Quodlibets

The Walking Wounded

Yesterday, on the way home from dinner (and a few assorted errands), Sam and I passed a girl on the street that I'm sure was anorexic.  There's a certain look that kind of girl has, and it's in the face.  There are naturally slender people, yes, and their faces look healthy.  But this girl on the street last night, her face was like skin stretched over a skull.  There was no softness in her face at all, and I'm nearly certain that that look belongs to eating disordered individuals.  She looked...unhealthy, to say the least.  Besides the skull-esque look of her face, her clothes looked...hollow.  They were probably the smallest adult size they sell, and it was almost as if there was nothing in them, no legs or arms of any substance.  It was scary as hell.  I'm not lying when I say I did a triple-take.

I don't know what to say about it exactly, except that I was walking home with a full stomach (a happy full stomach) and a bag containing some hummus leftovers (that I fully intend on eating at some point), and that I'm happy.  And that it's hard for me to imagine that girl was happy.  In fact, perhaps it was simply the look on her skeletal face (drawn, and sad) that made me feel something, but I really think she was miserable.  Maybe I just want her to be miserable, because I can't feeling even one moment of joy while looking like that.  Not even the briefest moment of joy.  She looked miserable.  The look on her face wasn't happy.  She looked scary. 

I don't know what the answer is, but the more I read, and the more I hear (I have a co-worker who is extremely fat-prejudiced, and I love her anyway, but still), the harder it is for me to imagine a world where we can all just eat.  Just give it all up and eat.  Just stop hating our thighs or our tummies or our arm flab and just love ourselves as we are.  I don't know one woman who unreservedly loves herself.  I don't know any woman who doesn't occasionally make a comment about how bad she is to be eating x food (where x equals something sweet or something fatty or something delicious).  I don't know any women that don't occasionally indulge in a self-bashing session, and that easily includes me. 

I guess there are just some people who take the self-bashing and turn it into physical bashing, because anorexia is the slow destruction of your body.  It's that psychological abuse turned frighteningly real.  And it seems like we're not even close to figuring out how to end the psychological abuse, which means we must be even farther from ending the physical stuff. 

I don't have any words I can possibly say to that girl on the street, the starving girl, but I want to.  I want to, but instead I'm just sad for her, just unspeakably sad (I'm not doing a very good job of expressing it here, after all). 

The TAL effect

One of the things that happened when I first started blogging (4 years ago, almost; during the campaign leading to the 2004 election) was that I started to experience events as if I was blogging them.  Things acquired a narration in my head, and that narration was attached to my blog.  That's somewhat faded over the four years of this, though some events I blog in my head still--concerts especially. 

I'm sort of embarrassed to admit that something else has really taken over this blogging in my head phenomenon, and that's the "What's my story?" question.  The question is in reference to "This American Life", which has taken over my brain.  Taken over my listening life, along with "The Bryant Park Project", "Fresh Air" and "The Story".  But it's "This American Life" that I love the most, and that really, really has me enraptured.  And I don't know if this is normal for all fans of the show, but almost every day, I think about what my story would be if I were on the show.

I think about what the theme could be, I think about if I would just be narrating a story, or interviewing someone.  And sometimes I wonder if could be the one interviewed.  It's a flight of fancy, of course, because even though the show is about "ordinary people doing ordinary things", it's not really.  Most of the stories are in fact about extraordinary people doing extraordinary things, and I'm not that.  There's nothing in my life that seems to qualify as interesting radio.  But nonetheless, the fantasizing continues. 

Am I alone in this?  I know that fans of the show read this blog, and I want to know if I'm crazy.  Am I nuts for doing this?  Or do you other fans sometimes indulge in flights of fancy where you are a subject of the show?

Roses

I've mentioned here before that I never quite grew out of my adolescent girl's love of horses, and so it still is.  I find them extremely beautiful, and there's nothing I like so much as watching the three legs of the Triple Crown in the early spring.  I love most of all the feast of horseflesh on TV; when else can I see such lovely creatures for such an extended period of time?  And the history of horse racing has me enthralled as well.  I told Sam yesterday, while watching the coverage of the race, that I love looking at historic portraits of winners of the past Derbies.  The black and white photos of horses are especially evocative to me, and I could look at them for hours.  Indeed, I even love to read books about famous Thoroughbreds, horses like Secretariat, Man-O-War, Citation, Seabiscuit, Native Dancer, Ruffian...etc.  The list could go on for ages.  I simply love everything about the horses, and the sport they are.

But you know by now, if you watched the race, or if you've keep up with news, that yesterday's Derby was both triumphant and hugely, deeply sad.  If you don't know, here's the short of it:  the filly in the race, the filly that took second in the race was put down right on the course immediately following the race.  She was euthanized past the second turn, while a crowd of people cheered for the winner, Big Brown.  The filly, Eight Belles, broke both of her front ankles, and though it's unclear how, what people keep saying is that horse racing is hard on the bodies of horses, and that this sometimes happens.  And it does.  The winner of the 2006 Kentucky Derby, Barbaro, broke down in the next race, the Preakness.  And died, later, after much intensive vet care that simply could not save his life.  Traditionally, a broken leg has always been a death sentence for horses.  And so it was for Eight Belles.

It's hard to feel good about a sport that seems to be getting more and more fraught with these sorts of fatal injuries.  From what I understand, it's a combination of factors.  The horses are getting more fragile with increased inbreeding, and because of that, the hard dirt of most race courses is more dangerous.  (There has been a movement to invent a better surface, a less dangerous one, and Arlington Park, Chicago's home course, has a synthetic track now, to try to prevent such injuries from happening.)  Horses are less hardy now, there's no doubt about it.  Past horses ran many more races each year, and with less trouble.  Drugs may be part of the problem, allowing for the masking of such symptoms that might indicate troubled racing. 

I don't know if there is a solution.  I'd hate for the solution to be an end to all horse racing, but it's really hard to know about yesterday's breakdown without wanting to see an end to that kind of pain for horses.  If you love them.  One thing I think would be beneficial would be to space out the three legs of the Triple Crown.  Would that have saved Eight Belles?  No, of course not.  But might it have saved Barbaro?  Who can say?  Of course, not all breakdowns happen around these three races.  I don't understand the precise economics of horse racing, but to make money, a horse has to race.  And I'm sure it has to race a certain amount of times during a year.  Perhaps too often than what is good for a horse?  I don't know the answer.  I don't know the answer to any of this.

But as a fan of horses, and of racing, I can only say that what happened yesterday--and seeing the pictures and the video of the injury (NBC briefly showed video footage of the horse down on the track, before the equine ambulances moved in front of her so they could put her down, and I moaned to Sam, "She's down, oh she's down" and I knew that it was so very bad if she couldn't stand at all.)--well, it tests the boundaries of your love for such a thing.  I loved the idea of that filly winning the race, and I loved that she came in second; I was more excited about that than Big Brown's win.  To have it end so is nearly unbearable.  Nearly unbearable.

Something I don't understand

Americans.  Americans who vote for the president of the US based on what kind of lettuce he/she likes.  I'm exaggerating, of course, but we see it every single damn election:   the question of who is more like "the common man". 

Who cares?  Why does the president need to be the common man?  If you averaged out Americans, I'm guessing he or she would be a pretty unspectacular person, and frankly, by my thinking, America needs a spectacular person to be president.  (To be clear, I'm not excluding any current candidate from this designation, because as should be clear to all of us at this point, none of the three major candidates are anything like the "common man", which is just fine by me.  I don't care what kind of lettuce they like, if they prefer OJ to coffee, or what kind of damn food they ate while they were in Chicago.  In fact, I don't care about their preferences at all until they start to infringe upon their ability to govern, which arugula?  Does not.)  It's some sort of blind spot millions of Americans have, the can-I-drink-a-beer-with-him blind spot, the very one that elected George Bush. 

How about this, America?  You're NEVER going to have a beer with the president of this country.  So stop pretending it's a good criteria for electing such person.  You'll never eat a salad with the pres, or drink coffee with the pres (unless they're campaigning and shamelessly courting your vote), or sit around watching a ballgame with the pres.  Your relationship to the president shouldn't be about whether you want to be friends with the person, but whether this person is going to run this country in such a way that you will not have to worry about food or famine, war or peace, etc.  This person we elect should be INTELLIGENT, like your doctor.  Do you want a bubba doing surgery on you?  Then how about let's not let a bubba do surgery on the country. 

After all, look where it's gotten us.