Minding My Own Business

So I was walking up the hill today and an ebullient, smiling fellow says to me, "Congratulations!"

Uhhhhh....

I say, "What for?"

He says, "Walking!"

OK.

I have walked all my life. We didn't have a car when I was growing up and I've never learned to drive as an adult. If I didn't walk, I didn't get there. In the last few years my knees have gotten worse and now I use two canes. I walk less but I still walk. I wasn't sure why my walking was a point of merit and then the guy starts to tell me that he was awake at 4 to see doctor so and so because he'd had weight loss surgery and lost some amount of weight and ...

I hate the surgery. Hate it. There are no long term studies about what ever harm may be done but it's a major alteration of an organ that is required for survival. I've read really bad outcome stories but I don't have anything to link and it doesn't matter. I hate it. I also feel that people have the right to make choices about their bodies. My first reaction when I hear someone has had the surgery is sadness. And then concern. And then anger, not at the person but at the doctor who told them it was a good idea.

I mumbled something about being sorry to hear that but wishing him luck and moved on while he continued to try and sell the surgery.

I was minding my own business.

I've always resented the assumptions people make about fat people in public and I really resent the things people think are OK to say. It's shocking.

AARP is promoting the surgery and making wild claims about the benefits and couching most negative outcomes as failure on the part of the individual. They do manage to note a few token bad things but blame individuals for things that go wrong. Because the truth is that the surgery only really works if the person eats nutritionally and exercises.

Sound familiar?

Make what ever choice you want to make for your body. Please don't assume you know anything about me and mine.

Choke Chain

I saw a photo of some posters for the Sims3 area at E3 (a game expo) yesterday. There is one big poster with: Play with bad girls (in large text) and above it another poster reads: choke chain optional.

Not OK.

The posters are about Pets but it's still not OK. It upset me so much I had bad EA dreams.

I think of myself as a sixties kid but I was born in 1953 so all that LeaveItToBeaver OzzieandHarriet value system was the aspirational story of my only child of a single parent existence. Identifying as a sixties kid was a way of rejecting all of that, which I did. So I am supportive of the cause of gay marriage but not actually supportive of the institution of marriage. It may sound like a contradiction but they are really two different things. I support the legitimacy of the commitment people make to one another when they get married, Straight or Gay. And. I don't need, or want the state to be the arbiter of that legitimacy. Nor the church but I understand why some people want the church.

When I play the Sims2 I really seem like a fifties kid. I play a lot of families and every family has a dog, or a cat, or both. I work to keep everybody happy. However when I play Romance Sims, who want to fall in love with everyone they meet, I let that happen.

The sixties were full of contradiction. Hippie girls were suppose to be all about free love. And feminists weren't suppose to condone objectification. In some ways women were claiming their own sexuality. In some ways women were tossed into an abyss of confusion.

In my adult life I worked in kitchens and hung out with musicians, two groups of people who know how to make everything into the most salacious double ententre. I have a high tolerance for the nonsense of how we all are when it comes to sex.

Maybe it's because the news is full of endless discussion of tweets and cheats but I am sick of the way women are represented, resented, tokenized, demeaned. Enough already.

Choke chains are not an option.