Putting It Together

I want to write as therapy. I've watched a lot of episodes of Starting Over -- okay, so I've watched pretty much EVERY episode of Starting Over. If you've never watched Starting Over, it is most easily described as The Real World for women who have completely lost control of themselves, having an early-mid or mid-life crisis. Each woman comes in with a broad sense of what she wants to achieve, and in order to accomplish her ultimate goal, she works with a "life coach" with god-knows-what "credentials" (one of them justifies her position as "life coach" because she watched her father shoot her mother and then himself). The life coach makes "steps" for the women, and once they finish a myriad of ridiculous assignments and cry at least once per episode, the woman graduates and is deemed a new woman who has, yes, STARTED OVER. Brilliant. I cling to every word of the amazing life coaches, Rhonda Britten and Iyanla Vanzant, and I even occasionally listen to Creepy Dr. Stan Katz.

But I digress. Why I bring up Starting Over is because not only does it provide me five hours a week (Monday-Friday at noon on NBC in New York) of moments that will no doubt go down in the canon of great television (think Iyanla clapping her hands and screaming "DEBRA!"), but it also makes me think -- even for a moment -- about how to work out my own problems. Granted, I am not a recovering alcoholic who gave my son up for adoption 18 years ago like Cassie, and I'm definitely not a matronly prison guard who wants to feel like a woman... like Katrinda (who goes by Candy for short, but who are we kidding? It doesn't make her the least bit feminine). But I do share many of the same insecurities and emotions that the fabulous six houseguests experience.

Not everything on this show is entirely useless. One thing every woman is forced by her LCs to do is journal -- she writes down her feelings, keeping them as a testament to her own growth and using them as a road through which she can come to know herself.

Here is what I know about myself. I am:
-originally from Ohio.
-liberal (which might be a contradicting term to the first contention).
-gay (also contradicting to the first?).
-about to graduate from New York University with a degree in journalism and sociology.
-planning on attending law school after working for a few years.
-pretty opinionated.

...and that's about it.

Without getting all "Dear Diary" up in here, I hope I will be able to use this blog to document and understand myself and my feelings on current events, and I hope that I will do this in a way that is both witty and insightful for those who stumble upon this page.

It's the first step my life coach has set for me.