A tale of shorts and the death of a terrorist (quite a range, huh?)

So, this is probably going to sound weird, but I haven't owned a pair of shorts in about seven years. I'll occasionally don capris or skirts in the summer, but more often than not I've worn jeans and kept these legs nice and covered.

The more I think about it, the stranger this is. Even when I was working out for 5 hours a week, the skinniest I've been since puberty, and felt relatively confident in my appearance, my legs stayed covered up to the best of my ability regardless of how hot it got.

Over the last year or so I've been working on being healthier - namely, getting more color in my diet and moving around more - and even though the weight has stopped dropping off, my body's continued to shift around as the proportions of muscle to fat change.

And slowly but surely, my perception of myself has changed too. I think I first noticed

it near the beginning of the year, when I realized that what I saw in the mirror wasn't what everyone around me saw. You know those images of people with eating disorders where they're super skinny but look in the mirror and see themselves as obese?

I've always thought that it's crazy that someone's perceptions can be so warped. And, while certainly not to the same extent, I realized that I'd been doing the exact same thing.

In the months since I've slowly started becoming more comfortable with my body - yes, even the chubby patches I've still got - and learning to be happy with where I'm at. I've still got further to go, both in terms of being healthy and in not being too hard on myself, but it's definitely improvement.

I'd had another post planned for this week's theme, but this week as I was doing goofy dance moves surrounded by mirrors in my gym class, as I watched myself I had a sudden realization:

I never thought I'd say this, but I like the way I look.

I just got my paycheck, and I see some shorts on the horizon...

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Oh! Almost forgot: we said we'd talk about the Osama Bin Laden death in our posts this week. I feel a little torn on the issue. The September 11th attacks had very little effect on me personally, since I'm across the country with no relatives in New York and was fairly young at the time. So on a personal level the whole thing feels kind of surreal, (this isn't meant to be tongue in cheek, but this is the best analogy I can make) like if you actually definitively killed off the Daleks in Doctor Who, a mainstay villain who always comes back and we've all gotten used to being around. What do you do with the big bad guy dead? Does this even change anything in the day-to-day, since there are so many other terrorists out there? Isn't it hypocritical of us to condemn a killer and then kill him with no trial or public tribunal (or even after that?)

But. At the same time, while I can't find it in me to condone the death of a human being, I also can't condemn those who have celebrated his death. Many, many people have had their lives taken from them or irrevocably damaged because of the terrorist attacks, and I think as humans we have a deep-seated thirst for "eye for an eye" justice. While I don't think revenge is a healthy method of dealing with grief, if the people effected by 9/11 feel more at peace now then I certainly can't tell them to stop feeling that way.

Bah, life is complicated. To quote Hank Green: truth resists simplicity.