Recruiting for a Plus-Sized Rebellion.

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Happy Canada Day!

My Cute Canadian Geek is celebrating his Canadian-ness today. Last night he was trying to convince me that he is what makes Canada great, and that his absence comes at a great price because we are denying Canada one of it’s national treasures.

Uh-huh…..

In other news, the CCG is on his way to becoming a REAL HONEST-TO-GOODNESS tattooer. He has made the next step in his apprenticeship, beginning to tattoo himself. Here is his first effort at the line work for a rose. I think it looks fucking awesome, and I’m so proud of him. Next step: shading!

Jeff's First Tattoo

Tiptoe Through the Tulips

Kiba’s gettin’ her summer on:

Kiba in Loring Park

FatGrrl Reviews: Supergirls Speak Out

It’s easy to spot author Liz Funk for a Supergirl: her birth year (1988) appears on the back jacket of her book, Supergirls Speak Out: Inside the Secret Crisis of Overachieving Girls. A quick peek inside the cover tells you the book was published in 2009, and then you do the math.

OMG! Published at 21! Amazing!

I think that may be part of the intent, and as Ms. Funk presents in her book, greater and greater achievements at younger and younger ages is part of the Supergirl syndrome.  I also think it’s important that Ms. Funk outed herself right on the back cover of the book, because readers should know going in that Liz is someone who has been there, and done that.

I was really looking forward to Supergirls because I consider myself a Supergirl in Recovery.  I look back at my past and see a pursuit-of-perfection streak a mile long: I was a high school valedictorian that carried a full-load of classes, participated in a ridiculous number of clubs, AND – because I didn’t have enough to do, it seemed – I studied for the AP Calculus exam on my own because the class wasn’t offered at my school. Did you read that carefully? I fucking created an AP Calculus class for myself.  As an interesting bit of trivia: I also wrote my first novel at age 14. It was nine hundred double-spaced pages of vampire-inspired drivel that shall never see the light of day (ha. ha.), but that’s not the point. The point is my mom got to say, “My 14-year-old  just finished her first novel.”

From there I got myself a wicked academic scholarship to a private college (a college I started looking for as a high school sophomore), helped start a sorority, competed at the national level in speech, went head-to-head with the Computer Science & Math Boys Club, and graduated suma cum laude. All by age 21. And what did all this work get me?

Crazy. Lots and lots of Crazy. And I am still dealing with the effects of The Crazy to this day.

Funk’s book is full of stories just like mine, and it is staggering to read some of the quotes from these girls who candidly discussed with Funk their obsession with perfection. And it isn’t that these girls aren’t unaware of the tremendous amounts of pressure they are putting on themselves, but their attitude seems more along the lines of: “If you want to get anywhere in life, this is how it’s got to be done. It sucks, but that’s the way it is.” While I was in college, tucked away in a bathroom cubicle having my third breakdown in a day, that’s what I told myself.

Funk gives a quick run-down of the Supergirl psyche as such:

Supergirls have:

The top grades
The best clothes
A great body
A cute boyfriend

And then she counters that these girls who seem to have it all may also have:

Exhaustion
Anxiety
Eating disorders
Crippling Insecurity

Ms. Funk goes into great depth on each of these traits and consequences, supporting it with research data and loads of interview material from Supergirls far and wide.  As I read the book, my mind kept coming back to these lists. I still struggle today with exhaustion, anxiety, an eating disorder, and crippling insecurity. But back in my Supergirl heyday I got to claim just one item off the list: top grades. My clothes were often second hand and ill-fitting because I was tall and fat, which usually put me in boys’ clothes.  I had a fat body which was ridiculed by peers and family. The attention from boys was often mocking and sexually degrading.

I actually started to feel a bit resentful as the book went along, full of these girls with looks, clothes, grades, and guys. It felt like it was a club I wasn’t allowed to be in, as if I was somehow less of a Supergirl than I could have been; that I failed and I wasn’t really a Supergirl at all. (Hear that? That’s The Crazy talkin’.) I keep trying to tell myself a lot of this is in my head, but I haven’t resolved the nagging feeling that there is a Supergirl Clique in this book and I felt pretty side-lined as a result, or that my experience was somehow minimized. Now Funk does address the double-standard of beauty, and that successful women invariably are beautiful and that beauty is a requisite component of her success, but really, this just made me feel worse. I think there are a lot of girls struggling with this endless pursuit of perfection, but Funk’s definition of a Supergirl left me feeling a bit excluded.

That being said, I imagine this would be a good book to slip to a friend/daughter/niece/cousin who is a Supergirl, but is totally in the dark about what is driving her to do what she does.

 

Praise & Adoration

FatGrrl: “Where’d you go? Bike ride?”

Canadian: “I had to leave the house immediately.”

F: “Huh?”

C: “That dog is disgusting.”

F: “I know you cannot possibly be referring to my Angel Hound.”

C: “THAT DOG got off the couch, stretched, stuck her butt in the air and farted for ten long seconds. Ten seconds at least!”

F: “I’m actually very sorry I missed that.”

C: “Brutal beast!”

F: “Awwww, settle down now.  She loves you. Think of it as her singing you a song. With her butt.”

I am cranky. So here is a list of crankiness.

My head’s about to explode due to a poverty-induced lack of anti-depressants (3 weeks and counting!), and I’ve warned everyone within a 10 foot radius of me that there is the possibility of verbal violence. I actually slipped and lost my temper with a resident today. And when I say “resident,” I actually mean a 19-year old first time renter with his head permanently lodged up his ass who was clearly not whooped on enough as a child. He had yet another excuse for his long list of fuck-ups, at which point I just said, “Dude, I hate you so hard right now. You are such a pain in my ass.” I don’t think Mr. Entitlement had ever been told that before because I could hear the very distinctive opening and closing of his wordless yap on the other end of the phone.

Anway, in an effort to try to do some mental dust-busting, I am going to lay out my list of crankiness in the hopes that I won’t be obsessing over these highly unimportant tidbits for, you know, eternity.

1. Robert Pattinson: Please, for the love of Heaven, shave! Ellie will disagree with me on this one but I thought you made a to-die-for disgustingly good looking vampire. For all future public appearances, I am asking that you please appear clean shaven.  Please. Pretty please. The scruff, it is killing me.

2. More Spock, less Kirk: I can’t even begin to understand the hulla-buh-howdy-dee-do over Chris Pine. I don’t get it. Kirk has never been my cup of tea, and I don’t care who plays that character, he will still be lamely Kirk. It’s unavoidable. Now let’s move on from that and focus on the oh-my-fucking-gawd deliciousness that is Zachary Quinto as Spock. You can roll your eyes at my nerdiness, but that’s only because you’re unwilling to admit how badly you are now interested in bedding a Vulcan.

3. Bristol Palin and her Abstinence Only Tour: Hasn’t the Palin clan left enough destruction in its wake? Do we really need to hear more about abstinence only sex education? ESPECIALLY coming from a girl who either 1) misread the pictorial directions on the box of condoms, 2) actually believed him when he said that if she really loved him, she would let him ride bareback, or 3) simply lacked the commonsense to advocate for her own reproductive health by investing time to understand the consequences of sex and how best to enjoy it while simultaneously protecting herself against disease and UNWANTED PREGNANCY. Earth to Bristol! You can still have sex without his pee-pee going into your hoo-hoo!

4. Upper Middleclass Jerks that Bitch About Their Taxes: When you have to sell your summer home and your boat to buy groceries, then you have permission to talk to me about poverty. 

5. Jon & Kate Gosselin - OMG! Open Marriage!: I saw a recent tabloid that described their “twisted” marriage. Bullshit. An open marriage is not a twisted marriage, at least, no more twisted than any other marriage out there. Once again, American loves snooping in other people’s bedrooms! Have we really learned nothing from the decades of the LGBT community fighting for civil rights otherwise denied to them because of their bedroom activities?? Jon and Kate: I think you’re pretty lame, but I’ve come to that conclusion for a whole other set of reasons. I don’t give a damn who you’re doing in your off time.

6. Camera Obscura: CCG, I swear, if you put that Camera Obscura CD on one more time I am going to put a pair of scissors through my eyeball. And then through yours.

7. Ray Charles the Cat: I am not a cat person right now. Why, Ray Charles, WHY do you have to destroy the blinds? And my beautiful tall green glass that I like to put lilacs in. You knocked it off the window sill and shattered it, you evil motherfucker.  My purpose in life is not to make all your dreams come true so why should I rearrange the whole house so you can do whatever you want without destroying everything?  The world certainly isn’t rearranging itself for me!  I don’t like you very much right now, Ray Charles.

God, I need a nap. A long, long, looooong nap.

Cat-walk Debut

Production has begun on coats for my upcoming appearance at GreyFest 2009 as a vendor. I have so much to do, and I’ve got a terrible case of Drag Ass. But in the midst of the lack of motivation I did put together one coat, just playing around with an applique idea. Alas, there was no dog in the house that the medium size coat would fit.

Ray Charles bravely “volunteered” for the task:

In which he realizes that he looks a bit ridiculous.

In which he realizes that he looks a bit ridiculous.

During which he silently begs the Canadian for assistance.

During which he silently begs the Canadian for assistance.

What do you think of our model? How about that snazzy star/button applique? This coat was made entirely from found fabrics and notions (aside from the thread).

Negotiating My Set Point

Wendy Shanker wrote in her book, “The Fat Girl’s Guide to Life,” - and I’m paraphrasing here - that if there’s anything you want to know about a diet, you don’t ask a skinny girl, you ask a fat one, because if they are any one of the hundreds of fat girls that have been socially shamed about their size, then they have most likely tried every diet imaginable. This line made me laugh loud and long because it’s so damn true. I could write books about everything I’ve seen and heard about dieting. I could probably recite the South Beath Diet book to you in its entirety and I haven’t even done that diet. That’s how preoccupied I’ve been with size: I want to know all the ways to lose weight, even though I know that I will not lose weight on them.

I bring this up because Body Weight Set Point Theory has been on my mind a lot lately. I’m very intrigued by this idea that your body knows where your weight is supposed to be, and if you just get out of the way, i.e. give it good stuff to eat, exercise, and rest, that it will steer the ship and take care of the rest, leaving you at exactly the weight your body wants you at. I like the idea that my body can take care of itself. I like the idea that if I’m taking care of business with food, water, exercise, and rest, that my body will get me where I need to be and I don’t have to apologize for wherever that “be” happens to end up. And then when someone asks me why I can’t be bothered to lose the weight and be “healthy,” I can just say, “Well, my body has other plans so just fuck the fuck off, mmkay?”

The problem is that my body and I are having a serious disagreement about where that set point should be. I think a little lower on the bell curve would be nice, and my body seems to think that it doesn’t matter where on the curve I end up so long as it’s a big curve. Sigh.

Here’s the deal: I have been the same weight, with normal fluctuations of a few pounds, for a year and a half now. It’s kind of amazing because for the 15 years previous to that my weight did nothing but climb, climb, climb.  So there is some kind of balance being maintained, and I’m cool with that. I don’t have a scale at home, so the only places I’m weighed are at the Emily Program and the doctor’s office. It doesn’t happen all that often (the weighing, I mean), but every time I step up on to that scale, I’m scared to death that I will have gained, and I’m also more than a little hopeful that I will have lost weight. (Eating disorder? Who, me?)

Recently I was at Planned Parenthood doing the birth control tango (and let’s take a brief moment to applaud the awesome work with reproductive health and choice that Planned Parenthood does everyday), and as a new client I had to go through the whole height/weight/allergies thing. I was already on an anxiety roller coaster when the nurse called me and so I ended up doing this awkward and pathetically funny little dance in front of the scale before I finally decided to step on backwards. Ms. Nurse didn’t pick up on my choice to not know my weight, and proceeded to sit in front of me and write it down on my chart. In very large numbers. That I could see clearly. Right near the box on the paper that I checked indicating that I have an eating disorder.

GAH!

I wasn’t bothered so much by the fact that Ms. Nurse could have gotten the same reaction out of me had she just hit me over the head with the damn scale, as I was by the number itself. It was the same number. The same number that has been following me around for a year and a half. 

My brain could have taken a few courses at this moment: 1) “Great! I’m maintaining! That’s fantastic news. It must mean that I’m doing good work!” or I could go for 2) “Ah, fuck! I haven’t lost anything. It must be my fault because I’m not eating perfectly and exercising perfectly” or I could try for, 3) “I’m maintaining. I’m not eating and exercising perfectly, and I’m maintaining. Does that mean if I DID eat and exercise perfectly that I would lose weight?” or last but not least, 4) “Geez. I’m maintaining. Is my body trying to tell me something? Is this where I’m supposed to be?”

First of all, I’d be curious to know what your brain would say in a situation like that, but if you guessed response #4 for this FatGrrl, then you were dead on. Well done! In fact, I was freakily afraid that my set point had made itself known and I’d better get with the acceptin’ ’cause it ain’t going nowhere no time soon.

This is incredibly sad for me. I don’t want to stay this size. I don’t like it. But I also don’t want to spend the rest of my life trying to beat my set point in to submission through excessive exercise and carrot sticks. Sigh. For the love of all that is fucking holy in this world, why can’t I just accept myself??!?!

Rock, meet hard place. Hard place, this is rock. Pleased to meet you.

Weekend Priorities

1. Go see X-Men Origins: Wolverine. (Hugh Jackman…mwrrowwr!)

2. Sew-sew-a-go-go! I’ll be making an appearance as a vendor at 2009 GreyFest so it’s time to make some greyhound coats!

3. Chillaxin’. (I stole that from Ellie.) Most likely chillaxin’ with a favorite game: We Love Katamari.

What are you folks doin’ this weekend?

Texas: A Visual Journey

It only took me 9 nine days to get these up! Enjoy.

United at last! Morgan and Ellie join forces!

United at last! Morgan and Ellie join forces!

My head is twice the size of this pup! *snorgle*

My head is twice the size of this pup! *snorgle*

Clean your plates, y'all!

Clean your plates, y'all!

One of these people enjoys the subtle tang of a Crayola marker.

One of these people enjoys the subtle tang of a Crayola marker.

Vampire and Spike give us The Cute Face.

Vampire and Spike give us The Cute Face.

Don't mess with Texas!

Don't mess with Texas!

Three TV Shows I’m Looking Forward to Tonight

1. House
2. Heroes
3. Mystery Diagnosis

It’s my way to relax because I enjoy:

1. Sick People
2. Freaky People
3. Sick People (the more the better)