This ain't a tune up, it's a goddamn racket

This actually started as a reaction to a bullshit Yoplait ad I saw while watching TV online - something about how low-fat yogurt, cereal, and a fruit are acceptable for 2 meals a day. And then I started calculating calorie counts and then I realized that this is not what I do best.

Because I don't feel like I have to break down how few calories that suggested "2 week tune up" is. It's fucked. It's a horrible, insidious suggestion that reentreches how women's bodies are WRONG WRONG WRONG. Because this ad isn't oriented at men - though I'll acknowledge this might mess up some men at the same time - it is beyond a doubt aimed at women. Because we're wrong. We need a "tune up" that consists of too few calories combined with exercise. We need a bunch of other shit like fake eyelashes, 30 day "shred" plans, videotapes, DVDs, blahblahblah.

All of our lives are devoted to this wrongness.

Of course I believe in health. Of course I think it matters. But there is not a single goddamn thing about starvation-style diets combined with exercise with a goal of losing weight that will almost certainly come back immediately. Not to mention that the whole connection of a SPECIFIC BRAND of low-fat yogurt (as if it has the magical formula to make you look hot at your high school reunion, as suggested in the ad I saw) isn't some gross consumerist crap that just makes us believe that we can buy the happiness that will make up for us being WRONG.

And I'm just so tired of wrongness. Tired of all of these plans, deals, videos, weekends away, diets, shreds, fucked up rules. I'm tired of being wrong. I no longer have the energy to pretend that any of it works (hint: long term, it doesn't), to pretend that I believe that it matters. I'm tired of accepting that I'm wrong.

Because maybe a world that tells me who I am is wrong is wrong.

Body Positive at Any Damn Size

All right. We're going there. I've been stuck on bodies lately and I keep treating this like it is a continuation of the journal that I had for 9 years running - like there's context, like there's an archive to get information to give some sort of background. There's not.

I come from a long line of disordered eaters and I followed in that fine tradition - I, like generations of big-hipped ladies before me, was an excellent anorexic.

But this isn't about that time, something I have blogged extensively about and might again, if I ever feel like it. This is about what it means to be "healthy."

I'm having a lot of struggles with reactionary body-hate I hear every day. I hear it at my work, I hear it in my graduate classes, I see it online, and I sometimes even get to revel in it while having a drink after work with friends. And I feel like I get weird side-glances during a lot of it because I'm not thin anymore. I'm not exactly fat, either - and no, that's not me bragging, just being accurate - but I exist in a body that looks a lot like many women's bodies, with a belly and an ass and larger breasts and thighs that rub together.

Now, I love all of ya'll who are exercising more and eating better and making your lives feel good. Seriously. I want to high five every one of you, because we SHOULD move our bodies, we SHOULD eat food that has recognizable food it in, we SHOULD like the way we feel.

But that doesn't have to be correlated to size. And, often, it isn't. I'm not going to name numbers, not because they're shameful, but because I honestly don't know them. When I started into recovery for my eating disorder, the first thing that had to be thrown out was my scale.

But I was sick when I was thin. I have certain heart concerns that I would never have had, I was anemic, I had no energy, I was a caffeine-pill junkie, I developed a pre-ulceric condition at 17, I had constant headaches and pain ... I was hungry. I was hungry and supplementing pills and cigarettes and cup after cup of coffee and Diet Coke and gum for food, with a steady influx of disordered exercise where I more than once FELL DOWN while running because I was so lightheaded.

When I was a size 6 or 8, nobody ever asked me how much I exercised. They didn't ask me how many vegetables I ate, they didn't condescendingly note the exercise habits that they did see. They just assumed that thin=healthy, so I must have been good.

I wasn't.

I'm sick of the pseudo-science being thrown around that obesity/my fat ass CAUSES things - thanks to a reminder of quantitative research methods from my class 11 years ago (because I turned around and got old), I now remember the way that popular media throws around the term "cause." The ONLY causal relationship that is scientifically significant between obesity and health?

The fatter you are, the less likely you are to go to a doctor. That's it. They may be able to show a correlation between weight and some diseases, but the only CAUSAL relationship? Is how often people go to doctors.

And you know when the last time I went to the doctor (the doctor, not my surgeon or PT for my broken leg)? It's been years.

This isn't saying that I don't want to hear about health. I love hearing about the new vegetable recipe you've tried or how beginning runners get over that initial feeling of disappointment. I enjoy when people talk about getting stronger and moving better.

I like to hear about the night you went dancing last weekend and didn't stop for three hours.

But lets not talk about pants size, okay? Lets not talk numbers and weight and BMI and all of that shit that doesn't really matter.

Tell me what you are and what you love, not some useless set of numbers. Please.

Oh, Spokane

A lot of people who live in my city don't particularly like it here. I think it's because many people have grown up here and need to move away.

Me? I'm from Montana. Spokane was the Big City for me when I moved here in 1998.

There are a lot of things I like about this place: decent numbers of trees, easily-accessible nature, weird little indie stores that probably wouldn't manage to stay open in a larger city. Hell, we have a river that runs though the middle of town.

One thing that I do NOT love, however, is Spokane's love affair with parking lots. Have a historical building? Let's tear it down and pave us another parking lot! Have open spaces? Let's pave it!

And now, a church on the lower side of one of our wealthier neighborhoods (which isn't saying much, Spokane is pretty much working-class to the CORE) is trying to push through a variance on building code to tear down a bunch of buildings in a historical neighborhood. Why? Of course. Because we need a PARKING LOT.

The strange thing about Spokane's obsession with parking lots is this: we have plenty of parking. We are not New York City or even Seattle or Portland - there is plenty of on-street parking in residential neighborhoods and light commercial areas. In what passes for a "downtown core" (it's reviving, but it's not exactly bustling), we have three large parking garages that I can think of.

One of the most awesome things about Spokane is the weird, quirky character of the town. We're in danger of losing it for one damn parking lot after another.

Cyborg Bodies

Believe it or not, I don't spend all of my time thinking about resumes, bodies, or fashion (though it probably seems like it to those who read my academic work). In the last couple of days, I've been returning to a text that I have found useful in a lot of contexts to work with ways that it can tease out different aspects of what I've been focusing on lately - fashion, bodies, queerness, the academy, and me (at heart, isn't most academic work about the academics themselves?).

The text is Donna Haraway's Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Haraway's background is interesting - she started as a feminist-socialist biologist and has since kind of slid into a poststructured, postmodern position against some pretty traditional feminist stances rooted in biology and binary politics and identities. In this book, she specifically advocates differntial politics for "inappropriate/d others," a phrase borrowed from Tinh T. Minh-ha which refers to a historical positioning of those people who refuse to adopt the personae of "self" or "other" offered by the dominating narratives of identity and politics. For Haraway, these inappropriate/d others are often those most dismissed in the world - women, people of color, members of ethnic or national groups which are considered "primitive."

Some of us, she says, become "cyborgs" - a chimera or intentionally-created hybrids of both the natural and the mechanical or constructed. This allows for room for many of us to move outside of binary concepts - Am I this way because I was born this way or because I was taught to be her? - and start to find a place in this hybridity.

The rejection of binaries has always been an attractive thing to me - to deny that people are one or the other, never both and certainly neither has an appeal that rings true in my experience of the world. It may be the baby punk that still lives somewhere inside me, but having someone tell me who and what I am, what that means ... it chafes.

What would it mean, then, for my body to be a cyborg body? How does that play into the discomforts I've been mulling over for the last couple of weeks with fashion and professional identity and queerness?

There are obvious constructs at play here -- "professional," "academic," "grown up," "woman," "queer," "feminine," so many others -- and many of them are at odds with each other. There are also things that I might want to call "natural" -- the concept of my own sexuality that I choose to call queer, the physical presence of my body. The tensions exist not just in the biological-to-construct parts of this story, but even within both groups. It is not as if my biology is rejecting the constructs or the constructed is rejecting my body; something far more insidious is happening. Each of the parts pulls at the others.

Even the tension of what clothes I put on to go to work this morning live within these points sometimes pulling and sometimes pushing at one another. A lot of people probably find this either ridiculous or depressing, but I am pretty sure that I find it comforting - I've always wanted to have explanations, theories, possible ideas that help the world make more sense.

And if the world, if it's this cyborg body, if it's the way that we construct ourselves, then it's not just me.

Clothing, Redux.

Tonight, I had a conversation for the fosterkidlet of some friends. She's 12 and, goddamn, is 12 hard. And she is AWESOME. She is doing an awesome program to increase civic engagement in junior high and high school students in DC this spring and we were talking about whether she was excited about it.

"I guess so," she said, shrugging.

"You're NOT?" I said, amazed.

"No, it sounds cool, but I'm not excited about the clothes."

Apparently, students are expected to dress appropriately - no jeans, no Uggs, business-casual at least.

So the friend-fosterkidlet and I made a pact - we'd go shopping together to find stuff that was awesome that made us both feel good.

Maybe I need to start at being 12 years old and not hating myself as much. Maybe.

Clothing, Bodies, Gender, and Professionalism

I've been trying to write more ... substantive journal entries, at least to make up for the fact (or to validate) that I'm writing fewer of them.

Since I started at my job at the university as a career advisor, I've been struggling with professional clothing and the ways that they affect perception of me as a professional and my own concept of myself. This will only be exacerbated when I start instructing next quarter.

Clothes are more than a little fraught for me. They always have been. Unlike my academic-fashionista kin, I have not always loved clothes. I wasn't someone who was really clever with pairings or daring with how I dressed. I just ... wore clothes.

The history of my discomfort with fashion is bifold and it's the oldest queer girl story in the book (or one of them, at least); it's about gender presentation and body dysmorphia.

Right? It's like a highlights reel of every substantive post I've written over a decade of blogging. But just in case you've missed that decade (which every one of you has, unless one of you has managed to find my old hand-coded journal from 1998), I'll review.

Fashion and Body Dysmorphia
I have never had any clear idea what my body looked like. From the time I was seven and decided I should just eat fruit for breakfast (which quickly became nothing by the time I was eight) to the full lifetime of taking a range of six sizes to the dressing room not just because clothes are inconsistent but because I honestly cannot see if I am a size eight or a size eighteen.

This makes fashion a little bit complicated. You know all of those articles, probably even useful ones, that talk about "good jeans for those with big thighs?" or "How to maximize your body shape?" I, basically, am not sure what column to look at. Combining the lack of understanding of my own body with my total inability to know what size I am basically results in shopping being a horrifying experience. Every pair of pants I try on, every shirt that doesn't button over my breasts (which is most of them) is like a personal failure. It is the world saying "Yup, you're still doing it wrong."

So I didn't do it. I have found a fair number of slacks that look okay and some t-shirts and sweaters that fit okay. There are a couple of skirts that fit right and I'm most comfortable in knee-high boots. So I make it. But it's not like the bloggers at Threadbared, Academic Chic, Fashion for Nerds, Blue Collar Catwalk, Bright Side Dweller, or any of these other pre-professional/professional women who look pulled together and genuinely seem to enjoy fashion.

Gender Identity and Fashion
Which leads to the second point of discomfort. As much as I love the aforementioned blogs, they're all variations upon femininity and femme-ness. Which is great, but it's not necessarily me. Occasionally, sure, I'm interested in some kind of queered femininity, often pairing something softer with some kick-ass boots or something, but in an average day, I'm not comfortable being that girly. I'm not masculine-presenting, exactly, but I am uncomfortable with compulsory femininity and, in a lot of ways, I'm not feminine.

This is, of course, complicated by being an out, queer woman who is partnered with a woman. Even in the notoriously liberal higher education field, assumptions are laid upon both of us in terms of presentation and expectations.

And so my options in professional clothing diminish. Because it seems like the options are the currently boring look I'm rocking or too consistently feminine.

This is, of course, oversimplification and hyperbole. Unfortunately, I have a lack of role models. So I pull together what I can, trying to take the ideas I get from blogs and people whose clothing I like and doing what I can with it without sacrificing what feels right to me.

So I've done a few things. I'm learning better skills of accessorizing, I'm trying new color combinations, and I'm trying to have fun with this.

But it's a pain in the fucking ass. And some days like today when I've spent a while trying to find fun, funky, sorta-punky clothing combinations that still look professional, I kind of want to wrap my whole body in a blanket and call it a day.

But there are other days, too. So maybe I'll just finish dying my hair, tie it back in a bright green scarf, throw on a purple long-sleeved shirt and some dark jeans with my knee-high black boots and maybe that will work.

I know you! I see you. Come over here. You are shaped like me.

So I've been obsessively reading through The Blogess' archives lately. She's funny, she's snarky, she seems to find her amazing Internet Friend Nancy W. Capps, Paralegal as amazing as I do.

And mostly? It's funny.

But then I came to this post, written by people who attended BlogHer and found some kind of connection.

The idea of looking at the world like Picasso is amazing, but even more?

Sometimes, we just recognize people. We look at them and we think "You. I know you. I've always known you or I should have."

And it's not about their faces or their bodies or anything nearly that visible. But it's like the triangles and circles in us recognize the triangles and circles in them.

One of the best people I know is coming to see me in two weeks. And I had that kind of recognition with her, like her rhombus looked kind of like my rhombus.

I thank whatever there is out there, actually, for the friends I've made through my mind and the lizard brain part of my head that sees people as having something that looks like me.

I never would have been brave enough to befriend most of you. But my life wouldn't be anything like it is without it.

New starts or: My Adventures in Broken Bones

For the last 7 years, I have journaled at LiveJournal. And, frankly, as much as I have enjoyed it, it seems like there might be a reason to start something new, to have something associate with me at 29, not me at 22.

Plus, I just googled "what to expect" and "broken ankle" as keywords and brought up no personal experiences.

So, why not start with a story?

I live with my partner, 3 dogs, a cat, and the snake (it wasn't the snake's fault). The other night, Sunday to be precise, I was going to bed late, denying that the weekend was over. I had turned off the light and went to go up our long flight of very steep stairs to our bedroom and the guest room. And ... my foot snagged.

On our 85 pound dog. (See, I told you it wasn't the snake's fault. Snake-haters).

I've probably tripped on Callie a few dozen times - I'm clumsy and she's big, so it happens.

This time, however, I heard a very distinct "snap" as I fell onto the ground. Looking down at my ankle, I remembered another time I had fallen (I've mentioned clumsy, right?) and how I thought I might have broken my ankle, but it was just a bad sprain.

Here's something I found out late Sunday night and I want to share it with you all: With this kind of break, there is no "maybe" about it. Through the haze of pain, I could actually see that the bone piece where it shouldn't have been.

Which was both gross and cool.

So my partner, Willow, drove me to the emergency room while I tried to curse QUIETLY, so as to not offend passersby. And, potentially, people 30 miles away.

I have no idea how long it takes normally to get an ankle looked at, x-rayed, set in a split , and discharged. In my case, it took just shy of 4 hours. The longest wait was between the x-ray (when the tech asked me "can you turn your foot that way?" and I hissed "no" as I tried not to pass out) and finding out what was going on, which kind of worried me.

Well, as worried as I could get while wondering why I hadn't had any painkillers yet.

They came back and, shockingly, it was broken. Apparently, the wait was surrounding not the break, but whether there was ligament damage. After putting on the splint, they decided not to operate that night, but to refer me to an orthopedic surgeon this week, so I was (FINALLY) allowed to drink water. Apparently, pain and shock make your mouth cotton-dry.

They gave me a 'script for Percocet and one for anti-nausea meds, both of which I am trying to avoid taking - vomiting and dizziness are pretty much my two least favorite things EVER.

And now, I'm discovering all of the things that I used to take for granted that, at least for the duration of this ankle thing, I no longer can;

1) Bathing: Oh yes. Before I moved to England to go to graduate school in the fall of 2004, I was a twice-a-day bather. And, although the stereotypes about Europeans being stinky is patently untrue, I will say that I ... relaxed over there. However, I still wash my hair every other day, bathe every day. That is, of course, I did these things until NOW.

How, exactly, is one supposed to bathe with a huge splint on a foot that they can't rest on the ground? I know, theoretically, the garbage bag thing should work, but do you have any idea how LONG that would take? So far, I'm subsisting on sponge baths and hoping to bribe my long-suffering girlfriend into washing my hair in the next day or so.

2) Having hair longer than 1": Speaking of the previous issue, I will be getting all of my hair cut off on Friday, after getting paid. It's just not POSSIBLE to do even the little bit of beauty work I do in the morning (wash, brush my hair; wash my face; lotion - yeah, I'm high-maintenance), so short hair it is.

3) Going to the bathroom: I am now carefully balancing staying hydrated (very important when taking any pain meds, even Advil) and how long it takes me to go to the bathroom. Seriously, the 50 foot trek from the living room futon (which is quickly becoming my home) to the bathroom has become a obstacle course. In that time, I have to dodge 3 interested dogs who want to know what's up with my foot and what those things under my arms are (crutches are AWESOME), chairs that have fallen, a cup that fell on the ground that I can't get, a pair of running shoes, and some piles of debris from my dogs destroying things. It's easier to just hold it.

4) Stairs The FEW blogs or articles I've managed to find about broken ankles say something along the lines of "stairs will be your greatest challenge!" And yes, they have that damn exclamation point and, yes, they are always obviously former athletes or masochists or something. Because stairs? Stairs suck. Going down them is easier, but still precarious, what with the whole potential for re-injury. Going up them? You're going to feel like you're pitching forth into nothingness every time and it's going to hurt muscles in your arms you didn't even know you HAD.

5) Eating: Oh man, food used to taste so good. But in the not-quite 48 hours since breaking my ankle, nothing sounds good and nothing tastes good. I'm basically eating as an excuse to take half a Percocet so I don't chop off my own leg.

So. This is probably going to be something I talk about for a while, being that it looks like I'll be swinging around on crutches and discovering entirely new muscles in my arms for the next 6 weeks, at least.

But you can be here with me!

I know, who could give up an invitation like THAT?