Quodlibets

Dear Kevin Smith,

I've made my fascination with you know on this website.  I think you're a funny guy; I've read both of your books, seen all your movies and both Evening With... dvds, and I've listened to 39 SModcasts.  And man, I'm telling you, you have to stop with the fat-hatred.  Stop with the protests for a second and think about something.  Think about your little daughter.

Are you thinking about her?  Good.  Now think of what an incredibly destructive environment you've placed her in, this little person who you've publicly said is the image of you.  If you hate yourself and your weight so much, what do you think it's going to teach her?  It's going to teach her to hate herself, and she might binge and go one step further than you do, and purge.  Or she might revile her body so much, as taught by yourself, that she'll starve herself to look more like her slender, fit mother.  You're placing your daughter in harm's way by not prizing who you are (and by extension, who she is) as you are.

Children are sponges, and even if she's not listening to your SModcasts or reading your blog, or taking in any of the very public fat loathing you put out there, she lives in your home, and she watches you go on that liquid diet to try to starve your body to a smaller size.  She sees you binge when you come off that diet, or binge when you feel emotionally needy.  Most of all, she sees that you think you're not good enough to be loved by her mother.  Her skinny, beautiful mother.

I can't judge your diet from where I sit.  And I don't want to, because I'm no skinny-minnie over here, in the mid-west.  As you've said in the podcast, you feel comfortable in Chicago because more people look like you.  I look more like you.  But I do want to speak out as someone who has struggled so much with self-fat-loathing, as someone who grew up in a household where fat-loathing was an immediate fact of life.  I want to speak out and tell you to let. it. go.  Stop the cycling of denial and fulfillment.  Stop setting such a detrimental example for someone who is, ultimately, fragile and vulnerable to you, one of her primary parents.

And to be quite honest, I almost can't listen to those SModcasts when you talk so hatefully about your size, because it makes me, a fat girl, hate myself a little more than I did a minute ago.  I've made so many inroads into my own pain and hatred and fear about this issue.  I've stopped the dieting and the bad/good food dichotomy in my life.  I've learned to eat more intuitively (though I work at it, still, and probably always will--it's so hard to lose that dichotomy, so hard), and I've learned to let my eyes see me as other people do.  As my wonderful boyfriend does, as my mom and my sister do, as the people who love me do.  It's so damn hard, Kevin.  I can't lie.  It's hard because I was raised in a place that didn't teach me to love myself as I am. 

Please, please, I implore you, please for the sake of your beautiful, sweet little girl, stop.  Stop and work yourself into a healthy mindset.  See a therapist if you need to.  Ask your wife for help.  Ask your many, many friends and fans for help.  Or use your will-power to do it.  I don't care how it happens, but seek out some way to stop yourself.  And I'm not telling you to get skinny (Ha!  As if it's so easy.), I'm telling you to begin the process of accepting who you are and letting yourself be that person.  Whatever that means about your appearance.  Do it for the sake of your daughter.

Still a fan--

Manogirl

Notice

Expect some slow posting for the next few weeks.  All the stuff I want to say I can't anymore--this is somewhat akin to my sister's dilemma--only worse.  I'm not about to be dooced for this shit, so I'm just avoiding it altogether.  When I can pull myself together again, I'll come back.  I will still post progress reports (they're keeping me honest, man!), but that might be it.  I'm still evaluating whether to do the March NaBloPoMo.  If you hadn't heard, there's going to be year-round months of blogging, some with themes, and the March theme is lists.  I love making lists (it's my anal-retentive coming out), so I might opt in.  I'm still working that one out in my head.

Don't worry though, I'm fine.  Or will be, or some such like it.  And don't ask me about it, people in real life.  I don't think I can talk about it just yet.

Progress Report Monday #14

You can see the last interesting bit of this cross-stitch going in on the right side: the lamp.  It's got a really great wreath on it, which will hopefully take shape in the next week.  I didn't sew that much this last week, because I was playing Rock Band and Civ, and I expect that to fall off in these coming weeks, because I'm already slightly bored of Civ, and I just can't get any better at Rock Band.  I've been playing songs in half speed in practice mode, and once I start to increase the speed?  Dunzo.  I guess that means I'm stuck, but it also means that I don't want to play as much.  Oh well.  I always knew my lame little fingers were only limitedly limber.  I've always had problems with the video games.

Unrealistic Expectations

My brother has made some mistakes.  I don't talk about him much on the blog, not because of those mistakes, but because we are in reality very far apart.  8 years is an incredibly long time in a young person's life, and by my estimation, Litty and I will only start to feel close in age when I'm in my later 30's and he's in his later 20's.  We were just separated by too much time when he was little--for god's sake, he was 10 when I left for college.  But in the last year or so, I've definitely gotten to know him better than I ever have, maybe since he was a toddler.  And I have to admit that I like my brother a whole lot.  As he gets older, and matures a bit, he's become a very, very interesting person.  Like I said, he's made some very bad choices--choices that have made him who he is--in his short life, and I think he's paid for those choices. 

And one of those choices?  It may have saved his life yesterday.  There's no way to know whether Litty would have been in that Geology class at NIU, but the possibility exists.  If Lit were still enrolled at NIU, he could have been in that class.  He could have been in the building, he could have been on that quad, or he could have been on campus.  The fact remains that good friends of his might have been, and that's bad enough.  But when I heard that horrible news yesterday, I didn't have to be nervous, because I knew Lit wouldn't be in that class.  I knew, because a year ago, he dropped out of NIU and moved home, and began attending community college.  And I've never been so happy that he made that choice as I was yesterday.

All the same, when you grow up in a town that's only 35-40 minutes away from the college, you know people who've attended.  I'd say that a pretty good number of kids from my town attend NIU.  I'd hazard a guess that anyone who grew up in that town knows someone who went there, or is currently going there.  Or went there themselves.  The shooting at Virginia Tech was tragic, there's absolutely no doubt about it.  But it didn't hit home like this one did.  It didn't happen to US.  It just happened.  And I can't really pretend that this is happening to me, because it's not.  But I didn't have to wonder whether people I knew were safe with VT, because the chances that I'd know someone there were slim to none.  The chances of my family knowing someone at NIU are much, much higher, and that alone brings it home.

The thing is, how do you stop something like this from happening?  There's no way to "lock" a campus to prevent someone from going on a rampage.  There's no way to "lock" up that killer before he commits the crime.  The only answer I can come up with is to get rid of the guns.  That's it.  I'm one of those people who could give a shit about whatever rights people want to claim in regards to owning guns.  I think they're a scourge, and I think we need to get them out of everyday usage.  I can accept hunting guns, but I think they need to be highly regulated.  I don't know that much about guns, but I do know that you don't use every single kind of gun out there for hunting.  ONLY hunting guns should be allowed.  And again, only under highly regulated and hard-to-get circumstances.  If this person, this person who hadn't shot up NIU, hadn't had access to guns, this wouldn't have happened.  Not the way it did, anyway.  He may have charged in there, and he may have been crazy and made threats, but I simply don't think 7 people would be dead right now if he hadn't come in with 3 guns blazing.

I'm having a hard time thinking about it in any other way right now.  This stuff doesn't need to happen.  It just doesn't.  But nobody, nobody will say it.  And that's a tragedy too.

I am not wearing red

I think this is the first Valentine's Day in our relationship that Sam and I aren't really participating in.  I did get him a couple of cards, and I plan on writing some personal messages in them, but we aren't going out to dinner, and we're not doing gifts.  I told Sam not to get me flowers, and I meant it.  It wasn't coy flirting or anything like that.  Part of it is money; we don't have a lot of that to spend on fripperies.  I definitely nixed the flowers based on the money thing.  However much he would have spent we can happily spend on something else, like a very expensive anniversary dinner.  (You better believe that I'm going to try to make the Custom House our anniversary tradition, as long as we can afford to spend that on one big meal.)  Also, part of me just thinks we're doing pretty good to just not NEED Valentine's Day.  The first few were kind of exciting--a sort of day to show your partner just how much you love them and want them around. 

But now that we live together, I sort of feel like that every day.  We're not unaffectionate people, and I'm pretty vocal about such things.  I mean, I'm no ice queen.  And in terms of presents, well, I could easily get Sam a small gift certificate to a camera store, but I again feel like I'd rather save up this occasion's money, and spend it on the anniversary gift.  The anniversary is really more special anyway, because that's the day we decided to be together, not the arbitrary day society wants us to celebrate our relationship.  And I love flowers, but I think I'll just make him buy them for me from the Green Market in the summer, when my favorite brain flowers are everywhere.  They'll be cheaper, and I'll love them just as much.  I guess what we're talking about here is delayed gratification.  We'll both be getting something on our anniversary, and by letting this one pass us by, we'll be getting more on that day.

But I'm no V-Day grinch, I swear.  I've always kind of had a soft spot for V-Day, and I'm sort of surprised by how sincere I was about the no gifts, no big dinner, no flowers thing I imposed this year.  I even asked Sam last night, "You're not going to surprise me with some present, are you?  Because I'm really not getting anything for you and I don't want to be the lame one.  I'll have to make you some stupid coupon book quickly to make up for it, and that would just be the worst."  He allayed my fears, so it looks like we really are just exchanging cards and doing something low-key.  Phew.

And the title of this post is correct.  I'm not wearing red.  In fact, I'm wearing an outfit composed of nearly all black.  I'm the Valentine's Day vampire, apparently.  I honestly sort of forgot it was V-Day until I came into work and saw one of the staff wearing a Hershey's Kiss pin.  Then I remembered and realized I was dressed strikingly wrong for the day.  Ah well, it doesn't bother me, and it sort of fits this year's low key theme.

Still, have a Happy Valentine's Day. 

Update:  Okay, I'm going to have to eat my words.  Sam sent me the most gorgeous roses--yellow and maroon--and I can't deny the thrill I got from seeing them for the first time.  So low-key, maybe, but I can't say I don't love the flowers.  I do.

In bad taste

I know it's ridiculous to complain about the weather in Chicago, because um, yeah, it's Chicago.

But fucking hell, one more commute in the snow and I might end up in an institution for a nervous breakdown.  This is getting slightly insane, the snow and the commute.  I've never felt so beat down about this commute.  Even podcasts and audiobooks aren't helping now.

Is it true that this is the snowiest winter since 78-79?  If so, it's definitely the snowiest winter I've ever seen, as I've seen pictures of my mother standing pregnant in front of a lot of snow, and that pregnancy turned out to be me.  So unless you think I saw the snow while in utero, this is it, and this sucks.  I wish I could urge my entire (read: extended) family to move en masse to somewhere with slighty more temperate weather.  Until that happens, I guess I need to calm down (read: play games and eat things) and prepare myself for what might be another hellish commute tomorrow morning. 

/rant

Progress Report Monday #13

Well, it looks like I haven't made that much progress.  I just haven't been sewing as enthusiastically.  I'm sick of trees and snow and house, and since that's pretty much all I've got left, I'm sort of screwed.  I have to tell you, though, that the tree on the right-hand side of the finished section is a pain.  If it looks like it's not much, I can tell you that the tree is EATING up sewing time.  It's ALL I did in about 3 hours of sewing yesterday.  It didn't help that I had to rip out a whole huge green section of that tree.  I had originally sewed it in the wrong spot.  That was demoralizing.  The end.

Oh, and you should go buy some Bolthouse Farms Clementine Juice.  It's incredible.  If you like Clementines, you're in for a huge treat.  It'll be in your produce section.  The end for real.

Say you're Canadian

When I was in Rome studying, in 1999, I got Mono.  I was supposed to travel to Spain (alone, and I was SO excited about this trip) during the second part of our two-week spring break.  Mono scuttled that, because I got Mono bad (ask my brother what I sounded like then, and he'll laugh and say "the teacher from Charlie Brown"; my family came to Italy during the first half of that break), and my parents were already uncomfortable with me traveling alone, and then sick?  No way, Jose.  Literally.

So my parents sprang for a room in the hotel I was living in (which kicked us out during the spring/Easter break), and I had a friend who had her plans abruptly canceled as well, so we stayed together in Rome, alone.  (This is the notorious break during which I acquired the nose piercing.)  One day, we heard quite a commotion in the streets, and looked out our street-facing window to see a huge mass of humanity pouring down the very main street we lived on.  (Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, if you know Rome, right near the Cat Sanctuary.)  It was a parade!  Our first Roman parade!  We squeezed out onto our teensy little stone balcony to watch and take pictures.  And then we realized it wasn't a parade.  In fact, it wasn't a joyful celebration at all.  It was an angry, crazy protest against America.  And more specifically, about the NATO bombing in Kosovo.  Or rather, what the protesters were definitely calling the American bombing of Kosovo.

I wasn't unaware of the situation in Kosovo; it was nearly impossible to be, considering the proximity of the region to Italy.  And also, one of my high-school friends was from that region.  Born in Yugoslavia.  Had family in Kosovo, but I don't think they were Albanian, if that means anything to you.  Which it might not, because honestly, I had no idea what the actual conflict roiling in that area was actually about.  I had no idea that the Serbs were massacring and forcibly removing Albanians from the territory.  I didn't know that it was probably genocide.  We actually didn't get all that much hard news in our isolated enclave.  Only what our families and friends told us (Don't go to Trieste!  Say you're Canadian!), and that was only whatever they had gleaned from the news back home.

So Moca and I are watching this protest, and we're shocked.  We're quiet, and we're kind of...contemplative about the whole thing.  I don't know that I'd considered what America was doing was wrong.  I don't know that I'd thought anything of it.  And I know that when the rest of our peers started pouring back into Rome, and we talked about that protest and the bombing, and what was happening, I was pragmatic about the thing--if bombing can paradoxically save lives, it might be an okay way to go.  My friends didn't much agree with me, being staunch pacifists.  And I'm essentially a pacifist, and I think there is one area in which I am not, and that would be when it involves genocide.  But I didn't know that word then, or that it applied to Kosovo, and so I wavered.  I wavered and waffled, and I never defended very heartily what was happening.

I've been thinking of this because I've just finished reading Samantha Power's A Problem From Hell.  It took me over two years, but I'm finally done with it.  Reading about Iraq, Rwanda and the Balkans now, over 15 years later, was interesting.  Especially as my own brief Kosovo experience came back to my mind.   And if I knew then what I know now, after reading the book (which is horrifying and shocking and saddening all at once, but it's the Rwanda chapter that really, really kills.  Our behavior in the situation in Rwanda was pathetic.  As our behavior towards Darfur is now.  We really cannot figure this humanitarian "Never again." thing out.  As Power quotes, "Never again in Germany involving the Jews in 1941."  Anyway, tangent.), I'm not sure I would have waffled as much.  Look, collateral damage is AWFUL, and we have to hope it doesn't happen.  But you know what's worse?  800,000 Tutsis dead in Rwanda.  Thousands of Muslim men wiped off the face of the Earth in Bosnia.  The Kurds systematically destroyed in Iraq.  The use of rape as a way to practice genocide against a group of women.  That is worse.  Not acting is worse.  And though Power isn't as harsh as she might be, I don't think you can read this book and not wish we were better.  We can't be the world's policeman, but goddamn, we should do something! anything! to stop genocide. 

And I think that you can really draw that conclusion from the book.  You should probably be able to draw that conclusion without it, too.  But this makes it more real.  More heart-breaking.  More important.

Progress Report Monday #12 (On Weds)

Not much got done.  I'm doing other things besides sewing lately, and the sewing is getting tedious.  Duh.  We'll see if I can motivate myself better this next week.

Yes We Can

Well, I cast my vote for Obama just 20 minutes ago.  In this state, I don't think he's going to have a problem wrapping up all the delegates, but I know some states are heavily for Hillary, and it makes me nervous. 

I'm sick and tired of reading bullshit about how you're not a feminist if you're voting for Barack, and that you should be ashamed of yourself for buying into the sexist bullshit.  To be honest, I'd be more sad for myself if I bought into the bullshit argument that to be a feminist you must vote for any woman running for any office.  I'm not saying I wouldn't love to have a woman president, because I would, but does it effing matter what gender a person is?  Or what color, for that matter?  I'm not voting for the superficialities of a person, but what that person stands for.  And frankly, I don't trust Hillary Clinton as far as I can throw her.  I can't say if her tears on the eves of two big primaries were real, but I can tell you what they looked like, and it ain't good.  I also think her lying and hedging about the Iraq war is ugly.  Her performance on that subject at the last debate made me wary of her.  More wary than I already was, anyway.

And to be honest, sometimes I think:  is this the way we want this to happen?  Do we want our first female president to be a former First Lady?  I can't answer my own question, but it's not altogether the most desirable situation.  And then I think too:  but realistically, this might be the best shot we have.  I can't exactly slag on her for that.  But I don't agree with as many of her views as I do with Obama's, and that's just fact.  I think either candidate will put a halt to the ridiculous farces that are funding for overseas health clinics that just happen to provide abortion information, and abstinence-only education, and I don't think Hillary's being a woman will necessarily mean she does good things for women in general.  As far as the whole gay thing goes, I'm not sure either of them will step up to bat for marriage.  So that's moot.  As I said above, I differ greatly from her as far as Iraq goes.

Frankly, doesn't it feel like it'll be politics as usual with Hillary?  I don't care if it seems like she has a better chance to hit the ground running, because I'd rather have a candidate who gets into office, examines things carefully, and tries damn hard to change things from the ground up, slowly if needs be. 

I can't say any more about this, because I just don't know who is going to win this thing, and I don't want to think about it any more.