Round Rage

I am not in the mood to write a blog today. I have about a zillion other things to do. I haven’t written in ages for a bunch of reasons, but the main one is that I felt like I’d had my say and was done.

I thought about writing, though, when Stephen Colbert started talking so much about his own weight on The Late Show. But I couldn’t summon the energy to repeat, and he there was something sad and plaintive about the whole thing that failed to make me mad.

That was then. Now we have 45/Thing/The-Toddler-in-Chief. And Thing is fat. Not HUGE, but still fat, and famously prone to eating a cliche fat-person-diet and not moving any more than he can manage. And all the liberals/progressives now have a sense that it’s okay to rag on a fat person because there’s a super-visible fat person out there who couldn’t even have been made up by Disney as an exemplar of everything, EVERYTHING negative anyone likes (and make no mistake, that definitely was me accusing your non-fat selves of reveling in this excuse to make fat-jokes) to think about fat people.

So here I am grumpily writing a blog. And, since I am not willing to give the subject a large chunk of my day, I’ll get right to the point. EVERY TIME YOU MAKE A FAT-JOKE ABOUT 45, YOU ARE MAKING THE SAME ACCUSATIONS AGAINST ME AND EVERY OTHER FAT PERSON YOU KNOW. And, yes, I am taking it personally. We all are. The world is full of people who are narcissistic, gleefully cruel, racist, sexist, willfully stupid, and a long list of criminalities and are righteously skinny. Paul Ryan comes to mind pretty easily. McDonalds, Diet Coke, and riding a golf cart may be unhealthy (okay, definitely are), but they do not make you an inexcusable fuckwad. Being an inexcusable fuckwad makes you an inexcusable fuckwad, and I would (on behalf of the plump/chunky/adipose/obese everywhere) would be grateful if you would stop making a connection that has no basis in reality. So once again, let me run through the Fatmatters Main Theses:

1. Skinny DOES NOT = smart, decent, humane, healthy, or sane.
2. Fat DOES NOT = stupid, barbaric, Scrooge-like, sick, or crazy.
3. Human bodies are not the proper location for abuse by other humans, EVER.
4. Being legit angry about someone’s execrable behavior does NOT negate 1, 2, or 3. Got it? No? Then fuck off, because you’re doing the same thing 45 does when he says things about immigrants or women or childrens’ health or Confederate monuments. This makes you an asshole. Wake up.

Round Pills

First off, I apologize for never getting around to correcting the spelling of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s name in the last blog I posted. The summer got busy and I lost track.

Second, I have pretty much concluded that I have nothing useful to say about race in this abstract space of the blogosphere, so I’ll keep my conversations on the subject to my classroom, my friends, and to sharing positive informational memes on FB. Otherwise, I will make a point of being aware of the extent of my privilege and doing whatever work comes my way.

I don’t know how much more I have to say about being fat. I’m still fat. It still sort of sucks. The world is still an ass on the subject–though there’s some hope in more and more fat people standing up for themselves and their bodies. I’ve just said a great deal of what I had to say on the subject and am not willing keep repeating myself in a loop. Especially since I feel a great upwelling of interest in myself in making peace with my body instead of treating it and its longings like my ugly-intentioned cousins. When I have something new to say, you’ll surely hear it. I’ll know it’s time to truly shut up on the subject when Kim Davis being fat isn’t seen as an indicator of her being an undereducated narcissist with a martyr complex.

But the body, oh the body, that there is endless material still to comment on, think about, weep for, fight for. From the death penalty to Eritrea, from the constant commodification of beauty standards to gun laws, to the treatment of border-crossing human bodies as disposable–the body and how we humans treat it is a tragically endless conversation.

So for today I want to talk about the medicated body. And Martin Shkreli, who unfortunately for him has a face that seems, as nearly as I can tell, that was made for sneering and smugness. I wonder whether folks would be attacking him with such fervor if he “looked” like a “nice guy?”  I can conceive of his doppelganger not looking like a smug, over-privileged graduate of schools that taught him to be smug, seek endless privilege, and that no profit is sufficient. But Mr. Shkreli, a hedge fund manager (i.e. someone who makes massive amounts of money without making or serving any other purpose but that money) who has been buying up rights to older, but immensely useful drugs and raising the prices by dizzying factors while evincing not the least shred of understanding about why it might not be ethical raise a drug that helps AIDS patients avoid catastrophic fungal infections from $13.50 a pill to $750. a pill. That’s a 5,000% increase. Shkreli hasn’t even offered a cogent defense–probably because there isn’t one, but also because he’s pretty much the amublatory definition of everything that’s wrong with a profit-driven medical system in the US, with the model of corporate capitalism that is rapidly turning the US into a Russian-style oligarchy, and with an education system that operates on a nothing-is-enough model and that treats students as “tuition units” (really, folks, that’s what they’re called by the administration here at Pretty Good U).

But really, ya’ll, as much as Shkreli deserves being called out and maybe even being the “Most Hated Man in America” (though one is moved to suspect that he’s happy to be called “Most” anything…), can we please stop a moment and remember that the universe is full of Shkrelis–hedge-fund managers and investment bankers and Koch brothers and congressional Republicans who couldn’t care less about the fact that their uselessly large bank accounts are made up, like Soylent Green, of human bodies. Bodies that die in car accidents caused by carefully ignored flaws in reputedly reliable vehicles, bodies poisoned by carcinogens in pretty much everything because they facilitate profit margins and replacing or eliminating them would require the corporate equivalent of turning around an aircraft carrier, bodies that are packed into boats or trucks like cordwood for extortionate prices and then allowed to drown or suffocate because money is more important than human bodies. I could go on. Martin Shkreli deserves his infamy, and the outcry has extracted from him a reluctant promise to lower the price to a “reasonable” leveI (I wouldn’t trust him and his ilk to understand the word “reasonable” ever). But he’s not unique. He’s not even unusual.

Studies indicate that there is an unusually high percentage of sociopaths among CEOs. I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you. Except not. I haven’t spoken to Shkreli personally and don’t have a degree in psychology, but I feel pretty confident in making a guess that he’s one of those statistics. His parents must be so proud.

But this is about the body. About the bodies of factory workers in Bangladeshi factories, about the bodies of Americans whose drug companies have forced them to take generics (“they’re chemically identical, really…”) made in factories in India without critical components so that for-profit insurers can pay their CEOS tens of millions of dollars each year, and about the bodies of refugees being water-cannoned by European governments and ignored in Libyan hell-hole camps while they await the chance to pay everything they have to risk death by drowning to get to Europe. Bodies. Which, not at all by the way, are the homes to souls, which every religion on the planet claims to care for.

So could we please stop acting surprised by Shkreli? He’s the norm. He’s what we’ve loosed upon the world. He’s our fault precisely because we haven’t been paying enough attention. The Occupy Wall Street folks are right, even though they were too wrapped up in their own not-so-competent understanding of anarchy to run a truly effective movement. But at least they were willing to put their bodies on the streets to fight for the rest of us. Even Shkreli and Kim Davis, one of whom mistakes his bank account for his soul and the other of whom mistakes her ego for her soul, but both of whom have bodies that deserve equal and humane care. Cripes, I am tired of there being so many people to hate or be repulsed by.

Praying Ground

Praying today for Raif Badawi. Also for his judges and jailers. And for the victims and survivors of the latest Boko Haram massacre, and the men who killed. The older I get, the more it seems to me that it’s as necessary to pray for light to enter the hearts of those who kill and maim as it is to pray for the victims. On any given day, it’s hard to be certain of my own righteousness, so I can’t, in good conscience, assert the steadiness of my own capacity for goodness.

Also, epiphanies and the entrance of light into the hearts of the men who commit crimes against innocents in the name of a mangled god would be both the most brutal wound any being could inflict on them, at the same time that it would be, perhaps, the beginning of salvation for them. So it’s not like I’m wishing them ease.

As a blogger who is prone to be a bit blunt now and again about one or another authority in my country/culture, I will admit to finding myself more than a little attached to Badawi’s survival. The worst thing that is ever likely to happen to me is trolls, who can be plenty vile (some of the best of the fatosphere bloggers have been silenced by their vileness), but my government is never going to respond to anything I say by sentencing me to 50 lashes a week for 20 weeks. Wahabi needs to go away as a denomination of Islam. It’s extremist and, like all extremisms, nothing more than proof-texted fear and loathing.

I have a lot of atheist friends–no surprise given that I’m a writer and an academic. Some of them are kind of fierce about it–prone to mistake faith for its misuse by humans (who are terribly prone to being jerks)–and some of them are quiet about it and just find ways to keep respecting me in spite of my being openly religious (note that I said “openly,” not “consistently”). I have a lot of more-conservative-than-me religious friends. I suspect that they sometimes suspect me of being a little lax, a little fuzzy, a little under-evangelical and too-loosely-Bible-driven. I’m pretty sure Jesus thinks I’m a bit of a jerk at least 50% of the time. And I will admit openly that I do not have a very conventional understanding of prayer or its efficacy or my ability to make things change by employing my fairly flimsy praying skills. It’s sort of on that terrifyingly short list of What I Can Do About It (“it” being anything that is wounding the planet or its beings). As near as I can figure, the rest of that list consists of  “Show Up,” “Feed People,” “Behave Well,” “Be Grateful,” “Speak Truth As Best You Can,” and “Shut Up Occasionally.” Not a lot of agency in there. No superpowers.

It confuses me on some profound level when people who preach the gospels/prophecies of a God whose love manifests itself in the creation of a physical (embodied, incarnated) universe are so willing, even eager, to rape and ravage that same creation, or members of it. I desperately want Boko Haram and the Saudi authorities (and all the zillions of other religious extremists within the traditions of Abraham) to understand how they betray their God every time they lift a whip, a gun, a torch, or a stone to another body. I’m pretty sure I’m doomed to confusion here. So, however inadequately (as if there were such a thing in this context as adequacy), I pray. For both victims and persecutors, though, given a choice, I’d have my prayers land on the victims first.

Another thing I am relatively sure of is that, at its ground, feminism is about the protection of the individual body and the spirit manifested therein–about recognizing the sanctity of human bodies, regardless of gender or color or size or virtue. We call it Feminism because women’s bodies have so consistently been the sites of failure to respect the body. So what is happening to Mr. Badawi is a feminist issue, just as the mass kidnapping and rape and forced conversion and marriage of African girls is a feminist issue, and just as the murders of Black men by policemen is a feminist issue. I don’t mean to bland the movement down by over-generalizing it. I mean that all bodies come from women’s bodies, so all bodies are a feminist issue. Just as, for me at least, all bodies wear the face of Creation.

Therefore, I will pray.

Grumping Around

Some of the links I follow on Facebook offer revelations, insights, and actual news. A lot of what I read, though (and I really need to quit) either confirms what I already know, feeds my prejudices, or turns out to have–yet again–lured my too-often-gullible self into reading yet another bit of fluff of one sort or another. No matter what links I follow, though, there is some actual cultural content on the page in the form of the other links that are offered up down the right side of the page (the primo area, I gather), in between paragraphs (most irritating) and the bottom (less desirable real estate than the right column, I suspect). It’s important in the same sense that popular culture is generally important to pay some attention to (though, heaven knows, I know plenty of darling, highly aware intellectuals who manage perfectly engaged lives while not being sure who Taylor Swift is) because it’s the cultural equivalent of the pulse-oxygen meter they generally make you wear on your finger in the hospital–it’s where large chunks of zeitgeist manifest, and it’s not a bad thing to have a handle on the zeitgeist.

I suspect I don’t have to make this argument for most of you. But there is still a strong thread (at least in Western Culture, which is the one I know about) of distrust of the popular and of the true intelligence/intellectualism of those who pay attention to any of it, including genre literature. But that’s another argument for another day and a different blog.

This blog is about the huge, drooling, fangy chunk of The Zeitgeist I ran into in the right hand column of at article about a documentary a woman is making about the descent of her happy, largely apolitical Democrat father into an angry, hate-filled, terrified Tea Party wingnut as a result of a change in his commute that left him listening to Rush Limbaugh and Laura Schlesinger. This blog is not about that documentary. It’s about the right column, which featured the following “articles” or photo sequences (which rather often sub for actual text these days):

26 Drunk Girls and Their Epic Fails (translation: inadvertent flashing)

12 Hottest Cosplay Girls Ever (no translation needed unless you’ve been under a high-culture rock)

These 60 Perfectly Painted Models Will Blow Your Mind Away (might be some truth in that assertion…)

As They’ve Gotten Older, These Stars Have Become More  and More Unattractive (featured Now and Then photos of Bardot)

These 10 Women Will Shock You (featured what looked like an engagement photo of a couple–the woman is fat and has an unusually large ass and is daring to wear a red halter dress, the guy looks pretty happy about the red dress)

53 Celebrity Bikini Fails That Will Have You Doing a Double Take (no explanation necessary here)

So we have drunk women (who, presumably did not consent to the photos) exposing themselves, conventionally pretty women dressed in interestingly configured bits of lycra and glitter, naked models who (for one reason or another) let other people do highly skilled trompe l’oiel paintings on their bodies, mostly-female (I confess I didn’t check) stars who’ve had the gall to age more or less naturally, 10 unusually fat women who probably didn’t consent to their photos being circulated, and 53 women who were caught by paparazzi in bathing suit failures. Notice a pattern here?

But noooooooooooooo, the bodies of women aren’t still being treated as fodder. Nor are they being judged solely by extremely narrow standards of “beauty.” Nor are they being treated as objects of derision, obsession, consumption, and brutalization. We don’t need feminism anymore. Nope. Because there’s no correlation between the constant barrage of public brutalization of women’s bodies (sometimes by women–can we talk about the cover of Madonna’s new album? Though, as I write that, it occurs to me that it operates on several levels, some of which could be construed as a kind of feminism. But then, she’s always played fast and loose with those lines, daughter of Paglia that she is.) and the newly revived spate of anti-female legislation being pushed by religio-political extremists in this country and violent anti-female activity by religio-political extremists in other parts of the world. Nope, none.

Just like racism and misogynism have nothing to do with each other. And what children see everywhere around them has no influence on them. And listening to Rush Limbaugh for several hours a day won’t make a perfectly sane person go around the bend.

I realize that good websites (and by “good” I include a pretty broad range, because I’m not always sure about the endless iterations of HuffPo) need to monetize somehow or other (though, given that so many of them do not pay most of their content producers, I’m not entirely sure what the point of monetization is beyond putting lots more money into the hands of the already rich… But the internet, bless its freewheeling, free-for-all, 1st-amendment-hugging, scary-assed heart is certainly doing at least as much harm as good. The balance, in some weird way, may tip toward the good insofar as it does keep the creepy chunks of the zeitgeist out there for us to see and be aware of. But I’m not sure about that.

What I am sure of is that fat women’s bodies, famous women’s bodies, older women’s bodies, drunk women’s bodies are all bodies worthy of respect and protection. The only women in that list who obviously consented to the distribution of photos of their bodies were the models and the Cosplay chicas, and I’m assuming that they signed away all distribution rights, which may be wrong. And they’re the only women whose bodies were not off the generally unrealistic chart of conventional beauty, as well as being the only ones who were not being offered up as failures of one sort or another. Which means that the definition, implicit, of female success is limited, at least in the context of the right-hand column of internet content, to being svelte and mostly naked.

Oh, yeah, there was also a piece about how the latest of the Duggar children to get married has been photographed actually kissing her fiance. It is so past time for anyone to pay attention to those people. They “blanket-train” their babies (which I will not define here beyond saying that in my universe it constitutes abuse of several kinds) and send any kid who dares to mope a bit during adolescence off to brainwashing camps. They’re just the smiley version of Westboro Baptist. Could we pleasepleaseplease stop paying attention to them?

But, again, it was an article about what a woman was choosing to do with her body.

Meanwhile, Paris (yeah, I know Charlie Hebdo prints a lot of not very funny, bully-ish stuff, but that’s not the point), and the Saudis are planning to whip a blogger who has dared to suggest the regime might be a teeny bit backward. Not immediately about women, in either case. But most definitely about bodies. And, in the long run, given the connection between extremist Islam and the abuse of women (yes, Wahabi is extremist), maybe it is about women on some level, too.

This was going to be short. And focused. It’s hard to stay focused on one bit of darkness these days.

Round Tears

I was going to avoid writing about fat and bodies and all the usual stuff this week. It’s a week to work on loving your body, being patient with your family, and letting yourself take pleasure in whatever version of abundance your life offers, so not a particularly good week for me to be stomping around the blog being ticked off about things fatmatterish. I even made a promise to myself to not post anything negative on FB for the week just to avoid adding to the stresses.

But the Cosby stuff is floating around the internet, finally unavoidable. I’ve read a good, thoughtful blog by a woman explaining why she loathes the term “rape culture” and then going on to detail her own rape by a powerful man. Her point about the term is that it dignifies the systemic degredation of women by suggesting that it is a function of culture. I’m not sure she’s right about that–I think she’s mistaking “culture” for what, for academics is “high culture”–the arts and humanities (where the same degradation of women is as persistent as in every other part of culture), as opposed to the more anthropological use of “culture” I understand the term to be. And, in anthropological terms, I think it’s a pretty decent way to name an ugly and nauseatingly persistent facet of human behavior, so I’m okay with it. But I have never been roofied and assaulted by a man too powerful to be touched by my coming forward.

I’ve also read several graceful and aching pieces by men acknowledging that dark thread of human behavior. Which has been comforting. I do believe, that at least in some parts of the world (I don’t mean that as geographically as I mean it to speak of more and more individual men stepping up, stepping in, and speaking out all over the place), there are some real shifts. I think it’s a hugely good thing that the Feds are investigating the handling of assault cases at 86 colleges and universities (including my own–Pretty Good U., where we just went through a tough fall with a variety of cases), and that more and more information about the men who do these things being chronic, serial rapists is coming out.

And I understand why no one has wanted to hear about Cosby for so long. It’s hard and terribly sad. He has, for many deeply valid reasons, been a beloved figure for decades, and he has, himself, been the victim of a huge and horrible wound in the murder of his son. And I understand that some of what goes into that kind of charisma is not infrequently a kind of sexual energy that can, in the complexity and muck of the human psyche, manifest in the worst ways. I understand that human beings are complicated and can be crazy-making combinations of vile and noble traits. And, if he is, as it looks increasingly, guilty, there is no adequate excuse for those behaviors, those repeated violences.

I also understand that we rather stupidly cling to the idea that saints are nice people and sinners are mean people. Saints, good people, strong people are very rarely easy people. Lots of actual saints, in fact, were notoriously grumpy and short on personal grooming. Mother Teresa was prone to violence with her sisters and novices, even as she was gentle and endlessly kind to the wretched and the dying. Cosby did, unerase-ably, change the culture for the better and put a lot of kids through college. But it wasn’t okay for Mother Teresa to hit her novices, and …

What worries me about the Cosby thing is that, as inexcusable as his behavior is, and as proper as it is that he should, on some level or other, pay heavily for it, that it will be an excuse to erase the good he did, especially because he’s black. Bill Clinton engaged, un-arguably, in relationships with women who were not his equals in power or status, which means that those women were not, legally, capable of consent. Whether or not those relationships were, technically, rape, they were non-consensual, which is pretty damn close. Bill Clinton gets to be an Elder Statesman (and maybe do a lot of good), and may get to be the first First Gentleman. The funny thing is that I never remember his looking as agonized or tormented, ever, when confronted by his behavior as Cosby’s recent photos have shown. I’m not expressing sympathy for Cosby. I’m saying that the facts of race will figure, inevitably, in how the revelations of his misconduct are handled and processed. I’m saying that if he were white, things might be looking a bit different right now. Then again, I may be wrong. Clarence Thomas gets to be a simulacrum of a Supreme Court Justice, and his wife gets to continue to harass the woman (more likely the only one who came forward) who had the spine to call him out. But race may have been a factor in that, too. 6 years of the Obama presidency has made it agonizingly clear how tangled and untangle-able the issue of race are in America, still–how present the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement are, how un-over they are. Turns out that all those years I’ve been laughing at Southerners’ obsession with “The Wo-ah” I’ve been being a jerk. “The Woah” is no more over than is whatever you want to call the part of humans that accepts that the bodies of men, and the drives of those bodies, have the right to erase the souls and bodies–the humanity–of women.

But once again, all of this stuff is being played out over and in and by the bodies of people, as though, for all our words and thinking and wisdom and hoping, we still do believe that it’s what’s on the outside that not only counts, but is somehow the truth of each person’s humanity.

The problem is not that Bill Cosby is flawed, even vilely flawed. The problem is that he’s human and capable of awfulness that seems to have manifested itself in the critical abuse of the bodies of women. That he’s black (and has also pushed the conversation on race into some weird places, even as he’s been a voice/force for good) is a facet of the problem, and will add to its complexity and color how it is, ultimately, dealt with. No matter how unacceptable his behavior, I am, I will admit, loathe to see a black man erased, especially if he is erased for crimes a white man has survived (even though Clinton’s transgressions may, may, may have been of lesser magnitude) remarkably unscathed.

I don’t pretend to have any answers here. Or even any substantive wisdom beyond that which comes from being the daughter of a charismatic man with a complicated history with women. All that gives me is maybe an above average understanding of how much good can co-exist with the inexcusable facets of a man’s character, and an unusual understanding of how dangerous charisma is to any human’s character and integrity, along with how complicated character and integrity can be.

But one thing I know about this awful business with Bill Cosby, the awful business of an otherwise deservedly distinguished professor trading sex for grades here at Pretty Good U, and of the huge number of grotesquely mis-handled assault cases on campuses all over the country (a young woman is more likely to be raped/assaulted if she goes to college than if she doesn’t–FACT–which certainly does not add up to any version of Equal Opportunity)–one thing I know is that this is about culture, about human culture, and that human culture NEEDS feminism to free men from the millenia of implicit permission to consume the bodies of women to reassure themselves of their too-often fragile and therefore violently expressed masculinity. Bill Cosby needed feminism as much as he needed the NAACP.

Rounding Up

Occasionally, very occasionally, I am just not in the mood to be angry. I have stuff on my desk that I can write about–bits and pieces of fat-oriented news that are worth discussion, but I’m not in the mood today to crawl around in the mess that is Contemporary Journalism. I read through a copy of Women’s Day this afternoon while babysitting for a friend, and it was full of the usual schizo mix of diet drug and diet system ads, yummy recipes, exercise tips, and lovingly produced articles about Women Who’ve Lost a Ton of Weight. Those were actually a little more interesting than usual, because all these women talked in terms of health and turning points and of taking care of themselves, which is a better-than-usual sort of conversation for WD to be having. And none of them had gotten size 6 thin–one of the women had happily stopped at 168, which is a very moderate and relatively sane notion of a successful weight loss campaign. And the article emphasized that all of them had achieved their huge losses by eating pretty reasonably–none of them used a system, took drugs, starved herself, or joined Weight Watchers. They were still eating what I would consider pretty decent meals (one woman, for instance, dropped from eating 10,000 calories a day to 3,000). And they all moved moderately. So, while I still loathe the constancy of the stories (what women’s magazine in the past I-don’t-know-how-many years has published an issue without at least one weight loss-related story) and am sad to think that the chances of these women maintaining are not giddy-making, I was happy to see the subtle shifts in approach. Millimeter by millimeter, maybe.

Or maybe I was just having a Day Without Anger. It’s not that it was a particularly good day or happy–I wasn’t in the mood to spend the afternoon babysitting (though the baby involved is a serious darling and the baby’s mom more than earns all the help she can get and is also a serious darling), and I was certainly not in the mood to do the flowers at church for the 5th week out of the past 7. I’m not particularly in the mood to ride my bike, but I will as soon as I post this because I know I’ll be happier when I do my sugar in the morning. I have a couple of juicy catalogs and a couple of good literary mags to keep me pedaling, so it’ll be okay. And I’m not in the mood to make the meringue base for the pavolva my daughter asked for for her birthday (though I will be interested to see how the combo of alternative sweeteners does in the recipe, because I miss meringues), and although I’m looking forward to her birthday evening tomorrow. I’m basically low-level whiny-crabby today, so you’d think I’d have been happy to dig out one of the off-pissing articles and hack away at it.

The blog started with ANGRY as its defining mode. I sort of thought at the time that I had a pretty much bottomless well of it. God knows, I can hold a grudge like rock holds a fossil, so I’ve got plenty of grrrrrrrr roiling around inside on the best of days. And I’m just temperamentally both hyper-sensitive and quick tempered, so the anger is almost my default mode. But either the blog, or some sort of late-middle-age mellowing, or a miracle, or the brute grieving I’ve been doing most of this year for my god-son, or something, does seem to be chipping away a little, so there are moments when I think about what it was in both of us that made it so hard for my father to grok me rather than about what an SOB he was–no absolution, but something a little like understanding, and a new layer of whatever it is that forgiveness is (waaaaayyy more complicated than they make it sound in Sunday school–a thing of infinite increments and shades). It’s interesting how hard it is for me to even talk about trying to understand ways in which my me-ness made it hard for my father to be my father–I’ve defined myself by my victimhood and his monsterhood for so long that my husband gets flustered and a little angry if I mention anything even remotely Daddy-absolving. And I don’t know that I would know who I was any more without that anger, who I would be if I weren’t defining myself in opposition to a man who’s been dead going on 10 years now. I don’t know that I’ve ever been willing to even think about the possibility.

But on a day like today, when I just couldn’t get up a proper head of steam for anything, my brain does start looking under some of its hoarded piles of anger to see if they need to be kept or moved or sorted or pitched.

Now there’s an interesting metaphor. It only popped out as I wrote. Maybe even more interesting is the fact that my next association was a visual of me hoarding flesh, my own flesh. Oh, shit, is that what I do? Is that what I’ve done?

Since I started to cry while writing that last paragraph, I’d suspect that I hit a nerve.

Not in the mood for that, either.

Is self-analysis a reasonable and responsible use of a blog? Interesting question. At some point, self-analysis can easily slip into self-indulgence, which, in turn can look like icky over-sharing. And where the line is between that and whatever it is that constitutes offering up your own heart/mind/experience honestly (hopefully with fairly rigorous honesty, but without straying into emotional porn) in order to expand and contribute to the conversation about what makes us human and what gets us through the day–that line I think can only be intuited and is always contingent and contextual.  Which is by way of saying that I do not know. I suspect that asking the question constantly is more important than trying to come up with a single answer, and a lot more possible.

Now I’m going to go get on the damn bike.

Rounding Down.2

I’m  going to post one of the comments the blog on bariatric surgery got because the two links feature important stories. One seconds most of my points (or would, except that it predates my blog by several years) and the other, in heartbreakingly honest terms, sets out the circumstances in which Weight Loss Surgery is the best thing to do. The comment is from my friend Catherine Carter:

“The links below are to two of the posts about weight loss surgery that I’ve found most memorable, in different ways. It’s not for me to tell people what they should or shouldn’t do with themselves, but the voices from the been-there are…illuminating. In a chilling kind of way:”

http://kateharding.net/2007/10/27/guest-blogger-vesta44-wlsdieting-and-fat-acceptance

/ http://kateharding.net/2007/09/18/guest-blogger-heidi-i-hate-wls-heres-why-im-having-it/

The several comments on this post have been particularly poignant. The one I want to address directly came from a friend who said that she’d just seen Dr. Mehmet Oz make a case for the surgery and had been thinking about it again.

I’ve seen Dr. Oz a number of times. Much of what he says on many subjects is sensible and sound. But he’s one of the serious Please-Shut-The-Ef-Up types on the subject of weight, and I wouldn’t trust him any farther than I could throw him if her were my doctor, which means he wouldn’t be my doctor.

God, I am so tired of being angry. I’m tired of being angry at the 1%, tired of being angry at Republicans, tired of being angry at my father, tired of being angry at my belly, tired of being angry with self-righteous medical pseudo-gurus who are all too happy to give us over to the knife, tired of being angry with stupidity,..the list goes on… just tired of being angry.

I am hoping, frankly, that writing the blog will eventually unload some of the anger and maybe give voice to some other people’s anger so they can work on it, or unload it, or at least name it, too.  It hasn’t been long enough yet, I suppose.

But something really lovely did come my way today. A former student (a child of light and goodness) who has struggled dangerously, heartbreakingly, and long with an eating disorder sent to a selection of her facebook friends a picture of her newly decorated bathroom scale. It now features a pair of multicolored footprints, lots of glitter, and a large, sparkly sign over the gauge reading “WHO CARES?”

She’s been reading this blog. I’ve been struck pretty forcefully by how many of the people reading it are not, and in many cases never have been, fat. Fat certainly is the issue for me and for many of us, but the bigger issue for all of us is the toxic pathology of the way we treat the body in the West. Sick, sick, sick, and sad, sad, sad.

So here’s one for all of us, from my fave loony should-be-saint, Meister Eckhardt: Every creature is a word of God.

That means every creature’s BODY is a word of God. Or, if you’re not so much into God, an expression of the divine.  Or however you want to put it. NOT a “temple” for the spirit (i.e. the problematic vessel of the sacred soul), but the being, the logos, the breath, the matter of the spirit.

Which, dammit, means that the 1% a-hole in his Lexus who cut me off yesterday and yelled at me while doing it is also a word of God.  I need to work on this.