Cynical Nymph

Atlas Shrugged Part 1: I Watched It So You Wouldn't Have To

2012-01-28T12:13:00.000-05:00

I watched Atlas Shrugged last night because I was bored and thought I'd do you the service of not making you watch it, ever, but still having any secret curiosity allayed.

Because I couldn't go through the pain entirely alone, I emailed [redacted] and Personal Failure my... uh... thoughts.

Let me preface this by reminding you that I wrote about the Atlas Shrugged movie before. And I'm pretty sure that I could hear [redacted]'s squeal of joy from hundreds of miles away when I admitted last night that, okay, they really should've waited until they could've made this movie with Angie and Brad.

Herewith, Atlas Shrugged: Part 1, A Synopsis

Short version: Actors who think staring steel-eyed at each other constitutes portraying rich industrialist characters.

Long version:

Opening shot: "September 2, 2016" (Or something)

This takes place in the future but they're using stock footage with cars from the late '90's at best. (Lines due to gas shortages, you see. Also, lots of poor black people*. Because the Dow is below 4000. The future is bleak because of SOCIALISM OR SOMETHING.)

*In fact, about the only time you see non-white people in this movie is when they're poor/homeless/indigent, or in some service job.

Oh, I see, the Middle East has cut off virtually all imports to the U.S. Oil spills, America is not taking care of its own country, they show an airplane falling apart, so "rail travel has reemerged as the only safe and affordable means of transportation!" says the newscaster, LOL THIS IS HILARIOUS. But at least they explained why everyone would give a shit about trains, if this doesn't take place in the '30's or so.

Uh oh, a train is rushing up to a broken track and the brakes aren't working.

Okay, here we go, we're in NYC, it's raining out and some dude has a trashcan fire going.

THIS IS FANTASTIC.

And we have our first "Who is John Galt?" of the night.

Oh good, and now John Galt is talking to Midas Mulligan and then a Missing Person graphic pops up over Mulligan. THEN:

TITLE SEQUENCE: ATLAS SHRUGGED.

*******

Dagny's apartment, by the way, is unspeakably ugly. Also, Dagny just found out about the major accident on the Taggart line FROM THE NEWS.

[redacted]: Those some fantastic ace reporters, eh? And I guess Eddie will be fired then?

I'm actually glad they cast a non-white person as Eddie Willers. I mean, they could've picked ANY OTHER ROLE to de-white the cast, but sure, pick the loyal underling with no pretensions of surpassing his "natural station" to cast the black guy. Whatever.

*******

LOL, ACTUAL LINE from Dagny to Jim: "Just know... that this is the consequence... of your policies."

Really. Trufax. Actual line.

This screenwriting is HILARIOUS.

*******

OH BOY OH BOY REARDEN!

I just have to say it again. The set decorator for this movie can't be an actual rich person, because actual rich people know how to do minimalist design tastefully.

THIS ACTING IS THE BEST. How many Razzies has this been nominated for, BTW?

Rearden: "I'm curious. Is it all right with you that I'm squeezing every penny I can from your emergency?"
Dagny: "I have to get the Rio Norte Line completely rerailed in 9 months or Taggart Transcontinental will crash."
Rearden: "They're doing their best to make it harder for you, aren't they?"
Dagny: "It's useless to anger people like my brother and his partners in Washington. I don't have time for it. I have to undo what they've done."
Rearden: "And after?"
~sultry looks~
Dagny: "After they won't matter anyway."

[redacted]: Who knew "and after?" was such a turn-on, lolz

Dagny: "If your new metal works, have you thought of the implications?"
Rearden: "Yeah!"

Good heavens, I hope he has.

Oh goody, the Rearden family! Okay, at least the costumer picked up on Rand's love for dressing Lillian in empire waists.

Oh, you guys. This dialogue. This dialogue.

*******

Back in Dagny's office. We have our first use of "Looters"! Weee!!

LOL, they actually include the scene of the Reardens having loveless, cold sex, and she goes, "All done, then?" I really find it ~endearing~ what they've left in vs. altered.

Dagny *on the phone* to Rearden (after the sex): "Why are so many great men going missing?" "Dagny, your trains, my metal. It's US who move the world."

*******

Y'all. McNamara at the train station, approached by Galt:
G: "Richard McNamara?"
M: "I'm McNamara. Are you here from Taggart Transcontinental?"
G: "I am not."
M: "What're you selling?"
G: "Nothing. I am simply offering a society that cultivates individual achievement. I know where such a place exists."

Also, the voice of the guy playing Galt is like the cheesiest thing ever. Cheesier than Camembert, I kid you not.

~Richard McNamara Manufacturing CEO Missing since November 6, 2016~

Hehe, yay, Ellis Wyatt. Oh good, they've turned him into a hollerer who uses the word "bullshit," which I certainly don't remember the book.

*******

Wow, the flirtation/sexual undertones in Dagny/Hank interactions is just.... wrong. So wrong.

And now she threw a drink in Francisco's face. "What happened to you, Francisco? Where is the man that I used to love?" ~his hand slides onto hers~ "You'll figure it out in time." ~he gets up~ "Just answer the question, please." ~he leans into her ear~ "Who is John Galt?" ~he walks awaaaaaay~

*******

Hank and Lillian's anniversary party. Hank is NOT mad enough at Dagny's bracelet shenanigans.

They don't even have the good grace to leave in Francisco's line from whence the title comes, despite that this is the only face to face meeting of Hank and Frisco in the entire movie. Just saying.

*******

OH BOY, HERE WE GO TO COLORADO and the Rio Norte Line!

Colorado in December, BTW, where everyone's in short sleeves and all the grasses and bushes are green. What.

[redacted]: Climate change. Duh.

THE CLIMATE CHANGE IS A LIE.

You guys, Hank's desk lamps are from Amazon.com. I saw them on Prime the other day.

Another de-whitewashed casting call: Dr. Stadler. Interesting choice, considering what he does in the end.

Dagny: "Do you think it can be stopped?"
Rearden: "This new line, or us?"
Dagny: "Both."

CN: ~dies~

DAGNY IS HAVING A CONVERSATION WITH EDDIE IN THE ENTRYWAY TO TAGGART TRANSCONTINENTAL'S MAIN BUILDING AND SHE IS STANDING ON THE CGI MARBLE TAGGART TRANSCONTINENTAL SEAL ON THE FLOOR. I CAN'T MAKE THIS UP.

This is also the part where she quits to officially separate the Rio Norte Line from Taggart Transcontinental. She walked into Jim's office to tell him and he was actually playing with a toy train.

On the map in Jim's office, I can't help but notice that they don't have a main line of their railroad running through Atlanta. Rather, it runs about through Columbus. I has a confuse.

"And one last warning, brother dear. I have never done anything to hurt a living creature in my life. But if you double cross me in any way, I will destroy you." Dagny to Jim. What.

*******

Violins as Dagny begs Frisco for moneys for the John Galt Line. WHEN HE WON'T GIVE HER MONEY SHE ACTUALLY TRIES TO SEDUCE HIM. WHAT.

A series of grey-haired white men shakes their heads at Dagny as she asks for loans for the John Galt Line oh wait an Asian lady shaking her head! She was walking with a grey-haired white guy also shaking his head, but still!

Also, they keep putting Dagny in rosy lipstick and it's BUGGING ME. The costume/makeup department in the movie should be shot for incompetence.

*******

Ah, Hank has brought back pics from 20th Century Motor Corporation now. Are they going to go in this movie?! I want to see this movie's version of the indigent locals who burn tallow candles!

"The legislature just passed the Equalization of Opportunity bill!" The legislature? Do they not have Congress in this future? Who says that, honestly.

*******

The first run on the John Galt Line.

LOL, worst CGI train ever, no, like, ever.

It's July 22nd but the trees are yellow in Wyoming. Is that normal?

This is a shame, because it's actually a really exhilarating sequence in the book.

I wish I could describe the bridge of Rearden Metal, because it somehow weds penis and vagina visual tropes AT ONCE. Like, not even taking into account the train.

Okay, now we're at Wyatt Junction. I really want to see Ellis Wyatt set the hills on fire.

BTW, Orren Boyle actually has a sleazy film noir villain mustache.

Dinner part at Ellis's, with lamb chops.

Ellis is excusing himself. HATESEX TIME! I BET! PLEASE LET THEM SHOW THE HATESEX!

This is not hatesex.

This is awkwardly filmed seduction.

Y'all. They have taken the crazy hatesex and turned it into piano and string-scored eye-gazing.

AND CUDDLING. WHAT.

Meanwhile, Ellis is in his study while his house guests are banging, and John Galt is knocking on the door. On Ellis Wyatt's house, in the middle of nowhere.

That's not threatening at all.

*******

Rearden just kissed Dagny on the cheek after saying good morning. HANK REARDEN DOES NOT KISS DAGNY TAGGART ON THE CHEEK.

Oh goody, they're going to 20th Century Motor Company. Tallow candles, here we come!

He just called her Dag. I might shoot the TV.

They found the piece of the engine. Dagny really got a great grasp of particle acceleration in her bachelor's study of engineering.

No tallow candles, though. Sadface.

*******

Sweeeet, we're going to visit Hugh Akston's diner!

Hilarious b-roll of a rental car driving through Colorado as Dagny makes her way to the diner. Just worth noting.

HUGH AKSTON'S CIGARETTE! DOLLAR SIGN! heeeeee.

Bahahaha, Wyatt just set his oil fields on fire and Dagny saw it on the TV... while John Galt was sitting down the diner counter from her.

You people thought Ayn Rand was heavy-handed.

Oh, y'all. Dagny is watching the oil fields under the mountain burn, over the HORRIBLE NARRATION of John Galt, as she stands next to Ellis Wyatt's final message: "I am leaving it as I found it. Take over. It's yours."

THANK THE FREE MARKET THAT'S OVER.

Checking in on the Met

2012-01-13T19:21:00.001-05:00

The Met opened its New American Wing several years ago, and tonight they opened a members-only preview of that wing's new setup for the Galleries for Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts. (Opens to the public on Sunday)

Since I get a Met membership every year from my parents for Christmas (that and a National Geographic subscription), naturally, that's where you would've found me tonight.

Y'all. There was a LOT of George Washington.

Hai.

Ohai.

I shall call it The Blue Room

Madame X in her new home

This picture just cracks me up for some reason. Look at Washington in the background... then look at all these slouching modern twits. (Don't get me wrong. I was slouching too.)

I also took the opportunity to visit the new Islamic art wing when it wasn't achingly crowded. If you get a chance, go. No, seriously. Go.

Anyway. I feel... refreshed.

Hiatus

2011-12-20T09:12:00.001-05:00

Posts have been touch and go here for a while now, but life is such that it is officially time to put this-here blawg on hiatus, rather than sitting in limbo and posting haphazardly.

This isn't due to any emergencies, crises, or ridiculousness. It's just due to taking some time to step back and be private for a little while.

You'll see me around, on comment threads at Forever in Hell particularly. You might see me pop in here now and again to post a New York picture, as I do.

This isn't goodbye - I'll be back after a little mental break.

Be good to yourselves in the interim.
-Cynical Nymph

Questions Not to Ask Someone With an Eating Disorder: Did You Gain Weight?

2011-12-03T23:58:00.001-05:00

It was a bad week. A bad, bad, bad, bad week. All things considered, my eating really wasn't that bad. At least, it wasn't bad, bad, bad, bad eating. I actually managed to probably eat more than usual.

Combine the out-of-the-ordinary eating with the bad, bad, bad, bad week, and I'm just proud I got through it without imploding.

So what do you not do after something like this?

You don't ask me, apropos of nothing, probably not even thinking of the change of eating or the tough week, "Did you gain weight?"

You don't ask that of an eating disorder patient, period.

You don't ask that unless you're a doctor, a counselor, or a nutritionist.

You don't ask that in the manner you'd ask an alcoholic, "Did you go to AA?" or the manner you'd ask someone with borderline personality disorder, "Did you sign up for the DBT group cycle that starts next week?"

First of all, I don't know if I gained weight. I haven't weighed myself in about a week and a half or two weeks now. The last time I weighed myself, it was the lowest weight I've seen since 2003, and it was officially anorexic.

At this point, I know my struggle well enough to know that if I weigh myself around now, no matter what the number, I'll take it the wrong way. If my weight's the same, I'm relieved but also ashamed. If my weight is down, I'm ashamed but also have a little frisson of accomplishment. If my weight's up, I'm ashamed but also proud but also panicked.

You don't ask an eating disorder patient, in the manner of checking whether an assignment was completed, "Did you gain weight?"

It doesn't work like that.

I gain weight -- and keep it on -- when I start to feel emotionally safe doing so.

I start to feel emotionally safe keeping on weight when food and body and weight stop taking the places of things I'm really trying to say or do or feel or figure out.

Food, etc., stop usurping the places of real experiences and challenges when I feel allowed to figure out what those experiences and challenges are, and conquer them head on or enjoy them for themselves.

I don't gain weight in a week and keep it on and then everything's okay because I gained some weight. That's not how it works. Don't ask me that. Don't ask anyone with an eating disorder that.

Ask how I'm feeling. Ask what I'm thinking. Give me time to figure out the answers, and if you're going to ask, listen to me -- really listen to me -- when I give you answers.

That's how it works, no matter who you are to me, no matter who I am to you, if I am someone with an eating disorer.

Holidays, Food, Women, Willpower, Bullshit

2011-11-26T12:42:00.001-05:00

There are so many things wrong with this one piece in the HuffPo that I don't even know why I violated my self-imposed no-HuffPo policy. (They have a strikingly irresponsible track record with ED and body image coverage, IMO.) I'm not actually linking to it up at the top here, because I don't want to give it any more traffic than it's invariably gotten. I'll link to it at the bottom. Hopefully that will minimize the number of you actually clicking through.

The gist of the piece is around "decision fatigue" and how it has an impact on willpower. Specifically, the discussion revolves around the holidays.

The piece is chock full of statements that on their own would be fine and dandy, even really practical advice ("[Mistakes] make you human... Give yourself a break," "Ratchet down the stress by putting things in perspective"). So far, so good.

However, then you have to put those statements into the context of article.

The context is, of course, that "willpower" is harder for women to exercise than for men (because, lady brains), and of course "willpower" is defined mostly in terms of decadent holiday food (and drink) (because, lady existence: defined by lady waistlines).

Because of course it is.

First of all, I find the "eating yummy things and having willpower are diametrically opposed" meme to be bullshit of the smelliest variety. It's related to the ignorant belief that anorexia has to do with willpower. Sure it does. Just like OCD has to do with the willpower to push through and just check that door lock one more time.

But second of all, and more to the point, I 100% grok the experience of "decision fatigue." I could be a social scientist's perfect specimen in observing the paralysis that sets in just due to the overwhelming stress of oh my word, it's all too much (especially when the paralysis itself just adds more to the much).

I don't deny that many people (particularly people socialized in the female way) DO view their food and drink activity, especially at holiday time, as a function of willpower or lack thereof. I am aware that it happens, and moreover I am aware that it happens to me.

I just think that it's total bullshit. (You're reading this, so you might just agree.) Articles like this, that just go ahead and assume that of course you're going to have trouble not shoveling Christmas cookies down and of course you're going to agonize over each extra pig in a blanket? Well, articles like this just play right into that total bullshit and perpetuate it.

What if - just run with me here for a second - we, as girls and woman, didn't spend our holiday-time lives from age 4 or so assaulted by the message that holidays can be stressful, and our stress will get taken out on all the holiday food?

What if - keep with me a little longer here - we spent our lives hearing that holidays can be stressful, and our stress will get taken out in different ways, because we are different people?

I know, I know. That's just silly. We're all really the same and we're all doomed to eat too much over the holidays, and what's more, beat ourselves up over it, not because we've spent our lives being told, "You're going to beat yourself up for eating too much holiday food!" but because, lady brains.

Obviously.

Here. Here is the crap article that buys into every assumption of Western femininity and food ever.

TIME "Ideas" Has New Idea: Fat People Are Gross

2011-11-16T15:44:00.001-05:00

Oh my quarks, I'm going to murder something. Maybe this writer's hard drive.

This week, Time.com's "ideas" section features "Let's Stop Being Passive About Fighting Obesity" by Shannon "Fat People Are Gross" Brownlee.

"Even among thin people, who wouldn't be affected by the surcharge (and who therefore might even see lower health insurance premiums, although the survey may not have explained that), support for the fat tax fell short of a majority. Why? Smoking is seen as being completely in the individual's control, whereas obesity is viewed as a result of a combination of complex factors."

It should go without saying that such a view of obesity is CLEARLY hallucinatory, amirite?

Here. This should tell you about how she feels about overweight people: "body mass index, the current term for degree of excess weight,"

Yeah, no. body mass index is not the term for "degree of excess weight." You aren't minus a BMI if you have no excess weight. You aren't aiming for a BMI of zero. That would mean you don't exist.

Talking about how the effects of second-hand smoke finally allowed people to really take up the anti-smoking cause, the writer argues, "Maybe it's time to be at least a little more willing to similarly demonize excess poundage."

To paraphrase Kate Harding's tweet about this piece, I'mma need Shannon here to show her work on how "excess poundage" isn't already demonized enough.

Why am I on about this? Especially after radio silence, except for pictures here and there, for a few months?

You know how this reads to me, as someone with an eating disorder that is sometimes straight BN, sometimes AN-P? This reads to me:

"Gaining weight is a terrible idea. Gaining weight should frighten you. Once you start gaining weight, you don't really have any guarantee you're going to stop. Even if you don't end up obese, you'll end up chubby, and just like it says in this article, once you gain weight, it's incredibly hard to lose it. Best not to gain any weight. Just to be on the safe side."

That's how my eating disordered brain translates this article.

And let me be clear. I need to gain weight right now. I am officially at the cusp of an anorexic BMI. It is nonsensical that I should be afraid of gaining weight. However, that's what an eating disorder does to thought processes. I get stressed (or sad, or what have you), I reroute it to food and weight, and my brain latches onto pieces of crap like this pageview-trolling travesty, and just kind of does its own thing from there.

So screw you, Shannon "Fat People Are Gross" Brownlee. A BMI is not a "degree of excess weight," obesity is not the equivalent of secondhand smoke, and you sound like a hateful troll.

It's a Post About Nothing

2011-11-07T15:35:00.001-05:00

So, anyway. Blogging, huh? Actual posts, yeah.

The month of October was, to put not too fine a point on it, so full of LOLWUT that I, to use the kids' parlance, can't even. Of November thus far, the sixth and the seventh have been reasonable. The rest of the first week need not apply for consideration.

On Wednesday the 2nd, I discovered that my weight hit a new low since 2003. On Friday I noticed you can actually see my chest bones in pictures right now. It's time to work on that. Nutritionist visits are in order. Meal plans are in order. White-knuckling is in order.

Whining is also in order, ughhhhhhh. I mean, you guys. What does 2011 think it is, 2009? Honestly. Honestly.

Here. Here's a picture of a bunch of ridiculously healthy people.

Marathons: I can see where they promote physical health. It's the mental health I'm less sure of. O_O

Right now the concept of stretching out my previously exercised recovery muscles feels as daunting to me as the concept of training for a marathon. (I say that as an avid non-runner.) But if tens of thousands of people ran 26.2 miles yesterday on purpose, I guess nothing is out of the question.

Yeah, No.

2011-11-01T22:12:00.001-04:00

This is not how it works. (Either the choice thing or the gag reflex thing.)

Just needed to state that for the record right-quick.

~Placeholder~

2011-10-24T19:34:00.002-04:00

This placeholder is for ~you~.

That's a tiger cub in Las Vegas in 2008. He's too busy to pay attention to you.

I, by contrast, am:

a) not a tiger cub
b) not in Las Vegas
c) not uninterested in paying more attention to you, fair reader of this blawg

But I am that busy.

~99% Placeholder~

2011-10-17T20:59:00.000-04:00

Sighted on Saturday:

"Write your NYC story."

Yeah, citibank, I'm pretty sure these folks just did. Maybe don't have some of them arrested next time.

Read This: Painkillers Are Good

2011-10-10T14:20:00.000-04:00

Hi there.

Work and life are trying to crunch my bones like so many giants' teeth. So I am just popping in to let you know that your reading assignment is this:

Painkillers Are Good, by our very own Comtesse, Personal Failure. Truly, it's important that this piece is read. It's important it gets out there. Read it. Think about it. Share it.

This is the ur post, people. The post of all posts. Perhaps not to you, but certainly to me.

I could find, right now, literally millions of posts and comments about how bad pinkillers are, about how they ruin people’s lives, kill people and should never be used, ever. That’s the perception of medications like Vicodin and Percoset and Oxycontin. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.

That’s not the whole story. Not by a long shot.

Painkillers are good.

I'd love it if you'd go read PF's post, and while you read it, I'd like you to think about the things in your own life that people make assumptions about. While you read, I'd request that you think about the things that are crucial to your wellbeing, and think about whether you have the privilege of people being for the most part informed about those things. Or are they ignorant about them? I'd love for you to read the post and consider that most things have more than one side (does anything have one?), and that very often, one of those sides tends to get squished into a dark, cramped corner.

I'd love for you to read, and I'd love for you to share.

Selves, Straws, Snaps

2011-09-30T20:27:00.001-04:00

You know when the stupidest crap morphs into something you just can't deal with? The kind of crap that any other time you would handle with aplomb, or wouldn't even notice you were handling at all, it would be so effortless?

Well.

My pharmacy has moved and they're taking the opportunity to upgrade computer systems, which entails bringing in new staff with knowledge of such. When I dialed my way through the automated ordering tonight, instead of the final prompt I got, as I have been getting lately, "Please hold for a member of our pharmacy staff." I've been thinking they're having some issue with the computers and phones when I get this prompt each month. Lately I'd been taking the Rx in physically.

Ha. Ha ha ha.

Turns out, my pharmacy has been filling my birth control under someone else's insurance since MARCH (when I got this year's birth control Rx). I am only finding out about this now because of a particularly detail-oriented new staff member. Prior to this whoever's been filling my Rx hasn't been checking my date of birth or my insurance any time I've picked up the Rx. Once someone (who's not a regular at that pharmacy location) did ask to verify my address, and it wasn't mine. Of course, nothing came of that ("Oh, you must have two profiles, we'll fix that"), and of course that happened mid-week, when this whole identity/freaking insurance fraud problem could've been solved easily.

My GP has my chart as Firstname Maidenname-Marriedname. She sends my Rx's in as Firstname Maidenname, because that's just always how she's done it. My GYN has my chart as Firstname Marriedname now, and as of this year that's how she sends my Rx in. This is a new thing as of 2009, despite my having been married since 2007. 2011, however, was the first time she e-prescribed for me. So you can see where the confusion comes in. Shorter: "Humans. I get it. But this is why we check our work."

I've known there was another version of me wandering around Manhattan (she has my Firstname Marriedname) since early 2010 when I went to an orthopedist for the first time. The person checking me in/verifying my patient identity looked at me and asked in a surprised tone if my date of birth was in '68.

This other me must live in my neighborhood, because apparently she also goes to my GYN - it looks as though this year's birth control Rx was sent into the pharmacy from my GYN's with her date of birth. Either that, or the pharmacy got in the Rx with my DOB and didn't notice, instead going to the first Firstname Marriedname they saw in their system, and going from there. I'm not sure which, but I should be finding out tomorrow after they've had time to go and look at the physical Rx they got in March. Anyway. That's beside the point, and whether it was my doctor's mistake or the pharmacy's mistake is irrelevant to tonight's Ridiculous Breakdown That Any Other Time Would Not Have Even Been A Thing.

Here is the Thing.

There's this woman I share a name with, an orthopedist with, and apparently a gynecologist with. She takes the same birth control as I do, but has a different insurance company, a different date of birth, a different life. (And a different birth control copay. I noticed mine had gone up; I just thought my insurance company were being dicks about it.)

I'm having a thematically tough time with who I am lately. I don't particularly want to be this version of me very much, this past while. This role, this function, this name - they just get on my very last nerve recently, and they are heavy. They sit there on that nerve, and they press. It's an exquisite irony to learn that if I'd just told my GYN to go ahead and keep using my old identity, that old name (which my insurance still has no issues processing), I'd be having no issues this weekend.

This year, you guys. This year. This year's been tough. It's been no 2009 (the year of YHGTBFKM), but it's held its own. I've been noticing just how tough lately as I've segued back into fall clothes, clothes I specifically remember wearing at specific places during specific moments in Paris last September, and the same clothes are slipping off, are sagging, are baggy, where last year they were maybe a bit loose. It's not that I've lost so dramatically much weight, but more that I've deflated. This year has been deflating.

So it is an especially back-breaking straw, this whole "ha ha, I'm your identity, and I shall screw you now! if you'd just used your other identity, you'd not be screwed!" prescription thing. There's just too much ugly poetry there.

*snap*

~Placeholder~

2011-09-29T22:02:00.002-04:00

If life were a wee English Robin hopping up to me with a white flower 'shopped jauntily onto its head, I could definitely deal much, much more easily.

Anywho, this placeholder is for [redacted]. She knows why.

~Placeholder~

2011-09-27T07:00:00.000-04:00

This placeholder is for the Empress, shiny be her tresses.

Why? It's a tiny, golden camel. (from the Met's Islamic art collection) (soon to be unveiled in an eight-years-in-the-making reinstallation) Do I need another reason?

Banned Books Week

2011-09-24T23:43:00.000-04:00

This is your friendly reminder that we are now experiencing Banned Books Week 2011. I'm actually only aware of this thanks to my Twitter feed, which tends toward the literary and the liberal.

bannedbooksweek.org crunched the numbers and came up with the 10 most challenged titles of 2010. The list includes classics (Brave New World), new classics (The Hunger Games), and some books I've never heard of but which sound interesting and thought-provoking, from what I see on Amazon.

The list also includes the Twilight series, which, say what you will, I don't think Twilight should be banned. (I don't think any book should be banned, but that's just me.) Twilight, or chapters thereof, would be an excellent study for creative writing class or English mechanics class under the syllabus section "How Not to Write." See? Everything's a lesson in waiting.

But the one most challenged book that really dropped my jaw is Barbara Ehrenreich's best-seller, the eviscerating and haunting and enraging Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America.

Your weekend assignment, if you have not already read it and if you don't have to eat a small bag of Dorito's for lunch while pregnant, or if you don't have to do math every month just to make sure you can do laundry on a regular basis, is to read Nickel and Dimed.

~Placeholder~

2011-09-20T23:06:00.001-04:00

This placeholder is for the Purple Fairy.

Your regularly scheduled programming will resume shortly*.

*for an as yet unquantified value of "shortly"

Terrible and Wonderful

2011-09-11T15:45:00.001-04:00

I already wrote my September 11th experience here. Rather than rehash everything, the link is here if you feel like reading about it.

That post is from five years ago, and while it still rings true, what I remember more than anything now is the care people took with each other.

I also remember making sandwiches for rescue workers at one of NYU's dining halls. My roommate and I worked at a table across from a little boy and his mother, assembling ham, tomato, and mayo on white bread. I remember us giggling at the gobs of mayo the kid slapped on his sandwiches. "Is he trying to give the rescue workers heart attacks?" we asked each other. I remember it was a relief to giggle, and it was a relief to see the unintentional humor of this little kid very clearly in a one-sided competition with us to make the most sandwiches.

I mostly remember the generosity, the unspoken assumption that it was okay to lean on a stranger, if you let them lean back on you. And it wasn't like that only on the 11th and the 12th. It was like that for months. It was terrible and wonderful.

Because F*ck Bomb Threats, That's Why

2011-09-10T17:09:00.000-04:00

Street fair on the Upper East Side today. Once you've been to one NYC street fair, you've been to them all. Nothing ground-breaking.

*yawn*

The sky went from overcast, to sunny with drifting clouds, to sunny again. When the clouds were sparse, it was that same September blue.

I'm sure everyone was just as aware as I was that we're existing under anniversary-related terror threats right now.

Meh. F*ck that. In bomb threats vs. falafel, roast corn, and lemonade, the street fair wins every time.

September Blue

2011-09-04T05:00:00.000-04:00

This was the color of the sky on September 11, 2001. Everyone talks about the blue of the sky that day. (I was looking through some pictures, and found this, from last September in Paris.)

The roll of film in my camera (imagine that!) that day was black and white, so I don't have any pictures of the sky, but this was the color. Truly, it felt like a mockery, how visible the columns of smoke were from downtown.

**

I left the apartment on the morning of September 1, 2011 and headed to the subway. It wasn't until I walked a few blocks that I glanced up at the sky. It was exactly this blue. Oh, perfect, I thought. That's just great. My throat got tight and my eyes teared up. It's gonna be an interesting couple of weeks. I said just that to my therapist, later in the day.

Honestly, I've always felt like a bit of a fraud, having feelings about it. I was two miles north of the World Trade Center that day. I didn't know anyone who died. I didn't know anyone who was physically hurt. I didn't have to evacuate my dorm, even. I have friends who saw people jumping. I have friends who ran from balls of pulverized concrete and asbestos, up Chambers Street.

My therapist (who was my group therapist 2004-2006) remembered that "it really affected" me. I assume that's because my eating disorder really kicked into high gear afterward, after it had been lazing its way toward clinical significance during the summer of 2001. But I told her again this past week how silly I felt, tearing up at Lexington Avenue almost ten years later, just because the sky was a certain color blue. I obviously didn't tear up last year in Paris when I took the picture above, or if I did, it was because I was flying home that afternoon.

The therapist and I were discussing everything in the context of my husband's reaction to my feelings around September 11th. One September early in our dating days, 2004 or 2005, he blithely suggested that I "stop being so melodramatic" when I was expressing the fact that I felt something about September 11th. He was in Miami that day in 2001. He wasn't able to understand why it affected me at all, and I wasn't able to feel justified in having feelings about it, so the solution was to "stop being so melodramatic."

I haven't talked about it with him since then. I didn't wake him up Wednesday night when I got this week's New York Magazine in, and stayed up 'til 3:00 reading the issue, their 9/11 Encyclopedia. There's an entry about the blue in there.

I don't know how to describe the feelings I have around September 11th. It was terrifying. It was desperate. It was life-affirming. September 12th was simultaneously one of the most numb and most purposeful days I've lived. September 13th was a Rube Goldberg trap of bad decisions. September 14th school officially went back to normal, but life didn't. We didn't. It was a new normal, I guess.

It's strange to feel that ten years minus ten days later, one is still in that new normal.

~Placeholder~

2011-08-31T21:21:00.001-04:00

I disappear for a week and Blogger changes its entire dashboard and posting interface WHAT. I FEAR CHANGE.

*ahem*

Just popped in to say that right now I am a broken record, in the figurative sense that I have nothing new to say and I feel exquisitely broken these days. I have plenty I'd like to talk about, eating disorder- and body-image-related and not.

For instance, [redacted] sent me an article about higher BMI and waist circumference indicating fewer or less severe hot flashes in menopausal women over 60. The news itself seems kind of "yeah, duh" to me since more fat = more estrogen and less estrogen = more hot flashes. (My mom got through most of relatively late menopause without too pronounced hot flashes... til she started taking a breast cancer maintenance drug blocking, you guessed it, estrogen.) So it wasn't the article itself that struck me (or [redacted]), but the framing of it, which essentially boiled down to, "Okay, ladies, don't go pigging out now, y'hear?!" The real beauty was that the "experts" quoted in the article had zero uteri and zero ovaries between them, both being born male and all.

For another instance, I started reading George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books recently, as funny luck would have it, around the same time that Sady Doyle over at Tiger Beatdown made a splash with an excoriating post about GRRM, ASOIAF, and fantasy more generally. I'm only now starting the second of five current books, so I don't feel equipped to write a post about my thoughts on the feminist blogosphere's response to ASOIAF, Game of Thrones on HBO, and fantasy in general. But perhaps when I'm finished with these five. (Which will be, at current pace, some time in March.) (The short first draft of the post: Here, please read some early Patricia Briggs.)

For a third instance, I do believe the Starbucks pumpkin spice lattes are soon to appear for the season (if they haven't already), and damn it, I would really like to be in a place to have one this year. Without unintended mental (and subsequent physical) consequences. I dunno if I'm there. Maybe in a few weeks.

I had a fourth instance, but it went *poof* in my head.

Um.

Here. Have a kitty who lives in the Giardini di Boboli in Florence:

There ya go. That oughta hold ya over for a little while.

Southwest Airlines Forces Woman to Buy 2nd Seat for Her "Safety and Comfort," Pulls an About-Face Once She's Already Humiliated

2011-08-21T22:39:00.000-04:00

If you prefer, a transcript.

The short version is in the title here. Ugh. Just.... UGH. And here is the end point:

This, ultimately, isn’t an issue of weight discrimination. It is a perfect example of how institutional policy and the public ritual of shaming combine together to form this oppressive process that disempowers an individual to the point where they can’t stand up in the face of injustice despite knowing what’s happening is wrong. It just shows the multi-faceted/multilayered functions of power within our society.

Well said, Athia. Well said.

Food Business

2011-08-17T22:33:00.000-04:00

I have a friend whose rare medical condition requires that at least 60% of her diet be carbohydrates. Reasonably speaking, her carbohydrates also need to contain fat, otherwise she'll be hungry again in a wink. Such is the nature of carbs. As such, in the office you'll see her eating things like a bag of chips instead of a protein bar, a doughnut instead of a scrambled egg, things like that. You definitely won't see her eating turkey in a lettuce wrap every day at lunch, because that would quite literally harm her.

One of her bosses has the odious habit of commenting on her lunches and snacks. A direct quote: "Is that good for you? Is that what you should be eating? She's eating another doughnut!"

Every day he does this. She does not have an eating disorder, but he doesn't know that. She has trouble getting enough calories to keep weight on, actually, but he doesn't know that.

What he does know, as her employer, is that she has special health considerations, and that she watches them assiduously, as she must. He knows, if he's been able to keep it in his head this long, that she had to have her spleen removed within the last two years and was hospitalized this time last year, both because of her condition.

So if he stops to think about it, he knows very well that, yes, she is doing what is good for her. If he were to apply any brain power to the idea, he does know, somewhere in there, that yes, that's what she should be eating.

But he doesn't think, he doesn't hold information about her as a specific human being in his head. He just sees a woman eating a doughnut, or some chips, or a rare Cadbury Egg in the spring, and he has to comment. Because in his head, somehow, her body is his property.

I've said that before and it sounds a little hyperbolic to some, but I ask you, what else can it possibly come down to? What else would give someone the idea that they have some say in something as integral to your self as what you put into that self to nourish it, quite literally?

I'll tell you what. My friends have seen me completely freak out and have a rolling panic attack because a waitress made a totally normal suggestion about my order. And she was a waitress. You know, who specifically has to deal with other people's food. That was a year ago. Tonight I had to white-knuckle my way through almost two rolls of sushi. Small rolls. That's all. I am trying not to obsess about it or dwell on it at all, but at the moment, all I can think is how glad I am that I was eating it in my room, with the cat at the computer. Because if anyone - my husband, a friend, a family member, anyone had said word one about my food? I would have been done right that second, whether I was just one piece in or one roll. That's just where I am tonight.

My friend isn't there. But her boss doesn't know that. Her office doesn't know that. What they think they know, for some reason, is that her food is their business.

Her food is not your business. My food is not your business. Your food is your business. Mind your own business.

Bad Days, I Has Them

2011-08-15T11:54:00.001-04:00

After being proactive last week, particularly in the latter half, my mood and coping skills have simply crashed since about Saturday. Today I'm working from home because I cannot bring myself to put on something other than a t-shirt and yoga pants.

I'm trying to come up with a suitable analogy to communicate how I feel about existing in my body on days like these, but nothing's presenting itself that isn't wildly hyperbolic or horribly insensitive.

Honestly, this is the only response to myself that I can drum up:

dunno source. all over teh interwebs.

Update:
Here, maybe this will help anyone in a similar position today:

link

New York Snaps

2011-08-12T07:01:00.000-04:00

I walked home from work Wednesday and Thursday. A one-way trip, not taking the most direct route, is about 4 miles. I was taking advantage of the fact that someone finally turned the ceiling fan on over the Northeast.

55th at Avenue of the Americas

Central Park at approximately Sixth Avenue and 62nd Street

Lexington and 71st

The ceiling at Grand Central

The terminal at Grand Central

Carl Schurz Park in Yorkville (the northeast edge of the Upper East Side)

Bee's butt at Carl Schurz

Angel of the Waters, Bethesda Fountain (Central Park at 72nd, mid-park)

Thin Hatred in a Fat-Fearing World

2011-08-11T06:00:00.000-04:00

Pinterest is my new distraction, though I'm not doing too much there yet. One of the few (two?) people I follow is, of course, The Bloggess. Here's one of her pins:

Source: strawberrie-heart.tumblr.com via Jennifer on Pinterest

Jenny capped that with, "Unless you get hit by a car. This poster was written by someone who's never eaten a cookie. I don't like this poster. This poster needs to be burned. I'm pinning it just to remind myself to burn it later." And much happiness ensued in my head.

Until I got to this comment under Jenny's pin:

"Skinny bitch needs to slow down and eat a cookie."

Lovely. I just... Can you imagine someone writing, "Fat bitch needs to speed up and put down the cookie?" Yes, you can imagine that, because people write stuff like that all the time. And innumerable readers of such comments recognize the words for what they are: mean.

I've gotten into mini blog battles before about this kind of casual negation and deriding of thin women before (whether they are thin naturally, thin by physiological illness, or thin by mental disorder). And I recognize that it's a different quality of disdain in our world, to be making cruel or cutting comments at someone whose body type doesn't fit into some arbitrary ideal, than to call a skinny woman a bitch.

But just like the "real women have curves" thing (I wasn't aware that I ceased to exist two sizes ago?), just because there is thin privilege in the world doesn't mean that arbitrary and thoughtless thin hatred is okay, any more than any arbitrary, thoughtless hatred is okay. The only people I really feel comfortable with hating are... I'm having a hard time here. I mean, Osama bin Laden is dead, so...

Anyway.

I don't know quite what it's about, the impulse to erase or hate thin bodies in such a palpably different way that we (as a culture) feel the impulse to erase or hate fat bodies. But I certainly do absorb it in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" osmotic process.

Body Perception in Eating Disorders: From Stuff to Stuffing

2011-08-10T06:02:00.003-04:00

Well. It seems like I've developed a new area of body fixation. I won't identify it here so as not to trigger anyone. I'd rather work out, in general terms, the process of disordered preoccupation with a particular part of the body, as that process pertains to an eating disorder.

Simply put, there is no physical way that this part of my body can have undergone the change I perceive it to have undergone. It is always possible I have gained real, physical, non-water-based weight, but even if that is the case, the human body (at least, many of them) doesn't put on weight all in one place.

And yet, that is the experience my mind is telling me I'm having with my body right now. Interestingly enough, if I look at this part in the mirror, I can see the physical reality that it really isn't all that different, if at all. But if I look down at it, all of a sudden it seems huge compared to what it was just two weeks ago, or even last week. I am hyper aware of this part of me, and if I'm not careful, that heightened attention spreads to the adjacent parts, and my mind, my eyes, they start to wonder. "What are you up to, body?" e_e

It strikes me as not odd at all that this process occurs at the same exact time that I am finally not having panic attacks or rampant anxiety for the first time in weeks. A transfer occurred sometime in the very recent past. Instead of being convinced I'm about to die, my eyes are telling me a part of my body is expanding, expanding, taking over...

It strikes me as yet again not odd at all that this process occurs around an archetypal body area for my time of life. From a remove I can appreciate that psychological inner workings that picked out THIS body part at THIS time. It's definitely been OTHER parts at OTHER times, and in retrospect, each of them makes sense for their time.

Of course, I can only self-remove and analyze for so long. Then I'm back in my body. With the metaphorical stuff, that my mind turns into literal stuffing, of which I would so very much like to be unburdened.

Ugh. No dice.

Affluence, Culture, Food, French

2011-08-09T12:43:00.001-04:00

French Are Getting Fat, Threatening American Fad Diet Industry

at Jezebel

I'll admit: I giggled when I read Jezebel's headline there. And I'll admit, I rolled my eyes when I went to the original story at npr and saw a picture of what is possibly the least French street in Paris.

But can we talk about what really goes on in the mouths parisiennes? Espresso and cigarettes, that's what. Not exclusively, of course, but the whole "French diet" thing is really grossly distorted. Croissants, for example, are not actually all that calorie-dense - especially not if that's all you're eating for breakfast, until lunch. Yes, Paris (and France) has plenty of cheese, bread, wine, etc. But if you think your average French fashionista is actually going around eating three hearty meals a day composed of Camembert, jambon, and pate de campagne, you're simply kidding yourself. I do adore Jezebel's tongue-in-cheek takedown of that assumption. Sometimes they really get it right.

But that's not really what I'd like to get into about this story.

Here's an interesting snippet from the npr article:

At one public day care center in Paris, 2-and-a-half-year-olds sit around a table for a hot lunch. The tiny diners wear napkins at their necks and are taught the proper use of cutlery. A recent menu featured grilled leg of lamb and cauliflower au gratin, all freshly prepared in the day care's own kitchen.

I can almost guarantee you that that public day care center is probably not located in the 19th or 20th arrondissements, and it's certainly not located in one of the immigrant-populated banlieues, whence came all that rioting news in 2005.

France, as will come as a surprise to no one reading this blog, has a troubled history with immigrants. (Speaking of which: I have, for the record, rethought my opinion on the full veil ban. I suppose I'll have to change my position to Against now. But really only because of the racism that underlies the law. I have no issue with the longstanding ban against headscarves in schools... because any religion-proclaiming wear in school has been long banned. At least that way it's equal opportunity.)

Anyway, as will again come as a surprise to no one reading this blog, I am zero percent shocked to read that the uptick in obesity rates has been mostly seen in low-income communities in France. The French way of life that the world associates with, well, the French way of life, is a very affluent one. Food prices are rising in France, just as they are around the globe. Of course food price hikes and food deserts and sending food away from the farms is going to affect less well-off French people first. It's unsettling when that's treated as a revelation. After all, it's not as though Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Vietnam or other countries whose emigrants are heavily France-bound are all crippled under obesity crises. Hardly.

This is an interesting story to see, this newest in a string of laments for the French Way Of Life, in the same week as the riots erupted in London, Liverpool and Birmingham, just a short easyJet hop away.

What People Did

2011-08-03T19:13:00.001-04:00

I almost smacked a woman with heavy things today. (Smacked her with my heavy things. She didn't have heavy things. I give up on syntax this season.)

I was leaving the fake ice cream place (Tasti-D-Lite) down the street and a woman was sitting by the door eating her "ice cream" there, talking on her cell phone. As I walked out she exclaimed, "He's SO funny!" She paused to listen, then, "He's funny. God's funny like that. He'll put us through something just to let us know what we can handle."

I kept walking out the front door, but not without a very colorful imaginative flash of me walloping her with my bag of hard frozen things. Not that I would ever have done this, you understand, but it popped into my mind as, say, what I might do if I were in a sitcom.

At first I wasn't sure why I had that pop of amused irritation. Her belief doesn't effect ME at all. After a few moments I realized that my reaction wasn't taking place in an emotional vacuum (they never do), and my irritation suddenly made sense.

What bothered me about it was the passivity of it. If God did whatever it is to you, then it's not something you did to yourself or a fellow human being did to you. In the end, it's something God ordained to be done to you.

When that premise becomes problematic for me (aside from the whole "benevolent and omnipotent creator/suffering in the world" thing) is when I put it into the context of all the people in my life right now who are stressed out and emotionally exhausted and strung tighter than a new violin.

The debt ceiling manufactured crisis and the way it was covered in the media produced a reverberation. How long ago was the recession intellectually over, and yet, here we are. People are still struggling. People are still tired. And now with the frenzy over the U.S. bond credit rating, people are trying to remember that they're still angry. At people. But we wouldn't want that, so Mitch McConnell and John Boehner have to talk about how everyone in Congress is actually bestest buddies and even though they fight over their toys, they always make up in the end. Well, good for you.

When I heard that woman trot out a version of the "it's all God's plan" meme today, I think part of me superimposed onto her all the people I've seen, read, or heard saying their dire financial situation is some test of God's to show them what they're capable of doing or that they only really need belief in God. (I have no idea what difficulty she was actually discussing, but I have seen, read, and heard a lot of those people.)

God didn't do that. People did that. Goldman Sachs did that. Merrill Lynch did that. Your own government did that. (And then it did it again.)

If you want to see what people did, go read the comments here:

Shakesville: Discussion Thread: Recession Realities

You will see over and over again that people preface their comments with a note about how they're lucky, they're really not that bad-off, they're so lucky compared to x.

It infuriates me that the emotional exhaustion, the anxious despair so many of the commenters describe seems "lucky" to them. And sure, they're "lucky" compared to the people in southern Somalia right now. They're "lucky" compared to teenagers imprisoned as sex slaves. "Lucky" compared to people who have lost their homes entirely.

And I swear, sometimes I'm pretty sure that The Powers That Be want nothing so much as for people to keep feeling "lucky" in worse and worse standards, to stay passive. They want nothing so little as for people to own how very angry they are, and then to take action. And I try to match up that feeling with people I know who work high up in hedge funds, who worked for Karl Rove during the Bush administration, and I just can't make my suspicion match the actual people.

Anyway. That comment thread. People did that. People did all of that.

Day of Fail

2011-08-01T22:27:00.001-04:00

I'm having one of those days where I can't eat anything successfully. Well, the bananas went okay this morning, and the Balance bar a few hours after that. Otherwise? Not so much.

I don't know what it is lately, other than that whole the-world-is-trying-to-squish-me-like-a-grape thing, but I seem to have just no resilience the past several weeks. I wish I could say that this round of stress finally went on my scorecard, and not my eating disorder's, but I can't say that. I would be happy to say that last week was two-steps-forward-one-step-back, but it would be more accurately labeled as one-step-forward-two-steps-back-one-step-forward-flop-in-a-forwardly-direction.

I would like very much to have had a good day today, but that's no longer a possibility. Here's aiming at tomorrow.

Meanwhile, since we were talking about art yesterday, here's a picture of (part of) one of the Water Lilies paintings at L'Orangerie (Paris).

When I win all the lotteries ever, I am going to buy this place and live there.

Interlude: Art

2011-07-31T14:34:00.001-04:00

I've needed a break. I took one from blogging. I don't think it's quite over yet, but soon. Sadly, it's harder to take a break from Real Life.

Anyway, here's a picture from the Guggenheim this weekend, a some random opinions on art.

Honestly, about as "modern" as my modern art tastes get is 1930 or so. After that, art is kinda lost on me, depending on the artist. Example: Bonnard, yes, Dali, no. (Unless you're talking deviantART, in which case, I'm down.) Now, that's a huge generalization. Let's just say that I can do reasonably well at MoMA, where reside various works by Redon, Boccioni, Van Gogh, Chagall, Severini, even some later Monet. And The Guggenheim has a smattering of Cézanne, even a Manet out right now.

But I really just. can't. appreciate. four boulders and a black piece of rubber, with one of the boulders daringly off the rubber of its corner, while the other three boulders obligingly comply with authority and weight down the rubber corners. I could stare at rock formations in nature until my eyes dried up and fell out of their sockets, but.... no. I do not need to pay $18 to see boulders on black rubber. Sorry. I am just Not A Modern Art Person. (Point of fact: I did not pay, my mom did.)

Several months ago (a year ago? more?) I saw a play brought over by the Donmar Warehouse, starring Alfred Molina. It was about Mark Rothko in his later years, and while it gave me some appreciation for Rothko's more famous stuff (as opposed to his earlier stuff, which I actually do enjoy), I mostly still look at a Rothko and see.... red.

And isn't that the neat thing about art? I can totally understand that there are people out there who probably go on major Rothko pilgrimages, whereas it is my life goal to somehow set up a tent on the grounds of Giverny (Quidditch World Cup style, of course). It's a totally accepted reality that different art will speak to different people at different times in their lives, and for the most part (except with snobs and Jerry Falwell), that's okay with everyone.

Wow, I would really like to keep thinking about art rather than all the other crap I have to think about.

The Society Pages post on "Hail to the V"

2011-07-20T12:26:00.000-04:00

I was waiting for this one. Short and sweet. The last paragraph pretty much sums it up:

Vertical smile? Are they serious with this? And as Finette says, “They’ve managed to combine ‘less than fresh down there’ vagina-shaming [omg, what subtle hints has your vagina been trying to get your attention with?!] with ethnic stereotypes! Awesome!”

On the Reaction to Reading Into Ads

2011-07-18T11:15:00.000-04:00

So, apparently a lot of people are interested in the Summer's Eve ad. A LOT of people are Googling it, I can tell you that much. The reactions I've seen cover many and varied responses, most often that the ad is gross, inappropriate, hilarious, clever, or spot-on.

Whatever it is, it's an effective ad. You can bet that more people are thinking about Summer's Eve than have done in some time.

The reactions to my own initial thoughts on the ad cover a similar spectrum, from almost point by point agreement, to telling me I'm overanalyzing something that's just supposed to be funny, or making too much of something that's basically true anyway.

Here's the thing: I don't think I am overanalyzing the campaign. I just think I'm analyzing it.

I tend to believe that just because something is funny, doesn't mean that's all it is. The campaign is "women are their vaginas" disguised as body positivism. It's cute, it's clever, it's pretty, it's tongue-in-cheek, but it's still "women are their vaginas." Summer's Eve is an entire brand built around the supposition that vaginas aren't acceptable in their natural, unscented, un-douched state. It follows that their ad campaigns will always spring - no matter how clever - from a foundation of "not right," or at least, "not good enough." To turn it around and try to make the products into a female empowerment brand is either dewy-eyed naivete, or cynicism. Given that we're talking about advertising, I'd hazard a guess at the latter.

I am, naturally, keenly interested in messages that reduce women to their bodies, or parts thereof. If the idea of woman's body as sole signifier and resource isn't a semiotic seed for cultural germination of eating disorders, then I don't know what is.

But more particularly, in this case, I'm interested in what it means that Cleopatra's most precious resource was her vagina, not her unparalleled skill at negotiations and intimidation campaigns. I'm interested in an ad campaign that wants to claim the power and non-taboo of the word "vagina," but uses the euphemism "V" throughout. I'm interested in how a product based around telling women that the most important piece of them is their vagina, and that this most important piece is unloved if it isn't bathed in chemicals, decides to cast itself as empowering.

And most particularly, I'm interested in the reaction to my reaction. I'm interested in people's assertion that humor is all that's there, and that we should stop in our reading of the ad once we've had a laugh at it. I'm interested in the insistence that looking beyond the ad's presumably self-aware humor is unnecessary, and an overreaction. If you go into observation afraid of overanalyzing or overreacting, then eventually you're going to end up taking everything at its face value. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but once you assume everything is only what it first appears to be, how many chances will you lose to learn?

Harry Potter and the Summer's Eve Ad? What?

2011-07-16T22:39:00.008-04:00

I saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 today. ~contented sigh~

What follows is not thoughts on the movie (~contented sigh~), but a tl;dr post about an ad that ran with my theater's reel. (Well, "reel.")

It was a Summer's Eve commercial, from which I gather they have a new ad campaign going. The tagline of the campaign is "Hail to the V." I can find videos online that involve talking hands (positioned vertically, because they are representing vaginas), but I can't find the ad they screened in our theater. If I find it later, I'll update with it here. For now, here's what I remember:

First we see a woman holding an infant up to the moonlight, in a suggestion of a prehistoric kind of setting. The next scene is a Cleopatra-like figure walking out on a dais above her adoring subjects. She thrusts her arms above her head in a victorious V and they all cheer. Third, we see a Crouching Tiger/Hidden Dragon type fight (in a bamboo forest and everything) between two men battling, presumably over the young woman watching them amidst the bamboo. Finally, it shows a joust with two knights riding toward each other, and a queen or noblewoman watching them with evident excitement and possibly lust. All throughout, the narration is along the lines of, "It is the foundation [or something like that] of society; [stuff I don't remember]; through time men have fought for it [at the bamboo shots], even died for it [on the joust hit]" etc.

Then at the end of the joust scene, it cuts to a woman in a grocery store ladies' bizness aisle, and the narrator cries something like, "So show it some love, ladies!"

"It" is of course the vagina, and the grocery store woman is holding a Summer's Eve "feminine wash" product.

When I'd seen the martial arts scene with two men clearly fighting over a woman, I started thinking, "What is it, love?" And then the jousting I thought, "Yeah, I guess, love."

But no, they're not talking about love, or even love as metaphor for sex. They are literally talking about literal vagina. (Though presumably Summer's Eve non-douche products have more to do with the vulva and labia?)

On the face of it, the campaign is about empowering women about their bodies through knowledge and confidence. And I can entertain the idea that the creative team really was working from such a place. Because - again, on the face of it - we're talking about the awesome and unique power of the vagina, about how special and awesome the vagina is, and isn't the vagina just awesome you guyz?

We see an infant lifted up to the moonlight, the moon being your prototypical female celestial body, aside from Venus. (Discounting the part where the uterus has really more to do with the production of an infant than a vagina does, particularly if the birth isn't vaginal?) We see a female Pharaoh (looks older than Cleopatra, but I'm not assuming the design team knows the difference between Cleopatra and Hatshepsut), and who doesn't associate the female Pharaohs with ultimate lady power? We see obviously skilled and powerful men just aching to beat each other out for the chance at love from a woman who clearly holds power over their fates.

The scene of the two martial arts fighters battling in the bamboo forest with the young woman watching them from behind the stalks edges into more problematic territory: Are they going to kill each other? Is she just letting that happen? Does she have any agency in who "wins" her when the fight is over, or is this like a mountain goat situation where brawn means all, regardless of her desires? Ditto on the jousting scene, though in the idiom of courtly love it's hardly assumed that this noblewoman (queen?) will actually sleep with her sponsored knight. If anything, the jousting scene, because of that reality about how the ideal of courtly love worked, doesn't really belong in the ad. (NOT that it was free from sex or adultery or fornication or what have you, but by and large, it was not assumed that the lady whose favor a knight vied for would sleep with said knight.)

Now, I'll give you that the ad was supposed to be lighthearted and humorous, and I'll give you that I laughed. But I wasn't laughing at the content of the ad, at least not in the way I was meant to. I was laughing a) at the ridiculousness of having a Summer's Eve commercial with a HARRY POTTER MOVIE, and b) at the thinly veiled sexism that defined the whole ad, and just how balls to the wall it was. (To use a wholly inappropriate expression.) A sexism that works both ways, by the way. Is this ad saying that men are totally powerless over the allure of the birth canal and adjacent outer bits? That's not terribly flattering to men.

I think we can skirt over the surface issue of, "We all know that Summer's Eve is actually more likely to irritate the external female genitalia than to make it healthier, yes?" And at this point we can definitely gloss over the problem of, "We all know that in the vast majority of cases douching is actually unhealthy, right?"

Let's just skip that and take it as a given that the existence of Summer's Eve as a long-standing brand is basically thanks to the scariness of the female genitalia and the ickiness of the vagina in the minds of popular culture. (You guys! It has mucus membranes! Eeeww!)

So let's posit that to "show [the vagina and vulva] some love" is all this ad campaign wants to do. Fine.

The entire construction of this particular ad is founded on the presumption that all the power, all the influence over society, over culture, over child-rearing, and hell, over finding love that women have ever had was always and forever based solely on their literal vaginas.

The most important thing a woman ever gives an infant is pushing it out of her vagina. The reason empires followed and enemies fell to female Pharaohs was that they had vaginas, which were, presumably, available if the right price was paid. The only reason two men would have to compete for the attentions of a woman is the sexy sex her vagina can bestow. (Particularly if she's a queen or landholder - there's definitely no other reason to want to get on her good side then, no treaties to be had or laws to be hammered out or anything.) The website has articles about breaking the verbal taboo of "vagina." Cool. So use the word in your commercials and print ads, then. According to the print ads of this campaign, Cleopatra's vagina (well, her "V") was "her most precious resource." Really? REALLY?? The only way to make sense of that assertion is by dropping acid.

Ladies, all you are, in the end, is a vagina. Hillary Clinton is just a vagina. Elizabeth I was just a vagina. Sally Ride is just a vagina. Aung San Suu Kyi is just a vagina. We are all just stinky, unloved vaginas that can maybe smell like delicate blossoms and be adored if we buy Summer's Eve!

Do I think that's actually what the ad's creative team was thinking when they sat down and storyboarded it? No, absolutely not. I think they imagined they were being funny and memorable. I'll definitely give them memorable. I'm even willing to bet that advances in science mean that today's Summer's Eve products are for the most part innocuous if you're not sensitive-skinned.

But the reduction of women to their vaginas, to objects - that's the reduction the ad's creative team worked from. I find it entirely easy to believe that not a single person in the brainstorming session sat up and went, "Hey, you guys realize we're reducing every accomplishment women have ever achieved and every contribution they've made to society to men's uncontrollable greed for vaginal sex, right?"

I hate that I went into my final first experience of a Harry Potter movie distracted by this stupid ad. I'm glad I was the only one I heard laugh in my theater. If no one else was as disbelieving as I was, at least no one else thought it was very funny.

Edit: Thanks to anon for finding a link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RosLrkIwZA

Don't Have a Title, Do Have a Headache

2011-07-15T19:08:00.001-04:00

My normal doctor is out of town, so as with my tetanus shot after slicing my thumb this spring, I saw one of her residents today. Residents tickle me a bit in their thoroughness. They're still trying things out, particularly patient interaction, when you're in a GP setting.

I happened to be there today for a thing that needed thoroughness. I've been having such incredible anxiety that not only has it escalated my incidence of purging, it's actually got me dizzy and headachy and blue-lipped and faint.

Of course, when you have an eating disorder, those can be symptoms of an electrolyte imbalance or a cardiac abnormality just as much as they can be the gaudy trappings of panic attacks. Best to have a blood draw, check the ol' electrolytes, said I.

"We need to do an EKG," said the resident.

This was after I admitted to her just how often I'd been purging, and that yes, I'd been having dizziness and heart palpitations, but I've had those for years without dying and when I can calm down and step away from my anxiety, I get neither. Still. We did the EKG. It looked normal. (Although when I had my blood pressure taken prior to the actual visit, it was 133/70, like, jeeeeeez, chill out a little.) (But more on that in a moment.)

After the EKG, the resident ran the results by the attending who was there, and who actually came in to introduce herself to me. "We're concerned," she said. She handed me info on, of all places, Renfrew. I explained my history with Renfrew, but thanked them for the thought.

From there I went to get blood drawn, the EKG having relieved a portion of my blood pressure-raising anxiety.

I couldn't stop obsessing about my weight, though, and that's the other thing I want to talk about. Back to the blood pressure reading.

When I arrived at the office they did the entry vitals - weight, pulse, blood pressure. I stepped on the scale backwards, and so we didn't have a repeat of what happened last time, I said, very clearly, "I don't want to know my weight."

When I stepped off the scale, I sat in the BP/pulse chair and the nurse wrapped the cuff around my arm. "What? You think you're too fat?" the nurse said.

I didn't really know what to make of her tone of voice. It could have been scorn, it could have been light ribbing, it could have been just plain "you're an idiot" or a more innocuous "you're weird."

I just plain told her (because now the other patient who'd been getting vitals was out of the room), "Well, I see Dr. A to monitor an eating disorder, so it's better that I just not know."

She gave me a very neutral (maaaaybe insightful?) "oh."

I'm not sure why they don't make notations on the charts. Or, maybe they do. My normal doctor has told me she's written on the chart that I'm not to be weighed. Either way, this same office keeps missing steps with me, and I'm aware that it's not the most horrible thing in the world to say, but it really is irritating.

Then I saw my weight on a chart that the resident had sitting on the corner of her desk, anyway. Fail.

You'd think I'd be glad the EKG was probably normal, after that appointment. You'd think I'd be content that the panic attack I was in the midst of during the first half hour of the appointment has cleared out.

But, no. I'm just thinking about that number, trying to rationalize it, trying to excuse it, trying to think of a way to get out of it.

It's giving me a headache.

The World is Trying to Crush Me Like a Grape

2011-07-11T15:31:00.000-04:00

Like a pale, thin-skinned little grape. Accordingly, please have a vineyard photo from 2009.

Vineyard photo of vineyard photo. Meta photo is meta.

I have stuff to say. Just not now.

*squish*

Eating Disorder Relapse and Recovery in Marriage: Snapshot

2011-06-30T22:01:00.002-04:00

I am sitting here in front of the same roll of sushi I ate last night, from the same restaurant, made by the same chef, with exactly the same ingredients.

And it looks huge.

I can appreciate when I say that "out loud" to myself -- it looks huge -- that this is not a huge amount of food. My old nutritionist used to advocate "two rolls and two pieces" as a standard meal-size portion of sushi. But at least tonight, I am crystal clear on why my food looks closer to the size of a lobster roll than a sushi roll.

The husband has decided vociferously and energetically that he's going to involve himself in my recovery and that we are going to "beat this together." I have majorly mixed feelings about this, and that's about the blandest way I can put it.

On the one hand, he's on my team, and he cares, and he wants me to be healthy.

On the other hand (ugh, one hand/other hand again??), he knows virtually nothing about speaking with a loved one with an eating disorder, and is resistant to me finding him material; he'd rather pick his own so he doesn't feel like he's getting an agenda from the author. Related to that, he has his own preconceived prejudices about the psychotherapy industry in general and talk therapists in particular, most of which boil down to, "they all see patients are annuities and don't really want patients to get better." Lastly (for now), in everything he does, he is goal-oriented to the point of eschewing what can turn out to be crucial intangibles.

Example: It is helpful to gain insight into why I have such visceral reactions to loudness and anger and frenzy, and why those visceral reactions get funneled into a total perversion of natural hunger/satiety cues, or into body obsession. In the next instance of loudness/anger/frenzy, I can use that insight to reality-check myself and keep reactions in the moment and afterward firmly in the relevant realm, rather than the irrelevant realm of food or body disorder.

To him, the above idea would be so far beside the point as to be preposterous.

Example: Right now, my therapy space is functioning chiefly as a place about me, for me to figure out what's really going on in my head, and what I can realistically do about it. It's about figuring out where my space is in my body and in my marriage, how I can learn to take care of myself again rather than spinning my wheels trying to take care of others.

To him, the above idea would be totally irrelevant to the goal of "eat the sushi roll, don't throw it up, do it again tomorrow night." Literally, he wants a twelve-week plan (not unlike how many in-patient programs are twelve weeks) of goals I can hit and progress I can make.

In some ways, his requirements aren't unlike the barest basics of the Maudsley method. "Eat the food, then we'll talk."

But in his mind, it's, "Eat the food, then you'll be better." In his mind it's not, "Why are you averse to eating the food? What do you mean, 'you're so full of overwhelming anxiety and emotions that you literally don't feel like you have any room left in you?"

There is definitely something to be said for the twelve-week plan idea. Believe me, I thrive on bullet-points and categories and lists. To a certain extent, just eating, just not purging, just white-knuckling it does work, and I'm sure as hell going to try. I finished the sushi roll while I typed this, for instance.

The trick is going to be, once I'm eating, once I'm white-knuckling it, what happens with all those emotions, all that anxiety? What happens when he thinks I'm eating so I'm better, so I'm fine sublimating my needs to his needs, my time to his time, my peace to his hamster wheel of manufactured stress and frenzy? What happens then? Honestly, what happens to my marriage if I don't have my eating disorder to emotionally take care of me? Because I have no idea how to make my own husband hear me if it's not through food.

Sushi, Consumed

2011-06-29T21:09:00.000-04:00

I am NOT eating that ginger, though. I may be marginally addicted to diet ginger ale, but I will simply never understand how the husband eats wads of this stuff. Blech.

Health Insurance and Eating Disorder Treatment Coverage: My Reality

2011-06-26T13:30:00.008-04:00

I'd like to talk about eating disorder treatment, mental health benefits in health insurance, and what it's like on the ground for me right now.

I know this post is kinda tl;dr but do me a favor and at least skim it; at least share the link.

The Eating Disorder Situation

The number of eating disorders looks to be climbing, so for every twenty- or thirty-something who used to be a teen with disordered eating behaviors and who now boasts a longstanding eating disorder, at least pieces of the below post are true.

As eating disorder number keep climbing, and as money and budgets keep becoming more pitched issues, becoming tighter, the specific experiences I talk about below are going to become even more widespread than they are now. This is important for me to work out on pixelated "paper" for myself, but it's also important to put out there because it's hardly just true for me. It's true for untold numbers of people, and those numbers are growing.

My Situation

I've been doing pretty poorly over the last month. It's not that my weight is at alarming levels, though it's down. It's that something in my head has gone ragged. The hard truth is that I could use a higher level of treatment right now, but that it isn't in the cards because of money. My health insurance plan doesn't cover anything but the most rudimentary coverage, and that not specified for eating disorders in any way. They pay for my psychiatric medication, which is truly a non-essential part of eating disorder treatment, and that's it. That's my reality right now. I need more, and I can't get more, and without more, I don't know what to do.

Before I started seeing my current therapist, I called New York's Renfrew Center location to schedule an intake and have them look into my insurance benefits relevant to their services. My insurance plan covers something like 30 psychiatry (not social worker, not psychologist, not counselor, not group therapy -- psychiatry) visits per year, and that's it as far as my mental health coverage goes.

What Works

Anyone who knows anything about eating disorders (or personality disorders, or a whole host of other mental health issues) knows that while psychiatry might get the ball rolling, drugs don't put the eating disordered brain back to order.

Eating disorders (or personality disorders, or a whole host of other mental health issues) are not bipolar disorder, for instance, or schizophrenia. Bipolar/schizophrenia can and do benefit from talk/behavioral therapy, but primarily require psychopharmacological treatment. Eating disorders seem to be the reverse of that.

SSRI's and SNRI's have shown some promise in helping reduce symptoms in bulimia or purgative type anorexia (as have some anticonvulsants with popular off-label use as mood stabilizers, e.g. Topamax, Lamictal). Studies show that even after recovery, bulimics' levels of serotonin don't recover to average levels, so SSRI's in particular are thought to help there. (Whether the levels were low before the onset of the eating disorder has so far been harder to track.)

I'm on an SSRI (Lexapro), and my insurance covers 50% of its monthly cost (after an annual Rx deductible). My anxiety is usually at tolerable levels, except for when I end up sobbing in the shower or hyperventilating on the bedroom floor. The depressive moods that are tied to my anxiety respond a lot better to the Lexapro than does the anxiety itself, but the anxiety difference on vs. off the SSRI is enough to keep me taking it. And anyone who wants to comment or email to me that I'm playing into Big Pharma's hands and poisoning my body and I could really just do hours of yoga a day and cut out caffeine and drink kambucha or whatever? You can go right ahead and kiss my ass. This is a tool that I know to be helpful to me, so I will use it.

However, as I say above, drugs are a tiny part of an eating disorder treatment plan (and certainly not universal to ED treatment plans). That necessarily means that psychiatry is not the be-all end-all in an eating disorder treatment plan.

But psychiatry (fewer than three visits per month) is what my insurance plan covers. (And we are not getting into my deductible and my co-insurance. Oh no we are not.) And psychiatry alone is not what works. What works in eating disorders is early, relentless, continuing treatment. At least that's what the data now shows.

Apologies for drawing dramatic and not entirely accurate parallels, but you could compare eating disorder treatment to diabetes treatment. Catch it early, monitor it closely, and you stand a chance of reversing its course. Throw the minimum scraps of resources at it, and really you might as well not be doing anything. So my family friend has the resources and time to monitor her pre-diabetic condition until it becomes Type II diabetes. Once she reaches her diabetes diagnosis, she has the resources to purchase and maintain a CGM.

This small study actually suggests that CBT can improve the 5-HT system functions in bulimia patients, and that even though there aren't neurochemical effects apparent in anorexic patients (restricting type or purging type), the psychological aspects of the diseases show marked improvement over this 20-week in-patient course.

But eating disorders are notoriously frustrating, because we still don't really know what to do about them. Or how to define them. Or how to prevent them. Or much of anything, other than that they're multiplying (or at least their identification is). We make stabs in the dark, hoping to hit a major artery. It seems that in some cases (depending on the study it's as low at 25% or as high as 65%), repeated stabbing of the disorder -- in other words, just keeping at it, and with bigger knives if necessary -- will eventually bleed it out, and keep it bled.

What's Realistic

I'm paying for my therapist out of pocket, but paying a weekly LCSW fee and paying for intensive outpatient treatment (IOP) or partial hospitalization treatment are two different things entirely. When I went into the partial hospitalization program (PHP) at the Atlanta Center for Eating Disorders, my insurance also didn't cover that treatment. But it was 2003 and economic times were a bit different, weren't they? My parents paid out of pocket for my treatment that summer, and while I imagine it wasn't terribly fun for them to do, it didn't impact our day to day lives, financially.

I have a lot of guilt over that treatment, and over the fact that, here I am again, at my lowest weight since 2003, still eating disordered, despite all the money my parents shelled out, all the time they spent in family therapy with me learning about eating disorders and how to communicate with me, how to care in a way that gives me what I need. And yet, I still can't get it right. Here I am again.

Only this time, PHP or IOP aren't options. The reality is that they are too expensive. In 2003, in a booming economy, with my parents' financial standing behind me, the expense wasn't right there and then an issue. Since the economy went to hell in 2007/2008, I worry about what that treatment stint may have cost them that they could be using right now to be more comfortable. Don't get me wrong -- they have their house, they have their cars, they have their Whole Foods groceries and their California wines and their beach vacations and the other trappings of middle-aged middle-class life.

But I can't help wondering, what was the point? What was the point of their spending all that money in 2003 only to have me end up back in a place, in 2011, where I need to be in a similar treatment environment, but no longer have access to one?

The guilt-based part of my brain tells me to give up, that I don't deserve treatment, that if I really wanted to get better, I'd just do it.

Then the reality-based part of my brain kicks in and I think again of my diabetes example. Eating disorders are illnesses -- mental illnesses. Diabetes is a physical illness, and while diabetes care is certainly anything but unstratified or judgement-free, no one's going to tell a diabetic to whip their damn pancreas in shape. They might get all judgey-McJudgersons about every step that diabetic takes or every non-protein-based morsel they put in their mouth, but no one is going to seriously argue that a diabetic can will their pancreas into working again, and insurance coverage is not going to reflect such a thing. Testing strips and insulin and even, depending on the plan, CGM's and accoutrements, are covered.

So I'm not sure why I should assume I ought to be capable of just whipping my brain or my psyche into shape. I need treatment, I need an accessible system, I need affordable options. In the absence of better knowledge on what really works for eating disorders, I need -- and hell, I deserve -- access to the things that we know do work, at least for some people, at least some of the time.

I don't have that access. I don't have the $30,000 for a month of in-patient treatment. (Usual minimum stay is 8 weeks.) I don't have the $2,500 for a week of PHP. (Usual minimum treatment is 4-12 weeks.) Right now, I don't even really have the wiggle room to add a weekly nutritionist visit to my weekly therapy (thanks to being a small business owner and at the mercy of other people's accounts payable departments). (Some insurance plans cover nutritionist visits; mine does not.)

You know what I have access to? Lexapro. My insurance plan is happy to pay for my Lexapro. (And don't get me wrong in the least -- I'm glad it is.) No thanks to BlueCross BlueSheild, I also have access to psychotherapy. That's mostly thanks to my own good fortune, and indirectly to my parents, who paid for my treatment at NYC's Renfrew location in 2004-2006, where I met this therapist, whose hourly rates are somewhere south of the Manhattan average.

My reality is that Lexapro is not going to fix me. The CBT workbook and the DBT workbook and the meditation guides and the various orders from Gurze Books that I pay for piecemeal are good tools, but they are not going to fix me.

The hard truth is that I don't know what will fix me. I don't know if anything will. But if diabetics and heart patients and Crohn's patients get access to basic treatment options that the establishment accepts as basically effective treatment? Then I want access to that equivalent for my illness, too. And I don't see why I shouldn't get it.

Again, not every diabetic patient has coverage for the newest cutting-edge CGM system, and not every Crohn's patient is covered for treatment/research at the Jacksonville Mayo Clinic (which specializes in diseases of the digestive system). But for the most part, insurance plans, once they see a diagnosis of Crohn's or diabetes, will at least grudgingly cover the basics. (When they don't kick you off the plan for a pre-existing condition, that is, but at least we're moving away from that.)

But in mental health? In eating disorders? Not so much. We're on our own. We can get our Lexapro or our Abilify or our Lithium or what have you, but if it's not drug-based, then mental health patients? We're on our own.

What Now

I earned the nickname Cynical Nymph and have kept it for a reason. When it comes down to it, despite a persistent rash of optimism, always lurking in my mind is the certainty that things like this mental health/health insurance problem exist because of the worst sides of people.

I specialize in complaining and in assuming the worst of people after I've tried to argue myself into believing the best. In this case is that translates to: the insurance companies don't want to pay for me now, so they'd rather pay later, when I have heart problems and dental problems and esophageal problems, etc., and that the pharmaceutical companies don't want me offered better treatment because then I would stop taking their drugs.

What I know right now is that "everyone" seems to admit that we don't really know what to do about eating disorders, but we know the direction we need to go in. It's accepted knowledge right now that we need to treat with the treatments we have, research the environmental and biological causes and risk factors, and above all not be complacent in treatment.

But it's accepted reality right now that finances force complacency, and that insurance companies are not interested in providing what's accepted as bare minimum levels of eating disorder treatment. (SSRI's and bimonthly psychiatry appointments do. not. count.)

That's the reality and it's been sued and argued and researched and evaded and ignored. The reality is $60,000. The reality is $10,000. The reality is that I know I am expensive, okay?? I know it. But I also know that I deserve treatment. I'm a human being. I deserve it.

NY State Senate Passes Marriage Equality Bill

2011-06-24T23:04:00.003-04:00

This is a huge moment. This is a huge night.

I am so proud to be a New Yorker today.

We shouldn't need a legislature to affirm rights that are intrinsic to our adult humanity. In a perfect world, we'd just have those rights. But it's not a perfect world, and we do need legislatures, or voters, or what have you. In this case, we have a legislative body, and they have done the right thing. That's all there is to it.

I was watching the live feed from the senate floor. I watched as they voted to approve a carefully-worded amendment protecting religious institutions and their non-profit affiliates and individuals working for them from civil or other legal actions. The viewer numbers at that point were about 36,000 - up from around 4,000 when the link to the live feed was passed around Twitter about two hours before.

Then I watched the numbers climb to about 39,000 as Senator Diaz, one of the Democrats voting no, bloviated about Archbishop Timothy Dolan's opinion about gay marriage (something Dolan's been sure gets into the press the last few weeks), and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' take on gay marriage (guess), despite the fact that Diaz himself is not Catholic (in fact, he's a minister in a protestant church). And as the president of the state senate moved to cut him off, and to not allow him to interrupt fellow senators, Senator Diaz rebuked the senate's president for curtailing his rights. For curtailing his rights to speak about the bill. Yes, you read that right. Senator Diaz complained about an abbreviation of his right to speak against this bill, after he'd gone over his own two-minute limit, when certainly not every senator who voted yea or nay was getting mic time tonight.

Senator Diaz wanted his rights.

Well, Senator Duane, who spoke after Senator Diaz, gets his rights now. Senator Duane, who also went over the two-minute limit, was also curtailed by the senate's president. But, see, Senator Duane gets a different right. Well, technically, the same right. The same right as Senator Diaz, who has been married and divorced only on his own adult say. Senator Duane, New York state's first openly gay and openly HIV-positive member, can now marry his partner Louis (or possibly Lewis? I only heard it, didn't read it) if they choose. Or not. You know, as they choose. Since it's their choice. And since it's their right. And since this state acknowledges that right now.

The viewer numbers on the official senate page were around 49,000 as the New York State Senate roll call officially passed this bill in that chamber. All that remains is for Gov. Cuomo, who championed this version of the bill, to sign it.

I <3 NY

Primal Scream vs. Fetal Position: Which Do You Choose?

2011-06-22T22:02:00.002-04:00

I mean, really. Which do you choose? Which is your favorite freak-out option?

Let's assume no one's going to hear you scream, no one's going to walk in on you huddled in the corner quietly decompensating all tucked into yourself. Which one is your go-to ideal to communicate to yourself the heartwarming truth, that, uuuggghghhghhhgh?

Just curious.

Too Tired to Title Without Four-Letter Words

2011-06-20T22:26:00.001-04:00

I may or may not have just had a minor breakdown over the inability of my iPhone's screen protector to lie properly underneath the phone's case. I'm not admitting to anything outright.

It's been that kind of ~~week~~ month.

I weighed myself this morning to get a handle on the reality of things after I found myself telling my therapist last week that I felt deflated, flat, fragile. My eating hasn't been off for that long, I reasoned to her, so it's not like I've actually lost weight, so it's interesting that I'm feeling this way.

Well, no, apparently my eating has been off for long enough to have lost weight. Not anything epic, but enough to go, "Uh. Huh." Again, looking at the anatomical physics at work here, it ought not to be surprising. My body has its own set of calorie in vs. calorie out math, and the math changed for a little while, so... yeah. Change doesn't happen in a vacuum, I suppose. Obviously.

So anyway. This feeling, and this weight. There's a lot of, "on the one hand... then on the other hand," as you might have guessed.

On the one hand, bully for me for actually having perceived that my weight was down.

On the other hand, sadface that I didn't actually lend any credence to my own perceptions. "No, no," said I, "it's all in my head."

On the one hand, once I had proof I've lost weight, I realized, "Crap. That's not the idea here."

On the other hand, a wee devilish part of me felt the familiar thrill.

On the one hand, I thought, "It's good that I can recognize that thrill's not rational, not healthy, and really not wanted. Progress?"

On the other hand, I thought, "My word, is that thrill ever going to go away?"

On the one hand, I thought I could give myself a pep talk because I've been trying to assert my needs and take care of myself where my interpersonal relationships are concerned, so that's something.

On the other hand, my efforts at self-preservation have been almost entirely rebuffed by the people they've been aimed at, and I'm about ready to steal something from the Met's arms and armor wing and commit very memorable murder.

And on the one hand, it's fairly normal to lose some weight when you've been working 'til 10:00 on weeknights and 8:00 on the weekends, often too focused or anxious or both to even have meals on the radar.

But on the other, final hand, it's not as if a simple forgetfulness or focus is what's really going on here. No, that's definitely not all.

Anyway, the cat has presented himself to me and has settled his butt squarely in my left hand, so that occupies one of the hands, at least.

And now, a statue with no hands:

If I were a Greek statue, I'd be a lot less conflicted, because my hands would probably have been lost by this point.
(I am posting this picture because if I don't look at something from the Met right at this second, I shall scream.)
(Next time, pictures with the sword I plan to use in my memorable murder.)

The Anxiety Reset Button: Back to Factory Settings!

2011-06-14T09:15:00.001-04:00

Dear Anxiety Level: I hate you.

Dear Cute Overload: Thanks for trying to help.

C.O. Page-a-Day Calendar: Suitable for all your benzodiazepine-replacement needs

It's been troubling how quickly I went from "hey, I'm kind of acting and thinking normally" in Atlanta to "there is a figurative lump stuck in my throat and gullet and I kind of can't eat anything correctly" almost as soon as I landed again in New York.

I didn't just revert to what I was doing/thinking/feeling before Atlanta, either. No, I've taken something of a nosedive into Eating Disordered living. If my brain is wired to be susceptible to an eating disorder or related disorder, then you could say that pronounced unhappiness and anxiety flips me back to factory settings.

I could have given myself a pass for the several days (at most) before I really noticed what was going on: that I was recognizing life as it currently is at home as Just Too Much, and defaulting back to restricting and refusing to digest perfectly reasonable amounts of food because somehow That Will Solve Things.

I get no pass for continuing to operate on Eating Disorder Default once I noticed what was going on, which was over a week ago now.

As far as "relapse" behavior goes it's not the end of the world or incredibly long-standing. Yet. But things are such right now that despite the fact that I know working through dinner and then having a banana for breakfast won't solve things, something is preventing me from enacting that logical knowledge.

Logic and Eating Disorders: Frenemies since time immemorial. Or whenever eating disorders started popping up. (Which was much earlier than the uninitiated like to admit, eating disorders being a 100% modern, first-world issue, of course. Except that they're not. But that's another post.)

Wednesday

2011-06-08T11:54:00.002-04:00

It's supposed to reach 97° F (36° C) today.

Ubiquitous Dissonance

2011-06-07T22:25:00.001-04:00

Today I (along with probably everyone in the technorati database) received an invitation to a new technorati venture. I get outreach emails every week or so. Some just go straight to the trash folder because I'm not interested in blogging about the newest craze in baby slings (e.g.). Some I'm excited about (ex.: I have a copy of Restoring Our Bodies, Reclaiming Our Lives sitting on my nightstand that has been sitting there since two weeks before the book came out because I haven't had a hot second to read it).

And then there are the ones about diets, dieting, weight loss tips, new diet pills, metabolism boosters, etc. Fantastic. Today's email was geared toward foodies and food bloggers and included, in a brief list of acceptable topics, diet recommendations. So not only am I most manifestly not a food blogger, I'm on an email list soliciting diet recommendations.

Well. I certainly have those. But I don't think you want the kind that I can give you.

So here I am, having a shit-storm of a day in a shit-storm of seven days now, and this email arrives in my inbox to remind me, "Hey, hi, you're not okay." Well, thanks, random email. I'm glad you reminded me. Thanks, emailer, for not taking a moment to actually see if I'm a food blogger before you added my email to your list. Do I expect marketers to read every blogger they email? Of course not. But, come on.

I was going to take a page out of The Bloggess's book and write back an over the top, farcical response to the marketer and post the results here. But you know what? I'm just too tired. My food has been completely fakakta since I got back from Atlanta, and everywhere I turn I feel like I'm getting hit in the face with you-still-have-and-eating-disorder flavored pie. (Inappropriate metaphor is inappropriate.)

This email is one of those little things that start as individual wisps of nothing, but that together form an amorphous blob of suck. Much like the fur my cat is still shedding, what are you doing to me, Meezie? Swiffer is really expensive and I simply can't clean any more.

But really, emails like this are overwhelming. The idea that a solicitation for foodies/food bloggers would include suggestions to write about dieting/weight loss? The idea that that is such a non-issue, that it apparently doesn't register as total cognitive dissonance to the people planning this campaign? I'm sorry, but I look at that and stack it up next to the rest of my world and my mind goes, "Ha ha ha! Good luck recovering and relearning how to intuitively eat with THAT sort of shit all over the place! Lulz!"

Yep. Lulz. It's everywhere.

Moldova or Bust!

2011-06-06T09:25:00.001-04:00

Oh, you guys. Ohhhhhh, you guys.

You know those weeks where adulthood is just all, "Lulz, you're adorable in your big-girl dress-up clothes"? Well, I don't literally pray, but this morning I metaphorically pray that this past week and weekend just... stay in the past. Because if they don't? I will straight up run away to Moldova; it would be an improvement. (While Moldova was rated the saddest country in the world, it at least has a literacy rate of 99%.) (Also, some random discussion board tells me it's a non extradition country, sooo...)

source
This is a Moldovan forest. I could totally hide in here forever. I read The Hunger Games, so I definitely know how to survive in a forest. Probably. Anyway, it would still be an improvement.

Disordered Reaction to a Return to Order

2011-05-31T22:15:00.002-04:00

I was in Atlanta and now I'm not.

I feel like my head is going to explode, and not from a headache. Or maybe I feel like my heart is going to explode, and not from a heart attack. Or maybe I feel like my body is going to explode, and not from eating differently than I normally do.

It's not that I was suddenly eating incredibly intuitively, though I did better than I do in my home environment. It's not that I was totally unaware of focusing on my body during incongruous moments, though I wasn't obsessive about it. (Part of that, though, is generally because I'm happy with my shape/size right now... which is problematic because this shape/size is not what my body maintains when I'm treating it how I ought. But that's another issue for another post.)

So it's not that I did so incredibly well and acted so astonishingly non-disordered, but for whatever reason, I spent the long weekend and now the long travel day back experiencing them mostly as weekend and travel day, not as food disorder and body disorder. Mostly. Relatively speaking.

And now I'm home, and I kind of want to curl up in a ball and retreat from the entire world, taking only the cat and my Kindle, because asking anything else from me at the moment kind of feels like asking a diabetic to win a pie-eating contest*.

I don't know. Here. Here's a picture of some decomposing tree blossoms at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. My mother thought I was very weird for taking picture after picture of this. I mostly thought it was a striking image, what with the dappled light and the various stages of decay and all.

Fine. Here is a less morbid picture of a live thing.

* Yes, I know. Inappropriate. That's why I chose it.

Thumbs Up, Redux

2011-05-20T21:14:00.004-04:00

Okay, let's try this again.

The husband went out on a walk earlier and came back with sushi. When he came back I was actually just about to eat some apples, which we all know is such a good decision.

He got some edamame out of the bag; the restauranteur had forced it on him since he knows I like it. I had a few pods of it, then I started eyeing his sushi. Then he not so subtly tried to get me to share his sushi. I had one piece. Then I asked if we had some soy sauce.

Now I'm attempting my own roll, the kind that was waiting in the fridge, the kind the husband knows I like.

I think I can do this.

Okay, I almost did it.

I'm not sure what it is about the situation, but I just can't bring myself to finish the roll. There's something vaguely And Then The World Will End about the idea of finishing a whole roll on my own. (Good timing, I suppose. Anyone going to a Rapture party?)

But anyway, I got some protein, I got some omega-3's, and I got some variety for my taste buds.

And I'm pretty sure my thumb is grateful.

Srsly? HopStop Counts Your Calories Now

2011-05-15T12:24:00.000-04:00

I'm meeting up with the illustrious Sheil today. We are going to see the Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Met. Sheil is staying in Brooklyn, so I popped over to HopStop to see about how long it will take her to make it up to the Upper East Side.

Did you know that HopStop features "approximate calories burned on your trip" now?

Did you know that I want to mail a sample of my cat's poop to the people at HopStop who came up with that idea?

I mean, really. Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me.

You know, pedometers are all well and good. Walking and being healthy is all well and good. Getting out and about is all well and good.

But as someone with an eating disorder, I do not feel the need to know how many calories I burn every morning commuting between my apartment and my office. I could now find that info out just so much more easily. And now, I'm going to sit here and war with myself about not going back over to HopStop to find out.

Honestly, the panic over obesity and inactivity... Every time I think there's no new way it could sneak into my life to surprise me and upset me? Every time I think that, it seems to pop up with a brand new way.

Does anyone really need to know that they'd burn approximately 28 calories traveling from Williamsburg to Yorkville? No. There is no possible instance in which that knowledge would concretely benefit anyone. 28 calories is literally nothing. There is no purpose to knowing that you might be burning 28 calories. I don't care who you are, what your weight is, what your activity level is.

Actually, I take that back: unless you are so anorexic or underweight that you literally have to fight for every calorie taken in and expended. In that case, you might need to know that X would burn 28 calories. But this information isn't aimed at anorexics or those severely underweight. I doubt the idea of counting calories so you don't lose them never occurred to the bright person who said, "Hey! Let's add calorie counts to the commutes!"

Ugh. Feck you, HopStop. Feck you.

Win Lose or Bra

2011-05-13T16:59:00.001-04:00

I really need to break down and buy some smaller bras. I am of two minds about this.

First mind: Your bras are too big. Buy some smaller ones.

Second mind: If you buy smaller bras, you have to stay at that size thereafter, or you will lose*.

Wait! I am of three minds! Third Mind: If you buy smaller bras, that means you are losing**.

I am usually a solid C cup. However, I have in my drawer, from various years of various weights and various incorrect bra sizings, 34D (at my highest -- which was still a healthy, just FTR -- weight), 32D, 34C (what I wore for a while when I should've been in a 32D), 32C, 34B (what I wore for a while when I should've been wearing a 32C). I think I have come to accept that right now, I need a 32B. Somehow that feels like a defeat.

* Lose? Lose at what? I don't know, life? I don't know.

** Look, I don't know, losing to disordered thinking and living? So, also losing at life? I really can't win here, can I?

The Cultural Hierarchy of Eating Disorders

2011-05-10T09:50:00.001-04:00

Let's talk about ED-NOS.

ED-NOS, that is, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, possibly to be renamed "Feeding and Eating Conditions Not Elsewhere Classified" in the DSM-V.

"[T]he problems of individuals with feeding or eating problems not meeting criteria for currently recognized disorders can be more appropriately described and categorized." This aim of refining and specifying eating disorder variants is not dissimilar (as this page notes) to the changes proposed for the Mood Disorders (and it seems to me, to some extent, the Personality Disorders). The point is that "these Conditions may be associated with levels of distress and/or impairment similar to those associated with the recognized Feeding and Eating Disorders, and may require intensive clinical intervention."

Recognition of eating disorders that you can't see with your eyeballs is one of the traditional problems that those in the field have been trying to correct over the last 15 or so years. Originally, anorexia got all the attention and therefore all the study. It was decades before bulimia nervosa was even its own diagnosis. Then, classic anorexia and classic bulimia got all the attention and therefore all the study. With a major emphasis still on anorexia, though.

(Here's an interesting example. It's great - it is effing fantastic - to see coverage of eating disorders in men. And the struggles that men with eating disorders undergo within our acute gender binary are just... I can't even imagine the layer of crap that piles on top o' the other crap. But this could have been an article about men with eating disorders: not just anorexia, but anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, purging disorder, and more.)

I have Thoughts about that. One of my Thoughts is that this seems sensible, since anorexia is the deadliest psychiatric disorder. But another of my Thoughts is that anorexia is relatively so rare. Comparable to anorexia, a huge portion of the ED population is bulimic, but bulimia isn't as pretty or as alluring, both from a study POV and from a cultural POV. And comparable to bulimia, a huge portion of the ED population is ED-NOS, but only now is there really beginning to be serious study into ED-NOS, and then the only cultural currency ED-NOS receives is through attention to Binge Eating Disorder, currently categorized under ED-NOS.

So my Thoughts are that we seem to be witnessing a gradual slide from attention to the peak: unattainable, alluring eating disorders -- the low weight restrictive ones that is; the saints live up there. That attention started trickling its way down the research and the cultural slopes, down to the valley where reside the ugly eating disorders, the disorders that for decades and decades weren't even acknowledged as eating disorders at all. (This isn't to say that anorexia isn't ugly. Anorexia nervosa is horrifying. However, it is approached with a reverence and an envy with which bulimia, binge eating disorder, and other eating disorders are not, at a cultural level.)

It's great that there is finally recognition that just because you're not at 85% or lower of your minimum acceptable body weight, or just because you don't binge and purge a minimum of once a week for at least three months, doesn't mean you don't have an eating disorder. But there is still such vast misunderstanding of anything that isn't visible Anorexia Nervosa or Bulimia Nervosa at a cultural level. And truly, there is still a hierarchy within the professional realm, at least as far as studies and diagnostics are concerned.

At a macro level, you can look over things and see the progress, and that sure does feel encouraging. But at a micro level it is still very, very disheartening that physicians who are trained to observe and evaluate data don't recognize eating disorders in patients whose weight is not at a certain shocking level, or who aren't obviously or admittedly bulimic, mostly because the information and the cultural acknowledgement of what is disordered just isn't there yet.

At the macro level, there is a nebulous knowledge that eating disorders are more than anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa, and that perhaps binge eating disorder is A Real Thing, rather than Lazy People. But at the micro level, the cultural hierarchy of eating disorders keeps so many individuals trapped in disordered eating and disordered living, unaware that they could ask for, and often even find help, if only they knew they deserved it.

Thumbs Up

2011-05-06T23:02:00.000-04:00

Tonight the husband ordered sushi for dinner. While he was chatting with the restaurant owner before hanging up the phone, I debated with myself whether to request a roll or two of my own. "No," the eating disorder shrugged in casual victor. "Apples for dinner."

Later, I was slicing apples with a knife we got as an engagement present from some very generous family friends (translation: high-quality knife). The knife was smallish and serrated. I was on my very last chop of the last apple slice. I was chopping a little inattentively. I was laughing at something my husband said.

I think you see where this is going.

I felt the knife slice into my thumb tip and immediately clamped my right thumb over the left-hand slice. I jumped up and down in a fair impersonation of Mario or Luigi, and I hopped to the bathroom to stick my hand under cold water. "I really don't want to look," I said. I've cut my fingers before, once deeply enough to scare me, but in general my own blood doesn't bother me. Bodies don't bother me in that way. When my husband had his pilonidal cyst excised, I stuffed the healing wound with gauze for two weeks with no problem. Here I'd felt the knife go into my thumb tip more deeply than would do for a Band-Aid, but I know that fingers are bleeders (thanks to my previous deep thumb slice taking place with my mother at hand), so it was the sensation that bothered me more than the idea of the blood. I didn't want to see my skin hanging apart, so I kept my right hand clamped down on my left, and both under the faucet, and I opened my eyes.

I glanced down at the tap water running over my hand and saw it pooling distinctively pink over our drain. And despite the fact that I know my own blood doesn't bother me, seeing the blood gushing enough to color swift water really bothered me. I started crying. My thumb didn't hurt. (I mean, it did, but not in an alarming way.) I simply found myself deeply upset.

The husband came into the bathroom to ask if I wanted to go to the ER, a little perplexed by the fact that I was crying not out of pain, but out of sheer distress. I told him no, but asked if he could run out for butterfly closure strips when he'd eaten. He put his sushi in the fridge and went out.

When he left I began to feel nauseous, then woozy. I kept crying, but more quietly. I kept my hand under the water, running perfectly clear now.

He came back, opened a bandage for me. I realized I'd have to let go of my thumb and view the open slice in order to bandage it. I'd been applying enough pressure that the blood had stopped and didn't immediately well up when I released my thumb. I looked at the slice, looked into it.

I started having dry heaves. I started seeing stars. I was absolutely hyperventilating as I plunked down on my bum and slid forward on the bathmat, slumped against the sink. I was laughing like a creepy wind-up doll. I thought, for only the second time in my life, that I was really and truly going to faint. It took two tries to get a bandage on. (I wouldn't let the husband do it because he has dirty man hands and I've seen him pick his nose with those fingers.)

Things I Learned:

1a. I have viscerally accessible existential issues with being separated from pieces of my body. This seems reasonable, given that you aren't really supposed to lose certain pieces.

1b. While I have no problem getting up close and personal with pilonidal cyst wounds or the goo that comes out of a ganglion, I do not want to look into my own body if I'm not supposed to be able to see into wherever I'm looking. I would psychoanalyze the shit out of that aversion if I felt like it. I don't feel like it.

2. I would be terrible in zombie combat operations. Or any combat zone, really.

3. Just have the damn sushi for dinner.

Loopy

2011-05-05T20:31:00.000-04:00

It's been quite a week, hasn't it? What with the whole bin Laden thing, and also Kendra finally getting booted off Dancing with the Stars. (What?)

Really, though, it's been a week. The husband and I started off the week by taking someone out to dinner Monday night. It was the first time I'd been out to dinner (as opposed to nachos and cocktails) at a restaurant since my mother-in-law's birthday, if I recall correctly. It was the first time I'd been out to dinner at a restaurant whose food was actually good since some time before that. (Since Paris, maybe? I feel as though I'm forgetting something that's going to insult someone.)

Anyway, dinner threw me for a loop. A weird loop.

A normal loop occurs when I enjoy the food that's not in my highly restrictive diet now. My taste buds and tummy want more food like that and inform my brain that they'd like more at some point, possibly tomorrow or next week or whenever, thankyouverymuch. My brain shuts them down without even politely pretending to humor their request. So I lapse back to the highly restrictive list of safe foods I've been subsisting on for however long, and while I joke about catching a tape worm, it never actually occurs to me that, hey, I could also just keep eating more of that food that I liked.

A weird loop occurs when all that same stuff happens... but then it actually occurs to me that I could also just keep eating more of that food that I liked.

This actually occurred to me Monday night after dinner. It also occurred to me Tuesday night when I sat down to my not-dinner. And Wednesday. And tonight. The week itself has been abysmal when considering the actual nutritional mechanics at work in my digestive system, but that new thought, or that old-new thought, is really a new something.

om nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom

Another thing I noticed this week is that when I feel sad (as opposed to numbly depressed, as in clinical depression) I don't have any particular feeling or thought about my body. Usually it doesn't occur to me to notice my body when I feel sad.

This is novel. (At least lately.) Eating disorders like to cut off emotions, or dull them, or warp them. When emotions emerge, often they're scary, and so the eating disorder slips itself into the situational recipe like too much cilantro in your guacamole. When for a moment there you were only feeling anxious, or only feeling angry, or only feeling cautiously optimistic, you are now feeling anxious and like you're physically expanding, or angry suddenly obsessed with [whatever body part/area], or cautiously optimistic and also strictly planning exactly the foods that will allow you to maintain that optimism.

But I realized this week that these days, when I am sad, I am just sad. Not about my body, or about my food, but about stuff in my life. And my body is there, and often it's walking me around Manhattan (because that seems to be when I can access my sadness), and, crucially, it's just my body. It's just moving. It's just harboring and supporting my mind, which is just sad.

These are only moments; the eating disorder swoops in again, always, like anything else comes crashing in to change and undo a moment. But they're there, and they're fascinating to me. They make me imagine experiencing other emotions like I am experiencing the sadness. The make me happy to feel sad.

Eating Disorders and Evolving Identity

2011-04-28T22:13:00.002-04:00

It's a tricky spot of rope I'm walking now. The first time I went into deliberate, purposeful eating disorder treatment was in 2003. I was still a student, still single, still utterly living my own life, about and for me and figuring out who I was. I wasn't a pre-teen or high schooler with an eating disorder fogging up my view of my own reflection, but in retrospect, I was closer to that kind of ED patient than I was closer to the ED patient I am now. Life is never simple, and eating disorders don't fall into the "simple" bin at life's store of complexity; still, recovering basically on ~~your~~* my own and (on the surface) for ~~your~~ myself was relatively simple. It's just ~~you~~ me. (And ~~your~~ my parents and ~~your~~ my friends and ~~your~~ my concept of the future and ~~your~~ my concept of ~~your~~ myself, and and and... But my point stands.)

The second time I went into deliberate, purposeful eating disorder treatment was in 2008. I was a home-business-owner, married for just shy of a year, and starting to marinate the idea of pregnancy. What with one thing and another, we never ended up trying, which worked out for the best. But the concept of a pregnancy, of an infant, a toddler, a child, acted as a spur in my flank. For about five months there, I was the healthiest I'd been since November 2001. For some reason, that spasm of recovery didn't require much thought. I made up my mind one day to go back on Lexapro. I made up my mind one day to find a non-traditional therapy group. Then in January '09, everything ~~kind of~~ really hit the shit. By March the recovery period was over for me, and since then it's been a slow downward slide, in terms of weight, sure, but more importantly in terms of living with and in an eating disorder.

So now I am in my third deliberate, purposeful eating disorder treatment stint. I'm still a business owner but now I go to an office, I've been married closer to four years than to three, and the idea of recovery is an abstract. I'm finding it harder. The questions are more complex. I'm no longer the single 21-year-old earning a B.F.A., ignorant of her own possibilities. I'm no longer the newlywed with baby on the brain. There is this whole, permanent part of me that's grown in since 2003, and knotted up since 2008, and I have no idea who that part is, or how it fits in with the rest. I revolt at the idea of connecting with the idea of recovery for an other (say, a hypothetical baby). I can't connect with the idea of recovery for me, yet, either. Which I suppose isn't terribly surprising, given that I don't actually know who I am just at the moment.

Eating disorders (like addictions) like to whittle you down to their own perfect idea of your identity, until they leave you only with your body and your food. I am absolutely not there. I am more than my body and my food. But unless we're talking in list form, I'd be at pains to tell you just what I am.

* Went back and changed that from second person to first person because, imagine, my experience is not universal and my second person description might be seen as belittling to younger or single or student eating disorder patients. Which is not what I meant by my use of second person, of course. I have a bad habit of slipping into it, when I do not mean to generalize or assume others' experience, but more when I'm edging into my tendency to distance myself from something.

Shopping with Your Eating Disorder

2011-04-25T14:21:00.000-04:00

On Saturday I went shopping for a dress for a friend's May wedding. (I was going to wait until I was all stressed out about it, but I had a revelatory realization that: how much weight can I really lose or gain in 4-6 weeks?)

It was one in a string of slightly eye-opening experiences, in that I kept grabbing the size I associate with myself, then the size below it... then having to send the saleswoman back for the next size down. Some of the designers didn't actually make dresses in sizes small enough for me.

It was weird.

Now, I suspect some of this is owed to the fact that no designer anywhere wants to agree on a size about anything, ever. Seriously, one Ralph Lauren "Lauren" dress I tried on in "size B" fit like most of the other designers' stuff at least two sizes up (we'll call it "size D"). I ended up with a "size A" dress, though the saleswoman made a point of saying that that designer made things "big."

So I really don't come away knowing anything, do I?

Well, I know I didn't quite look right in the mirror. Our only full-length mirror at home is inside the door of our book closet (yes, book closet). That's out in the living room, and I am not one to make a habit of parading about mostly naked. So when I disrobed in the dressing room, I did a bit of a double-take. "Oh. Huh. Oops," was basically my train of thought.

ON THE OTHER HAND, it is a department store dressing room we're talking about, and aren't those notorious for slimming effects?

Again, I really don't know anything, huh?

I know my bras are too big right now, like, whoa. Except when they're not? And it might all be slipping straps and crazy brain?

I know I walked home after I went shopping, lest I gain one ounce, despite the fact that I could gain well into several ounces, nay, a pound or three, and the dress would still fit. And despite my earlier realization that four weeks cannot a dress size make or break.

I know that I am measuring the time running up to this wedding in a back-and-forth hopscotch of I should gain weight/I should lose weight/I should gain/I should lose, because it's in Atlanta, which means seeing my parents, which means... complicated psychological stuff: I want people to worry, I want no one to ask me about it, I want people to see I'm underweight, I want no one to know I'm not okay, everyone already worries and knows I'm not okay, oh Quantum Field I don't want to get into it.

Hm. Well. At least it isn't Passover again, right? Right. And at least I ended up paying 10% of the total cost of the dress. Seriously. Ten percent. Thank you, gift cards and pre-sales (not that I fully understand what that is).

Les Comtesses on the Chicago Tribune's Massive Dose of WTFery

2011-04-22T11:33:00.000-04:00

Today Les Comtesses attempt to answer the age-old question, "WTF?!" (Specifically as it relates to a Chicago Tribune article that is just beyond description.)

via Shakesville, Broaching a weighty subject

Cynical Nymph: This article. What? What is this?? WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE???

Marzie: I dunno... I'm thinking this is a great way to let people know you're an asshole without the risks of face to face interaction where you'll have to deal with their tears or anger or possible weaponry.

Personal Failure: PF MAD. Look, I've lived with an obese to morbidly obese man for close to 13 years now. He does not need to be told he is obese, he knows it. He knows all about the "health concerns", he's tried numerous diets and you know what? Some asshole walking up to him and saying, "a gun to your head! you have it!" is not going to help. Fuck off. Oh, and another thing? He really doesn't eat much more than I do. My body likes being at the edge of underweight, his body likes being obese. He has lost weight -- and gained it right back. He's not fat for lack of trying, he's fat because of biology. You can't fight millions of years of evolution with a website.

Marzie: You... You mean, you don't think this website isn't offering the New Mirror? PF, you are so damn picky.

[redacted]: Note: this is the newest anti-gay concern troll line of reasoning, as well. Some of them may just be cluelessly parroting the misused stats that they were given, but I don't care what their intent is. I want them to STFU and stop pretending that making it legally impossible for gay relationships to be economically intertwined and harder to get out of when the going gets tough is somehow a solution to STIs associated with promiscuity. First the person trots out the "stats" (without context, or with horrible misunderstanding of it) of STI rates for teh homoz, and then they go all "we're not being hateful, we're trying to save people from an awful death from AIDS." Obvs, I've left out a lot of nattering, but that's the gist of it.

CN: I still can't believe Lynn Grefe, the president of NEDA, is actually saying these things. I want to punch her in the ovaries. I really do. Part of NEDA's whole thing, traditionally, is to educate people about not conflating certain weights or body states as eating disordered or healthy, per se. HI, LYNN, GUESS WHAT YOU JUST DID.

PF: Really, the CEO of NEDA managed to slap the entire spectrum of ED and weight issues in one interview. I'd be impressed if I weren't so disgusted with her. Seriously, if I hear "Well, they just don't know they're fat" one more fucking time, I'm going door to door punching everyone who answers in the face in the hopes that I will punch the people saying this shit.

[redacted]: Excellent idea. I shall invoke the wrath of The Girl Child, as well, because damned if her "friend" didn't call her "fat" the other day. Note: yes, same friend who told my daughter that "the 'h' word...is 'whore.'" Yes, I've already talked to school.

Marzie: Geez!!!

PF: What the hell are those parents doing?!

CN: Calling each other fat whores in front of their daughter?

[redacted]: I can speak from personal experience, though, on pretty much all fronts here. And just because I'm at a healthy weight (almost) and running a mini in two weeks doesn't mean I don't have ridiculous jacked up ideas and behaviors about food AND exercise.

Marzie: You know, the thing that just bothers me is that idea of people making such assumptions and knowing nothing about what you may be going through to put you where you are. Me, at 40: [too low] lbs of lean muscled rock climber, virtually counting every single calorie. Me at 44: [higher] lbs of bloated, prednisone-swollen celiac out of control, joints swollen and painful, having trouble keeping almost anything down or in. People would ask me why I gained weight, that I had looked so good before, etc. I mean I looked really SICK, and people are asking about my weight? Hello?

GlamKitty: People asked WHY you gained weight?!? WTF answer were they expecting? Maybe... a). "Oh, I just kind of FELT like it, of course! (teehee!)" b). "I realized that all my clothing fit me too well, but I had grown SO bored with it, and gaining weight was the perfect opportunity to buy lots of new things!" c). "BECAUSE I REALLY, REALLY WANTED TO FIELD THAT PARTICULARLY-RUDE-&-INSENSITIVE QUESTION FROM ASSHOLES LIKE YOU!!" Grrrrrrr...

Marzie: They got the cold stare.

PF: When I first started dropping weight, I looked awful. My hair was also falling out, I had bags and circles under my eyes, my skin looked waxy, I could hardly move, and people were like "Wow! It's so AWESOME that you're losing weight! Good for you!" Basically, our entire society has ED.

[redacted]: If one more person (and let's be clear here: none of these persons has a Y chromosome) whom I haven't seen in a long time but knows I'm running the mini emails me and says "That is so great that you're running a half-marathon! It's so inspiring! I'M JEALOUS; YOU MUST BE SO SKINNY." I am going to beat the crap out of them. I'm SO MUCH more proud of the fact that I can RUN (well, "run") 11 miles than any of the weight loss or working out or just...anything else right now. I suck at this, and I still do it. That is unheard of for me. Also, it's damned hard. And I still do it. Also unheard of. It's the not quitting that I am proud of, not the nonexistent six-pack or quads of steel or whatever. I just....it's SO frustrating. SO SO frustrating. Why is it that my body or my activities are somehow sending this completely false message? What about the world makes THAT the message they're getting, and how do we shake up the frame that everyone uses to see it?

GK: I'm torn between two possible courses of action after reading that, and all because of one little word (no pun intended here, believe me): "I'm jealous; you must be so skinny!". (Beating my head against my lovely green wall is my first instinct, but given today's headache level after only a couple hours of sleep, I'm going with Door #2, pinching the bridge of my nose very hard.) There is something seriously wrong with any society in which people equate being "skinny" with something good and desirable. "Healthy" and "fit" are admirable goals (no matter what size or shape that takes); "skinny" should only be the result of some sort of illness (unless, of course, the goal is weakness and malnourishment, in which case... ~sigh~ there is just no hope).

CN: This plays back into my obsession with Your Body As Public Property. It also dovetails nicely with PF's post yesterday about purity obsession in evangelical Christianity. If I am allowed to feel like I have some say in your body, then the only way I can reason my way to that is to believe your body is in some way mine. If your body is in some way mine, then I get to control it, or at least feel as though I'm entitled to control it. And if I'm entitled to control it, then the first step toward control is being Totally Justified In Sharing My Opinions About Your Body With You.

Marzie: Female body as public property? I don't see too many men getting questioned...

CN: Well, if you're a man and you're FAT you get questioned.

Marzie: Not so much and not as overtly and not as much "Right to know".

[redacted]: Well the default for "public" property (or really anything in the public sphere, right?) is "belongs to teh menz. Teh white menz speshully." Right? I mean, you don't get much more uppity than expecting to participate in THEIR world at the same level, hunh? Also nicely dovetails (how many damn doves are we up to at this point?) with how pregnant women get treated. I love how they've already got "protecting the rights of the helpless" into the national vocabulary so that any pregnant woman can't possibly be autonomous, because there's a helpless baby in there and IT'S YOUR CHRISTIAN DUTY TO GET ALL UP IN HER UTERUS. (Note: don't take your wallet with you though. Or something. Maybe it's okay to get your wallet up in there if there's a zygote already? No, wait. I don't know.)

CN: Oh, Quantum Field. There is too much Body Control All Your Body Are Belong To Us going on for 11:30 a.m. I think I might have to go break into the booze.

Passover 2011: In Which CN Is Stuck With The Worst Conversation Partner Of All Time

2011-04-19T11:03:00.001-04:00

We are minus the Internet at home right now, so I had the night to figure how not to turn this into another whiny post about our culture's pervasive diet obsession and made up food rules and food-based holiday perversions and other points of why is this so much lose? Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful in my attempts to reframe the night outside of the frame of whinging. (I think that frame is probably a nauseating puce hue, don't you?) Instead, I shall simply take you through the first night of Passover. I preface this by stating that I love my mother-in-law forever, the end.

4:30 p.m.: I arrive at BIL & SIL's apartment not far from ours. Everything's fine....

4:45 p.m.: .... for about 15 minutes, until an extended-family-member-by-marriage (SIL's family) arrives and sees my husband, who has lost a lot of weight (in the healthy sense) since the last time he saw this guy, and who has started going to the gym again recently.

4:46 - 5:00 p.m.: Uninterrupted monologue at me about food and diet and weight loss. This guy recently lost 23 lbs. and is so! excited! about it! He has more energy! He has to restrain himself from eating as much as he wants! He's so much healthier! It's easier when you both [in a marriage] get into the fitness thing! He can tell that my husband's health kick was really all because of me because I look so good and am obviously into the health thing! Actually, I tell him, I'm not really doing anything different than I've ever done in a long time; the newfound healthiness is all to my husband's credit. Well good for him because it's so important to stay trim! Also fad diets are awful, but here are some food rules! And here are some more! Also, some crazy people eat raw food! Also the entire food supply is tainted and meat is evil! But this guy still eats meat! Also, they tracked anorexics and they actually lived longer! Oh, I mention, as my MIL sidles over and slips her arm through mine and squeezes -- he isn't talking about actual anorexics, he's talking about that primate study where they found that a "restricted calorie" diet may contribute to longevity? Yes! That's exactly the one he means! But who can enjoy their life like that?! If you're not eating you're not really living! Also, being thin does not necessarily mean being healthy! I mean, you guys, not fifteen minutes ago, he was talking about how he's living 100% magic-level better because he's started eating less, but if you're not eating what you want, you're not living. He can look at me and tell I'm healthy because I'm thin, but being thing does not equate to being healthy. I cannot even with this cognitive dissonance. I cannot even.

5:00 p.m.: The seder starts. Guess who I am seated right across from.

5:30 p.m.: Super-reform and fast seder is super-reform and fast. Time for eating. Guess who comes back to the table with his plate piled ridiculously high and tells me that he breaks all his food rules today.

5:31 p.m.: I sneak into the coat room to text my mom because WHAT IS THIS, I CAN'T EVEN.

5:32 p.m.: The husband leaves me here, with his family, to go home and do work. Visions of cast-iron skillets and blood-spattered walls dance in my head.

5:32 - 6:15 p.m.: Guess who spends all the actual eating time talking about food rules and the meat in the stew that is evil (evil with hormones and toxins, that is) but delicious.

6:15 p.m.: The evening takes a promising turn when the guy and I remember that we were both raised Catholic. We begin to have a non-food, non-body-related discussion about the issues that caused us to break with the Church, and Catholicism and its contrasts with Judaism... Only the discussion doesn't so much remain a discussion; it morphs into a monologue. It's a shame, too, because it really could have been an interesting two-way conversation. I tried, I really did, but I very literally couldn't get a word in.

6:25 p.m.: The two doctors present at the table start to discuss the deficit, and how nothing will ever be solved until overspending in Medicare is addressed. Some of their statements are sweeping generalizations, but some of them are fact-based and experience-based, so I can live with that.

6:26 p.m.: Then other people chime in about Social Security.

6:27 p.m.: Then someone says that Trump would be a better president than Obama.

6:28 p.m.: Then I leave, because that, apparently, is the line for me.

Halp.

2011-04-14T10:05:00.001-04:00

I feel so depressed. I am kind of over this "get back in touch with your emotions!" B.S., because apparently all the emotions are this color:

Distraction plz? Something along these lines would work fine:

ohai

Please send all bear cubs to:

Cynical Nymph

c/o depressive fecking B.S.

New York, NY 10028.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

Food and Body Peace

2011-04-12T20:57:00.001-04:00

Thank you for your comments and emails after last night's post. I really do appreciate the understanding, the support, the sounding back of the "oh, so it isn't just me?"

What it comes down to is that I want to feel peace. I want to feel peace in my body, and peace in my eating. I want my body just to be my body, and my food just to be my food. I want my body to be just an intricate organic machine housing who I am. I want my food to be just the enjoyable fuel running the machine and rebuilding its damaged parts.

That's what I want. I want us to be at peace amongst ourselves. I defy that such a thing is impossible in this culture in general, or for me in particular. I defy and deny it and refuse to believe it.

Last week, my therapist and I discussed how bingeing and then purging acts as a vehicle through which I manage my desires, and try to regulate longing. For now, it's literal longing for certain foods I feel I can't have in moderation, for whatever reason. But underneath the literal food stuff lie the actual desires that part of me wants to regulate.

Maybe that's what the battle fever has been about lately: unearthing, via dynamite, the desire for peace.

Food Wars

2011-04-11T23:46:00.001-04:00

Tonight I emailed one of Les Comtesses that "I mostly spent the weekend at war with food." I must not have an impartial view of my own writing style, because right until I typed out the words "at war," I would've said that was just too hyperbolic for me. But then I typed just those words, and they sure did seem just right.

I am at a point where every food feels as though it teeters on a fence. If the food falls one way, I can engage in normalized eating. If the food falls the other way, the food is either a total no-go, or a surprise binge food. (Binge foods and forbidden foods are not necessarily the same foods.) This is a maddening way to exist, when apples act as land mines.

When I say "binge foods," I don't mean necessarily that I go out for lunch, buy a salad, eat the salad, it turns into a binge food, and I go get three more salads. I mean that I go out for lunch, buy a salad, and proceed to eat the salad in such a way that I am not just eating a salad. I find I can't articulate better than that. Sometimes, I'm just eating a salad. Or an apple. Or whatever. But sometimes, I'm eating a dirty bomb. Or a biological weapon. Or a good, old-fashioned hand grenade.

This weekend, everything was the hand grenade.

On Thursday, the therapist and I tried to strategize. Rather, I tried to strategize and she tried to get me to quit strategizing and list-making and to possibly just be okay with observing. In my fit of battlefield mapping, though, I did realize that food journals and meal plans are not going to work for me right now. They work against my every instinct to resist taking things one day at a time, one meal at a time.

So at the moment I'm meant to be not planning, not strategizing, not going over the top just because I'm sick of being down in the trenches, only to be mowed down by the first truffled-colored bullet that plants itself in my gut. I'm meant to be above the battlefield, watching how it plays out, observing, accepting.

Apparently I really suck at that, because I still spent the weekend all at war. And while I was, by definition, just observing, not strategizing, it's hard to keep up troop morale with what I see.

Exciting Business Venture

2011-04-08T15:29:00.000-04:00

h/t to Personal Failure, snazzy certificate of incorporation via incorporatemyuterus.com

Wednesday

2011-04-06T14:52:00.002-04:00

Off Topic: The Perfect Vagina

2011-04-03T22:45:00.001-04:00

I had my annual gynecologist appointment this past week. Aside from your run-of-the-mill stuff, I mentioned to her that I'd recently seen The Perfect Vagina, a 2008 documentary out of Britain.

The documentary itself got going based on the producers coming across the factoid that the fastest-growing elective surgery in the U.K. was vaginal surgery, that is to say, labiaplasty, hymen reconstruction, vulvoplasty, etc. The documentary is really quite moving - as well as eye-opening. (Be prepared to see vagina. A lot of it. Also, you get to watch a labiaplasty procedure performed on a 21-year-old.) (Yeah. 21.)

Anyway, my doctor and I got to talking about the fact that this has grown into its own industry here in the U.S. as well. She did her residency in L.A. and saw a bit more of it there, but she practices here on the Upper East Side, so still sees her fair share. She hadn't seen this documentary, but shook her head at the idea of a 21-year-old having cosmetic surgery on her labia, and generally at the idea that the visual definition of the vagina ought to be anything less varied than the visual definition of the human face.

So very many people visit this blog through my Brazilian wax post (a post I almost delete about every other month, mind). With bathing suit season approaching, I have the urge to fight against the cultural insistence that women's bits have to look just a certain way, an insistence I am reminded of every time I log into my IP tracker and see thousands of hits a month pouring in to the wax post, a post I wrote to be funny, and a post that people from all over the world read presumably for information.

So, Women's History Month may be over for another year, and I may be a good three years late to the game with this documentary, but, again. The Perfect Vagina. You have a perfect vagina. Don't believe me? Watch it.

Link via The Fat Nutritionist

2011-04-03T12:51:00.001-04:00

Fantastic post from last autumn, just tweeted by Michelle at Fat Nutritionist.

Ami's Guide to Food Privilege

ETA:

Oh, and speaking of which:
FDA proposal would require chain restaurants to display calorie information

We all remember what my opinion of calorie posting laws is, yes? Well, just in case, let me sum up:

They don't work, are classist, and are potentially damaging to the eating disordered population.

Les Comtesses on Eating Disorder Articles and Commenters

2011-03-30T11:21:00.001-04:00

The Comtesses are having a round-table (as we do) about my post yesterday, and the article and comments it covers. Here are some of the highlights.

Marzie: It's just astonishing that someone can on the one hand be preaching self-acceptance of physique and aging in a fashion so wholly derisive, dismissive and *offensive* of/to those who struggle with a genuine MH issue, isn't it? Could this person have missed the entire point of the article by a wider margin, I wonder? Simply astonishing!!!

[redacted]: WTF was with all the motivesplaining?! Is everything on the well like that, or is it common to ED discussions, or what? That is presumptuous, and solipsistic, and unfuckingcalledfor.

CN: Last time I read any of them, they were pretty heavy on that, yeah.

There's one duo in there where someone tells ED'd b!tches to go volunteer and do something that isn't obsessed with themselves for a change. The next commenter follows up nicely pointing out that, yeah, there are, like, ED'd doctors and nurses and volunteers and teachers and.... So sometimes you do get the redemptive value thrown in there for good measure.

There's also a fair amount of "THERE ARE STARVING CHILDREN IN AFRICA HOW DARE YOU CARE ABOUT MAGAZINES," which, I cannot even begin.

Personal Failure: As to motivesplaining: in all honesty, motivesplaining of any kind says volumes about the 'splainer. ED is caused by wanting the perfect, faithful man? Then this person cannot imagine a man being loving and faithful to anyone who is not physically perfect according to our culture, which is really, really sad for them when you think about it.

Enraging, but saddening.

GlamKitty: Most people seem to be more the "in one ear/out the other" variety when it comes to anything not directly related to them... That's why so many articles and even posts are written from the simplest perspective... That's who's gonna (if you're lucky) be reading (or at the least, skimming) your article: the huddled masses.

It's easier for people to get an idea about the problems if they focus on the physical issues (such as low weight extremes and all the purgative behaviors resulting in myriad, visually-quantifiable health problems) rather than the psychological ones (like the real "why" behind the behaviors). This also goes to CN's frustration with the triggers so commonly put front and center; but once again, that's kind of my point here: the article isn't written for someone who has struggled with these issues and has given so much thought, time, and effort to learning about the history, significance, reasons, manifestations, treatments, etc., ... it was written for neighbors, co-workers, the checkout girl who sees you three times a week, so that they have a chance of identifying what they see, and possibly even being concerned for the right reasons if someone close to them exhibits any of the more-obvious symptoms.

Marzie: Which is why the commentary is all the more disturbing, as few people will likely have the sense or skill set to parse the issues raised in some of them. Some people may read the sociobabble of RC or psychobabble of LL and actually take away the idea that they're insightful. In fact some of the other commenters did.

Sometimes the internet can be a crucible of ignorance to a truly disheartening extent. (Was it only a week ago I read Ann Coulter's column on how radiation was really good for us? My eyes!!! My eyes!!! Burned by her idiocy!!!!) The article: just fine for its particular purpose. The commentary: cost me brain cells, because of exploding white matter.

CN: These are all true points, I believe. But I think this is also some of the problem.

Since most people are indeed "in one ear/out the other" when it comes to things not directly relevant to their own lives, then it follows that most people are never going to gain a more thorough understanding of eating disorders and their interplay with everyday life, unless and until an eating disorder directly affects them or their family... The problem with eating disorders is that yes, sometimes a diet or a new exercise regimen is the trigger that sets them off, but frankly, that's not usually the case. Talking about eating disorders in terms of "and then she decided to lose weight" is like talking about addictions in terms of "and then he decided to start drinking more."

I can appreciate what the article wants to do, and I'd rather have it written and published than not. But it doesn't actually do much to address the fact that people in mid-life or later life with eating disorders have always been around, like that older article didn't address the fact that eating disorders and substance abuse have long been bosom buddies. Maybe that's part of my issue with these two articles: they read to me like just more NY Times "trend pieces." And in some way they are.

But while their aim is to teach, whereas most of the NY Times trend pieces you see aim to divert or socially titillate (Women are deciding en masse to stop wearing perfume because they don't want to impinge upon others' space! Women are raising chickens in Brooklyn because they are feminists and also environmentalists!), what this piece sometimes does (and what that older piece did to a much larger extent) is to continue to address what are basically ED tropes, and employ rather ham-handed tactics.

For instance, it's hard to see how the writer or editor let the comment "... so [physicians] can recognize and distinguish between menopause-related changes, real health problems and eating disorders..." stand without in-print clarification that when the doctor said "real health problems" she meant, for example, anemia borne of ulcerative colitis, as opposed to the psychiatric problem of an eating disorder that leads to health problems. Tara Parker-Pope clears that up in the comments, but the fact that it made it to print unadorned suggests an unawareness that is discouraging. It unwittingly underscores the suggestion that eating disorders are not "real health problems," which you can clearly tell from the comments is a dearly cherished belief by many. That combined with the weight/height/pounds triggers suggests that while this piece aims to help people "get it," the piece itself doesn't entirely "get it."

So the point and merit of the piece is definitely summed up in the one doctor's quote, "We need to let everybody know that it’s possible to develop these illnesses across the life span." But in the course of letting everybody know that, the writer and editors missed some pretty easy fixes.

Is there ever going to be a perfect eating disorder education piece that accomplishes consciousness-raising and balanced sensitivity to the special interest group of patients and loved ones? No. But that definitely doesn't mean that I have to accept some of the shortcomings in the existing pieces.

New York Times Blog and Commenters on Eating Disorders. Oh Dear.

2011-03-29T22:01:00.003-04:00

I did not study rhetoric. I was not on the debate club. I did not study logic. But I have thoughts. So let's do this in sections.

The piece: "An Older Generation Falls Prey to Eating Disorders" on the NY Times blog "Well" written by Tara Parker-Pope.

The piece, on the one hand: Yup, eating disorders aren't just a rich teeny-bopper trend anymore. Glad you noticed. Glad their existence is garnering some kind of coverage.

The piece, on the other hand: There are so many problems with this well-intentioned piece, not least of which is that it assumes and perpetuates the fallacy that eating disorders are about weight, shape, food, etc. The symptoms revolve around weight, shape, food, etc. The disorders are not about those things.

My next issue with the piece is that it seems like it was written/edited without regard to the most basic of trigger knowledge about eating disorders, assuming it was written with eating disordered readers at least partially in mind. Pieces like this love to, in my opinion unnecessarily, chart the height and low weight/high weight of the interview subjects.

Third, and perhaps most irritating to me: People of all ages with eating disorders. They have been around since the invention of eating disorders. Trufax. This irritates me on the level of a NY Times piece several years ago about "drunkorexia," that was to say, eating disordered people who abuse alcohol and therefore get most of their calories through booze. People with eating disorders - especially bulimia - who have substance abuse problems. They have been around since the invention of eating disorders and also substances.

Fourth and very parenthetically, the piece lists common disordered behaviors, but totally ignores purging, by far and away one of the most common symptoms in clinical-level eating disorders. Going by the numbers, there are vastly more patients with purgative behaviors, i.e. bulimic behaviors, than with strictly anorexic/restrictive behaviors. Again, going by the numbers, the most common purgative behavior is vomiting. It just seems weird that a piece purporting to teach about eating disorders would eliminate the most common eating disorder behavior in anorexia and bulimia. (Binge eating does not, by definition, include compensatory purging.)

I mostly enjoy "Well," though when it does fat/food/ED pieces like this, it tend to bug me because they tend to be written from this same half-researched, awkwardly-worded place. But, again, a well meaning place, I think.

Moving on.

The comments: Why am I even surprised?

I am struggling to cultivate detached compassion about this one, this one (same person) (who is in love with Camille Paglia), and this one.

This one just needs to learn more about nutrition.

But this one is just so out-of-left-field-awful that it's actually hilarious.

Shorter CN: I'm not so good at arguing. I sputter a lot. I use this emoticon when in doubt: o_O

Shorter, shorter CN: o_O >_<

Emotional Exhaustion, Different Than Oregon Trail Exhaustion

2011-03-24T09:49:00.001-04:00

I'm bloody exhausted. Tired. Fatigued. Pooped. (Hehe.)

As I go through the early therapy process again, and through that oh-that's-what-I've-been-doing-with-my-emotions thing again, I am really, really freaking tired.

It takes a certain amount of energy to look the following thoughts in their ugly faces:

"I have my business, my marriage, my eating disorder, and my self. Three of those have a symbiotic relationship. Guess which one is the odd one out."

"With my eating disorder I create a sturdy little wall behind which I can build my space, and all of you GTFO, it's mine."

"I have so much of the last few years jam packed down in my metaphorical gut that my literal gut sometimes feels food (or my eyes tell my literal gut about the possibility of food) and says DO NOT WANT. And now it's time to unpack my metaphorical gut! Fun!"

It takes a certain amount of energy to look the above thoughts in their ugly faces... And then it takes more energy to actually do something with those thoughts. That's one of the frustrating things about early therapy: you can see the thoughts, and see the truth there, and to some extent see what you might be able to do with them... but the energy to do anything about any of it just isn't there yet. So you (when did I slip into second person?) watch yourself continue to go through your disordered motions, while being more aware of where those disordered motions originate, for the present. It's wholly maddening. And emotionally exhausting. "Wait. You want me to work up the gumption to deal with what now?!"

I mean, you can see where this leaves me wanting to reread His Dark Materials and play with the cat and eff all that noise, right? Right??

The Guilt of Bingeing

2011-03-15T23:42:00.002-04:00

And now, I will talk about something that produces feelings of intense shame, and which I therefore don't talk about here a lot, outright. Bingeing.

Bingeing, purging and restricting is a self-perpetuating cycle, and most eating disorders feature it in some way. The bingeing isn't always an objective binge, the purging isn't always vomiting, and the restricting isn't always the restricting of calories, but the cycle is pretty universally applicable.

Now that I've explained that in so many words, I could be about to tell you about a subjective binge I had involving an objectively appropriate amount of food, and a purgative episode that only entailed fasting or exercise, and a restrictive behavior that was the restriction of social interaction.

But I'm not. I'm talking about bingeing on an objectively unnecessary amount of food. I'm talking about purging by vomiting. And I'm talking about restricting by limiting food variety and amount to an objectively inappropriate level. And primarily, I'm talking about the bingeing.

Generally, the farther you get into an eating disorder that involves restricting, the more and more limited your "safe" foods get. And if you have an eating disorder that also involves bingeing *waves*, the farther you get into that restricting, the more kinds of foods become potential binge foods. Luna bars are a recent example of mine. I actually binged on Luna bars. Because that's what was around that wasn't a "safe" food. That's what was on hand.

I keep getting tripped up over in Hell lately. PF mentioned in a recent post that mentioning or displaying pain is verboten in polite society. So are bingeing eating behaviors. Anorexia is at once less and more secretive, at least its popularly known features are, than bingeing that takes place in bulimia and in binge eating disorder. (And that also takes place in anorexia, but that doesn't count if you can't see it, right? Right. Anorexics are holy. Bulimics are gross.)

Today the discussion is about* access to food, and all I can think - maybe rightly so - is what a fucking little shit I feel like that I recently binged. On Luna bars. Which are expensive. Addictions are expensive: alcohol is expensive, cigarettes are expensive, gambling is expensive. An eating disorder, binges or not, isn't an addiction - not chemically, not behaviorally. But a bingeing eating disorder is a privileged expense; there's no denying that. So on top of the guilt about having an eating disorder at all, add the guilt of, well, being a disordered, privileged little shit.

There is guilt in the restricting, and of course in the purging, too. But for me the guilt has always been primarily about the bingeing, which is why I usually pussyfoot around it here. The guilt is about the money, even though I can afford what I'm doing. (The guilt is that I can afford it, partly.)

The guilt is about the waste, regardless of money. The guilt is basically that I'm taking too much. The purging is because there will be too much of me if I don't. The restricting is because there is just enough of me right now. And the bingeing is, biologically, a physiological response to there not being enough. And the bingeing is, subconsciously, a revolt, a demand for more. Rinse and repeat, ad nauseam. (Ha. "nauseam." Get it? Do u see wut I did thar?)

And this post is after my second week of therapy. Mehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I have a lot of work to do.

*or was supposed to be about, before everyone missed the point in a round of really peerless privilege display, which the redacted Comtesse has named "carsplaining"

Reentering Treatment

2011-03-03T09:05:00.001-05:00

I had my first therapy session since (I think?) 2008 yesterday. It was kind of the opposite of the above picture, but look at that picture. I had to.

The meeting was with a LCSW who led the group I went to for a couple years at Renfrew (from around 2004 - 2006).

I left feeling incredibly energized and hopeful for the first time in a long time.

I still didn't do so hot in terms of food when I got home, and I'm still not all about, you know, "eating" this morning.

But it's a start. Letting myself be the center of my own universe again for 45 minutes a week is a start.

Weighing In, Weighing Up, Bluntly

2011-02-23T11:19:00.000-05:00

Here. Here is an honest account of what's going on right now.

*SSCCCRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAM*

In Theory: Some of the pictures of K and me from a couple of weeks ago, I looked at and went, "Yeah, no. That's not how I'm supposed to look. That's too little."

In Practice: "OH MY GOD OH MY GOD I AM GOING TO TURN INTO A BLIMP AND NONE OF MY CLOTHES WILL FIT AND I AM SQUISHY AND HORRIBLE."

In Theory: If you have low muscle mass, you have to remember, the heart is a muscle. Sooooooo.... Weight gain = gud.

In Practice: "OH MY GOD OH MY GOD I AM GOING TO TURN INTO A BLIMP AND NONE OF MY CLOTHES WILL FIT AND I LIKE THE WAY I AM RIGHT NOW AND I AM TOTALLY UNABLE TO CONTROL MY WEIGHT OH MY GOD."

In Theory: Energy is gud, too.

In Practice: "OH MY GOD I AM SO DEPRESSED BECAUSE I AM GAINING WEIGHT THAT I HAVE NO ENERGY EXCEPT TO SILENTLY SCREAM, OH MY GOD OH MY GOD."

And there you have it. Enough with that namby-pamby falcon crap.

Weighing In, Weighing Up

2011-02-23T10:05:00.000-05:00

I woke up this morning and weighed myself for the first time in about a week and a half, for a reality check. The number was up.

I have been trying to distract myself by thinking and emailing about the new release in one of my friends' favorite UF series. (Iron Crowned by Richelle Mead, book #3 in the Dark Swan series. Initial consensus: mixed.)

It's only working to a certain extent, because this weight gain comes from nothing I'm really doing on purpose. I mean, I am. I'm putting food into my mouth on purpose. I'm digesting it on purpose. I'm eating slightly more protein on purpose. But while weight loss and gain and maintenance come down to simple math, I don't sit there and crunch the numbers. So. I feel puffy. I feel squishy. I feel scared. I'm trying to psych myself up about it, go through the logical motions meant to defeat cognitive dissonance. But... Yeah, no.

Here. Have a falcon. Because I like falcons and because it's today's Wikimedia picture.

Andreas Trepte

www.photo-natur.de

commons.wikimedia.org

Off-Topic and Obligatory: Unions

2011-02-21T13:56:00.000-05:00

I can't be the only one who is a little appalled that the DOWN WITH UNIONS!!! thing is going on when we are but one month shy of the centennial anniversary of the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Surely this irony isn't lost on most people (well, on most people who are aware of what the fire was, what it signified and set off in American workers' rights movement, in the women's rights movement, in the immigrants' rights movement, and so on...).

Seriously, guys, read some of the interviews with survivors. Read about the justice that didn't come (ever) for the owners of that company. Read about the total disregard for life and limb (of others, of course). You read that and you try to argue with me about unions. No, the teachers in Wisconsin aren't fighting for unlocked fire exits so they don't burn to death. Yes, they are fighting for quality of life, and in many ways symbolic and tangible, that fight started after the Triangle fire.

I had classes in that building when I was at NYU. In my AP American History class we had a whole unit on the rolling intersection of the Industrial Revolution, the Gilded Age, and the New Deal, so the location of the Triangle fire was already in my sphere of knowledge when I had my first classes as a freshman Drama major. These days, that's primarily a College of Arts & Sciences building, but most of my required theatre studies classes and a handful of electives were there. I had several, over my four years, on the eighth floor where the Triangle fire started. It's a neat old building. Technically NYU connects two buildings there; I forget what the other one's called, but it's the home of CAS and has beautiful views over the Village and Washington Square Park. Really beautiful, with lots of staircases, lots of fire hoses, lots of sturdy fire escapes, lots of sprinklers.

Something else I experienced frequently while at NYU? Student teacher strikes. I don't know what the situation is like now, but the president (John Sexton?) had a reputation for exploiting student teachers. Furthermore, the student teachers weren't allowed to unionize. A lot of the protests and pickets I witnessed took place at the northeast corner of Washington Square Park, right at the College of Arts & Sciences building, right where the Triangle Shirtwaist Company operated.

I'm Really Busy

2011-02-14T13:00:00.000-05:00

Also, stressed. Also, busy. Also, busy and stressed. The kind of busystress where you lie there in bed and go, "Do I really have to get up? Oh, space-time, is it going to go on like this for ever?" The kind of busystress where you poke at your scalp while trying to assess, "Do I really have to expend the extra energy of showering today? Is there aaaaaaany way it can be put off yet another day? Because it just takes so much energy."

Meh. I got of bed, but my hair is dirty. Good compromise. Plus, one of the employees informs me it looks "shiny, but not oily shiny." A win on all fronts, I'd say.

Anyway. I'm here, but not here.

Go read this instead. Go. Read it read it read it go read it now.

Treacherous Salad

2011-02-08T12:35:00.001-05:00

istockphoto wants you to believe that eating salads is the best thing evar!!!!11!!onemillion!!

The husband went out to grab lunch and I asked him to pick me up a salad from one of those create-your-own places that abound here. I wrote down what I wanted in it, including "on the side" instructions for the dressing.

He brought it back with dressing on it.

It was fat free dressing (yuck) so he told me the low number of calories it added to the salad, thinking I'd feel better. But here's the thing. It could have been calorie-free dressing for all I cared. It's a texture thing. It's a sliminess thing. It's a messiness thing.

I cannot abide messy food, and I cannot abide slimy salads, because sliminess on vegetables feels as though it ought to be messy. I can in all honesty say that eating this salad just now (I did eat it. Mostly.) was nearly as difficult as it has been in similar circumstances with full-calorie dressing. I literally almost cried about three times while eating what I could of this salad.

The above-pictured experience was NOT my salad experience. I want a damn lunch do-over.

Food and Marriage, Part 2

2011-02-03T12:22:00.003-05:00

The husband, like so many people, has a totally skewed idea on what kind of time and activity it takes to lose or gain weight. The skewing often translates into his not eating for an extended period of time, and then usually doing what a lot of people do after skipping several meals: pigging out.

He called me from home today sounding agitated. I was worried it was something work-related that I'd messed up on, and my stomach clenched, because the husband doesn't have a great rack record with handling momentary crises in a reasoned, rational way.

Nope. He was calling to snap at me to not keep food around the house.

'Member that recent post about how "there's no real food here"? 'Member that?

He was calling to snap at me to not keep food around the house.

So, what, two weeks ago, we have, "Where is my sandwich stuff? Where are my snacks?" Today we have, "Why did you buy Wheat thins??? I can't have this stuff around here!"

Actually, it's around here because, even though I'm psychic and I know exactly when you've changed your mind about "your" foods around the house, I just don't do anything with my amazing telepathic knowledge simply to spite you.

He wants me not to keep food around the house. He wants me not to keep snacks I eat around the house. When I told him in no uncertain terms that that was unfair to me, he suggested I hide the food from him. Hiding food. Yeah. That's exactly what I need to do. To be fair, that white chocolate I mentioned in a recent post? I "hide" that at his request... I "hide" it in the freezer. So it's not as if we're talking about a secret cupboard under the couch or something.

But still.

He wants me to hide food, because he has problems not blowing through a whole box of crackers when he's bored, or when he's skipped meals, etc. He wants me to hide my food.

You guys, I just don't know. I just. don't. know.

Update: I got home and he'd actually thrown out my various snack foods, which amount to my real foods at home. Well, those and the apples and bananas. Yelling was involved. Yelling and a patently obscene amount of bloody daydreams. So much blood.

Update 2: He is now very contrite. I figure I should say so here in the interest of fairness. But there still might be blood and fractured skull pieces embedded in the walls.

Open Letter

2011-01-27T10:24:00.001-05:00

Dear Winter,

This is Manhattan, not Minnesota. That's enough now.

That's the moon this morning on my way to work. You can sort of see it now, as opposed to last night, when you could not see anything, except possibly your hand in front of your face, provided you didn't extend your arm all the way out.

Those are the trees outside our building. That's the snow that's about to break their branches.

That's a single-file line on the un-shoveled sidewalk. It goes over packed ice.

That's a cab. And another one behind it. They're stuck. I watched their tires smoking trying to get out.

That right-there on the left of this last picture? That's a NYC bus. It's not running.

That's enough, Winter. I love you, but that's enough.

Food and Marriage

2011-01-23T15:15:00.001-05:00

"The way to a man's heart is through his stomach." Huh. Ugh.

Welcome to one of the infrequent times that I blog forthrightly about my marriage's interaction with my eating disorder. Summary: it's hard.

This afternoon after I finished cleaning (I always end in the kitchen), the husband harrumphed in, ate a Macintosh apple, and started going through the cabinets in search of more food. He picked up a box of dark chocolate-covered fortune cookies one of Les Comtesses sent me for my birthday last week and started opening and eating them.

"There's a piece of paper in that," I informed him, since I wasn't sure he noticed. Once I saw that he was eating more than one (there were only six or so in the little box, and I'd already had two) I told him, in a deliberately pleasant voice, "Can you leave me those last two? Marzie sent them for my birthday. Or at least one?"

This question, innocent enough, occasioned a husband-style asshatsplosion (tm) of grievances. How was he supposed to know they were for my birthday? (He wasn't, I told him, that's why I said something now so he could leave me one or two.) Why did I always do that, I mean, not this time, but why did I always tell him in this nasty voice? (I let that one fly right by. You know what? Yes, I can be touchy and irritable about "my" food. That's part of the eating disorder.) Why was there never any food around here?

That last one was the one that got me. There is food around here, I told him. Apples, bananas, oranges, carrots, Triscuits and cream cheese and hummus, string cheese, Gold Fish and walnuts, there's deli turkey in the fridge (honey maple for me and regular for him because he hates honey maple turkey). As for meal-type stuff, we're New Yorkers: we order in. So there wouldn't be a lot of the makings of, say, a well-rounded dinner just lying around. Not that the huband could do anything with them if there were.

"That's not real food!" I was informed. As to the turkey, "To eat with what?! What about sandwich stuff? Bread and tomato slices and things to make sandwiches with?!" "I'm not psychic. I don't know if you want sandwich making stuff unless you tell me." "Why did you only buy one container of OJ yesterday?" "Because most people don't need more than one in a single day?" "Most people?! I mean, sometimes you stock up, but..." "You're right, because I don't want to carry a lot of stuff all the time, and because I don't want to constantly get delivery because it gets expensive." "Always these excuses!"

This hits me in two places.

1. It's not nineteen fifty-fucking-five, buddy. You have legs and money. You can buy your own damn food if I'm not buying you food you like.

2. This smacks me in the face with just how really far gone I am at the moment. It doesn't occur to me to buy deli meats with sandwich-making accoutrements that most people would buy with them. I look at the snack portion of the pantry and see a whopping two options: Triscuits and things that go with them; Goldfish and things that go with them. I look at the fruit and vegetable:more substantial food ratio in my kitchen and easily see why my doctor called to tell me that while my electrolytes are fine, my muscle mass is low.

2a. (And here we have the intersection) I am not speaking up and being honest, and I am not taking care of myself. Right now my eating disorder is functioning in that textbook role of caretaker. I take care of the husband on many levels, normative and dysfunctional, and that's as much as I'll say about it here. With all the taking care of him, there is no one to take care of me, at least not in a way that I'm letting them. Enter the Eating Disorder.

*sigh*

Exit, pursued by a bear.

Food Labeling: An Anecdote

2011-01-20T11:01:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, in the interest of not losing more weight, I picked up some chocolate covered pretzels while I was at the drug store. I wanted chocolate, but I also wanted something that felt a little more snack-like than, say, a Snickers. Plus, chocolate- or yogurt-covered pretzels aren't really a problem for me. Any person with an eating disorder has plenty but PLENTY of foods that someone might look at and go, "Really? You have no problem eating that? But you won't eat [less logically frightening food]??"

Anyway. Pretzels and I are okay.

As I was putting about the third pretzel in my mouth, I saw this:

Being a good little sleuth, I followed the asterisk. I saw this:

So then I figured I'd see exactly what the "flavor" came from. I saw this:

Okay, I thought, at least cocoa is ON there. Though by its place in the *cough* "confectionery coating" ingredients list, it's maybe 5% of the coating. Then, just for kicks, I took a gander at the nutritional info, with my finger covering the calorie info.

Now, listen. Fat and I have no problem. We're BFF. Yesterday I told my doctor that I'm basically subsisting on bananas, low-sodium V8, walnuts, almonds, and white chocolate right now.

But that? Up there? "Confectionery coating" is not worth THAT.

I went back out and got an overpriced, imported dark chocolate bar. It was the least I could do.

Weigh In

2011-01-19T12:27:00.000-05:00

So, we got the office space. I'm a commuter again, and frankly, it's kind of fabulous. The density of my panic attacks has plummeted for the most part*, and though of course adding expense is always a stress, the move seems to have actually... helped?

Well, at least palliatively it's helped. Nothing is concretely helping right now, as I'm at my lowest weight since 2003. Cheers.

You know the funny thing? Our office is near Renfrew's New York location. Five minute walk away.

It's a sign, but I'm at that totally unrealistic state of precontemplation of treatment, wherein I totally want to get better. But I want to get better and stay in the body in which I feel comfortable. That might be possible, but only if the person staying at this weight is in some alternate parallel universe.

* This morning notwithstanding. First doctor's appointment in a while. First official weigh-in in a while. Honestly, I felt like a kid being sent to the principal's office on my way to the doctor today.

Confused

2011-01-14T18:56:00.000-05:00

Here's what I think happened. I think my body heard me going on about, "Can't wait for Shadowfever, must find Shadowfever, so crazy excited for Shadowfever," and it got confused. I think it just heard the "fever" part, and said to itself, "You... You want a fever? Are you... I mean, if you're sure. [apprehensive pause] Okay, I guess I'll just go find a rhinovirus, then. Cheers."

My body is not very detail-oriented. Either that or it's just an idiot.

The Noise of the Street Enters the House

2011-01-09T01:15:00.002-05:00

Well, hi there. Long time.

So, tonight was my mother-in-law's birthday party. If I have one more person tell me how skinny I am, I am going to throw something through a window.

When I saw my parents over Christmas, I could tell they were worried. But, being minimally educated* about eating disorders they expressed their concerns in ways related to my life, not my weight. (See how they're not the same things??) Recently when I asked my dad what he wants for his birthday, he told me, "Just for you to be happy." This is how you communicate with someone to tell them that you understand that some Shit Is Going Down with them right now.

What you don't do is see someone who was at a healthy weight last time you saw them and say, "You've sure gotten skinny!" with a big damn smile on your face. What you don't do, especially if you're a psychologist (a psychologist, people), is furrow your brow and purse your lips, saying, "Wellll, you've gotten... slender," with a knowing look in your narrowed eyes. What you don't do, as you're leaving the party, is exclaim where everyone is looking and listening, "Wow, you lost weight," leaving your conversational target to stammer something about, "Uh, been busy, stressed and stuff," while other people look on, prompting your spouse to chime in, "Yeah, between you and [your husband] you've lost - well, you didn't have a lot of weight on you, but especially him! He really lost a lot!"

Oh, you guys. Ohhhhhhhh, you guys. I mean, really, most of the party was fine, but, ohhhhhh you guys. After tonight, I just don't even have the energy to discuss with you the friend my husband had over who just. kept. telling me. how little I was. I mean, I was going to whinge about that one, but after the party it's just superfluous, yes?

So, what now? Now when I gain weight, am I fat to these people? I mean, it's really fantastic that, either way I look at it (low weight/average weight/high weight), these extended family members by marriage know, whether they know it or not, when I Have My Shit Together and when Shit Is Going Down. It's just so exciting to me that my mind and body have conspired to inform the world at large about my inner peace. I'm just so thrilled.

I'm just so over it.

But not quite over it enough to, you know, eat nearly enough at dinner. Because that would be silly.

The Noise of the Street Enters the House

Umberto Boccioni

(via Wikimedia)

* Obviously my parents are more than minimally educated about eating disorders. What I mean is that it takes the absolute bare minimum of education about eating or body issues to know that fixating on weight is Thing Number One Not To Do.

2010, GTFO, TYVM

2010-12-31T22:30:00.000-05:00

Not that it was as bad for me as 2009. OH NO, NOT NEARLY. I'm not sure anything could have outdone the year of YHGTBFKM. But 2010 managed to hold a candle, or possibly a torch, alongside 2009.

Anyway, I've got a wee bit of tawny port, some noisy neighbors, a softly snoring husband, and a hot date:

Let the New Year's subdued revelry commence.

Christmas List

2010-12-26T14:44:00.001-05:00

I've got to let my thoughts on Christmas marinate for a few days. In the meantime, some predictable bullet points:

The instant I served my pear-walnut upside-down cake, my mom said, "Look, walnuts are good for ya!" to my dessert-averse father-in-law. He immediately muttered, "Yeah... Good for you..."
My mother still eats the way she did when I was growing up: getting several tiny helpings that total to one "normal" sized helping. Somewhere along the way I seem to have omitted the "several" part in my "how to eat appropriately" instincts.
I actually baked with butter and sugar instead of Smart Balance and Splenda. Predictably, the results were much more enjoyable and satisfying, in that it was easier to eat an appropriate amount.
I don't really know the calorie density of venison, and eff you if you tell me because I don't really want to know.
That newfangled china you can pop in the dishwasher is pretty much the best thing ever, especially for a Manhattan-sized kitchen.
My dad was telling a story about the Great Recession and said, "It'll be something I can tell my grandchildren - if I ever have any - about. It's been that big of a change for me." It is hard to accurately describe the stab of feeling I had, but there is probably a German word for it that might translate to PanicOfOnlyChildGuiltAndFrenziedOvarianWanting. I want a child. I really do. But my eating disorder is the first of only several Big Issues that have got to be tackled before we start trying. I'm turning 29 in January and my mom was 32 when she had me, so since I measure Everything I Do against my mother (trufax), I'm starting to feel like I am Running Out Of Time to choose between being as thin as I want to be (not really what it's about) and being able to procreate and possibly raise a girl child (not to say that boy children can't have bodily hangups) in a physically and mentally healthy environment.

That seems a good bullet point of excessive parentheticals upon which to leave the list. Actually, forget the marinating. That's really all I'd like to think about Christmas. 2011, here I come. GTFO of my way.

December Deaths

2010-12-12T12:27:00.002-05:00

I'd kind of like December to stop stripping away my family. In December '07 my cousin Sara, not quite a year older than I, died. Last December, just short of her 89th birthday, my Nana died. The wake was on her birthday. She had been ready since my Grandpa passed in '98, but... you know. She was the grandparent I was closest to, without a doubt. She was a hugely formative influence on who I am as a person, and any time I appreciate some of my favorite things - tea, fairies, literature, history - I am grateful for her and I miss her.

On Friday my oldest cousin, Billy, suffered a massive stroke. Yesterday afternoon he died easily. The last time I saw him was Nana's funeral. Despite the fact that we were fairly different in beliefs and priorities, we always shared... I don't know. I don't really know how to put it. I loved him. I really did.

He was planning a trip, and his last Facebook status update read, "Got two tickets to Paradise!" He would have been only 42 in January. He leaves behind my aunt and uncle and my cousin Elizabeth. Also, the twelve-year-old daughter and ten- and four-year-old sons. You know. Because that's fair.

As I told one of les Comtesses yesterday, December begins to be on my shit list.

Thinking Disorderedly

2010-12-10T18:35:00.001-05:00

After working from a home office since mid-2006, today we started looking at actual office space. That's a stressful, high-risk proposition. Imaginary friends, you know I live in New York. And you, my imaginary friends, are smart. Being smart, you know New York is expensive. Being smart and intuitive (did I mention you're attractive, too?), you can see why looking at office space is a stressful thing.

So even if I were eating three square meals a day and in no way mistreating my own body, I'd have known I wasn't out of the eating disorder woods as soon as I stepped into these offices and started simply thinking.

The first place I went to was food:

How will I eat what I want to eat for lunch if I have to plan ahead? Sometimes all I want it apples. Sometimes I can handle a salad. Sometimes all I can stand is string cheese. This week I had soup for lunch for the first time in about a year. What is going to happen to my acrobatic routine of snacks and noshes? If I stray from my carefully calibrated comfort settings, I get irritable or angry or just quiet and sad. Not necessarily conducive to working efficiently. If I accidentally open my palate up again by having temptation in my face at delis and cafes, am I going to end up just eating and eating and eating and....? Working from home, I've slowly whittled down my food choices to what I know I'll feel comfortable with throughout the day, both in substance and quantity.

It didn't help that earlier in the day I'd only had a chance to consume a banana and some Goldfish crackers and walnuts; and two small apples and some string cheese. Also, some tea. This is between waking and 6:00 p.m. When you're hungry, you think about food. When you're hungry and you have an eating disorder, you think about food disorderedly.

After food, I went to body:

That woman who just stepped out of that office is really thin. Am I going to be around her every day? What does she eat? Am I going to compare myself to here every time I see her? I don't know how I fit here, literally. I felt everything, every bulge over my bra, every jut of my hip bones as I walked, even every tired, dry blink.

Not eating much earlier came into play again here. The immediate mental association with missing meals is losing weight. If you're theoretically losing weight, then that's theoretical weight you could theoretically regain by one stupid move. When you're in a stressful situation, you can feel out of place. When you're in a stressful situation and you have an eating disorder, you feel out of place disorderedly.

Now it's 6:30, so I've been awake for twelve hours, and haven't managed to add to that list of today's vittles. I psyched myself out, what with one thing and another on a tense, stressed-out day, and I'm sitting here with diet ginger ale and pretty much no desire to eat. And I'm feeling blasé, proud, sheepish, stupid, angry, excited, accomplished, ridiculous, nervous, and sad all at once. Most people don't get much of a chance to eat on a given day, they say screw it and forget about it. Right now, I have a lurking feeling - and I know it's patently dotty - that my self-worth rests on my decision of whether or not to have dinner. And I could make a case for winning or losing at life either way.

The interesting thing will be to see what happens when I do, inevitably, eat dinner. Will I have decided that's winning or losing?

Let's Ponder Some Disturbing Things

2010-12-07T14:40:00.002-05:00

Disturbing Thing #1

This is Scabior, the Snatcher from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, as brought to life on screen by actor Nick Moran. Scabior, we must understand, is a nasty, evil villain in both the book and the movie; the movie ups his creep factor by having him sniff Hermione's hair and generally be threateningly suggestive. Nick Moran, we must understand, is an empirically attractive actor.

Here's the Disturbing Thing: People are shipping Scabior and Hermione.

Which just goes to prove (again) if you make it pretty, no matter how Bad it is, people will like it.

Update: Disturbing Thing #1a, to go with Deathly Hallows Part 2

Disturbing Thing #2

Hospitalizations for problems caused by eating disorders grew 18 percent from 1999 to 2006, with the steepest rise among children under age 12 (up 119 percent)

Fabulous! Great news! The obesity panic is working! And it's exciting to see mental health treatment in this country be really prioritized! Nothing helps someone with a psychological disorder get better like taking away all their treatment options by not reimbursing for them! Awesome!

You know, I think those are the only Disturbing Things I care to deal with just at the moment. Carry on.

Life Is Inconsiderate Of My Borderline Reading Addiction

2010-12-01T11:27:00.006-05:00

There is too much I desperately want to reread right now, but there's also too much I want to read for the first time right this second now, but there's too much work to do, but I feel too frenetic to focus on work, but I can't just read because I'll feel guilty, and also I don't know what to pick to read and oh you guys, my life is hard.

The constant low-grade nausea of anxiety isn't helping with my appetite, which means that I am in an equally constant and low-grade state of shaky low blood sugar.

Also, I have a cold.

I need a teleportation device so I can go cuddle sloths in Costa Rica. They can use their awesome claws to turn pages for me. Do they have otters in Costa Rica? Maybe a baby sloth/otter pup rescue. The otters can sit on my tummy while the sloths read over my shoulder. And it doesn't have to be in Costa Rica; I'm not that picky.

Monday Funday!

2010-11-29T09:40:00.000-05:00

You guys know what's so much fun? An anxiety attack that takes hold at about 11:00 p.m. and doesn't loose its grip until a good while after 3:00. And then the cat wakes you up at 5:00. So much fun!

And this morning it looks like I've got to bust out the regal otter (the official mascot of Les Comtesses) to get my digestive system in line before I hurl* all over my desk.

SO MUCH FUN!

* and before you ask, no, I am not pregnant.
(otter pic ganked from Google Images. awesome graphics aaaalll me.)

Things I Learned This Thanksgiving

2010-11-25T22:45:00.000-05:00

- A lot of people google "cynical thanksgiving." I mean, a lot.

- No matter how many times I hope differently [see: not really all that cynical], every time the food comes out, the conversation will always, always turn to diet/weight loss.

- There is no way to look interested when someone starts talking about home improvements.

- I have a real and true hang-up with not eating something green at every meal. (There was no green vegetable. This bothered me more than any other thing about the food, including the desserts.)

- The cat will always drag his tail through his own poop right before you have to leave, not one moment before. And you will always insist on washing it out with the organic shampoo because you don't want his woogums to ingest all the chemicals in the Paul Mitchell or Tresemé crap you usually wash your hair with.

- It is never too early to put up the artificial Christmas tree.

boidz!

(Being a paranoid kitty mommy, I just can't bring myself to get a real tree, since their sap is so toxic and their needles so very dangerous to the kitty digestive system. We love our kitty 'round these here parts. In case you couldn't tell.)

Thanksgiving and Trolls

2010-11-25T12:04:00.000-05:00

The below post has a blocked comment. Said comment was blocked thanks to an ingenious bit of code written by someone whom I've never met. This person counts as a better practitioner of Christian values than does the "Christian" blocked commenter, just by virtue of his willingness to put time and effort into writing a hatred-blocking code for a score of bloggers whom he's never even met.

The troll you can no longer see, and whom I won't name because he doesn't deserve the attention, enjoys making disgusting threats against atheist blogs, and against those who comment on those blogs. One of our beloved Comtesses, Personal Failure, writes Forever In Hell, a blog that often takes an excoriating look at organized religion. Since I comment at Hell, our troll followed me here some months ago. He has made it his mission, apparently, to post threatening and disgusting comments on posts in which I pour my heart out. He tends to ignore the generic posts, the funny posts, the posts about my kitteh. Where he usually pops up is posts like the one below. These are the posts that often pour out of my fingertips and straight onto the virtual page because in the moment, there is nothing I can do but write in order to exorcise some of my despair, some of my obsession, any of my hopelessness. It's to these posts that the troll inevitably arrives to remind me that, yeah, sometimes people really are just that shitty.

What makes him particularly shitty is that I don't really talk about atheism here. I do talk about my support of equal rights across the gender and sexuality spectrum, a believe you won't find supported in the canon of many religions, but other than that, I keep it pretty separate. Hell, a lot of atheists wouldn't even consider me an atheist, considering my bone-level, strictly-unsupported-by-evidence belief in some kind of Quantum Field type of interconnection among all atoms in the universe. It really is kind of a non-theist kind of woo, this feeling.

But that doesn't stop our troll from trolling all over my most vulnerable posts. Since he purports to gleefully wait until he can behead atheists in the name of Jesus, I just can't help but point out that Jesus probably wouldn't be all about beheading me. Just a guess.

Anyway, this Thanksgiving I'd like to give Thanks for fellow bloggers who are fighting the good fight and keeping this asshat troll at bay with consistent work and collaboration, and handy-dandy code generation. Thanks, allies!

Why Food Rules Piss Me The Fuck Off

2010-11-19T15:28:00.005-05:00

(Or, "In Which I Eschew My Usual Eschewing of the F Word ['Fuck,' Not 'Fat']")

I was about to go to Starbucks. I was going to get an eggnog latte. I googled to see if I could determine the eggnog latte's availability so far this season, and the top page was this one:

www.starbucks.com/menu/drinks/espresso/eggnog-latte

You know where that goes? To a nutritional chart right smack dab in front of your face. I didn't know how many calories were in an eggnog latte. I didn't want to know. I wanted to go order a tall nonfat fucking eggnog latte with no fucking whipped cream, and I wanted to fucking enjoy it.

Know what happens now? I have two choices. I can go to Starbucks and get a tall nonfat eggnog latte without whipped cream, and I can drink it, and I can try to enjoy it, but I can just about guarantee you that I will crash and burn at that one. Or I can sit here and not have an the latte, and not feel disgusting and horrific about myself... Until I start tallying up all the other calories from today, because seeing calories is a huge trigger for me. All I wanted to know was whether the eggnog latte was available yet. What I got instead was (to me) harmful information without my consent. (Getting pissed off writing this post is my attempt to distract myself from the urge to tally until it passes.)

Last Friday, Mike Huckabee was a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher, and they talked about the "nanny state" and weight loss. (Huckabee used to be quite overweight.) Maher (about whom I have such mixed feelings that they could've come out of a blender) told Huckabee he was wrong about Mayor Bloomberg wanting to institute a salt restriction on foods in NYC restaurants. No, Maher said, what actually happened was the public decided it wanted less salt and restaurants started to respond to that. Capitalism. Actually, Bill was wrong, and Mike was right. I posted about the NYC salt restriction at the time, pointing out that our Mayor was imposing his own food hang-ups on our whole city.

But you know, it doesn't matter, ultimately, if a food rule imposed on the masses came down from on high or evolved from a grass-roots obsession. Starbucks, for instance, posted calorie information long before Bloomberg instituted his calorie rule (which was separate from the salt issue). In the obesity panic, no one stops to consider whether the obsession gets us anywhere, and people like me (sorry, I do occasionally insist on being counted, you know) don't just get disregarded; we get hurt.

Another thing Huckabee noted in his Real Time appearance was how he'd grown up with a mindset that allowed him to have a very unhealthy relationship with food. "Were you good? You get ice cream! If you weren't good, you get no ice cream." (I paraphrase.) Huckabee had to re-contextualize food in order to have a healthy relationship with it. Do I ever get that. Food as reward or punishment is huge in America; all splashing calories around at "celebratory" food places does is add a really sick ingredient to an already ailing recipe.

Contextualization is key in the whole obesity panic/disordered eating dichotomy. So what the hell kind of context are we constructing with the passive-aggressive posting of calorie info, whether at the supposed behest of the masses, or at the father-knows-best recommendations of public policy makers? We're constructing a shitty, passive-aggressive context, and that is why food rules piss me the fuck off.

Oh, For The Love

2010-11-15T13:26:00.000-05:00

"So, you just kind of snack all day?"

".... Uh...." Awesome. Now I'm going to feel self-conscious every time I put something in my mouth for the rest of the week. Thanks. "I guess it depends on the day." So about that work thing that is in no way related to my body or my eating, both of which you keep commenting on...

Truly. The "you just snack all day" comment is from someone who on Thursday wanted to know how I stay "so little."

I would just like this opportunity to point out, yet again, how deeply weird it is - when you really stop to think about it - that we feel it's totally normal to comment on another person's body and eating habits. What, is this person looking to me for tips? Go to a nutritionist, because my methods sure as shit won't get you anywhere. Is this person looking for conversation? That's absolutely fine, but why do we women default to body and food? Why? Whyyyyyy? I frigging hate it. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. Don't ask me about how I eat unless you want to hear the true answer, which is, "Yes, I do tend to snack several times a day rather than eat three big meals, because if I try to eat the three 'big' meals then more likely than not I'm going to freak out at the feeling of fullness, and end up vomiting, and it just gets soooo tiring cleaning up the bathroom and drinking all that V8 so my electrolytes don't get out of whack, you know?" I mean, really. Just don't ask. DON'T. DO IT.

/ whiny rant.

pic source

Trigger Happy

2010-11-15T09:51:00.001-05:00

I could itch my skin off today. Since I am not an allergy-prone person, this is either dry skin or a psychosomatic symptom of wanting to GTFO of my body. (Probably it's a combination of both. It's happened before.)

Triggers are everywhere I look lately. When one is so inclined, just about anything can be a trigger to obsess about body or food or both. That thin woman over there? Trigger. The post-partum weight loss post on a friend's blog? Trigger. A dinner scene in a TV show, my in-laws buying lunch, doing the laundry, getting dressed, getting undressed, sitting in a particular position, looking at clothing in person or online, hearing about the weight loss efforts of others, eating anything, simply being hungry, seeing babies (sets off thoughts of whether I'll ever be healthy enough to have one), seeing old people (sets off thoughts of long term realities of always! being! thin!), talking to my parents, checking my email, ignoring my email, going for a walk, sitting around like a slug, breakfast time, lunch time, dinner time, reading the feminist blogs, stumbling across news related to food/diet/obesity/health. All triggers.

Basically, everything is a trigger right now except for books, and the cat.

There we go. That's better.

Work, Pancakes, Blah Blah Blah

2010-11-09T20:13:00.000-05:00

Work is conspiring to make me into a hollow imitation of a well-rounded adult. I have to train someone starting tomorrow and I am not so very hot at delegating.

To say that I fulfill the control freak stereotype of the eating disordered person would be inaccurate. ... But I don't really want to teach you how to do that because I can just do it myself and that way I'll know if it's done right and if it's not I'll know what's wrong with it, how 'bout you just watch YouTube all day or something, no, this is not too much work for me to handle on my own, I don't know what you're talking about.

Because that always ends well for everyone. We're certainly not going to talk about how it ends for the food or lack thereof or glut thereof or stressing over thereof or what-have-you-ing thereof. (Why ever would we talk about that on an eating disorder blog? Psh.) We're mostly not talking about it because my higher brain functions have all been subsumed by work, and, re: the food thing, are only capable of producing this kind of analysis: ".... Uhhhhhh...."

While work is eating my brain, please have a symbolic-type picture, courtesy of Cheezburger:

Get it? Because if I can conquer eating pancakes (e.g.) appropriately and happily, I can conquer the world? Get it? Get it?

Oh, never mind. I'll just go back to work now.

Puzzle

2010-11-03T08:41:00.000-04:00

As you probably deduced from the bra situation, my weight is creeping back up to that acceptable-on-the-BMI-charts level where it was for a bit several months ago. At the same time, life is very busy and stressful, and I don't have much time to do the little, daily things I associate with me.

The questions, then: Am I gaining weight because I am depressed? Or am I depressed because I am gaining weight? Or are the weight gain and the depression coinciding accidentally? Or am I feeling more acutely because I am getting back to a healthy weight?

I don't know the answer, but I do know that I just ordered this shirt:

From Natalie Dee / Sharing Machine, and truly unrivaled as a summary of modern times. Plus, it's much more succinct than Being and Nothingness. Or even Le Mythe de Sisyphe, for that matter. Brevity and wit and all that. Whoopdee doo.

Enough

2010-11-02T09:30:00.001-04:00

The husband is trying to lose weight. To this end, he's eating more healthfully, and to that end, he's taking alli.

I have thoughts, the not least-disordered of which being, "If he's doing it, why aren't I allowed to?"

I can't stand my body right now. I really can't stand it. I'm being generally better to it, and I feel as if it's getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and....

I hate being stuck in the hate. I would love to love my body. I would love to love that I breathe without thinking about it, that my neurotransmitters are basically on track, that the little wounds I accumulate from living heal a little more each time I sleep. It ought to be enough. I try. I go through the motions. I try to make it enough. It ought to be enough.

Who's up for a little Regina Spektor?

(I've got a perfect body, but sometimes I forget)
(I've got a perfect body 'cause my eyelashes catch my sweat)
(Yes they do, they do....)

Boobs. I Have Thoughts On Mine.

2010-11-01T16:24:00.000-04:00

I have to buy some bigger bras. I have larger sized ones than those I'm wearing now, but the band size on them is still too big. I need to buy my current band size and a larger cup size.

I have in my head the belief that most women under a certain cup size would enjoy this fact, or even be tickled by it.

I would like to get out some Ace bandages and get this shit under control. We're not talking A to DD here, either. We're talking 32C to 32D*. I also have 34B and 34C idling in my lingerie drawer, but they haven't been used lo these many months. I'm just.... not amused. I am so very ready for my body to quit it and do what I tell it to.

(Right. Because it always does.)

* I swear, it would make my life if American bra designers would actually have a constant cup size from band to band. Does it drive anyone else nuts that the B cup of a 32B and the B cup of a 34B are two completely different B's? Because I find that just so ridiculous and nonsensical. If I could have an actual 32 band with the C cup from a 34C bra, my life would be complete, but no. They're forcing me to buy a 32D because They want more of my money, because They are greedy assholes.

Infuriating, Meet Ineloquent

2010-10-27T17:31:00.000-04:00

I usually associate Marie Claire with being the "thinker" of the fluffy lady magazines. You know, they're the one that sends journalists to cover female genital mutilation, or sex trafficking in Southeast Asia, or Darfur. (And then run the stories next to the diet pill ads, I mean.)

I do not expect this from Marie Claire.

Should "Fatties" Get a Room? (Even on TV?)

Okay, did you read it? If the answer is yes and your eyes didn't pop and proceed to dribble down your face, congratulations, it must not piss you off quite as much as it does me.

Let's start with last things first: the author, Maura Kelly, added this update after she found herself in a veritable shit storm almost as soon as she hit the "publish" button:

UPDATE: I would really like to apologize for the insensitive things I've said in this post. Believe it or not, I never wanted anyone to feel bullied or ashamed after reading this, and I sorely regret that it upset people so much. A lot of what I said was unnecessary. It wasn't productive, either.

That's nice. But here's the problem: the unnecessary and unproductive things you said? You still said them. But let's at least take Maura's apology, and continue to what's in the post.

I'm not some size-ist jerk.

Hm. Okay. But you just said this:

To be brutally honest, even in real life, I find it aesthetically displeasing to watch a very, very fat person simply walk across a room -

Wait for it, now it's time to justify it:

— just like I'd find it distressing if I saw a very drunk person stumbling across a bar or a heroine addict slumping in a chair.

Later in the update I quoted first, Maura points out that she feels equally uncomfortable when she sees an anorexic person as when she sees a morbidly obese person, so at least that one is diametrically opposed.... sort of....

By the by, there are plenty of "fatties" on TV. Ever seen half the game and reality shows out there? Overweight and obese contestants are - at a minimum - semi-regularly featured on Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, Wipeout (look, I don't know where I came up with that one either), Wife Swap, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Supernanny.... shall I go on? Is it just that "fatties" aren't allowed to have love lives?

My issue with the Marie Claire post is really the entire framing of the thing. They tell you when you're little that there's no such thing as a stupid question, but "should we watch fat people making out on TV?" IS A STUPID QUESTION. I am not being very eloquent here - at ALL - but, sorry, I just can't. The question she SHOULD be asking is, "Why the HELL do I care so much about someone else's body?" It's not really about money, although that's the trendy excuse. (The "fat people are costing us money" trope is tired, and if anyone actually wanted to enact change around other people's behavior for their health, Prohibition would never have been repealed, and cigarettes would have followed booze.) And it sure ain't the health of the ~~other person~~ total freaking stranger motivates the obsession at a mass level, or else there wouldn't be reality shows like Intervention. And if it were actually unappealing to watch extremely drunk people do something like make out, as Maura suggests, then movies like Knocked Up wouldn't make quite so much money. Considering its entire premise is extremely drunk people having unprotected sex. To me that's a lot more disturbing than two people, who happen to be fat, smooching.

So really, the framing is off. The question shouldn't be, "Should we watch fat people making out on TV?" The question ought to be, "What is it about me that it makes me so uncomfortable watching fat people making out on TV?" If Maura had stepped back and considered where her discomfort came from, her post could have been worth reading, I'd expect. But this version is, sadly, only worth flaming.

Fun and Fascinating

2010-10-27T12:27:00.000-04:00

An article on Dr. Samira Kawash and her studies and blog on American culture and candy in today's NY Times.

Oh Bother

2010-10-25T19:55:00.006-04:00

Well, the weekend went as weekends with aging grandparents do. It was good that I went, because my mother was sorely in need of a mental health break. We took a drive to the Ashokan Reservoir (as you may have seen) and ate at the most incongruously French restaurant possible in podunk Hudson Valley New York (sorry, Kingston, but it's true).

I haven't lost weight since Paris, so this trip had just the right kind of vibe for the following, because my mother made numerous references to worrying about me, worrying if I'm happy, worrying if I'm healthy. And not in a maudlin or overbearing way, either. (Which she'd be the first to admit, she's prone to.)

I don't know. I feel very at odds with the world, and not particularly in a way centered around my body, even. Just... You know. You've felt it before. Off kilter. Out of joint. Like the upper and lower halves of your body are slightly disconnected from each other, like a magician's assistant in one of the mirror boxes. I believe there's a word for it.

"Meh."

In a finer age, I think they called it ennui.

Well, buck up, li'l cowpoke, right!? I'm going to the Rally to Restore Sanity* later this week, there to briefly commune with La Comtesse Marzie. And by golly, my head** and my foot*** will cooperate on Saturday.

* I purchased a perfectly ironic shirt. This one. The irony. Do you see it?
** The computer monitor's brightness is turned aallll the way down, and I am mainlining Excedrin****
*** I had a ganglion cyst on my right foot. Had it aspirated in February. It came back after about a month. I waited to deal with it until I "had" to, i.e., when I could no longer wear any form of non-open-top shoe. BAD IDEA. I just had it kind of aspirated again today, and apparently they get more solid the longer you let 'em go. So now I'll have to have it excised (outpatient surgery). But by Godot, I will wear my awesome boots to the Rally.
**** Probably not the best idea, considering I had a large-gauge needle shoved into my foot earlier today. Still waiting for the Excedrin to work, too.

Weekend Reading Assignment

2010-10-22T13:43:00.002-04:00

I'll be in Kingston this weekend lending mental support to my mother. My grandma fell and fractured her hip last week, and had surgery last Saturday. My mom arrived up there last Saturday and is being relieved by her brother on Sunday. I think she might have gone a wee bit bonkers in the ensuing week.

I'll be reading the second volume of The Orphan's Tales by Catherynne Valente, and trying not to rush through it, at that.

YOU will be reading the following and considering its applications to the "body as public property" theory that's popular 'round these here parts.

Why Can't Middle-Aged Women Have Long Hair?
by Dominique Browning for the NY Times

I have a horror of short hair with my face shape. Granted, if I don't layer a bit toward the front, my face goes from "rather long" to "is that a horse?" so long hair by itself doesn't do right by me either. But I admit that it gives me hives to think about "having" to chop off all my hair one day. And I, sir, will not be doing it. (She says now.)

Anyway. Read, discuss, ponder what little changes you feel you "have" to make to fit in with your class, your age, your gender, your identity. And think about whether you really have to.