How Gainesville Made Me Crazy

I don't know what to do. The pain this morning is horrible. It hurts to sit, it hurts to stand....I know it sounds dramatic, but I can assure you that I'm actually not exaggerating. My knee looks slightly purple and the pain is now traveling below the kneecap to the shin.

So I'm going to try to not think about that for now and just write some more.

We left off with my move to Gainesville. We pick up in my horrible apartment by the Beef Teaching Unit. It was horrible mainly because my roommates hated me. They belonged to a racially defined sorority, and I was the odd man out. It was so strange to me, since I lived at Columbia with roommates of every race, creed, and color, and nobody gave it a second thought.

My bedroom was also the bedroom closest to the front door.  In fact, the way the room was designed, my bedroom window was actually next to the front door, since the bedroom jutted into the hallway of the apartment complex. That meant that I could hear all of the noise in the hallway AND in the apartment any time of the day or night. And, with my roommates, that noise was ALL DAY & ALL NIGHT.

From abusive boyfriends breaking into our apartment to loud parties thrown until 6 or 7 am on a Tuesday morning (about the time I would be waking up for my Math for Idiots Liberal Arts Majors class), my apartment was anything but a sanctuary.

On top of all of that, I felt friendless and abandoned. I was fortunate to have Stephanie, one of my very best friends from high school, but she had developed friendships with other people (not to mention developed a relationship with the man who she actually just married this past month), so I felt like the third wheel most of the time. She introduced me to a guy who expressed his interest in hooking up with me until he could find a real girl friend, but I found it difficult to develop any meaningful friendships outside of the one I already had with Steph.

And so I started running. I felt fat and ugly, watching all of the pretty sorostitutes flaunt their perfect, tan bodies as they jogged around the campus, and so I started making changes to my lifestyle & diet.

I started eating oatmeal for breakfast, an apple for a snack, and a black bean salad for lunch. I had another apple and sometimes a rice cake around midday, and then one of the protein shakes that I was still taking from the cleanse for dinner.

I would run up and down 23rd st. every morning, logging first one, then two, then three miles a day. As we headed into March, I started to drop weight.

...to be continued.