Fat Friday - BOO!

Can’t have Halloween without a big dose of fat - am I right? Huh? Right?!?! Have a great Halloween/Samhain, folks. And for trick-or-treaters out there, remember to brush and floss!
(Via BestWeekEver)

Fat Friday - Toyko Rose

Stumbled across a great Flickr pool by Jasper Gregory. He calls it “Feminine Bodies” and it features “women embracing their curves.” I like that he spends so much time looking at various subculture fashion. Here are a few of my favs:

Tidbits

Today marks the 4th anniversary of my first post at FatGrrl.com. (Golf claps.)

I actually do want to spend a little time looking back over the past 4 years and write more about this experience, but that is going to have to come this weekend. I’m taking the GRE tomorrow and this week has just been, well, shitty. From beginning to end.

Anyway, keep your fingers crossed for me and look for more in the way of anniversary musings later this week.

Watching: A parade of math formulas and vocabulary words dance before my eyes.
Listening: To the sound of my head hitting a brick wall.
Playing: With the minds of some of my more useless tenants.

***UPDATE***

Just got back from the GRE and the verbal and math scores are in (I’ll have to wait a while for the analytical writing to be assessed). Anyway, drumroll please….

Verbal: 620/800
Math: 670/800

Not so bad, I guess. The last time I took I got just the opposite…a stronger verbal score. And Ellie will twitch when I say this, but there was not nearly enough algebra on that test. I love algebra.

Big Fat Satire

Sometimes I just wanna tuck Colbert’s head under my arm and give him some big fat noogies.

The Descent

Tuesday’s Group was another great session with Eating in the Light of the Moon by Anita Johnston. We went over Chapter 15, The Descent: Meeting the Shadow. Johnston describes the descent as the point a woman reaches when “she realizes that complete recovery requires a willingness to descend deep into the depths of her being, to confront all those aspects of herself that she would just as soon leave hidden in the dark.”

The story that goes along with this chapter is so lovely that I want to share it with you:

In an ancient Sumerian myth, Inanna, the Queen of Heaven and Earth, decided it was time for her to replenish her powers since she was feeling them waning. She knew that in order to do this, she needed to descend into the underworld. Her people pleaded with her not to do this for the underworld was ruled by Inanna’s vicious sister, Ereshkigal, Queen of the Great Below. It was a very dangerous place and many of those who journeyed there never returned. Inanna insisted, however, and so her closest assistant devised a plan to send help in the event that Inanna did not return in three days.

Even though Inanna was the Queen of Heaven, Ereshkigal insisted that she enter the underworld the way everyone else had to: by passing through seven gates. At each gateway she had to remove a piece of her magnificent regalia and be judged by the gatekeepers. She arrived in the kingdom of the Great Below, naked and judged by the seven gatekeepers. Ereshkigal, true to form, killed her and hung her body on a peg.

After three days had passed without Inanna’s return, her assistant set in motion a plan to rescue her. When Inanna’s parents refused to interfere with the ways of the underworld, Inanna’s assistant sought help from Enki, the god of waters and wisdom. Enki sent two little creatures, neither male nor female, both endowed with the gift of empathy, to rescue Inanna. The creatures were able to slip through the gates unnoticed, carrying the food and water of life.

When they encountered Ereshkigal, they found her mourning the recent death of her husband. The two creatures sat with her in her grief. Ereshkigal was so touched by the empathy they offered and was so grateful for it (since no one before had ever approached her with compassion), that she granted them their request for Inanna’s body. They took her body and revived her with the food and water of life and Inanna to her kingdom with her powers fully restored.

I really like this story quite a bit. The idea that in each of us, there is this underworld where we hide our shame and embarrassment and guilt; feelings of worthlessness and abandonment. I like the idea that traveling to that place and seeing and caring for that injured shadow self can, in the end, be the very key to my own….well, salvation.

Leaving the Group, our therapist moderator reminded us that the descent isn’t something beyond our reach; that, in fact, we’re IN IT right now. Being in that room, being in recovery, means being in the descent.

I, for one, can’t wait for the ascension.

Wellnessless Initiatives

I love me some Minnesota Public Radio, and Kerri Miller is by far one of my favorite hosts (such an amazing voice!). She hosts Midmorning on MPR and she never fails to feature guests and topics that create great conversation. Driving in to work this morning, I caught a preview of her upcoming segment:

Are wellness incentives fair?
An amendment in the Senate finance committee’s health care reform bill would allow companies to increase discounts on insurance premiums for employees that meet certain health goals. Advocates say that financial incentives play an important role in encouraging healthy lifestyles, but opponents worry that lowering premiums for some will raise them for others.

Guests
Michael O’Donnell: Founder and editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Health Promotion.
Kenneth Thorpe: Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University.
Dick Woodruff: Senior director of federal government relations with the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network.

AAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!  I am sick to death of Wellness Initiatives in their current form, and the initiatives being proposed as part of Obama’s health care reform legislation.

Don’t get me wrong. I l.o.v.e the idea of a wellness initiative: implementing health programs that promote healthy behaviors. My previous employer offered programs like brown bag lunches with guests speakers that talked about nutrition, blood pressure and cholesterol check-ups, on-site yoga classes, and 10,000 steps competitions. Participating in these programs came with financial incentives on insurance premiums. I am so down with that because we KNOW that healthy activity, good food, and stable blood pressure/cholesterol do good things for our bodies.

Too bad that the vast majority of the current incarnations of wellness initiatives foster more insidious motives. Yeah, the rhetoric looks good on the surface: promoting preventative care (such as smoking cessation) that pays us back down the road in terms of lower health care costs. But under the surface, there is a system for evaluating the health of employees - often based on inaccurate measuring tools - that penalizes people for what the system dictates is unhealthy behavior.  Yes, you totally know what I’m talking about: Body Mass Index.

Why won’t this thing just DIE? A number on a scale is going to be used to determine what I pay for insurance? Conventional assumptions about my body size - you know, OBVIOUSLY I must be stuffing my face with high fat foods on the couch all day long - are going to gauge my “health”? They want to dictate weight loss for my “health” and reward me for dieting? Penalize me for not?

Unsurprisingly, plenty of callers have phoned in on Keri’s show to tout the fairness of penalizing people with higher premiums, citing that “it’s not fair that we should be burdened for other people’s bad choices.” Apparently, smoking, BMI, cholesterol, and blood pressure, are characteristics wholly dependent upon individual choice. Smoking? Yeah, that definitely is a choice. But blood pressure? It’s a little more complicated than simply a matter of personal choice. I don’t wake up in the morning and think, “Hmmm, I think I’ll go for a slightly elevated blood pressure today. Goes great with these shoes!” I guess all I want to say to those folks is: Fuck you. I haven’t asked you to bear any kind of burden for me. This just makes me so angry!  I’m still not particularly fond of my body size, but I take care of myself, and I resent the implication that I’m some sort of walking time bomb and I should pay more now for the inevitable catastrophic costs I’m going to burden the system with later.

People NEED healthcare. Some folks will need a little less over their lifetime, and some will need more. I am so tired of the greed that permeates the current health care system; the need to classify risk assessment and wring as much money from people as possible and then refuse to pay that money out when people need it most. I have been without health insurance for a year now, and it’s scary. There’s something really wrong with this country when the value of a dollar is placed so far above the value of a person.

Arctic Tundra

Ellie likes to tease me about living in Minnesota…the frozen north, the Arctic tundra, etc. And it was totally funny. Until a couple of days ago when we got our first dusting of snow. Then it was still kinda of funny: “Ha! Ha! We got some snow! Look at us!” Then it got a lot less funny this morning when it snowed and snowed until just about 30 minutes ago. It just doesn’t seem appropriate to have snow before Halloween. The trees are still green, for goodness’ sake!

Sigh. What are you gonna do?

Answer: Curl up on the couch with the nearest furball, watch blank-blank-blank: Season blank on DVD (I opted for Lost: Season 2), and find something crafty to work on. I chose my ongoing series of Yoshitomo Nara cross stitch projects. Judging by Kiba’s expression today, I guess I have some more work to do:

Please Excuse our Mess

Hey, folks. I’m going to spend this weekend trying to get the google ads up and running on the site. Thanks to everyone for their input and support as I move forward with this. Of course, the top priority will be weeding out the ads that run contrary to the mission of this site, but if you happen to see one of those damn lame diet ads, leave the URL here in the comments and I will get it removed as soon as I can.

Jya!

Reading: The Outlaw Demon Wails by Kim Harrison
Watching: Lost: Season 2
Playing: Katamari Forever for PS3

Fat Friday - Hot Pink Mwrowrrr!

Via JennyLamb.

Fat and Academia

Like women’s, gay and lesbian, and african american studies before it, the field of fat studies is starting to make itself known in the world of academia. The GW Hatchet recently put the spotlight on an English professor and doctoral candidate who is branching out to look at the use of fat characters as literary devices. Professor Julia McCrossin explains about her work:

I came to fat studies because of one simple thought: as someone who studies literature, I believe that when authors create fat characters, they don’t do so innocently or free from the cultural baggage fat people have traditionally had.

I think it’s about time that fatness was taken on in the academic world as a serious and complex identity issue. But while McCrossin worries that she “[doesn't] know if fat studies will ever be codified in the academy in the way that, say, women’s and gender studies has been,” she quick to point out the tremendous potential for interdisciplinary work in the field of fat studies, explaining that “this work is popping up literally in every liberal arts discipline you can think of, and some that you can’t.”

BUST Magazine also featured a blog post talking about McCrossin, as well as SDSU Professor Esther Rothblum who recently finished co-editing a fat studies anthology called The Fat Studies Reader. I think the poster ended it in a rather bad way, suggesting that the field of study should “at least be renamed,” but kudos to BUST for giving this topic their time and energy.

What kind of topics do you want to see Fat Studies tackle? Psychology? Film? Art? Anthropology?