Am ded of all the cute. Aimee! Puppy! Em!

Boo for returning fevers, buy yay for snagging the best friend.

I got into a bad self-punishment loop when I tried to silence the voices altogether; every time they yipped at me, I felt worse for not being strong enough to muffle them, which just proved how right they were after all about me, which just made them crow with triumph, which made me feel even worse and more self-defeated, which made them louder, etc. ad infinitem.

from the self-loathing discussion last night, this pinged me quite a lot. I'm in an OK place right now, but I cycle fairly regularly. When I'm on the low end of the spectrum, I just feel like there's no way I can pull myself out, and I keep running the reasons that I just FUCKING HATE MYSELF so much over and over, and then I alternate that with beating myself down for being so fucking weak about it, and fury about thinking I have problems in this first world existence I live in.

Today, though, I'm OK. Which is good.

Teppy, I hope today you're OK, or better, or at least not worse.

Poor Emmett, I hope he gets better soon.

Teppy, I hope today you're OK, or better, or at least not worse.

I can say that I'm not worse (where values of "worse" would equal "slicing parts of my enormous reservoir of fat off my body"). But still full of the tasty zesty self-hate. Whee.

And I have no cute new pit bull puppy, so I might as well just go crawl into a cave, puppy-less. The injustice of it all!

It snowed! It snowed! I *knew* Beverly would share with me. Although, I didn't ask for the bitter cold so she can have that back. Snow and mid 40s = good. Snow and a high only in the 20s = Brrrrr!

My office-mate is currently in the process of making one of our office walls into an Olympics scoreboard. Whee?

My morning is already trippy because I think my ultra-conservative leg. quoted Eldridge Cleaver or whatever radical said "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem." No! Ours. He can't have it. That worked out though cause he thinks I'm part of the solution and I think he's part of the problem. He probably thinks P.T. Barnum said it, but obviously I'm not ready to start this day. Dag.

The Return of Ken... [link]

NEW YORK (Reuters) - He's been to the gym, looks buff and stylish, and now Barbie's boy toy Ken wants to win back the doll he split from two years ago.

After a two-year separation, Mattel Inc. said on Thursday that Barbie's long-time suitor wants to rekindle his decades-long romance with his plastic paramour.

"Ken has revamped his life -- mind, body and soul," Hollywood stylist and Mattel consultant Phillip Bloch said in a statement. "Everyone knows how difficult it is to change, especially when you've lived your life a certain way for more than four decades."

"A certain way"? Sounds like they're admitting Barbie was his beard.

Barbie should definitely read Dan Savage's column in the NYT this morning before she goes there. Metro- sexual, sure. Nice try, Kenny boy.

I wonder how they revamped Ken's soul? Is he gonna start talking about ID?

Ok, people with the self-hatred. I am by no means entirely cured of it myself, but here is the reasoning I stumbled upon that helped me down the road to making the self-hatred leave me alone.

Water seeks its own level. This is something my mother used to say all the time. It means the same as "birds of a feather flock together", yet it seems more pointed to me, more atavistic. I believe it, firmly. Most of us do. There is good reason. The friends and associates we choose, and feel most at home with, are fundementally on the same level of maturity, quality, whatever as we ourselves are - not always precisely the same, but the basic ability to grok each other is there. Now, take a look at the people you surround yourselves with - your friends are amazing people. They are loving, giving, smart, passionate, witty, amazing people. They are Buffistas, who abound with those qualities, as well as the simply amazing people whom we know apart from this place. The reason we are surrounded by these amazing people is not because they have taken pity on us and let us hang around, but because we are fundementally on the same level as they are. It is hard to accept at first. But logically, and truly, we are wonderful and amazing people too.

But the sad thing is that somewhere along the way, we have been taught, most likely by our families, that we do not deserve to be loved without condition, that we are not good enough. We have learned that it is right and good to say horrible, ugly things to ourselves - because our parents or someone else close to us in our formative times did so. We believe the crap that our families tried to smother us in. We say things to ourselves that we would never dream of saying to someone we think is an amazing, wonderful person.

The challenge is learning to talk to ourselves the way we talk to our friends. It feels strange at first, but after a while it gets easier. We deserve to be loved, and loved by ourselves. We deserve to hear good things said to us, and we can say those things to ourselves.