Huge

I was really looking forward to Huge. The commercials were pretty great. There were things that I liked very much not the least of which was how many young fat actors now have jobs. I thought they created some interesting relationships and portrayed a variety of characters. It's a little hard for me to understand how they're going to maintain the fat rebel character when she's choosing to remain at diet camp but it will be interesting to watch. And most of all I liked that they showed how damaging dieting can be to a young person's sense of worth.

I'm not that well versed in eating disorders but I don't think there are fat bulimics. I might be wrong and maybe the portrayal of a young woman who eats a bunch and then throws up was intended to show a beginning bulimic. It just wasn't clear to me.

The Times did a review that begins with an assertion that gainer blogs are an offshoot of the fat pride movement. Um. Wrong. Someone trying to gain weight is pretty much as loopy as someone trying to lose weight in my opinion. Fat pride (a descriptor of the movement that always makes me a little tense) has nothing to do with trying to be fat when you aren't. It's about owning the body that you have and making food and exercise choices that are about ... food ... and exercise.

I think there many as many ideas about "the movement" as there are fat people. I've never loved size acceptance. It feels passive. Fat pride feels active but I don't feel any more pride about my weight than I do the color of my eyes. I'm fat. It's just one thing about me. It's become central in my identity because of the cultural crap about it. Not because I needed or even wanted to focus on it. I'm not ashamed. I'm not proud. I'm just fat.

The main character's rebel stance is an act of defiance. I understand that. I think that's often the way it begins. But the review in the Times takes home the message that being fat is about being discontent. And I can see how they got there. I'm not sure how they can establish a grounded notion of size being a fact of diversity. It's a show about a diet camp.

So we'll see.

Mornings

April linked this on Facebook.
In the morning we awaken loaded down with the weight of entropy and sleep. Our natural response is to turn over and go back to sleep and put off the crisis of stepping out into the world. Perhaps the promise of something better gets us up onto our feet. Most acts of engagement require an effort of will, desire and an emotionally charged image of how things might be different.
It's interesting because I've been thinking a lot about my mornings. I've always needed time to be slow in the morning. If I need to be somewhere early I wake up earlier to allow for slow time. I stumble to the computer, check email, play something mindless like Spider Solitaire while I eat. Even when I swim I wake up early enough to have a little zone time.
When I was working on the MFA and for a few years after that I got into a habit of listening to KPFA or KQED while I read blogs and wrote my post. I listen to the radio now but I don't blog very often. I half read some newspapers. Play a game.
I keep thinking I should try to do some yoga first thing. I am in the pool three days by 6 AM and by 8:15 on Saturday. Then I come home and zone.
Most acts of engagement require an effort of will, desire and an emotionally charged image of how things might be different.
I think there is something to just imagining how it might look if it were different. I don't begrudge myself some zone time but I wish it were shorter. I realize that I am the one who needs to make it shorter.
Writing often begins as a revelry. I walk around with a repetitive narrative and eventually I sit down and type. I have something in my head these days.
...will, desire and an emotionally charged image of how things might be different.

The Book

I got a new computer. It's a very happy thing but it doesn't have a floppy drive. I guess those are being phased out. I was going through floppy discs looking for my book and I could NOT find it. I have some hard copies and there's a copy at U.S.F. I tried to let it go. Today I made one more effort to find it and ... it was on the first disc.
In the days between giving up and finding it I've been sad, angry with myself, resigned. I realized how deeply I've given up on it.
I really don't know how to revive my writing. I know it felt really good to open the book on the new computer. I feel like the book needs work and I've had ideas about it all but I just do not get it done. Maybe this will give me the nudge and get me writing.
I guess we'll see.

Fat Stuff

I've had a few moments-of-fat lately. Some positive and some not.

The not list begins with a local news/entertainment show on which I saw a doctor who works with the AIDS ride. She was telling a story about a woman who went to her doctor reporting sudden and extreme weight loss. The doctor asked why she was worried because everyone wanted weight loss. She had the good sense to go to another doctor and was diagnosed HIV positive. When weight is used as a metric for health the bias for less weight causes problems for all of us.

A friend asked me if I'd heard about the new guide lines for obesity. I had not. She told me by those guidelines she was fat. She is not. Not at all. Not by any standard.

There's a commercial in which two women are in a laundromat. One asks the other for quarters because she's trying to shrink some jeans. She explains that she's been eating whole grain cereal and she's lost weight. I have so many problems with it. I eat whole grain cereal. Fat people eat whole grain cereal. The part that really bugs me is the actress playing the part of she who has lost weight is extremely thin. I don't like to make negative comments or assumptions about extremely thin people but if she's lost weight she's lost too much. She is bone thin. The other woman does not look like someone who needs to lose any weight at all. There is an idea of healthy weight being communicated that looks extreme. Weight bias is not useful in any discussion of health. It should go without saying but clearly it needs to be said over and over. The culture seems to be moving from fat phobic to pro ana.

However, I stumbled upon a new to me show on TV: Drop Dead Diva. I found it on Hulu. It's sad how much anxiety I feel when I see a fat person on a television show. The show is about a thin model who dies but is returned to earth in the body of a fat lawyer. She retains the memories of her thin life and the IQ of her fat life. Convoluted way to set up a thin person learning what it's like to be a fat person.

In the first episode she is sitting in a meeting with a client and can't take her eyes off a plate of doughnuts. I was reminded of the first episode of The Practice on which Camryn Manheim was supposed to eat a doughnut. She didn't want to be the fat girl eating so she (the actress) shoved the doughnut into the mouth of her boss (the character). Apparently it worked so well they decided to keep it. Drop Dead Diva eats the doughnut. It is kind of cute though because the thin girl inside the fat body hasn't eaten doughnuts and her enjoyment is the joy of discovering taste. That theme is repeated. Food, flavor is a revelation.

In the first episodes her disgust about her fat body is annoying. But in each show she is confronted with unfairness. Bartenders who bought her drinks when she was thin ignore her when she's fat. People don't take her seriously. Former friends shun her. She reacts with outrage and is always coming to levels of acceptance about who she is now.

It's not perfect but I've watched almost all of the first season and it's pretty great. She delivers one diatribe in a court room that could have been written by the fiercest fat activist. I'm pretty hooked.

Better that that is Fat Dinosty. Wonderful, wonderful! SO good! Such a soul reviving, joy inducing, belly laughing, great, good thing.

Oprah

If I get irritated watching Oprah I have no one to blame but myself, especially if she's talking about weight loss. I have the bad habit of using the television as background noise and I was flipping through the channels the day she had Geneen Roth talking about her new book. Oprah is talking about the book like it's fill of new ideas. It's not.
Many of the ideas in the book are the ones that I embraced as a teenager and many of the ideas are positive. She talks about loving yourself now and not waiting until you're thin. The problem is that she says when you fully embrace the ideas you will inevitably lose weight. It's a re-articulation of the same old tired message. Being fat means something is wrong specifically in terms of your relationship with food. Do self work to reveal what's wrong and your relationship with food will heal and you'll lose the weight -- for good. It's not that different from Oprah's earlier articulation of "make the connection".
I do often enjoy Oprah's affection for personal process. On the show she talked about a recent self revelation.
"Oprah says even she turns to food when life gets hard. "There's still anxiety when I have to say no to someone," she says. "I still worry, 'What are they going to think' ... [That happened to me recently and] I did not eat a pound of potato chips. I ate a pound of lettuce. But it's the same thing. I've switched the drug from potato chips to lettuce."
In that moment, Oprah says she started questioning her actions. After saying no and standing up for herself, why was she so anxiety-ridden that she had to eat a bowl of lettuce? "I went back to what you had said in the book,” she says. “What I'm really feeling is every time I have ever been beaten by my grandmother. ... What I recognize as I'm stuffing myself with the lettuce is I still have that feeling of if I don't do what pleased the other person, then somehow that person has the power to annihilate me."
I have some of that issue. I wasn't beaten but Mom and I did live with her parents for my first twelve years. I did get the message that we could be homeless if the grandparents got too angry. I learned to accommodate and never really trust the affection of anyone. I don't really think my grandparents would have kicked us out. Mom paid rent, which was a benefit to them. I know they loved us. But my grandmother did have a way of seeming to threaten. And when I was younger and trying so hard to do self analysis I did make connections between those kind of issues, how I ate and my weight. At some point I realized that there was no amount of any food that could take away the feelings of loss, rejection, anger, sadness, and so on. I wish there were.
There are people who will read this book and have insights and make changes in how they eat and they may lose weight. And I don't really have a problem with that. Awareness is good. Is Oprah one of them? I doubt it. Oprah has demonstrated what a fat person's body does naturally. She gains weight. Again and again. When she exercises rigorously and makes modifications to her diet she does lose weight. But clearly she can't sustain those things. I don't know her so I don't know what she does but we've watched her regain weight for so many years. I mean really. When is she gonna get it?
I remember a show back in the "make the connection" days. She was in a grocery store talking about healthy food choices and she was so excited about red and yellow bell peppers. It was cute. I support her attempts to eat well. I don't really care how much exercise she does but exercise is good. I just wish she'd stop believing that her weight is something she can control. I wish she would accept that she is a fat person and make food and exercise choices with no thought about her weight.
I resent the way the book says to do that very thing in a completely disingenuous manner. The book talks about loving your body at any size but implies that when you do that you will lose weight. I resent the idea of a god that wants everyone to be thin.
There's a really good video of Kelly Bliss in which Lynn McAfee talks about the will power it takes to walk out the door in the morning. I love the way Kelly talks about being someone who eats in a healthy manner and exercises and is still what is considered fat. The video shows women of different sizes exercising. It's good.
I have a lot of good thoughts about Oprah. She loves books and reading. She's done a lot of great work specifically in support of young women. I just wish she'd use that overwhelming media power to promote a world view in which Lynn McAfee doesn't have to summon the will to leave her house.

Only The Impediments

"Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key -- as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away." - Saul Bellow.
Bellow wrote that in a letter to Cynthia Ozick. I read it the other night and keep rereading it because it's such a beautiful sentence. He writes a lot of apologies for not writing in his letters. For me the beauty of the way he writes about not writing erases what ever lack of writing might have been. And since writing about not writing is my most common theme these days it resonated.
I've been in a wretched mood. I feel like I'm underwater surfacing long enough to catch a breath and then submerging again.
There's no one reason why I'm so cranky and there's a surprising array of things that pull me out of the funk: little bits from the reading I'm doing, catching up on Glee, finding more fresh peas when I shop, the way the light hits the water when I swim. And then the dive.
R & N are coming for a visit, which will cheer me up. In an embarrassingly frequent reflex I seem to have been even more grouchy not as a result but almost as if I'm purging.
Bellow was writing apologies for a lack of correspondence, of which I am also guilty. He, however, was pouring out fiction at the time. I'm -- well -- dusting.

Blog Rolling

Before the job swallowed me I spend every morning listening to KPFA, reading blogs and writing my daily post. I've been trying to get that grove back with no success. I tend to write posts later in the day now and I rarely read anyone. It's not that I don't read because I'm not interested. I'm just still relatively caved in emotionally. And also, it's overwhelming.
This morning I tried to get through my blog roll. I keep trying to make it smaller thinking that might help but ... I just can't. I have always been amazed by how intensely emotional blogging is and how much it has always felt like the school yard always felt to me. My longing to belong is almost as strong as my longing to be left alone. I remember the thrill of seeing my blog on the blog roll of someone I admired. Extending the metaphor of the school yard, it felt like being one of the cool kids. Ironically, the cool kids in blogging (for me) were probably not that cool in school. I like the big brains. Bigger brains than mine. I don't always get them but I like the feeling of pushing toward the thinking. I like the artists and the poets and the mommies. I like too many. I can't let go of anyone.
I wish I understood this place I'm in. I know I need to connect. I want to connect. And I want to bury myself in a game or a book or a movie or dusting or anything. I think I'm afraid to fail. But. I mean. What does that mean?
Bloggers have books out and have television shows and there are movies about them. Bloggers are referred to as news sources. Bloggers have blogged their way onto the big stage. I stopped blogging and stopped writing and stopped thinking and feeling to some extent. Obviously not entirely but ... yeah. I used myself up dragging myself through my day, my week. Years went by. I'm angry. I'm frustrated. I'm uncertain, floundering, stuttering. Hopeless. Hopeful. What do I care about? Why do I care?
I think it might be more accurate to say that I'm writing a journal. I'm not interested in being a pundit. Well that's not true I am interested. I'm interested in writing about being fat in political terms. I have things to say about everything else but the chattering is already so loud, so hyper and so bifurcated. I turned on CNN this morning and the (cough) news person was voicing an opinion about Miranda rights. And that's what's happening now. Opinion. Even when I agree I often find it annoying. I did not agree with this particular person so I was a little extra annoyed.
So I'm writing a journal and I'm trying to understand things about myself out loud in public. At this point I'm mostly talking to myself, which is probably best.
A friend of mine wanted to leave a comment on the food blog but found the process onerous. It is much more complicated than it used to be. Signing in, password protections. I understand why but it does hamper the spontaneous act that commenting can be. Oh lord I used to love comments. I didn't always love the snarky, the need to correct my spelling and my grammar, the just plain mean ones. But, hey. If you put it out there you need to deal.
Oh jeez I don't know what I'm doing here. This is a reaction to reading as much as I could and seeing some beautiful pictures and some news about families. This is a reaction to seeing that my name has been taken off some blog rolls. Of course it has. I didn't write for years. This is a reaction to wanting to write and not having anything to say and having a torrent of things to say stuck in the back of of my throat and wanting to be in the mix.
I'm going to go wash some dishes.