May 2007 Home May 1 2007 9:43 PM I hate missing the bus by one minute and that's exactly what happened to me twice today. I'm not sure why but both times I've walked out of the pool and towards the bus stop, just as I arrive at the corner the bus is pulling up across the street. I wave my pass but the drivers is ruthless. It doesn't matter a fig because I'm totally early and there is always another one coming on that particular line. I could miss three more and still get to the train on time. And then at night, I take a bus and as I'm coming around the corner I look to see if the other bus is there. If it is I wait for it at the next stop. If it's not, I walk. Again, not a big deal. Except my knees were tired and the second bus saves me from walking three long blocks. Drag. All day I've been thinking about this time when I used the word akimbo to describe a shopping cart in a grocery store and one of my workshop mates asked me how a cart could be akimbo. It seems she had looked up the word and only found definitions referring to arms. I frantically looked for others but found none and reluctantly changed the word. Some time later another friend used the word in reference to cars. I was so happy. Somehow her use of the word gave me some kind of permission. But I never used the word again. Akimbo:
It works. I could use it to describe a shopping cart. It works when describing cars at a sharp angle. I love the feeling of being on. I hate feeling off. I over react. Somehow I interpret things in a global way. It means something about me. No amount of reason works. It's just kooky.
May 6 2007 12:30 PM I heard the best fat joke the other day. Not a sentence you'd imagine coming out of my mouth, I'm sure. What made the joke good was that it was weak and dimwitted being delivered by a weak and dimwitted character. You could, I certainly would, say that about all fat jokes. This one was written to sound that way. When someone on Will and Grace talks about how many garbage bags it took for the ashes of the dead, fat husband, we are supposed to laugh about the guy. And when we object we are told that everyone gets made fun of on the show and they do but they are also there to push back at the humor. The husband is one of the absent fatsos about which Amp wrote so eloquently. The joke to which I refer was on Ugly Betty, a show I like. I don't love it but I like lots of things about it. I started watching it because I liked the actor in Real Woman Have Curves. It is more than a little frustrating for me because she is one of the actors representing for fat and ... she's not fat. I'm uncomfortable saying that. I used to swim on Sundays with a group of fat women. There was an established size range in which you had to fit to attend the swim and the friend I often went with was at the low end of the range. As a result she was made to feel unwelcome, which I resented more than she did. One woman told me that she "would kill" to be the size of my friend. To be fair she knew it wasn't the most fat positive thing to say but my question was - why, when you feel something like that, do you not seek to deconstruct it in yourself? Why do you want to make the other person go away? It was ironic because my friend was sometimes called fat by people outside of the swim. Too fat outside the swim, not fat enough for the swim. Who gets to be fat? I am often bewildered by who is considered fat. I work with a young man who is regularly told he has to lose weight by the soccer league for which he works as a referee. He does not, in my opinion, need to lose weight. He runs miles keeping up with the players and does actually lose ten pounds, or more, on a day when he works. Imagine if he didn't have those pounds. His body would cannibalize his muscles, one of which would be his heart. Real healthy, huh? The point is, he is able to do the job and the people who hire him again and again must think so. He has missed some opportunities and he thinks it may have been because of their opinion of his size. That's discrimination. But what am I suggesting when I say these people aren't fat? Am I saying that being fat is something you don't want to be and so you have to be really fat before I will believe you are suffering the kinds of oppression I suffer? I have been and am critical of the fat political community that puts the smaller, more active, not food addicted members in the front. I think I spend too much time talking about what I don't eat and how much I exercise. Breaking stereotypes is good but we cross a line into intellectual dishonesty when we don't allow the facts of everyone's experience. At that same swim I talked to women with compulsive over eating disorders who felt they couldn't talk about them there. It was impolitic and they were silenced just as my friend was made to feel unwelcome. The push to pathologize obesity is badly framed. Compulsive over eating is an issue for some people and some of those people are fat. Let's be able to talk about that. It's not my issue. Which is not to say that I have never compulsively over eaten. I have. I may again. But I'm not driven to on a daily basis. And, here again, I begin to talk about myself as a fat person but distance myself from those "bad" over eating fat people. Why? Is it truly useful? Years ago, at a NAAFA weekend I had lots of conversations with people who would whisper furtively to me about wanting to lose weight. Why did they pick me? Maybe because I was willing to hear it. I wasn't going to encourage it. I was going to challenge the thinking but I was willing to allow for the process. On the other hand I found myself frustrated by people who had the surgery but were still fat and were angry that they were no longer welcome in fat community. I felt that they wanted the comfort of fat positive messages but had chosen away from the rigour of what it takes to process the complex issues of life in a fat body. I always want to be willing to allow for process. I want people to tell the truth and I want them to be willing to have the difficult conversations. It's not easy. It should not be easy. Life is complex. In all revolutions there have been people who silenced what they considered counter revolutionary ideas. For me, a true revolution embraces complexity. The whole notion of ugly confuses me. It seems if you take a really beautiful woman, dress her in clothes that don't match, put braces on her teeth, give her glasses that are too big for her face, you can call her ugly. For me she looks likes someone with a quirky style that I rather like but none of it matters because the clincher on ugly is when you call her fat. I am fat but I am not ugly and I never have been. I've always been in the "such a pretty face" camp and, as such, get some amount of privilege. And I think I've internalized a lot of bad fat psychology. In almost every episode of Ugly Betty the questioned is posed: can Betty have what she wants? She is the problem solver, the helper, the one who will sacrifice herself for her boss and her family. In many ways this is an apt psychological portrait of many fat women. We are already "a problem" so what can we do to make up for that? We can fall dutifully in line with service to those who truly deserve happiness. After the fat joke, a love interest of Betty's tries to come to her defense but fails. It is Betty who ends up defending herself. It was quite satisfying. I also like the relationship between Betty and her boss. It is the relationship that seems to bring out the best of him. I like that they aren't a love match. But then again, there's that fat girl role: be the reason someone else gets to grow. So I struggle a bit with all of the ideas and I think that's a good thing. Who gets to be fat? In a nation where the average size is considered fat, my body is an extreme. I'm actually OK with that. I've been less fat. I was OK with that. I have the body I want because I want the body I have. I have the body that reflects the life I have lived, the family from which I come and the values I want to empower. Interesting article in the NYT today. Could be the fodder for another whole post but I think I just want to call out the opening paragraph.
Who gets to be fat? With so many people willing to be anything but, who gets to be? I wish fat actors had work. I wish I could look at television and see a representation of me and my life and not simulacrum. I wish all the fat jokes on all the shows were written to demonstrate idiocy. I wish there were no fat jokes because being fat was understood a natural expression of diversity and not something to cure. Until then I'll root for Betty.
May 9 2007 11:20 PM I just got home from dinner with Paul. We're going to try and make a monthly habit of it and I hope we succeed because I come home happy and wound up. I am so wound up, in fact, that I'm going to write a post because I'm too wound up to sleep. The post is something I've been thinking about all day. I checked my g-mail, which I don't do often enough. Someone sent me a link to a thread by Andrew Sullivan, who, by the way, I have seen on CSPAN and thought was smart. Don't agree with him on lots of stuff but, he's old school Republican. I can deal with that. The thread begins here and goes on here and there may be more. Anything that uses obesity, serious and health problem in a sentence immediately makes my eyes glaze over. Sometimes it makes me angry but these days it's just too ubiquitous. It's the least original thinking possible. It's used on the right. It's used more on the left. Which makes his comment that no one is allowed to talk about it confusing. IT, being the terrible problem of obesity, is talked about all day everywhere. Where does he live? And ya know, if anyone feels the need to leave me a comment in which they remind me that people eat crap food and don't get enough exercise, please resist the urge. I agree. People do. Sullivan says something so full of problems that it makes my head hurt.
Um. Let's see. Interesting what he does there. He talks about shallow, physically - oriented men. Because I guess there are no shallow, physically - oriented women. Case in point. Where are the fat lesbians? There's a lot of shallow, physically - oriented images. And it's a huge hit. Loved by some of the most radical feminists I know. Why? I have been bewildered by that fact. Except. I understand that when you don't see your life in the media anything is better that nothing. Even a cartoon that I LOVE has only a few fat characters. And then there's the conflation of staying in shape with thinness. Makes me wanna say, dude, (because now I say dude all the time) there are thin people who are not fit. There are fat people who are fit. Fit is not about size. And then. There's the idea that being unfit (read fat because that's what he's really saying) is unappealing to all men. Wrong again. It's so tired I can't even work up any outrage, the lack of which he notes in his second post. The comments in that post made me more angry than the post and the fact that he can conclude that the lesbian community is not PC since there are lesbians who don't want to be fat and don't want fatness in a partner and who are also worried about how fat the lesbian community is. I hate the use of PC. It's code for "anything that challenges my assumptions too much." Here's some political thought that I hope is correct. I don't care if you're on a diet. I don't want to hear about it because it bores me and it's proven wrong headed again and again and again. But I don't care. Do your thing. I don't care if you wish you were thin. Here's what I care about. Do you have access to non biased heath care? Do your health care professionals have the equipment to diagnose you correctly? Do your doctors focus on your weight and ignore potentially life threatening issues? Because even the doctors who do the studies say the darndest things.
When he suggests that people resist the urge to take a breath will people think he's kinda kooky? Do you have access to public facilities? Can you find a place to sit in which you are not in pain? Can you fly for work, or for family concerns, without being charged for the space you need? Will your children be taken away from you because some idiot public health official will determine that their weight is a sign of abuse? Will you be harassed at work, or fired because of your weight? Wanna hear some outrage Andrew? The doctor again.
Imagine if we chose to battle social injustice and put in the same energy that we put into battling the size of our ass. Lesbians come in all sizes and are as capable of buying into fat bigotry as any straight, white, man. Sadly. Is there an obesity epidemic specific to lesbians? Gee. I dunno. Kids are fatter. Dogs and cats are fatter. It gets talked about all the time, everywhere. Obesity. Serious. Health problem. Yadda yadda. Yawn. OK. I think I can go to sleep now.
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