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.

Stuff

For most of my adult life all of my worldly possessions fit into two boxes and a suitcase. I amassed furniture and books and all of the usual detritus and then I'd move and sell most of it. I usually needed the money. I did hold onto one book. I always dreamed of doing pottery. I did take a class and now own two thick bottomed, badly glazed, small pots in which I stash pens and pencils. But I love the thinking in the book. The cover is now ragged.

I have three pair of scissors. Four if you count the Joyce Chen's. One I got when I was working at EA and needed a pair often enough to rationalize buying one. One Mom sent me in the endless supply of stuff she's getting rid of and one I got years ago to cut yarn.

I mean.

Why?

How did this happen?

It's sort of good to have a pair in the kitchen (other than the JC's since they are for food alone) and a pair at the desk. I guess.

I have lived in my apartment longer than I have lived anywhere, ever. I have many, many more books. More clothes. Furniture that I like. Kitchen stuff. Posters in frames. Little plastic animals that came out of bars in three different states.

I mean ...

The thing is I kind of like it. Not the three (four) pair of scissors exactly. It feels like I'm more rooted than I've ever been. It's not true because someday I will need to move to a place with no stairs.

Oh. Lord. How many boxes will I need?

No Fat Kings

I've been watching the last season of The Tudors. I don't get HBO so I always see these things a long time after they air and there is a long time before I see a new season. From the beginning I was confused by the choice of actors to play Henry and wondered how they would make him fat. I cringe at the idea of a fat suit but they would be using makeup to age him so ... maybe it would be OK. It never happens. Henry never seems to age and he never really gains weight. He gets some grey hair, walks with a bit of a limp and is a bit padded but really it's all pretty token.

I'm hyper aware of how fat people are represented in culture. Henry has always been an icon of gluttony and excess, which seems historically accurate. It would be silly to be offended by that portrayal. But HBO ignores it. I spent sometime this morning listening to interviews with the actor who explains this as HBO trying to make the history more appealing to young people.

I used to get this kind of feedback when I worked on The Sims. One art director said to always make pretty Sims. Pretty? What does that mean? Sims are cartoons. I often heard people refer to a Sim as "hot". Our ideas about beauty are so distorted that cartoons are thought of as "hot". The Sims 3 has great tools to make a real variety of Sims but we needed to make "pretty" Sims. What comes first? Ideas about beauty? Or Media portrayals that teach a narrow idea of beauty?

Henry is not an endearing guy. In this series he is portrayed in a somewhat complicated manner. He is manipulative, paranoid, self centered and cruel but he is also loving, generous and interested in learning. I like all of that. But he is also always young and virile and never fat. This is the kind of thing that usually makes me angry but it's so extreme I find myself somewhere between stunned and bemused. I'm not an expert on the time but it seems that a fair amount of money has been spent on historically accurate costumes and sets. So why not lean toward a more physically accurate Henry?

The acting is pretty good. The writing is pretty good. Anne Boleyn gets more coverage than any of the other wives. It's entertaining. I just wonder why it has to be so ... thin.

Movie Theology

I have never read the Harry Potter books. I'm sure they're a fun read but I'm not that into fantasy fiction and there are always other books clamoring for my attention. And I've never seen the movies from beginning to end. I've seen most of them in chunks on TV. This weekend there was a marathon and I kept seeing ten or twenty minutes here and there. On Sunday I just kept it on all day. I still wasn't sitting and watching so I still have holes in my understanding but there were things that I really liked.

I like that Harry is suspicious of his own specialness. In one scene his friends were talking up some of his feats and he said they were mostly about luck and nothing to envy. He wants to understand why he is who he is but he worries that his difference may make keep him separate.

Oprah has thing about not believing in luck. She says luck is about preparation and being ready when opportunity arrives. Some times. Maybe.

Earlier in the weekend the Matrix movies were in a marathon. It almost embarrassed me to admit how much I like those movies. The fight scenes are dance like and the mash-up of religion and philosophy makes me smile. I like the bring it on hand gesture.

There's a moment like that in one of the Potter films. He doesn't really want to fight but he really has no choice. Even though he has no choice it still matters that he makes one. He stands in the moment. I've always liked the hero journey thematically.

Maybe I felt the need for some kind of theological musing since it was suppose to be the end of the world.

A friend has been reading this book. I downloaded a sample and it's interesting. He talks about not being able to distinguish good things from bad. He mentions realizing that having Cancer brought him closer to his family and friends but the radiation caused the heart disease he has now.

Movie theology always has an arc. Life is more meandering. The rapture is rescheduled.

More time to prepare I suppose.

Bully This

I'm listening to a hearing on bullying. Some guy is talking about free speech and the marginalization of people who think being gay is a sin.

God forbid.

Now a guy is talking about the separation of conduct and speech. Such a lucid rebuttal.

Lately I've been thinking about the It Gets Better campaign. It is wonderful and has my complete support but I feel resentful when I see it. I want to start a campaign for fat kids. I want to tell them it will not get better. They live in a country committed to labeling them as diseased. When they are bullied (and make no mistake, they are) they will be told to lose weight. It won't stop when they grow up. They will have trouble in employment. They will rarely see positive representation of themselves in media. Their health care will focus on their weight and sometimes miss other more serious issues. They may not have access to public environments because they may not fit in the seats and if they travel they may have to pay more or be asked to get off a plane and that may mean they miss any number of important events. Assumptions will be made about what they eat and how much they exercise. They will have to work so hard to hold on to their own experience and their own truth. Their families and friends may love them but may still want them to be something that they cannot really be. Again and again they will be told to eat less and exercise more and all the problems will go away.

And some of them will lose weight. They won't be thin. They may look thin but they will have a new battle. Fat people who have lost weight always describe it as a battle. They will have a damaged relationship to food and appetite. They will have a damaged relationship to physical activity. And all of this will be in the name of health.

Health.

It will not get better.

They will have a great opportunity for self definition and self understanding but they will need to do all that alone.

It's never useful to compare oppressions and there is lots of competition for the last acceptable form of discrimination but I am sure it will be weight based. There is no doubt in my mind.

It will not get better.

I don't think I am read much by the fat revolution community any more. I don't write much so why should I be? I imagine some of them reading this and wanting to call me from what must sound like despair. This isn't about despair. This is about hearing the same people who talk about the horrors of bullying talk about the horrors of childhood obesity. Because after all it's about health.

Health.

It's not about health. It's about hate and social control.

And it's also about my mood today. It's about my window being covered with rain and my COBRA running out and not getting enough sleep. It's about being angry the way a wounded animal is angry. It's about thinking the guy stepping off the back of the ferry into the Mississippi was selfish and wishing I could be that selfish.

Bully this.

Context

A sad truth about me is that I'm not really at home in the natural world. I like nature. Even a ride through the Presidio with the smell of Eucalyptus in the air makes me happy in the way only nature can. But I don't want to spend the night in a tent somewhere. This lack of comfort is especially true when it comes to animals. I love them. But I'm a little bit afraid of most of them.

Sunday I was sitting at the computer and I heard a bird chirping. It was so loud I figured it was right outside my kitchen window. Wrong. It was inside my kitchen window. Then it was flying around my living room. And I was out my front door. A humming bird the size of my big toe had chased me out of my home. Every time I tried to go back in the little guy flew around chirping. Intellectuality I knew I was being crazy but I was completely undone. Visions of Tippi Hendren danced in my head. Eventually the bird went back into the kitchen and I closed the door to the living room. After a realllly long time he flew out the window.

I've been trying to write a post about politics for a week or so. I think I used to do that a lot more often but these days I don't have much to say. I can go on and on. I can always go on and on. But, why? The left and the right sound the same to me. I agree with most of what the left has to say and cringe at the extreme right but so often they sound like resounding gongs and clanging symbols.

But then Republican Governors started trying to destroy Democracy and, oh lord! The push back! The push back is so amazing! And then there is the Arab Spring. It's like people are all standing up and saying: enough. It's all very encouraging. Scary and worrisome but also thrilling.

I heard about the release of the birth certificate first thing in the morning. I just felt sad. I understood why he did it but he should never have had to do it. After a day of listening to news talk I was back to being frustrated and angry. Was the wedding next? A day full of split screens with the wedding on one side and tornado destruction on the other. And of course the latest news. I liked the apparently not exactly MLK quote twice on Facebook.

It's been a wild ride and it seems like it may continue. I'm always filled with more than one emotion. Intellectually understanding and still feeling undone.

Later on Sunday I was having coffee in the Ferry Building where pigeons fly in and out and hover waiting for a dropped crumb. They never bother me.

Context is everything.