on being healthy

bonzai, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, February 3, 2007

I’ve come to the radical conclusion that I am fine.

This is why I stopped going the gym. (Well, that and the fact that I can’t spare the $60/mo., but that’s for another post.) Now, I’m all for being healthy. For making conscious decisions about how you live and what you put in your body. For getting out into the world and actually doing something.

However, those noble goals are not what going to the gym was about. No matter how much I tried to convince myself otherwise, it was about one thing and one thing only: losing weight. It was about equating the number on the scale with my moral fortitude, about finding another way to judge myself, about setting myself up for more self-loathing. About punishing myself, denying myself, and using any indulgence as an example of my inherent weaknesses and personal failure. Turning pleasure into guilt.

Socially sanctioned guilt, at that. It is amazing how, because of the tenuous medical backing, how common and expected self-loathing is w/r/t one’s weight. Yes, dear Reader, I have heard all about the obesity epidemic. Our fat American asses are front-page-news these days. But it seems to me that this whole issue—not debate, per se, since no one is on the side of the fat asses—is really two separate things.

The first is consumption. It’s not hard to admit that our culture is based on mindless, endless consumption, and that this is killing us. Pick anything you want: national consumer debt, industrial farm waste, the Colorado River (which no longer reaches the sea). Hell, global warming is little more than the fact that we have burned all of the oil in the world. Just like that episode of Dinosaurs where they eat the last two grapedelites. Why can’t we just get more, they ask. That’s what more means.

But now we have a problem because, well, consuming is fun! And changing not only how we live our lives but also how we view the entire world is hard. The market has a solution for everything; you can buy something to fix problems you don’t even know you have. But to stop consumption? To change not only how we live but how we view the world and our place it in? Well, that would be crazy.

Anyway, this is where our cultural obsession with weightloss comes from. We can’t assuage our subconscious guilt over devouring our planet by seeing the systemic ways in which our culture is built around endless consumption, and thus changing our behavior to solve the problem. But we can subconsciously blame ourselves individually. And we can punish our bodies for giving away our dirty little secret.

The rubric of medical compliance give us a pass, but the real goal of the weightloss regime is culture-wide self-loathing. About what other subject is it so commonly acceptable to publically denigrate yourself? It disgusts me that everyday conversations consist of discussing how food and eating (that is, an activity you need to survive) are Bad Things, and that if you indulge at all you are A Bad Person. You are weak. You have failed. On the other hand if you deny yourself the pleasure of a little snack, you are good. But not Good, because everyone knows that this is only passing absolution. You must be on constant guard.

It is absurd that this is normal. I regularly have conversations that consist of nothing more than relating every little thing that someone (usually a woman, becuase lets face it, women aren’t people; they are bodies) has or has not eaten recently, and the relative goodness imbued in each item, followed by a description of how good or bad she has been with regard to the gym. I get so uncomfortable in conversations where food is allowed to be defined solely by its calorie count, with the actual experience of enjoying food relegated to a cruel temptation to sin. This is hate speech, directed toward ourselves.

Now, I’m about five and a half feet tall. Over the last decade or so, my weight has fluctuated between about 190 lbs down to 150 and then back up to 180; currently I’m somewhere in the 160s. I’ve tried to diet, I’ve tried exercising. I’ve counted calories, I’ve gotten up early to run in place for an hour. But there has never been a correlation between my activity level or diet and my weight. There has, however, always been a strong correlation between how happy I am in my life and how fat I am. When I’m depressed, lonely, lost, and afraid, I gain weight. When I am content, when I am looking forward and actively trying to do something with myself, I lose weight.

Because I live in this culture too, have been raised with its values, when I lose hope I try to fill the void with things as I’ve been taught. Food. Television. Sleep. It doesn’t matter what your drug is, if you are trying to fill an existential emptiness with tangible things, you’ll just end up full of them. Full of emptiness. On the other hand, when I am better—not necessarily happier, just more conscious and deliberate—I lose weight. Because I realize that I am my body; it is not a separate thing to punish for its own failings. That I should take care of myself, yes, but that I should also experience this world, and that my body is the portal to both the world and my enjoyment of it. And miraculously, when I stop worrying about the numbers and start thinking about the clouds, things are okay.

Oftentimes, you can determine the right course of action because it is also the most difficult. It is easy to hate yourself and look for a solution you can buy. Jenny Craig. Gastric bypass. Alli. This structure—determining a previously undefined problem and presenting a solution through consmuption—in the basis for most successful marketing campaigns.

It is more difficult to enjoy your body—as it is, in all its imperfect glory—and admit that you are okay and that the world is crazy.

on sincerity

Empty public pool, Sunset Park, Brooklyn. June 10, 2007.

I here offer never ending thanks to Tatiana, who was kind enough to loan me her copy of Birds of America by Lorrie Moore even after I spilled cherry Jello on her couch. And since I not only hold Tatiana’s opinions w/r/t literature in high regard, but also because the loan of this book was accompanied by a great story about sitting next to Carrie and Janet (of Sleater-Kinney fame) at a Lorrie Moore reading, I put aside what I was reading at the time and dove right in.

What I discovered were some of the most finely crafted short stories I have ever had to pleasure to read. The best pieces in this collection provide emotion without being sentimental and humor without being slapstick. Moore creates fully human female characters, whose romantic entanglements, though relevant, aren’t their sole reason for being/thinking. She addresses the both large and banal ways women must compromise themselves to simply make it through this world.

Moore is able to accomplish all this because of the exquisite precision of her prose. (I had recently read Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, and I am probably–and gratefully–influenced by her advocacy of close reading of a text.) Every single word is exactly what it should be, exactly where it should be. And while the stories are complete, they are not too much. I was surprised that I was so taken by the efficiency of Moore’s writing—I tend to fall for the try-to-describe-every-thought-and-detail-of-a-world, David Foster Wallace–style of writing. I usually enjoy the “too much.” But Moore is precise and efficient without being mechanical, and is able to imbue her stories with a reality, a lived-in feeling.

For example, here’s the opening passage from “Real Estate”:

It must be, Ruth thought, that she was going to die in the spring. She felt such inexplicable desolation then, such sludge in the heart, felt the season’s mockery, all that chartreuse humidity in her throat like a gag.

It’s a simple, direct sentence, yet it perfectly presents Ruth to us: resigned to her life, to the sadness there. The passive voice in the first clause, showing that Ruth isn’t searching for death, just assuming how it will come. But then this straightforward introduction is paired with the “chartreuse humidity” of the spring—unusual, but entirely tangible, tactile.

Moore then goes on to explain that Ruth always discovered her husband’s affairs in the spring.

But the last one was years ago, and what did she care about all that now? There had been a parade of flings—in the end, they’d made her laugh: Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

And then “Ha!”s filling up the entire next two pages! Perfect. At first it may sound indulgent, or gimicky. But how else to describe the resignation? The humor, yes, but the pain that goes with realizing that you are just going to accept your husband’s infidelity?

It is difficult to describe just how amazing this story is without coming across as someone trying to explain why a joke is funny. Explaining the point takes the power away from the original, in a way. So I’ll let my gushing stop for a moment. I will say, though, that Moore’s stories accomplish something that I have been looking for more and more these days: sincerity. Not sentimentality, emotion for emotion’s sake. Not hip ironic detachment. But just being able to look at the world honestly, with open eyes, at all of its horror and beauty.

on loving well

Memory is a strange thing. I clearly remember watching Jason and the Argonauts while eating grinders from Angelina’s in Mr. West’s seventh grade Language Arts class, and I remember trying to get my newly retainered mouth to explain to my ninth grade history teacher that the existence of pyramid-shaped structures in both Egypt and Central America did not, in fact, prove that there was ancient contact between the two cultures. However, until this afternoon, I had completely forgotten about Loving Well.

Loving Well was (and still is, I imagine) a “curriculum” taught in my eighth grade English class. According to Boston University, where it was developed, this “curriculum”

helps adolescents learn responsible sexual and social values through good literature, which reveals the complexity of life and love relationships.

Which, when translated into English, means attempting to brainwash fourteen-year-olds with abstinence-based education by twisting literary criticism to misguided and pointless ends.

But wait, you say, isn’t one of the great things about literature that it gives us a window onto the greater dramas in our own lives? Isn’t exposing adolescents to the relevance of literature a worthy endeavor? And hey, what do you have against “promoting . . . critical thinking,” “enhanc[ing] mutual respect,” and “counter[ing] school and family violence”? What better way to both encourage young people to participate in the life of the mind AND take a considered approach to interpersonal choices than to explicitly relate literary themes with their own lived experiences? And what greater dramatic theme is there to investigate than love?

Well, Dear Reader, in my repressed-until-this-afternoon experience with the thing, none of the above mentioned goals was met. Instead, Loving Well was just another method of stifling independent thought and reinforcing patriarchal and religious strictures. Of course I did not phrase it that way in my pre-queer-man-hating-feminist days; I just thought it was dumb.

Because catch this: The very first assignment was to read the Brothers’ Grimm version of “Sleeping Beauty.” You know the drill: princess gets finger “pricked” by spindle, falls asleep until heroically rescued by dragon-slaying prince, all is right in the world. In this program, the only acceptable interpretation of this story was spindle = temptation, blood (from said prick) = menstruation = physical maturity, falling asleep = she’s not ready for sex, prince = the perfect man for whom you’re supposed to be selling yourself to in marriage saving yourself. I guess the dragon = virginity. There was also something about all of the earlier princes who failed in their attempts to storm the castle, and they are supposed to represent the fact that good girls not only wait for sex, but also only put out for dudes who fit neatly into the traditional definitions of masculinity and/or can slay dragons and shit.

As mentioned, that was only the beginning. The end is the kicker: the “final” of this program as a MOCK WEDDING. Thinking back, I can’t believe that this happened year after year without anyone’s head exploding over the absolutely absurd nature of the whole thing. The “bride” and “groom” were determined by a vote! Everyone had to contribute something to the ceremony (I think I made cupcakes or something), and then we all lined up and cheered awkwardly while our classmates were unofficially hitched.

And this was in a public school in Massachusetts, not necessarily the worst offender when it comes to ill-advised pedagogical pursuits. To be fair, we did have LAMO in elementary school (Learning About Myself and Others, sort of an elective “where do babies come from” class w/ parents) and peer educators in high school (students trained in all sorts of sex-ed who had a private room to meet w/ other students “outside of school hours”), but I am appalled that I had to go through this Loving Well shit. At least it didn’t take.

How much longer do we have to put up with people trying to argue that abstinence-only “education” has any merit whatsoever? I don’t understand how anyone can support an ideology that a) is based on lying to people, and b) doesn’t fucking work. Study after study has shown that abstinence-only education don’t stop people from having sex, just stops people from having safe sex.

Oh wait, I remember now. Abstinence-only sex education isn’t actually about trying to help people make good decisions or lowering the number of unwanted pregnancies. Don’t forget:

One curriculum instructs, “Women gauge their happiness and judge their success by their relationships. Men’s happiness and success hinge on their accomplishments.” Another lists “Financial Support” as one of the “5 Major Needs of Women,” and “Domestic Support” as one of the “5 Major Needs of Men.” This same curriculum encourages girls to show their admiration of boys by “regard[ing] him with wonder, delight, and approval.”

[sounds of me vomiting on my computer]

Abstinence-only sex education is about maintaining the patriarchal structure that views women as property whose uteri need to be in freshly-picked shape for socially-accepted breeding–unless of course you fail as a socially-acceptable breeding vehicle, at which point you’re relegated to the slut class and then who cares about what sorts of STIs/unwanted pregnancy/emotional trauma you experience. It’s your own fault you didn’t believe the lies we told you in the first place.

on writing v. being a writer

First posts tend to be mission statements, and far be it from me to disappoint. Thus:

I don’t write as much as I should.

I had been avoiding the whole weblog phenomenon because I am not entirely comfortable with the solipsistic nature of most incarnations of the ‘blog. I’m sure that format serves a useful purpose for some, but I honestly think that the minutae of my daily life would bore any possible readers as much as it bores me.

On the other hand, I have been spending a fair amount of time recently wondering why I find it so difficult to pursue any of the creative endeavors I claim to enjoy–particularly writing. Yes, there is the “I work with books all day, why would I want to do more of that at home” excuse; the “what’s the point if no one is going to read it” excuse; and of course the “but there is so much more Battlestar Galactica to watch” excuse.

That’s exactly what those are, though: excuses. I think that were I to be honest with myself I would have to admit that while I enjoy writing, while I believe I have some talent in this area, I have never felt myself to be “a writer,” in that it is not part of my identity. To be fair, there are few things that I consider myself to “be” inherently. While I suppose the pro and cons of my aversion to identity politics can be the topic of a later post, suffice it to say that I see writing as something I do, rather than something that I am. But I think that’s part of the reason why I am less motivated to actually put pen to paper: it’s not like I’m a writer or something.

Secondly, as my friend Mabel pointed out a number of years ago, there isn’t much point to writing without an audience to read what you’ve created. While I don’t necessarily agree with this in every circumstance, it is true for substantive writing. At the end of the day, creating something is difficult. It takes a fair amount of effort. Not having an audience with which to share the fruits of that labor just leads to a tree-falls-in-the-forest situation.

Anyway, I am sure the direction of this discussion is obvious. You, dear Reader, get to be my Audience. And as to whether I am a “writer” or simply “writing,” I suppose that’s not the sort of thing that is up to me to decide.

Plus, I need somewhere to post picutres of the shirts and things I’ve been making.