Pride is an Evil Green Monster

Actually, pride is a lot of colors. It's black because it shows the dark side of people. It's green because it makes me ill. It's red because it makes my blood boil. It's yellow because in truth it is usually hiding cowardliness.

Pride is a difficult emotion to define in our society because it is used to describe so many different things.

Pride. n. (1) A sense of one's own proper dignity or value; self-respect. (2) Pleasure or satisfaction taken in an achievement, possession, or association: parental pride. (3) Arrogant or disdainful conduct or treatment; haughtiness. (4) A cause or source of pleasure or satisfaction; the best of a group or class: These soldiers were their country's pride. (5) The most successful or thriving condition; prime: the pride of youth. (6) An excessively high opinion of oneself; conceit.
(7) Mettle or spirit in horses. (8) A company of lions. See synonyms at flock1. (9) A flamboyant or impressive group: a pride of acrobats.

Now, obviously, I'm not talking about self-respect. There is nothing I want you to suppress less than self-respect. I'm talking about arrogance, haughtiness, and conceit. It is one of my pet peeves. For all of you girls out there who think you like assertive men, remember that there is nothing more unattractive than arrogance. These are the people who are above rules, morality, and assistance. They know everything about everything. It is a true expression of ignorance. These people would cut off their own nose to spite their face. They would do harm to an innocent to get back at an enemy. They have lost all concept of the greater good. They are completely self-absorbed, self-seeking, and selfish. Everything they do is done to benefit themselves. They are a cancer. And what is always most difficult for the rest of us to come to terms with is that they will not change until they want to change. Can you image how difficult it is to get someone who is so completely selfish to want to change? It makes you want to pull all of your hair out and begin banging your head against the wall until you pass out. Aggravating does not even begin to describe it.

So, tell me, what kind of pride do you hold? Is it the kind that benefits those around you or only yourself? Are you the cancer that is bringing your own destruction? Or is there someone in your circle of friends who is the cancer? To what extent do you sacrifice yourself to make that person happy? Cancer is a difficult thing to cure. If you catch it early and keep it under control, then you can make a full recovery. But if it is allowed to grow and spread, then it will destroy everything.

Choices

Have you ever thought about how much your friends mean to you? To what lengths would you go for your friends? Would you do anything? Really?

Sacrifice takes on new meaning when it means doing something for a person whom you care about. We hate to see anyone suffer, but to see it happen to someone you love is to suffer yourself. What would you do to ease their suffering? Would you take on their burden? Could you be completely selfless?

I ask the questions because I don't know the answers. No one can say with any degree of certainty what they would and wouldn't do given particular situations. And there are those situations that cannot be undone. Parents pray to take the cancer that infects their child's body. Friends curse the misfortune that took their friend's life instead of theirs.

Then there are the situations that I believe friends should not help with. Unless you are independently wealthy, I would not recommend getting your friends out of debt, buying them a new car, or loaning them money. If you have money to lose and it doesn't matter to you, then go ahead. For the rest of us, if you value your friendship at all, don't do it. It never ends well. Plus, you are not doing your friend a favor. Part of making mistakes is learning from the consequences. If your friends do not learn this lesson, then they are doomed to repeat their mistakes.

But what about those other cases....your friend's house burns down and they have no where to live and no worldly possessions? Would you let them move into your spare room and have half of your clothes? Or the friend who may never be able to have children? Do you offer to carry her child? Or the friend who is dangerously close to a bomb about to explode? Do you sacrifice your life in order to protect theirs? Here is hoping that these are choices that you are never asked to make.

Holding on to Youth

Today I want to briefly explain why I refer to a lot of teens and young adults as "kids." It's not because I'm so much older than them, although I realize I'm widening the age gap day by day. It's because I firmly believe that young people should hold on to their "kid" card for as long as possible. Believe me, you will spend the rest of your adult life trying to reclaim it. I can't say that I don't understand why kids are so anxious to grow up. It's just that as I look back, I don't understand why I thought it was so important to grow up. It was the fact that to be a kid was to be naive. To be naive was to not know something. To not know something was to be uncool. Amazing how many things growing up revolved around our popularity status. Yet I could tell you all day long that popularity doesn't matter outside of high school and you would still continue to ignore me. The fact is that it matters in your life now and not having that status can really hurt. It's not like the popular kids don't have problems and never have to worry about anything. It's just that they are upheld as being the standard by which all uncool kids are measured by. Even their flaws add to their charm. They are the mature, fashionable, and attractive people that we see on TV and read about in magazines. They are society incarnate. And to be like them is to be one step closer to greatness. And in the process we risk losing a piece of ourselves. I probably come back around to this point more often than I should, but I'll say it again: Be who YOU want to be. Notice I said who and not what? Your job doesn't define you. Your role in the universe doesn't define you. Your personality, your view point, and your priorities are what define you. Consider what is most important to YOU and the rest will fall into place.

Time to Change Things Up a Bit

I think I tried too hard when I started this blog and I ran out of steam very quickly. It wasn't from a lack of things to write about, simply a frustration with the drama that I could have written about. Simply put, stupid people shouldn't breed. Kids make mistakes. That's fine. That I can deal with. What I can't stand is parents who refuse to admit that their kid may have been at fault or that they were anything less than model parents. It's always someone else’s fault, remember? But I digress....

Today's entry is about planning for the future. What makes it so difficult to decide what you want to do with your life? It was simple when we were kids. We could be whatever we wanted to be. Then as we got older, we seemed to have more people putting limitations on what we should be. Ah, the age old question...what we want to do vs. what we should do. Then it always comes back around to what our parents want us to be. This is as difficult a situation to be in for parents as it is to be in for kids. On one side you have the parent who wants to see their child be successful (i.e. rich) and happy (i.e. rich). On the other side you have the kid who wants to be successful (i.e. be good at it) and happy (i.e. enjoy it). Ok, so I may be exaggerating a bit on the side of the parents. It's not like they want you to be a millionaire so they can move into your big house and live off your income for a change. They just want you to make enough money so that they aren't having to pay for your bankruptcy attorney in a few years. Neither side is all right or all wrong. For instance, lots of kids would love to spend their entire lives doing nothing. They could be very successful at doing nothing and who's not happy being able to do whatever they want? That's where parents come in handy. If nothing else, they can nag you until you do something just so they'll leave you alone.

The problem lies in the fact that I really don't think that most kids want to be slugs. Happiness aside, they too would like to make enough money to pay their bills. Face it, from the first day we started working we realized the correlation between our paycheck and gas in our cars. These days, we're working just so we can put gas in our cars. Where parents are failing is in being facilitators. Whether you want your kids to be doctors is not the point, it's whether your kids want to be doctors. You can pay for the fancy college all day long, but if they don't enjoy it then they aren't going to make it through. Motivation is a key factor in success. Before a kid even needs to decide where they're going to go to school and what they're going to major in, they need to be asked what they want to do. They may not know. I didn't know. I knew I liked math, but aside from teaching I didn't know what may career options were. It wasn't until my senior year of college that a professor told me that I should go into actuary science. But by that point I was only a semester away from my BS in Business. Guess what, I didn't go back to college for actuary science. I probably never will. I was lucky to survive one bachelors degree and I'll be paying on it until my kids are in college. Maybe it wasn't meant to be. If I had gone that route from the beginning, then a lot of the good experiences that I've had in my life wouldn't have happened. I probably wouldn't have met my husband. But I still would have liked to have had the choice. But do I blame my parents or my math teacher for not guiding me down that path? Do I blame myself for not asking the right questions? In high school, I didn't even know what actuary science was or where I could go to school for it. Was actuary science even my only option? I'm finding out now that there are a lot of things that I enjoy, that involve math, and I could have gone to school for.

Really, it was no one person's fault. The adults in my life didn't listen when I told them what I wanted to do. Then to make matters worse they didn't listen when I told them where I wanted to go to school. I was told that I had to go to a liberal arts college. Trade schools weren't "real schools." There went my dreams of being a pastry chef. I spent a couple years selling my wares at farmers markets and then my cooking for profit days were pretty much spent. Time to get a "real job." That's what really gets me. I let my parents control my life well into my adult years. And then I see it happen to countless other young adults. Parents are manipulative. They threaten to take your car or kick you out of the house if you don't do as they say. And with those threats they have power over us. But guess what, YOU choose if you let them have power over you. Yep, it's all your fault. You could buy your own car and move into your own apartment. If you're going to college, you could move onto campus. No, it's certainly not as affordable as living at home, but look at what that is costing you. Despite what parents like to believe, there are a lot of people out there who graduated from trade schools and are making more money than their peers who graduated from college. Why? Because they took charge of their lives. Oh, yes, there are also a lot of trade school grads working at McDonald's, but I bet you'd find a few college grads there as well. Book learning is not for everyone. A good portion of Americans are artistic thinkers. They appear messy, are often labeled ADD, and are the most brilliant minds I know. They learn by doing things hands on. Give them a book and they can't focus for five minutes. Give them a Rubik cube and they have it solved in five seconds. Get away from this mentality that all higher learning must be done at a liberal arts school. I am all for higher education. If you want to be successful, then you have to dedicate your entire life to learning. But not all learning comes from books.

Decide what YOU want to do with your life. Find someone who is in that profession and ask them how they would recommend you get there. Then do it. There will be struggles and opposition, but in the end you will be successful and happy.

What's Going On With Stephanie Ragusa's Smile?

TAMPA When the door opened Monday at the Hillsborough sheriff's office, Stephanie Ragusa walked out wearing handcuffs and a wide grin.

"Stephanie, why the smile?" a reporter asked.

Ragusa grinned more broadly, shook her head and continued walking toward the patrol cruiser that would haul her to jail.

The school teacher's toothy smile — spread across newspapers, TV and the Internet — has become her public trademark. It is there in three booking mug shots that followed her three arrests on charges she had sex with underage boys.

"She doesn't seem like this is serious," said Karen A. Duncan, a sex assault therapist in Indianapolis who has studied women as sex offenders.

Ragusa seems to be a member of a new category of sexual offenders, Duncan said: young, attractive, professional and predatory women who target underage boys. Another in the group is Debra Lafave, the blond former Greco Middle School teacher who was sentenced to house arrest after pleading guilty in 2005 to having sex with a 14-year-old student.

"I think something is going on with a certain group of young women and the media attention," Duncan said. "They seem to be seeking the media attention. Some sort of need is being met for them. … They kind of pose for the camera and they dress up."

Duncan emphasized the word "predatory" in describing them. Female sex offenders, she said, prey on teenagers' vulnerability and sexual curiosity.

Media attention seems to give them celebrity status, Duncan said, even though it's negative. Still, she said, this behavior seems to conflict with their professional lives.

"There's an immaturity I see in these women. I don't think they see the seriousness of the situation or their behavior."

A Desire For Attention?

In a court hearing Tuesday, where a judge was to determine whether Ragusa should be jailed without bail pending trial, she gave short perky answers as the judge asked her questions.

"Do you understand there currently is no bond in your case and that's the way it's going to stay until the court rules otherwise?" Circuit Judge J. Rogers Padgett said.

"OK," Ragusa responded cheerfully, breaking into a smile.

The smile lasted for the remaining moments of the hearing.

Bonnie Bucqueroux, who runs the Victims and the Media program at Michigan State University, wondered whether female teachers who have sex with their students are doing it for media attention.

"It gives them their Paris Hilton 15 minutes" of fame, Bucqueroux said. "Does it spark that sort of behavior or was it there all along? I find that to be a difficult question to answer."

Bucqueroux, 64, said teens and their teachers have been blurring the lines of relationships for years. When she was 13 in the eighth grade, Bucqueroux said, she tried to seduce a teacher. He declined but she said she still managed to get one of his colleagues to kiss her after a dance.

She acknowledged, however, that sex between an underage teen and an authority figure is a "recipe for disaster."

And that is where the emphasis should remain, Duncan said.

At 16, a student might not view himself as a victim.

"He's interested in the sex she has to offer," Duncan said.

Deputies have said the teen and Ragusa may have had sex 20 times or more, and it continued after he knew she had been arrested for it. His sexual values may be forming along negative lines, such as manipulation and his own sexual satisfaction, Duncan said.

"'I was used by a woman so now I'm going to use a woman and not give a care about my consequences,'" Duncan said the teen may reason.

He may not be doing this consciously, she said, but this is how he was introduced to sex.

Duncan said she does not mean to suggest the victim is the aggressor. Rather, she aims to highlight the effects of victimization.

Compulsion And Competency

If the latest charges against Ragusa are true, if she had sex with her victim even while out on bail, she is showing a compulsion typical of sex offenders, Duncan said. When a therapist treats a sex offender, she said, the treatment is similar to therapy for addictions.

"It's the belief that somehow what they're doing isn't wrong, and there is some sort of a love interest here," Duncan said. "Love validates the behavior."

Brian Gonzalez, a Tampa defense lawyer not affiliated with Ragusa's case, said the way she has presented herself makes him wonder whether competency will become an issue as she builds a defense.

"Certainly, as much trouble as she has right now," Gonzalez said, "the fact that in the face of all this publicity she still could not conform and go back and engage in this behavior lends itself to competency issues."

Legally, competency can affect a case in two ways. Attorneys can argue that defendants are not competent to assist in their defense or they were not competent when they committed the crime. In the latter case, they do not realize their actions are wrong, also known as an insanity defense.

"Legal insanity is obviously an extremely difficult defense to lean on," Gonzalez said.

The threshold is high from psychological and legal standpoints, he said. Asked how often it works in Hillsborough County, Gonzalez responded: "Rare to none."

Gonzalez said he expects Ragusa's attorney will have her evaluated by a mental health professional. Even if she is not deemed incompetent, the information could prove valuable in reducing a sentence should she be found guilty.

Kashi frozen meals

I don't have a lot of time to post, but I just wanted to give big kudos to Kashi for their frozen meals. They are a delicious, healthy lunch. Even the men at work comment on how good they smell. They are loaded with protein and fiber. I can't say enough good things about this company. They have really mastered the skill of making healthy foods taste good.

Healthy Snacking

Snacking is probably the biggest issue when it comes to eating healthy. We snack for a variety of reasons: emotional, boredom, PMS, etc. It can be a difficult habit to break. The common misunderstanding is that all snacking is bad. A lot of young women think that the first step to dieting is to eat less and so they completely cut out snacking. Snacking is looked at negatively as simply "stuffing your face." But it doesn't have to be so detrimental. Snacking is actually part of our normal part of your metabolic function.

Your metabolism needs a jump start every day in order to encourage it to start burning calories. Hence the name "breakfast." You are literally breaking the fast from not eating all night. The earlier you eat this first meal, the sooner your body will start burning calories. Then, like the engine of a car, it needs fuel to keep it running. It is recommended that you eat every three hours in order to keep your metabolism going. Most foods will move through your entire digestive tract in four hours, so eating every three hours ensures that food is constantly moving through your body. Gaps in this cycle will actually make your body think that you are starving it, leading it to store calories rather than burn them.

Snacking is important to ensure that your body keeps burning calories. Many nutritionists will suggest six small meals a day. The premise is that eating often will decrease the chances of over eating at any one particular meal, another thing that causes diets to fail. The snacks will have many of the same food groups as meals: protein, vegetable, and fiber. The difference is in what is eaten. Eat granola instead of potato chips. Even pretzels are a healthier option since they are baked rather fried. Pack fruits and vegetables to snack on. I have found the 100 calorie packs to be extremely helpful when snacking. The controlled portions make it easier to snack without risking over eating. I also really enjoy the Quakes flavored rice cake chips as a substitute for chips. I tried the cheddar ones for the first time this weekend and they are addicting.

Healthy snacking can be a gradual change. Each week substitute another healthy snack. You will be amazed at how easy the transformation can be.