Aimee Bender

Great short story writer. Check out a selection of her stuff here.

Ginmar's Pics From Babylon

Including the famous: Wild Cats of Babylon.

I Can't Belive I Forgot to Have Children!

Older piece by Pollitt, very good:

A long time ago I dated a 28-year-old man who told me the first time we went out that he wanted to have seven children. Subsequently, I was involved for many years with an already middle-aged man who also claimed to be eager for fatherhood. How many children have these now-gray gentlemen produced in a lifetime of strenuous heterosexuality? None. But because they are men, nobody's writing books about how they blew their lives, missed the brass ring, find life a downward spiral of serial girlfriends and work that's lost its savor. We understand, when we think about men, that people often say they want one thing while making choices that over time show they care more about something else, that circumstances get in the way of many of our wishes and that for many "have kids" occupies a place on the to-do list between "learn Italian" and "exercise."

Good Stories, Fake People

Nice peice about the plasticisation of Hollywood stars, and it's ripple-effect. Where are all the real people?

Today's Repeat

Today's song, stuck on repeat: Modest Mouse, The Moon & Antarctica "3rd Planet."

I don't why this song makes me happy to listen to. But, it does.

Finally, Some Context

I wish more people wrote about this shit this way. More on boys vs. girls, done right.

Dreams

Had a dream last night that 1) I was a Supah Ninjah stealing magical artifacts from an archeological dig. Lots of snow caves were involved, and bright spotlights. 2) I was part of said archeological team and having an affair with the lead archeologist, a rather twitchy, dorky guy who finally had to push me off him with the immortal words, "I'm so tired" so he could go back to crunching some sort of ancient archeological puzzle numbers. That troublesome architect from work made an appearance as one of the archelogical team who burst into the lead's place while he and I sat over coffee and bagels and debated ancient puzzle numbers. Upon seeing I was clad in nothing but a towel and quite obviously banging the lead acheologist, the architect broke into a frustrated wail and stomped out of the room.

It occurs to me that I could have an entire blog full of nothing but batshit dream entries.

Night Thoughts

"It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers; and even the sex, once she and Richard reached that point, was ardent but awkward, unsatisfying, more kindly than passionate. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other."

- The Hours. Michael Cunningham.

The Small, Secret Battle

Regular readers know that I'm a binge eater whose default tendency is to overconsume mass amounts of food when I go through a chemical imbalance, usually because of emotional stress or because I've been triggered by eating something that gives me a big glucose spike. I've been fighting to stop this, permanently, for the last year and a half or so. Before that, I was pretty much stuck in the old binge-and-purge cycle - I'd be "on a diet" for 6 months or a year, then "not on a diet" for a couple years, then "on a diet," and etc.

I suspect that most of my body's imbalance has to do with this kind of dieting, which is why I have a vested interest in work being done by Paul Campos and research by Wendy Shanker, who've held a mirror up to the dieting industry and come back wondering how invested that industry really is in "making us thin," encouraging us to be healthy, or - heaven forbid - like ourselves.

My buddy Jenn and I ran errands today, and hopped into Trader Joe's for coffee beans. I picked up some mixed nuts and dried apples, and found myself increasingly twitchy around the prepared foods.

I was hungry, I admit, but I was also stressed about a number of things, angsting over boys (Should I throw in the towel and just go on dates? Just not pursue relationships? Figure out casual sex? Use it as a tool just to meet people? I plan to buy myself a dozen yellow roses and study for the LSATs on the 14th), angsting over the state of my apartment, angsting over the book I'm supposed to be writing, angsting over LSATs (I'd spent a bit of the morning going over practice questions) - and I knew it.

And as we walked down the chocolate-covered everything aisle, I had an intense desire for toffee. Jenn is a hoarder, and can buy a couple tins of this stuff and eat it a piece at a time over a couple of months. I can't.

I wanted a tin. I wanted to eat the whole thing. I stared and stared, and that incredible desire came over me, that full-body, must-have-this-now desire that's like death. I couldn't imagine not having that goddamn toffee. Excelerated breathing, shaky hands. Death. Death without toffee.

I got into line with Jenn, waited half a moment, and went back to the toffee. I tracked it down, put it in my basket, and crept back to the cashier.

The mere act of putting the toffee in my basket somewhat alleviated my intense desire.

Oh, how I wanted that toffee.

And as I stepped up to the cashier, internal yes-no-yes-no voices warring with each other about the goddamn toffee, I swiped the toffee out of my basket and put it in the basket of chocolate coins by the register.

I surrendered it.

My hands were still shaking as I bought the almonds and dried apples. I went after Jenn, got into the car, and ate a couple of the dried apples. I felt better. I didn't need to eat the whole bag. I was only hungry. Just hunger. Assuaging hunger does not mean consuming an entire box of something.

Reseal bag of apples. Neatly fold hands in lap.

Undergo a deep, abiding moment of utter self-loathing.

I hate myself when I do this. And no, I didn't buy the toffee and scarf it down in the car like a fat girl cliche. I didn't do that because that's not who I want to be, not ever again. Cause I've done that on and off for ten years, and I'm tired.

But quelching the actual *desire* to engage in binge behavior is a struggle. I've successfully beat it back for a year, but "not buying 5,000 calories worth of food and consuming it all in one sitting" and "not having the intense, overwhelming desire to consume 5,000 calories in one sitting" are very different things. And it's not fucking easy, and it's another one of those perpetual battles that I have to fight every day, because there's a person I want to be, and she doesn't hide up in her room stuffing away a midnight meal from Taco Bell that could feed a small village in Peru, for no other purpose but that she's depressed, and her body tells her this is the way she has to deal with it, because this is how she deals with it when the emotional stuff gets to be too much.

Thanks, no. I'm not doing that anymore, however briefly those times last.

And yes, there are days when I do wonder if my body is broken, if ten years of binge-and-purge American dieting has broken some key internal regulating device that's now malfunctioning. I don't know. All I know is that I fight it, because like all the things I fight, it pisses me off. And it makes me weak.

Seeing the weakness is the worst part. That was the part I hated, sitting there in the car as Jenn pulled out and we headed out on the next errand. I hated that weak part of myself that wanted, needed, desired, something that was absolutely unneccesary, something I didn't need. The part that desired an easy, temporary escape from my "problems." Because it's a short-term solution that will ultimately do me more harm than good.

When I came home I worked through my eating schedule again. Am I doing OK? What am I eating that's triggering me? Can I cut back on anything? In actual fact, I suspect that my biggest problem right now is that my exercise schedule is erratic, and I've been down to two days of MA classes instead of three all month, for a variety of reasons, and jogging is precarious in the ice and snow, which leaves me lazy around the house (aside from morning weight routine), glaring at the elliptical machine.

On the food front, right now we're looking at a weekday of protein shake for breakfast, string cheese and mixed nuts for snacking, broccoli and chicken for lunch, protein bar snack at 3pm, another protein bar at 6pm, and either an omelette or a whole wheat pita with ham and cream cheese for dinner. I go out to eat once or twice a week, generally indulge in rice and some pastry-type item. Coffee and treat most Sundays. Beer once or twice a week.

This is not an awful thing. On Saturday and/or Sunday mornings, I'll sometimes have low-carb, sugarfree pancakes with sugarfree syrup.

I could become some sort of wack-out crazy and stop going out to eat all together, or only eat salads when I go out. I could stop eating the Sunday dessert. I could cut out all the cheese I eat.

But there's a point at which you cut out so many things that it's just not fun anymore. I just recently swapped the rice, chicken, and veggies I usually prepped for workday lunches for just veggies and chicken. That's worked really well for me.

But there's only so far you can push things before, I fear, what I'll do instead is *encourage* my binge eating by not eating enough during the week, and I can't do that. I've got to find something flexible that works not just *now*, but in the long term. Because I'm working toward a place I want to be with everything in my life - and that includes this body, me, my appetite, my strength. I've spent too long giving up my body while pursuing academic interests, or giving up the academics for my body, and I want that balance. I want that confidence.

Like everything else I push myself to do, this isn't easy either. A part of my deep sense of loathing does have to do with the fact that I feel that this is something I've done to myself. I spent a good bit of time hating myself, and I manifested that hate by showing it in what I'd do to my body. It was unfair of me to do to myself, and I mourn my foolish adolescent decision to punish myself and those around me by heaping it all into my health and appearance. It was stupid, and ultimately, not successful. The only person it actually hurt was me.

And at the same time I realize my fight is far, far, more difficult than that, because I have a grandfather who ate himself to death, an aunt who just had gastric bypass surgery, and my dad's scheduled for the same thing next month.

I know the battle I'm fighting. I know that, like depression, like self-confidence, like strength, it's a battle that's not won, but on-going, and that its origin is as complex as any war, a mix of genetics and environment and past experience.

I don't have any illusions about it. I also realize it's an intensely personal, somewhat trivial battle, because in the grand scheme of the world, one woman who spends her day *not* consumed by self-loathing because of what she desires isn't really all that important.

In some way, you're convinced that what you say and do doesn't change the world, but I suppose you hope that in some small, secret way... Because if you don't know yourself, if you can't overcome your own small, secret battles, how do you change the world? How do you go out there and say, "Listen up, fuckers, and let me tell you how it's done"?

Where's your jumping-off point? Where does that confidence of self come from?

I think it comes from these battles, however stupid and self-absorbed. If I can win the war with myself, I can take on anybody.

I'm my own worst enemy.

And, For Those Keeping Track...

Ginmar's on her way home from Iraq.

Please send her cookies. And hot guys.

Nightmare

I just forced myself awake from a dead sleep. I had a nightmare that Jenn (my roomie) told me that she was moving in with her her SO when our lease ran out in May. I was flabbergasted, because I'd told her months before that as soon as they started talking about it, I would need to know, because I had no money in savings and wouldn't be able to make it on my own unless I had enough of a heads' up to plan. The deep sense of betrayal was extreme.

I then told her yea, that was fine, and I wanted nothing but her happiness, but I had no money, and it meant I'd be living out of a hotel.

She smiled broadly and hopped up and down and said,"OK" and beamed at her SO.

I then proceeded to have a hysterical breakdown. I just couldn't believe somebody I'd counted on was totally ditching me, alone, without any money, when I'd trusted her. I couldn't believe that after everything else, I was being ditched on the side of the road for an SO, never to be seen again. I felt totally betrayed, and she just beamed and beamed and beamed...

It's funny, because the abandonment-from-someone-you-trust and having no means to take care of yourself (money) are fears I know very, very well. I've been ditched with no money before. I don't think I just realized how deep my fear of being ditched with no money was until now.

It's a nightmare-worthy experience.

Moral of the story: I need to put some goddamn money in savings.

Reason I can now go to sleep now, after sitting awake full of terror for half an hour?

I realize I have well over a grand in 401(K) and stock money. I thought through how much money I could stockpile in two months, now that I've got my raise. Could come in early some mornings, beef up the paychecks. I put together a two-month exit strategy. I felt better.

I'll be fine.

Goddamn. The fears that keep you up at night.

Episode 32

In which the protagonist realizes she's utterly exhausted.

She decides to move to France.

Snow

And, yea, there's an incredibly dorky, dorky shot of me "preparing to shovel" which, alas, I will NOT reproduce here. Just the snow:

Casablanca

Is not a romance movie. It's not a movie about people falling in love. It's not, in fact, about real people.

Cardboard Heroine: There's danger here! I'm so confused! Do I want to run away with my rebel-leader husband, or the drunk non-communitive ex-lover of mine who's treated me like shit from the moment I walked in the door?

Drunk Bar Owner: Obviously, I'm in love with this woman. She's so hot. Obviously. Love=hotness. Yes, I realize there are other Hot Women around who pine after me, but this one puts up with me treating her like shit, and that's pretty tough to find.

I mean, c'mon, what the hell do these two people find attractive about each other? Does she juggle? Does he read Kant? What, exactly, do these two people talk about when he's not going, "You bitch!" and she's not going, "I'm so confused! Think for me!"

I mean, don't get me wrong, it's got great dialogue, the dueling national anthems are great, I love the war theme. But is this what love is? Is this all we get as a template?

Sweet fuck, no wonder more than half the people who get married get divorced. I would too, when I found out my partner wasn't "a feeling in Paris" and really was a drunk, non-communitive bar owner.

As Someone Who Absolutely Loathes..

For those in SF circles, you may be aware of the Trent/gabe & friends circle jerk (no, I won't link to him. Matt does. See link to Matt below). I guess I should just be gleeful this time around because he addressed the reader as "you" and reserved "him" for describing any character you might want to write, like a pedophile, who's of course a default he. All he's saying this time around is that you should "force genetic rules" on a character to make them - I mean, him, this is Trentland, after all - more interesting and "truer."

Trent insists that people are boring and consistent and undergo no change whatsoever, or that they follow these "rules" that you can chart like math, so your characters should be boring and totally predictable, too, just like physics.

I'm sorry, what was that about physics? Theories, not facts? Oh nevermind. I mean, that's all psychologists, you know, those people who study people, really do with their time. They make these complex math formulas that tell you that if Sara had a coke at 3pm and Shawna kicked a ball close to her at 4pm, then Sara would "turn into" a lesbian and lose all her money betting on horses when she turned 40, and marry a gay guy named Enrique at 60 who made model airplanes.

Sweet fuck, if people were boring, I would have no friends.

Anyway, people should be just like math problems. Which is why that Golden Age SF stuff had such incredibly fascinating, riveting, characters. Trent has once again stepped down from the mount to exposit to all us "newbies," "wannabes" and "maybes" about how we're supposed to be writing, what we're supposed to be writing, and etc.

I think he mainly writes these things cause he's not spending enough time writing his own damn fiction.

But I don't have to even address this flailer, because Matt Cheney already has.

Bless you, Matt.

Shit, What Did You Expect?

WASHINGTON - President Bush (news - web sites) is readying a new budget that would carve savings from Medicaid and other benefit programs, congressional aides and lobbyists say, but it is unclear if he will be able to push the plan through the Republican-run Congress.

Where else was the money supposed to come from? No more SS, no more medicare. We have a deep, abiding interest in *life* after all.

Want to know who the 50 most loathsome people in America are? Here's a list (no, not PC, sometimes funny):

50. Ann Coulter

Crimes: Coulter plummets down the list as she slips into irrelevance. As her columns degenerate further into absurd, incoherent attacks against her own personal paranoid fantasy of fanged, drooling, Saddam-loving liberals who hate America and childish France-bashing, we find our outrage slowly giving way to a baffled “I can’t believe I used to go out with you” feeling. Her arguments are ridiculous, her vitriol forced, her hatchet face even harder to look at. Still, she insulted a one-armed war veteran, called reports of the hundreds of tons of missing munitions in Iraq false, claimed Wesley Clark was pro-infanticide, and blamed Abu Ghraib on the presence of women in the armed forces—they’re not all like you, Ann—and on and on. It’s just not worth debunking someone who has no credibility in the first place.

41. Everyone who got together to watch the final episode of “Friends”

Crimes: Allowing a trivial sitcom about living in New York, made for people who’ve never been anywhere near New York, to become a focal point in their shallow, meaningless lives. Watching TV together is not a bonding experience; it is a distancing experience, a way in which people can cohabit a room without actually having to engage each other or connect personally. Whoever’s ultimately responsible for the “watch ‘Friends’ or the terrorists win” meme should have a special room reserved for him in the bad section of hell.

28. Ben Affleck

Crimes: His uncanny ability to produce an unending stream of shitty movies and still get work rivals that of even Kevin Costner. Has coasted for years on a reputation built largely on a former association with Matt Damon, but has done nothing to justify his star status aside from boning Jennifer Lopez. Gigli was the cinematic equivalent of the Madrid bombings.

3. You (me)

Crimes: You gaze idly at the carnage around you, sigh, and go calmly back to your coffee and your People magazine. You can’t stop buying useless crap, though you’re drowning in a deepening pool of debt. You think you’re an activist because you bitch all day on the internet, but you reelect the same gangsters at a 99% rate. You consider yourself informed because you waste a significant portion of your life watching the same three news stories cycle over and over again on your gargantuan, aerodynamic television set while you eat processed food. You really thought everything would be okay if Kerry won. Not only do you believe in an invisible man who magically farted out the universe, you also excoriate and marginalize those who disagree. You have a poorer understanding of your country’s foreign policy history than a third world peasant, but you can’t wait to see what Julia Roberts will be wearing at the Oscars. You cheer as Ukrainians challenge an election based on exit poll data, but keep waiting around for someone else to fix your problems. You can’t think, you can’t organize and you won’t act. This is all your fault.

What, you think I can argue with that?

Update

Dude. 6 or 7 inches? Actually, over a foot, and still falling.

Jenn has pictures. I'll try and steal them.

Guess who's getting up early tomorrow?

EDIT: for those reading this post before the one below, Julian reminds me to remind those of you heading out to parties tonight that I'm talking about -- the SNOW. I am talking about the SNOW. Pictures of THE SNOW.

Ahem.

Digging Out

Waded up and out to class today, then dropped by Old Navy to buy a new pair of khaki pants.

Unfortunatley, the one pair I liked and wanted they didn't have in my size. Or, rather, they had it in my size, and it didn't fit, so I got the next size up, and *that* didn't fit, and the wash of failure and oh-dear-god-I'm-going-insane-I'm-working-so-hard-and-I'm-the-size-of-a-house feeling overcame me. I then realized they were an "ultra low-rise" cut, which means you *have* to buy them a size or two bigger than you usually wear.

Trying on regular cuts, I fit in them fine.

Panic averted.

Oh, to be white and middle class, with a cozy job with government ties and an apartment with hardwood floors and central heating! Oh, to be one of the few who can waste enormous amounts of mental energy angsting about whether or not she can fit into manufactured clothing sizes! To be so lucky!

Yes. I'm aware of the sheer idiocy of this. Now... to make myself stop.

In fact, the best way to make myself stop was to go upstairs and shop in the boys' section. The coats all fit better (broader shoulders, and the pants are longer - for some reason they don't sell women's khaki pants in a "long" cut).

I was wearing a bulky black peacoat of the Chicago variety, and had my hair tucked up under a navy green newsboy cap, and I was wearing the boots I've got that put me at about 6 feet tall, and I breezed past one of the saleclerks trying to sell Old Navy cards. I had just come from class, so I had that boxer's walk (read: very masculine walk), and she says behind me, "Sir? Sir...? Uh... Ma'am?"

I turned. She apologized profusely.

I, however, thought being mistaken for a boy was supremely funny, and told her it was no big deal, and no, I already have an Old Navy card.

I admit that much of my anger about the "girls vs. boys" generalizations as far as height, weight, and strength are concerned comes from the fact that I'm not and have never been very small. Not in height or weight or the breadth of my shoulders. So when I look at guys on the train, and I'm being honest with myself, I'll think, "You know, there's not much of a difference."

This is, of course, because I'm as tall as, or taller than, half the men in the country (the average guy is 5'9), and outweigh him by ten pounds or so (average guy is 180-90). So, in my universe, when I have my confidence back and look around, what I'm seeing are a lot of people who don't look all that differently, and whose differences have more to do with everybody trying to wear what they think they're supposed to wear and eat as much as they think they're supposed to eat, and pretend they're bigger or smaller or whatever.

When I was in Denver, I caught an interview with Taye Diggs on the Chris Rock show. If you know Taye Diggs, you'll know that he's absolutely beautiful. The guy smiles and the whole goddamn room lights up. Rock was harrassing him about being so pretty, and how women must go nuts over him, and Diggs said,

"You know the first thing women say when they meet me in person? -- `Damn, you're short!'"

For the record, he's about 5'10.

Funny, how we all get our little complexes based on what we're supposed to be like. Women always worrying about being too big, men worrying about being too small.

Kind of stupid, isn't it?

If the coats fit better in the guy's section, maybe it's not me that's fucked up, maybe it's the clothes.

Anyhow, it's a mess out here in Chicago, and I've got to go dig out my roommate's car from about six or seven inches of snow... and counting. For the record, it's not that she couldn't do this: it's just that if I do it, it won't take as long.

Gosh, you'd think that without a boy in the house, we'd be housebound, huh?

Bah. It's funny, how in real life, nobody bats an eyelash, but talk about being strong and capable and smart outside a "real life" setting: in cyberspace, in a classroom, anywhere in academia, and people freak out. They forget to remember all the people they actually hang out with, the ones who get up every morning and live their lives. If you don't get up and live, you'll die a lot sooner.

It doesn't behoove Natural Selection to select for dumb-and-weak-without-the-Y.

But I think this is one of those days when I'm preaching to the choir.

I'm off...

God Is Angry.

I would be too. Such displeasure on the state of affairs: tsunamis, gay sponges, snowstorms. I mean, it's so obvious the end is nigh.

I'll spend it curled up with my copy of On War and some hot chocolate.

It seems entirely appropriate.

Life's Great Mystery

Why is it that when my cheap headphones crap out, it's always the right headphone that craps out?

Truly, one of life's great mysteries.