Eat the Damn Cake

I woke up feeling restless. Something had shifted inside me. In the same way that it does every year, when the summer begins to break. Every year, I forget that I’ll feel like that, and every year it surprises me. I wanted to write a fantasy story. I wanted to go somewhere else. Somewhere with mountains, and open space. The urge was so strong that I rushed to my computer and moved the Lord of the Rings trilogy to the top of my netflix queue. Not because I need to watch more orcs getting beheaded. Oy vey. That got excessive after the third one or so. I wanted to see the dramatic New Zealand/Middle-earth landscapes. That’s pretty desperate.

(image source here)

It was Saturday. I told my fiancé that we had to have a wild adventure. We got on the Hudson Line and went up to Tarrytown. It took about an hour. We walked up a hill into the center of town. It pretty much looked like a town. There were some antique shops, an ice cream place, and a 7-Eleven.

“Is this enough of an adventure?” my fiancé asked. Continue Reading »

Ladies and (possibly a handful of) gentlemen, I give you…..Ragen! Many of you probably already know her. She blogs at Dances With Fat, and she is fabulous. She inspires me. So without further ado:

“My feet hurt today.  My knee has a sharp pain when I bend it, my hip aches, and my left hamstring still hurts.”  Normally I wouldn’t admit any of these things, but I was I explaining this to my massage therapist.  She was running late, so I had offered to talk in the lobby while her previous client was getting dressed so that I could speed us along.

I’m fat – 5’4, 280lbs. According to World Health Organization BMI scale I’m “Class III – Super Obese”. I’m as fat as you can get on the BMI Scale – maxed out as it were.  According to what I read about people my weight I should probably be dead of fat, so the fact that any attempt to be ambulatory at my size only ended up with a little foot, knee, hip and hamstring pain should probably have me thanking my lucky stars.

According to the BMI chart it would seem that all of my problems would be solved by getting taller. Seriously, since BMI is just a ratio of height and weight, if I could find a way to get taller that would also apparently solve all of my pain.  What they recommend though, is losing weight. Since this medical document also says that, were I “normal weight”, I would be “considered more attractive than [my] overweight and obese peers”,  it’s possible that it would solve my dating problems too…although my quirky personality would remain, so I suppose there are no guarantees there.

At any rate, I don’t like to admit to hurting because I’m always afraid that people will think it’s because I’m fat. In reality it’s because I’m a … Continue Reading »

I was brushing my teeth, and looking in the mirror, and the fat on my arm jiggled. It jiggled!

It hit me then. Not the arm fat itself, but the realization that my arms were fat. That they were unacceptably, abnormally, suddenly fat. And what was the worst part: they were fat in a way that didn’t match the rest of my body. In photos that cut off just below the shoulders they made a convincing argument that I probably weighed about 200 pounds, even though the body below was pretty small in real life. They were out to get me. They were going to destroy my wedding, which prominently features a strapless gown. There was a possibility that they would destroy my life. And I had no idea how this had happened.

I got a couple free personal training sessions when I joined a local gym. I asked the trainer, “What can I do about my arms?”

She said, “Well, there are a lot of exercises that will tone them.”

“Will they look really different?”

She laughed. “No. To do that you have to modify your caloric intake.”

Oh. Eat a lot less. Continue Reading »

(image source here)

I am on the phone with the stationer. I hadn’t known that that was anyone’s job title. We’ve been talking for a very long time, and she is unhappy. I am making her life extremely difficult. I am unable to comprehend something incredibly basic about the world, and, as a result, she has no idea what to do with me. We disagree about something so fundamental that we will probably never be able to understand one another. The problem may seem at first deceptively simple: She wants everything to match, and I do not. More than that, she doesn’t understand how anyone in the civilized world can take the stance that I am taking.

No one has ever insisted on not having a dark border on their wedding invitations before. In the history of weddings. It has never happened.

She keeps saying, “But it matches the text. The tones are harmonious.”

She says that a lot. The tones are harmonious. Every time, I think reflexively of one of those color coded xylophones for little kids. Continue Reading »

Sorry if you were expecting the video to involve some cuteness occurring on a nude beach. It’s not like that.

But first, this is Rogue:

I asked her to talk a little about nude beaches, and this is what she said:

I go to a nude beach on Long Island pretty regularly every summer. It is a very social beach with a party atmosphere. Let me preface by saying that even though I am 5’10 that does not mean that I have a model body. I have some cellulite, adult acne and muffin tops when I try to fit into a size 12. However, this beach is my own personal paradise. Continue Reading »

I feel like I should try again. I wrote that piece about not calling myself a feminist anymore, and a lot of things happened at once. A lot of feminists were offended, I was offended that they were offended, and I was abruptly introduced to a community I’d been almost completely unaware of beforehand. I didn’t know there was such a thriving group of feminist bloggers (and the feminists who read those blogs). There are plenty of women who hint at feminism in their writing and comments, or who never use the word, but are obviously interested in standing up for women. But the community I stumbled upon seems much more overt, much more directed, and much more intense. Maybe that’s just because I made them mad.

There are a few things I want to talk about here.

1. In my original piece, I referenced stereotypes about feminists (unshaved armpits, manhating, etc). Some people seemed to believe that I thought these things were true and/or despicable. I made a joke about a pedicure. Someone thought I’d traded in feminism for pedicures, for real. I have this problem a lot. Not pedicures. I’ve gotten two in my entire life.  People don’t recognize when I’m joking, even when I think it’s pretty obvious. This is both a problem of the medium and my failure to be more clear. For the record, I don’t think that the tired stereotypes of feminists I mentioned are true for most people who define themselves as feminists these days (and I wouldn’t really care if they were true), but I also don’t think that they’ve worked their way completely out of the system, as some people suggest they have. I’ve met plenty of people who seemed to believe every one of those stereotypes. But my decision not to actively call myself a feminist isn’t a result of my desire to be accepted by these people (I never will be, in any case); it’s a result of my disinterest in having one problematic word do all the talking for me.

2. Along these lines, I actually think that women should stop saying, “I don’t hate men!” so much. “I like men!” It’s annoying. It’s annoying that women have to start sentences about their feminism with a claim that they really, really love men. Because the unspoken (and too often spoken) assumption is that if they identify as a feminist, there’s a chance they don’t like men. As if that’s the most salient feature of feminism. “Men are great!” is not a solution. And we can’t look at violent crime, religious oppression, sexual offenses, or, you know, frat houses, without noticing that men, as a group, do a lot of terrible things that women don’t, in general. That is just a fact. When I walk down the street and see a group of guys coming towards me, I feel anxious. There’s a reason for that. In my opinion, there should be more feminists (and other women) out there who are willing to talk about this, without first apologizing or disclaiming. Continue Reading »