BIC... it's complex... I've warned you...
Friday January 25, 2008

Edit: For all you Aussies, this is hilarious – How do you tell if you are a true Aussie. I particularly like numbers 5: “You’ve made a bong out of your garden hose rather than use it for something illegal such as watering the garden.” and 36: “When returning home from overseas, you expect to be brutally strip-searched by Customs – just in case you’re trying to sneak in fruit.”

I have issues… sigh. Be warned, this is going to be a post with absolutely no thought to how the sentences appear on the page.

Haha, I can’t believe how close I am to writing a whiny “woe is me” post. But I’m having to deal with something that is a huge… HUUUUUGE issue to me, not because it’s something I’m normally obsessed over, but because it’s something I’m normally not obsessed over.

Welcome to my body image complex. The “my thighs are too fat and now I have love handles and chubby cheeks (times by four)” issue…

The problem about my “body image complex” (let’s call it BIC for short) is that as usual, I’m the only one to think there is a problem.

And don’t you just hate it when you’re down on your body and people say “you should be happy the way you are”? I mean come off it! I’m not suddenly going to turn around and say, “hey, you’re right, even though I’m not happy about my weight gain, I’m just going to be happy with the way I am”. Give me a break.

And the thing that I hate the most about this whole BIC is the fact that because I’m not Biggest Loser type large, or even 25 BMI large, the general population feels like I don’t have a right to be unhappy with my weight.

And don’t let me forget the complex issue of shopping for clothes. Sizes that you find in the store that used to fit you 12 months ago don’t fit anymore, and your same sized clothes that you bought 12 months ago fit perfectly.

Does that even make sense? The same brand/style of jeans I have been buying for the last… 7 years… have somehow shrunk. And no, it’s not because my arse has grown that much (even though I’m going to concede on that point a little), it’s because the size model has shrunk by about 1.5 sizes. How is a girl supposed to feel about her body when the world is conspiring to make her feel fat?

Sigh. I hate having issues, particularly when they’re about my body. It sucks. Body images suck. So long as you’re healthy, you should be happy. But having maintained a good and steady weight for ooooh… the last 10 years (yes folks, since I was 15/16 years old my weight fluctuated, but always around the same mark) and suddenly have it go up a good 7 kilos (in the last… 8 months) has kind of got me shaken. And stirred.

It has to be the year I get married. I’m sure that’s why this is frustrating me more. I want to look perfect on the day! Why is it that this is the year (and when I say year, I’m really referring to the last 9 months and moving forward) that my body decides to put on weight, get cavities and have hair/scalp problems?

Anyway… after all that I just wanted to write out my “goals” in terms of my BIC for the next few months:

1. Exercise more. IN fact, by more I mean running every other morning and going to the gym at least two to three times a week.
2. Eat healthier. No more heavy foods for lunch! Salad sandwich and a piece of fruit all the way.
3. Exercise more…
4. Eat healthier
5. Exercise more…
6. Go to the dietitian
7. Eat healthier
8. Can you see the theme yet??
9. And last but certainly not least, get over myself.

Wish me luck!

Comment [4]

The need for equality in all things
Friday February 16, 2007

I had a meeting scheduled with my manager this morning, to talk about study and progression options. He decided to take the day off today, and informed me this morning.

Normally this wouldn’t bother me, but this meeting has already been rescheduled, and it wasn’t because of my unavailablity!

I understand that meetings with clients are very important, but looking after your staff is equally important, if not more so, because they’re the driving force behind your company. If you schedule a meeting that you know is important, you should not be able to take the day off unless you’re sick.

I don’t want my progression and my study to be held back just because somebody else doesn’t think that it’s “that important”. If I had to enrol somewhere to do a course and this had happened, I would have missed out for the semester.

But what pisses me off the most is that I want to talk about the company helping me get better at what I do, so that I can bring more to the company. But. Because of the missed meetings and the “forgotten” meetings, I feel as though the company doesn’t want to help me.

What this says to me is, “as a company, [we] want to get as much out of you as possible, but we’re not prepared to help you get anything that you want”.

I constantly get asked to do more than I can yet I always try and do it. I schedule my days off around what I am being asked to work on and I’m always conscious of the effects of when I take a day off.

I give a lot to the company, and even though this is the first time I’ve felt really let down, it has really hit me hard that maybe I’m giving too much.

Comment [2]

The most annoying thing (nerd moment)
Wednesday February 7, 2007

I just discovered the most annoying bug ever in IE6’s interpretation of CSS...

Having multiple individual classes (not chains of classes, which I already knew didn’t work) on a div…

You would think that code that looks like this…

#DivID.class1 {}
#DivID2.class1 {}

#DivID.class2 {}
#DivID2.class2 {}

#DivID.class3 {}
#DivID2.class3 {}

... Would not pose too many problems right? Wrong! I just spent 2 hours banging my head on the keyboard trying to work out why the first definition would always work and the rest of them would simply disappear into the ether.

As it turns out for IE6 on Windows – not IE5.5 or IE7 – only the first definition is rendered. The rest just don’t work.

Solution? Get rid of the ID and rename all of the classes individually…

Sometimes I think the gods are teasing me =(