web log (late 20th c. – early 21st c.)
Lots of workingman’s weekdays. Work has been a little harder because of staffing levels, so fewer hands to do the same work. I’ve been getting home and passing out early. Started watching Attack on Titan last night, I’m really liking it so far.
Ate cereal, drove to work. When I got in, I found out that nobody had picked up the van I needed for later in the day, which was fine because I was bingeing on Invisibilia. I have mixed feelings about the show. It’s well reported and crafted, but I can’t stand the Radiolab-inspired, “we’re just two brainy gals putting on a show because, gosh darn it, we just have so many questions” tone to the show.
The rest of the morning passed. I paid bills and sent out emails about things I’m working on. Basically attended to accounts.
In the afternoon, I got a group of kids together to get their teeth looked at and assessed for a day of free dental work that’s coming up. The weather was pretty bad, and the vans that we use can be…difficult in good conditions, so I wasn’t thrilled about being on the road. It’s been really windy and wet, and the Glenn Jackson bridge between Oregon and Washington was particularly scary. We got to the club that was hosting the dental day, and they were pretty shorthanded too so the whole thing was a little crazy. The kids were pretty good, though. That being said, it was still pretty noisy and pretty crazy, so I started having a baby migraine level headache that just kept building as the afternoon turned to evening. By the time all the kids were picked up by their parents and I left to drop off the van and pick up my own car, my head was splitting.
I took the opportunity to stop by a Trader Joes (I’m very sad that there’s not one closer to my house) and got myself a bottle of wine and some food. Once I got some food, some water, and some blissful silence, I felt a lot better, even though my head still hurt a lot. I tried to get some preparation done for my Shakespeare thing next week: I read a few pages of As You Like It and watched a few minutes of one of those painful 70’s BBC adaptations that feature great actors, great acting, and miserable everything else. I was finding it really hard to focus on, well, anything, so I decided to say fuck this day and went to sleep at like 10:30.
Very quick Wednesday
*3/7ths of this list refers to energy or sleeping.
**It was at the convention center. I’m not a car guy, so it was only all right. I did see a grown man throw a petit-four that he didn’t like on the floor like a child. I was accidentally served a G&T with still water, which was really, really gross.
***I’m in a weird place right now.
I had planned to be up after last night’s insanity to talk about Are You My Mother with L, but ended up sleeping until it was time to get ready for work.
I’m not quite sure what’s prompted it, maybe last weekend’s fun, but I’ve been going through a little spell of is-there-anybody-out-there-for-me loneliness. I expressed this today by doing a little OKCupid trawling. My current angle is that if I message people online and keep a low simmer of fear of rejection going at all times, maybe I won’t lock up so much when serendipity happens in person. Of course the idea of there being an angle to figure out always reminds me of this scene from LOST:
I broke my resolution to not read any inspirational/life coachy material and read everything about meeting people I could find on Captain Awkward, which is all wonderful but has almost nothing aimed at me—or at least that I can see right now. One thing that I came across that seemed to address a blind spot that I have right now was a link to a piece by Kate Harding called “The Fantasy of Being Thin.” Whether from some place of logic or place of insecurity, I have a really hard time “trying on” the ideas of the fat acceptance movement. Nevertheless, the truth of these words, as well as their of-a-pieceness with other work I’ve been doing, seemed worthy of some deeper thought:
We’ve talked a lot here about how being fat shouldn’t stop you from doing the things you’ve always believed you couldn’t do until you were thin. Put on a bathing suit and go waterskiing. Apply for that awesome job you’re just barely qualified for. Ask that hot guy out. Join a gym. Wear a gorgeous dress. All of those concrete things you’ve been putting off? Just fucking do them, now, because this IS your life, happening as we speak.
But exhortations like that don’t take into account magical thinking about thinness, which I suspect — and the quote above suggests — is really quite common. Because, you see, the Fantasy of Being Thin is not just about becoming small enough to be perceived as more acceptable. It is about becoming anentirely different person – one with far more courage, confidence, and luck than the fat you has…
In light of that, it’s a lot easier to understand why some people freak out when you say no, really, your chances of losing weight permanently are virtually nil, so you’d be better off focusing on feeling good and enjoying your life as a fat person. To someone fully wrapped up in The Fantasy of Being Thin, that doesn’t just mean, “All the best evidence suggests you will be fat for the rest of your life, but that’s really not a terrible thing.” It means, “You will NEVER be the person you want to be!
Even this short passage provokes strong contradictory emotions in me: part of what I’m doing right now is learning how to live as though expected outcomes—”chances”—are not a factor, yet another part of what I’m trying to do right now is to live with as few ideas about how I have to do X before starting as possible.
One thing that I’ve been aware of for a while is that if I want to go forward as a performer, I have some intense and difficult work to do with the way that I carry myself and my body language. I feel like it is related to some of the feelings that Harding writes about. Each month at Blow Pony, there are these hogbellied go-go dancing bears, and I’m always jealous of their comfort with themselves and their ability to not give a fuck.
Work was fine. I did a little media literacy with 2nd graders. One called the Budweiser commercial with the dog and the horse a movie. The only commercial that they remembered unprompted was the one where it made it seem like the TV signal went out.
Terry Gross was really weirded out that anybody would even wonder if you could read braille with the head of the clitoris or penis (you can’t). I’m glad somebody asked and answered the question.
I made a delicious dinner of garlic buttered rice, pork, and red chard. I love cooking, hate shopping.
After dinner, I fucked around for a little bit. Got caught up on Top Chef. I am obsessed with the possibility that a black man might win this season. There has never been a black male chef in the finale, as I recall. Plus, last season’s defeat of an idiosyncratic Caribbean woman chef with a master’s demeanor by a bland, Massachusetts white manchild with a perpetually entitled pouty face was particularly rough. It doesn’t hurt that the chef, Gregory Gourdet, is from Portland, a gay black hipster, and has a super compelling and interesting personal history.
I headed over to the Academy after finishing to watch the new Chris Rock movie, Top Five. That movie had so much squandered starpower and was such a mess that I don’t even have an appetite for picking it apart. I had pretty low expectations, and it was worse than that. I’d been spoiled on the distasteful gay jokes in the movie, but by then I almost didn’t even care that much because I thought it wasn’t a very good movie. In fact, I loved that scene because I’m coming to accept that I have a non-ironic, non-comic attraction to Anders Holm and his buttery smooth pale body:
When I got home, I was getting ready for bed when I accidentally snapped my glasses, because I didn’t have enough on my plate this month and fuck my life. I’m going to have to get replacements, and I have no idea how I’m going to pay for them.
hammer & jack 