Some Thing and Some Thing

Some thing happened.
It's not worth detailing. My reaction was disproportionate. I knew it was. I could not control it.
You know those films where a building is being purposefully collapsed? It seems like they always happen in Vegas. The whole building seems to crumble all at once. That's how I felt.
I understand my psychological architecture fairly well. I can usually tell when something has tapped some part of the substructure. There's a Rickie Lee lyric:There are wounds that stir up the force of gravity. A cold that will wipe the hope from your eyes. 
Yeah.
So I've been down. Dumbstruck. Wounded. I stopped listening to music. The one time I tried I felt like my heart was being torn from chest. I slowed participating in social media. Stopped checking in.
I want to say I'm all better but I'm not.
However.
There may be some thing happening.
Many problems may be solved.  
 I did have some fun with food.

Still Home

I've been home long enough to find it surprising how much pleasure I am still getting from just being in my apartment. I look around at the plants and books and just stuff in general and feel ... good. For something that is really not at all what I wanted it to be my music project has made a huge and positive difference in my day. I almost filled 160 GB, which could make me sad because I'd like to buy a bunch of new music but I can't afford and I feel like I have a bunch since I'm hearing stuff I haven't listened to in years. Bruce Cockburn just now. PLus I could delete some opera. Traviata tends to load all at once instead of aria at a time. You really have to be in the mood for the whole thing.
I wrote a food blog about my post soup coma. Right now I'm eating a bowl full of left over beef chow fun, cashew chicken and pan fried string beans.  A lovely mish mash.

Lived

I saw a quote on Facebook yesterday: I will not live an unlived life. It wasn't a famous person or at least not famous to me. It gave me a brain cramp. If you're living you are living a life. How do you un-live? Of course I understand the intent. I know that life can feel somnambulism and rote. It just seems like an inexact way to say what was intended. Aphorisms call for dubious metrics.

And then I realized that the book I've been talking about reading has In Praise of the Unlived Life in the title. But I think (having only read excerpts and a review) he's writing about what I mean. 

I know when I was in NC I felt zoned. I worked on puzzles and read books and made soup. I had numerous conversations about nothing interesting. There were days when I felt like running out the door. 

Now that I'm writing about it I realize that I'm not really sure why it bugged me as much as it did. It felt like a grand pronouncement with no substantive intention. It feels like we nod and smile and applaud these things and we don't really know what's being said.    

Kindness

Muni has a policy that women can ask a driver to let them off of a bus closer to their destination when it's late. They won't go off their route but if letting you off a block away from a stop gets you closer they will, or they should. I learned about it one night when a woman asked to be let off on my corner. I got off behind her and we struck up a conversation. We've been neighborhood friends ever since. We see each other from time to time and chat. We have never exchanged information but I'm always glad to see her.
I was always reticent to ask. The policy is not well articulated and some drivers think it's after dark and others think it's after 10:00 PM. Some stop and others argue about the policy. I hate asking for special treatment so if they argue it makes me miserable. It's not really special treatment if it's a policy and if they say something like they don't have time I'm OK. It's ridiculous because they have to stop on my corner anyway. We're talking about maybe two minutes to let me off.
One night it was dark and raining and I asked and the guy said it was too early. My knees weren't as bad as they are now but I did limp. I got off and walked home in the cold, dark night feeling angry and sorry for myself. It was pouring. I got soaked. The guy was so unkind. For no obvious reason I remembered all this recently and was going to write a post about it and then forgot.
I am increasingly dependent on kindness. I am becoming Blanche Dubois. But I am never comfortable asking for help.
I am lucky. I have great neighbors who get my mail and take my trash down and carry groceries up. I'd be in so much more pain if they didn't do these things. But there are times when I need to ask. It's just so hard.
After I read the book review for the Philips book I realized that I had a book he'd coauthored. I don't remember if I read something or heard him on the radio but I remember buying the book during one of Kristina's visits. Kristina's kindness is legend in my life. Specifically her contributions to my reading addiction. I think there was a scenario in which we found one copy of the book in one book store, which she bought for me and another in a different book store, which I bought for her. And then we made jokes about our kindness.
I decided I need to read the book I already have before I buy a new one. I don't know why. It's some weird notion of discipline I made up. Anyway. I think I'm getting a feel for his thinking.
I grew up with my grandparents and knew I had to help. I never resented helping. I took pride in it. Philips makes this very point about the naturalness of kindness. He writes about the pleasure of kindness being in the way it connects us with other people. But it also makes us vulnerable. I think I learned that my help toward my grandparents was a sort of rent. A need/obligation. And that shadowed my pleasure and sense of connection. I've been trying to untangle those wires for years.
When I was in North Carolina people seemed so kind. Mom and rarely approached a door without someone opening it for us. One host in a restaurant stretched herself like a ballet dancer to hold two different doors. Sales clerks and grocery checkers seemed less disgruntled than they do here.
One morning I walked out the door and saw the bus a block away at the stop. I figured I'd missed it. I started down my hill and when I looked up the bus was stopped at my corner. The driver was one I saw many mornings and she must have seen me and was waiting. I heard the sound of the door opening and ran for it so grateful and surprised.
Kindness is surprising. It's another thing Philips mentions. It shouldn't be. But it is.  
 

Some Things Happened

I'm almost done getting all my discs into the IPod. There are 4641 songs on it now, which thrills me. Just as I finished writing the post yesterday Big Big Love hit the shuffle. Fun. Mood shifter.

Then I watched the first half of a documentary about Ai Weiwei. He's so interesting. Sometimes his art reminds me of an American artist who I have mixed feelings about but Weiwei's art is so rooted in a political perspective. In the doc he visits the town in which he sustained a brain injury from being hit by a policeman. He goes to ask that an investigation be launched. While there he has a dinner, which moves outside in front of the restaurant where he is joined by a group of fans. It creates an image that is comically close to the last supper. The police ask if he can move back inside and he says he will when he finished eating. All he's doing is having dinner with friends but it's such a challenge to a political system in which gathering together is seditious. He uses Twitter like a weapon against tyranny.

Later I read a book review. After the first paragraph I was ready to buy the book .     
  ...he argues that, instead of feeling that we should have a better life, we should just live, as gratifyingly as possible, the life we have. Otherwise, we are setting ourselves up for bitterness. What makes us think that we could have been a contender? Yet, in the dark of night, we do think this, and grieve that it wasn’t possible. “And what was not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives,” Phillips writes. “Our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless trauma about, the lives we were unable to live.” 

The reviewer doesn't seem to like Phillips much and after I'd read the whole review I decided to wait. I have a book he co-wrote and I think I heard him being interviewed about it. He has many interesting things to say. Many lucid things. 

So a few random and disparate things happened. And I got a bunch of salt and pepper shakers washed. By the end of the day I felt clear. Or something. Clear is not the right word. Smoothed out. But also full of thought. But also other things. Hard to quite describe. 

 

What I Mean

I was dreary yesterday. I'm dreary often enough that I might not have noticed but I've been so happy to be home. I was getting used to that feeling. After awhile I realized that it was the after effects of writing my letter. I felt uncertain. Worried that I hadn't said things well enough. Imagining all manner of eye rolls and worse a passive lack of understanding. What I mean when I say that being fat is a political identity for me has to do with my experience of the polis. 
A friend of Mom's picked me up at the airport years ago. A few days later Mom told me that her friend had not thought much of me at first glace because of my weight. After talking with me on the way home she decided that I was a very intelligent and kind person. Mom was very happy because the friend had seen past my weight. I was pissed. I asked Mom why it was OK with her that someone (anyone) had made an assessment of me based on appearance, specifically my weight. She stuttered and stammered because she has the same assessment of fat people when she sees them. She's fat. Her mother was fat. Her mother made no apologies and thought dieting was stupid and unhealthy. She was on and off diets all her life and still thinks she's failing because she's fat. Some part of her is angry when people think anything bad about me but she believes that if I were thin it wouldn't happen. I bring it on myself.
I don't really care what people think, especially strangers. I cared more when I was younger. I know that when I was with thinner friends I harbored a thought that people would see me with them and know I wasn't like other fat people. Sigh.
Another friend told me a story about her father. He almost didn't hire the man who ultimately became his business partner and life long friend because he was fat.
Someone once told a friend of mine that she couldn't imagine having anything to talk to me about because I was fat.
In my letter I mentioned a woman on her show who seemed full of fat hatred. I didn't want to go into it too much and still don't because, honestly, I don't have the energy for people like that anymore. Sanctimonious. Full of certainty. Blind to their own bad faith. And most of all, unwilling. You can not talk about the health of fat people and hate them and think you are fair. You are not. You are not concerned with my own good. You're concerned with being right. You're a bully.
I do wish I could talk to Melissa and people like her about it all. She said she has an obsession with The Biggest Loser. Really broke my heart. And realistically, public people like that getting random e-mails. I mean. I just feel like I'm shouting into the void.
Today there is a new statue of Rosa Parks on one end of Washington and a Supreme Court talking about dismantling the voting rights act on the other end. It's all so important. When I talk about my political identity I imagine eyes glazing over.
So I was dreary. And I'm still a little dreary. But. As MHP's father used to write in her birthday cards. The struggle continues.  

Open Letter To MHP

Dear Melissa,
It's me, Tish.
First I should let you know that this is an open letter and I should say to people who may read me but not watch MHP, Melissa writes a lot of letters to a lot of people and reads them on her show. They're smart and fun and, well, you should watch.
I watched as you wiped off your makeup in solidarity with the Barefaced and Beautiful campaign and, in some way that I'm not quite clear on, as a response to National Eating Disorders week. The connection you make is about the sense that too many young women have of not being good enough. You look fabulous with or without make up. I agree that sometimes makeup is a mask and sometimes it's a fun way to play. I'm just not sure that taking off makeup speaks to the serious issue of eating disorders.
It would be interesting to know how many of the 81% of the 10 year-olds who are afraid of being fat are boys. The same question would apply to the hospitalizations for eating disorders. Makeup may be an issue for a percentage of boys but, again, it's tangential at best.
The show you did on the politics and profits of weight loss was discouraging for me because it began with the assumption that losing weight was desirable and healthy and the only positive choice. The slight deference paid to the idea that fat people shouldn't be demonized banged against the wall of fat hatred articulated by at least one of your guests. I am in complete agreement that food is political and race and class issues are an important part of that discussion but even on the set your usually very smart show the assumptions about fat people were brain numbing. Belly fat? Really?
I have this issue with so much of the lefty media I so enjoy. I'm all for organic, local food. I'm angry about GMOs. I'm nodding and agreeing and then someone starts talking about obesity.
Let me be clear about why that bothers me. I'm fat. For me being fat is a political identity. I am generationally fat. I do not need sympathy or support for being fat. It's a body type not an illness.  
I was a fat kid. It wasn't easy being a fat kid in the fifties but I am terrified for fat kinds today. They are being told that they have a disease. And there are thin kids who eat fast food and play video games. It's just as bad for them but no one seems worried about them. 
I have as much affection for Michele Obama as I can have for someone I don't actually know. But this rise in eating disorders and her articulation of the obesity epidemic are connected. Again, love the garden. Love the dancing. But don't thin kids need those things?
Can we please do some critical thinking about fat bodies? And health. And social justice. And beauty.
I also have as much affection for you as I can have for someone I don't actually know. I love the show. I just long for some different thinking, some deep wisdom and insight. These are the things I usually get from you.
Your biggest ( not a loser) fan.