He likes it! Hey, Mikey!

A cutesy twist on the Life Cereal and Little Mikey commercial. Found on a staircase in the ‘hood.

Fat Friday - POP!

In a magazine that I would typically associate with the Scary Clavicle Club, it’s refreshing to see a feature on Gossip frontwoman, Beth Ditto. Rawk!

Is anyone else creeped out by the male model?

Via Too Fat For Fashion.

Reason #127 I haven’t sold my children to gypsies yet.

This morning, I was having some severe difficulties waking Husband, so I sicced my children on him.  Banshee, the oldest, sat on Husband.  Husband continued to snore peacefully.

It was time to bring out the big guns.

Using a complex nonverbal system of gestures and pointing (because just in case Husband was half-awake, I didn’t want him to hear what I had planned for him, also, I do have to note here that I have a very clever child as he understood what I wanted instantly.) I instructed Vampire, the three year old, to lift daddy’s eyelids.  He did.  I began to giggle, but Husband remained steadfastly asleep.  I then instructed Vampire to do the ultimate in parental abuse, and give his daddy a wet willie.  Score!  I began to giggle in earnest and Husband finally woke up and was most foul at the abuse his left ear had suffered.

Heh.  Clever children.  I’ll keep them a few more days.  Life isn’t worth living if you can’t torment your significant other with your children.

You Know You’re At A David Cronenberg Film When…

…You look around the theater auditorium and notice that all the other film-goers also came on their own.

You do not bring a date to a Cronenberg film. It’s a rule. (That goes for Lars von Trier films, too.) But in spite of these directors making you feel just a little bit dirty each time you sit down to one of their films, I encourage you all to go see Eastern Promises. Amazing and really well done film. Viggo Mortenson totally blew me away as a Russian mafioso.

Yummy McAdorablePants

So, since receiving requests to hear more about the Cute Canadian Geek, I’ve been thinking and thinking and thinking about this post. (Obsessive much, Morgan?) What I thought a lot about was the high school girlieness with which I used to yammer on about Steve the Former Caretaker. There was no self-censoring because, like most great and impossible crushes, Steve had no idea that I actually existed outside of the context of That Building Manager that Lives Next Door. CCG exists in no such context, he’s very much aware of me. (!!!) And over the month-and-a-half-long whirlwind in which he and I have gotten to know one another, there is much that I would love to gossip about, yet I’ve found myself navigating a territory in which I wanted to respect his privacy without limiting my liberty as a writer to see how many times I can include ‘Squee!’ in one post. Eventually I just asked him straight out about what he thinks. His response?

Morgan, you can post anything you like about me.

Ah! Gather round, girlfriends, and prepare for the Tale of the Cute Canadian Geek. Squee! (You may find it helpful at this point to prepare for your screen to be frosted over in sugar by the time I’m finished. Hee hee!)

CCG found his way to FatGrrl through a search for reference material for a comic that he is drawing. (Yes, he is an artist! He draws!) But the reference material out there for fat girls - everyday fat girls not being used for, you know, circus freak or comedic effect - is pretty damn hard to come by. He happened across my site and found this. Beautiful…oh, yes. But he didn’t just grab the image and run; he stuck around for a while and spent some time navigating my brain by way of innumerable posts about food, and fat, and fashion, and crazy fucking residents. He left a comment explaining the above, and then he wrote that he thinks I’m beautiful and have an amazing personality. (I know, girls….squee!) I left a comment in response, commiserating the lack of beautiful imagery of fat girls and welcomed him to the mix of people here. Then he e-mailed me.

From there it turned in to a whirlwind of talking art, navigating personality quirks, and trading secrets. His sincerity in each message at the beginning was so overwhelming. And part of my brain tried to resist - “This isn’t right. He can’t really be attracted to me. I already know that normal men don’t choose me. He must be an alien.” - and I fought it for a long time. It comes down to the idea of believing that I’m not worth it; not worthy of that kind of desire, and love, and adoration. It comes from years of compiled evidence that the men I’ve wanted simply do not choose the fat girl. And I’ve spent those years going on dates in which I thought my only chance was to dazzle them with my wit and intellect in the hopes that they could overlook the glaring flaw that is my body.

I was pouring my heart out to Ellie one night, trying to understand why I just couldn’t accept it even though I wanted it, and her response was that she was glad that CCG was wearing me down because I did deserve that kind of happiness; to feel loved and desired. I spent the rest of the evening crying, conflicted, before I finally decided to give up. So I wrote to him and told him as much: that the two pieces of my brain and heart fighting it out over whether or not to give in and trust him and care about him was exhausting. It was draining, and I needed that strength to battle my ED. I wrote to tell him that I’m giving up, and I’m giving him my heart. Essentially, as Ellie would later put it, I told him, “You can hurt me now, but just don’t, okay?”

And then he told me that he loves me. It warmed me all the way down to my toes. I had totally fallen for him. His shyness that pops up at the most adorable moments, his amazing artistic talent and drive to do the best art he can (he’s currently working towards an apprenticeship at a tattoo studio), his sarcastic and quirky sense of humor, and all his other geeky charms. He understands my crush on Jesus - which is just awesome. He’s gentle and generous and he’s all mine. Ellie nicknamed him Yummy McAdorablePants. (I warned you that this post was sugary!) This is him, my Cute Canadian Geek:

And I love him with all of my bloody heart. And he gave me his in return:

Squee!

Let this be a lesson to you.

Ladies, note the feet of the Sex and the City chicks.  See what wearing nothing but pointy stilletos does to your feet?  It makes them hideous.  And we can’t even see their toes, which I would imagine are horrible.  Kim Cattrall seems to have skipped the Vein Horror to which the other three girls have been subjected.   Models and actresses in general seems to have really scary feet and toes.

And also note that none of these women can possibly weigh more than 120, so it’s not their weight that makes their feet look like that. 

See, this is why we should love our tennis shoes and flip flops.  They don’t maul our feet.

This public service message brought to you by the extremely pregnant woman who couldn’t wear pointy stilletos right now if someone paid her, because 1- she couldn’t stuff her swollen feet into them, 2- she’d fall on her face due to changes in her center of gravity and 3- she doesn’t own any stilletos anyway, because those bitches hurt, yo.

~Ellie

Must…contain…rage…

Our esteemed president doesn’t want your kid, or mine, or anyone else’s, to have health insurance.  You know, because everone can afford private insurance.  Didn’t you guys know that?

GAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!

~Ellie

Welcome to Holland

There is a great short essay by Emily Perl Kingsley about having a kid with a disability. I’ll link it here. It’s really short. I’ll wait while you read it.

Back? Good. I’ll warn you now, this is a very long post.

I haven’t talked a lot about my experiences with Alex (otherwise known as Banshee in other posts) but I think it’s about time.

Before I get started, let me tell you exactly what he’s affected by, so you’ll know what I mean later on. He has Cortical Blindness/Cortical Visual Impairment, which means that he’s legally blind. He has some vision, but it works like a short in a lamp. Sometimes he can see, sometimes he can’t. On good days he can watch TV (albeit three inches from the screen) on bad days, he runs into walls and is exceptionally cranky. His eyes aren’t the problem, it’s his brain (although, in our most recent Opthamologist appt, he did find some scarring on Alex’s optic nerves). It can’t process the signals it gets all of the time. His left eye works much better than his right, so depth perception is a bitch. He uses a cane to get around, and I must say, I may be biased, but he’s cute as hell tooling around with that cane. He’s really good with it.

He’s microcephalic, which means that his brain is very small for his age. It isn’t as visually noticable as it was when he was a baby, but his head is a little small for his body. Microcephaly can cause developmental delays (and has in his case). Alex is a special case, because Microcephaly can often be devestating to a child, making them extremely handicapped and very ill. Alex is the exception to the rule (which makes him completely awesome, but more about that in a bit.)

He’s also hemiplegic, which means that his left side works much better than his right. His right arm stays bent most of the time, and the muscles stay very tight (hypertonicity). His right arm is more of a “helper” arm than a fully functioning arm. He can use it to help balance things, but not for anything that requires fine motor skills (like tying shoes or buttoning clothes). His right leg is only mildly affected, and the only thing you’ll see is that he develops a limp if he’s tired, sick, or ornery.

He has developmental delays, meaning that he’s functioning at about a five year old level, and some behavioral issues (meaning he is prone to flip out over things that would just only mildly tick other kids off) and some self-soothing issues (which, unfortunately, manifest themselves by his spinning around in circles, chewing on his fingers, and occasionally hitting himself or banging his head against things).

If you’re wondering, I didn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs while I was pregnant with him. I had a mostly normal pregnancy, except for when I went into anaphalactic shock due to a new food allergy. When he was just a few hours old, he contracted meningoencephalitis which caused brain swelling and grand mal seizures and had to spend almost four weeks in intensive care. The M-E fried his brain and left parts of it dead, which is why we have the issues we have today.

More after the jump.

Continue reading »

Caturday for Star Trek geeks!

Happy Caturday, y’all!

~Ellie

Fat Friday - Caption Me