August 2002

 

August 1 2002          9 :42 AM

K2 kindly took me on a field trip to The mighty mighty Berkeley Bowl.  If America is about abundance, the Bowl is church. At least when comes to fruits and veggies. I ran from one display of peaches to the next. There must have been eight (or twenty) varieties. I got purple asparagus and yellow beans, little fingerling potatoes and golden raspberries, two kinds of avocado, plums, peaches, zebra tomatoes, mango, cherries, shitakes, watercress. It was so much fun.

 

Sometimes, in my web wandering, I find folks who are on a diet and daily write down what they eat on line as part of a diet chronicle.

 

Let me say this first. I DON'T CARE IF YOU DIET. I do not disapprove. It's your body. It's your life. It's your web page.

 

OK. As I was saying. I see these lists of what people are eating and I always think that what dieting does is make you think about your food. And in some  ways that's a good thing.

 

I have my own judgements about good and bad when it comes to food. Standing at the door of the Bowl, looking at row after row of beautiful produce, I thought, food is good.

 

I didn't say much about this guy and his law suit. I think when it was being talked about I was in my checked out place. I have no love of fast food. NONE. If every fast food joint in the world closed ... I probably wouldn't notice. But I don't think this guy is fat because he eats fast food. MANY people eat fast food and do not get fat. Only people with a genetic predisposition toward fatness will get fat.

 

I do think the fast food industry contributes to the decline in people's health and well being. There are plenty of reasons to sue the fast food industry. But ya know ... if you're poor and you work two jobs trying to keep your family fed and you never have any time ... you may eat fast food. Even if you're not poor you may just be too busy to think about your food. Or you may not have the interest. Makes sense to me. In a sad sorta way.

 

I loved it when Jose Bove drove his tractor into the McDonalds. He was just released from prison Bove wrote this great piece in the Guardian In which he coins the term malbouffe.

 

Malbouffe implies eating any old thing, prepared any old way. The word has become universally accepted to express a confused unease, a mixture of guilt and accusation.

 

Malbouffe is completely uniform; it's food from nowhere, not even a degeneration of American culture. Everywhere the same labels, the same way of running the "restaurants".

 

The difference with the diet mentality is that it's punitive. It holds the idea that if you ate a cookie instead of asparagus you were/are very bad. A nutritionist, Karin Katrina, that I read on the Show me the data list talked about broccoli and pizza.

 

I ask my audiences to name a healthy food, and an unhealthy food..... it is amazing the consistency with which I hear "broccoli" and "pizza".  I ask, if a person has not had enuf protein on a given day, but plenty of fruits and vegetables, would broccoli be a good choice for dinner.  NO, broccoli would serve to detract from health because the body needs protein, not more fiber or antioxidents.  Would broccoli or pizza be more health enhancing that day?????  Pizza would be the "healthy food" that day. 

 

I then ask, if you were to be put in prison for 6 months and had as your only 2 choices of food for that time period the "healthy" broccoli or the "unhealthy" pizza, which would promote the most health during that time....the answer is the unhealthy pizza, in fact, the healthy broccoli might promote your death.

 

I'm lucky. I have choice. I might start writing about what I eat every day. This morning I had scrambled eggs with New Zealand sharp cheddar and zebra tomatoes on whole wheat tortillas. And cantaloupe. And Graffeo. It's early.

 

Pattie and Carl show today. They're going to talk about books like this one.

 

    

 

I want to be an honest man and a good writer, as James Baldwin was. I greatly admired him. He once told a story that I used in the third volume of Memory of Fire. He was very young, and he was walking down the street with a friend, a painter. They stop at a red light. "Look," says the friend. Baldwin sees nothing, except a dirty pool of water. The friend insisted: "Look at it, really." So Baldwin takes a good look and sees a spot of oil spreading in the puddle. In the spot of oil, he sees a rainbow, and the street moving, and people moving in the street; and he sees madmen and magicians and the whole world moving. The universe was there in that little pool. On that day, Baldwin said, he learned to see. For me, that's an important lesson. I am always trying to look at the universe through the little puddles in the streets.               - Eduardo Galeano

 

August 2 2002                          9:42 AM 

...and then I had a cherry scone, a handful of walnuts, a handful of veggie booty, couple of fork fulls of tuna salad, a carrot, and dinner with Renee at Da Flora. Featuring, the gnocchi, (of course), speck, olives, arugala and figs, roasted pork with barley and fennel, pappardelle with oyster mushrooms and warm chocolate cake.  We shared all that. I drank wine.

 

The food chronicling won't last long. It's entertaining for a while but I can't spend that much time thinking about it. I mostly eat in hand fulls though out the day. Or standing in front of the refrigerator with a fork or a spoon. I push myself to fix dinner ... on  a plate ... as much as I can. I always eat breakfast. Right now I'm eating Multi Grain Cheerios with milk and cantaloupe. And Graffeo. I do think it's good to be mindful about food.

 

Pattie left a comment yesterday that I don't want any one to miss.

 

I personally have a love/hate relationship with so-called "fast foods." I hate cooking. When I eat at home, I eat raw foods and cheeses and yogurt. I could probably survive on nuts and berries and not skip a beat. But I also eat at those "aweful places" two or three meals a week, usually on an extremely busy day when I have no time or money and I need some quick protein. But I note that usually I don't feel good afterward, I usually pay a price for the indulgence. However, sometimes, I feel okay, happy to have the salt and nutrients (yes, hamburgers have nutrients.)

I have what turns out to be, I guess, a radical theory that different people at different times need different kinds of food and that no one food is good for everyone or bad for everyone and that what is good or bad changes with circumstance.

I also think it is important to listen to how one's body feels before and after a meal. But this mindfulness is difficult to do, so I remain gentle with myself. After all, food obeys the spiritual principal that most things in life do, "this too shall pass." :)

 

Heh.

 

The field trip to The Bowl has me thinking like a cook again. And I am a food snob. When I eat a hamburger and french fries I (generally) eat them at Mo's, where they grind the meat fresh daily and use real fresh cut potatoes.

 

The dinner with Renee was about her birthday and the fact that she's leaving for college. In Ohio. Oberlin. Gasp.

 

My apartment building is usually pretty quiet. But last night, at one o'clock in the morning, someone was sitting in the parking lot listening to Marvin Gaye, REALLY LOUD. I love Marvin Gaye. But...there was no way to sleep, so I read. I'm sleep deprived and woozy. I was just thinking that I might have to go back to bed. Then I realized that I made some coffee but I never drank it.

 

Paul blogs that Adbusters is asking for feedback from fat culture. I'm writing my ... feedback ... now. Beginning with reminding them that fat and obese are different words, with different implications.

 

    

August 3 2002                          8 :28 AM 

Abeer sent me a link to this letter to the Prime Minister of Bangladesh urging her to do something about the way journalists are treated there.

I heard the same show on which I'd listened to Helen Caldicott interview Julia Butterfly Hill last week. Caldicott did a series of interviews and you can hear a bit of them on Pacifica stations.

 

Julia was deported from Ecuador a few weeks ago. She was there protesting the OCP pipeline.

 

I've been hearing about Diane Wilson a lot lately. She's on a hunger strike outside the Dow Chemical plant in Texas.

 

There are brave people doing brave things in the world.

 

I tried to work on the BSWP. It was a struggle. I eeked out three pages. I'm going to work on it aaaall day today.

 

Coz ... you know ... the summer ... is almost ...over.

 

    

 

August 4 2002               8 :05 AM

I'm having trouble sleeping. Then I do this funny thing. In the morning I gather up my breakfast stuff and go to the computer and read blogs while I eat. At a certain point I get my coffee. For the last few days I've been so spacey and not awake that I forget to go get the coffee. It just makes me laugh. But. Maybe it's only funny because I'm so tired.

 

I did get some writing done yesterday. But it is a struggle. The writing feels uneven and rushed. Ironic, since it seems to take an hour to write a sentence.

 

There was an interesting This American Life yesterday. They talked to some Israeli and Palestinian people about life in the war zone and the collapse of the peace process. They did a lot of talking about Camp David. It's always good to pick a moment in time as an anchor when trying to understand this conflict but it seems to me that every moment you pick has a counter moment. In other words, the conflict has two distinct perspectives (at least) and when you pick an event to discuss there is often a moment before then that can be seen as the event that was the cause. And that moment can be traced back. It is interesting to listen to people who live there. From both sides.

 

So, I wrote and listened to the radio and talked on the phone and ate purple asparagus, yellow beet and watercress salad, slept badly and now...I'm gonna do it all some more.

 

    

August 5 2002                  7 :50 AM

I got some writing done in the morning before swimming. Good thing I did because I couldn't focus in the afternoon. I made some comic attempts. Powered up Word. Stared at the screen. Played Spider Solitaire. Checked e-mail. Stared at the screen. started a cleaning project. Stared at the screen. Wrote a sentence. Played more solitaire.

 

It never really got much better.

 

But I did get the little bit done in the morning. Swimming was good. Lunch was good. took a nap. And then failed to do much else.

 

This all probably makes for pretty boring reading. I promise I'll get worked up over something. Soon. 

 

   

August 6 2002                  7 :50 AM 

I took a class with David called revolting Romantics in which he would give us two words (seemingly picked at random)  and tell us to write about them. We usually read these little bits out loud in class. Once he gave us the words madness and genius. I wrote this.

 

 

I am sitting on The Ship of Fools also known as the #14 Mission. I am trying to read Foucault.

 

Is this madness?

 

I am distracted by the sounds coming from a young man sitting across the aisle. I noticed him at the bus stop. He was walking as if his legs were permanently bowed and his knees no longer bent. It wasn’t so much walking, as it was a kind of cowboy shuffle.

 

Now he is making the noises often heard from people who have been deaf from birth, no consonant or sibilance. Later, with great force and agility, he will push his way through the crowd saying, “This is my stop, I have to get off.” Leaving me to wonder if it has all been some kind of performance piece.

 

Is this genius?

  

More distraction comes from the woman sitting next to me. She is wearing a white mask over her mouth, dark glasses, a winter coat and she has a cane which never hits the ground but rather swings errantly from her wrist bashing a knee or elbow of each person she passes. From the minute she boarded she began shouting  “Somebody please to give me a seat I can’t … somebody … a seat.”

 

The man who had been sitting beside me jumped up to let her sit down and now they are arguing because she thinks he's pushin up on her and she keeps saying, “ Be polite.” He responds by telling her to close her mouth because her breath stinks. Interesting that he has such olfactory acuity since the smell of gin permeates the air within a foot of him. He says, “I gave you a seat. Be cool.” She says, “Be cool.”

 

The driver is skipping stops because the bus is already quite full. Each time he passes a group of frantic people, cursing and flailing, and shouts come from the back of the bus, back door, back door.

 

Is this madness?

 

Foucault writes, “Navigation to the uncertainty of fate; on water, each of us in the hands of his own destiny; every embarkation is, potentially, the last. It is for the other world that the madman sets sail in his fools boat; it is from the other world that he comes when he disembarks. The madman’s voyage is at once a rigorous division and an absolute Passage.”

 

Is this genius?

 

It is time for me to disembark. I am on my way to class. In four weeks I will graduate. I am deeper in debt that I ever been. I am less employable than I have ever been. I spent an amount of money that I refuse to be totally conscious of so that I could read Foucault on a bus. I read Camus on the subway in New York and it only cost me a buck.

 

Moreover my current assignment entreats me to write about madness and genius and, clearly, I am having trouble discerning which is which.

 

 

Why am I shareing this with you now? Because last night I was on the #14 Mission again. The faces had changed, but the questions remain the same.

 

    

August 7 2002                          8 :07 AM

Cheryl very kindly sent  me a copy of Margaret Cho's book I'm the One That I Want. I read it on the bus. Much better than Foucault.

 

At first I wasn't sure about her. I can usually tell if someone is fat positive, fat negative, or size neutral. She seemed to be a bit fat negative. Just a bit. And then I got to the chapter where the people who are helping her to do her TV show have put her on a crash diet because she's too fat. They almost kill her.

 

I remember her show. I have never seen a photo of her where she looks fat. Not even a little fat. But, I know my perspective is skewed. Or... is it the perspective of the culture that is skewed? Hmmmm.

 

Anyway. When people like her talk about being fat I just want to say ... Oh. No. You are not fat. This is what fat looks like. But I know that she was told she was fat and she felt fat.

 

And she was not white. So, her body was just so wrong!!! She writes brilliantly about this.

 

She did a lot of drugs and body abuse. As I was reading I thought about all the years when I was less fat. Years when I was just a really big girl. And I lived with this belief that I was so fat and wrong and ugly.

 

I wasn't.

 

But, when you are told that your body is wrong and you never see anyone who looks like you in the media, you just stop caring about your body. You blame your body for all the things that are wrong in your life. No sex life, no job, it's all about the fat. And if you get a cold, or sprain a muscle, or have kidney failure, you just have this ... now what? ... feeling. The problem body is being a problem again. Can't it just leave me alone?!

 

Ah. Hmmm. No. I guess not.

 

One day I looked around and realized that thin women weren't always happy in love, or work, or life. They weren't always healthy and I thought hmmm...maybe it's not about being fat.

 

There are two things that are true. Thin and average sized people don't deal with the discrimination that fat people deal with. If you're fat and you go to a doctor about a sore throat you get diet pamphlets. If you look for a job you may be told you don't represent the company image. And sex... well...that's a whole conversation.

 

But happiness is another deal. Happiness is just odd. And not about fat/thin. For me things fall along a different line. Not happy/sad. But rather life/death.

 

I mean I have to learn to care about my body, my life, every day. I think a lot of folks have this problem. But I think my way of thinking about life is shadowed by years of being told that my body was wrong. Not valued. How am I suppose to value a body that I am told is not valuable...unless it's thin?

 

That's the daily process.

 

Ironically, I heard Cho on KPFA yesterday. Suddenly she's everywhere. And when she talks about diversity she includes size in the discussion. It seems like she may have some fat consciousness. Her book ends with her own experience of weight being very much in the Fat is a Feminist Issue mode. She got clear about loving herself and her weight leveled out. But...like I said...she's not fat. I have some resentment about the Orbach book.

 

Some of are fat. We do not have eating disorders. We're just fat.

 

It was good to read the Cho book. (Thank you Cheryl!) For many reasons. It made me laugh. It made me cry. It gave me some things to think about in terms of the BSWP. Which I worked on yesterday.

 

I think I'll have this tattooed on the back of my neck.

Thanks to Willa for the link.

 

Cheney is in town. Think he'll want to buy me lunch?

 

    

 

August 8 2002                          8:52 AM

 

I love San Francisco. He never did call to see if I wanted to have lunch. What's that about?

 

Liz left a comment yesterday that fit nicely into some thinking I've been doing lately about the funny line drawn in terms of who is fat and who is not. 

 

In the fat community there are many people who are not what I call fat. But in mainstream culture they are called fat. They suffer all the slings and arrows of fat as an expletive. So, when Margaret Cho says she's fat I understand what she means. She lived on diet pills and laxatives and cigarettes, trying to not be fat. She's paid her dues, as it were.

 

The culture sets the dial on what is fat at a ridiculously low place. And YES the people who live at the low end of the spectrum get what I mean about fat issues and fat consciousness.

 

There are the younger, smaller, members of the community, who are very physically active and eat good healthy food and are fat (by that kooky standard) and they're pissed. And they should be.

 

But if this revolution is only  fought in gym classes and vegetarian restaurants then it will be an incomplete revolution. It frustrates me when I hear too much talk about how people eat and how much they exercise. And I should be quick to say that I do a lot of that talking myself.

 

It's like a new form of Puritanism in which healthy choices draw the line between who is acceptable and who is not.

 

If Margaret Cho says, "Hey, look. This fat oppression thing is not OK." She's going to get on TV and very nice talk show hosts are going to nod in agreement. If I go on the same show people are going to push the health question. But what about your health?

 

If I don't always eat in a healthy manner or get the exercise I need ... so fucking what? You don't give a shit about my health. You just want to make sure I'm still enrolled in the same obedience school that you're in, even if I do fail all the classes.

 

It's a complex topic and it's early in the morning. But I am thinking a lot about this. I want the people in the fat community, and the people who identify as fat, or understand and support the revolution, but who aren't really fat to understand their privilege. But I don't want to push them away. I don't want to deny their pain or their process.

 

Pattie and Carl show is a rerun of their fat show. If you tune in you can hear the lovely Jennifer Portnick be interviewed by the lovely Pattie. And you can hear me rage.  

 

    

 

August 9 2002                          7:48 AM

 

BSWP need to be done now. I had my last meeting with my advisor. She was so great to work with! I have her notes and I'm working though them. Hopefully I can click on print sometime this weekend. I'm feeling pretty good about it but I also feel like it's never been more clear to me that it needs work. Fortunately it's also cleared what kind of work it needs.

 

But my advisor said (and I think she's right) that I need to let it go for a while. School starts...soon. Gulp. I need to think about what I'm going to write about his year.

 

Worries me a little. Especially since the minute I typed that, I stopped, stared at the screen, and suddenly had nothing to say.

 

Oh dear.

 

Bobbie has a new splash page that's very beautiful.

 

    

August 10 2002                          9:28 AM

Caitlin and Aaron are in town for a visit. They took me out to dinner at Millennium. Very good! (Thank you!) We were at my apartment after dinner, talking. When we first got here we all smelled fried chicken. As time went by we all commented that something smelled like it was burning. It got worse and worse though and we all ran around looking out windows for flames. We saw none. A few minutes later I looked out the back and saw three fire trucks. Jeez! I still don't know what was burning where. But I could feel smoke in my nose and my eyes.

 

It reminded me of a time when I was living in New York. I had a very small room on the sixth floor of a residential hotel. I worked, for a while, with the people who were opening a big restaurant. We'd been working twelve, thirteen hours a day. The people in charge were mean and unorganized. I came home every day, drained and miserable.

 

One evening I woke up to a lot of noise and the smell of smoke. My window opened onto an area between four buildings. I'd be generous to call it a court yard.  It was just ... an area. In the top corner room, across the yard from me, there was a terrible fire. Flames. Big ones. And the dark silhouettes of firefighters on the roof, shining flashlights into the yard. It was beautiful and dramatic and close. But I was too tired to be scared. I just went to sleep, despite the smoke and the pounding and the shouting.

 

I went to sleep last night too.

 

    

August 11 2002                          9:52 AM

I'm in an editing stupor. I've been scrolling and staring for too many hours. I think I said that BSWP needed to be done, right? So why can't I stop picking at it? I'm driving my self crazy.

 

I'm having a weird morning. I followed a link from a page that I trust in terms of fat stuff and found a slew of people-on-diets sites. What makes me sad is the self recrimination. I am never sad when people eat heathy good food. I am never sad when people exercise. I am sad when people feel like they need to do both to be considered valuable. I am sad when I read a young woman chastise her self for eating an ice cream cone. I am sad when people say they just can not breach the chasm of perception required to love their bodies at any size.

 

I'm not sharing any of the links because I think people have a right to put what they want to put on line with out fear of criticism. I mean, it is a public forum, so criticism may come with publishing. But I'm not going to jump into someone's diet chat with my thinking. I'm not sure why the original link that I followed was where it was.

 

I don't know. The whole thing put me in a mood and now I have to go back to work on my book about a fat life. A life in which I realized that the way people think about my body is much worse for my health than any amount of poundage.

 

And, sadly, I don't have a ride to swim today. I won't be moving though that silky, gravity free space, feeling my body. I won't be looking around at all the fat butts and bellies rising above the water level. Fat women moving with grace and ease and pleasure.

 

I am always encouraged when people tell me that reading things I write makes them think differently, or think at all, about the way the view fat. But I'm never sure it's going to make much of a difference when I see the truly massive amount of limited thinking that's out there. It makes me tired. It makes me sad. It pisses me off.