Hot for hyperbole.

I suppose one of my character flaws is that I have very little patience for other people’s personality “quirks”.  I go from zero to off-the-charts irritated quickly when confronted with nonsense generated to gain attention or solicit friendships.  Being a borderline shut-in for most of my twenties provided me with the opportunity to spend enormous amounts of time with my head up my own ass, examining what I was about and why, and I came out the other side with one eyebrow permanently cocked Spock-style with disdain at...well, pretty much the entire universe.

As the years have marched on, our general culture has morphed into that guy that stands in the background of news reports done live and on the street who jumps up and down, waving his hands, perhaps pointing at his genitals.  People pour every single thought, feeling, and deepest secret out into the world.  Once, it was done to perhaps find fellowship with others feeling and thinking the same sort of thing and, ultimately, lead to some sort of personal epiphany.  Nowadays?  It’s less about finding fellowship and more about FML.

130,418 blog posts for the price of one.

Yeah, so it’s been a bit since I’ve felt the need to put fingers to keyboard and whip up some sort of mildly interesting or vaguely entertaining blog post.  You know, not the greatest post you’ve ever seen in the history of bloggings, but not utter shit, either.  One of those that elicits as “oh, it was fine” or “how nice” or “well, most of the words were spelled correctly.”

I was chewing recently on my relationship – it’s a long-distance relationship, like, LOOOOONG distance.  We’re not talking I live in Illinois and he lives in Wisconsin, oh no, this is a distance that requires double-digit hours on an airplane long distance.  The kind of distance that makes roll my eyes at a movie like “Going the Distance”, where Drew Barrymore and Justin Long are pinin’ for the fjords because she lives in San Francisco and he lives in New York City.  Don’t get me wrong, I actually enjoyed the shit out of that movie because everyone cussed like sailors, they weren’t rolling in dough so flying to the coasts was not a no-big-deal proposition, and they captured some of the more agonizing bits of a long-distance relationship really nicely.  All that being said...I’d sit through a Carrot Top show once a week if it meant my fellow was a mere five-hour flight away from me.  

What the Fuck Friday.

So at my workplace, we have a cafeteria that features all sorts of delightful things, from a well-appointed salad bar to freshly made sandwiches and whatnot.  The selection is goodly-sized and it’s a nice perk to have.  I was in said cafeteria recently to get breakfast, as I am known to do, and I decided to have a flatbread sandwich-esque thing that involved cheddar cheese, egg, sausage, and mushrooms.  While I was awaiting my treat, two employees that I know in that “I see you frequently and will say ‘good morning’ to you but we don’t work in the same area” kind of way came into the cafeteria and proceeded to circle around the assorted offerings (fruit, yogurt, oatmeal, bagels, toast, and items from the grill) and loudly discuss what they “could” and “couldn’t” have.  Then, they proceeded to stand behind me (a little too closely behind me) to observe what I was having for breakfast.  They bemoaned their inability to have something like I was having – not because they didn’t have enough money to pay for it or lacked vocal cords to tell the grill cook what they wanted or were unable to hold the plate in their mitts.  No, they couldn’t have it because they were on diets.  Ahhhh.  But I guess standing practically up my snapper in order to verbally mourn items they “couldn’t” have somehow made up for it. 

It’s not unusual behavior in the workplace (or society in general) to have that segment of people groaning and moaning about what they are not “allowed” to have because of whatever diets they happen to be on that that given moment.  They loudly celebrate being “good” because they chose not to have a brownie and flagellate themselves when they are “bad” and have a brownie or “jokingly” hiss at the co-worker who dared to bring in those brownies or candy or whatever about how said co-worker is trying to make them “fat” – oh wait, *I* would be that co-worker who brought in that candy!  I was under the impression that having a treat available in our high-stress unit would be a nice thing, but apparently I’m trying to make my co-workers “fat”.  To which I said, “come join me” with arms widespread.  (No really, I did.) 

People on diets at any given time, it’s not my problem that you “can’t” have whatever it is I choose to be eating, whether it’s a flatbread with egg and whatnot or a brownie or any number of things on the assorted lists of “bad” things.  It’s not my problem that you’ve bought into the horseshit pumped out there about how you have no “willpower” or “self-control”.  When you prattle on about how “bad” you are for eating something that involves fat or sugar or white flour or chocolate, I’m not going to comfort you and tell you you’re okay and you can work it off on the treadmill or just have salads for the next 30 days in order to atone for your behavior.  I’m sorry that you’ve become terrified of food, but it’s not my problem.  I won’t stand over you and shove whatever evil foodstuff you’re avoiding into your face, and I would appreciate it if you could manage to shut your yap – I mean, maintain a polite silence  – when I’m enjoying whatever I’ve chosen to enjoy.  I’d love it if you could manage to have a meal or a conversation or whatever that doesn’t ultimately turn into a conversation about your diet and workout plan and how you’ve been “good” or “bad” in any given week.  You're more than welcome to do what you like with your body and your food intake, but perhaps you might want to find someone else to discuss it with. 

Meanwhile, over at Roger Ebert's reviews, he reviews a documentary called “Forks Over Knives” which is a doc in the vein of Morgan Spurlock’s “Supersize Me” where he ate nothing but McDonald’s for a month and, like, turned into the Grimace or some shit.  Never mind that a vast majority of humanity doesn’t eat McDonald’s for every meal, but whatever.  “Forks Over Knives” is about how animal protein is wrong and everyone should eat a plant-based diet and four people with assorted illnesses are magically transformed into healthy (read: virtuous and good) human beings because they ate fruits and vegetables and shunned the evil animal proteins and dairy and sugar.  I’m quite sure that the doc doesn’t touch on concepts like privilege or access or that sort of thing because so often the “you’re an asshole if you don’t eat perfectly” movement doesn’t go anywhere near realizing that not everyone is a middle-class white person.  But what bothered me was Roger Ebert’s belief that he was “weak and lazy” back in his fat days and the underlying tone that because he didn’t eat “correctly”, he brought his illness (the cancer that took his jaw) upon himself.  

I’m fat.  I’m neither weak nor lazy.  I eat fast food perhaps once a month, I avoid processed stuff because it makes me feel shitacular, I love the shit out of vegetables (which torments my vegetable-loathing boyfriend beyond belief) and fish and all sorts of things that fall both on those vaunted “good food” lists and “bad naughty evil awful food” lists.  I didn’t think Roger was weak or lazy when he was fat, and he’s not weak or lazy now, and he sure as motherfucking hell didn’t bring his cancer on himself.  I adore the shit out of Roger Ebert.  One of my most nerdliest of nerdy moments came years ago when I emailed him a question about a movie and OH. MY. GOD. HE. REPLIED. BACK. TO. ME. FOR. REAL.  He sent my mom a nice note after he wrote a column in the Sun-Times about being a recovering alcoholic and she wrote him a note of admiration for his candor (she was working as a nurse at a rehab center at that time).  I can't help but shake my head and feel sad for a moment that after all these years, he seems to be so strongly bothered by his years as a fat man.  After everything he’s accomplished, will the one thing he points to as the most important achievement of his life be losing 70 pounds and no longer being “weak and lazy”?  How many people who aren’t Pulitzer Prize-winning critics keep holding onto that notion that life can only be worthwhile if they fit into the approved definition of what “healthy” is (thin)? 

Anyway.  It's Friday, goddammit, it's been a hell of a week at the Evil Empire (picture me running around as if my head was on fire and only being able to put it out in a large bucket at about 2:40 p.m. today).  One of these weeks I'll write a post that doesn't involve opening up the Lecture Loft, I swear.  That is, if I'm not dead from the butter and animal protein and box of donuts I eat every hour on the hour, even in my sleep.  Let me tell you, my pillow smells delicious.

Five years gone

Recently, my friend Jenn celebrated her fifth wedding anniversary, which is a nice thing and whatnot.  It was a bit mindblowing to me because it seemed like it was about 200 years ago - seriously, after you hit a certain age, time whips by and everything winds up having happened 200 years ago.  I mean, for God's sake, I just realized that it was 19 years ago this month that I had my 30 seconds of Z-list fame when I was an Audience of One on "Night After Night with Allan Havey" on Comedy Central.

NINETEEN.  What the hell.  And I'm going to be 40 in nine months.  What the super-hell.  ANYWAY.  I'm drifting, as I am wont to do, and I kind of sort of have a point to this particular post.

Kind of.  And we'll get there...together!

The post you've all been waiting for.

I woke up today with this idea in my head of what I could bllllllog about and I was all excited and rarin’ to go and then I had to have a bagel and a smoke and some caffeine and promptly forgot what the fuck I was going to write about.  As the day wore on and I played Zuma Blitz and Bejeweled Blitz until my eyes bled (haven’t hit the Angry Birds....yet) I kept reminding myself that I needed to write SOMETHING, need to yap about whatever, just some sort of mildly creative – “mildly” is an understatement  – thing so one could stave off the annoying whiny “I can’t WRIIIIIIIITE anymore” moods I’ve been finding myself in as of late.  Then I remembered that whenever my terribly delightful manfriendpartnerbeing happens to be online at the same time as I’m having these moods, he always says I should write about him. 

You asked for it, sucker.

Let's hold on a second here.

A note: I've decided to turn off comments because...well, I just don't feel like having comments or moderating comments.  I appreciate all of you who read it (all five of you), but not having access to moderating said comments during the day and refusing to not moderate doesn't engender much of a conversation beyond "that was good" or "fuck, you fucking suck" or whatever.  So I'm shuttin' 'em down.

Anyway.  So I was reading the glorious Fat Chat and Fatosphere feed, waiting for someone to pick up on a little news blurb I'd caught on the elevator whilst at work.  The elevators in the office building I work at has these screens that show news and sports scores and ads, and one of the news blurbs was about how First Lady Michelle Obama was saying that childhood obesity was negatively affecting the economy.  Hmmm.  Now, being a fat that has, apparently, helped to cause terrorism and is killing the planet (not kidding about those - people have publicly said that), I was curious to find out how fat kids could possibly be causing the economy to tank.  The feeds came through for me as I discovered this is what came flying out of her mouth at the National League of Cities conference:


"Childhood obesity is affecting your workforces too – obese children are less healthy and miss more school on average,” leading to more parental tardiness and absenteeism at businesses in their communities, she said. “When we talk about childhood obesity we are talking about the workforce you are trying to build, businesses you are trying to attract, budgets you are trying to balance everyday,” Obama said warning that businesses may be reluctant to invest and build in communities with an unhealthy future workforce. (from CNN)

Now, given that absolutely no sources or studies or anything was cited by Mrs. Obama in that little spurt of speechifying, I'm inclined to call GIGANTIC HORSESHIT.  Have a gander at Paul Campos' latest over at the Daily Beast, where actual studies and whatnot show that in fact, GIGANTIC HORSESHIT. 

Let me tell you some stories and yes, it's anecdotal, but perhaps it might shed some light on why fat kids miss more school on average - and it's not because us fat kids were sickly.

From first grade until eight grade, I was saddled with gym teachers who were, on a good day, complete assholes.  As a kid in elementary school, I was mocked and made fun of more by a grown man than any of my peers.  I went to other adults explaining the problem and...absolutely nothing was done.  In sixth grade, my teacher told another teacher of mine that I was "crazy".  I was shuffled off to a social worker who knew that all that ailed me was my fat and gave me diet books.  In junior high, my gym teacher was determined to save me from myself or whatever, and demanded weekly weigh-ins and for me to keep a food diary.  Thankfully, my mother shut that shit down right quick, and in my eighth grade yearbook, my gym teacher wrote something along the lines of "exercise is fun!".  But thanks to her and to the douchebag fuckface elementary school teacher, exercise wasn't fun, it was torture.  It was punishment for not being particularly good at games like softball or kickball, for not doing 25 sit-ups in 30 seconds for the Presidential Physical Fitness test, for not being able to do a chin-up.  I didn't like school very much and if I could weasel my way out of going, you bet your ass I did.  Did my mom miss work because of it?  Hell no.  We were still in the glory days of being able to be left alone in the house at a reasonable age. 

In my freshman year of high school, my entire homeroom decided that I was the fat ass they were going to pick on.  Signs on my back, tacks on my chair - did they get their bullying handbook from the 1950s?  A boy told me he'd kill himself if he were me.  Do you really think I was leaping out of bed every morning, eager to go to school to learn?  The only bright spot was that my mom was smart enough to get me excused from gym for three years straight because she'd seen the kind of psychological toll dealing with COMPLETELY HORRIBLE ADULTS had caused, and she wasn't about to force me to endure any more of it.  I consider myself lucky, though.  I really do.  I got lucky and found my feet and my people in theater and radio, and I could escape the crapweasels from sophomore year on thanks to having homeroom in the school radio station.  And what's so darkly amusing to me is that these same fellow students that took such delight in shitting upon me from a great height were the same fellow students who voted me "Most Original" my senior year and signed my yearbook and danced in a circle with me at prom. 

I do think that the overall concept of "Let's Move" is a decent one.  Like, the notion that everyone should have access to good eats and safe spaces in which to play and run about and whatever - I can't quibble with that because everyone should.  But instead, it's morphed into this bizarro fat-shaming festival that targets fat kids and ostracizes them even more than they already are and makes it clear that they're a problem to be solved, something to be fixed.  There's no acknowledgment of how eating disorders are turning up in younger and younger kids, no mention of how soul-chilling it is that four- and five-year-olds are talking about dieting, no thought given to how something like "Let's Move" is ultimately doomed to fail because thinness is its only marker of success. 

Every day, I'm more and more grateful that I grew up when I did because chances are had there been the same kind of almost inescapable pressure being put on fat kids to do whatever it takes to stop being fat when I was a fat kid, I very well may have done what that shitty classmate of mine freshman year thought I should do.  Aren't we supposed to be smarter than this? 

Maximum overdrive.

I’ve been on a bit of a vacation for the last, oh, four weeks or so.  I spent most of February out of the country and then a week on my ass recovering from those two weeks.  There’s something almost sinister about the jetlag that sets in when one returns from Australia.  You’re crossing about 19 trillion time zones along with the International Dateline itself, and it stands to reason that one good quality 14 hour sleep would go a long way to resetting your clock.

Oh no, not the clock for this carcass.  I came home on a Monday and it wasn’t until a good nine days later that I felt like my body was realigned with the time zone in which I reside.  It was entertaining for about two days to sleep until two or three in the afternoon – then it got annoying and old and I wanted to have my shit back in its place so I could resemble a functioning human again. 

This little anecdote is really apropos of nothing, except to maybe say there’s a good reason why I haven’t taken metaphorical pen to metaphorical paper and rattled off some bloggings; or, more to the point, I am dreadfully fucking lazy and after a year or so of dedicated blogging regarding Fat Acceptance have a hard time writing a blog unless I have something I consider “important” enough to say. 

That’s the bitch of writing on one particular subject only for so long – the ability to fluff it up and get relaxed and ridiculous tends to go away.  I have a LiveJournal – well, “had” is more accurate a way to put it.  I haven’t updated it in over a year and let it drift into unpaid status.  But man, I used to take rather large pride in the kind of silly-ass dross and babbling I could chuck into the LiJo (I just totally made that up.)  I’d happily yammer about Orlando Bloom and music and whatever other pop culture hoo-hah that was delighting me at any given time, and then I made the mistake of, like, reading shit.  And paying closer attention to the world in general.  And suddenly realizing how much stuff is fucking wrong and evil and hurtful.  So basically, my “fun” writing took a big turn for the buzzkill. 

Not that I feel anything resembling regret about spending as much time as I did writing exclusively about FA, oh heavens no.  Frankly, I think I wrote some good shit.  But writing in a fashion approaching, like, grown-uppish caused my “fun muscle”, let’s call it until we all start giggling inappropriately, to atrophy in a fierce fashion.  I pay far less attention to pop culture and whatnot than I used to, mostly because so much of it winds up offending me or bothering me in some way and I really am not hot on feeling like shit while watching a movie or a TV show or whatever.  But I’ve found that it’s hard to shut off that part of my brain that wants to analyze the holy hell out of everything and explain why such-and-such moment on “How I Met Your Mother” was problematic for me and yammer for 20 minutes about what a fucking load of shit whatever tearful weight loss “success story” commercial was and create a feltboard presentation about how I would save the world or whatever.    

I don’t know that this entry will wind up being fluffy as a fucking cotton candy cloud because I’ve been pondering some things lately about my life versus other people’s lives versus other people’s perspectives about their lives and my life and I swear, I can be super-fun at parties and I can have conversations that aren’t deep or meaningful in any way.  I use Twitter, dammit, I USE THE TWITTER.  I suppose I’ve got a constant, severe case of compassion fatigue.  I fully admit I’m very conditional in my compassion.  I don’t hug nor do I pozzie those who rant incessantly about issues that one refuses to fix in one’s life.  I used to be that person, railing and complaining about things that no one but me could handle and repair, doing the “Look at me in my despair and how unfair the world is and it’s all because of other people and has nothing whatsoever to do with me” dance.  Then I realized what a fucking bore I had become and decided to spend the time I used to yap in a boring fashion about my boring ass to fix my boring-ass life so I wasn’t a walking black hole.  It’s hard work and it sucks and it takes a tremendous amount of strength to not go begging on the internet or in real life for people to file once again through Jane’s Bad News Buffet stocked with bummed-out baked chicken, frowny french green beans, and pouty pudding.  It expends a lot of mental energy to keep my head out of my ass and not make absolutely every single frigging thing in the known and unknown universe ABOUT ME.  I have my days of utter assholatry, but I can identify the behavior and stop it before it devolves into a FML-Fest. 

And that’s not to say that everyone is allowed to have days of wallowing.  Wallowing needs to be done.  But it also needs to end.  Just like this entry does because Christ, it’s reaching “Under the Dome” proportions.  So, in summary:

I was on the prison planet of Australia for two weeks and recovering from jetlag for another week and boy, are my arms tired

I am incapable of enjoying anything anymore because my brain is annoying

Get your shit together

There’s your Cliff’s Notes.  I’m off to flex my fun muscle.