I will exponentially regulate you

Sunday, July 27, 2008
I am miserable with the way that I look and I know it’s my fault. I’m really doing great with working out, but it’s just not enough. The part I struggle with is the food. Yesterday I did really well. For a while anyway. I worked out hard and ate well… then the evening set in and, as usual, I got snacky. Nicole was at the clubhouse on the internet so I didn’t feel guilty snacking, and I still didn’t do too bad. I had healthy snacks, just several of them when I wasn’t the least bit hungry. And then I went out dancing, so I’d like to think I burned off all the extra calories that I ate. Tonight, however, was not quite the near happy ending as the night before. I worked out really hard this afternoon and I felt great afterwards, but I was really craving some pizza. My plans was to only eat 2 pieces to satisfy my craving and my appetite. I ate 6 pieces. Hours later I felt completely disgusting and guilty and just plain awful. It’s easy for me to eat well when I’m living with Sandy because I can feel her constantly watching me and judging me. It’s different here. My boss pokes fun at me for working out so much and my coworkers often try to encourage me to order burgers and such instead of salads when we go out to eat. It’s torture. I’m a member of the Biggest Loser Club online and it’s a program that you have to pay a monthly membership to. I can keep track of my daily calorie intake, my workouts and my weight loss progress, but I have to have internet in order to do this! We don’t have internet in our apartment so we have to go to the community clubhouse to use the internet there, and that only works two thirds of the time. It wasn’t working today so I wasn’t entirely sure where I was at calorie wise. The staff at the clubhouse are trashy and don’t care about anything, especially the status of the internet. Right now I just wish I was in Austin so I could loose the freaking weight that I want, I could use the internet when I want to and could be around people who care about me and actually want to talk to me. I definitely LOVE my job, but I don’t love Pickwick, or Nicole at the moment or my eating habits.

Anyway, last night Amber invited me to go down to Broad Ripple (think 6th street on a smaller scale) with Andy and a couple of their friends. Nicole couldn’t go because she’s not 21 yet (2 more weeks!) so the only people that I knew were Andy and Amber. Amber had a friend in town and we met up with some more people that they knew and it ended up being awkward for me. Amber didn’t really talk to me much, she more just stuck to her friend Erica so I ended up feeling like a third wheel. After I’d had a couple of drinks I got brave enough to hit the dance floor. I ended up dancing with one of Andy’s friend, who wasn’t very cute, but I was so desperate for someone to talk to that I didn’t even care when he started hitting on me. Just when I was starting to have some fun Amber told me that she and Andy were ready to leave. It was about 12:30. Matt, the guy I’d been dancing with, had actually rode with us there and was going to stay and get a ride with someone else. He offered to give me a life home if I wanted to stay longer, and he wasn’t really creepy, but I still felt like it was best for me to leave with Amber. I guess my main reason for that was just so that Amber didn’t think I was interested in him or wonder what happened after she left or any other option in that direction. I did have fun that night, but it was when I was dancing with strangers. I just felt like Amber invited me out of pity so I wouldn’t be sitting at home, which I appreciate, but it also would have been nice if I felt like she actually wanted me there.

Tomorrow Nicole and I have Risk Management training at a hotel with a bunch of consultants from other sororities. I’m not really looking forward to that. Christ told us it’s probably going to be quite boring and that the main reason for it is to meet people. I suck at meeting people. Ugh.
Monday, July 28, 2008
I learned a lot today. Not so much about Risk Management, but just a lot of stuff about a lot of things. I did learn a few interesting things about Risk Management that I’m definitely going to pass along to other chapters, like secrets about Sober Sister or Roadside Assistant Sister and about guests lists, etc. I also learned some things about transitioning from college life to the real world (it’s quite the transition really). One of the first things we learned is that the Golden Rule does not apply in the work place. Rather than do unto others as you would have them do unto you, it really should be “Do unto others as they would like to have done unto them”. We came to this conclusion after having done a mini communication styles quiz to identify what kind of communicators we were. The four categories were Regulators, Analyzers, Moderators and Exponents. It was really interesting and we talked at length about the different characteristics of the different communicators in different work place and real life situations. The fundamental point of the exercise was not just to identify what we were, but also to identify what those around us were so we could more effectively work with them. If our boss is a regulator, we need to keep that in mind and cater to that when communicating with them, hence the change in the work place golden rule. In doing this activity I felt I was able to identify what kind of communicator me and some of my friends are. Elaine and I are regulators. I believe Becca to be an analyzer, Hannah and Crystal to be moderators and John and Samantha to be exponents. We all posses characteristics of each kind of communicator, but these were what I felt were most fitting for us. When I took the test it said I was a moderator, but we only answered 10 questions when it’s usually about 150, so he told us that these results may not be quite accurate, but the descriptions of the different styles would be more accurate and tell us more about ourselves and others.

I also learned that things that are good to do in college are not going to be so great to do in the work place, such as doing everyone else’s work, doing exactly as your told, waiting to be taught, broadcasting your complaints and taking a 3 month summer vacation! The presenter went on to talk about qualities that are valued in college versus qualities that are valued in the work place. For example:
COLLEGE WORK
-independence -team work
-individuality -conformity
-entitlement -duty
-equality -hierarchy
He was a very good speaker and he told us that making the transition from college to the work place is very difficult. He compared it to the transition you go through when you become a parent. In college, it’s all about finding yourself and expressing yourself, and most of the time, that’s not really the case out in the work place. He gave us a list of 15 things we can to do to become a better employee and a website with more resources (www.jobbound.com).

I also had a much better day today emotionally (and with food) and I learned some things about myself on this day out. There were several different speakers that got up and spoke throughout the day. One of them was the other author of I Heart Recruitment. We met with Jessica last week to talk about recruitment stuff and today Colleen got up and talked about what it’s like to have mental health issues in college, including eating disorders. It was really interesting to hear her tell her story. After she spoke, another woman got up and talked about hot to deal with helping someone else with an eating disorder. When she first got up there, she told us that she herself used to be overweight and has lost 85 pounds in the last 4 years through a 12 step weight loss program called Overeaters Anonymous. I made a note of that in my notebook to look it up later. When I came home I did and I think it might be something worth looking into. It’s not a program that you have to pay for at all, which is a plus for me given my current lack of an adequate income. It’s also based on the same 12 steps and 12 traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous, which I’m very familiar with since the majority of my family has been through that program and I used to attend Ala-non meetings in middle school. There are meetings and you get a sponsor and everything. I think I’m going to look up some meeting times here in Indy and go to a few (the recommend going to 6 different meetings before deciding if it is right for you and settling on a particular meeting group) and see if I think that’ its right for me. It’s all about identifying the issues in your life and helping you to deal with those in relation to eating and helping you to abstain from overeating rather that simply making a diet plan and restricting what you eat, etc. I also realized that what I’m doing at the moment may be working, but I’m just so freaking impatient. Even with the mess-ups that I’ve had, I still have not gained any weight in the last 4 weeks, which is good. But I lost 4 pounds rather quickly and then slowly lost another 2 and I need to recognize that it took me 3 years to put this weight on, so it’s going to take me some time to take it off. That’s really hard for me. I guess it’s also hard because back when I did the south beach a couple of years ago I lost like 15 pound pretty quickly and kept it off for over a year. I’m frustrated that I’m not able to do that again. I need to remember that I am a completely different person now than I was back then and my life style is completely different and will never again be as simple as it was then. This new program is something that (if I decide I like it and is worth it) is something that I think I can do while I’m on the road and will simply compliment what I’m doing now and also help to improve me as a person. I won’t be able to regularly attend meetings, but I will have contact information for people that I can talk to on the phone and get support from them as well as the materials that I can read. I’m not sure how much time I’ll really have to read these things because I’ll have so much going on and the time I will have off I will want to spend on things I enjoy, like personal reading and movie, but I’m going to give it a shot and see what it has to offer. Even if it’s not something that will work for my life right now, maybe it’s something that will work for me later in life. After reading through pages and pages of material on the website, I realized that I do have an eating problem. I may not be morbidly obese, but I don’t want to wait until I am before I start addressing the problem, especially when I see it now. I’m also proud of myself because I got up and worked out this morning. I didn’t make it to the gym, but I did crunches and lunges and things of that sort for 20 minutes. I was exhausted when I got home from the workshop this evening but because I’ve been so good about making it to the gym and because I didn’t do bad with eating today and because I did make the time this morning to work out, I was ok taking a day off from the gym. I don’t want to get burnt out on it, so I don’t force myself to go when I’m just not feeling up to it. I really enjoy working out so I end up going like 5 days a week, which I feel is very acceptable.

There were consultants from 16 different sororities there today and I got to meet a lot of people. The people that I felt would be useful are the two consultants that are also going to Clayton State in Georgia to start a chapter. I gave them my business card and we chatted with them about our worries, etc. It was interesting to talk to all these other girls and hear how differently their organizations do training and to hear about what their sorority experience was like at a big school. Alpha Sigma Alpha tends to be at smaller schools with smaller chapters. We are at some big school with big chapters over a hundred women, but we were hearing stories about 600 plus women going through recruitment with new member classes of 80 and chapter total being over 200. It was nuts to imagine a chapter like that! It did get me worried about dealing with bigger chapters and universities. I know I won’t be dealing with anything quite that big, but Greek life elsewhere is still going to be a major shock to me since I really don’t have much to compare it to. From what I’ve heard from other consultants and from woman at convention, Greek life at Schreiner is not a good representation of what real Greek life is like. This is something I’ve always suspected (clearly) but now I know for sure. When the show Greek first came out, a lot of the Greeks on my campus were upset about the way it portrayed Greek life saying “It’s not like that at all!” but now I’ve heard several people say that it really is pretty accurate of what Greek life is like on a lot of campuses. I have no idea what to expect! There were also 16 women there who were second year consultants. I know that you can reapply to be an LC again if you wish to do so, but it’s not that common in Alpha Sigma Alpha. We’ve had I think 3 women do it for 2 years in the last 30 years, whereas there was one chapter today who had 7 returning consultants and 6 new consultants. That was also a shock that they had 13 consultants compared to our 2 (though we soon hope to have 3). I’m not going to make any decisions now, partly because I kind of like the idea of not knowing what’s going to come next in my life, but who knows. Maybe this is something that I’ll want to do again next year.

Some random, disturbing facts about the apartment complex that I’m currently living in:
Nicole was at the pool the other day and struck up a conversation with someone who told her that there have been a lot of reports of theft in the complex lately. We had just been talking about the number of cops we see driving around the complex, so with this new information we have our door constantly locked, even when we’re home and are sure to lock the dead bolt and the handle when we’re not.
We got home from our workshop this afternoon and walked up to the building to find a poster nailed to the wall with a picture of 4 black men on it that read: “WANTED! If you see these men in Pickwick, call 911 immediately!” Are you shitting me?? I was going to walk over and do laundry this evening, but Nicole was at the clubhouse and I’m no longer comfortable walking over there in the dark by myself, so I put my laundry off until tomorrow. This place just keeps getting better and better.