___ how society wants me to look, I’m going to mow down on this cake!” Then you pretend your diet really starts tomorrow. Mmmkay.
Excessive contact with boyfriend.
Of course you love him, but why is it that after your evening with him, you text him before he even gets back home with how much you miss him and have a text session unless you fall asleep with the phone in your hand. Can you not go half a day without contact? Or even a whole day? If not then that’s just stupid. Take a breather from him. Don’t make your world revolve around him. You have a life too, remember?
I’m sure there’s more, but these are the main ones. Thoughts?
As I have posted about before, I have been sending out letters to friends and family asking for donation to help fund my entry fee into the Miss International 2012 pageant in July. Fortunately I have been able to receive help from very kind individuals and my sincere thanks goes out to those people. One of which was Miss Indiana USA 2008 and current international model, Brittany Mason. Being the sweetie she is, she sent me a letter via facebook along with her donation and her words were so warm and encouraging that I knew I had to share.
“When I first started pursuing my dreams my first idea was to compete in pageants because of all the opportunities that come with it. My family didn’t have any money to pay the entry fee let a lone buy a dress and all the other stuff that is needed. I was a teen and worked as much as possible for $5.15 an hour and went around to every business in my hometown asking for help, I came up with the entry fee and ended up wearing an old bridesmaid dress and swimsuit. Competing against girls that had thousand dollar dresses and spent hours and money on training, I ended up winning my first title….no dream is to big.
I know how hard it is to come up with the money to invest in the things you really want to do. I believe in perseverance and that all things are possible if you stay focused. I am a firm believer in your platform, 1 in 4 women have experienced violence…I hope you continue working with that with or without the crown.
I wish you the best of luck in the pursuit of the crown, but remember everything else you can gain from just competing. Keep me posted!
All the best,
Brittany Mason”
It is nice to hear personal stories like this knowing that they have since succeeded in their lives. This immediately lifted my spirit and I want to give my sincere thanks to Brittany for her encouragement and donation.
I have always been a fan of poetry. I started writing poems when I was little, not long after we moved to Indiana and got settled in to a house outside of Albany, so I was 6 or 7. I wrote poetry off and on pretty much ever since. I rarely showed my work to people though because I always felt like my stuff was unfinished and could be improved and I didn’t want to show it to anyone unless I felt it was the best that it could be, but I undoubtedly always had a knack for writing and a love and appreciation for the art of it.
However poetry is not as popular as it once was, or at least it doesn’t seem like it is. The only poetry I ever see these days exists in the form of song lyrics, and even in that the quality of poetry in lyrics seems to be dwindling, especially in mainstream music. The lyrics of most popular songs these days rivals the quality of stuff I wrote when I was 10, so what does that tell you?
I don’t know, maybe I am just not looking in the right places. Maybe there is still a community of poetry fans out there. If so, where are they?
Do you enjoy reading or writing poetry? Do you think poetry is dead?
I have become quite drawn to dubstep music within the past year. I love the different sound and slower paced beats. I have noticed that I tend to most like the tracks with women vocals in them. I’m not trying to downplay the ones with male vocals or no vocals at all. I just think there is something so beautiful and hypnotizing about dubstep + female voice that takes me away to a new place and time.
Ok so here is a list of some of my most favorite ones, and most of these happen to be remixes of already popular songs (many are even better than the original in my opinion).
If you have any suggestions of dubstep tracks, post them!
I have recently mentally immersed myself into a new and totally unexpected interest that will probably become my new hobby for the year. I never even knew what hoop dancing was until maybe a few months ago. I remember watching the video for Justin Timberlake’s song What Goes Around, Comes Around which features a fire hoop dancer and other fire performers at various points in the video and thinking, “How fricking cool is that?!”
More recently however, while I was at the Indy ScreamPark back in October, I saw a girl hooping with a lighted cosmic (LED) hoop, and then she started hooping with torches lit around them. She wasn’t just hooping like we all did when we were kids. She was incorporating all these dance steps and tricks into the mix and I hadn’t really seen anything it much before. I thought it was so cool. I knew at that point that was something that looked fun and I wanted to try it. That night, it was dark so I didn’t immediately recognize who was hooping, but I later discovered that the girl was an old friend/co-worker of mine from Pizza King. Her name is Laura. I hadn’t seen or talked to her in a couple years, so I looked her up on facebook and found out that she makes custom day hoops and sells them. I asked her about pricing and then did some research and found out that the hoops used for dancing are different than the kids toys sold a local stores. Dancing and performing hoops are usually a little bit larger and more weighted than toy hula hoops, so I decided to ask her to make one in my choice colors pink and black. I was able to meet with her yesterday and here is my first hoop that I will be using to practice with.
Thanks Laura! It will probably take me a few months to learn anything, and I hate that because I want to know how to do it all now. Apparently, hoop dancing is quickly emerging into the mainstream field of performance entertainment as well as a form of exercising. But before I get into all that, I probably just need to learn a thing or two first. So far today I spent about a half an hour getting comfortable with waist hooping and trying to walk while hooping. It appears my garage will have to be my practice space, since it’s January and all. Laura told me about this place that is a music venue and bar where they have hoopers get together and learn and practice on Monday nights, so I plan on getting into some of that later.
Laura doing her thing.
Browsing youtube, I came across this girl whose style and performance I really like.
Has anyone else had experience with hooping? Feel free to share.
I am the oldest of my sisters, and just like most first born children, there was always this expectation of me to set an example. I was supposed to do everything first and be the most brave, responsible, and nurturing. I think as a child, I held up to that standard pretty well. I got up first to get ready for school. I started waking up to my own alarm at around age 8 pr 9. Then I would get my sister up and fix her breakfast. I made sure she got ready in time, helped her in school and with her homework. I told her all about what it was like to be in my grade, told her what to expect and gave her advice. I didn’t really have anyone to give me the detailed advice I gave her. I had to experience it first. Being the first born out of them was something I identified with.
But the funny thing was, that even though I had always been seen as the “leader of the pack” among my sisters, it wasn’t that way otherwise. I was never the top student in class, or the lead singer in the choir, or the lead part in the play. And I wasn’t the leader among my groups of friends either. I didn’t know why. I was always out shined by people with stronger personalities and abilities. I didn’t mind it. I didn’t always want all that pressure and extra attention. I was ok with sitting back and observing others being the leader. I was actually kind of relieved that I got to relax and let someone else do the work, I didn’t want to be a leader anymore and I started to identify more with being a follower. That characteristic became more prominent the older I got.
Then as a teenager, I became pretty interested in the zodiac. I would read all about my sign, Leo. There it was again. The Leo is of course the lion. And what is a lion? A leader. Nearly every single description of people born under the Leo sign was supposed to be a “natural born leader” as well as “dramatic, dominant, independent, loves the spotlight and attention.” Anything that had to do with being alpha. I always thought, “Well that doesn’t describe me at all!” I began wondering if God messed up in creating me under that sign.
However, it seems that as I go through life I am still expected to be in some kind of a leadership position, and I usually try to avoid it. How am I supposed to be a leader when I don’t even like to walk in front of other people? When I worked at Pizza King a few years ago, I heard from a co-worker that it was in talks of offering me a supervisor position because one of the main ones was leaving, which many of my co-workers at the time sought after, but it scared me more than anything. I wondered if I could handle it or like it. The extra pay and hours sounded nice, but I still wasn’t sure if it was going to be worth what all I knew they had to deal with. Well it turned out the girl didn’t leave after all so I was never officially offered the position, and I was actually relieved. At my job now, there are team leaders who basically train new people, and every year, I think, they appoint new people who have been working there for a while and they trust to become a trainer, and I had a feeling for a while that they might ask me to be one, and I tried to show my lack of interest in that. I just didn’t want to have to worry about showing anyone the ropes and wondering if they were understanding what I was doing and saying. I didn’t want to worry about taking the responsibility over the work efficiency of someone else or anyone blaming me if a trainee screws up or slacks around. All I want to do is go to work and worry about my job only, and then leave.
I wonder if my lack of interest in taking lead on things has to do with my hang up about decision making. A great deal of being a leader is about making decisions, and as I have talked about before, I am not particularly good at making decisions, or at least I am not confident about them when I face choices. Just the other day, I was sitting here with my boyfriend and we were trying to figure out what to eat. We knew we wanted pizza, but it was a matter of getting a carry out pizza or buying one from the grocery store. We were listing our options and I exclaimed, “Ugh I don’t know! Too many choices!” He stated, “Actually there’s only 2.” I jokingly rebuffed, “That’s still too many,” as I smiled and then somehow not long after that we just finally went with getting one from the grocery store. I realized how silly it was that I had trouble making a decision about pizza, and when there were only two choices, but I was making it seem like a much bigger deal.
Something recently has got me thinking about this for some reason. With it being the holidays and all, I am always bummed because I miss the days when my immediate family were together. Now everyone has spread all over the US and is doing their own thing with little means or incentive for getting together. Maybe it bothers them too, but I feel this instinct that it’s my job to try to rally everyone up again and draw us closer together again, literally and figuratively. There are some issues between a couple of my family members, and I have always tried to encourage a makeup between them, I have been told that there’s nothing I can do. But still, I feel an obligation. I feel like, if I tried, I can have influence to help things between them, and ultimately all of us. But to do that, I am going to have to take the lead, and for this, I am not scared. This isn’t just something I feel like I have to do, but it’s something I want to do. Okay, so I understand I can’t make any of them do anything or make up, but I am willing to try to help encourage better understanding and communication, and then they can make the decisions on their own about how they want to get along.
This is the first time I feel like I actually want to take the lead in something. I think this and other issues than I am passionate about, I am not as reluctant to be a leader so maybe I am starting to break out of the shell from being a cowardly lion. I still need to work on my decision making, so I am going to start with small things, build my confidence in those things and move up to bigger decisions. Hopefully I will one day successfully become the lioness I was born to be.
I have a serious issue with people who will not or cannot seem to take responsibility for themselves. I understand that no one is perfect and people will make mistakes, but it seems like most people I encounter who make mistakes or have some kind of misfortune, won’t admit to being at least partially to blame. They play the victim. They will often find something or someone else to blame or find fault in to take the heat off of their own possible role in the situation. It’s like people are afraid to death of being at fault for something. I used to be the same way. I never wanted to be at fault, at blame, or corrected. I would argue anyone into the ground, even if I was proven wrong. But then one day I just let go of my ego and realized that it is not that bad to be wrong or at fault. It’t really not that painful to say out loud or even just to yourself, “Hey I screwed up. I made my bed, now I get to lay in it. But I’ll move on. I learned a valuable lesson from this.” Actually it’s pretty relieving.
Unfortunately, I rarely hear people muster up the gull to that kind of thinking. I don’t know why. It’s not going to kill them! Maybe it’s denial. Maybe it’s ego. Maybe it’s something else. But whatever it is, it has to stop. People around you don’t want to be blamed for your mistake. They don’t want you to take your anger out on them. They don’t want you to pull their attitudes and moods down with your own. They don’t want to feel screwed over when you do stupid things, and they aren’t always going to be there to help bail you out after they repeatedly try to warn you about things.
(Note that when I say YOU, I am talking in general, not to someone specific).
You think your life sucks? Well fine. Did it ever occur to you to stop and think about what *you* could have done to contribute to it and what *you* can do to maybe fix it? You have a lot more power to change your life than what you are willing to accept. I for one am tired of people expecting happiness and good fortune to just fall in their laps and never take responsibility for their own unhappiness. You won’t ever be happy if you think you are nothing but a victim of life’s bad karma. There is no magical fairy that is going to come swoop down and give you the life you think you so rightfully deserve.
No one is holding you back but yourself!
No one is keeping you where you are but yourself!
No one can pull you out of your misery but yourself!
You have to stop and realize the bad choices you are making (and I’m sure there are quite a few if you are the average person), and fix those choices and turn it around to your advantage. I think I have touched on a similar idea to this before, and again, I’m not saying that bad things don’t happen to good people once in a while. They do of course, but not with everything.
Own up to your mistakes. Learn from them and move on. Just something to think about.
These are just some inspiration pieces that I jot down from time to time. All have been created by me. I give permission for anyone to use them if they wish, but I ask that you give credit where credit is due and either tag my name to these or link to this post. Thanks!
The key to success is working hard, working smart, and knowing how to make yourself irresistible to the world.
Some people can walk into the room full of people, say absolutely nothing, yet still command the attention of everyone there. That is power.
Live notoriously.
Still shining, even on the darkest day.
Beautiful and breathtaking, she had his heart in a headlock.
The important thing to remember is to focus on yourself. Don’t compete with others, compete with yourself. And don’t be afraid to fail once in a while. Failure is just a part of the process of succeeding.
With talent made to be seen, she is the Hollywood dream.
I have realized that people would be a lot happier if they just learned how to not give a shit
More to come!
Lately I have been seriously considering getting into belly dancing. Now before some of you freak out and think that it’s all about scantily clad women showing off, I invite you to watch a couple of videos I came across if you have a little bit of time.
This first video is a belly dancer named Jalila. This is probably the best routine that I have came across from watching clips of belly dancers on youtube during the past couple of weeks. She’s great!
Next is a video blogger that I have been watching for a while. Her username is SickMouth. She talks mostly about women’s issues and I just love her discussions. She did one about belly dancing a little bit ago because she has been taking classes. I thought she had some really interesting thoughts on the issue.
I have always admired belly dancers and the dance itself as an art form. There is something very sensual and creative that I would love to try out, so I have been doing a little bit of research on the history of belly dance and how it came to be, and it’s really quite interesting.
I decided to learn a bit about it first and then I will start taking classes probably sometime next year. I’m not sure if I will get into performing, but it would at least be something fun to do as a past-time.
Has anyone had any experience with belly dancing?
